Loved this piece, and I think this articulates something important that even big histories of the war I've read (and contemporary commentaries I remembered) missed
A shocking event led to the dominance of a political faction that previously had just been one of several competing factions, because that faction’s basic vibe (that we should make use of American hegemony, and that rogue states are a threat to national security) was roughly supported by the event.
There was a lot of incredulity about responding to 9/11 by going after Iraq given that almost no one claimed Iraq was behind the attack; at best you had sort of desperate allusions to loose linkages between Hussein and al-Qaeda affiliates, which turned out to all be false. But skeptics were probably responding overly literally and in terms of the actual chain of logic instead of "which factions in government are empowered by this development," the answer to which was the PNAC crowd that wanted an Iraq invasion.
Seems useful in thinking about moments like MechaHitler or the DeepSeek shock. In the latter, for instance, a lot of people made good arguments that DeepSeek being able to train an excellent model with less compute implies that compute is more valuable than we thought, and that export controls might be more important, but despite that, it probably on the margin empowered Jensen Huang and the laissez-faire faction by making Biden's policies look feckless.
Thank you three so much for coordinating this, and more generally for your leadership in making EA a safer place.
Loved this piece, and I think this articulates something important that even big histories of the war I've read (and contemporary commentaries I remembered) missed
There was a lot of incredulity about responding to 9/11 by going after Iraq given that almost no one claimed Iraq was behind the attack; at best you had sort of desperate allusions to loose linkages between Hussein and al-Qaeda affiliates, which turned out to all be false. But skeptics were probably responding overly literally and in terms of the actual chain of logic instead of "which factions in government are empowered by this development," the answer to which was the PNAC crowd that wanted an Iraq invasion.
Seems useful in thinking about moments like MechaHitler or the DeepSeek shock. In the latter, for instance, a lot of people made good arguments that DeepSeek being able to train an excellent model with less compute implies that compute is more valuable than we thought, and that export controls might be more important, but despite that, it probably on the margin empowered Jensen Huang and the laissez-faire faction by making Biden's policies look feckless.
Just noting that there's a huge literature on this exact question, eg
Josh is like the Velvet Underground: not a household name, his message reached relatively few of us, but almost all of us wound up donating.
(Lovely piece Molly; I also had some wild catheter experiences but thankfully nothing this bad.)