I do that several times a year, and never wipe my phone. I looked at statistics of such phone examinations over the last few years, and I didn't see any difference between the current and last administrations, when nobody was wiping their phones.
Not in my organization, or in any that I know of. I don't even understand why it would be in an organization's interest to do that. Why should they care if I'm harrassed for data of a political nature? They generally tell me not to even have any such data on their property.
They do, however, require that I take a burner device or wipe it completely, if I travel to China.
Serious question: should companies not participate in contracts from their country's defense department? Or is the argument that it's only US companies which shouldn't, because the US is uniquely evil?
There is an undeniable conflict between "Don't be evil." and "Evil pays.". A lot of what militaries do can be best described as the lesser of two evils. Murdering people is bad, but sometimes a little murder can prevent a lot of murder. However ethically or unethically a state uses force, there's usually a lot of money to be had in supplying that state with the means of force.
Is there room for ethics in military research and procurement? Absolutely. An AI company might say, "We will help you choose the best targets when under time pressure, but we won't provide an oracle that lets you justify indiscriminate killing of civilians." An explosives factory might say, "We'll build precision missile warheads for you, but not white phosphorous or cluster munitions, because these kill civilians indiscriminately.". People working for companies that do defence work have a moral obligation to observe how their labour is used and refuse to give it if the results are unethical. It's no different from soldiers having a moral duty to refuse illegal orders.
To answer your question, I'd say that participating in the defence industry can be justifiable if you remain guided by ethics, and unjustifiable if you abandon them for money. e.g. If you're currently doing anything to help develop the IDF's Lavender or "Where's Daddy" programs, it's pretty hard to argue that you have a functioning moral compass.
It's also completely fine to say, "I don't want to deal with moral grey zones" and refuse to work for companies that do military work. You might make less money, but you'll almost certainly sleep easier.
> You might make less money, but you'll almost certainly sleep easier
Idk, there's something unethical in outsourcing ethical grey areas to other people while reaping the benefits of the peace (or war far from your home) it brings.
Predatory monsters exist. A wealthy society that demilitarizes learns the lesson Europe is now. (If Ukraine didn't have a domestic defence industry, it wouldn't have been able to fight the fight it has been able to.) Put another way, you'll sleep easier, but it's a false security, even if it's one that may last for the rest of your own life.
I'd also note that you can absolutely contribute to parts of the military where you actions are highly unlikely to directly result in anyone dying. Air-defence radars and munitions, for example, particulalry those designed to take out missiles and ballistics.
> where the idea that defence or defensive weapons are somehow morally better comes from
As a category, I think it's safe to say that defensive weapons tend to be more morally defensible than purely-offensive ones. Of course the circumstances matter. But that doesn't mean we can't make generalisations.
You're not responding to their actual comment, you're arguing something else.
As for "someone else will do it if i don't".... (aka your argument). That's true of a lot of things, and I sleep great at night choosing not to steal from people even though I know others will choose to steal. It turns out I don't have the ability to choose their actions for them, only my own.
> "someone else will do it if i don't".... (aka your argument)
That's not the argument. It's more like "if I don't do it then I better hope somebody else will, otherwise my whole country will inevitably become subservient to a despotic regime". Basically, the question is whether strict pacifism is a tenable national policy in the real world. All of modern and ancient history up to this point seems to suggest it is not.
I think the better argument is that Europe has a credible nuclear defense, therefore they don't need conventional military. If Russia starts rolling tanks towards Berlin, drop a nuke outside their international waters and announce the next one will be on Moscow
How about if Russia starts sending troops to "protect" the ethnic Russian population in Latvia? Would the USA, UK, and/or France really threaten to nuke Moscow and start WW3 in that scenario? It's better to have a credible conventional deterrent and a range of possible responses instead of betting everything on an all-or-nothing nuclear response.
What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupied instead? I've found that to be rather entertaining, when the 1st season began. Though only the pilot and 1st few episodes. What came later was just so-so.
Would you define Russia not nuking Ukraine as "strict pacifism"? Because every modern country and army seems to have some basic standard of ethics and morals that restrict them from waging total war even if you want to argue that's purely for diplomatic or PR reasons.
There are a whole lot of decisions that need to be made to get from "strict pacifism" to total war, so I don't know why we need to flatten this into a binary.
> Would you define Russia not nuking Ukraine as "strict pacifism"?
Nobody reasonable would. Russia started a war of choice. That's the opposite of pacifism.
Strict pacifism would be Ukraine refusing to fight after being invaded. Someone saying all war in all circumtances is evil and should not be contributed to, directly or indirectly, is sort of endorsing that view. The folks calling for nuclear disarmament, or no first use policy, are pretty far away from that.
>Nobody reasonable would. Russia started a war of choice. That's the opposite of pacifism.
Yes, that was my point. The person I replied to stated a nation taking actions off the table "will inevitably become subservient to a despotic regime". As a response, I pointed to a country that many would call "a despotic regime" who seems to operate with at least some consideration towards the ethics of war even if that is due to external pressure.
This isn't about the nations taking actions off the table, it's about:
> Serious question: should companies not participate in contracts from their country's defense department?
I contend that unless you want your government to be toppled by a foreign invader, companies contributing to your nation's military capabilities is something you should generally be in favor of.
>As for "someone else will do it if i don't".... (aka your argument). That's true of a lot of things, and I sleep great at night choosing not to steal from people even though I know others will choose to steal. It turns out I don't have the ability to choose their actions for them, only my own.
This is from your response:
>It's more like "if I don't do it then I better hope somebody else will, otherwise my whole country will inevitably become subservient to a despotic regime".
Are you now claiming that all those "I"s are really "companies"? You think you were having a conversation about how "[companies] sleep great at night"?
The "I" a person. If a company has no employees, it ceases to exist in any meaningful sense, so if you refuse to work for such companies you better hope somebody else will do so in your place.
Just to be clear, the conversation so far:
> beloch: It's also completely fine to say, "I don't want to deal with moral grey zones" and refuse to work for companies that do military work.
> JumpCrisscross: Idk, there's something unethical in outsourcing ethical grey areas [working for defense contractors] to other people while reaping the benefits of the peace (or war far from your home) it brings.
> sophacles: "someone else will do it if i don't".... (aka your argument)
> me: That's not the argument. It's more like "if I don't [work for defense contractors] then I better hope somebody else will. [Because strict pacifism isn't tenable.]
You then somehow interpreted this comment as me saying "a nation taking actions off the table "will inevitably become subservient to a despotic regime"", which wasn't at all what I said, so I jumped back in correct that. Then the whole conversation went off the rails.
You and other people who replied removed nuance from beloch's comment. The "moral grey zones" were not merely a question of working for a military contractor or not. Just from a basic grammar perspective, the use of the plural "zones" should indicate this isn't a singular question. I read that as a reference to the moral and ethical issues described in the three previous paragraphs.
Yet by the time you replied, those three paragraphs of nuance were flattened. It was no longer a question of which military programs and actions can be morally and ethical justified, it is now simply a question of whether they are done or not. And once it is flattened into a binary yes or no, all that nuance of potentially unjustifiable uses of the military in beloch's comment fall into the "yes" category. Making it into a binary reduces the issue to pacifism versus total war.
I think saying you "refuse to work for companies that do military work" because you "don't want to deal with moral grey zones" is a pretty binary choice with not a lot of nuance, but whatever. I think both our positions have been made pretty clear at this point and I'm not that interested in continuing to debate the semantics of previous comments.
Maybe I'm slow , but how is that relevant to the point? Can you expand? Am I understand is that defense is important because sooner or later someone else may choose aggression.
You might put your life savings on the street in front of your house for a day or two without someone stealing it, but sooner or later someone unscrupulous is likely to come along based on the evidence we have
The person I replied to stated that a country refusing to develop military tech for moral reasons was destined to fall to a country that ignores morals and develops that tech. I pointed to an example of an aggressor nation that is refusing to use all the military tech at its disposal. Modern society has decided that ethics don't go completely out the window in war and by and large nation states at least pretend they agree.
I'll be as straightforward as possible. Ukraine does not have a nuclear deterrent and yet Russia is deterred from using nuclear weapons ergo Ukraine didn't need its own nuclear weapons as a deterrent to prevent Russia from using nuclear weapons. And when even the "despotic regimes" like Russia are refusing to use a weapon, it no longer becomes a credible threat for the ostensibly good guys to threaten to use.
Weapons can only act as a deterrent if your opponent believes you're willing to use them and there are some weapons that no one is willing to use. And if no one is willing to use them, it's probably a waste to develop them in the first place.
> Ukraine does not have a nuclear deterrent and yet Russia is deterred from using nuclear weapons
Ukraine giving up its Soviet nukes in the 1990s was, with the benefit of hindsight, a mistake that has cost over a hundred thousand Ukrainians their lives. Even if Ukraine just had the missiles in a basement, the possibility that it had cracked the control system–or shortened the runway to reprocessing the warheads for a domestic platform–would have likely deterred war.
Do you think Ukraine would have used nuclear weapons against Russia? How do you think Russia would have responded to that? Do you think that would cost fewer than a hundred thousand Ukrainian lives?
Once again, nuclear weapons can only be a deterrent if your enemy believe you will use them and everyone knows that no nation state has the stomach to use them. Russia doesn't have to fear MAD and yet it is still deterred from using nuclear weapons. What makes you think that Ukraine would choose MAD over their current predicament? Because if Russia doesn't believe Ukraine is willing to commit to MAD, Russia can still invade. It certainly changes strategy, but over the years many nuclear powers have been involved in arm conflicts without using nuclear weapons, including in conflicts against other nuclear powers.
How is that an argument that demilitarized pacifism is a tenable national policy. This was the point you started arguing against. Russia hasent nuked Ukraine so nobody needs defenses or arms?
>How is that an argument that demilitarized pacifism is a tenable national policy.
I never made that argument. My original comment was refuting the idea that taking a singular option off the table is equivalent to pacifism. Ukraine didn't feel the need to develop a nuclear program, that doesn't make them pacifists.
> It's more like "if I don't do it then I better hope somebody else will, otherwise my whole country will inevitably become subservient to a despotic regime". Basically, the question is whether strict pacifism is a tenable national policy in the real world.
This person equates not "do[ing] it" with "strict pacifism".
"It" is having some level of military capability. I agree with Ajedi32 that not doing it is strict pacifism.
beloch and jump- advocated for some level of national defense as a practical necessity
sophacles- stupidly thought this was an "If I dont, someone will" argument
Ajedi32- clarifies "the question is whether strict pacifism is a tenable national policy in the real world"
The point is some level of defense is required. This point is completely compatible with not taking a maximalist approach to military. It is also compatible with the fact that even Russia doesn't take a maximalist approach to military.
The whole point of the chain is that citizens should not fixate on if companies or people participate in the military-industrial complex because it is good an necessary, but rather what those actors actually doing.
>"It" is having some level of military capability. I agree with Ajedi32 that not doing it is strict pacifism.
>beloch and jump- advocated for some level of national defense as a practical necessity
I don't think this an accurate summary of the nuance contained in beloch's comment. I'll specifically highlight what I think was lost by the people who replied:
> People working for companies that do defence work have a moral obligation to observe how their labour is used and refuse to give it if the results are unethical. It's no different from soldiers having a moral duty to refuse illegal orders.
>To answer your question, I'd say that participating in the defence industry can be justifiable if you remain guided by ethics, and unjustifiable if you abandon them for money.
Once the choice is either a yes or no, this nuance is lost. If you set up the choice as between pacifism and military capability, you're tacitly endorsing any form of military capability including nuclear weapons.
Why do you reject the idea or possibility of yes to military capability, but with ethics or restrictions?
It seems obviously possible, and your arguments support it.
Where is this tacit endorsement you see coming from? It seems like nobody thinks that way with respect to their employment or support.
Anyways, this seems to be more about semantics than substance at this point, if you are arguing it is not binary, and I'm arguing that nobody said it was
Russia not nuking Ukraine had nothing to do with ethics or morals. It's more pragmatic than that. Putin wants to take Ukraine largely intact to control its population and resources, not turn it into an irradiated wasteland. And he knows that use of WMDs would invite economic sanctions from key neutral trading partners such as India.
Also, it's questionable whether Russia's nuclear arsenal would even work reliably. The USA and other nuclear powers spend enormous amounts every year just on nuclear weapons maintenance and testing. Those munitions can't just be stored in a warehouse indefinitely like rifle cartridges and pulled out when needed; they require periodic remanufacturing in order to remain operational at all. Russia is a relatively poor and highly corrupt country so I suspect many of their nukes wouldn't deliver the rated yield if used today. From their perspective an attempted strike resulting in a fizzle would be even worse: all of the diplomatic disadvantages for no military gain.
> Putin wants to take Ukraine largely intact to control its population and resources, not turn it into an irradiated wasteland
Nuking Kyiv, Odessa and Lviv would probably force Ukraine to surrender.
> use of WMDs would invite economic sanctions from key neutral trading partners such as India
This is the real constraint. There is still the credible threat of being economically isolated by America, Europe, China and India. (Neither China nor India wants the normalisation of nuclear bombardment normalised. They both have border disputes with nuclear-armed neighbours.)
>Nuking Kyiv and Lviv would probably force Ukraine to surrender.
Or if we want to take nuclear options off the table because Russia values infrastructure, they aren't attacking population centers with bioweapons.
>This is the real constraint. There is still the credible threat of being economically isolated by America, Europe, China and India. (Neither China nor India wants the normalisation of nuclear bombardment normalised. They both have border disputes with nuclear-armed neighbours.)
Ethics enforced by external pressure are still ethics in action. The comment I replied to was basically arguing that we have to do this unethical thing because if we don't our enemies will. Well here is an example of our ostensibly unethical enemy not doing something because of ethical pressure. So why would this pressure work for nuclear weapons and not this new military tech?
> if we want to take nuclear options off the table because Russia values infrastructure
Putin doesn't care about infrastructure in Kyiv. He wants the natural gas and resources in the east. A nuked rump Ukraine isn't a threat to his power.
> why would this pressure work for nuclear weapons and not this new military tech?
Because the normalisation of nuclear weapons has global consequences in a way conventional warfare does not. The most problematic aspects of Trump's Iran war for India and China are that it raises oil prices.
Heavy use of cluster munitions (and land mines) was critical in allowing Ukraine to stop the second Russian invasion in 2022-2023 and stabilize the front lines. The notion that they kill civilians indiscriminately, or that it's unethical for defense contractors to build them for the US and allied militaries, is ludicrous and disconnected from objective reality.
Cluster munitions are highly effective at destroying massed formations of men and equipment. This forces the attacker to heavily armor up, which doesn’t work well against modern cluster munitions, and/or disperse forces across a very large area so that few targets will be within the kill zone of a cluster munition to limit their effectiveness.
They limit the ability of an attacker to mass vast forces in an area for a brute-force assault. Soviet doctrine was notorious for this kind of attack, so cluster munitions were developed as a solution. Russia still uses this kind of assault, so cluster munitions still work against their forces. Other militaries (e.g. the US) use doctrines that render cluster munitions ineffective.
Just about every weapon invented was developed to address a specific scenario where it is highly effective at shaping the battlefield. Some have become obsolete because those scenarios don’t occur in modern warfare, but there is still a lot of diversity in the practice of warfare.
Today that role (strongly discouraging grouped formations) has been occupied by drones.
The current UA/RU front is a 30km deep kill zone crossed by FPV craft (and discarded optic fibre cables) in which the largest effective group size might be four or so soldiers. Tanks are all but useless as sitting ducks.
Reuters made a surprisingly good infographic / interactive feature on this this past July:
Some aspects of modern warfare seem to be taking the classic idea of light infantry and dialing it up to 11. They have little armor or heavy weaponry but are such a fluid sparse target and have such a small logistical footprint that they are expensive and difficult to root out.
The modern version of this allows the same soldiers to command heavier, better weaponry via remote control that is asymmetric to their logistical footprint, enabling them to shape a battle space that would not have been possible historically.
Of course these things ebb and flow. I imagine the solution to this problem is something like autonomous drone swarms with advanced sensors that can systematically sterilize an area of any hidden soft targets. Sparsity would not be much of a defense in this case.
The following wiki article has a section on it. Cluster munitions allow you to saturate areas and prevent infantry from advancing. The issue is that some of the submunitions malfunction and sit around on the ground and injury civilians (particularly children since they look like toys at times) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-purpose_improved_conventi...
No need to get serious. Only a sith deals in absolutes. There's plenty of work within the us military that is definitely not evil. Even within the field of weapons development. You could say develop a target selection approach that is less likely to blow up a school halfway across the world than existing approaches. You are literally saving lives working on that project, despite what the people who only see in black and white and make grandstand positions online might think.
"You could say develop a target selection approach that is less likely to blow up a school halfway across the world than existing approaches."
Sure, you save some lives. Then the military realizes they can apply violence far more liberally than they ever could before. Subsequent conflicts result in a whole lot more death for the losing side. Maybe a lot more "militar-aged men" end up as cannon fodder for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Or... do those lives not count? Depends on your definition of "evil," I guess: I'm using the Christian one.
There’s a story in the Christian Bible about David, Old Testament. He was told to fire arrows into the ground. He shot 3. The response he got was something like “you should have shot more, now you’ll only sack 3 cities.”
>Serious question: should companies not participate in contracts from their country's defense department? Or is the argument that it's only US companies which shouldn't, because the US is uniquely evil?
Depends if they do evil shit or not. The USA does a lot of evil shit. If you wanted to not be evil, you wouldn't help people to do evil shit.
Other countries probably focus quite a bit more on the defense aspect. How many times has the US military countered a hostile attacking force? Instead, I can think of significantly more instances where the US was instigating the situation.
The US stopped countless wars from starting in the first place due to deterrence. Look at Ukraine to see what happens to a country that isn't part of an alliance like NATO.
Ukraine seems to be what happens when a country willingly gave up their nukes (with US encouragement).
I have no problem if the US navy wants to tool around shipping lanes for the good of global trade. I take issue with everything else.
In the past couple of years, the US has implicitly used the strength of its military to threaten the sovereignty of Greenland, Panama, Canada, Mexico, and Cuba. Abducted a foreign head of state. Started a war. Bombed drug runners and fishermen.
The death toll for the Iraq war is heavily contested, but the numbers are somewhere in the region of 200k to one million dead. All under the guise of WMDs.
Like any large organization, there is a mixture of good and bad outcomes.
Ukraine was home to many nuclear and rocket scientists so presumably they could have reverse engineered them if they wanted and got a big head start in it.
But yeah thats only if they wanted to try and spend the money to support a nuclear program. As they sat they were unreliable at best case.
That's false. Please stop spreading Russian propaganda. Not only Ukraine was able to control and maintaining them, in fact, Ukrainian companies manufactured nuke ICBMs, and then serviced them in Russia long after the collapse of the USSR. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KB_Pivdenne
The two major ongoing wars are due to US foreign policy and could be over tomorrow if US government fully stopped supporting their respective belligerents.
A good chunk of the human population has never known a "Pax Americana" and regions such as East Asia are clearly better off due to declining American hegemony.
If you’re referring to Ukraine as one of the two, we already heavily reduced our support under Trump and there is no chance in hell that removing the leftover support causes Ukraine to capitulate by tomorrows, especially after recent territory gains and destruction of Russian logistical supply lines with Wildberries and their refinery infrastructure.
Also if the other is Iran, lol at “stopped supporting respective belligerents” as if the US itself was not one of the major belligerents.
The USA is heavily supporting Ukraine with intelligence sharing, private financial support, StarLink, and """indirectly""" providing arms through European middlemen.
The latter was Trump's innovation so that he can pretend he is upholding some foreign policy campaign promise without materially changing anything.
Private financial support doesn’t count, that’s private actors.
I’ll accept Starlink as US support despite their back and forth on supporting Russia, because they are a large corporation requiring on government assent the same way Wildberries is for Russia.
The indirect one you’ll have to sell me on as support. We’re selling shit, and like to make money. Someone buying our shit to give to Ukraine doesn’t count as support or antagonistic to me but as a neutral position.
I think the other example is Israel which seems like the much more obviously belligerent, actively colonial nation state that the US is largely propping up (and wouldn't exist otherwise)
also, arguably, the half-century of creating, establishing, funding, and build-up of NATO largely supersedes the point that Trump cut spending there temporarily. that all came from American coffers and the current conflict there is a long hangover from that
> colonial nation state that the US is largely propping up (and wouldn't exist otherwise)
This is a baseless, American-centric notion I've heard frequently in New York and San Francisco.
If America pulled support from Israel, it would find partners in other countries. India and China are at the top of the list–they want Israeli weapons technology and intelligence. Russia would probably play too. And depending on the kind of mess we leave Iran in, some Gulf countries may also find a way to come to a nuclear technology transfer deal with Tel Aviv.
I don’t know why so many people take it as a given that Israel only exists because of America.
They used to be aligned with the USSR and we did a lot of work to peel them off into our own domain. They also have their own military industrial complex and are perfectly capable of manufacturing the weapons they need domestically.
And they can redirect resources to the war if we removed it.
If anything, removal of our support probably leads to the use of dumber less targeted weapons like carpet bombing or good ole white phosphorus that they’ve already demonstrated use of in past conflicts.
If we were giving them 30+% of their gdp then yea, dropping that probably stops the conflict. 2% is just a budget reshuffle.
you should look up how much the 2008 financial crisis shrank the US GDP. 2% of an entire nation state's GDP especially with aid concentrated in gov\mil sectors of which a huge part of Israel's private sector is dependent on for grants is not a 'budget reshuffle'
It is when there’s an existential threat which, agree with Israel’s government or not, they believe the neighboring Islamic factions are.
I’m not claiming it would be easy but it’s definitely not an amount that losing would end the war overnight, which was the original claim I responded to
Israelis can't carpet bomb. They don't have the tech.
Are you saying 10's of thousands of bombs US supplied to level the entire cities and countryside to the ground is preferable to IL having to get this elsewhere, because why exactly? What does precision have to do with it?
You can scroll around here to see what US did by providing all those mostly free bombs:
> Israelis can't carpet bomb. They don't have the tech.
What? I’m not even responding to the rest if this is how you open up.
Carpet bombing is so low tech I can’t imagine a country in the modern age that couldn’t create the technology even if they couldn’t afford actually deploying it. It’s a matter of logistics and having enough bombs.
It’s literally just dropping a fuck ton of dumb bombs on an area to “carpet” it, unless we’re talking past each other and you were referring to something else.
Give me enough guano, charcoal, sulphur, steel, and flint and I can cobble together carpet bombing from my kitchen without ever having to go up the tech tree past a few hundred years ago.
Hell Hamas themselves under heavy sanctions have shown they have the technology, they merely lack the surfeit of resources to implement it.
This isn’t me arguing with you, I’m just flabbergasted that someone could say with a straight face that Israel doesn’t have the technology to carpet bomb.
I want us to decrease or end our alliance with Israel for political reasons related to how their government has interacted with ours(the US) but I am constantly surprised by these people who honestly think that Israel wouldn’t collapse the moment US support ended, like they didn’t fight several existential wars and win previous to our support.
Carpet bombing requires delivery vehicles and bombs IL does not have. Best they have are F-15s (and not a lot of those) fighter bombers which can carry about 7 each of the 1 ton bombs they're getting 60 thousands of for free from americans soon again.
So all in all if they send 50 of F-15s fully loaded they can drop 350 bombs. Which is about 3x their normal day in Gaza the whole 2 years after oct 2023. If this is carpet bombing, they were carpet bombing Gaza for 2 years already.
I don't care what anyone thinks IL could do if they developed the capability. I'm telling you what they can't do because they don't have it now. They don't need it either, because it's not worth it.
So where are the Israeli bombers? Nowhere. All they have is fighter-bombers, which are quite limited. And clearly they don't even have the bombs. Otherwise why the need for US to send them 10s of thousands of bombs for free in early months of the genocide?
Not enough for anything close to what WW2 or Vietnam war like area bombing operations were done with.
oh? I didn't know China and Russia had such solid relationships with Israel. my understanding was that Israel has been repeatedly condemned by both and last I heard, the free-trade agreement with them has been stalled for years. but what do I know?
> my understanding was that Israel has been repeatedly condemned by both and last I heard, the free-trade agreement with them has been stalled for years. but what do I know?
India-Israel trade has been growing since diplomatic relations between the nations were established in 1992 (including since the war in Gaza) [1]. In 2025 they signed a bilateral investment agreement. And Israel is a growing defence provider to India.
I know less about the China relationship, but it remains a major trading partner with Isrel [2]. (I do not believe there are significant military relations. China has recently been calling what Israel is doing in Gaza a genocide, and I'll note they started doing this a year ago, before Trump bungled into Iran, though for obvious reasons Beijing isn't dwelling on the question.)
Russia is currently embedded with Iran, but nothing about that is geostrategic. Israel and the USSR once had close relations. Putin needs weapons for Ukraine. An Israel searching desperately for partners would be useful to Moscow.
Note, too, that both China and India have governments in power that explicitly reject the rights of their domestic Muslim populations.
Israel sanctioned BYD and China sanctioned Israeli cybersec firms back recently to my knowledge. The average Chinese citizen also is much more willing to call it a genocide and if there's one thing the Politburo knows to do, it's not to unnecessarily foment unrest by collusion
I don't personally think it's likely relations would improve on this and I consider myself much better read on the goings-on of the PRC than most
For the other nation states you discussed, I'm far from an expert on them so you very well might be right. But I doubt it'll be straightforward if the US were to cease aid. I also seriously doubt Israel would be so aggressively expansionist without the 300 billion or so they've received from the US. An un-invaded Iraq in combination with Iran would have put its existence at major jeopardy
> Israel sanctioned BYD and China sanctioned Israeli cybersec firms back recently to my knowledge
Yup. China is also shipping arms precursors (and very likely intelligence) to Iran. China and Israel aren't friends. But Israel pivoting from the U.S. absolutely brings it back to the table. China isn't, like, sanctioning Israeli firms in general, or even Israeli firms in the West Bank.
> doubt it'll be straightforward or that Israel would be so aggressively expansionist without the 300 billion or so they've received from the US
My personal hypothesis is the aid turned Israel into a monster. Removing the aid, however, won't change that. It just means more broad-based munitions.
Israel and Gaza have natural gas. The world has shown it will tolerate a lot of nonsense from an energy supplier, particularly a nuclear-armed one.
Israel vs Palestine is not a major conflict, especially given the one sided nature of the fight.
Israel + US vs Iran is a majorish conflict but the US is directly a belligerent in that one.
> also, arguably, the half-century of creating, establishing, funding, and build-up of NATO largely supersedes the point that Trump cut spending there temporarily. that all came from American coffers and the current conflict there is a long hangover from that
Glossing over the Russian propaganda points accusing a defensive pact as a reason for starting a war, that still means that the conflict “ could be over tomorrow” is incorrect even if the US ended all support today.
That may be partly true, but in recent times, most western countries participated in wars like Afganistan and Iraq, and provided logistical or other support during the current Iran war.
I think it’s difficult to come up with hard and fast rules. But the fact that the US government (falsely) renamed their Department of Defense to Department of War is perhaps a useful signal.
> Defense was always just a euphemism for War. That’s not the signal you think it is.
No, it was not. Tom Nichols, professor emiritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College:
> It is almost impossible to overstate the inanity of this move. The United States has a Department of Defense for a reason. It was called the “War” Department until 1947, when the dictates of a new and more dangerous world required the creation of a much larger military organization than any in American history. Harry Truman and the American leaders who destroyed the Axis, and who now were facing the Soviet empire, realized that national security had become a larger undertaking than the previous American tradition of moving, as needed, between discrete conditions of “war” and “peace.”
> These leaders understood that America could no longer afford the isolationist luxury of militarizing itself during times of threat and then making soldiers train with wooden sticks[1] when the storm clouds passed. Now, they knew, the security of the country would be a daily undertaking, a matter of ongoing national defense, in which the actual exercise of military force would be only part of preserving the freedom and independence of the United States and its allies.
> In 1949, after two years that included a massive reorganization of the U.S. military (and the establishment of an air force), Truman christened the new United States Department of Defense, which consolidated elements of the previous War and Navy Departments. […]
I answered in response to a different comment about the level of patience I have with men that think changing one word in the title of the bureaucracy in charge of war somehow meaningfully changes the reality or meaning of war (spoiler: none).
I wanted to address this though:
> The Department of War had a different function for a different geopolitical outlook that no longer matched reality in the post-WW2 world.
The reality of the post-WW2 world is that those who were most responsible for bringing big messy & complex wars to the world were no longer able to litter their own little subcontinent hanging off the western edge of Asia with as much ordinance as they could manufacture. It was too expensive & they were either too occupied or too preoccupied with the rather expensive operation of trying to maintain their hold on their colonial enterprises. We could afford to pretend that all of our wars were “defensive” because our goal was to make sure they couldn’t pull that shit again & there was only one or two relevant powers at a time we were in direct competition with that was otherwise keeping us busy. Telling the UK & France to fuck off during the Suez Crisis was approximately a phone call.
But whether a war was actually offensive or defensive still came down to what story we wanted to tell ourselves at the end of the day.
> I answered in response to a different comment about the level of patience I have with men that think changing one word in the title of the bureaucracy in charge of war somehow meaningfully changes the reality or meaning of war (spoiler: none).
Except it wasn't just a change in the name in the department: the Department of War actually became the Department of the Army, the DoNavy was merged with, the Air Force was split off from being with-in the Army (USAAF -> USAF), creation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and CIA, etc:
> But whether a war was actually offensive or defensive still came down to what story we wanted to tell ourselves at the end of the day.
And sometimes a war does not happen because someone has a big enough stick that other people don't want to risk it being used on them. It's not like the 'other side' was passively sitting around:
I don't think that quote helps your case or detracts from the parent.
Tangentially—and perhaps counterintuitively—it can be taken as an argument in favor of the name change.
The statement also does little to address the ethical concerns at the root of the relationship between industries and the military.
They noted it but I think the important part was before then the Department of War only really existed when congress declared war. Once the war was over 95% of those people went home and back into civilian life. So even if a President wanted to start a war they had limited resources to do so unless Congress declared war and re-expanded or formed a Department of War.
Right. But somewhere in between then and now the powers of the President expanded so that "the actual exercise of military force" in the name of defense ("preserving the freedom and independence of the United States and its allies") involved fighting in wars.
Defense was an Orwellian spin on the greatest warfighting organization in the history of the world. This quote does nothing to change anything but is some weird appeal to authority when no authority is needed
Why isn't it? The change was clearly made to indicate the posture of the department. Either to US citizens or to powers abroad. Even though its "just" words it indicates intent.
It was originally entitled “Department of War” and was changed after World War II for better PR. Whether it is called “Department of War” or “Department of Defense”, it’s still the same organization maintaining the same mission operating under the same budget.
Personally, I view “Department of War” as more honest, because War has always been its business.
This is actually not true! This is a pedantic point but I think is important.
The department of defense is not equivalent to the pre-1947 War Department. The War Department was in charge of just the army. There was a separate Department of the Navy. There was no over-arching department for all of the US military.
Post WW2 the US military was restructured to organize all of the branches (including the newly-formed Department of the Air Force) under a united civilian leadership. This was done in the National Security Act of 1947. The new structure was initially called the National Military Establishment and then renamed to the Department of Defense.
So the department of war name going away wasn’t a PR thing. It was because of military parochialism. If they had called this unified structure the Department of War it would have seemed like the Army was now taking over the other branches! And I promise you today’s Admirals understand that history, even if the secretary of defense doesn’t.
> Whether it is called “Department of War” or “Department of Defense”, it’s still the same organization maintaining the same mission operating under the same budget.
The mission of the Department of War, which was its name pre-WW2, and the mission of the Department of Defence (post-WW2) is completely different: this is evidenced by the number of military personnel in the two time periods (and the draw-down in personal post-1990, after the Cold War ended):
> it’s still the same organization maintaining the same mission operating under the same budget
WWII demonstrated wars of conquest don't work in the industrial age. When America and its Department of War and Navy were founded, invasion and conquest could still be done profitably. WWII showed that was no longer true–industrial machinery and skilled workers are destroyed by invasion and even base resources quickly become useless when surrounded by people who hate you. (Nuclear weapons sealed the equation.)
The Americans who fought in WWII saw that lesson firsthand and seem to have genuinely pivoted away from wars of conquest and annexation towards something closer to status quo preservation. We, of course, still went to war. But it was generally to help the current leader repel something or the other. The case in point for this is the truly devilish stuff having been shifted to the CIA's clandestine portfolio.
Renaming the DoD the DoW basically says all that clandestine stuff wasn't shameful, it's good. It's a real message being written by idiots who don't know history or war and are mastered by their own insecurities.
Whether a war is fought defensively or offensively, war is still war. I don’t have a lot of patience for the romantic notions of men, that changing one word in a bureaucratic ensemble of Departments is going to change meaning of what it means to go to war or the reality of war itself. Only how we actually prosecute our wars & handle the subsequent consequences of war will give them any meaning.
> Whether a war is fought defensively or offensively, war is still war
Someone being invaded should lay down arms because invasion and fighting an invader are morally equal?
> that changing one word in a bureaucratic ensemble of Departments is going to change meaning of what it means to go to war or the reality of war itself
Department of War celebrates an era when wars of conquest were profitably fought. It explicitly embraces the notion that war is good and accretive to America. Renaming something the Department of War means we're going to have more wars. America being America, they're mostly going to be offensive.
> Someone being invaded should lay down arms because invasion and fighting an invader are morally equal?
The morality of a war is not easily encompassed in small words like “war” or “defense”.
> America being America, they're mostly going to be offensive.
America being America, any war fought by us not in direct defense of American people & territory is by definition an offensive war. Doesn’t stop us from calling wars fought elsewhere “defense”.
> morality of a war is not easily encompassed in small words like “war” or “defense”
It's not. But you're avoiding the question. If you claim all war is morally equal, then a defender is equally at fault as an invader, and we're going to fundamentally disagree. If you don't believe that, I'm still curious about your position.
> America being America, any war fought by us not in direct defense of American people & territory is by definition an offensive war
Agree.
> Doesn’t stop us from calling wars fought elsewhere “defense”
We still call them wars. Nobody calls what we did in Iraq or Vietnam or Korea the defense or whatever. We call them wars.
I think we agree that renaming the DoW the DoD didn't reduce American military adventurism. What I'm saying is returning the DoD to the DoW absolutely presages a difference in attitude that is more dangerous and more violent.
I didn’t make this claim. War is war, but the morality of our actions is found not in the act of war, but in the why & how of war.
> We still call them wars. Nobody calls what we did in Iraq or Vietnam or Korea the defense or whatever. We call them wars.
Of course we still call them wars. That was not mutually exclusive with politicians justifying it as “defense”. The mantra is defense abroad rather than defense at home, which is a fine enough mantra if you’re selling a war, but I’m not going to nod along & pretend that it’s not actually offense.
> What I'm saying is returning the DoD to the DoW absolutely presages a difference in attitude that is more dangerous and more violent.
The election of more dangerous & more violent politicians presaged that. Turns out America is more dangerous. As to whether we’re more violent? TBD. The President’s unwillingness to actually put boots on the ground abroad despite trying to talk a dangerous game makes this part less objectively clear to me.
World War 2 did not demonstrate that, the USSR (and arguably the US) proved the exact opposite by conquering entire continents. What kind of narrative even is this?
> the USSR (and arguably the US) proved the exact opposite by conquering entire continents
WWII demonstrated it. America learned the lesson sort of, for a while. The USSR, arguably, did not. At the end of the day, the security infrastructure the USSR had to deploy to subdue its conquered poopulations (and its nonsense with China, to say nothing of its own idiocy in Afghanistan) pretty directly lead to the economic uncompetitiveness vis-à-vis its adversaries.
And no, America wasn't running around annexing foreign territory. Where we were trying to do so indirectly, through puppets, one, that's categorically different from annexation-aimed conquest, and two, we did it clandestinely and–I'd argue–in a way that in the long term was almost never accretive to American power and interests.
Before WWII, the Mexican-American war, the German unification, the Prussian unification, Japan's conquest of Manchuria, Japan's invasion of Taiwan and the Russo-Japanese wars were each pretty definitively winning moves for the instigators.
Since WWII, the only wars of conquest that may have yielded the victor more than it cost was arguably Israel's six-day war and, for a short time, Russia's conquest of Crimea. Both subsequently undid those gains by trying to double down. (I'm not counting India's invsasion of Bangladesh as a war of conquest since nothing was annexed. Same for America and the USSR intervening everywhere without annexing.)
People keep attempting wars of conquest, or to work clandestinely and find a loophole. Nobody has. It doesn't work. It absolutely used to. Acknowledging that might help prevent empire-ending mistakes like Iraq and Iraq 2 Trump in Iran Boogaloo.
Big difference between defense of a country and starting wars. Canada and Switzerland don't start wars but they still have a military in case they ever need it to protect from an aggressor. Like Russia or the Canadian neighbor to the south who has a president making social media posts with the US flag over all of North America. Which suits the name, "Department of War".
Both Bush and Obama used the Department of “Defense” to launch regime change “operations” across the MENA. If anything, Trump is guilty of saying the quiet part out loud, AKA “Truth in Advertising.” If anything, he got this one right. We’re a militant state.
You’re right, what we choose to call things is important, but our calls should better reflect reality.
Like Venezuela: we definitely did things that a neutral observer could fairly & reasonably call Acts of War by conducting an aggressive military operation that ended in the result of us arresting Maduro. Yet the net result is that we did not actually fight a war in Venezuela, and we are still not fighting a war in Venezuela. So if a tinpot socialist dictator gets arrested in a forest & none of the invaders/law enforcement are left to shoot at when the smoke clears, was it really a war? Apparently not.
As to Iran, the only moral differences I see between our operations in Iran conducted by the US Department of War & our operations in Iraq conducted by the US Department of Defense 23 years earlier, is that 23 years earlier, the politicians actually bothered to try & make a convincing case to the American public first & the the invasion of Iraq was executed more competently. I definitely wouldn’t call either operation “defense”.
Because the US has mostly been an imperial force of evil among the world, not a net benefit outsides of the elites that benefit from the deliberate colonialism + death.
War Is a Racket is almost a 100 years old and it's about one man's feelings towards his manipulation in the banana wars [1] + middle east interventions. You can go back every century and see what damage colonialism has done both abroad and at home.
I think this is secondary to a widespread loss of confidence in our nation's political and foreign policy apparatus to do what's right for the average American. "Working for the military is evil" descends from a post-Vietnam, post-Iraq, post-Snowden worldview that presupposes that the military will leverage technology it has access to in unexpected, undesirable, and broadly harmful ways.
Well that and it's indicative of the broader American social dysfunction that they are chronically incapable of holding themselves or their (still surprisingly democratic) government accountable and so everything is always about "the corporations".
Every problem is meant to be solved by what corporations do or do not do.
> * Or is the argument that it's only US companies which shouldn't, because the* US is uniquely evil?
What are the (current?) foreign policy goals of the country in question? If it leans more defensive, like Japan, that's different than a country that may have a more interventionist bent.
Also what product(s) is the company developing or offering (field hospital equipment or are we talking about Palantir)?
There's a class of people in the West who have forgotten that wars happen and that defense is necessary. American especially benefit from two oceans separating them from the rest of the world and having never seen a war except on CNN.
Some of them, esp in central/eastern Europe, were rudely woken up in 2022 when Russian tanks rolle into a neighboring country. Others still have their heads buried in the sand and will not wake up even when Chinese robots march in Taipei in a few years.
Pretty much, corporate lobbying, corporate donations, superpacs, the list is pretty much endless. Little timmy's vote in rural nebraska isn't moving the needle. Maybe he can complain at his local town meeting about the datacenter they're building in his back yard. Or put a sign in his yard to show he's on the blue team or the red team but practically it doesn't matter.
As an aside, I emailed my congressman (blue) about one of the proposals (bipartisan) to essentially force device age verification and his office emailed me back well after it passed with a few reguritared sentences about protecting the children. I bet if I called a lobbyist in Maryland and had him meet the congressman for coffee to express my view he might be more willing to listen.
There was more corporate and billionaire backing and donations to the Democrats than the Republicans. Also, studies have shown that the power of money in elections is overestimated. Money tends to go for the viable candidate, it's not the money which makes them viable.
You don't need to take everyone's vote to influence an election. Look at the data. Most elections are decided by a small percentage of swing votes. With appropriate amount of data and resources (i.e. money) it is possible to swing elections.
If your country's defense department is conducting itself ethically, and the contracts are for equipment or technology that is not inherently ethically fraught (like autonymous weapon systems), then one might consider that acceptable if you aren't a pacifist. An enormous amount of US military technology and weapons have been recently used to perpetuate a genocide, so the US is certainly an outlier in the global landscape.
Among the list of countries which supply arms to Israel are UK, Canada, Germany, Australia, Netherlands, India, Italy, Taiwan, Romania and a few others. The US is not unique in this by any means.
If everyone is so comfortable, what do we need a revolution for? Wasn't that the goal of civilization? If someone doesn't like civilization, why try to bring it down? There's plenty of places on earth you can go to live without it.
Most people are comfortable, but not everyone. At least, comfortable in the sense that they are not willing to die for their country/people at the moment, and aren't personally affected by most of the bad things their government does. In the US at least, things like high food/gas prices or unemployment/healthcare issues are just one of many other issues, and aren't causing most people so much pain that they are willing to pick up a weapon and give up their lives. Or even peacefully protest.
People that had enough money that they weren't paying attention to the price of groceries before Trump, probably still don't care all that much now. I might eat out less, but that's not worth abandoning my family or dying over to me.
The kind of problems you're describing certainly don't sound like things you should "pick up a weapon and give up your life" for, so this doesn't seem to add an argument in favour of "revolution".
The article is suggesting that there was an assumed dynamic in designing these mechanisms for petitions and claims - that there is a threshold of cost (time and effort, mostly) that the petitioner is willing to pay for petitioning the government, and that this cost is, at least to some extent, minimizing frivolous or "lets try it even if it's a long shot" claims.
When the cost of such claims goes to zero, that assumed dynamic will no longer work.
But why? Why are the rules of the universe consistent? What orders them? These are some of the most baffling questions in philosophy. This is even more of mystery if you take non-theist interpretation of the universe. If all possible universes (including ones with changing rules) are equally probable, then what are the odds that we would be in both a universe with simple rules such that the elegant mathematical models referred to the in the paper have such predictive power and the rule are not changing over time. This is one of those papers that is massively under appreciated by people who do not study philosophy.
> then what are the odds that we would be in both a universe with simple rules such that the elegant mathematical models referred to the in the paper have such predictive power and the rule are not changing over time.
Could conscious life capable of asking such a question evolve in a world with volatile rules?
Also, math spots patterns. It makes sense that we would spot patterns with it. But these patterns could either be just a tiny slice or an extremely high abstraction of reality.
Supposs Earth is visited by a bunch of friendly aliens. They're eager to explore our oceans, and for some reason a magnetic crane is their favorite tool for scientific inquiry. They drop the magnes into the ocean and pull out heaps of metal junk. They conclude that the ocean floor is made up exclusively of metal junk, and then they use the distribution patterns of that junk to come up with coherent explanations for all sorts of observable phenomena.
I guess what I'm saying is: you can only see what you can see. There could be loads that we won't discover any time soon because it's undiscoverable with a math mind.
A sibling comment to my reply made the point already about deterministic not being simple, so let me address your first point that there could be a filter causing it.
First, a disclaimer. I'm a theist. I like arguments like the so-called "modal ontological argument" and find them convincing. That said, I love explore philosophy especially non-theistic positions because I'm already convinced of theism.
Second, your arguing that there is a filter, and, yes, I agree that one of the possible explanations is a filter. But just asserting that filter with a simple claim as the original commenter did dismisses what is a fascinating exploration of why? How do we know that's a sufficient filter. How do we know that volatility prevents life from existing and asking the question? Is it not possible that there is a volatility that preserves our existence. When your dealing with infinite possible "worlds" this paper becomes more interesting.
Third, if I could put on my non-theist hat (and do it without my biases affecting me), it seems that discoveries such as those made in the paper require non-theist explanations to depend on the existence of a multiverse.
Fourth, there is something else that always get's missed. In a non-theist philosophical framework that forces us to consider all logical possible worlds and universes there is no restriction that a universe begin in a simple state such as a singularity that causes a big bang. A universe can logically begin to exists in an infinite set of states. And again, if every possible universe is equally probable. Why should we be in a universe where what we see can be logically extrapolated backwards to imply that there was a history that follows the mathematical models that we construct. Even a life filter like what you suggested is not capable of answering why we should end up in such a universe. That's a deep and fascinating mystery to be explored.
> Also, math spots patterns.
> ... you can only see what you can see. ... undiscoverable with a math mind.
It's not that we believe that we have a math mind. It's that we believe that we have logical minds. Math is just one part of the abstract domain of logic. I agree that there are limitations to our ability to observe and limitations with the capacity (storage depth and processing depth) of our brains. If our brains can be trusted then they are logical, and nothing illogical can exists. It seems to me like this is a very hard argument for you to make.
The article makes a more subtle point. You can still have deterministic physics but not necessarily explained by simple math equations. For instance, physics could have worked through small algorithms with results that can't be captured in elegant math equations like E=mc2.
You don't have enough information to simulate and predict what goes on in an arbitrary 10 cubic cm part of your tissues for an arbitrary purpose (things are different if you had sensing instruments and are satisfied measuring something easily measurable for that purpose). Doctors can't predict, either. Yet many lives could be greatly improved it we were able to do this cheaply.
But you and I have ignored all that and are blind to all these things that are part of reality that you still don't have knowledge of, or abide by mathematics. If we simply put our attention to the parts of experience that have order that can be described by maths and blind ourselves to everything else, then sure, maths seems very powerful.
I think your conflating emergent behavior that results from complex physical states / arrangements of matter with the surprisingly simple laws of physics which can be modelled with mathematics and are the foundations that such complex emergent behavior operate according to. Discoveries since the paper was created have not changed that.
1. what makes you confident that the rules of particle physics alone can lead to a perfect simulation of macroscopic phenomena? (as you call it "emergent behavior")
2. what makes you confident that our universe is not "turtles all the way down", that as soon as we develop more precise and powerful instruments we will discover new "fundamental phenomena" that requires new theory? This has happened before where neat Newtonian physics was found to fail at edge cases detectable by more precise instruments.
3. considering that we have no feasible way of snapshotting a 1 cubic inch of the world, and even if we have done that, no feasible way of simulating its dynamics at the qft level for one second, and yet we have "approximate" physical theories with less invasive instruments that can do that (for specific purposes), is the ideology of calling macroscopic phenomena an emergent behavior of particle physics still relevant? In a similar bent, there exists a Starbucks in certain places in the world, and there does not exist a Starbucks in other places. This is a fundamental truth of the present world, and many peoples' lives are oriented around that and affected by it. Nevertheless, it cannot be precisely predicted by mathematics where there exist Starbucks and where there does not exist Starbucks one year into the future.
4. I hope you can see that just as Newtonian physics was useful for describing an approximation to the world but still fails at giving knowledge about sufficiently complex systems and sufficiently small scales, you now see that likewise particle physics is just an "effective lens" for a particular genre of human activity.
> 1. what makes you confident that the rules of particle physics alone can lead to a perfect simulation of macroscopic phenomena? (as you call it "emergent behavior")
Given the general axiom of science that the same experiments under the same conditions will yield the same results, I do think we can trust the standard model because of how successful it has been at matching real world tests. That doesn't mean that the standard model is "correct" or complete--we know that we still don't have a quantum theory of gravity--only that model is amazingly predictive, which is all that we could ask of a mathematical model. There are also philosophical explanation of quantum physics that need to be factored in (Copenhagen, many-worlds, pilot wave).
All that said, I think your mixing up the need for a perfect simulation with the fact that the currently understood quantum level interactions of matter and space produce produce the lions share of influence at the larger macroscopic levels. The fact that medical science has been massively successful at using our understanding of chemistry and physics to explain so much of what we know about the details of the body is evidence of how amazing our understanding already it, even if it's not perfect.
> 2. what makes you confident that our universe is not "turtles all the way down", that as soon as we develop more precise and powerful instruments we will discover new "fundamental phenomena" that requires new theory? This has happened before where neat Newtonian physics was found to fail at edge cases detectable by more precise instruments.
All of physics is dying to be the one who discoveries the next level or foundation or theory of everything in physics. No disagreement there, but if that next level turns out to be indescribable with simple mathematical models as is the case with the currently understood quantum level, then that make the effectiveness of relatively simple mathematical models at the quantum level and in relativity/Newtonian physics all the more astounding. How amazing it would be that the complexity would produce such elegance. That would answer one of the whys that we wish to answer!
> 3. considering that we have no feasible way of snapshotting a 1 cubic inch of the world, and even if we have done that, no feasible way of simulating its dynamics at the qft level for one second, and yet we have "approximate" physical theories with less invasive instruments that can do that (for specific purposes), is the ideology of calling macroscopic phenomena an emergent behavior of particle physics still relevant? In a similar bent, there exists a Starbucks in certain places in the world, and there does not exist a Starbucks in other places. This is a fundamental truth of the present world, and many peoples' lives are oriented around that and affected by it. Nevertheless, it cannot be precisely predicted by mathematics where there exist Starbucks and where there does not exist Starbucks one year into the future.
"...is the ideology of calling macroscopic phenomena an emergent behavior of particle physics still relevant?" How did this become an ideology? That said, yes, even with all that said, the effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences is still amazing. How the universe came to have it's current arrangement is a fascinating question with it's own mysteries, but that doesn't take away from the points about the effectiveness of mathematics.
"Nevertheless, it cannot be precisely predicted by mathematics..." The ontological naturalists would push back on that claim. Although, I do my best to explore naturalism under it's own terms and conditions, I'm a theist who believes that humans have a soul. For that reason I would agree that we cannot predict such a scenario because there are inputs from outside the physical universe. That said, if we are just talking about physics only, it would be an assumption on your part that it cannot be precisely predicted by mathematics.
> 4. I hope you can see that just as Newtonian physics was useful for describing an approximation to the world but still fails at giving knowledge about sufficiently complex systems and sufficiently small scales, you now see that likewise particle physics is just an "effective lens" for a particular genre of human activity.
I think my other comments have addressed this. Thank you. I enjoy these discussions & debates.
I'm sorry, I cannot continue this conversation. To do so we need an intense back-and-forth that this format is too asynchronous to provide. Either that, or I will need to spend hours trying to anticipate your responses and address them, and I am not sufficiently motivated to do that. I can state my position succinctly in that my view on science and knowledge is very close to philosophical pragmatism.
As you move up levels starting from physics (eg. physics-> chemistry-> biochemistry-> biology), each layer has several "laws" which are generally pretty established, but a causal connection between the layers is hard to provide satisfactorily. And that is how I think it'll always be, else we'll be expecting to explain Shakespeare's plays using physics.
Also, this is where Rutherford's "all science is either physics or stamp collecting" holds a lot of water. As you move up the science layers, the laws themselves become less mathematically rigid until by the time you get to the social sciences, explanations are all hand-waving, and all "laws" are statistical at best and empirical.
Fundamental physics is also empirical. It's that as you move up to more 'fuzzy' sciences, the 'laws' become less strict, less formal defined, and (most importantly) less reliable.
Edit: and less universal. Physics underlies biology, chemistry, nuclear tech & more. Biology (so far) only applies to carbon-based life as we know it on Earth.
Yes, this is key in my mind. It's not really that the laws and definitions become less strict of themselves, it's that the subjects under study become less uniform. It's fine to study a few atoms in isolation and describe their features, but if you put a lot of them together they'd better be in a uniform lattice or your calculations will take more than a lifetime to complete. If you want to describe the interaction in a drop of water, you don't use the Standard Model to integrate over 3e22 baryon fields.
Yes, physics underlies all other fields. But fundamental physics is also completely untractable to solve problems in those other fields, even if Heisenberg would allow it.
> else we'll be expecting to explain Shakespeare's plays using physics.
This is just a data problem though. From the perspective of a deterministic universe, creative works theoretically can be explained as a physics outcome (ignoring the impact of potential quantum randomness).
Yeah, but that’s like saying predicting next week’s lottery numbers, or the precise weather exactly one year from now, is a data problem. There’s no simulation that could answer those questions even in principle even if the universe were fully classical.
> From the perspective of a deterministic universe, creative works theoretically can be explained as a physics outcome
In other words, physics can explain Shakespeare's plays when you hand-wave away the biggest reason it cannot.
> theoretically
... meaning not in reality, but in an abstraction of reality that conveniently leaves out the hard part.
> This is just a data problem though.
The word "just" makes it sound like that data problem is a minor inconvenience, and not a fundamental obstacle.
Becoming a billionaire is simple, after all it's just a money problem.
I mean, you're right in that (leaving out quantum randomness), you could predict macroscopic outcomes based on a physics simulation that includes all elementary particles explicitly, if you assume that such a simulation can be scaled from <10 particles to macroscopic numbers. But there is no evidence that this assumption is true, so it remains an interesting thought experiment that gets confused with reality because people like to slap the "in theory" label on it.
Yes, we've all seen the xkcd[1] but you've misunderstood it. Physics applies mathematics but mathematics cannot derive physics in the way that a complete physics (and a lot of compute) could derive chemistry and biochemistry.
Math isn't attempting to describe a physical universe. It provides the substrate upon which such a description can be expressed and validated - found to be consistent with itself - but many valid descriptions do not describe our universe. Physics is the empirical search for the correct mathematical description of our universe.
thats just at the current state of the art...doesnt mean a complete maths cannot...its arguably debatable why physics follow some maths and why the specific constrains
I don't think that's true. Mathematics can model every conceivable universe; you cannot derive the values of c or G in our universe from a purely mathematical model. Even if there were a proof that the current values for cosmological constants are the only possible values, that proof would necessarily have to rely on lemmas from physics.
It could be that once we truly understand math in a complete way it would lead inexorably to the definition of one and only one possible universe with only one possible set of rules and c and G would simply fall out naturally. I'd agree it seems unlikely given our current understanding of math and physics (and their relationship to each other). But given both are incomplete it remains a possibility. The one theme that seems to hold true as we dig deeper and deeper into how the world works is that the fundamental rules seem to get more and more unified.
Please tell us more about this. I’m not familiar with any definition of mathematics that would support the idea that it can prove statements about our universe without access to observed facts.
Are there any papers where this possibility is explored? What does it mean to have a complete understanding of mathematics?
Downvoters are probably misunderstanding this. Mathematical theory is based on axioms and inference. The axioms do not have to be true in any cosmic sense for the math to be correct or even useful.
Even AOC doesn't believe what she said. She's saying it because she has a startup of her own which sells ideas, and gets paid in votes. It may not be 93%, but she's had a pretty good growth rate, and when you get to about 50 million, you have a great shot at being President. Ideas which bash rich people have had a growing market for a while, and she's good at it, and people are telling their friends about her.
- This change of what used be a functional object into a brand was done to appeal to one-upmanship (my watch is more expensive than yours) rather than the aesthetic urge which drives appreciation for art. He doesn't blame the watch brands, it may have been the only way they could survive after the triple shock. But..
- If you're an engineer and techie type and are drawn to the complexity and mechanistic elegance of mechanical watches, he's warning you that the problems being worked on in the brand age actually take you away from good functional design which attracted you there in the first place.
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