LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I think lawfare tends to involve civil not criminal cases?

Corporal vs jail is overdetermined - the former shocks and horrifies people, most people would also choose the former.

I would caution against torture. I can't articulate the reasoning,  but I feel that torture is worse/ less wholesome (for both the torturer and tortured) than pain caused by straightforward damage. 

It is also less scary - the idea of being tortured without any real damage isn't visceral the way beatings are

P.S. you should care about justice/vengeance, and in those areas I believe corporal punishment >> torture/prison

The reason Chinese individuals have increasing quality of life, seems to be far more because they manufacture things cheaply than any sort of cashing in they do.

That is absolutely true, but it remains to be seen if those attempts will hold up in the long run. There is a big difference between American power being in decline (but still dominant) and the world being multipolar. I would say that currently the derivative is <0 but American power is still vastly greater than any other country.

Of course the Chinese nuclear arsenal is enough in absolute terms to destroy a large segment of the US population (and an even greater share of GDP) but I would not say the same in practice. Contrary to the US and Russia, China has a "no first use" nuclear weapons doctrine. This piece of policy does have material consequences, meaning that the PRC's nuclear arsenal is really just a large stockpile of weapons, not a 24/7/365 array of ICBM bunkers. There is no such thing as a Chinese "red button", but there is an American one. The PRC also possesses no significant SLBM potential, meaning that the US could probably wipe out much of the Chinese land based capability and population centers with minimal losses in return.

While I find your analysis mostly correct, I'd be strongly against weakening norms against killing people through legal institutions.

I believe this would increase the value of lawfare, as instead of lengthy drawn out jail time where an enemy could pull a reversal they are simply dead. 

This would worry me at the political, ideological and private levels

I think there's a spectrum between great man theory and structural forces theory and I would classify your view as much closer to the structural forces view, rather than a combination of the two.

The strongest counter-example might be Mao. It seems like one man's idiosyncratic whims really did set the trajectory for hundreds of millions of people. Although of course as soon as he died most of the power vanished, but surely China and the world would be extremely different today without him.

Sorry but you said Tetris, not some imaginary minimal thing that you now want to call Tetris but is actually only the base object model with no input or output. You can't just eliminate the graphics processing complexity because Tetris isn't very graphics intensive - It is just as complex to describe a GPU that processes 10 triangles in a month as one that processes 1 billion in a nanosecond. 

As an aside, the complexity of most things that we think of as simple these days is dominated by the complexity of their input and output - I'm particularly thinking of the IoT and all those smart modules in your car and smart lightbulbs where the communications stack is orders of magnitude larger than the "core" function. You can't just ignore that stuff. A smart lightbulb without WiFi,Ethernet,TCP/IP etc, is not a lightbulb. 

The Duke of Wellington said that Napoleon's presence on a battlefield “was worth forty thousand men”.

This would be about 4% of France's military size in 1812.

1. In research you don't usually know your precise destination. Maybe LA but definitely not the hotel.
2. research, in general, is about mapping all of California, not just the quickest route between two points and all the friends helped with that.
3. You say "Alice tackled the central bottleneck" but you don't say what that was, only her "solution". Alice is only key here with the benefit of hindsight. If the I5 didn't exist or was closed for some reason then one of her friends solutions might have been better.

Of indirect relevance here is that Derya Unutmaz is an avid OpenAI fan who they trust enough to be an early tester. So while I'm not saying that he's deliberately dissembling, he is known to be overly enthusiastic about AI, and so any of his vibes-y impressions should be taken with a pound of salt.