7 ms·

Astral Codex Ten (or Slate Star Codex, or,...) would be a lot more compelling if one didn't always find some obvious historical error like this in the typical a

Astral Codex Ten (or Slate Star Codex, or,...) would be a lot more compelling if one didn't always find some obvious historical error like this in the typical article. If only he could afford a fact-checker.

pdonis 4y ago
He shouldn't need to hire a fact checker. He just needs to realize that his error rate is too high when he just tosses off these historical claims based on his own background knowledge, and stop doing that. If the claim is really central to the argument, then take the time to check it. If it's not that important, then just leave it out. Unfortunately, public intellectuals in our current society don't hold themselves to these kinds of standards (which would have been considered obvious for public intellectuals a couple of centuries ago), and no one else holds them to it either.
- thebooktocome 4y ago
  He's not a public intellectual and he doesn't want to be. But people treat him like one regardless, because he happened to attain a little clout as a "Rationalist".
  - pdonis 4y ago
    He doesn't get to decide whether he's a public intellectual. If you publish your thoughts and ideas about issues that are of interest to the public, you're a public intellectual, whether you like it or not. Even more so if many people read what you publish, discuss it, and give it weight.
- solveit 4y ago
  > Unfortunately, public intellectuals in our current society don't hold themselves to these kinds of standards (which would have been considered obvious for public intellectuals a couple of centuries ago) Have you read anything a couple of centuries old? The problem was, if anything, much worse!
sebzim4500 4y ago
This is not a historical error. It is objectively true that there is no conventional bomb which can destroy half a city.
- thebooktocome 4y ago
  Insofar as it is objectively true, it is irrelevant to his point; insofar as it is relevant to his point, it is historically false. Dresden, Tokyo, Hanoi—how many more counterexamples do you need? The means to level a city with conventional bombs already existed. The nuclear bomb's innovation was as a weapon of intimidation, not raw destructive force.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    > Dresden, Tokyo, Hanoi—how many more counterexamples do you need? The means to level a city with conventional bombs already existed. The nuclear bomb's innovation was as a weapon of intimidation, not raw destructive force. Conventional strategic bombers and high explosives would never have given us MAD. The raw destructive force is absolutely relevant, it was (and remains) infeasible to do anything like wipe out a whole country in a day or two with conventional weapons, that'd take months or years and enormous dedication of resources. With nukes? Now it's possible. I'm really not getting the reading of this as "LOL we could blow up cities with regular bombs, he's wrong!" Like, WTF was all the worry over nukes in the cold war, then? They're extremely obviously a major game-changer. A functioning nuke program means multiplying the max plausible destructive power a country can deploy inside a week by a very large number—no later developments in conventional weapons have really closed that gap, it's a whole other category of weapon, and you either have it, or you don't.
    - thebooktocome 4y ago
      Nuclear warheads on ICBMs are wildly different from what the Allies had during WWII, and far beyond the scope of this debate. They also represent an incremental advance in the state of the art, and not the quantum leap Scott is failing to invoke here.

pdonis 4y ago

He shouldn't need to hire a fact checker. He just needs to realize that his error rate is too high when he just tosses off these historical claims based on his own background knowledge, and stop doing that. If the claim is really central to the argument, then take the time to check it. If it's not that important, then just leave it out. Unfortunately, public intellectuals in our current society don't hold themselves to these kinds of standards (which would have been considered obvious for public intellectuals a couple of centuries ago), and no one else holds them to it either.

thebooktocome 4y ago
He's not a public intellectual and he doesn't want to be. But people treat him like one regardless, because he happened to attain a little clout as a "Rationalist".
- pdonis 4y ago
  He doesn't get to decide whether he's a public intellectual. If you publish your thoughts and ideas about issues that are of interest to the public, you're a public intellectual, whether you like it or not. Even more so if many people read what you publish, discuss it, and give it weight.
solveit 4y ago
> Unfortunately, public intellectuals in our current society don't hold themselves to these kinds of standards (which would have been considered obvious for public intellectuals a couple of centuries ago) Have you read anything a couple of centuries old? The problem was, if anything, much worse!

sebzim4500 4y ago

This is not a historical error. It is objectively true that there is no conventional bomb which can destroy half a city.

thebooktocome 4y ago
Insofar as it is objectively true, it is irrelevant to his point; insofar as it is relevant to his point, it is historically false. Dresden, Tokyo, Hanoi—how many more counterexamples do you need? The means to level a city with conventional bombs already existed. The nuclear bomb's innovation was as a weapon of intimidation, not raw destructive force.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  > Dresden, Tokyo, Hanoi—how many more counterexamples do you need? The means to level a city with conventional bombs already existed. The nuclear bomb's innovation was as a weapon of intimidation, not raw destructive force. Conventional strategic bombers and high explosives would never have given us MAD. The raw destructive force is absolutely relevant, it was (and remains) infeasible to do anything like wipe out a whole country in a day or two with conventional weapons, that'd take months or years and enormous dedication of resources. With nukes? Now it's possible. I'm really not getting the reading of this as "LOL we could blow up cities with regular bombs, he's wrong!" Like, WTF was all the worry over nukes in the cold war, then? They're extremely obviously a major game-changer. A functioning nuke program means multiplying the max plausible destructive power a country can deploy inside a week by a very large number—no later developments in conventional weapons have really closed that gap, it's a whole other category of weapon, and you either have it, or you don't.
  - thebooktocome 4y ago
    Nuclear warheads on ICBMs are wildly different from what the Allies had during WWII, and far beyond the scope of this debate. They also represent an incremental advance in the state of the art, and not the quantum leap Scott is failing to invoke here.