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The first time I have agreed with David Sacks

toss1 21d ago
Yup. Sacks has been so consistently catastrophically wrong about everything else (especially geopolitics), this prompts me to reconsider my opinion on this. [edit: +consistently]
- pembrook 21d ago
  To be fair, his takes on the Ukraine war from the covid days have aged very well, and were contrarian to mainstream narratives at the time.
  - okdood64 21d ago
    > his takes on the Ukraine war What's specifically?
    - pembrook 21d ago
      Mainstream narratives for the first year or two of the war were: - Russia was a paper tiger and weak - Ukraine was going to win against a corrupt/unmotivated Russian military so it should keep fighting - Putin had made an error and he would get overthrown - The Russian economy was going to collapse due to sanctions - Russia oil pipelines would freeze and never come back online without western help (this was a Peter Zeihan favorite) - Europe would come to Ukraine's defense - Etc. He threw cold water on every single one of those narratives (specifically) from the beginning, meanwhile western media was busy spinning false rah-rah propaganda narratives like "the ghost of Kiev" etc. Basically he was correct that we should not have cheered on this war. If a settlement and concessions were reached much earlier it would have been better for Ukraine (they likely would have kept more territory) and we wouldn't have 1+ million casualties and EU economies like Germany death spiraling and turning far right due to cutting themselves off from Russian energy.
      - semiquaver 21d ago
        WTF? I remember the exact opposite. Everyone on social media and in the mainstream news said Ukraine was toast and the war would last a few months tops.
      - tacticalturtle 21d ago
        Who were the mainstream voices saying this? My layman definition is it’s the people writing in major newspapers, the people getting paid by CNN to sit in a half circle on their news analysis shows, etc. Is Peter Zeihan “mainstream”? The only time I remember anyone speculating that Russia was in trouble was the short lived Wagner Rebellion - because nothing like it had happened before. But that lasted … two days?
        pembrook 21d ago
        Going on Joe Rogan and having a million YouTube followers is absolutely the modern definition of mainstream. Also you appear to have been living in a different algorithmic bubble. Joe Biden was literally on stage multiple times saying everything I listed. If a democrat US president isnt mainstream, I don’t think your assessment of reality is accurate.
        toss1 20d ago
        No wonder this account is such a font of idiocy and backwards takes — it considers "Joe Rogan" to be a serious mainstream source of information. If "mainstream" counts as having lots of viewers, fine. But no one who is serious about information, especially about geopolitical information would ever mistake a numerous count of viewers for the serious multi-layer vetting and double-checking of information that happened in a serious old-school newsroom, or give them anything like the same kind of credibility. Yet this account clearly gives such massively biased and uninformed podcasters the kind of credulous belief formerly reserved for the the likes of Chet Huntley and Walter Cronkite, which no longer exists in any newsroom today. So, a great example of Dunning-Kruger, where the most ignorant spout the most nonsense with the greatest confidence — explains the plethora of nonsense in the posts. And NO, those were not the narratives of any actual serious reporter or govt figure. I've followed this very closely from before the 2022 invasion; some I'd heard of as remarkably optimistic takes, and some I literally never heard of. The entire world, including Putin, was stunned Ukraine did not fall in three days. It was pretty much universally accepted that Russia was the second best military in the world. Of course, it was also soon shown that RU was not even the second best military in Ukraine. Only recently, since the Operation Spiderweb and the 'long-range sanctions' making serious strikes deep inside Russia disabling military targets, oil production & transport, and dual-purpose logistics, and since the RU casualties have exceeded 1000 dead/month and RU started LOSING land, have any serious people started speculating about cracks in RU's ability to continue, and those are still tentative. Go read the writings of people with ACTUAL knowledge of Russia and Ukraine, such as Garry Kasparov, Bill Browder, Volodomor Zelenskyy, all of whom are on Xitter or Substack, since you get your media from that type of sources. You get your information from clowns, it is no surprise you post like a clown (no insult meant to professional clowns).
  - toss1 21d ago
    I was trying to avoid that topic on HN, but DS' takes on the Ukraine ware were the MOST atrocious, amoral, and just plain wrong, basically suggesting Ukraine should just give up because Russia would win anyway. Nevermind that any decent person would support a people's right to live and determine their own future without a neighboring despot using all his nation's might to literally eliminate them as a people. Quite the opposite is true. And even if it weren't, condemning all of Ukraine to the fate of the massacres Bucha and Mariupol is just plain evil. Unreal anyone would call that kind of take "fair". Rethink your life
    - pembrook 21d ago
      So to clarify...your position is that: it's better that Ukraine has been completely decimated and half a million have died fighting an un-winnable war...instead of taking lesser concessions upfront than they will ultimately have to make for this thing to end? Russia was clearly in the wrong here, and I wish Ukraine could win, but reality exists, and we kind of have to anchor our decisions based on it or suffer the consequences. I get it, realism is emotionally upsetting. But if you actually care about Ukraine, the only approach that can get the best outcome is realism.
      - mopsi 21d ago
        > to make for this thing to end Why should it end after concessions? You've just validated their strategy. There is surprisingly little realism among the crowd calling themselves realists.
        pembrook 21d ago
        Because while Russia was in a way stronger position than western media was portraying, they don't have an infinite capacity for pain. They would absolutely love to not be sending their kids to die and selling natural resources to whomever again and traveling around the globe without sanctions. The concessions they would have accepted at the beginning were less. However, now that they've lost so many men and risked their regime on it, they can't simply accept the same deal. This is why the incentives that wars create are so terrible, especially for authoritarian regimes, even if they're at fault.
- reducesuffering 21d ago
  As you should. Sacks takes the contrarian moronic take on everything, and the people that are correct and prescient (idk maybe all of the people who ended up as CEO's of frontier labs and Turing award winners in AI?) are saying that AGI is a very real risk of humanity's extinction.
  - toss1 20d ago
    Indeed, although now we are assured by the thing occupying the President's chair that we need nothing but "STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT" (as if we had one) to handle the problem, so I should believe that, right?... At the very least, Dario Amodei is clearly correct that we need at least more mandatory transparency among all of them. And Sacks is absolutely wrong, since individually self-disarming without some kind of overseeing referee and force to police such a disarming is a guaranteed losing move, so no one can start the self-regulation system. You've properly nailed Sacks — contrarian moron is exactly it! His shtick does seem to be just taking the stupid opposite take on everything and acting like it is brilliant. The only mystery is why anyone takes him seriously.
seviu 21d ago
He is a smart guy, and his podcast is good, if you can switch your brain off whenever they talk Trump and politics I mean. His posture about all this nonsense has been clear for months already

toss1 21d ago

Yup. Sacks has been so consistently catastrophically wrong about everything else (especially geopolitics), this prompts me to reconsider my opinion on this. [edit: +consistently]

pembrook 21d ago
To be fair, his takes on the Ukraine war from the covid days have aged very well, and were contrarian to mainstream narratives at the time.
- okdood64 21d ago
  > his takes on the Ukraine war What's specifically?
  - pembrook 21d ago
    Mainstream narratives for the first year or two of the war were: - Russia was a paper tiger and weak - Ukraine was going to win against a corrupt/unmotivated Russian military so it should keep fighting - Putin had made an error and he would get overthrown - The Russian economy was going to collapse due to sanctions - Russia oil pipelines would freeze and never come back online without western help (this was a Peter Zeihan favorite) - Europe would come to Ukraine's defense - Etc. He threw cold water on every single one of those narratives (specifically) from the beginning, meanwhile western media was busy spinning false rah-rah propaganda narratives like "the ghost of Kiev" etc. Basically he was correct that we should not have cheered on this war. If a settlement and concessions were reached much earlier it would have been better for Ukraine (they likely would have kept more territory) and we wouldn't have 1+ million casualties and EU economies like Germany death spiraling and turning far right due to cutting themselves off from Russian energy.
    - semiquaver 21d ago
      WTF? I remember the exact opposite. Everyone on social media and in the mainstream news said Ukraine was toast and the war would last a few months tops.
    - tacticalturtle 21d ago
      Who were the mainstream voices saying this? My layman definition is it’s the people writing in major newspapers, the people getting paid by CNN to sit in a half circle on their news analysis shows, etc. Is Peter Zeihan “mainstream”? The only time I remember anyone speculating that Russia was in trouble was the short lived Wagner Rebellion - because nothing like it had happened before. But that lasted … two days?
      - pembrook 21d ago
        Going on Joe Rogan and having a million YouTube followers is absolutely the modern definition of mainstream. Also you appear to have been living in a different algorithmic bubble. Joe Biden was literally on stage multiple times saying everything I listed. If a democrat US president isnt mainstream, I don’t think your assessment of reality is accurate.
        toss1 20d ago
        No wonder this account is such a font of idiocy and backwards takes — it considers "Joe Rogan" to be a serious mainstream source of information. If "mainstream" counts as having lots of viewers, fine. But no one who is serious about information, especially about geopolitical information would ever mistake a numerous count of viewers for the serious multi-layer vetting and double-checking of information that happened in a serious old-school newsroom, or give them anything like the same kind of credibility. Yet this account clearly gives such massively biased and uninformed podcasters the kind of credulous belief formerly reserved for the the likes of Chet Huntley and Walter Cronkite, which no longer exists in any newsroom today. So, a great example of Dunning-Kruger, where the most ignorant spout the most nonsense with the greatest confidence — explains the plethora of nonsense in the posts. And NO, those were not the narratives of any actual serious reporter or govt figure. I've followed this very closely from before the 2022 invasion; some I'd heard of as remarkably optimistic takes, and some I literally never heard of. The entire world, including Putin, was stunned Ukraine did not fall in three days. It was pretty much universally accepted that Russia was the second best military in the world. Of course, it was also soon shown that RU was not even the second best military in Ukraine. Only recently, since the Operation Spiderweb and the 'long-range sanctions' making serious strikes deep inside Russia disabling military targets, oil production & transport, and dual-purpose logistics, and since the RU casualties have exceeded 1000 dead/month and RU started LOSING land, have any serious people started speculating about cracks in RU's ability to continue, and those are still tentative. Go read the writings of people with ACTUAL knowledge of Russia and Ukraine, such as Garry Kasparov, Bill Browder, Volodomor Zelenskyy, all of whom are on Xitter or Substack, since you get your media from that type of sources. You get your information from clowns, it is no surprise you post like a clown (no insult meant to professional clowns).
- toss1 21d ago
  I was trying to avoid that topic on HN, but DS' takes on the Ukraine ware were the MOST atrocious, amoral, and just plain wrong, basically suggesting Ukraine should just give up because Russia would win anyway. Nevermind that any decent person would support a people's right to live and determine their own future without a neighboring despot using all his nation's might to literally eliminate them as a people. Quite the opposite is true. And even if it weren't, condemning all of Ukraine to the fate of the massacres Bucha and Mariupol is just plain evil. Unreal anyone would call that kind of take "fair". Rethink your life
  - pembrook 21d ago
    So to clarify...your position is that: it's better that Ukraine has been completely decimated and half a million have died fighting an un-winnable war...instead of taking lesser concessions upfront than they will ultimately have to make for this thing to end? Russia was clearly in the wrong here, and I wish Ukraine could win, but reality exists, and we kind of have to anchor our decisions based on it or suffer the consequences. I get it, realism is emotionally upsetting. But if you actually care about Ukraine, the only approach that can get the best outcome is realism.
    - mopsi 21d ago
      > to make for this thing to end Why should it end after concessions? You've just validated their strategy. There is surprisingly little realism among the crowd calling themselves realists.
      - pembrook 21d ago
        Because while Russia was in a way stronger position than western media was portraying, they don't have an infinite capacity for pain. They would absolutely love to not be sending their kids to die and selling natural resources to whomever again and traveling around the globe without sanctions. The concessions they would have accepted at the beginning were less. However, now that they've lost so many men and risked their regime on it, they can't simply accept the same deal. This is why the incentives that wars create are so terrible, especially for authoritarian regimes, even if they're at fault.
reducesuffering 21d ago
As you should. Sacks takes the contrarian moronic take on everything, and the people that are correct and prescient (idk maybe all of the people who ended up as CEO's of frontier labs and Turing award winners in AI?) are saying that AGI is a very real risk of humanity's extinction.
- toss1 20d ago
  Indeed, although now we are assured by the thing occupying the President's chair that we need nothing but "STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT" (as if we had one) to handle the problem, so I should believe that, right?... At the very least, Dario Amodei is clearly correct that we need at least more mandatory transparency among all of them. And Sacks is absolutely wrong, since individually self-disarming without some kind of overseeing referee and force to police such a disarming is a guaranteed losing move, so no one can start the self-regulation system. You've properly nailed Sacks — contrarian moron is exactly it! His shtick does seem to be just taking the stupid opposite take on everything and acting like it is brilliant. The only mystery is why anyone takes him seriously.

seviu 21d ago

He is a smart guy, and his podcast is good, if you can switch your brain off whenever they talk Trump and politics I mean. His posture about all this nonsense has been clear for months already