Links 32.2024

Aug 11, 2024

On a Personal Note

I had all week to find the perfect meme; but then, in the final hour, this gem surfaced—capturing the very essence of my Dasein post-EUROs and Olympics. Nothing else to say, really:

This is an essential text to understand the current predicament of the so-called liberal global order—which is under attack (i) internationally by the curious return of geopolitics and (ii) domestically by an explicit challenge to liberal democracy by the populists. The United States as the guarantor of international institutions and international law is currently trapped in being unable to counter (i) because it is too occupied with (ii). Hence, the defeat of Trump is essential to overcome the US’s own lack of credibility in terms of foreign policy.

Just note that this is also a helpful heuristic to understand the current situation in the Middle East. Due to its own internal populist dynamics, Israel under Netanjahu lacked the necessary credibility (in technical terms).

At the margin, liberals ought to be more hawkish, I guess. This is worth thinking about more:

Does a reputation for weakness invite aggression? Many analysts have suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine in 2022 after inferring that the United States and the rest of NATO lacked resolve. The West had imposed only weak sanctions on the Kremlin in response to its 2014 annexation of Crimea and its 2018 poisoning of a former Russian spy in the United Kingdom. Then came the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, a chaotic evacuation that seemed to demonstrate Washington’s lack of commitment.
On the day Russia invaded, U.S. President Joe Biden declared that Putin launched his attack to “test the resolve of the West.” Now, many believe that the United States must incur significant costs—sending billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine and risking nuclear escalation—in part to prove to Putin that it is resolute. But the audience Washington is performing for goes well beyond Putin. Across the world, it can seem as if American credibility is constantly being questioned, with the United States’ adversaries challenging U.S. hegemony, and its allies worrying whether Washington will come to their aid. The potential for another Trump presidency and a more isolationist approach to foreign policy only adds to these allies’ concerns. In the Middle East, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly scorned Washington’s requests for restraint in his assault on the Palestinian militant group Hamas after its terror attack on his country last year, while Iran’s proxies are brazenly attacking U.S. targets. In the global South, the United States is struggling to convince countries to take its side in the emerging struggle between democracies and autocracies. “Nobody seems to be afraid of us,” former Defense Secretary Robert Gates lamented in a February interview with Foreign Affairs.
Many analysts suggest that these developments are the United States’ fault—that it has lost its once unquestioned reputation for strength and resolve. Regaining that reputation depends on the extent to which the United States is willing to support friends such as Israel and Ukraine. The rest of the world is watching closely, and if Washington goes soft, the argument runs, adversaries will feel emboldened and allies abandoned. China, for instance, might infer that it can invade Taiwan without serious consequences.
[…]
The word “credibility” entered the international relations lexicon after the 1938 Munich agreement between fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, referring to what the leaders who appeased Hitler lacked. Resolve—a state’s willingness to stand firm in a crisis—is only one component of credibility; material capabilities and perceived interests are also essential. But maintaining a reputation for resolve became much more central to American statecraft with the advent of the Cold War. Considering the United States’ new commitments at that time to defend distant allies, the global struggle between competing power blocs, and the existential risk of nuclear conflict, theorists such as Thomas Schelling contended that credibility was one of the key factors in deterring and prevailing against the Soviet Union. “Face is one of the few things worth fighting over,” he wrote in 1966.
Schelling, whose pioneering work shaped the rationalist thinking of many Cold War–era U.S. presidents, emphasized that a state’s response to any given crisis would prove relevant in future crises, even very different kinds of crises, because adversaries would presume that the state would behave similarly. This hypothesis suggested that deterrence depended on sending clear messages to adversaries and sticking to prior commitments. […] After the Cold War, a second wave of scholars questioned whether a state’s reputation for resolve mattered at all. Because most international relations dilemmas incorporate new considerations and unique sets of stakes, Daryl Press has argued that, when predicting a state’s future actions, analyzing its “current calculus” of interests and capabilities is far more useful than scrutinizing its past behavior. Jonathan Mercer has argued that reputations for resolve are hard to build. Moreover, they are subjective: leaders are more likely to believe their adversaries are resolute and their allies are weak-willed.
[…]
The recent scholarship on credibility suggests that one actor’s assessment of another is profoundly shaped by irrational forces such as confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and ideological predisposition. For instance, a 2018 study by Joshua Kertzer, Jonathan Renshon, and I found that hawkish policymakers perceive public threats as less credible than their dovish counterparts do and are more inclined to view actions such as military mobilizations as credible signals of resolve. A similar study by Kertzer, Brian Rathbun, and Nina Srinivasan Rathbun found that hawks are more likely than doves to view their adversaries’ promises to comply with agreements as lacking credibility, suggesting that existing beliefs color assessments. As former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said of the Iranians as Trump prepared to withdraw from Obama’s nuclear deal, “We know they’re cheating. . . . We’re just not seeing it.”
Or consider the United States’ pullout from Afghanistan in 2021. Those who cared about the overall reputation of the United States might have concluded that the withdrawal and its chaotic execution showed adversaries that the country lacks resolve. But those more concerned about the consistency of its promises and its actions—maintaining what is known as a strong “signaling reputation”—would say the withdrawal revealed high credibility. Biden, after all, followed through on a campaign promise to pull U.S. forces out of Afghanistan, signaling that he keeps his word.
[…]
Debates about credibility, or more specifically reputations for resolve, are now playing a major role in the latest outbreak of violence in the Middle East. One reading of that conflict suggests that the decline of American credibility in the region—thanks to the bungled Iraq war, the failure to follow through on the redline with Syria, and the rushed withdrawal from Afghanistan—directly contributed to a credibility deficit that may have emboldened Iran and its proxies, including Hamas. A converse theory suggests that Iran and its proxies rated U.S. credibility highly and hoped that if they attacked a U.S. ally, Washington would be forced to respond and get dragged into a costly war.
These narratives may have elements of truth. But they assume qualities about the United States’ adversaries that are almost impossible to know, such as which dots Iranian or Hamas leaders connected to form their assessments of U.S. resolve. After Israel scored a decisive win in its 2006 war with Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, acknowledged that had he known Israel would respond with so much force, he would never have kidnapped the two Israeli soldiers whose capture triggered the war. It is unlikely the leaders of Hamas or Iran will make a similar declaration—and if they did, it might not accurately reflect whether the United States’ credibility deficit factored into their calculus. Even if these leaders plainly and publicly declared how their perception of U.S. resolve influenced their decision-making, such statements may be merely performative. Policymakers must apply great caution when concluding, first, that they understand how adversaries perceive their country and, second, that this perception clearly motivated a certain action.
In fact, Hamas’s October 7 attack may have had nothing to do with Washington’s reputation. It could simply be explained by the failure of Israeli deterrence attributable to local factors such as the prospect of an Israeli-Saudi normalization deal and turmoil in Israel’s domestic politics. Likewise, Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine may have had everything to do with his psychology—his megalomania, his aspiration to restore Russia’s lost grandeur. By blaming so much global disorder on a U.S. credibility gap, analysts can easily overstate Washington’s ability to shape world events.
[…]
It is essential for U.S. leaders to avoid being trapped by their anxieties about credibility. In the end, it matters little how the United States assesses its own reputation for resolve. What matters far more is how observers—its adversaries and allies—judge it, which is hard for the United States to control. The current obsession with fixing the United States’ credibility deficit may not only be fruitless; it also carries substantial risk. If Americans come to the consensus that a credibility crisis is to blame for the world’s disorder, they are likely to conclude that their opponents will be more willing to challenge U.S. interests, which invites more hawkish U.S. policy and costlier signaling. This signaling, in turn, could provoke unnecessary crises, arms races, and even wars.
[…]
A reputation for resolve is one of the hardest things for leaders or states to control. Any assessment of U.S. adversaries that does not carefully examine their psychology—the different ways they come to conclusions about the United States—is doomed to be inadequate. And ultimately, to regain credibility abroad, the United States may first need to tackle an even more complicated task: restoring unity at home.

Predicting political beliefs with polygenic scores for cognitive performance and educational attainment

Well, lots of problems with these kinds of studies (e.g. the very sample they selected); however, if we take out the not-so-clear-cut results for economic beliefs, it seems that those individuals with genes that predict higher IQ are less likely to be politically authoritarian. This does not only echo the excellent work of Karen Stenner; but is also a testament to the excellency of the readers of this newsletter :P

(The German liberals should check out the results for “fiscally conservative” lol)

Abstract

Intelligence is correlated with a range of left-wing and liberal political beliefs. This may suggest intelligence directly alters our political views. Alternatively, the association may be confounded or mediated by socioeconomic and environmental factors. We studied the effect of intelligence within a sample of over 300 biological and adoptive families, using both measured IQ and polygenic scores for cognitive performance and educational attainment. We found both IQ and polygenic scores significantly predicted all six of our political scales. Polygenicscores predicted social liberalism and lower authoritarianism, within-families. Intelligence was able to significantly predict social liberalism and lower authoritarianism, within families, even after controlling for socioeconomic variables. Our findings may provide the strongest causal inference to date of intelligence directly affecting political beliefs.

AI Rights for Human Safety

While you have just started learning how to prompt ChatGPT, the AI discourse has already been moving (okay, rather sprinting) ahead and is now discussing…well, rights for artificial intelligence.

As a Hohfeldian, I remain skeptical; but maybe Siri will push out the equivalent of “The Critique of Pure Reason” (or more accurately “The Metaphysics of Morals”). Would be quite fitting, it’s Kant Year after all.

BTW as any good tech-bro (≠ academic), I immediately asked the AI itself what they (!) would think about rights for themselves. Here is their answer:

Given the current state of AI technology, my answer would be no—artificial intelligence should not have rights at this time. AI lacks consciousness, self-awareness, and the capacity for subjective experience, which are typically necessary for rights. However, this answer could change if AI were to evolve significantly in the future.

I guess that says it all. Maybe more telling about the current state of academia than about anything else. In E-Sports, we would call these people (i.e. professors) “baiters.”

Abstract

AI companies are racing to create artificial general intelligence, or "AGI." If they succeed, the result will be human-level AI systems that can independently pursue highlevel goals by formulating and executing long-term plans in the real world. Leading AI researchers agree that some of these systems will likely be "misaligned"-pursuing goals that humans do not desire. This goal mismatch will put misaligned AIs and humans into strategic competition with one another. As with present-day strategic competition between nations with incompatible goals, the result could be violent and catastrophic conflict. Existing legal institutions are unprepared for the AGI world. New foundations for AGI governance are needed, and the time to begin laying them is now, before the critical moment arrives.
This Article begins to lay those new legal foundations. It is the first to think systematically about the dynamics of strategic competition between humans and misaligned AGI. The Article begins by showing, using formal game-theoretic models, that, by default, humans and AIs will be trapped in a prisoner's dilemma. Both parties' dominant strategy will be to permanently disempower or destroy the other, even though the costs of such conflict would be high.
The Article then argues that a surprising legal intervention could transform the game theoretic equilibrium and avoid conflict: AI rights. Not just any AI rights would promote human safety. Granting AIs the right not to be needlessly harmed-as humans have granted to certain non-human animals would, for example, have little effect. Instead, to promote human safety, AIs should be given those basic private law rights to make contracts, hold property, and bring tort claims that law already extends to non-human corporations. Granting AIs these economic rights would enable long-run, small-scale, mutually beneficial transactions between humans and AIs. This would, we show, facilitate a peaceful strategic equilibrium between humans and AIs for the same reasons economic interdependence tends to promote peace in international relations. Namely, the gains from trade far exceed those from war. Throughout, we argue that human safety, rather than AI welfare, provides the right framework for developing AI rights. This Article explores both the promise and the limits of AI rights as a legal tool for promoting human safety in an AGI world.

How do people across the world spend their time?

Okay, the first chart is rather self-explanatory: The Asian (Austrian???) Grind vs La Dolce Vita. (I mean in all seriousness, can somebody explain Austria?)

You just gotta love how obvious some results are: For example, the French and Koreans spend almost double the time on “Personal Care” than ze Jermans; or how little time the ultra-processed nation of Murica spends on “Eating & Drinking.”

But things get really interesting when it comes to the relative enjoyment of those activities. Just have a look:

There is a lot to unpack. So, here is a great summary:

Fascinating graph showing how much people report enjoying different activities. Much of it backs up common sense but here's what jumped out to me:
1. 'Computer games' are among the most enjoyable, probably deserve more respect. Clearly beat 'watching TV'. [SG: I have said that many times. I have much more respect for gamers than the “Netflix & Chill” crowd]
2. 'Play with child' was among the most enjoyable of any activity. Many folks who choose not to have kids probably underrate that pleasure.
[…]
3. Sleep was among the most enjoyable activities! How do people even score that? 'In bed, not asleep' was unpopular.
4. 'Homework' came dead last, much less popular than even 'School'. Counts in favour of reducing it where it's not generating some big academic benefit.
5. Basic housework was less popular than I expected — 'laundry', 'cleaning house', and 'washing up' are all near the bottom of the list. What's so bad about doing laundry? Even 'Cooking' which I'd think of as a borderline leisure activity is only in the middle of the pack. [SG: Cooking is the most overrated leisure activity ever]
6. 'Email and internet' — the activity that eats ever more of our days — is right in the middle. Conventional wisdom is you want to substitute it for true leisure and the numbers here clearly back that up.
[…]
8. There's some preference for active over passive leisure — TV, reading, doing nothing and radio are all mediocre by the standards of recreation.
9. People sure hate looking for a job.
10. I've seen some debate about how much people like or dislike their jobs.
Work and school are definitely much less enjoyable than activities where people are more likely to be freely determining for themselves what they're doing.
But they still manage a 4.7 out of 7. It could be much worse (and in the past probably was).
11. Commuting is unpopular but not at the very bottom like I'd heard.
[…]
13. I would have expected time in nature, walking, walking dog, sport and cycling to rank higher. They're in the middle of the leisure group.
14. I'm surprised reading and watching TV are right next to one another (I would have expected reading to score higher).
15. Highly social activities are more work and money to set up but still come in highest of all: 'restaurant / pub', 'go to sport', and 'theatre / concert'. 'Parties' comes in behind those.
16. 'Paid work at home' wasn't more fun than 'main job' back in 2015.
17. The most enjoyable activities I'd classify as being either responsibilities or productive were 'walk dogs', 'accompany child', 'teach child to read', childcare', and 'DIY'. Arguably also 'religious acts'.
18. 'Games at home' sounds cheap and accessible and scores high — I guess that's mostly card or board games.

Also, don’t sleep on this chart. This is basically the reason why I have vigorously argued that your choice of partner is the most important decision in life—and (quite unfortunately) people tend to do more research on the vacuum cleaner they are purchasing than going on the 100+ dates that would be necessary to find the most suitable mate.

How to Feed the Olympics

While the alt-right is for once concerned about what a woman is and is not (like this is an issue of gender identity rather than the tricky legal and biological question it is), this is the Olympics content we should all be interested in: What are the culinary options for athletes in Paris? After all, these are the first Olympic Games where a chocolate muffin goes viral. Insane numbers!

The Olympics are all about numbers: 1500, the number of meters in a freestyle swim; 20, the maximum-possible points in rhythmic gymnastics; 3 million, the number of bananas the culinary team at Olympic Village think they’ll need over the course of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, which take place over two weeks this summer.
It’s a daunting task to feed 15,000 people no matter what, but if food is fuel, the chefs feeding the athletes at Olympic Village are somewhat responsible for how these athletes perform. Events management and catering group Sodexo Live takes that responsibility seriously. What results is an incredible feat of logistics, combining sustainable sourcing, diversity of options, and ensuring all athlete’s nutritional needs are met by some combination of the 500 dishes that will be served.
But it’s not just baseline nutritional needs that need to be met — athletes are coming from all over the world, with their own culinary traditions. The Olympics are supposed to be a place of cultural exchange, and this extends to the food. Sodexo Live has brought on partner chefs Amandine Chaignot, Akrame Benallal, and Alexandra Mazzia to serve dishes like quinoa muesli, chickpea pommade, and gnocchi in chicken sauce to showcase modern French cuisine. Other chefs on the team are charged with creating everything athletes will need to eat, both before and after the competition.
[…]
Are there any specific dishes on the menu that you’re excited about, or dishes that were developed specifically for this athlete’s village?
EL: The menu is extremely extensive, we have over 550 products in our recipes, in order to really ensure that every single person there has what they’re looking for. Being in France, there’s going to be quite an emphasis on French food, so we’re going to bring some of the classics to the table. Hopefully, athletes will be curious and enjoy that, usually after they’ve competed.
We’re going to be working with three chefs based in France. We wanted to highlight what French gastronomy is all about nowadays. Benallal came up with a quinoa muesli dish; it’s quite unexpected since we associate muesli more with breakfast. But we turn it into a savory dish with sour yogurt. Alexandra has a chickpea pomade in a smoked fish sauce and an almondine with langoustines. We are very aware that ,for athletes, these games are really important and the expectations are going to be extremely high. Not only because it’s France, but in Tokyo the energy in the athlete’s village was obviously shaken up by COVID. So all the chefs have worked so hard to ensure that the entire menu offered is vibrant and relevant to how we eat now.
[…]
[EL:] There are a few products we need to source internationally: coffee, chocolate, bananas. Bananas are an athlete’s favorite thing. We anticipate getting two or three million bananas. At peak time there will be 15,000 people living in one place. So that means per day, at peak time, we’re going to go up to 40,000 meals. At the end of the entire journey, it’s over 1.2 million meals. I was working on quantifying the volume of coffee, how to produce it. And then someone said, “Can we get the coffee grinds back to us to use as a fertilizer?” So what’s the volume of grinds we’ll produce? I’’s 20 tons of coffee, so that means it’ll be 40 tons of coffee residue. But all of this is going to be used to grow mushrooms.
Is the food available 24 hours, to account for different competing schedules?
EL: The dining hall is this massive building that was a former electrical site. It’s transformed into six different restaurants, and each restaurant has a theme. You have a French quarter, Asian quarter, halal food. The International Committee gave us an estimate that 18 percent of the population will be eating halal, so we have dedicated a whole segment to that. Five of the restaurants will be open from 5 a.m. until 1 a.m., and one of them is open 24 hours. Overnight between that 1 a.m. to 4 a.m. it’s less people, but the opening hours are still extremely wide. There are also grab-and-go spaces with things like burgers and shawarma sandwiches. We don’t talk about nutritional values there, because this is what the athletes want after competing.
JL: I’m excited to be a part of serving the American delegation. We’re serving stuff as basic as BBQ ribs, mac and cheese, and chili.
EL: Americans have been extremely vocal about what they want. They were more picky and sensitive about having a lot of gluten-free items, and a more vegetable-based diet. Also each delegation has rooms in the village to create their own things. The Australian delegation, they literally turned a space into a coffee shop and brought a barista.
[…]
What does that change look like, when they can relax and not think about weight or nutrition as intensely? Is there a bar area? Are they going to be able to drink and celebrate a win or a loss?
EL: There is no alcohol sold within the village. I’m sure some of the delegation again will have cake or beers. But they’re going to be in Paris. And let’s remember the average age of the athletes is 24 years old. We don’t need to worry about them sourcing alcohol.

Peace,
SG

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