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Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

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Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#161

Post by danaris »

watwut wrote: post #152
danaris wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To clarify what dukeyukey said a little further: The Black Death killed 40-50% of the population indiscriminately . Wars killed able-bodied men in their prime almost exclusively—removing a huge chunk of those best able to bring in the harvest (many able-bodied women can help, of course, but some percentage of those are pregnant or caring for babies for much of the day), without removing a proportional chunk of those…

> Wars killed able-bodied men in their prime almost exclusively Definitely not true and increasingly not. Civilians, especially old and vulnerable die due to violence of soldiers, general violence, lack of food, medicine, having to move without support and so on. Armies extract very much needed resources and destabilize places. Plus, civilians are often targets - WWII notoriously killed more civilians then soldiers.…

I was referring to wars prior to WWI—those where the loss of manpower was directly relevant to the harvest.

And sure, wars could target civilians, and sometimes did. But what you can be guaranteed of in a war is that soldiers will die.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#162

Post by oblio »

philwelch wrote: post #160
oblio wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're kind of talking past each other :-) He's saying that tanks became less effective during WW2, at first offense was overpowering defense thanks to tanks, airplanes and improved logistics. During WW2 defense started getting closer to offense, at least on land (air power improved greatly and it was the thing which facilitated all major offensives). For example during the Battle of Kursk German tanks couldn't break…

The Soviets also had more tanks, though.

They had a much higher ratio during Barbarossa ;-)

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#163

Post by 0x10c0fe11ce »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #142
0x10c0fe11ce wrote: post #14

The OP lost me on a bunch of bad analogies. I’ll keep recommending to my friends The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by Carlo Cipolla. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49348225-the-basic-laws-...

Not a good summary. Some more informative links: • http://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidit... • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_M._Cipolla#The_Basic_Law... • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2570448 (as someone else linked)

Usually I recommend the book as my friends don’t like summaries. But thanks anyway.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#164

Post by tstrimple »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #143
tstrimple wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're simply wrong. We've got plenty of conservative politicians celebrating low vaccination rates and pushing anti-vaccine misinformation. https://wset.com/news/local/us-rep-greene-congratulates-crow... https://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/71921

Those politicians aren't "the government", though. bobthechef's claim, as stated, is accurate. Your counterclaim, while also accurate, does not refute bob's point.

That's facile. These are politicians who make up the government. They represent half of the two party system we have in this country. Is disingenuous at best to claim she isn't a representative of the government.

Honestly it's pretty disgusting that you're going to pretend Republicans haven't been downplaying the virus and doing what they can to prevent localities from taking precautions against it for over a year now. Either you're dangerously ignorant to the steps Republicans are taking to prevent us from handling this virus or you're deliberately spreading misinformation. Either way, you're a net negative to the discussion and actively causing harm with your misinformation.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#165

Post by duncanawoods »

anyonecancode wrote: post #75
duncanawoods wrote: post #10

Calling trench warfare stupid because of conceptual obsolescence seems suspect. It was a new problem with no obvious solution. Trench warfare in the US Civil War didn't end in such a stalemate so there wasn't much precedence, There were newer automatic weapons and a vast scale of the armies covering an entire front that hadn't been seen before. A stalemate might have been the best available outcome at the time where…

> Trench warfare in the US Civil War didn't end in such a stalemate so there wasn't much precedence I suppose this hangs on one's definition of stalemate, but I'd consider the nine months of the siege of Petersburg to qualify. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Petersburg

Yes, I think you are right, that counts as precedent.

I was thinking of the famous battles chasing each other around the map that included entrenchment but didn't stall as significantly. I can see an argument that Petersburg is the last stand of an exhausted defeated army digging in at their capital with the attackers choosing to siege rather than purely an unsolvable tactical impasse created by entrenchment technology... but it's probably that too.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#166

Post by Fnoord »

samatman wrote: post #115
Fnoord wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is to strike at the enemy the moment they are weakened. Western societies were severely weakened in March 2020 onward to summer 2020. They were on lockdown, there have been logistics problems, which had impact on things like police and secret service. I very much doubt military are exempt from it. Being in a good condition isn't a guarantee you remain unaffected, and the danger of being affected mildly is t…

SARS2 made it to Afghanistan, you know. Did the Taliban lock down? Of course not. So we've done this experiment and you're simply wrong.

We've done the experiment indeed; see the historical example of the Spanish conquistadors. Other than that I'm not aware of it, so we don't know if such an attack could work. Its a hypothesis.

The original SARS and MERS were too deadly to spread widely. In order for the attack to work, you don't need a disease which is lethal. All you need is a disease which makes your enemy ill enough to attack their infra, while you're immune (e.g. via full vaccination, or because of group immunity from antibodies).

Right now, Israel is practically immune to COVID (and was the quickest to get vaccinated), while their surrounding regions are not. This could give them an advantage in warfare, should they decide to initiate such (legit or via proxy). Which, incidentally, is also why is was clever of Israel to pay large sums of money for the vaccines.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#167

Post by samatman »

Fnoord wrote: post #166
samatman wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SARS2 made it to Afghanistan, you know. Did the Taliban lock down? Of course not. So we've done this experiment and you're simply wrong.

We've done the experiment indeed; see the historical example of the Spanish conquistadors. Other than that I'm not aware of it, so we don't know if such an attack could work. Its a hypothesis. The original SARS and MERS were too deadly to spread widely. In order for the attack to work, you don't need a disease which is lethal. All you need is a disease which makes your enemy ill enough to attack their infra, while yo…

You're just not getting it.

For one thing, the initial wave of smallpox wasn't an attack, it was just an ordinary infection. Incredibly deadly but it wasn't deliberately introduced.

For another, comparing smallpox with covid is so thick-headed that I'm not interested in discussing things with you anymore.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#168

Post by AnimalMuppet »

tstrimple wrote: post #164
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those politicians aren't "the government", though. bobthechef's claim, as stated, is accurate. Your counterclaim, while also accurate, does not refute bob's point.

That's facile. These are politicians who make up the government. They represent half of the two party system we have in this country. Is disingenuous at best to claim she isn't a representative of the government. Honestly it's pretty disgusting that you're going to pretend Republicans haven't been downplaying the virus and doing what they can to prevent localities from taking precautions against it for over a year no…

Representative Greene does not speak for the federal government. She does not set federal policy. She does not represent the government; she represents one district. She has less than 1/435th of the power of the House of Representatives. ("Less" because she chairs no committees.)

I don't deny your claim about "celebrating low vaccination rates and pushing anti-vaccine misinformation". But you are simply wrong that Greene and people like her represent the government. They don't. (In the same way that AOC, say, doesn't represent the government. And, in fact, AOC and Greene can't both represent the US government.)

> Either you're dangerously ignorant to the steps Republicans are taking to prevent us from handling this virus or you're deliberately spreading misinformation. Either way, you're a net negative to the discussion and actively causing harm with your misinformation.

Yeah... maybe you ought to cool it with your accusations when you are actually misrepresenting my point.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#169

Post by watwut »

danaris wrote: post #161
watwut wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wars killed able-bodied men in their prime almost exclusively Definitely not true and increasingly not. Civilians, especially old and vulnerable die due to violence of soldiers, general violence, lack of food, medicine, having to move without support and so on. Armies extract very much needed resources and destabilize places. Plus, civilians are often targets - WWII notoriously killed more civilians then soldiers.…

I was referring to wars prior to WWI—those where the loss of manpower was directly relevant to the harvest. And sure, wars could target civilians, and sometimes did. But what you can be guaranteed of in a war is that soldiers will die.

> And sure, wars could target civilians, and sometimes did.

They very often do. It is not exceptional. In pretty much all wars, civilians die. Cities, villages, farms get attacked and destroyed along people in them. War where civilians don't die would be an exception.

Also, wars happen where people live.

> I was referring to wars prior to WWII

In those, civilians died too, cities/villages were attacked for fun and profit and all that.

In addition, prior wold wars, armies lived off the land. Meaning taking food off whoever happened to live there, by force if necessary. Meaning, additional deaths off lack of food.

Re: Stupidity is a specific cognitive failing

#170

Post by mcguire »

cpleppert wrote: post #148
mcguire wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" I'm not sure trying to improvise a way through a novel kind of conflict counts as stupid so much as untrained. Maybe there was someone in WWI saying "This is obviously wrong and won't work - we should do this other thing instead." " There were. Some of the ideas were good, and eventually took off, some were good-ish but needed more development (aircraft and tanks, for example), and some just didn't work. But to thi…

>>But mostly, the war ended when the governments and economies of the nations fighting could no longer withstand the strain and started collapsing. (Russia is the most obvious example; Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire were sketchy going in; Germany and France were the military superpowers but Germany finally fell apart with France about this far > Huh? Germany lost. It couldn't have defended its territory by th…

Germany still occupied part of France and most of Belgium at the time of the armistice. Much of the allied offensives in mid- to late-1918 were recovering ground taken by the German spring offensives of 1918. Whether or not Germany could have militarily defended its borders is kind of irrelevant because the government collapsed (https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/government..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Revolution_of_1918%E2%8...).
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