111–120 of 174 posts
Is a long way of saying "thinking you know something that you actually don't." It's about hidden assumptions, and if there's any psychology to it would be hubris.
I think one of the biggest issues is confusing knowledge with intelligence. Haig may have known everything about the previous generation of warfare, that doesn't necessarily make him intelligent. It makes him knowledgeable. Now, he was also likely intelligent enough to apply his knowledge of then conventional warfare to various then conventional situations. And this likely made him excellent at his position. In so mu…
The author may be onto something. Or they may have had one good idea and are now trying to make it fit too many problems. WWI did have moments of extreme stupidity. But the real problem was that, for the first time since castles vs. troops without cannon, defense was stronger than offense. Machine guns, barbed wire, and trenches could resist most attacks. When that wasn't enough, both sides had plenty of railroad cap…
Makes me wonder whether we could have defeated an organization such as Taliban with say COVID. The very unfortunate side effect (understatement) would be all the civil casualties, but that is also part of guerilla warfare (e.g. happens in Israel/Palestina conflict as well). But nevertheless, something like COVID could've been used as a biochemical weapon, with the side launching it being vaccinated, or knowing how to…
They would be full of grief and anger at losing some of their grandparents, but that won't affect their ability to fight and would be likely to motivate them to continue.
Smallpox had up to 90% mortality in Native American populations, across all demographics. Fair to say it was a different beast.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps surprisingly the main problem with current warfare isn't the lack of options to kill enough people in some general area. Although if you were to go in that direction COVID-19 would be a minor inconvenience when it comes to warfare so I'm not too sure what you're aiming at there. The Spanish "used" diseases that were a heck of a lot more severe.
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…
Did the Taliban lock down? Of course not.
So we've done this experiment and you're simply wrong.
I think one of the biggest issues is confusing knowledge with intelligence. Haig may have known everything about the previous generation of warfare, that doesn't necessarily make him intelligent. It makes him knowledgeable. Now, he was also likely intelligent enough to apply his knowledge of then conventional warfare to various then conventional situations. And this likely made him excellent at his position. In so mu…
This is something that was briefly touched upon in The Smug Style in American Liberalism where Knowledge and Knowing aren’t the same, but in general people are incredibly uncomfortable in hearing this - on HN and elsewhere. Too many confuse Knowing with Knowledge. Knowing isn’t a metric of intelligence, merely conformism without any critical thinking.
For instance I know that I should not put diesel in my car. I know that it will fuck it up. The reason I know this is that it's literally in the manual. And the only reason I trust the manual is that it was written by the people who built the car. I defer to their expertise.
But not for one second do I believe that it means I know why I shouldn't do that. Or how a combustion engine works. Or that I can diagnose and repair my car's engine if it breaks down.
There is no way round that "stupid" is primarily an insult thrown at opponents, not a statement of fact. As a matter of fact we are all incredibly smart. And stupid too. With that said, I have a hard time agreeing with the definition of stupidity put forth in the article, as far as I understand it. To me stupidity is that state of mind that one may find oneself in before the first cup of coffee in the morning, or whe…
Calling someone ugly is also an insult, but that person might get binned right at the bottom of a Hot or Not style survey.
I'm not in love with the author's framing of what it really is, but I agree that 'stupidity' is something which intelligent people exhibit on a regular basis.
But the word itself is ambiguous, such that trying to pin down a definition has to wrestle with the fact that we would also call someone who is rather low intelligence "stupid" if we don't mind insulting that person in the process.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tactics evolved a lot during WW1, e.g. creeping barrages and shock troops. It was also the first true industrial war. It saw submarines and the first combat use of aircraft, in bombing, close air support, recon and air combat. And it let to the invention of the tank. Haig so, for all his support pf veterans after the war, IMHO never understood what he really did. The Germans wanted a decisive battle, which they didn'…
Regarding "It was also the first true industrial war" , you may like this quote by Scott Westerfeld on the Wikipedia page for Dieselpunk [1] "But to me, World War I is the dividing point where modernity goes from being optimistic to being pessimistic. Because when you put the words "machine" and "gun" together, they both change. At that point, war is no longer about a sense of adventure and chivalry and a way of test…
That sounds like a dangerous glorification of pre-industrial war.
I wish the author[1] read a bit more about the science of wisdom and foolishness before ruining their good intuition with a stubbornly limited perspective. > Stupidity is a very specific cognitive failing. Crudely put, it occurs when you don’t have the right conceptual tools for the job. The result is an inability to make sense of what is happening and a resulting tendency to force phenomena into crude, distorting pi…
Would you mind avoiding the tortured use of terminology from CS to describe what is not a CS problem? This occurs too often on HN and often conceals gross misunderstanding behind a veneer of technical jargon. You end up reasoning about something other than the thing at hand because you've tried to redefine it in terms of something you're more familiar with (see "Law of Instrument").
You haven't mentioned which terminology you're talking about but assuming it is one of combinatorial explosion, compression, framing or heuristics; these are not computer science exclusive jargon, these are information processing terms, something both humans and computers do, and as such used in cognitive science contexts pretty extensively and correctly.
> This occurs too often on HN and often conceals gross misunderstanding behind a veneer of technical jargon.
Unless you're ready to point out what the gross misunderstanding was, your point is moot.