"Among the 1.2bn people who inhabit the world’s liberal democracies, 75% now hold a negative view of China, & 87% a negative view of Russia. However, for the 6.3bn people who live in the rest of the world … 70% feel positively towards China, & 66% positively towards Russia" https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/A_World_Divided.pdf
The Social Recession: By the Numbers — “Fewer friends, relationships on the decline, delayed adulthood, trust at an all-time low, and many diseases of despair. The prognosis is not great.” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Xo7qmDakxiizG7B9c/the-social-recession-by-the-numbers
“This may revolutionize data science: we introduce TabPFN, a new tabular data classification method that takes 1 second & yields SOTA performance (better than hyperparameter-optimized gradient boosting in 1h). Current limits: up to 1k data points, 100 features, 10 classes.” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1583410845307977733.html
By subjecting a quantum computer’s qubits to quasi-rhythmic laser pulses based on the Fibonacci sequence, physicists demonstrated a way of storing quantum information that is less prone to errors https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/958880
Google’s Video AI: Outrageously Good! 🤖 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxmAQiiHOkA
Mechanical neural network could enable smart aircraft wings that morph https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.abq7278
Experimental indications of non-classical brain functions https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2399-6528/ac94be
"Contrary to our expectations, our data suggest that it is liberal—not conservative—men who engage in increased political aggression after experiencing threats to their masculinity." https://psyarxiv.com/qnpw4/
Who's afraid of the big bad data? https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/whos-afraid-of-the-big-bad-data
“If you think I'm overreacting to all these calls to just "diplomacy harder", a quick thread on why it's so damaging at the moment” https://twitter.com/pwnallthethings/status/1584745122209886208
Report: Germany pressures Switzerland to re-export tank ammo to Ukraine
Swiss neutrality has been an idiotic stance the last time someone fought a war of conquest and it is now.
Neutrality only works as long as others are fighting for your freedom and they win. If the conquerors win you'll eventually be conquered as well because defending an isolated stretch of land while allowing others to reap the world's resources is unsustainable.
I wrote more on this back in March:
There exists a subculture among the political right that is in favor of military isolationism. They proclaim that when the war comes to where they live, they will defend their homeland. But they will stay home and are not going anywhere else to fight.
“I’m staying at home and when the war comes to Arkansas, I will dig my boots in the ground and I will die for everything I love and I will not retreat.”
― UFC fighter Bryce Mitchell
I understand the sentiment. I'm also too much of a coward to go and fight abroad. The freedom I enjoy is due to other people -- in my case American soldiers -- who are were willing to fight far from their homeland to prevent evils such as communism from taking over the world.
Non-interventionism simply isn't a viable option if you don't enjoy the protection of other countries like Germany does. Take, for example, China. 500 years ago, China destroyed its world-dominating navy and thereby ceded world domination to Western colonial powers. Why does half of the world population speak Indo-European languages rather than Mandarin? This is it.
Or take the US navy. It was created because pirates captured American merchant ships. Had the American Congress been of the opinion that the use of a country's military should be restricted to the defense of its homeland then the United States would not be a world power today. Some interventionist forces like Nazism or communism would have taken over the world and eventually consumed America as well.
To see how this idea of restricting your focus on the place you live cannot possibly work let's take this idea to its logical conclusion by considering aliens. Yes, aliens!
Would it be a viable strategy for humanity to restrict its sphere of influence to the solar system and watch grabby aliens take over the Laniakea Supercluster? Obviously not. You cannot defend one solar system against an intergalactic civilization. Even if they are relatively incompetent and their forces have low morals, we would succumb to their superior numbers.
There is no choice but to try to project your power and shape the world according to your values. Otherwise, someone else will shape the world in their image. And you might not be a part of this image.
RE isolationism, it is clearly a matter of degrees. The UFC fighter says they'll wait for war to enter Arkansas, which I assume is a flourish. Hard to believe they would shun the fight if Florida were attacked.
I'm of the opinion that most foreign engagement has not been good for US citizens or the world. Even when fighting evils like communism or islamic extremism, Vietnam and Afghanistan were not good for those countries or us. I guess what I'm getting at is that the bar for foreign engagement is too low in my book. And it's annoying when failure after failure justified with reference to some hypothetical end of the world where USA (or the rest of the world) is subjected by some totalitarian ideology.
Note that this is compatible with believing the Pax Americana is real. And indeed one can believe that less intervention would strengthen the peace. USA would have much more power had we handled Vietnam and Afghanistan differently. Essentially, been isolationist.