Graham Walker

So if this remains a short term thing, probably every oil producer is happy with the windfall. The longer it goes on, the more minds are focussed on "how do we shift to something with more secure supply?"

The "Trump tweets, KSA jumps" frame was never correct, but it is true that KSA has spent a lot of diplomatic and monetary effort these last 12 years to corral the non-US producers into a semi-functioning group and has been mostly happy to play along with the idea that it was for Trump's benefit.

There's an extent of course, as Dan was saying, where you can kind of smuggle in rationality through the back door in this way, "well it makes sense according to the ideology." But those perspectives are also very interested in what they see as inevitable self-contradiction.

The usual meaning of "ideology" is also along these lines of "irrationality", right, but the constructivist/post-positivist use of it does actually go into "what are the contradictions here, why might one principle win out over another, why might they do a thing even though it is bad for them"

No need to apologise at all from my (ir)rational perspective, good discussion!

I think you're articulating it fine, I think you're right that this is what rationalists often do and that the perspective even requires it somewhat. But I'm saying we don't have to do that, we can be eclectic or constructivist or something.

And he doesn't say "these people are wrong and stupid", he just says "I'm going to focus on why wars might happen when actors are rational." So what I'm saying is, if we can't come to a reasonable rational explanation for a conflict, it might be because the actor is incompetent or mad.

To be fair, he starts the paper with "some say that wars happen because leaders are irrational, or because they don't bear the costs of war."

Sure, but what I am saying is that you can use it to "eliminate the impossible" by saying "this is stretching what we mean by rationality beyond what it can tolerate." If you're in a strictly rat choice dept, then sure, they of course may be prepared to manipulate what "rational" means.

*Explanations, sorry.

I feel like Fearon's Rationalist Arguments for War can be used in this way, right? In the sense of it lets you discuss whether the case at hand can be explained in terms of rational actors, so you are able to say "well someone is either being silly or mendacious here."

Also pretty impactful on the relations between EU/UK and US, but those are already under a bit of strain, it is fair to say.

Liz Truss's YouTube channel, perhaps.

Goodwin showing the incredible numeracy he, as a former alleged political scientist, is rightly known for.

Donut Lab on mittauttanut Donut Batteryn ominaisuuksia yhdellä Euroopan johtavista tutkimusorganisaatioista – julkaisee mittausraportit sarjana tulevina viikkoina | Donut Lab Donut Lab on tilannut kansainvälisesti arvostetun Teknologian tutkimuskeskus VTT:n mittaamaan yhtiön julkistaman, maailman ensimmäisen sarjatuotantoon sopivan solid state -akun ominaisuuksia riippumat...

The plot thickens:

www.sttinfo.fi/tiedote/7182...

#greensky #energysky

Didn't realise you were a KEGS guy, my dad went there around the same time as Perry and Heffer.

How many people heard it, relative to "the US economy is a disaster because the president is senile"? What is the overall skew of the media environment? These are empirical questions, people do this work, and their findings don't support your viewpoint of a neutral "media-as-messenger".

You absolutely can frame the same lived experience in radically different ways. Again, this is well studied, from psychology to behavioural economics to political science.

Whole areas of academic research show that voters don't only "form opinions from their own experience", so I don't think it is insulting to voters to say e.g. elite cues matter, what is in the newspaper matters etc. These things are part of a voters experience.

In the UK at least, Bernard Ingham, Thatcher's press secretary, was both influential in getting nuclear back on the agenda in the 2000s (via his group SONE), and also backing/astroturfing local anti-wind groups

Yeah, if it is a bet about innovation, it feels like the odds of RES/BESS breakthroughs are more likely than nuclear, partly because the iteration time is so slow (especially if we are talking big nukes not SMR, where we still need to see how it works in a commercial environment).

"But I don't need 10 nuclear power plants" is considered petty quibbling.

Even now, the discussion in the UK (and of course the US) is that it is the fault of "regulation". The response to the question "can you build one on time and budget?" is usually a mixture of "No, but the Chinese/South Koreans can" and "No, but let us build 10 and we will learn from the first one."

Having lived next to a great pub happily revitalised after being bought by its locals, some counterpoints:

you don't need to have your fag outside my front door;
I don't need to hear your drunken conversations while you do;
you don't need to push your mate through my front window

Or put another way, ideology

How do they want to connect that AI to the grid, if not with more grid? That's part of "the grid that actually needs to be built", presumably?

I would have thought Angus preferred a flat white.

Sure they outline it, but then they semi-reject that by injecting Pavlick's "I'm a reasonable sceptic who takes the middle position" point of view ("we don't understand how they work...we don't know...if it will ever make sense to call them conscious"). We do know that, though.

Peanut butter has had it too good for too long.

Although, the framing is bad here - it didn't "decide" anything, it repeated lines of argument available in its training data based on however the probabilities happened to fall that particular time. It has no moral commitments, it's an LLM.