Daniel Ellsberg has died

https://youtu.be/TQ-Crh3rdQA?t=1946

(BTW - the whole interview is well worth watching).

If you think people lack courage, you don't have to look far as to why.

This is a part that would be good to remember in UFO discussions. You have no idea of what supposedly all this secret information about UFOs are, or about the context that is being suppressed, or even how much there is as opposed to Chinese whispers recirculating the same exact original datum, wikiception-style, slowly rising from some garbage better discarded to 'the intelligence community has reports'...

Unfortunately, I feel that a lot of political leaders, bureaucrats, intelligence analysts, etc. never reach that stage of realising that much of our intelligence is mistaken, wrong, incomplete, misleading etc. - so they’re always operating in that ‘can’t learn from anybody who isn’t in the club, just pretend to listen while immediately dismissing anything they have to say, no matter their expertise’ stage… And it affects democracy too - from their perspective, why listen to the will of the people, because they don’t know what we know.

And let this be a warning whenever you read something from an unnamed ‘intelligence source’ or ‘Government source’ in the press…

Naturally human nature is to think the opposite, that the most highly protected secrets have been carefully evaluated because they're so important, when the relationship is actually the inverse.

Maybe there should be a maximum period of time that any given information can remain classified, and maybe it should be short.

I think all corruption ultimately runs on ignorance of this simple phenomenon.

In retort - "Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks."

Full terrors should be exposed for MAD to work.

I think that it should be required reading at all the US military academies.

I’d recommend “Soldiers of Reason”, which is about the RAND corporation and the thought process behind the madness.

Hearing about how military bureaucracy does stupid and incompetent things is a given… understanding how a lunatic like LeMay was in charge of and restrained from initiating a global apocalypse is more enlightening, if not terrifying.

Repeated games under epistemic uncertainty actually allows you to get an edge by extracting information and reducing that uncertainty, in comparison to a game which is guaranteed to have no edge for you.

With the 30/30 red/green urn, on the other hand, you don't really have a much greater edge than 50%, at least in the early phases. In the later phases, perhaps you could count balls to get an edge, unless the balls are put back in the urn after being drawn.

Still very interesting.

Best case is 60:0

Worst case is 1:59

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellsberg_paradox#Possible_expl...

However, it does seem plausible to me that people would prefer the first urn even if they didn't suspect any trickery.

Look at the "one-urn paradox" version at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellsberg_paradox. This clarifies that there is no subjective probability that can rationalise people's behaviour. If you prefer betting on red to betting on black, you should also prefer betting on red or yellow to betting on black or yellow.

As a metaphor imagine if a game like chess required zero classified information: every move you make you need to disclose all your thinking and future moves to your opponent. You would be at a disadvantage.

And yet Nixon handily won in 1968 (even with Wallace kneecapping him in 5 states) and 1972.

While not well covered, Ellsberg would mention in person that his early issues weren't that it was a bad or immoral war but that the US wasn't committing the forces/effort required to win it. That's one of the reasons he waffled for so long.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+18%3A20...

Similarly, an honest journalist doesn't cover for their newspaper, so there are no honest journalists left in the NYT.

It's a flawed premise when you look back on the past 100 years where the concept of 'honesty' really meant 'loyalty to your government'. Hitler, Stalin, McCarthy, Nixon...

In Genesis God is drawn to do something about Sodom as the din of shrieks from that city has spurred him to action, shrieks either from people of the city oppressed in it or visitors to the city oppressed by it. Considering the Lot story later and God's intention to destroy Sodom presumably shrieks by visitors. Anyhow. Yes, Abraham haggles. Just prior to this we hear God's internal monologue where he decides, for the first time, to include a human -- post Adam, depending on how you read the naming of things -- in the decision making process that governs the world. Abraham is presumably horrified -- the narrator of Genesis does not say -- and haggles God down from destroying the city outright, to 50 etc etc daring to go as low as 10, a number that, just so happens, to be a later minimum administrative unit size in Jewish society. In the narrative structure of Genesis we have already seen an attempt to eradicate evil through destruction -- the Flood -- and that does not work, to the point where God promises not to do outright, global destruction like that again. So it's clear in the narrative -- though perhaps not to Abraham who may or may not have known about the post-Flood promise -- that God has a maximum upper bound on the amount of people that can be destroyed in response to evil: all. Abraham brings this maximum upper bound down to 50 as an opening gambit, then etc etc. It is worth noting that Abraham, at this point in the story, is elderly and rich, so he's presumably used to negotiation as a way of life.

Why would Sodom not be destroyed if there were less honest people? God's intention before consulting Abraham is to destroy the whole city but it is Abraham that bargains the number down to a minimum. If ten can be found, the threshold for destruction isn't reached. An entirely reasonable read here is that Abraham couldn't bear to see an entire city's worth of people destroyed and God was willing to be convinced otherwise. In itself that's a remarkable thing for a Near Eastern deity and is one sign that Genesis as a piece of literature is in conversation with and opposed to other contemporary Near Eastern literature.

Anyway, that's not the only read here -- there are millennia of commentary on this very text -- but it is worth pointing out that the Genesis text comes from the Mesopotamian culture, one that is both distinct from our Greek-derived way of thinking/being and has also gone extinct outside of literature, so norms that may have appeared self-evident to the original audience might not come through to modern readers so easily, or at all.

Was Trump exposing the classified information he took to the broader populace? No. Was there a public good to be had if he did? Probably not. Taking the nuclear secrets and making those public? Not good.

There is no intent in the espionage law, so from a legal standpoint that doesn’t matter, but I don’t think Trump belongs with the whistleblowers. Sounds like he wanted to keep this information secret, for himself. He’s on tape, saying as much.

One of my Christian friends offered a different perspective: the city was so vile that even a man of slightly dubious moral character like Lot was a man of virtue, compared to the crowd outside his house.

In any case, that was not enough to save the city.

27 Abraham answered and said, “Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes. 28 Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking. Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five?” And he said, “I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there.” 29 Again he spoke to him and said, “Suppose forty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of forty I will not do it.” 30 Then he said, “Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak. Suppose thirty are found there.” He answered, “I will not do it, if I find thirty there.” 31 He said, “Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord. Suppose twenty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of twenty I will not destroy it.” 32 Then he said, “Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak again but this once. Suppose ten are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of ten I will not destroy it.” 33 And the Lord went his way, when he had finished speaking to Abraham, and Abraham returned to his place.

I don't think that's accurate, I just double checked and it's God who's doing the evaluating, there's lots of hits for "If I find...".

Leaving such a significant part of his recent life out of the obituary seems utterly bizarre, deeply not normal and it's hard to imagine how it's not deliberate.

But "the Pentagon Papers" sound important (kind of like the Panama Papers or the Paradise Papers, and may even be the trope namer?) and "who leaked the Pentagon Papers" sounds like an interesting story that I might want to learn more about.

"Someone who is famous in some way but you've never heard of has died" is a much weaker pull. Yeah, there might be something interesting there, and if it's someone whose death has hit the top of the HN front page then the odds of me finding it worth reading are somewhat higher than if it was a headline almost anywhere else (hence why I'm here). But there are a bunch of other headlines on HN, and I could have easily skipped past it. "who leaked the pentagon papers" would have been a much stronger signal that this was someone I wanted to read more about.