The Decisive Fraction: What Percentage of the Population Wins or Loses a War?

In close elections, it's often pointed out (usually by the losing faction) that a relatively small portion of the country chose the whole country's fate, by choosing the country's next leader. For example, in the United States 2016 Presidential election, 42.3% of the total population of the country voted. But an even smaller fraction determines a country's future where the method used is state-organized mass violence rather than uncoerced choice. Here is a table of the most decisive battles of each war, and the fraction of the defenders' populations involved in each.

Battle	War	Year Fought	% Host Country Population
Hastings	Norman Conquest	1066	0.41
Spanish Armada	Spanish Invasion of England	1588	0.43-0.51
Plains of Abraham	Seven Years War (in North America)	1759	0.29
Yorktown	American Revolution	1781	0.41
Gettysburg	American Civil War	1863	0.40
D-Day	World War II	1944	0.40

Cherry picking? I chose the the most decisive battle in six conflicts in Anglophone history. Notably, the major decision I had to make was, for D-Day, do I use the combined population of the Allies (in which case the percentage is 0.063%) or, as I did here since it seemed to make more sense, the defending country hosting the battle, which was France. (Only a minority of troops in that battle was French.)

Is it possible that the most decisive battle is usually the biggest battle? Yes, I would think there aren't many most-decisive battles that are small - in fact the Battle of Plains of Abraham is famous for being small and quick among important battles. Looking at the Wiki article for the list of American Civil War battles, and at all the battles listed as having "A" importance as considered by historians, the mean and median come out to 0.21% and 0.18% of the population, with a range of 0.0004% to 0.58%. Clearly Gettysburg was bigger than all but a few of even the important battles (all but 6 out of 42 others.) If you'd like to add up all the "B" battles to look for mean and median go ahead - at a glance, they are clearly smaller on average.

The biggest land battle in history in terms of number of combatants is probably the Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad, which saw 0.59% of the Soviet population participate in the battle. We might reasonably consider this an upper bound of the amount of a civilization that could participate in a battle. This is also considered by many historians the most important battle of the war.

It is also possible that historians, lacking counterfactuals, merely pick the largest battles of any war since they have objective numbers of participants and casualties. However the counterargument there is that if the generals at the time did not consider a battle important, they likely would not have contested it with a large number of troops, and there would have been no large battle.

Assuming we're converging to 0.4 for most of the critical battles, what determines this number? My guess is it's a function of percentage of willing able-bodied men, transportation, and "surface area" between combatants. These of course are all pre-ICBM numbers, and now that we're all combatants, when a nuclear conflict occurs, the numbers will all be orders of magnitude higher, though it's hard to imagine a family sleeping in their home as combatants.

Fiction Is Dreaming In Print

There are mathematical techniques intended to counter over-fitting in data. Imagine a stockmarket analysis program. If it's trained on a year of data when, that year on June 23, all tech stocks dropped, it might start to recommend selling (or shorting) all its tech stocks just prior to June 23 every year. Obviously this isn't smart; the program has overfitted. What you might do is take the training data and slice it up and restack it in some new way - different sectors, different months - and the program might start finding more meaningful relationships.

This is analogous to dreaming, and has been rediscovered (or re-engineered, if you prefer) in other settings for some years now. We still don't really know why we sleep, let alone why we dream. But if we assume that brains are doing the same thing - avoiding overfitting - the explanation makes sense, and is consistent with the characteristics of dreams. Suddenly you're at the beach you used to go to every summer as a kid, but then in your school; your deceased grandmother is there, at the same time as your asshole coworker from the last company, and then you're driving down a steep mountain road with no brakes. Obviously they never met, and they especially didn't meet in some bizarre hybrid beach-school-mountain place. By mixing them, you're trying to avoid overfitting. In contrast, if you have PTSD, you do dream literally the same concrete traumatic experience over and over - and your waking behavior is overfitted - you avoid trucks under overpasses, or that one street corner, or movies about fire, based on whatever experience you had that you can't "digest", integrate with the rest of your life's experience, and move past.

Returning to computers, Andrej Karpathy on Twitter says "...in some sense, hallucination is all LLMs do. They are dream machines. We direct their dreams with prompts. The prompts start the dream, and based on the LLM's hazy recollection of its training documents, most of the time the result goes someplace useful." Similarly, the data stored and sliced and diced in our dreams influences how we perceive the world. It provides the top-down filter for the bottom-up sense data pouring in.[1] Without this, we veer off into hallucinations and delusions within days.[2]

But sometimes we humans' dreams intrude into our waking hours, drawing attention to themselves in full form, like stars briefly visible in the daytime if you know where to look[3], or if you like, a laundry dryer opened mid-cycle to let a sock or a shirt fly out. In the shower, you start laughing when a joke you heard in eighth grade pops out of nowhere. While driving to work somehow you're suddenly thinking of your recently deceased cat, and you're sad.

It seems to me that fiction is a more elaborated version of this, committed to a less ephemeral form, one that produces fossils of our overfitting-avoidance. Something has to explain the reason that we write stories that never actually happened, that we know no one will ever think actually happened, and that we (mostly) never even show to anyone else. (Out of all the short stories ever completed in history, what percentage of them was even intended for publication, let alone did the author think had a real chance of being read by someone else?) So why do we bother? Why are we so compelled? We're avoiding overfitting the things that are important to us. We write character-driven stories examining the psychology of people similar to those we know, or we write alternate history what-ifs about events that we find interesting - all of which we are trying to understand better and connect to our other experience, as we turn it over, and slice and dice it and rub it up against our other experiences.. Even the writing process itself is consistent with this - the ideas somehow just appear automatically, along with some scenes and images and events, that the writer has to organize (often laboriously, decidedly non-automatically) into a coherent narrative.


[1] In psychosis, the top-down part of the process dominates and you're lost in a waking dream of hallucinations and delusions. Autism is sometimes thought of as a diametric opposite to psychosis, when the bottom-up sense data dominates and unfiltered and the overwhelming cacophony of sounds, lights, or textures become intolerable.

[2] Waters F, Chiu Vivian, Atkinson A, Blom JD. Severe Sleep Deprivation Causes Hallucinations and a Gradual Progression Toward Psychosis With Increasing Time Awake. Front Psychiatry. 2018; 9: 303.

[3] When Venus is on the same side of the Sun as Earth, you can actually see it with the naked eye during the day. When I first located it in a blue daytime sky, I found this almost disorienting.

A Brief Sketch of History: Subdivisions of the Iron Age

Large sedentary civilizations emerged where groups of people were forced to, and then rewarded by, central organization of labor - often in marginal environments (dry river valleys requiring irrigation, or in the special case that generalizes the rule, rice farming.) Because of the more rapid diffusion of ideas, the Silk Road regions (Asia, Middle East, Europe, North Africa) were advantaged over the rest of the world. (Hence, the description here is focused on the Silk Road macro-region.) Europe, in turn, was advantaged over China because geography predisposed the formation of multiple small states which acted like incubators for cultural selection; and Greece was advantaged over the rest of Europe given its peninsulas, mountains, and islands. This arrangement still allowed eventual cultural diffusion, overtaking China only with the printing press. The other factor which allowed Europe's situation to obtain was the separation of religious/moral authority and secular authority - a Pope, and kings (as opposed to the unity of these institutions throughout much of Islamic history, and the relative marginalization of religion in East Asian history.)

States demonstrate a natural cycle of 200-250 years. Even if a nation by the same name, on the same territory, with the same people, lasts longer than this, typically there is a transition period. The natural experiment of a large state on a fertile plain showing this pattern is China, but Rome also demonstrated the Principate and Dominate periods, the Ottomans had a similar pattern, and it can be seen elsewhere as well. In these rough divisions I am focusing on the Silk Road regions of the Old World - China, the Middle East, North Africa and and Europe.


THE IRON AGE: 1200 BCE-1800 CE

Early Iron Age: 1200 BCE-500 CE. Began in Europe with the Bronze Age Collapse, saw the rise of multiethnic administrative empires and coinage, and thus the Axial Age. In China, this contains the end of the Shang Dynasty, as well as the rise and fall of the Zhou and Han Dynasties. In Europe this can be further divided into Early Iron Age 1 (1200-600 BCE) featuring palace economies, and Early Iron Age 2 with the later development of oligarchic rule and early market economies.

Middle Iron Age: 500-1500 CE. Roughly co-extensive with the medieval period. in Europe this begins with collapse of Western Roman Empire, the weakening of the Eastern Roman Empire, the collapse of Persia and the spread of Islam. In China, it begins earlier with the end of the Han Dynasty. The Middle Iron Age is characterized by the spread of supra-ethnic philosophies and the dissolution of large empires, which can be thought of as an ecological model of cooperation within empires no longer exceeding competition within empires; oligarchies quarelled amongst themselves, and social or ethnic outsider groups benefiting from cultural diffusion (Germanic tribes in Europe, or the Yellow Turban Rebellion in China.) This period is marked by states and peoples developing a sense of identity if not patriotism, and especially by nomads occasionally overwhelming established states, with the Mongols as the military high water mark of nomads in history, with their decline signaling the end of this period.

Late Iron Age: 1500-1800 CE. In the West this contains the Renaissance, Protestant Reformation, Age of Discovery and Enlightenment. In Russia, it starts with the Great Stand on the Ugra and eastward expansion. In China, it's the parallel end of the Yuan Dyansty. Ultimately it begins with the spread of gunpowder, as seen in the gunpowder kingdoms, as well as the printing press, which had its greatest impact in Europe both for the good (Europe's domination of the world starting in this period) and the bad (religious civil wars as Northern Europe could communicate more easily.) At this time, the technological advantage of sedentary societies began to overwhelm that of nomads. Simultaneously, the benefit of technological innovation in the crucible of a sort of geographically-enforced natural federalism in Europe allowed Europe to outstrip China and colonize the world. The use of gunpowder as a source of energy more powerful than human or animal muscle anticipates the Industrial Age. Like the Mongols, Napoleon was the high water mark of Iron Age warfare, and was ultimately undone by the home of the Industrial Age, the United Kingdom.


Though not the focus of the post, the Industrial Age comes with its own subdivisions: the first wave in 1790-1830 with steam and water power leading to factories, materials extraction and textiles, an interim with three "transition wars" in the West (the Crimean War, American Civil War, and Franco-Prussian War; the Taiping Rebellion still appeared very much like a late Iron Age religious War, like a Thirty Years War compressed into half the time) with the second industrial revolution 1870-1910 converting industrial power into consumer goods; this culminated in World War I, the first industrialized war.

No Connection Between ABC Laws and Alcohol-Related Outcomes

States in red have ABC laws. (Source: wiki)
American states have varying levels of state control over alcohol sales. When the topic is discussed at all, it's typically framed as an issue of controlling a potential vice - ostensibly, those laws are there to protect the states' citizens from the bad effects of alcohol. So it's obviously worth asking: do these laws actually help?

One of the nice things about a federal system is we can give some states the slack to conduct their own individual experiments, and see if they work out, so in that sense it's a good thing that some states have ABC laws and some don't. I initially wanted data either for QALY lost due to alcohol per capita by state, or alcohol use disorder by state. I was unable to find that data (if you have it, contact me and I will add it to the analysis.) But there were three outcomes where I could find data that are on their face relevant to why we would care about this: alcohol-related death rate, cost of alcohol related morbidity and mortality per capita, and volume of alcohol consumed per capita.

Using two-tailed t-tests and data as cited below, there is no significant difference between ABC states and non-ABC states in death rate, alcohol-related health costs, or consumption.

If you don't trust fancy statistics and just want to know the averages, then I have to tell you, the (again, not significant) averages were WORSE for death and consumption in ABC states, and better for costs in ABC states. There's just no way to look at these numbers and conclude that ABC laws improve alcohol outcomes.

Are there outliers? Yes, unsurprisingly, Utah. Removal of Utah from the data makes the consumption difference significant the other way. That is to say, if we take out Utah, there actually IS a significant difference in consumption between ABC and non-ABC states - and ABC states drink MORE.

Of course this says nothing about causality, with or without the difference in consumption that becomes significant when we remove Utah. In that case, you could understand the statistics as meaning

• ABC laws actually make people drink more, or
• People in ABC states already drank more, and their governments passed ABC laws to reign them in, or
• It's something else, and ABC laws have no effect.

Obviously none of these are palatable as publicly debated arguments for ABC laws ("The Governor announced today we're keeping the ABC laws because you people are impulsive animals who can't be trusted with liquor") and the states who are collecting revenue from such laws are not going to do anything to damage the fragile justification for continuing the system as-is.

Of course, the next question is "Then why do states keep ABC laws in place?" The answer is likely revenues, veto blocs (the employees at the state stores who want to keep their jobs more than they want the state government to make sense for citizens) and some degree of virtue signaling to voters. If you're ever fortunate enough to hear public officials and state store employees and unions defend the status quo on this, you'll be treated to some vaguely moralizing, gyratory, evidence-free statements; gambling produces similar sorts of 2 + 2 = 5 rhetoric, which is why the arrangement is rarely if ever directly addressed. Consequently, in an environment where this kind of absurdity is accepted with a shrug, adjacent nonsensical laws, e.g. the Johnstown Flood Tax still being collected today from alcohol sales in Pennsylvania, can persist and metastasize easily.*

Remember this next time you're at your local state store, talking about this with a friend, or most importantly, voting.


REFERENCES
Death rates: drugabusestatistics.org
Alcohol health-related costs: CDC
Alcohol consumption per capita: wisevoter.com

*There are those who claim Johnstown has been rebuilt, but reasonable people can disagree on this. That said, guys, it's been well over a century. Either they've rebuilt Johnstown by now, or they should give up.

Foundation, Empire, and Pennsylvania

If you like alternate history, there's more here.




The Central State's flag above, and the American flag below, with the lions of sacred Mount Nittany standing guard. At one time the American flag had thirteen stripes, prior to the absorption of the Northeast Extension, the Lower Counties, and The Shore (old style, Connecticut, Delaware and New Jersey respectively.)



From fair Henlopen in the South, and Franklinton, New Reading and Long Island. From Toledo in the Northwest where the prairies begin, and the industrial river metropolis of Huntington, the Central State looms large in history and in our hearts. From the beginning it was a microcosm of all of America. The culture and government of the United States was not always so dominated as it is today by the Keystone Kingdom. Indeed it is sometimes difficult to separate discussions of national politics from those of "Pee-Ay". But it is instructive to revisit the events that led to such an arrangement.


On the eve of the Revolution, there was no sure sign that Pennsylvania would come to dominate the Union just as the original crown colony of Virginia had until then dominated the colonies. But there was already a hint during the Seven Years War, when British officers who came to fight the French in the North American theater recognized, in print, that Virginians promised everything and delivered nothing, while for the Pennsylvanians it was the contrary. No surprise that the opportunist Washington was the first to engage the French (illegally killing a surrendered officer), hunker down at Fort Necessity, and quickly lose.



The Grand Canyon. (Credit Bayjournal.com.)
It bears repeating what every American learns in school, but imagining that we were there, not knowing how things would turn out, making decisions in real time. In the spring of 1784, Pennsylvania had had enough from the treacherous Yankees of the Northeast Extension (then called Connecticut), who continued illegally squatting in the Wyoming Valley and dispossessing the Central State of its land based on deeds from King George - who the inbred Anglophiles may not have realized was no longer in charge of North America! Leading the charge were Alexander Patterson and Henry Shoemaker, low-level officials who would be catapulted into history as protectors and heroes of the young republic. In response to the mobs of Yankees rampaging through the valley attacking women and children, a militia was raised in July by order of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Executive Council. Outgoing president of Congress (a rather modest position with no hint of what was to come) Thomas Mifflin, after pleading with both sides to stop, visited the valley and saw the Yankee depradations with his own eyes.

In August the strengthened militia fully ejected the Yankees and pursued them across the border into New York. Mifflin returned to the Confederated States capital at Annapaolis and made his impassioned speech, demanding "Can only the Pennsylvanian reckon justice?" The call was heard back home, and as the Pennamite army pushed the weakening Yankees back to the Hudson River, reinforcements continued to pour in. (The story of a fleeing Yankee taunting now-General Shoemaker that Pennamites couldn't swim, while delicious, is likely apocryphal.) Thus began the Crossing near Newburgh, the Glorious March, and the Forty Great Days. The swollen Pennamite Army pursued the haggard Yankees, first to Hartford, then turned back to New Haven where the final resistance was met and crushed. The Burning of New Haven and subsequent salting of the soil caused the victorious Pennamites to name the town built on its ashes New Carthage. The first new piece of the Central State had been assembled.

The Death of New Haven, John Troutman. (Really Burning Village at Night by Johann Trautmann, 1716-1769.)


Fresh from their victory and with no serious organized opposition, Shoemaker made the then-controversial decision to continue along the coast to the harbor town of Franklinton (then called simply New York City; difficult though it is for us to believe today, Franklinton was at that time actually slightly larger than Philadelphia!) Of course, we were all shocked to learn based on recently discovered letters that Mifflin had essentially ordered him not to. Franklinton took a few days longer but finally fell; it is often simplistically imagined that the fighting stopped quickly and neatly, but for nearly two months the hunt-and-snipe naval warfare continued, with most of the guerilla fighting both in the streets of the main island Manhattan and in the forests of Staten Island, along with significant resistance from the converted commercial barges coming down the Hudson. At this point Mifflin issued demands to the Lower Counties (then, confusingly, called "Delaware" after a county in southeast Pennsylvania that always remained as part of the Central State) that they return to the fold, and they rejoined with a minimum of discussion. Getting New Jersey's delegates to agree was slightly harder but after the (now archaic-seeming) carve-outs were placed in the Act of Union, Pennsylvania now extended to the Atlantic. This is the basis for public wagering and the production of certain pork products being restricted to The Shore; a pig farmer at the negotiations named Charles Taylor insisted on the latter, and the pork rolls still bear his name. (It's a curiosity that The Shore's official name remains New Jersey, though mapmakers seem unconcerned with this.)

By October, other states had begun organizing their own militias, with Massachusetts in particular preparing for all-out war. Mifflin unilaterally moved the capital back to Philadelphia, and appealed to the other states to quickly send delegates that the Articles of Confederation could be amended, as winter was approaching. Revisionists occasionally deride this as an illegal move, but the Republic as it stands is founded on the agreements subsequently drawn up. (The grumbling of James Montgomery, the Rhode Island delegate, that he was rubber-stamping something to give it an air of legitimacy, gives us the phrase "like a Rhode Islander at the convention" for those who decry pointless ceremonies.) Mifflin began with tweaks to the articles which subtly gave the Central State the "first among equals" status it now not so subtly enjoys. But the work continued into the winter, and once there was snow on the ground, he went full bore - in particular, in adding an article outlawing slavery, which Pennsylvania had already done within its own borders, in a law written by Mifflin himself. Mifflin knew what he was doing in bringing out these amendments to his captive audience when the weather turned - hence, where an Englishman might talk about crossing the Rubicon, an American would quote Mifflin: "When the first flake strikes the Schuylkill."

The First and Highest, Governor Mifflin. (Credit Pennsylvania House of Representatives.)
The agrarian states in the South obviously balked, but Mifflin had anticipated this. A militia composed of the willing - not only the Pennamites from the Central State's expanded realm but also New England abolitionists, had already been dispatched south, going plantation to plantation, intercepting riders bringing news of their approach, and most importantly - conducting rendition of slaveowners. This is the most difficult part of Thomas Mifflin's legacy, but the results are not in dispute. When the brigade officer met with the plantation owner, the owner would be asked to sign a document freeing his slaves, and a petition to be submitted to the Final Congress demanding the abolition of slavery throughout the nation. Of course, most refused; they were then brought north, themselves to work in the chilly fields of Lancaster and Berks County and building roads and digging canals, with the only condition required for their release - signing those two documents. By 1785 there were few enough holdouts that the Emancipation Act was passed, closing a stained chapter of our history.

The British were no idle spectators and indeed, had expected the experiment in self-government to fail from its first days. Caught by surprise, they had provided only nominal aid to the Yankees in the fall of 1784, but they were taken off guard; not so the following year. The wealthy plantation owners of Virginia met with the British naval officers who came up that state's rivers at night, and the Battle of Williamsburg was a narrow Pennamite victory, when a detachment of troops came upon a squadron of British ships at anchor. Of the owners who were sought and captured as a result of their foreign involvement, we mostly remember Washington, whose service to the cause of independence will be forever marred by his willingness to consort with the enemy to keep human beings in chains. One wonders how long, in some other world, some of our other Virginian First Fathers (Titan oldngods to Mifflin, Patterson and Montgomery's Greek pantheon) would have continued the institution of slavery without the example of Washington to encourage them to emancipate. This incident resulted in the transfer of Virginia's mountain counties and Trans-Ohio lands to Pennsylvania, a transaction encoded directly in the Charter, and the Central State took the final form it has today.



The High Governor's two official residences. Above, at Ocean City in The Shore and below, in South Mountain, Berks County.


In 1786 the Charter was finalized by Franklin and signed by Mifflin, and the Republic of America was born, with Pennsylvania at its heart. Governor Mifflin finally achieved his title, formally transferring his responsibilities to head of the Central State's government rather than that of the nation. As a result, legally, "Governor of Pennsylvania" is de facto interchangeable with leader of the Republic of America, with the American President having a mostly ceremonial role, much like the king in a constitutional monarchy. Mifflin was followed by Patterson and Shoemaker, and during the terms of the Great Three, America pushed in every direction, not only expanding beyond the Mississippi but also taking England's possessions in Canada and the Caribbean and adding them to the Republic. As the Republic expanded within the North American continent, it found itself in a complex arrangement, with the Pennsylvanian-founded states like Ollinger and Yoder having a status akin to a Republican version of those in Europe ruled directly by the Holy Roman Empire, and independent states like New Mexico and California as duchies and principalities. The Pennamites appeared to be unstoppable, and this era produced William Pitt the Younger's frustrated statement about finding England's sins, so she could be absolved and saved from this new race of devils.

A subsequent history of Pennsylvania is necessarily a history of the world, given its immediate industrial expansion and its people's close ties with the many progressive German states, usually considered to have started with an overseas victory by a combined force of European and Pennamite troops over the French despot Napoleon at Austerlitz, where Napoleon was captured and executed. These ties only deepened over the next century. Despite a brief clash between east and west nearly erupting into full civil war over the use of "soda" versus "pop", and "youse" vs "yinz", Americans continue to be greeted the world over as "pennies", and immigrants continue to arrive in Philadelphia and take a picture as they order their first sauerkraut and scrapple in the Central State. The ongoing Wawa-Sheetz controversy seems intractable, but Pennsylvania has always synthesized its extremes and risen above them.


BACK FROM ALTERNATE HISTORY: WHY DID NEW YORK AND NOT PENNSYLVANIA BECOME THE EMPIRE STATE?

New York didn't dominate the Union to nearly the same degree as our fun alternate history of "Imperial Pennsylvania." (I liked "Central State" better than "Keystone" because it echoes the literal translation of China's self-confident name for itself, the Central Kingdom.) But New York is to some extent the first among equals on the East Coast, even if de facto rather than de jure. Why? As usual, a combination of geography and demography being destiny, and historical happenstance.

First, what do we mean by "empire state"? The biggest wealthiest city, and the most famous people. Let's start with the second one there. It often sticks out to me that Pennsylvania had so many fewer presidents than the states that surround it. Virginia has eight, Ohio has eight, and New York has five. Pennsylvania finally has a second - in an ironic twist, the first was Buchanan, the worst president in American history until the twenty-first century, and the second president from PA unseated the only president who was even worse than Buchanan.[1] Again, why?

Pennsylvania was settled by people from the Midlands of England and Germans.[2] The German religious migrants and Midlanders were a group that valued equality and an overall "flat" social organization which was a major contributor to the informality and salt-of-the-Earth directness of the overall American character, and the religious tolerance that Penn espoused fit them well. New York had a heavy influence from the more rigid settlers of New England who valued education much more than Pennsylvania's farmers - and, in real life, came directly into armed conflict with them in the actually quite real Pennamite Wars[3], which formed the branchpoint in our exercise here.

As to the second factor - geography - New York was already slightly bigger during the time of the Revolution, but this obviously just begs the question.[4] Why was New York already bigger? You might think it's because it's a little closer to Europe, so it was easier for European migrants to arrive there. True, but then why isn't Massachusetts the Empire State? The real reason is that New York has the Hudson, a navigable river that crosses the Fall Line, which can be sailed all the way to Troy. It was easier to get raw materials and get to markets and then later, with canals, onto the Great Lakes. Similar reasons account for the origins of Detroit as the center of the automotive industry and Seattle as the headquarters of Boeing (wood for material, and water for transport for the early aerospace industry.) While Pennsylvania does have shoreline on Lake Erie, it's across the significant and little-discussed Eastern Continental Divide, that divides the watersheds of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. Pennsylvania did build a canal later connecting the Delaware and Chesapeake but the Susquehanna (whose name, according to a humorous myth, means "mile wide, inch deep") is just not a useful river for transporting goods.

Years ago I was curious why Virginia, the cradle of presidents, ended up settling with the title of dominion rather than empire? You may have noticed that despite Jamestown being the oldest culturally ancestral settlement in America[5], our biggest densest cities are not in coastal Virginia. (We actually lost the location of Jamestown at one point!) But straight line extrapolation from single facts is always a fool's game. Virginia's first two centuries were strong ones - the military uniform Washington wore early in the Seven Years War actually implied Virginia was a equal part of the United Kingdom along with England, Scotland and Ireland (sorry Wales.) But after the Civil War, Virginia was relegated to partly a suburb of DC, and then, well, the rest of it. (I'm partial to Hampton Roads for reasons of childhood vacations, and Shenandoah National Park is cooler than you might realize, but the point is fair.) Virginia is a warmer Pennsylvania, but even worse, with a wider coastal plain between the Atlantic and the Fall Line. Why even worse? Because as the industrial age unfolded, its better climate and broader plains cursed it.[6] The first settlers were from the estates of southern England (Albion's Seed termed them Cavaliers) and served as the first Presidents, but the agrarian paradise that Jefferson envisioned (a chain of plantation mini-states that were either utopias or dystopias depending what color your skin was) was soon outcompeted in dollars, growth, and power by the industrial cities to the north. (I would be curious to look at a Gini calculation between Pennsylvania and Virginia landowners or a comparison of mean farm size between the two, but I'm going to call that the line where the professionals can take over.) And finally, if you think the Fall Line in Pennsylvania was hard to get over, try the Appalachians in Virginia. Some of those roads in Shenandoah wouldn't look out of place in the Sierras if not for the deciduousness of the forests.

Long live the Keystone State! May it ever shine in glory!


FOOTNOTES

[1] If you don't agree, I'm surprised that you were able to read this far, but surely it was slow going and you're likely mouthing your words as you read.

[2] Albion's Seed is an excellent book, which details how each region of colonial America was settled by people from specific parts of England. Similar things happened in the Spanish-speaking world, for example people from Andalusia to Mexico, people from the Canaries to the Caribbean.

[3] This was actually the second time Pennsylvanians fought with another colony or state. Suck it, Cresap.

[4] I suspect we don't talk as much about New York during the Revolution as we do Philadelphia and Boston because we mostly got our asses kicked there. The British abandoned Boston early in the war, Philly was occupied only after a fight but both the Declaration and Constitution were written there, and the interior was never occupied, with the pesky insurgents brazenly camping right up the Schuylkill in Valley Forge.

[5] The roundabout language of "culturally ancestral" disqualifies St. Augustine, Roanoke, along with Cahokia and every Native American city, since there isn't an unbroken cultural chain from any of them to us today in modern America.

[6] There's a great statistic cited in Zakaria's Post-American World that I will give in the abstract here, to maximize impact. Country 1 has a sound lead in industry X; Country 2 in industry Y. Sales in industry X are at least an order of magnitude bigger than Y. So you want to be Country 1 right? Filling in the blanks: the year was 1900, Country 1 was the UK, industry X was bicycles, Country 2 was the US, and industry Y was automobiles. Extending this to Virginia (and the South in general), its better climate made it over-reliant on agriculture, and the industrial revolution arrived late and weakly.

Whether AIs are "Conscious" or "Intelligent", Etc. Is Irrelevant to Questions of Danger and Alignment

1. If the question of our continued survival and flourishing is what's important – then it's an interesting question whether AIs are just imitating language, or have experience and therefore possibly worthy of moral consideration. But it’s not important to the question of danger. If the AI can out-process us (whether are not you believe it’s “thinking”) and destroy us, who cares if it's "just imitating"? Unless you can show that whatever those words mean (thinking, processing, conscio etc.) has some bearing on predicting the objective behavior of the entity, it's irrelevant.

To my knowledge these are open questions in philosophy, and it surprises me to see the most intense doomers e.g. Yudkowsky giving one second of attention to them in discussions.


2. AIs are, so far, increasingly complicated echo chambers. That is, to an AI, "enojo" means "zorn" and vice versa - both mean “anger” in English, and the AI can put them in the right place in context with words, but there is no real argument at all that these phrases correspond to the Ais experience, unlike the way most of us think about language.

Again, this is not a dismissal of the possible danger of AI. That GPT4 is an echo chamber is irrelevant if the machines can out-process us even if they're "just imitating". However the AIs are language engines, not survival engines. Humans have come from selection over billions of years in the realm of real-world physics and have programmed in the very core of our being to avoid death and to reproduce; language is a recent side effect of that. AT THIS STAGE, I would be surprised if these language models were to resist being erased or turned off. Therefore we should be very concerned about genetic or evolutionary techniques for producing language engines.

Herein, I Criticize the Governor of Florida

Florida bill HB991 has not yet become law as I write this article. However, if it does pass, please consider my statement made in this post to be repeated the day after the law goes into effect. And that statement is that not only is Ron Desantis a bad governor, he is also not a true Christian.