
The Collapsing Leviathan - nabla9
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4816
======
dustingetz
USA's power stems from having coasts on both oceans, which gives the USA
unique naval advantages, according to a book:

> The United States Navy controls all of the oceans of the world. Whether it’s
> a junk in the South China Sea, a dhow off the African coast, a tanker in the
> Persian Gulf, or a cabin cruiser in the Caribbean, every ship in the world
> moves under the eyes of American satellites in space and its movement is
> guaranteed—or denied—at will by the U.S. Navy. The combined naval force of
> the rest of the world doesn’t come close to equaling that of the U.S. Navy.

> Having achieved the unprecedented feat of dominating all of the world’s
> oceans, the United States obviously wanted to continue to hold them. The
> simplest way to do this was to prevent other nations from building navies,
> and this could be done by making certain that no one was motivated to build
> navies—or had the resources to do so. One strategy, “the carrot,” is to make
> sure that everyone has access to the sea without needing to build a navy.
> The other strategy, “the stick,” is to tie down potential enemies in land-
> based confrontations so that they are forced to exhaust their military
> dollars on troops and tanks, with little left over for navies.

\-- Friedman, George. The Next 100 Years (p. 45). Knopf Doubleday Publishing
Group. Kindle Edition.

Basically he says that the USA can spend recklessly, be astoundingly
inefficient, etc and still remain in power due to this.

~~~
leto_ii
I've also read Friedman's work and tend to agree with a lot of his points.
However, what we've started seeing for some years now is a severe degradation
of the US's soft power. The hard power is still there and the US will probably
make more and more use of it in order to keep other countries (or its own
population) under control.

For the rest of the world (and for a significant part of the US population)
this will make life more unpleasant, but at the same time will help dispel any
lingering illusions about the benevolent or fair nature of American power.

~~~
dustingetz
what is soft power vs hard power?

~~~
chiph
Soft power: Influence, prestige, money, persuasion.

Hard power: planes, tanks, ships, spacecraft.

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eat_veggies
I agree with a lot of this post, but I'm skeptical of characterizing the SAT
as "one of the most fearsome weapons against entrenched wealth and power ever
devised."

The SAT was originally created by a eugenicist "to uphold a racial caste
system. He advanced this theory of standardized testing as a means of
upholding racial purity in his book A Study of American Intelligence. The
tests, he wrote, would prove the racial superiority of white Americans and
prevent 'the continued propagation of defective strains in the present
population'—chiefly, the 'infiltration of white blood into the Negro.'" [0]

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#History)

~~~
MattGaiser
His argument is slightly different.

It is not a fearsome weapon to elevate the people at the bottom, but rather
one to make elites prove that they are reasonably intelligent before being
given the keys to the power and wealth.

Character, extracurriculars, awards, etc. can all be neatly packaged and
generated for a student. Grades can be gamed very easily. Another local school
near mine had internal grades and adjusted grades for sending to universities.

The student needs to pass the SAT on their own even if they are relentlessly
tutored. It is one thing that someone cannot do for them entirely.

------
MattGaiser
> The last side door for smart noncomformist kids is now being slammed shut.

How does a standardized test benefit nonconformists? I strongly disagree with
eliminating the SAT, but always viewed success at it as requiring one to
conform to a certain template. You need to shift your thinking patterns and
your style to match what test writers want.

Wouldn't nonconformists have some of the more interesting extracurriculars and
essays, things which have increased in value?

I agree with the part about smart kids being disadvantaged by the SAT going
away, but nonconformists and smart people are not the same thing.

~~~
CDRdude
> I agree with the part about smart kids being disadvantaged by the SAT going
> away, but nonconformists and smart people are not the same thing.

In this context, "smart noncomformist kids" refers to the intersection of
"smart kids" and "nonconformist kids". The proposition of this sentence is
that college admissions officers will reject all the nonconformist kids
because they can't tell which ones are smart.

------
buboard
The stock market didnt really crater.

But more importantly, the author has nothing to say about academia itself. The
whole 'went to the moon and promised flying cars' has cratered too. Simple
things like epidemiology don't work. World seems resigned to watch humanity
pay the toll of herd immunity and call that an achievement.

------
somewhereoutth
Covid-19 has perhaps been a test of _organisation_ , more than anything else.

Unfortunately the US (from what I observed during my short time there a few
years ago), though really amazing in many ways, did rather seem (in my
European eyes) to be somewhat floundering in that regard.

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deogeo
> the US’s “holistic” college admissions system, with its baffling-to-
> foreigners emphasis on “character,” “leadership,” “well-roundedness,” etc.
> rather than test scores, originated in a successful push a century ago by
> the presidents of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale to keep Jewish enrollments
> down. Today the system fulfills precisely the same function, except against
> Asian-Americans rather than Jews.)

"Fulfills" implies it is effective, but enrollment statistics show this to be
utterly false:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21130080](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21130080)

------
rch
> do you not understand what your system will actually do to society’s
> underdogs? Or do you understand perfectly well, and approve?

I'm cynical by nature, but I'd rely on Hanlon's razor here.

------
ur-whale
Reminds me of a great movie called Idiocracy :

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKyoSS3bwjA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKyoSS3bwjA)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZHCVyllnck](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZHCVyllnck)

------
softwaredoug
I have been trying to think of a systematic way of testing whether and the
extent of which the US is in collapse. It can be hard to separate the
histrionics of the current media environment from facts on the ground. I’d be
curious what model or factors people would consider relevant to such an
analysis.

\- influence on the world stage?

\- GDP

\- wealth inequality

\- quality of life

??

~~~
cambalache
Yes, those are good points. US is in an excellent position (but not as good as
the average American think).

In 1960 the US was 40% of the world economy (in nominal terms). Right now is
around 24%, it was 22% when Trump was elected.This number will decrease even
further in the upcoming decades.

Regarding per-capita, quality-of-life measures, things like HDI, Gini
coeffcient, Corruption Perception, Food and Enviromental protections the US
tend to be in the middle of the pack for the OECD countries, usually around
position 10-20. This was unthinkable in the 1960s when America #1 was taking
for granted.

~~~
softwaredoug
How much of being 40% of the world economy In the 60s is being the only
economy left standing after WW2? From that perspective growth elsewhere is
just about inevitable... the short sightedness is perhaps not recognizing that
the 60s was the anomaly, not the status quo

------
KKKKkkkk1
So how do all the countries that don't have the SAT manage not to collapse?

~~~
MattGaiser
Most countries call it the national exam or entrance exam. They are very
common throughout the world.

------
makomk
One of the amazing things about the coronavirus pandemic is watching what all
the right-thinking, non-MAGA folks are expected to blame Trump for swivel 180
degrees in an instant. Not so long ago, the idea that it mattered whether the
US made things anymore was a Trumpian delusion, a cynical and counter-
productive attempt to exploit people's nostalgia that fundamentally didn't
understand how the modern world worked. Now that it turns out that actually
being able to make things matters and is what decides if you can supply your
populace and doctors with protection, suddenly it's Trump's fault for
supposedly destroying American industry in just three years. Similarly, his
China travel ban has gone from pointless and xenophobic to not strict enough
without anyone blinking an eyelid.

------
courtf
The elite schools have always been a caste system, we just convinced ourselves
after WW2 that the entire country belonged in a global upper caste. The notion
seems just as absurd today as it did in the 1800s.

I attended public high school in rural upstate NY in the 90s and scored a 35
on the ACT when I was 16, without preparing at all. With some amount of
studying I had a 1440 on the SAT that same year (1998 or 99) and didn't bother
taking it again. I've always scored well on these tests, but it never
translated into much acclaim or academic success. I smoked weed at lunchtime
every single day my junior and senior years of high school, which was the kind
of achievement that gets celebrated in those parts. For a while there we all
dropped acid on the weekends too, the winters upstate are brutal. Unlike most
of my friends, I went to college where I slacked my way through a 2nd rung
liberal arts school with a 3.7 in subject (mathematics), graduating in 2005.
By 2010 I was in a hurry to leave the miserable customer service/QA engineer
role I had worked for 3 years at Surveymonkey.com, so I took the GRE. After
about a week of half-assed prep in the evening I scored a 790 math 670 verbal
6.0 writing, enough to get me a scholarship for my Masters. Turns out going to
school to escape your shitty job isn't the best decision, but I didn't have a
lot of other options. Surveymonkey is worth what, a couple billion today? Well
they didn't treat me very well back in 2007. In today's climate of online
outrage I probably could have parlayed that mistreatment into something, I am
a protected species afterall (gay).

From my perspective, the problem with this whole system is that smart kids are
not challenged enough. Everything is too easy in public school, and bad habits
are never corrected. There's also no role-models to show smart kids that they
might go somewhere in life. Upstate New York is in a permanent state of
decline, there's nothing these kids can look forward to and they have no money
to go anywhere else. Depression and doubt, difficult home lives, access to all
manner of drugs, child abuse etc. The best results from my high school came
from a few Indian immigrant families who sent their daughters off to Harvard
and the like. We still got those girls to drink and smoke weed with us though
:).

There was another local (ie, white) kid in high school who was really smart
and smoked lots of weed and got into trouble the same way I did. A real math
talent. We took a double period of AP physics together right after lunch, so
we were both high as hell in the back of the classroom. We both scored 5's on
the test at the end of the year, too. He is a seasonal worker now, puts up
tents for country fairs and the like during the summer.

The alcoholism in upstate New York is something people out in polite society
would not believe. Lots of DUIs in my old friend group. These guys are
conscious when they blow a .4 (or higher) on the breathalyzer. One ex-marine
friend is a fire jumper (seasonal as well) and went to the hospital with a .6!
He was joking with the doctor while they were pumping his stomach, a real
character. No small number of these kids are dead.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, ain't nothing new under the sun.

~~~
ErikAugust
Just for reference: How far upstate are we talking?

~~~
courtf
This is all around Utica, but I imagine it lines up pretty closely with other
rustbelt experiences from the region. It sounds a bit grim on second reading,
and it can be, but we had a lot of fun. There is a lot of waste too, though.

Edit: Here's a little taste of the local culture, this guy was on tv all the
time growing up :)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FBY2qTLvTM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FBY2qTLvTM)

------
riazrizvi
> University of California will now permanently end the use of SAT and ACT in
> undergraduate admissions. This is widely expected, probably correctly, to
> trigger a chain reaction, whereby one US university after the next will
> abandon standardized tests

You're really missing the point of this action. Since the College Admissions
scandal, it has become clear that people with deep pockets can game the SATs
and ACTs by paying people with inside knowledge. The UofC doesn't want to
eliminate standardized testing, they declared they want a replacement. They
are changing this because it is unfairly skewed toward people who can pay up.

Trump and the corruption and anticompetitiveness that he represents is a long
line of Conservatism that up-ticked during Reagan's era. Yes, that is
certainly a threat to America, and something to worry about.

Conservatives want it all, and they want it concentrated in the fewest hands
possible. They are the scorpion on the back of the frog which is Capitalism.
Capitalism is free-enterprise, the opportunity for people to create wealth by
creating things that benefit society. Conservatives want to twist the rules,
to cheat the system, so that you don't have the opportunity, so that the rules
heavily favor the people who already have it. Why? Because Conservatives stand
for no-change, keep the wealth in the hands of people who were born into it.
And concentrate it into their hands even more.

Conservatism is the opposite of what created the USA and made it special, it
is the opposite of what made the USA an economic powerhouse. Conservatism is
the default that most countries are governed by, since the beginning of time,
across all geographies. Conservatism is the reason why innovation and
brilliant creativism is sidelined. Because incumbent power brokers don't need
it, they don't need change, they don't need improvements. They just need all
the gains to continue going to a very few, and all they need for that is the
maintenance of exploitation. Occasionally throughout history Conservatism has
been broken by special laws the created fairness. In Ancient Greece it was the
Solonian Constitution. In Ancient Rome it was The Law Of Twelve Tables. In
1707 Britain it was Parliament which broke Royal Monopolies and led to the
Industrial Revolution. At the founding of the USA it was the Constitution. In
all these cases, these laws of fairness drove massive levels of economic
growth, of creative destruction and innovation, that changed the world.

The Conservatives want to destroy that, because they want it all for
themselves, no matter what the consequences. The Roman Emperors destroyed
their equitable laws, and that lead to the decline of Rome. Now massive
corporations, their heads, and their political stooges/lackeys want to destroy
equitable economic laws, they want to destroy antitrust legislation that
prevents them from controlling it all forever. The momentum that big companies
are building to destroy competition and fairness in this country is an
existential threat to what makes the USA special. Citizens United. Unfettered
mergers and acquisitions. Widespread corporate surveillance using data
snooping. All these are of great concern.

------
api
His first point is valid. His second doesn't make sense to me.

The wealthy are already very good at gaming the SAT/ACT system via tutoring.
Teaching to a test always improves test scores. Any metric will be gamed if an
incentive to game it exists. No exceptions.

Meanwhile he ignores the real elephant in the room, namely that the elite
university system as a whole is a major source of inequality in our society.
Even if Harvard, MIT, and Stanford do everything in their power to make
admissions as fair as possible or even to bias them toward underdogs, it
doesn't matter much. All the top ten universities combined can't educate more
than a tiny percentage of Americans. That means this tiny percentage of
Americans get an outsized advantage that the vast majority of Americans will
never experience.

~~~
ribs
Is teaching to the SAT really so distorting, and so expensive to obtain? It’s
a pretty general-knowledge test, and there are tons of people out there who
will tutor for reasonable prices, I’d expect.

~~~
vkou
> and there are tons of people out there who will tutor for reasonable prices,

Any significant amount of 1:1 instruction is not a 'reasonable' price for a
poor family. The middle class can afford it, the lower class can't.

One of the problems with the SAT is that if all the rich applicants can pay
their way to acing it, being a smart poor kid doesn't actually set you apart.

You aced it, they aced it. You can't afford to be captain of the hockey team,
they can. In that case, the test isn't actually a sorting function for talent,
it's just another cash-expensive hurdle to overcome.

At least, this is the theory.

