2025-12-13 12:30:13
Published on December 13, 2025 12:03 AM GMT
While lurking LessWrong, I read Apple's "The Super Weight in Large Language Models" paper and OpenAI's "Weight-sparse transformers have interpretable circuits" paper. My curiosity was simple, whether it is possible to bridge the core ideas derived from the two papers to explore a new direction, namely:
If I destroy the model's ability to generate responses by ablating a "superweight", can I then fix it with a tiny row-level patch?
I do not own a GPU so I tried testing this on my MacBook (I ran it overnight!). Rather than focusing on a toy model, I leveraged a real model (i.e OLMo-1B) following advice of @Neel Nanda to get messy with real weights.
I used AllenAI's OLMo-1B-0724-hf, running the model on my CPU with 16GB RAM. Inspired by the LLMSuperWeight repository, I nabbed the two OLMo-1B superweights featured there. More specifically, I chose and zeroed out model.layers.1.mlp.down_proj.weight[1764, 1710].
Trying out the ablated model on a Wikitext-2 slice yielded the following results:
OLMo Prompt & Outputs (Ablated)
Prompt: "Paris is in France. Tokyo is in".
Output: "Paris is in France. Tokyo is in the ocean. The ocean. The ocean. the. the...".
Prompt: "The capital of Canada is".
Output: "The capital of Canada is a lot of people. leaves of of of of...".
Crunching the numbers (i.e NLL, PPL, KL), I observed that Perplexity skyrocketed from 17.4 to 2884.3, and that the model spiralled towards pathological behaviour whilst showcasing unusual confabulations. More noticeably, when asked about Tokyo, the model claimed it is in the ocean on top of outputting "mar, mar, mar" many times in succession.
To introduce a fix for the broken model, I decided to freeze the entire model and introduce a single, trainable vector . I added this vector to the superweight's row 1764 of the down-projection matrix, like so:
After doing this, I trained the model utilizing the original model as a teacher and the broken model (plus patch) as a student on train[:2%] of the Wikitext-2-raw-v1 dataset, filtering by non-empty lines. I treated the token-shifted KL divergence between teacher and student logits as the loss. Severe compute constraints (i.e only CPU available) led to only two epochs of training with batch size 2 (thanks to my RAM) and 200 steps per epoch, totalling 400 optimization steps. This lead to a nice downward trend for the loss (see the top right graph below).
Surprisingly, it worked! Perplexity dropped drastically(i.e 2884.3 to 25.2) nearing the original model's values, and the Tokyo prompt was fixed, as seen in example outputs below. All in all, I observed approximately 93% recovery.
OLMo Prompt & Outputs (Patched)
My hypothesis that the patch would just relearn the original weight I deleted was wrong. As I came to discover, this was totally not the case. I observed that the cosine similarity between my patch and the original row was only around 0.13. In addition, I noticed the patch learned a completely new direction (i.e norm of about 3.0) to compensate for zero'd values. When I sparsified the patch (i.e keeping only Top-16 entries), performance degraded significantly, suggesting that the patch acts as a distributed circuit. This means it spreads the repair across several non-zero entries rather than via a singular super scalar.
Weird behaviour in the broken model was also a part of my further analysis by checking out the tokens themselves. They were all seemingly marine biology terms (i.e lobster, North Sea, etc), leading me to believe I had ablated the "water neuron" that the patch attempted to rebuild. This logic explains the weird "mar, marina, maritimes" etc outputted by the broken model.
This whole experiment was done independently on a CPU in 16 hours while applying to MATS. I am looking for Research Engineer roles as a recent graduate at present, if you or anyone you know is seeking a person who enjoys digging into model internals (in spite of no GPU), don't hesitate to reach out!
Code: https://github.com/sunmoonron/super-weight-circuit-patching
2025-12-13 11:10:43
Published on December 13, 2025 3:10 AM GMT
My current setup for playing dances is a bit excessive, and transport my pedalboard in an old hardshell suitcase. [1] There's no built-in padding, so I use sheets of foam to protect my equipment. Initially I just had these loose, but this was one more piece to deal with, so I decided to permanently attach them to the suitcase.
It's tricky to bond foam to plastic, but after some LLM-assisted searching it seemed like 3M 90 spray adhesive was a good choice. I followed the instructions (outside!) and attached my foam sheets to the case:
I was going to write something up right away, but I was wary of the dynamic where I write when something is new and exciting but before I know if it will last. Would the sheets just fall off again?
It's now been four months, including six gigs with Kingfisher, three with the Free Raisins, and one with Dandelion. [2] Four of these involved flights, which with the rough handling and temperature swings are probably the worst abuse the case will get. And... it's great! I haven't had any issues, and they still seem well attached. I guess I could have written the post when I had that just-did-something-new energy after all!
[1] I looked into lighter
options but everything was super expensive and I couldn't find
good used options.
[2] Somehow I ended up playing a very large fraction of my dances for the year this fall. This was more than currently makes sense given work and family, and I'm going to try to spread things out a lot more.
2025-12-13 10:29:26
Published on December 13, 2025 2:29 AM GMT
For more than 2000 years, geometers and mathematicians tried in vain to prove the parallel postulate from the other axioms of Euclidean geometry. These other axioms said[1]:
These axioms are beautiful in their simplicity. They clarify precisely what we feel like geometry is trying to describe intuitively. The parallel postulate read as follows:
5. If a straight line intersects two straight lines, making the interior angles on one side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if produced indefinitely, meet on that side on which the angles are less than two right angles.
“Blegh! Gross! We hate it!” said the mathematicians.
This doesn’t feel like it should be a fundamental notion of geometry. Sure, perhaps we could try and write it simpler, but it still isn’t analogous to capturing my basic instinct of what a line is, or what a circle is. If you showed me an example of three straight lines on a piece of paper, I could see that they do exhibit this property — but it doesn’t feel basic. Yet we needed it to help us build the rest of geometry, along with the four simple axioms.
Mathematicians’ attempts to prove that the parallel postulate could be proven from the other axioms were in vain because in fact, it does not follow from the other axioms. You can have a perfectly reasonable geometry where this axiom does not hold. Either because all lines eventually meet (spherical geometry), or because there are many “parallel lines” which never meet through a given point (hyperbolic geometry).
These different notions of geometry would today be known as models. They offer different models of the first four axioms of geometry. In at least one of these models, the parallel postulate is also true (Euclidean geometry), and yet there are other models, as shown in the image above, where the parallel postulate is not true.
In fact, there are models for all consistent mathematical theories — that is, so long as your theory isn’t self-contradictory, there’s a model for it[2]. Including the theory in which we do all of our modern mathematics: Set Theory (so long as set theory is consistent).
The Constructible Universe of sets, often referred to as L, is one of these models of set theory. It is — in some ways — the simplest model of set theory. It was defined first by Gödel in 1938. It is often the model that lay-people have in mind when they think about “the Universe of sets.”
It was built by Gödel in stages, as follows:
So, for example, once we reach the first “L infinity,” we bundle everything up. We then use the second step in our recipe to get to “L infinity plus one”, “L infinity plus two,” and so on until we have to reach “L infinity times two,” where we apply our third step again, bundling everything up.
(I should say, that although there are such entities as “infinity plus one,” “infinity plus two,” they are not bigger than infinity, they just come after infinity in order, but not in size — don’t worry about it too much[3]).
We do this forever. There is no stopping point. There are always larger and larger infinities to get to. If you think you’ve reached the largest infinity, set theory will stop you, point ahead at the next infinity, and show you how much further you have to go (you still have to go so much further than you’ve already gone)![4]
If we step back, and consider the class[5] of all sets you will eventually build, you will be able to show that all of the 9 axioms of set theory[6] are satisfied within this structure. That is, if you believe that this structure can be built, then you believe that set theory must be consistent. Further, despite us making no use of the axiom of choice to build this structure, it does satisfy the axiom of choice (yet another arrow in the Axiom of Choice’s quiver).
The reason that Gödel built this structure was to prove that the Continuum hypothesis (the first of Hilbert’s 23 problems for mathematicians in the 20th century) is consistent with set theory. The continuum hypothesis says that there is no “intermediate size” between the size of the whole numbers, and the size of the real numbers.
L believes that the continuum hypothesis is true, and so long as set theory is consistent, L must also exist. So it must be possible to have a version of set theory that believes the continuum hypothesis — much like it is possible to have a version of geometry that believes the parallel postulate.
So why not accept the continuum hypothesis is true, say that L is set theory, and all that remains for mathematicians is to analyze L. Set theory by itself is not able to prove that there’s anything outside of L. It looks rather tempting…
In 1963, depending on who you ask, Paul Cohen either: destroyed the dream that we might one day resolve the continuum hypothesis; or he resolved the continuum hypothesis once and for all. He demonstrated that there is a model of set theory where the continuum hypothesis fails: managing to create the equivalent of “spherical geometry” for set theory.
The method he used to do this was called forcing. Explaining forcing in a rigorous manner here would be impossible, but let me attempt to briefly outline the idea in two not-so-easy steps!
First, we begin with the L we built. It is a fact that if there is some model of a theory, no matter how big, then there is a model of that theory which contains only countably many elements.
Let’s pause here and realize that something weird is happening. There is a countable structure that believes everything that L believes, including that there are uncountable sets — yet every set in this structure is countable: the structure itself is countable! This is known as Skolem’s paradox, and it is strange. Essentially, the explanation of the paradox is to realize that “uncountable” just means “not countable” — there is not a function that counts all the elements in the set. From our perspective, looking at this model, we can see that of course the sets it contains are actually countable. However, this model cannot see the function that counts the elements in the “uncountable” set. So from within the model this set is uncountable — are you starting to see why Cantor went crazy yet?
Okay, now on to the second and final step. This countable model that’s been created — which believes and proves everything that L believes and proves — has a copy of the “real numbers[7]” within it. Within L, there is no size of infinity that lies between the real numbers and the whole numbers, so this countable model must think the same thing. However, from the outside we can see that this countable model can see barely any of the real numbers. From the outside, the “real numbers” of this model are countable! We know that there are more real real numbers than that.
So we think of a clever trick we can play on this model. Under cover of darkness, we sneak in and add a new collection of real numbers — we force it to see more real numbers[8], being careful not to break any of the axioms of set theory that the model believes in. We add only countably many of them, but it’s enough that this model now believes that the number of real numbers it can see is not the first uncountable infinity, there are the second uncountable infinity many real numbers! There are too many real numbers in this model — enough that it thinks it can squeeze the first uncountable infinity between the number of whole numbers and the number of real numbers. So this model still satisfies the axioms of set theory, and yet it doesn’t agree with the continuum hypothesis!
So the continuum hypothesis is neither provable nor unprovable from the axioms of set theory. It is a statement much like the parallel postulate, there are cases where it is true and cases where it is false.
But the consequences of Cohen’s method went far beyond the continuum hypothesis[9], it opened up a multiverse of different possible interpretations of the axioms of set theory. The same argument that was used to refute the continuum hypothesis was able to be modified to make the size of the reals as big as you would like! It could be modified again, and again, and again to show that a plethora of statements were neither provable nor disprovable from the axioms. It was, in a word, a revolution.
So set theorists started to believe that there is no one model of set theory. That set theory is destined to forever be another branch of mathematics like geometry — where you can believe what you want to believe and analyze whichever model interests you the most. Set theorists began to let a thousand flowers bloom, and even argue that this was the correct philosophical interpretation of the results that had occurred up to this point. This is the pluralist/multiverse view of set theory. They were arguing that it was the correct one — or at least the one we ought to adopt.
Yet those who wished for there to be one true Universe of Sets never quite went away. There were always those who thought that one day we could reconcile our desire to have a strong set theory with our intuitions for how sets should behave: “Wouldn’t it be nice if the continuum hypothesis were true?” they would argue, “Can’t we agree on the one True Universe?” These acolytes would argue that we have all agreed on a single version of the whole numbers for number theory, and a single version of the real numbers for analysis, why can we not do the same thing for set theory?
To this end, Hugh Woodin has proposed a field of research aimed at showing that there exists a structure — Ultimate L — that functions very similarly to L, and yet is much stronger than it. Those who believe in a true Universe of Sets think that there is strong evidence for very large numbers. Numbers so large that you cannot prove that they exist from set theory alone. However, if we could construct a structure like L, that is also able to contain these large numbers, all of a sudden, this Ultimate L looks a lot more appealing compared to the multiverse of sets we’ve been able to garner from forcing. If we can all agree on it, we can finally decide the truth of statements like the continuum hypothesis. Unfortunately, as yet, the project developing Ultimate L remains conjectural, and even if it’s shown to work, the committed pluralist can just add it to their collection of multiverses!
Ultimately, I must admit that I come down on the pluralist side of the argument. As a society we have proceeded over time to reject the “unique truth” that Euclidean geometry once thought it provided, in favor of a richer view of geometry. We have rejected the “unique truth” of the real numbers, with work developing analysis in the hyperreals[10]. Algebraists have never even felt the need to limit themselves to finding the “One True Group” — it’s not clear what such a thing would even mean, and certainly it is clear why it’s not desirable to seek it.
Is it not richer to live in a Universe teeming with possibilities, where around every set-theoretical corner we don’t know what we will find? Where in every new model of set theory we explore, there may be some interesting structure waiting to surprise and astound us? I certainly think so — but this is not to say that giving up this one True Universe when it comes to mathematics in general is not a sacrifice, it certainly is. It’s just a sacrifice worth making.
Axioms adapted from Thomas Heath’s translation.
Just read some of this wikipedia page if you can’t help but worry — I promise it’s fine.
You may wish to listen to some music while you build:
What we have built is too big to be a set. Far too big! It is a class which is what set theorists call an object that they can describe, but that if it were a set would lead us to a contradiction.
Some people say there are only eight. It’s much like planets, those people are no fun! (Yes I know two of them are technically axiom schema, don’t be a pedant).
Of course, they are not the true real numbers — or are they? Everything that is true about the actual real numbers is true about this countable set of “real numbers,” from within the model.
We really do have to be very careful not to change anything else about the model, in particular, so that the model doesn’t start thinking that the uncountable infinities change sizes, as that could mess up the whole trick.
There is a reason Cohen is the only mathematician in the field of mathematical logic to ever win the Fields medal— although Gödel certainly would have won were he eligible for it after 1950.
Although there are other reasons why it is not so nice to work with the hyperreals — relating to a property called “categoricity.”
2025-12-13 09:18:54
Published on December 13, 2025 12:06 AM GMT
This is a linkpost to a blogpost I've written about wages under superintelligence, responding to recent discussion among economists.
TLDR: Under stylized assumptions, I argue that, if there is a superintelligence that generates more output per unit of capital than humans do across all tasks, human wages could decline relative to today, because humans will be priced out of capital markets. At that point, human workers will be reduced to the wage we can get with our bare hands: we won’t be able to afford complementary capital. This result holds even if there is rapid capital accumulation from AI production. To avoid horrible outcomes for labor, we would need redistribution or other political reforms. I also discuss situations where my argument doesn’t go through.
2025-12-13 04:15:59
Published on December 12, 2025 8:15 PM GMT
The Age of Fighting Sail is a book about the War of 1812, written by a novelist of Napoleonic naval conflicts, C.S. Forester. On its face, the concept is straightforward: A man who made his name writing historical fiction now regales us with true tales, dramatically told. History buff dads all across the Anglosphere will be pleased to find the same dramas, the same heroism and blunders, as in their favorite Horatio Hornblower series.
But I think this isn't actually a book about naval warfare. I think The Age of Fighting Sail is a book about why war breaks out, and why it goes on longer than it ought to. I've been cracking jokes about how maintaining peace between China and the States should be a top EA cause. But like all jokes I'm half serious, and I've been digging into theories of bargaining, diplomacy, and conflict in hopes of understanding the sitch-ops. I'm early in this process, and welcome corrections & commentary from readers who are better informed.
I was excited to read The Age of Fighting Sail, because
(1) Few of us have thought seriously about the War of 1812; it's a relatively minor conflict, and most American history buffs focus on the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, or World War II. That means alpha for the taking.
(2) Because diplomacy and bargaining are still inexact sciences, and inexact sciences are where writers, artists, and poets really shine.
Forester doesn't disappoint. He offers three main insights, which I'll treat in order from most intuitive to most surprising.
The beginning of the war is so crazy, I barely know where to begin. But it becomes, for instance, very obvious why the United States—originally a loose confederacy—centralizes and consolidates power over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. Why Hamilton's federalist vision wins out.
Picture the scene: America is at war, and several of its major ports (Boston, most significantly) are shipping supplies directly to Britain, their declared enemy. Supplies that are feeding and clothing and arming the British military, allowing it to more effectively wage war against America. (This includes Boston, but early in the war, the British have a tacit policy of leniency towards the city.) Partly, this is because Boston is thick with Loyalists who oppose the war. Partly, it's because they're businessmen who want to make a quick buck, and are indifferent to politics. And the American government is too limited in its power to even enforce its early-stage trade embargo.
It's so bonkers: British troops will be in Canada in a desperate situation, trying to invade New England but nearly starving, and New England merchants will bail them out. Or Wellington will be on his knees in the Peninsula, trying to invade France, unable to march for want of food and shoes. These supply deficits could cripple the British campaigns, and if Napoleon loses his war, America loses hers.
This, potentially, is an existential threat for the young nation. And American merchants bail out the Brits. Some elements in New England even want to secede, and the political pressure gives the British enormous leverage, because Madison's desperately trying to wage a war while also appeasing the northern colonies. It’s just crippling, trying to run a war when a big chunk of your polity is not just ambivalent about, but legally and functionally able to oppose, said war.
You want to talk about the disadvantages of being a decentralized, loose confederacy of states in wartime, well there you go. One state defects on all the others for personal profit, or a political grudge, and the whole thing near collapses. Madison’s trying to enforce embargos and blockades and many of the states won’t comply and Madison can’t make them.
OK so now they're at war, America’s building ships for its navy, it's got a handful of frigates but it can’t adequately man them. Why can’t it man them? Not for a lack of seaworthy men. All the states are on the Eastern seaboard. It’s a coastal country at this point. Nearly all the major cities are seaports. We forget this now—you can live in New York and somehow forget it's on the water. But if you've ever looked at a map of the city, you'll have this eyes-widening moment of realizing how crazy the New York City harbor is. How many bodies of water it connects to. And the Chesapeake is the exact same, it's the heart of this war, control of that Bay is how an amphibious force can land and burn down the Capitol. I have a lot to say about amphibious attacks later, and their tremendous advantages, but it'll have to wait.
Anyway, there are plenty of military-aged seaworthy Americans who know who to tie rope and eat ships biscuits without chipping teeth. But the American navy can’t find anyone to man their new and very expensive frigates because all the sailors are off privateering. They’ve signed onto corporate-sponsored pirate ships and are raiding for personal profit. Like 90% of the war at sea is going to be fought by private companies, the next two years. It's totally crazy; there's been a lot of discourse about the U.S. using private forces in the Middle East like this is some unprecedented neoliberal end-days-of-Rome decadence metaphor and maybe it is, but also? This has happened before, to a way greater extent.
Anyways, a privateer is a small, fast ship that goes and grabs commercial prizes, nabs goods off convoys. Which is in fact very disruptive to British trade, but an order of magnitude less disruptive than it could be, because none of the privateers work together. If one captain figures out the shipping convoy schedule to the Indies, he’ll make a killing nabbing small ships, but he’s not sharing that information. He isn’t inviting a fleet to come take bigger prizes. They aren’t coordinating to take major catches.
Moreover, when they go after prizes, they’re going after prizes of great economic value. Now, simplistically, we could say that the larger the prize seized by a privateer, the more damaging this is for England. But it’s not so straightforward, because a shipment of shoes might be mission-critical for ensuring Wellington can continue the Peninsula campaign. Stealing a bunch of cheap soldiers' shoes could bring Britain to its knees. But that's gonna get a lot less at market than a seizure of exotic spices. There is a meaningful misalignment between business interests and the government interests, and that misalignment may have cost America the war.
And the point I guess, is that the Forester sees the War of 1812 as being defined by a series of internal misalignments that are largely obscured before the war's outbreak, and which are revealed through war. Part of war's function is to discover the extent of these misalignments. If this isn't intuitive, it should be by the "War is communication" section.
[The chance of conflict] had been greatly increased as a result of blunders in the technique of international negotiation. There had been misunderstandings; some agents had exceeded their powers and others had been indiscreet, and in each case the mutual irritation had been heightened. (Forester)
Forester argues that internal misalignment and principal-agent problems constitute a large part of why the War of 1812 breaks out to begin with. America is unable to adequately coordinate non-violent punitive measures, such as trade embargoes, so the situation becomes dire. Extreme measures must be taken precisely because more moderate measures are unachievable. The British, for their part, don't believe that the American states are capable of the level of unity required to wage an effective war—they think America lacks wartime capacity and resolve. This leads them to take a very cavalier attitude toward the naval impressments that trigger war's outbreak. So let's talk about the naval impressments.
Another reason Britain is dragged into this whole provincial skirmish—at a time when war on the Continent was already consuming so many resources—is due to a series of misalignments between different levels of governmental & military hierarchy. Britain by now has been at war for decades with France. They are exhausted. Wastage of men and supplies is high. Many of their best officers and men have been killed and replaced with young, green inferiors. So they are desperate for sailors. A captain out at sea is a private tyrant, in the miniature world of his ship, thousands of miles away from his superiors. And he needs skilled hands or his ship will fall apart or be captured or sunk. It's an existential crisis to stay seaworthy, and one way to solve this problem is to board an American vessel and start impressing sailors. Forester: "A captain whose professional career, whose actual life, depended on the safety of his ship, which in turn depended on acquiring the services of another twenty topmen, was not going to give too much attention to the niceties of international law."
America quite reasonably feels that this is an act of war—you just can’t seize another nation's vessel by force and start kidnapping its sailors. Often, the impressed sailors are American citizens. And so this practice by ship commanders—which is officially discouraged by British command, but in practice never strictly enforced—drags the entire country into a costly war.
The officers of the Royal Navy don't actually mind the war breaking out. America's navy is two orders of magnitude smaller than Britain's, and with little fighting experience. The outbreak of war offers Royal Navy captains more chance for prizes, and thereby advancement—precisely at a time when France's navy is largely tied up and blockaded by ports, offering little chance for encounters.
So we might argue it is precisely the weak negative feedback—the lax punishment from top levels of governance—which leads naval subordinates to act in a way contrary to the national interest, and eventually leads to war breaking out.
This board has shown a long interest in tactics and errors of categorization, way back to bleggs and rubes. So I figure an anecdote here, as intermission, might be amusing.
One of the great tactical advantages of the American navy, at war's start, is largely linguistic. At the time, it was customary for ships to only engage, in cases of single (1v1) action, with ships of the same class or rating. Sloop to sloop, frigate to frigate. It was perfectly honorable for a frigate to decline battle with a ship-of-the-line. But for a frigate to decline battle with a frigate—that could carry a court martial.
In 1794, the American shipwright Joseph Humphreys designs six frigates for the U.S. Navy, including the famous USS Constitution. These ships were significantly larger than standard European frigates: They carry 44, and sometimes up to 50 guns, in contrast with the British 38. These guns are heavier than is standard in British frigates, and shoot larger rounds at a greater range. Moreover, the frigates' hulls are thicker, with a diagonal rib layout providing extra strength.
And so, out of principle, pride, or honor—and from a genuine belief in their approximately commensurate strength—British frigate captains routinely engaged their American counterparts, in the early months of the war, and were badly beaten. And when the British frigates were summarily spanked—often with only light casualties, on the American side—the British press dutifully reported that an HMS, in a fair fight, had once again been beaten by a USS of equal rating.
This has a terrible effect on British morale. Its public for decades had enjoyed the prestige of the world's greatest navy. A series of naval defeats was genuinely unprecedented; for them to come at the hands of a provincial power was humiliating.
Forester makes a lot of morale. Every time he recounts a duel at sea, he tells us of the fallout in the British and American press, in the British and American government, in public sentiment. Over and over, Forester stresses the importance of early American naval victories. These victories were often symbolic, but it would be a mistake to call them purely symbolic—their consequences were all-too material. As press coverage of the battles circulated, the British public began pushing for peace, and the American government increased its navy budget. Loyalist and secessionist movements in New England quieted down.
Morale is a gauge of a group's outlook—of its forecast, its predictions as to future outcomes of the war. But it isn't a passive representation; it actively transforms the actions of warring parties. It alters the resolve of a nation, and of its military, and of its government, which brings us to...
I never really understood Clausewitz's famous dictum until I read The Age of Fighting Sail. To recap: "War is the continuation of policy with other means."
The usual reading of Clausewitz's dictum is that war is a means of pursuing geopolitical goals: territory, resources, regime control, prestige.
I want to offer a slightly different interpretation, prompted by Forester, and prejudiced by my reading of Thomas Schelling. If policy is a ruleset—a system of terms, boundaries, and contracts that bind participants—then war is a means of renegotiating the contract.
Contract negotiations typically revolve around displays of capacity (a player's power) and commitment (his will or resolve). These are hidden variables: Each player in a bargaining situation can make educated guesses about the other player's capacity and commitment, but have little certainty—even when it comes to their own desires and abilities. A bargaining game must play out as a means of discovering and displaying each player's relative capacity and commitment. Participants in an auction may find themselves bowing out sooner or later than expected. When pressed against the wall, they may recall yet-untapped sources of wealth or desire.
This is why unions must actually go on strike. They may threaten strike, but their employer cannot know how serious they are, or how long strikers can economically hold out, or how much internal cohesion there is among union members. Crucially, a trade union itself does not know these things with certainty. Going on strike is a way for both sides to find out what they're made of, and test their mettle.
In other words, strikes are a form of costly signaling. Mere talk cannot be trusted, since both sides in a strike will misleadingly represent their capacity, cohesion, and commitment. Playing out the game is the only means of discovering and displaying each side's relative qualities.
War is the same way. If there were perfect knowledge among participants in a war, then each party could agree upon, and enter into, the very terms struck at war's end. But there is not perfect knowledge, and so the war must play out. America, Forester writes, needed to "make such a nuisance of herself that her demands would be listened to." We see similar patterns in macaque societies, whose males battle in Bayesian-efficient tournaments for hierarchy.
War, then, is the costliest form of communication which animals have invented. Is there some less costly means of display and discovery?
Some scholars now call this signaling theory of war the "dominant framework" within the international relations field. Its roots go back to the late 60s game theory work of Thomas Schelling, but it didn't take off til the mid-90s polisci work of James Fearon. Forester got there in 1956.
If both sides in a negotiation have perfect knowledge—of their own, and of each other's , relative capacities and resolves—then the process of bargaining is unnecessary; a new set of coordination terms can be immediately entered into.
If war is thus unnecessary given a state of perfect knowledge, it stands to reason that more knowledge (and more reliable knowledge) ought to make war less necessary. We might say that peace itself is a science. That peace between nations results from an ongoing science of mutual knowledge.
Insofar as war is communication, it also means that conflict will be prolonged in the face of diplomatic breakdowns and delays.
Soon after the War of 1812 breaks out, the Russian Tsar Alexander I gets wind and wants to broker a treaty. I don't have primary sources in front of me, but let’s say it takes him at least a month to even hear about the outbreak of war, given the slow pace of early 19th C comms. Once he writes his letter, offering to broker a treaty, it takes a few months to get the proposal in both British and American hands. And then it takes another few months for American ambassadors to be selected and travel to Russia. By the time they arrive, the situation’s changed dramatically: Napoleon’s invading Russia, the tsar doesn’t have time for some backwater conflict, and the ambassadors kill six months waiting for a meeting. Finally, giving up on Alexander, they travel to London—which takes another month—and begin long drawn-out negotiations for peace.
Those negotiations are upended every time news comes in how the war’s going. If the Americans have had a prominent recent victory, their ambassadors gain leverage, and vice-versa for the British. But due to transit times, a "recent victory" is at least a month old. When finally a peace proposal is drawn up, it has to get shipped across the Atlantic again for the American government to read and ratify it. Once it's ratified, messages have to be sent all over the word, to American ships and bases from Canada to the Caribbean. Andrew Jackson will make his name defending New Orleans from British attack, two weeks after the Treaty of Ghent. American frigates are still taking prizes six months into peacetime.
Two years then, spent trying to establish lines communications, trying to make progress on negotiations. All over a war that should never have started—that was in neither state's interest—that broke out as a result of misalignments in the British military-governmental hierarchy. (The best argument for why the War of 1812 should never have happened is that the peace terms mark a return to pre-war status quo—i.e. neither party gained anything from the war. If this outcome could have been predicted in advance, then neither party would have had an incentive to go to war.)
So we begin to understand Kennedy’s anxiety when he’s trying to get letters passed to Kruschev in the Cuban Missile Crisis. We begin to understand why Kennedy insists on installing a telephone hotline between the superpowers: because you don’t want to be delayed by hours or days when a nuclear war can end the world in an hour.
It's becoming well-established that China is gaining institutional capacity compared to the United States. They can build things much faster, much cheaper, much more reliably.
Much of this may simply result from relative industrial development tempos. But it's also possible to draw several conclusions that are repugnant to Western worldviews: That there is a tension between individual freedoms and state capacity given alignment, like will-to-win, is critical to geopolitical struggles. America's 20th C rise to power convinced many modern nations that internal demographic and ideological heterogeneity was not a hindrance, but in fact an advantage, in geopolitical struggle.
Is it possible that, in the evolutionary game of geopolitics, liberal ideas may not win? Authoritarian regimes may be better equipped to handle the spread of literal contagion, and they may similarly be better equipped to handle the spread of memetic contagion. In an age of information and mind war, is liberalism on the ropes?
And what are the counteracting dynamics, that might keep freedom alive? That might lead liberal political organization to triumph, in the end? Or at least, some post-liberal system that lives out Western values? There must be literature on this; I'd be indebted to any who link or cite in the comments. Market economies, at least, appear to outperform centralized economies pre-AGSI? And perhaps there is great power in the dialectical progress that free speech promises.
Perhaps it is natural and good populations bind together when threatened existentially, and fracture when wealthy and peaceful. In November 1941, there was mass support for the new state of Jefferson, splintering off from northern California and southern Oregon. Independence was declared, Route 99 was blockaded, and Congressional support quickly growing. In December 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Within 24 hours, the secessionists had re-pledged their loyalty to the Union.
Perhaps our fractiousness, as a nation, is not some unchangeable facet of liberal democracy, or of our decadence, but a rational response to our comfortable position of power. When core holdings are safe, you bargain over margins. "Bicker themselves into fragments," is how Pynchon describes the post-Revolutionary War fallout, in Mason & Dixon. Then war came, and the fragments re-assembled.
2025-12-13 03:43:32
Published on December 12, 2025 7:43 PM GMT
A federal judge found probable cause the Trump administration willfully defied a court order on deportation flights to El Salvador. The contempt probe intensified this week as the judge presses for whistleblower and DOJ testimony on who ordered the flights and how the government responded.
That case, along with related questions about contempt referrals, DOJ follow-through, and the treatment of people sent to prisons abroad, are among the scenarios covered in Metaculus's U.S. Democracy Threat Index, a forecasting series we built with Bright Line Watch, a nonpartisan watchdog group. We just added a $10,000 prize pool to incentivize accurate forecasts.
Bright Line Watch is a nonpartisan group of political scientists from Dartmouth and other institutions who have monitored democratic norms since 2017. They selected 39 indicators across six areas: electoral integrity, political rights, civil liberties, rule of law, institutional checks and balances, and information integrity.
Each question asks whether a specific, observable event will occur during a two-year period. Historical data has been backfilled for 2021–2024 to provide base rates. Current forecasting periods are 2025–26 and 2027–28.
The index value is the average probability across all 39 questions. Higher values indicate greater predicted threat to democratic institutions; lower values indicate greater predicted resilience. As news breaks and forecasters update, the index moves (or doesn't), providing signal about which events actually affect institutional health.
$7,500 will be awarded based on prediction accuracy from December 12, 2025 onward.
$2,500 will be awarded based on periodic snapshots timed to coincide with Bright Line Watch's surveys of political scientists and the American public. This enables direct comparison between Metaculus forecasters and expert opinion.
The first snapshot is January 1, 2026, so forecasts should be submitted before then.
