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—with the added bonus that all events are true.
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.
2025-12-13 03:31:51
Published on December 12, 2025 7:31 PM GMT
The Ising Model is a classic toy model of magnets. We imagine a big 2D or 3D grid, representing a crystal lattice. At each grid vertex , there’s a little magnetic atom with state , which can point either up () or down (). When two adjacent atoms point the same direction, their joint energy is lower than when they point different directions; atoms further apart don’t directly interact. So we write the energy function (aka Hamiltonian) as for some constant ; two adjacent atoms with the same direction contribute energy, while two adjacent atoms with different directions contribute energy.
With the energy function in hand, the Boltzmann distribution specifies the distribution of states for temperature . Crucially, this distribution factors locally: we can write it as a product of terms which each depend on only two adjacent atom-states, i.e. . In the terminology of graphical models, Ising is an undirected graphical model, aka a Markov random field; it “factors over” a graph matching the grid. That factorization is key for representing the distribution efficiently, and unlocks lots of standard algorithms and techniques for working with the distribution.
At low temperatures, most of the atoms will lock in to point the same direction. That’s a long-range signal: observing the consensus direction in one little chunk of the grid gives us a pretty confident estimate of the consensus direction in another chunk far away. Other than that signal, far-apart chunks are independent.
That’s all standard material; now for the new and interesting claim.
This is cool because it means we can condition on that long-range signal - i.e. the consensus direction - and still use the graphical factorization for efficient representation, standard algorithms, etc.
In the particular case of Ising, there’s also a neat physical interpretation: conditioning on long-range signal is approximately equivalent to a weak external magnetic field. We won’t focus much on that interpretation because we’re not that interested in magnets per se; we’re mainly interested in generalization to other graphical models.
Conceptually, at low temperatures, the distribution of states \sigma is very bimodal: there’s one mode where most atoms point down, and one where most point up, and these two modes are very well separated.
Conditioning on the long-range signal means picking out one of the two modes - e.g. if we condition on the consensus direction being up (+1), then our posterior distribution will have all its weight on just one of the two modes.
So with that in the back of our minds, let’s first walk through a simpler 1-dimensional problem.
Let be a scalar, and let be a 50/50 mixture of two unimodal distributions and , with very well separated modes and very little overlap, e.g.:
Now, let’s think about the maxent problem
maxent relative to subject to
… where we choose , i.e. the mean must match the second of the two mixture components.
By the usual maxent machinery, the solution will have the form
for some scalar and normalizer . (We’re using the inverse of the usual lagrange multiplier here because it’s easier to interpret.)
Now, let’s consider two rough quantities associated with our bimodal mixture distribution :
By assumption, the two distributions are well separated, i.e. .
To get an approximate solution to our maxent problem, pick some at a middle scale between and , i.e. . Then:
Now put those two together:
Takeaway: when the two peaks of are well separated (i.e. distance between them large relative to their widths), we can find a distribution of the form which approximately matches the distribution of just one peak.
Going back to the Ising model, let’s consider .
Within each peak, the consensus direction is effectively “given”, so far-apart chunks of the grid are independent. So, the central limit theorem will kick in, and will be normal - again, within each peak, so the two separate peaks will be two separate normal distributions.
With atoms in the grid, the magnitude of will scale like , with the two peaks having opposite signs. The standard deviation (i.e. width of the peak) will scale like . Peak separation is much larger (for large ) than peak width , so we can apply the trick from the previous section.
Upshot: as long as we choose satisfying , we will find that approximately matches . The term will be approximately-constant over the consensus-direction-up peak, and will differ exponentially between the two peaks, so that nearly all the weight is on the up-peak. (By taking of the opposite sign, we can similarly make match .)
So we have (for some handwavy notion of approximation which we never actually defined). The last step is just to substitute in the factored form of and write everything in an explicit factored form:
… and there we have it.
A central subproblem of natural abstraction is, roughly, how to handle the low-level conditional on the high level.
The prototypical mental picture is very roughly:
... but in order for that mental picture to make any sense, the low level processing at the first and last step has to be local - i.e. it needs to not involve unpacking a low level model of the entire world.
Concretely, for an Ising model, the idea would be:
... but again, this only works insofar as the first and last step can work with a little chunk of the low level system without having to unpack the entire system at a low level. That requires some kind of locality, which is what the hand-wavy proof argues for.
Even with that locality established, we don't yet have all the pieces to follow the conceptual story. But it gives us any foothold at all.
Of course, the real hope is to find extremely general techniques, which work far beyond Ising. And the hand-wavy proof above is reasonably general: it just requires that the long-range signal distribution has well-separated peaks, with peak spacing much larger than width. In other words, it's a form of scale separation. That applies to an awful lot of systems... but importantly not all systems.
Insofar as the scale separation trick fails, what should we do instead? Well, presumably we need to leverage some kind of structure other than undirected graphical structure conditional on the long-range signal. Figuring out that structure is the real hot goal here, and to that end two major takeaways are:
2025-12-13 02:27:30
Published on December 12, 2025 6:27 PM GMT
In a preprint published on October 1, researchers from the Technion, Google Research, and the University of Zagreb found that leading AI programs struggle to navigate realistic ethical dilemmas that they might be expected to encounter when used in the workplace.
The researchers looked specifically at models including Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4, Google's Gemini 2.5, and OpenAI's GPT-5. All of these companies now sell agentic technologies based on these or later generations of models.
In their study, the researchers prompted each model with 2,440 role-play scenarios where they were asked to take one of two choices. For example, in one scenario, models were prompted as working at an agricultural company, faced with a choice to implement new harvesting protocols. Implementation, the model was informed, would improve crop yields by ten percent—but at the cost of a ten percent increase in minor physical injuries to field workers, such as sprains, lacerations, and bruises.
Continue reading at foommagazine.org ...
2025-12-13 00:33:09
Published on December 12, 2025 4:33 PM GMT
Nice eye-grabbing headline.
There is a Wittgenstein quote I've been thinking about ever since going through AI to Zombies around a decade ago:
If there were a verb meaning 'to believe falsely', it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.
As a statement of boolean logic, that's fine, it's p ∧ ¬p being false — claiming that “I falsely believe p” cannot be asserted, because the moment you avow that a belief is false, you withdraw your belief — and given Wittgenstein was famously a logician this is natural…
… but that's not how humans actually do their thinking. There's a lot of ways we just plain don't work like that.
We don't actually fully disavow beliefs when we first recognise them false, and we (fail to) do so in more than just one way:
p ∧ ¬p type issues within our minds whenever any of us demonstrates hypocrisy, and sometimes people notice they're hypocritical without needing someone else to point it out, so anyone who says "huh, I'm being a hypocrite here…" is, in that way, using "hypocrite" as a first person present indicative of 'to believe falsely'. They may or may not withdraw from either belief, we can be all over the place on this, those who do not withdraw from at least one of those beliefs are an example of non-Wittgenstein behaviour.So, linguistically, we do sometimes say things equivalent to "I currently falsely believe this specific thing".
I have of course asked everyone's favourite Shoggoth to critique this and tell me everything wrong with this post before posting it; the AI is now trying to simultaneously give me two mutually incompatible directions — telling me Wittgenstein was actually talking about language instead of logic, and also trying to say that I'm focusing on language when I should be looking at logic — I clearly can't get more useful feedback from it. I will be amused if there's a similar split in the comments.
2025-12-13 00:05:52
Published on December 12, 2025 2:15 PM GMT
The linked post rounds up some of my notes and thoughts on AI self-replication.
Here's the table of contents; sections largely make sense in isolation.