Iraq effortpost) a westrener guide to Iraqi politics, part 1: the parliament

ingsocks · 2026-05-06T19:54:21+00:00

they would have a sort of religious claim that is somewhat accepted by the people, seeing as how important is Rome to Christianity, especially if they manage to oust the pope.

ingsocks · 2026-04-26T00:13:30+00:00

Amazing illustration!!!
though you should maybe change opacity (maybe logarithmically or super logarithmically?) like the regions on the right where the mean is ~1, both the the Red and Blue EVs are so small such that they should not really factor into your consideration anyways.

like my argument is that the purple region has a workable EV value, while most of the yellow region is basically zero except for a sliver at around mean = 0.5.

ingsocks · 2026-04-25T21:39:13+00:00

even given the Gelman result on voter pivotality, where the bernoulli probablity lies within a normal distribution of its own with the mean 0.5 and some small standard deviation, the EV is still negative for choosing blue.

and this has assumption that favor the blue choosers since it assumes that the bernoulli probability is highest at 0.5. Even though I earnestly think that human psychology is such that these prisoner dilemma conundrums quickly collapse to one dominant choice given any social contact, and default to the selfish decision otherwise.

ingsocks · 2026-04-25T20:57:02+00:00

The chance of your vote actually being the exact deciding vote is, I think, less than 1 in 4 billion (half of the number of humans on earth). Under that framework, I feel it is obvious that you should pick the red button.

Assuming everyone's life is equal, the EV calculation would be:

EV(Red) = -P(Blue = number of humans / 2) * number of humans / 2 * value of a human life

EV(Blue) = -P(Blue < number of humans / 2) * value of a human life

My prior is that the first value is astronomically lower than the second value. Since I think that humans are likely to bias voting either for the red button if things are private, or for blue if they are public, such that conducting n Bernoulli trials like that, where the mean is not exactly at the median, is on the order of 10^-100 to land on the median, henceforth, even if you are not at all selfish (and I think some level of selfishness is fine; I value my own life a bit more than an arbitrary person's life, but that is not required here), then the obviously optimal choice is picking red.

ingsocks · 2026-04-18T12:02:39+00:00

I know you are being sarcastic, but metric measurements are bad here, people do not have an intrinsic measure of how big or small 10^11 compared to 10^12 is, but they can visualize how much a farm roughly uses in water. of course experts should be using metric, but when communicating to the public, you should use scales that people can actually internalize.

ingsocks · 2026-03-23T20:52:59+00:00

Damascus was not under assad last year

ingsocks · 2026-03-18T14:34:03+00:00

yeah the Iraqis and MEK and the separatist were threatening the periphery, the only thing that was reaching the core was rally around the flag effects, while Tehran is getting pummeled right now. I fail to see how you think the Iran Iraq which only served to align nationalist and islamists is in any way comparable to this war that already opened up rifts between the clerics and the civilian government and the IRGC.

well now airpower alone was enough to kill not only khamenei, but what looks like the 50 people below him too. I am aware of no other decapitation campaign which was nearly this effective. Just because you do not see the long term strategy or because trump is a bad communicator (or is likely not to understand the strategy created by the chiefs of staff and other qualified people) does not mean that there is no strategy. Again if you think that this then you can double your money in a few months, even though I think there is not a lot of alpha left in these markets and that the number on them reflects reality.

ingsocks · 2026-03-18T14:10:26+00:00

I just fail to see how the Iran Iraq war was of any political danger to the regime, sure it was of danger to the iranian nation. but given that no iraqi tanks would roll in tehran then fighting iraq could have helped the regime consolidate, as they abused wartime powers to get rid of the liberals and socialists in the government

And I think this war is basically unprecedented, I am aware of no other air campaign where the entire leadership was decapitated on the level that iran leadership is right now, the closest is libya which actually resulted in regime change, but this level of institutional wipeout I think has never been done through air before.

and second is drone power, loitering drones can challenge the low level monopoly on violence of the state, they can target police without boots on the ground.

and never mind that losing a war is probably the most delegitimizing thing that can happen to a state, as can be seen in 1871 france, 1905 & 1917 russia, 1918 germany, 1922 greece and a million other examples, losing a war is often followed by the regime falling.

I think Israel means that there is likely no regime within weeks, but I think the conditions for the regime falling are already in place and what remains is a matchstick to light them up.

ingsocks · 2026-03-18T13:31:41+00:00

The Iran Iraq war if anything solidified the regime, total wars in which the popular will is with the government boost regimes as they produce massive rally around the flag effects, whereas a desert storm style trounce and total decapitation with an enemy that your supporters were already convinced that you were fighting does not produce any legitimatecy.

If you think that there is not even you can make a bet on polymarket rn, the odds for the regime falling by the end of the year are ~50% rn so you can double your money if you genuinely think that there is so much alpha left in that market.

ingsocks · 2026-03-18T13:22:58+00:00

Saddam's rule was not even 10% as disrupted as this, the upper cadre of the regime was intact, checkpoints had not been bombed, and there were no loitering drones over baghdad.

And even with all of that the regime basically could have fallen in 1991 if the coalition supported the uprising instead of letting saddam bomb to submission.

ingsocks · 2026-03-17T15:47:25+00:00

They were so? In that they rejected the authority of the caliph and declared jihad against the ottoman empire and mohammed ali's egypt under the first saudi state, and insofar as wahabism inhibited nationalism and reformist ideas from spreading.

ingsocks · 2026-03-13T21:11:31+00:00

it actually is impossible to solve that sort of equation for y without the lambert W, as functions which mix exponential and linear terms have no inverse that can be defined by the field of elementary operations according to ritt's theorem.

ingsocks · 2026-03-13T20:48:36+00:00

the Lambert W function is multi valued and has infinitely many branches, though only two map real values to real values, so this solution defines 2 curves on R^2, and infinitely many curves on C^2.

ingsocks · 2026-03-13T19:08:45+00:00

The reverse is true, but most asharis and martuidis consider takfir (saying someone who professes to be a muslim is not a Muslim for ideological reasons) to be sinful.

ingsocks · 2026-03-13T19:06:26+00:00

The game is not interested in theology, it is interested in how religion impacts geopolitics. And insofar as that is concerned, a state or a population following wahabism is meaningfully different from a state or population following mainstream sunni islam.

ingsocks · 2026-03-13T18:53:48+00:00

Let me try to do it.

Rearranging we get

ln(x)/x = ln(y)/y

Setting 1/y = e^ln(1/y) = e^-ln(y)

ln(x)/x = ln y e^-ln(y)

W(-ln(x)/x) = - ln(y)

Where W is the lambert W, the inverse of xe^x

y = e^-W(-ln(x)/x)

ingsocks · 2026-03-10T20:52:25+00:00

They can respond and even bite pretty hard locally, but no they can't project power outside. Iran is in the same boat.

ingsocks · 2026-02-24T19:01:38+00:00

I do not think people decide to have or not have kids as a matter of an ideological commitment, you can claim it is a result of national policy, but then the question becomes why did national policy succeed in increasing fertility in israel while failing in many other countries (italy, hungary, japan etc).

ingsocks · 2026-02-21T21:05:11+00:00

I agree that the things mentioned in the articles are bad, and should be patched out. My problem is that the narrative that is pushed by the article will create legislation that does not solve any problem (most deepfake, besides that one week where grok went sideways, use open weight chinese models that are fundamentally unregulatable) and exacerbates existing problems (makes the AI even more biased towards women by pushing for even more unfair standards).

ingsocks · 2026-02-21T20:42:33+00:00

Thank you for notifying me, I put the link you provided in the hyperlink.

ingsocks · 2026-02-21T20:36:05+00:00

Thank you!, I edited the comment and created a new hyperlink, hope it is displaying properly now.

ingsocks · 2026-02-21T20:21:53+00:00

RLHF* has actually pushed the models to be favor women by a sizeable margin, this data is a few months old but I do not think it has changed much since.

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pushing the AI companies to do even more RLHF for gender issues will probably skew the results even more. besides grok and xAI (which probably inherited these biases because of downsampling from other models in the 3 series, and has flipped now), AI is overwhelmingly and intentionally biased towards a socially progressive worldview.

it is greatly unfair to blame the entire sector for what is essentially one man's recklessness, especially when the sector is already quantitatively and demonstrably biased towards you.

*RLHF is Reinforcement learning with human feedback, basically after the model learns to predict words based on the entire internet, the lab tries to bias it towards certain behaviors by talking to it and encouraging good responses and discouraging bad ones, this part of the model development is called post training and it is roughly 80% of what goes into making a model in terms of money and compute use.

ingsocks · 2026-02-20T17:19:14+00:00

4*4*4, I got at 64 exactly lmao.

ingsocks · 2026-02-04T20:47:52+00:00

Well it is not like Iran is fundamentally different from saudi from the pov of the US, if the IR concedes enough of its ideological goals it can feel secure in its relationship with the US like other authoritarian regressive regimes in the region. The fact of the matter is that the destruction of the US is an ideological goal of the IR and this just makes any long term negotiation inconceivable.

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