Elon Musk never did Philosophy in University

and it shows.

For those who can't be bothered to click, it's a story on Musk getting up in front of an audience some place and doing some philosophy, badly: that we're all living in a video game in the future.

"If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now. Then you just say, okay, let's imagine it's 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing on the evolutionary scale.

So given that we're clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality, and those games could be played on any set-top box or on a PC or whatever, and there would probably be billions of such computers or set-top boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions.

Tell me what's wrong with that argument. Is there a flaw in that argument?"

Thanks, Elon, I'll take it from here. If you've been hanging around the internet for awhile, you've probably seen these sorts of ideas before. And the fatal flaw in all of them is very simple: where's the evidence? Without evidence (and projecting past trends into the future while assuming we're actually living in the future is most certainly not evidence) then the entire argument is null and void. An interesting question on its own we could ask is "what would constitute good evidence for reality itself being falsified?" I suspect that the rabbit bites off its own head at this point, since if you could, in theory, have some evidence of a falsified reality, it seems to me the evidence would undermine itself, since any evidence in this [falsified] reality could, in itself, be falsified.

If you're still not convinced, let me rephrase the argument, but make it explicitly religious: "what if the rapture already happened, and this world we live in now is in fact heaven?" Does it still appeal? I'm guessing it doesn't.

So: Musk's argument (and all similar ideas) are stuff that, in short, you don't need to worry about. So why do these ideas kick about? I think it's part of a much larger story, where people act in a religious manner, even as the explicit references to religion are (heh) exorcised. When Friedrich Nietzsche wrote his most famous quip, "God is dead" is actually meant a hell of a lot more (if you pardon the pun) than simply the nonexistence of a supreme being. He meant the death of the whole system of values that God and religion underpinned; a serious event in our civilization that went way beyond mere epistemology. Not only did religion give us our values, it gave us our ability to give meaning to human suffering. This is also why Nietzsche took the Atheists of his time to task: that if religion was a behavior, and not just one or a series of truth statements, you could easily behave in a religious manner without actually having explicit religious ideas. And of course, Nietzsche thought that Atheists did exactly that: condemn the belief, but still keep up the behavior. Given how many academics are atheists but still believe in objective morality today, I'd say it's still a relevant criticism.

TL;DR: You shouldn't be surprised that people with an abiding faith in technology to redeem the world start talking like a Renaissance monk. Nietzsche certainly wouldn't. And it certainly won't be the last time you'll see people take arguments that somebody like Rene Descartes would have familiarity with, add some math or science (numbers, typically) to fortify it, and then act like they've discovered something new.

I watch it so you don't have to: Victory Through Air Power

I assume that most people reading this blog are like me; history nerds and people who like scale model things.  I bring this up because I've always more or less assumed the broad historical context is understood, be it about Zeppelins or B-36s. This blog features a lot of stuff that assumes the background of strategic bombing is understood. Now, if you are someone who does not understand strategic bombing, the Second World War must be filled with inexplicable, horrific events. Not that World War 2 in particular isn't chock full of those anyway, but Nazis murdering people is at least understandable because the Nazis are understood to be nasty, nasty people. Strategic bombing by the Allies, in contrast, must seem just as horrific but without any rhyme or reason behind it.

Take the atomic attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki for example. They're the topic of many a university undergrad discussion/shouting match, where they are often treated as unique events. Truth be told, the only thing unique about them was the technology involved; everything else was standard Allied practice. More people died in the firebombings of Tokyo than died in both atomic attacks, for example, but that's usually unknown to the undergrad debater. This chilling montage from the Errol Morris documentary The Fog of War does a great job illustrating the sheer destruction wrought on Japan by USAAF B-29s - and if the montage is your first point of contact with strategic bombing, it must seem like madness.

Well, good news! If you are confused by these events, I found something that can help: a World War 2 propaganda film animated by of Walt Disney, of all people.

Victory Through Air Power is an hour-long film Disney produced out of his own pocket, to explain the role of strategic bombing in World War 2, and to champion the ideas set forth in a book by the same name. Alexander P. de Seversky, the book's author, argued that the best way to win the Second World War was through applied use of air power; in particular, the use of strategic bombers to destroy heavy industry. At this juncture a brief outline of the reasons for strategic bombing may be useful. There are four:

1. Break the will of the people to fight by attacking them in their homes;

2. Destroy the enemy's industry and removing their ability to fight a modern industrialized war;

3. Destroy the enemy's air force (the air-force, even if not directly targeted, has to get in the sky to fight your bombers;)

 4. and making the enemy use resources to defend their airspace.

Even the pokey Zeppelin raiders managed #4, while the Allied bombing campaign against the Nazis managed #2, #3, and #4. At the same time, the Allies also spent a lot of time and effort on #1 - which is something that remains deeply controversial. My take: 2, 3, and 4 proved to be effective tactics at winning the war, while #1 was at best a waste of resources that managed to kill huge numbers of civilians. Victory Through Air Power is going to spend all its time concentrating on selling the audience the #2 formula. As a expository bonus, it also explains supply lines and the basics of logistics to Second World War audiences. People who really know the material may be able to spot flaws in its assumptions, but it is a propaganda film; it's purpose is to get an argument across, not struggle with mere detail. There's one part near the end that is eerie in how accurate de Seversky's words are, and for a film trying to predict the future, it is admerable in how reasonable and generally accurate de Seversky's analysis is. Predicting the future is a long history of people being wrong, so it's always impressive when somebody shows some accuracy that's guided by reason instead of luck.

Also I know how to make .gifs now, so there's that.

0-7:30 minutes: preface, intro, and dedication. Film critic Leonard Maltin introduces the film. Disney also got de Seversky to do live action bits in the film where de Seversky explains his own ideas.

7:30 - 23:15: a brief history of aviation, then 40 years old. This is mostly off to the side of the interesting stuff, so I'll say little, except that the most interesting anecdote it has is the first person to fly across the United States.  A $50,000 prize tempted Calbraith P. Rogers to try his luck -  69 flights and 15 crashes later, he became the first trans-continental flyer (though his airplane had a ship of Theseus problem: only his left-rear strut has started off with Rogers in Long Island.) Also, unfortunately for Rogers, the $50,000 prize came with a 30 day restriction on attempts, which Rogers had missed by 19 days. Certainly, you appreciate how amazing modern air travel is (as per my last post) when you read about the early days of aviation.

I've love to see a short made like this summarizing the development of digital computing.

23:15 - 26:00: The film introduces Alexander P. de Seversky, and gives his bona-fies as an aeronautical smarty-man. Like Igor Siskorsky, de Seversky was was born in the Russian Empire, and after a rather amazing early career in aviation, fled to America to escape the communist revolution. Many aviation firsts were achived by de Seversky after this, despite having lost his leg in combat during World War 1. While the film doesn't mention it, de Seversky started his own aviation firm that would, after a Russian revolution-esque management change, became Republic Aviation, and would go on to produce the P-47 Thunderbolt. (The P-47 was designed by another expat Russian, Alexander Kartveli.) TL;DR dude knows aviation.

26:00 -    The film settles down to brass tacks. First up is air power: it changes shit. Those familiar with history will recognize the points: first, the Nazis bypassed and neutralized the fixed defenses of the French Maginot line, and then used air power to press their attack. Only when German air power had to contend with the RAF over Dunkirk was its power neutralized. Then, air power allowed for the German invasion of Norway, and the rebuff of the British counter-invasion. This lesson about Navies needing air cover was driven home in December 1941, when the Royal Navy Resolute and Prince of Wales were sunk by Japanese land-based bombers. The battle of Crete is also brought out as an example of air power prevailing over land and sea power. These historical examples are also slightly sneaky, as all of them are examples of western allied nations not taking air power seriously, and paying for it.

41:00  The second major point is the importance of supply lines for everybody, and more especially the weakness of the Allied position compared to the Axis. The Axis powers are likened to wheels: their supply lines are short and insular. Meanwhile, the supply lines of the Allies literally span the globe; lend lease supplies to Russia were often landed through the Persian Gulf and sent up through Iran. This weakness means that the Axis have an advantage on defense. (It's interesting, too, to read about weaknesses in the Allied strategic position; if you know World War 2 history, you hear a lot about weaknesses in the Axis strategic position and strengths in the Allied one, but not vice versa.)

As Nazi Germany is already in the range of existing bomber designs, it gets used as the working example. We're given the USA, a beating heart of Industrial power:

Versus the grinding factories of the crooked cross:

The problem is distance of supply. The Third Reich has comparatively short and fast supply lines, while America has long, slow ones.

The literal bottleneck of shipping slows things down further. And of course, those long supply lines are easy to attack. Meanwhile, the supply lines from the industrial heart to the front lines are quick and easy for the Nazis. (An irony here; Victory Through Air Power assumes that submarines are a problem that can only really be dealt with via strikes on shipyards and sub pens; in reality, it was air power over the ocean hunting submarines that was critical in the defeat of the U-boats. Bombing raids against sub pens proved pointless: the Nazis had constructed sub pens in France so strong even the heaviest bombs could not damage them, and manufacturing of U-boats was distributed so that the bits of a U-boat only needed to come together for final assembly.)

This has consequences for anybody attacking the Nazis. The Nazi position (if you couldn't guess already) is likened to a wheel, with the hub being the factories of Nazi Germany, and the spokes of supply strengthening the rim. Attack by land, and it looks like this:

A bunch of forces trying to beat in the wheel, with the lines of supply and the industrial hub untouched. Even if you concentrate a really big force:

The Nazis can shift their forces to resist this greater force easily. Attack with many strong forces, the Nazis can shrink their wheel to create a thicker rim, etc. The message here is that using land forces alone create at best a war of attrition, which is something anybody remembering the First World War surely wants to avoid.

But, with the application of Air Power, you can skip over the battlefield, and strike at assets before they reach the battlefield.

Even better, you can use air power to bypass the spokes and the rim of the wheel entirely, and strike at the resupplying hub:

With the central hub smashed, attacking forces can make real headway against the rim and take out Nazi Germany with "a tremendous saving of human lives." Air power thus becomes not only the most effective tactic, but a (sorta) humanitarian one as well. It's ambiguous if you're saving German lives by doing this, but you are definitely saving the lives of Allied Soldiers, probably the greatest concern of a potential 1943 viewer. At any rate, this is how strategic bombing thesis #2 works: destroy the industrial power of the enemy, then defeat him on the ground.

Now that the film has the theory, it now seeks thornier tactical problems, and maybe to the surprise of modern audiences, turns away from the Nazis and to Japan. Most of the war effort as a stated government policy was directed toward the defeat of Germany, with only about 20% effort going against Japan. Meanwhile, any belief that the Japanese were going to be pushovers died very quickly in Guadalcanal, and when battles to take lone islands producing appalling casualties. Clearly, the Japanese had no fear of a war of attrition. The public was worried that after the defeat of Germany, it still faced years of war against an enemy who seemed fearless and disdainful of all human life, especially his own.

Victory Through Air Power is quick to point out that the strategy outlined above against Germany won't work against Japan - the ranges from viable bases are just too big. Several hypothetical lines of attack are examined and then rejected. The strategy of bombing from China is rejected as you need an absolute mountain of stuff to resupply a strategic bombing campaign, and the only way to get it into China a whole new war in Southeast Asia to take Rangoon, Thailand, Vietnam etc back from the Imperial Japanese Army. (Historically, the USAAF tried doing a airlift over the Himalayas for resupply - it was just too inefficient.) Bombing from Siberia is out for several tactical reasons, though a bigger one would be the Soviet Union and Japan having a Neutrality pact. Attack direct by sea is dismissed as land airplanes are more capable than carrier aircraft. (I guess this is meant to be "why don't we sail a huge carrier fleet to Japan directly" instead of what happened historically.)

Then the topic of a combined arms island-hopping campaign is brought up, and dismissed, on the basis that it would be 'far too costly in lives and material.' Another factor is that while this campaign is going on, those interior supply lines will be inviolate, as all the newly seized war-making materials will be shipped back to Japan's industrial heart, making it stronger. (History reveals this line of reasoning to be questionable at best, since historically Allied forces pursued the island hopping strategy - capturing outlying islands and isolating major strongholds in the South Pacific, all the while fighting its way up New Guinea and disrupting Japan's supply lines - and when the Americans belatedly equipped their submarines with working torpedoes, USN submarines sank half the Japanese Merchant fleet in six months - crippling Japanese industry.  So yeah, ignore this argument.)

This was the worry.

Faced with yet another grinding war of attrition, Victory through Air Power offers up its solution: erm, air power. Long range bombers are the answer, naturally. With the optimistic formula of "twice the range cuts the fighting time in half"  de Seversky proposes the creation of a new extremely long range bomber fleet. The clincher for the sale is that a sufficiently long range bomber could be staged to attack Japan out of Alaska - which would make America's supply lines the interior, fast ones. It's not God from a machine, but it is a aeronautical solution to an otherwise insoluble problem.

The wing and fuselage span in these blueprints are close to what the B-36 would be.

Alaska is halfway to everywhere, and thus a logical place for big airbases.

De Seversky also talks a bit about what these bombers would be like. The craft envisioned by Victory is very close to the B-36, then under development. While de Seversky doesn't go into the technical details, such bombers would be able to neutralize the enemy's air force via defensive guns. (A whole generation of flyers in B-17s and B-24s, fighting trench warfare over Europe's skies, must have laughed harshly at that one.) Still, once again, de Seversky is thinking of a giant airplane with a destroyer's worth of anti-aircraft cannon - another B-36 design feature.

When we say "bristling with cannon" we're serious.

"While single engine fighters must maneuver to get into firing position, the heavy bomber is *always* in firing position."

Not only will these transoceanic bombers destroy the enemy's air force in the sky, they will hit the enemy's air force on the ground too. It's a slightly paradoxical quirk of the argument that fighting on land and sea is viewed as folly, while fighting in the air is 1) more efficient and 2) will definitely go America's way even before enemy industry is affected. "Once complete mastery of the air is achieved, enemy war industries will lie helplessly exposed for systematic destruction" says de Seversky. The strategic bombing campaign over Europe would eventually prove the truth of these words.

As super bombers are developed, so are bombs "forever growing in size and destructive power".We get to see a whole new series of hypothetical bombs, able to destory even the most intransigent of structures.  De Seversky emphasis that this sort of destructive power is in the long run something that everybody will have - but right now is America's alone, as only America has the spare industrial output to start working on such things. Japan must take time to consolidate its gains, and that time is to America's advantage. As de Seversky says: "today the enemy is sprawled on the ground, and while his greedy tentacles are clutching the loot, his body lies unprotected. Why spend our precious time trying to loosen his grip in a struggle that can only lead to the complete devastation of the very lands we are trying to free?"

We're in the home stretch now - it's now time for the "LET'S GET 'EM" moment. I mean, why make a film about Victory through Air Power, if you're not going to show Victory through Air Power? "For with the strategy of air power, they will make the enemy fight on our terms, against the weapons of our choosing, on our time, but on his soil. "

Get the point yet? Well, this is a propaganda film, and THEY ARE COMING AROUND FOR ANOTHER PASS

Yes, this is a Bald eagle kicking the shit out of a sinister oriental octopus, what of it

And thus peace is restored.

So, there you have it: Victory through Air Power. While history doesn't agree with all of its arguments, you can understand why this was a popular vision. Technology creating an American victory without a WW1 style war of attrition couldn't help but be attractive for people who remembered the First World War. With a positive vision of a less costly war, and a sort-of humanitarian justification in saving human lives*, you can understand how strategic bombing in general was so popular with the Americans and British.

There's one more thing I'd like to pull out. de Seversky at one point manages to get downright prophetic:

"this is the coming reality. And we must face the fact that it is a two-way proposition. No nation has a monopoly on this kind of air power. And when it comes, there can be no real defense against such an attack. [...] And the only sure defense is a vigorous offense. It's a question of who destroys who first."

In that, he was absolutely right. The only thing de Seversky didn't see was that two new technologies would emerge that would not only massively increase the firepower of his bomber fleets, it would also render them obsolete...

This blog has a excellent writeup of the magazine article.

A direct link to the article for the interested