OSD 263: AlphaGo and invisible limits
Innovate or die.
Back in 2016, AlphaGo became the first computer program to beat a 9 dan (i.e. top-ranked) Go player. Like chess before it, Go had long been a holy grail of AI research. It was a big deal to surpass human capabilities in the game. DeepMind, which created AlphaGo, continued to iterate on it and they, along with other researchers and the open source community, quickly left humans far behind. The best recent engines can achieve invincibility against human players with just hours of training — and they’re generalizable enough that they can perform that feat in Go, chess, and shogi.
You’d think that would have destroyed the (rich and ancient) culture around Go. But we recently stumbled upon data about what actually happened:
Existential threats are, well, existential. But the flip side of them is that if you survive, you will have necessarily gotten much stronger in the process. That idea — “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, essentially — is the weak form of the claim. The strong form is that threats can be good. Because they’re the only thing that forces innovation. If innovation is an option, then it’s always easier to opt not to do it.
We wrote about this in:
OSD 252: G.K. Chesterton the gun influencer
That edition of the newsletter was about a passage of Orthodoxy where Chesterton makes the point that the more things stay the same, the more they have to change. This excerpt sounds political, but he’s speaking in the context of his Catholicism. Bold emphasis ours:
We have remarked that one reason offered for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow better. But the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post.
How does this apply to guns? Well, the times that have been the hardest for gun rights have also led to major advances. Because they needed to lead to major advances.
The Gun Control Act of 1968 led to the NRA’s 1977 overhaul. And for all its faults, the NRA in the couple decades after that was the reason that gun rights had any political pull at all.
The early ‘90s burst of assault weapons bans (until Washington state’s ban in 2022, every AWB in the country dated to a five-year political spasm from 1989 to 1994) led to enormous interest and pent-up demand for ARs. At the time of the federal AWB, there were less than 700,000 affected rifles in the country. Today, in part because of the backlash to that ban, the installed base is something like 50x number.
That curve bent upwards in response to the political atmosphere after the Sandy Hook shooting, which was the closest the country has come to a second federal AWB. In the handful of states where some guns are already banned, the bans only ratchet tighter over time. But everywhere else in the US, each failed attempt at restriction only makes future attempts even less likely to succeed. More on that in:
OSD 204: When you come at the king, you best not miss
To be clear, restrictions aren’t good — if you could wave a magic wand, you’d get rid of them instead of wish for more. But in the real world we can’t always control that. We can however control the reaction, and the good news is that we have a tailwind there. In jurisdictions where they’re not a done deal from the start, restrictions galvanize the gun community and force innovation.
That’s cold comfort when rights are under an acute threat, but it’s reason to stay positive. In the long run, our odds are good.
This week’s links
Washington Post op-ed: “When domestic abuse victims turn violent, the law should protect them”
h/t Discord user @WaGuns45.
By the time Deven Grey shot her boyfriend in 2017, he had been isolating and abusing her for years. The night she killed him at their home in rural Alabama, he had fired a gun at her, pistol-whipped her and strangled her with a hose. In court, she filed a “stand your ground” self-defense claim — which she was denied because she had shot her abuser five minutes after he had lain on the couch. “I just didn’t want it to be me,” she said.
She took a guilty plea for manslaughter and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
“Finland to open 300 shooting ranges to boost interest in national defence”
There are currently around 600 ranges in Finland, compared with 2,000 at the turn of the 21st century.
A spokesman for Finland’s defence ministry said it was working to “safeguard the activities of Finland’s shooting ranges and promote the establishment of new shooting ranges”.
In a statement to The Guardian, the spokesman added: “The environmental permit processes and legislation concerning shooting ranges will be streamlined.
“The target for the number of outdoor shooting ranges will be about 1,000 by the end of the decade. The focus will be on establishing a sufficient number of rifle and tactical ranges throughout the country.”
Insight from an OSD Discord user on mental health reporting
h/t @wtree:
I found an interesting video, tangentially related to guns regarding mental health. I've seen people on Twitter call it a "loophole" that only people involuntarily committed to mental institutions are banned from possessing guns, as opposed to everyone who is committed. The Trace also seems to think any visit to a mental institution should result in banning the person from possessing a gun: thetrace.org/2023/12/emergency-hospitalization-gun-rights/
I think most everyone here is well aware that such a change would result in fewer people seeking mental health treatment due to the fear of having their guns rights taken. It turns out there is already a system where we can see this happen. The FAA is apparently very willing to revoke pilots licenses from people with any mental health issues, leading to situations where pilots avoid seeking help. The video here shows how this all happened in a recent high profile incident: youtube.com/watch?v=988j2-4CdgM
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