One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein, Volumes 1 & 2

By: Whitney Alyse Webb

Briefly, what are these books about?

The alleged connections between organized crime and national intelligence agencies which led to the numerous illicit operations including Watergate, Iran-Contra, the JFK Assassination, and of course the entire Jeffrey Epstein mess.

A key component of these operations was the tactic of collecting blackmail and using it to convince people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t.

What's the author's angle?

Charitably, Webb is an autodidact with an enormous command of facts and connections.

Uncharitably, she’s someone with a weak evidentiary filter making conspiratorial mountains out of tenuously connected molehills.

Who should read these books?

No one should just read them. You should either ignore them or study them intently as part of an “Intro to Conspiracy Theories” curriculum. Of the two I would recommend the former. Read on to see why.

I- How does one approach a book like this?

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1. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by: Neil Gaiman

2. There Is No Antimemetics Division by: qntm

3. The Man Who Had All the Luck by: Arthur Miller

4. How Green Was My Valley by: Richard Llewellyn

5. Theft of Fire: Orbital Space #1 by: Devon Eriksen

6. Assassin's Apprentice (The Farseer Trilogy, Book 1) by: Robin Hobb

7. Royal Assassin (The Farseer Trilogy, Book 2) by: Robin Hobb

With the enormous increase in the power of AI (specifically LLMs) people are using them for all sorts of things, hoping to find areas where they’re better, or at least cheaper than humans. FiveThirtyNine (get it?) is one such attempt, and they claim that AI can do forecasting better than humans.

Scott Alexander, of Astral Codex Ten, reviewed the service and concluded that they still have a long way to go. I have no doubt that this is the case, but one can imagine that this will not always be the case. What then? My assertion would be that at the point when AI forecasting does “work” (should that ever happen) it will make the problems of superforecasting even worse.2

I- The problems of superforecasting

What are the problems of superforecasting?

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