Israel Assassination Backfires (and Other Mideast Updates)

Plus: BP’s climate backtrack, another zany billionaire, China ultra-hawks ascendant, America’s Jewish anti-Zionists, AI Nobels, and more!

Updates on the Middle East conflict:

• Israel’s July assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the relatively moderate leader of Hamas, has led the militant group to restart suicide attacks in Israel, according to the Wall Street Journal. Haniyeh and his allies in Hamas had opposed the use of suicide bombings, which they viewed as politically toxic. But after Haniyeh’s death, leadership of Hamas fell to Yahya Sinwar, the group’s hardline leader in Gaza and the chief architect of the Oct. 7 attacks. Sinwar immediately ordered a revival of suicide attacks in hopes of destabilizing Israel, according to Arab intelligence officials who spoke with the Journal. Hamas has since attempted at least three such attacks inside Israel, including a bombing that killed no one but the bomber and a shooting spree in Tel Aviv that killed seven civilians and injured 16 and left the two attackers dead.

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued an ultimatum to the Lebanese people. “You have the opportunity to save Lebanon before it falls into the abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering like we see in Gaza,” he said. “Free your country from Hezbollah so that this war can end.” It’s unclear how Netanyahu expects the Lebanese people to rise up and defeat Hezbollah, which remains the country’s most powerful military force even after the damage Israel has done to it in recent weeks. Gregg Carlstrom of The Economist wrote, “To many Lebanese his words sound like a bleak choice: restart your civil war, or stay under prolonged Israeli bombardment.”

• French President Emmanuel Macron, in a radio interview, urged world leaders to stop sending Israel weapons and to support a political solution to the Middle East conflict. Netanyahu issued his response in a short video. “As Israel fights the forces of barbarism led by Iran, all civilized countries should be standing firmly by Israel’s side,” the prime minister declared. Israel, Netanyahu said, is “defending itself on seven fronts,” taking on adversaries in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Iran, and “Judea and Samaria” (which means, roughly, the West Bank).

• In an interview with 60 Minutes, Kamala Harris said that Iran is America’s “greatest adversary” because Iranian leaders have “American blood on their hands,” an apparent reference to the fact that Tehran has provided weapons to groups that have killed US soldiers. The comment drew consternation from a diverse array of foreign policy analysts. Some hawks chided Harris for underestimating the threat from China, which is widely considered America’s most powerful adversary. More dovish analysts—like Sina Toossi of the Center for International Policy—argued that Harris’s framing needlessly increased the chances of a US-Iran war at a time when an escalating Iran-Israel conflict had already raised them to a disturbing level. “If we continue down this path of reflexively demonizing Iran, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of Iraq—locking ourselves into a cycle of endless conflict with no clear benefit to US security or stability in the region,” Toossi told Politico.

Earlier this week, we introduced the NonZero Time Machine, a feature that takes a distinctive look at the recent past. Today, we’re shifting our gaze toward the future.

The NonZero Newsletter is creating its own forecasting community through Metaculus, an online platform that aggregates forecasts about world events in hopes of increasing predictive accuracy. Starting this week, we’ll be sharing questions about NZN-related subjects like foreign policy, AI, and US politics. Readers (and members of the NZN team) can submit their forecasts, and Metaculus will automatically create an aggregated prediction that will serve as a gauge of the NZN community’s views on major issues. Down the road, we may open some of these questions to the wider Metaculus community as well.

One goal of this initiative is to help you and other NZN readers sharpen your analyses by prompting you to make testable predictions about the future—predictions that you can reflect on once the verdict is in. Another plus is that we’ll get to find out if the NZN community is eerily prescient–or, alternatively, is prone to certain kinds of cognitive biases. So give it a shot! And don’t hesitate to debate these questions with other subscribers using Chat-NZN. We predict that such debate will improve your predictive accuracy.

This week’s Metaculus question is: Will Israel strike Iranian nuclear facilities before the 2024 US general election—by midnight US Eastern Time on November 4? (Note: Assassinating nuclear scientists or other Iranians associated with nuclear research—something Israel has done before and, judging, by the way Israeli officials are describing the impending retaliation, could do again—doesn’t by itself count as a strike on nuclear facilities.) Head over to Metaculus to make your prediction before the question closes on Monday.

Geoffrey Hinton—who is sometimes called “the Godfather of AI” and has used his prominence to warn about the perils of ungoverned AI—just got more prominent. This week he won the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with John Hopfield of Princeton. Both men made fundamental contributions to the development of “neural networks,” the foundation for recent progress in large language models and generative AI more broadly.

So what does that have to do with physics? Some of their breakthroughs in AI made use of “statistical mechanics,” a method taken from physics. (If you want to get into the weeds, apparently Hinton made use of the “Boltzmann distribution” in helping to develop “back propagation”—a tool that greatly accelerates the training of large language models.)

In short: The logic behind this Nobel is less than straightforward. And it’s less straightforward than the logic behind the other Nobel given to AI researchers this week—the prize in Chemistry, which went to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, both of Google. True, they didn’t win for research in chemistry per se. But they won for developing a tool used in chemistry (and molecular biology and ultimately medicine)—AlphaFold, an AI that aids in the prediction of protein structures. And there’s a long history of Nobels going to people who invent research tools (as in 1986, when the physics prize was given for contributions to electron microscopy).

If you’re wondering why Hinton is so worried about AI, part of the answer can be found in a 2023 NZN piece about him and his work. And if you’re wondering why the irrepressible Hinton used the occasion of winning a Nobel Prize to take a shot at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (he congratulated one of his former grad students for having played a role in firing Altman), part of the answer may lie in this more recent NZN piece.

You might think that this newsletter has run out of eccentric billionaires to write about. Within the past two months we’ve explored the distinctive psyches of Palantir CEO Alex Karp and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and we’ve touched on the penchant of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Bill Ackman for embracing dubious conspiracy theories.

But billionaire eccentricity is one of America’s most abundant resources, and we continue to tap this rich vein. Which brings us to Brian Armstrong.