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This is the second part (I) of our long-delayed series looking at Hearts of Iron IV, Paradox Interactive’s World War II grand strategy game and also one of the most popular strategy games currently on the market.

Last week, we looked at how HoI4 simulates combat, particularly its focus on operations (rather than tactics or, as we’ll see in later weeks, strategy). Much of Hearts of Iron‘s success is due to its effectiveness as an operational simulator and its operational model is by far the most developed part of the game.

This week we’re turning to the question of how Hearts of Iron IV handles what is going on below the operational level that the player operates at. Because the player does not themselves handle – or even really see – how their armies function below that division-level operational simulator, the granularity here comes from how Hearts of Iron IV understands ‘doctrine,’ which is to say the practices, guidelines and expectations that militaries use to guide their function in the field. The player is thus notionally given some ability, by choosing doctrines and determining the composition of their divisions, to shape how their units fight in the small scale (or at least how those fights are abstractly simulated). In practice, however, as we’ll see, HoI4‘s approach to doctrine is less developed than its approach to operations and never quite succeeds in really capturing the different ways that armies in this period understood themselves and functioned.

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As noted last time, in addition to aiming to win the war in Europe before the USSR can join the war, one of our goals here is **Maximum Britain** which means following the focus tree to merge the United Kingdom, the Dominions and also India into a global superstate.
This is, to be clear, historically speaking, a fairly absurd idea in practice, but the game makes it possible. Pursuing it early on is a significant handicap as it is necessary to bank around 500 political power before taking the major decision to hold the Imperial Conference (you need a few hundred for the decisions themselves, but also several hundred to run ‘improve opinion’ diplomatic efforts to get all of the relevant countries to agree).
I was finally in a position to fire the conference in January of 1941, while my armies continued to hold the line in the Low Countries.
Also, Iraq decided to go fascist at this point in the run and it went very badly for them, as you may be able to see in the background.

What is Doctrine?

Now military doctrine is a concept we have been meaning to get to here on the blog for quite a while and – at last – we have a good opportunity! Military doctrine, as a concept is one of those famously tricky to define concepts, but also absolutely essential for understanding how a military in any period – but perhaps especially in the Second World War – operates in practice. Parshall and Tully¹ offer what I think is one of the most accessible and useful definitions of doctrine, “At its simplest, doctrine is the body of formal knowledge that tells a fighting force how it is expected to fight…doctrine is bigger than tactic in that doctrine encompasses not only the means for actually handling forces in battle, but also augments it with command structure and communications procedures.”

Doctrine is thus the term for the ‘standard operating procedures,’ as it were, of an army or indeed of an entire military.

The reason doctrine is essential is because, as Clausewitz says, everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult (drink!). The concept of a coordinated attack on an enemy position is very simple. The execution of a coordinated attack on an enemy position is very hard. After all, a real army does not actually consist of a few dozen units that, as in a video game, respond more or less instantly to the precise, clear and unambiguous commands of a single leader. Instead, a real army consists of many thousands (or hundreds of thousands or even millions) of human beings, each of whom is in their own experiential little universe – unable to read their minds and often unaware of the positions of their fellows.

If you want a large group of people to execute even the simplest of commands effectively, they need to already have some common conception of what the orders mean and how they carry them out. If you want two units, with different commanders, to coordinate effectively – often when they cannot be in direct communication – those commanders (and their soldiers) need to share some common conception of the normal or correct way to attack or defend. If I am commanding, say, a division’s artillery support (probably split into half a dozen or more batteries) and I am supposed to support a brigade’s attack in the morning, I need to have the same conception of what an attack means as the brigade commander. On the battlefield, armies cannot ‘make it up as they go along,’ they need to function according to standard procedures, a shared understanding of what an attack looks like, what a defensive line looks like, how to call out information on a radio, what orders mean and so on.

That shared conception is at the core of the concept of doctrine.

By the Second World War, this sort of doctrine had been largely formalized in nearly all of the militaries of the major participants. That body of formal knowledge consisted of training materials and best practices often laid out in an extensive catalog of field manuals, complete with their own bespoke jargon. As the war progressed, changes to doctrine could be promulgated the same way, with After Action Reports and ‘Lesson’s Learned’ summaries flowing ideally up the chain of command and new doctrine publications, updated field manuals and such flowing down the chain of command.

That said, as a pre-modernist, I have to note that while formal military doctrine – written out in field manuals – is a relatively modern invention, informal military doctrine is as old as warfare itself. Pre-modern armies also had ‘standard operating procedures,’ – often every bit as rigid as modern doctrine – which were learned informally, with older soldiers teaching newer ones (and young officers practically ‘apprenticing’ to more senior ones).

In short doctrine is necessary for armies (and navies, and air forces) to function. While it can be constraining, a ‘straitjacket’ that imposes standard approaches (sometimes to non-standard problems) there is simply no other way of coordination battles that might involve tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals who need to act in concert in order to be successful.

In terms of what doctrine includes, we run the real risk that because almost everything a military does (or has) interacts with doctrine, there’s a sense in which everything is doctrine and so nothing seems like doctrine in a kind of ‘the fish doesn’t know it is wet’ situation. Instead, while it is the case that doctrine tends to be evolutionary (smaller changes, iteration on iteration) rather than being designed ‘from scratch’ from first principles, it is helpful to think about building a doctrine from first principles to get a sense of what it entails.

Beginning at the operational level (we’ll put strategy aside for now), doctrine begins with a theory of victory, a sense of how an army defeats an opposing force. That theory of victory could be, for instance, attritional in nature (“we win by inflicting more casualties on the enemy until their force collapses”) or it could be based in maneuver (“we win by breaking through enemy lines and then maneuvering to cut off enemy forces or disrupt their logistics.”) Heck, in the case of some kinds of militaries waging protected war (or engaged in non-violence or terrorism), the theory of victory may be entirely abstract, focused on public opinion or popular will. Naturally armies with different theories of victory are going to construct very different doctrines for achieving those goals.

For instance, an army that has a theory of victory based on maneuver is going to need to concentrate a lot of force and coordinate it to create that breakthrough at a specific spot in the enemy line and then the ability to go fast once that breach is made, which is going to demand different command structures and procedures than an army that is focused on simply inflicting attrition. In particular, the maneuver army might want to push a lot of command authority down to lower ranks so that they can go fast in situations where communications with high command are difficult and conditions on the ground are rapidly changing. But a different army might want to pull command authority up to enable very large, well-coordinated, intricately planned ‘set piece’ battles, perhaps in order to try to shift the attritional balance in their favor (or achieve a very choreographed advance).

That theory of victory in turn is going to shape the conduct of a battle. To take our ‘maneuver’ theory of victory army, the next question becomes “what is the force structure of the sharp forward edge of your breakthrough force?” Do you want your tanks distributed widely or concentrated into a handful of units? What is the role of infantry in this attack? If the infantry and the tanks are expected to coordinate closely, they probably need to be placed together into the same divisions so that they can train together and be commanded together. What about the artillery? Do you want each small unit to have a little bit of artillery of its own, or a really big ‘grand battery’ at the disposal of the division commander, which can be unleashed in a coordinated manner, perhaps focused on a single objective in a larger battle? Doctrine is going to play into the structure of your army: what capabilities, equipment and troops does a given division (or corps or brigade or army group) have? What is its command structure? Which elements are subordinate?

Those concerns then flow downward into the fighting procedures for individual smaller units. When the divisional commander orders his armored brigade to ‘take that hill’ – what does that look like? Do the tanks have a formation to advance in? Does the infantry expect to go first in front of the tanks or to follow in their wake (or is the infantry not in the same command chain as the tanks at all and so will just struggle to mutually support each other – a persistent problem for the British Army for much of WWII). How does air power and artillery factor in here? What level of ‘fires’ support does the company commander advancing his company expect to get – and how does he expect to get it? Doctrine gets all the way down to “how does the company commander’s signal officer call for an artillery strike?” because in the chaos of battle you need standard ways to indicate a specific location and call a specific strike (grid squares, usually).

And again, the ‘best approach’ here may differ if the theory of victory is different! We might ask for instance, during a large offensive, what is the best use of your close air support aircraft? Are they best employed to focus their attacks on the point of breakthrough, contributing to the massed firepower at the decisive point? Or perhaps it is a better idea to have them striking deeper along an enemy’s operational depth, hitting reserves, reinforcements on the move, supply depots and rear echelon units that might be softer targets? The balance between those missions (with implications for what the guys on the ground expect from their aircraft) is going to depend on what you are trying to achieve (that theory of victory) but also how you are trying to achieve it.²

(As you can see, doctrine for land troops, navies and air forces are going to interact here too: these elements often need to be mutually supporting, so they need doctrines that link up effectively. Shore bombardment support gets a lot more effective if the troops ashore have a way to signal rapidly to the ships where they need the big guns.)

Mixed in with these choices are also just a ton of ‘best practices.’ Often the ‘best’ way to do something is not obvious or cannot be reasoned out easily from first principles but emerges slowly with experience. Something like, for instance, the ‘combat box‘ bomber formations, which enabled greater coverage and fields of fire from heavy bombers’ defensive guns (thus limiting – though by no means removing – the damage enemy fighters could do) had to be developed and refined based on experience from the field. Already mentioned but shore bombardment doctrine in the United States Navy evolved a lot during the war, particularly the somewhat counter-intuitive realization that often cruisers and destroyers provided the most effective shore support because their lighter (though still massive by land-warfare standards) guns could be quick, accurate and responsive, whereas the Big Guns on battleships were harder to fire ‘danger close’ and slower to get effectively on the target.

But what I want to stress is just how expansive doctrine ends up being. It isn’t just a simple tactical field manual – for one, by World War II, tactics are so complex that the ‘simple tactical field manual’ for a combined arms division with motorized, mechanized and armor elements supported by artillery and anti-aircraft along with maintenance and logistics elements would be enormous (in practice that’s dozens and dozens of field manuals). But equally command structures, communications practices, unit structures (what elements go in what division at what level), operational concepts and training procedures all fit into doctrine too.

And all of that matters because it gets to how two armies with broadly similar equipment can fight very differently, because they understand what they’re doing with that equipment differently, because they have different practices for its employment and different training to set up those practices. So doctrine is really important.

The first half of 1941 ended up being more heavily focused on naval and overseas affairs. My infantry-centric army could hold the Low Countries, but wouldn’t be able to push outward without unacceptable losses. Getting those 50-odd divisions to France for 1939, however, required cutting lots of corners, with the result that the armored and motorized divisions required for offensive operations wouldn’t be available in quantity until late 1941 and I wouldn’t have enough of them to break out until summer 1942.
In the meantime, I focused on locking down North Africa and dealing with the Italian Navy, the Regia Marina. I had split my navy into two main battlegroups, a home fleet (organized around my more modern, deadly fast carrier group) and the Mediterranean fleet, organized around eight of my big ol’ battlewagons. The French navy was a lot less helpful than expected, so my fight with the Regia Marina ended up being somewhat attritional: the Mediterranean fleet won a series of battles basically trading screens favorably with the Regia Marina. Under normal circumstances, the way naval battles work in *HoI4* is that damage accrues first to the smaller screening ships, so for the most part you have to ‘burn off’ an enemy’s supply of destroyers and cruisers before getting to put away their capital ships.

The Doctrine Tree

Sussing out how Hearts of Iron IV handles formal doctrine is actually really easy: it is a specific, discrete game mechanic called ‘doctrine,’ which is then split between land doctrine, air doctrine and naval doctrine.

That said, I think it is fairly clear that this is a set of mechanics the Hearts of Iron IV team has never been fully satisfied with. You can tell because the doctrine system has undergone more changes than most core Hearts of Iron IV systems, getting two major overhauls and a ton of minor tweaks. On release, doctrine was part of the research system and so doctrines were basically technologies which thus competed for research slots with every other kind of technology. However with the 1.11 patch (in 2021), doctrine was moved out of the research tree into its own space and used ‘army/air/navy experience’ as its currency instead of research time. Then with the 1.17 patch (in 2025) the system was massively overhauled again to drop much of the ‘tree’ structure entirely.

I want to talk about both the system as it existed post 1.11 and post 1.17, because I think both doctrine systems help understand what the developers are trying to do and also expose some weaknesses with the end result. We’re going to focus here in particular on Land Doctrine, but in each case the Air and Naval trees work basically the same way.

Let’s start with the ‘old’ doctrine tree:

I pulled a screencap from a Developer Diary for this because this version of the doctrine tree isn’t in the game anymore and I couldn’t find a good screencap of what it looked like in 1.16, but this is **reasonably** close to the final form it took.

Basically the structure here was a series of doctrine paths. Players first had to choose a tree (you could only develop one of the four doctrine categories) and then spent army experience (or air experience or navy experience for those trees) to ‘buy’ each progressive notch on the tree (originally this was research using technology). At a couple of points in each tree, it branched and the player chose one of the two branches (losing access to the other branch). Each stop on the tree confers a set of statistical benefits, making your divisions (or air wings, or ships) slightly better in a given way. The currency for this is that army/air/navy experience, which can be gained in peacetime slowly through having theorists in your high command or by doing military exercises, but is gained rapidly during a war simply by fighting, representing the battlefield’s role as a harsh teacher.

And you can see what this system is trying to do. Each of the four major ‘trees’ is meant to represent the military doctrine of one or more of the major powers. The Mobile Warfare Doctrine tree is meant to reflect German doctrine through the war (generally called by its German name, bewegungskrieg, ‘maneuver warfare’), with split branches favoring offense or defense meant to reflect the potential for Germany to get in over its head and have to shift to a more defensive approach to warfare (as it did, historically). The Superior Firepower Doctrine tree is meant to reflect the American approach to the war, with split branches that honestly don’t make a whole lot of sense and mostly gesture towards late- or post- Cold War doctrinal revisions (AirLand Battle was a 1980s US military doctrine and a significant depature from what came before while the phrase ‘Shock and Awe’ is most often associated with the 2003 Invasion of Iraq). The Grand Battleplan doctrine is meant to reflect countries that stuck closer to WWI tactical approaches (France, Britain, Japan), with one line for increasingly artillery and armor heavy British doctrine and another for Japanese infantry infiltration tactics. The formal doctrine it most clearly evokes is French Methodical Battle (La Bataille Conduite). Finally, the ‘Mass Assault’ doctrine was supposed to encompass both Chinese and Soviet approaches and that’s just…a real problem for reasons we’ll get into in a moment.

The update changes this system, recognizing that it was way to rigid. So the new post-1.17 system replaced the single doctrine tree the player must choose with a ‘grand doctrine’ and then supporting modular doctrines for each combat ‘arm.’ Thus a country’s army doctrine becomes the sum of its ‘grand doctrine’ (representing overall operational concept), plus a choice of one of several infantry, support, armor and operations sub-doctrines. That said the main four ‘grand doctrines’ retain the names and framing of the doctrine trees.

The new doctrine tree, following my doctrine selection for my current United Kingdom run. I opted to stick with Grand Battleplan here, because it is actually quite strong in the current build of the game, despite the fact that generally historians view the doctrines that it is meant to represent (French Methodical Battle, the British focus on set piece engagements and for some inexplicable reason Japanese Army doctrine) as some of the least effective land battle doctrines in the war.

A country picks a doctrine for each of these categories (spending army experience as before) and then as that unit-type (or any unit from the grand doctrine) fights, they accumulate ‘mastery’ which unlocks progressive tiers of bonuses. The idea is that you spend army experience to pick the kind of warfare you want to do and then get better at it over time as the approach is practiced and refined.

There’s clearly a second intention to this system which is to enable players to try to recreate historical doctrinal systems. That is very evidence in the original ‘four trees’ system, where each tree (or branch) is clearly themed after the doctrine of a specific combatant. But it remains true in the post-1.17 modular system. Players are going to quickly pick up on, for instance, in the ‘armor’ subdoctrine, that ‘Armored Spearhead’ shows an American tank (a Sherman), while ‘Armored Infantry Support’ shows a German tank (a Tiger) and ‘Streamlined Deployment’ shows three Soviet tanks (T-34s, I think, though so small and in profile they could also be IS-2s).

And on the one hand, I think this is a noble attempt to actually model something fairly complex and on the other hand I think quite a few problems remain.

The first problem, somewhat reduced but not removed by the new system is simply that the ‘grand doctrines’ don’t necessarily map on well to what major powers were doing or at least thought they were doing. Both the United States and the Soviet Union understood themselves to be attempting to do a kind of maneuver warfare, the USA attempting to reverse-engineer German maneuver warfare doctrine, whereas the USSR came into the war with its own maneuver warfare doctrine (Deep Operations), which it needed to refine but also actually train and implement because Stalin had purged most of the officers who knew and developed it. It is certainly the case that the United States pursued a firepower-based solution to generating maneuver, enabled by the USA’s much larger industrial base, but the goal was still breakthroughs and maneuver, not merely blowing things up for blowing things’ up sake.

Meanwhile, placing the USSR under ‘Mass Assault’ is honestly borderline insulting given that the USSR would finish WWII with what is generally now regarded as the most sophisticated maneuver warfare doctrine around. While Soviet armies often took huge casualties and Soviet commanders – especially early in the war – often didn’t seem to understand their own doctrine and engaged in under-prepared, under-resourced infantry attacks (not infrequently because Stalin demanded counter-offensives before they were ready), the USSR was not doing ‘human wave’ attacks a la Enemy at the Gates (2001) and indeed by the time we are at Operation Bagration in 1944, it is very easy to argue that the Soviets are better at maneuver warfare than the Germans (indeed one could potentially try to make that argument as early as Operation Uranus in late 1942).

Likewise, ‘Grand Battleplan’ as the umbrella for France, Britain and Japan is equally odd. The British Army struggled a fair bit with infantry-and-armor coordination through the war and generally preferred carefully planned ‘set piece’ battles, with a pretty clear legacy reaching back to the lessons of the First World War (alongside the French Methodical Battle approach), but the Imperial Japanese Army was devoted to the cult of the offensive and favored quick marches, surprise and tenacity in offense, rather than a slow operational tempo characterized by intensive planning. If I were to place the IJA anywhere on the doctrine tree, it would be as a kind of alternate branch of the Mobile Warfare tree: Japan was trying to do speed, infiltration and maneuver, just with infantry (for the most part) rather than with armor (for the most part). The limitations of a ‘light and fast’ approach become pretty shockingly clear as one gets into the back half of 1942 and the IJA starts tangling with well-supplied Americans and Australians who have a lot of firepower at their disposal. In short, the Imperial Japanese Navy may have favored baroque, overly complex and choreographed battleplans, but the IJA was very much a ‘cult of the offensive’ organization that prioritized speed and surprise – albeit with a lot less trucks and tanks than what European armies were using.

So in the notional layout, these doctrines are often a weak match for the historical countries they are supposed to represent. The bonuses also often do not line up clearly either. Admittedly, the new doctrine system is significantly better in this regard. One of the classic balancing goof-ups of the old system was the ‘Mass Mobilization’ branch the Mass Assault Doctrine, which offered bonuses to manpower and reduced frontage for infantry brigades (enabling a country to get more infantry in the fight on a given section of front), which was meant to represent Nationalist China and (to an extent) the USSR reaching deep to mobilize enormous amounts of manpower – a ‘muscle not metal’ approach – but actually was basically useless for those countries (they have plenty of manpower anyway) and extremely useful for small highly industrialized countries which desperately needed the huge boost to recruitable manpower.

The new tree avoids these kinds of errors, but in playing I have generally found the connections between doctrine choices and actual operational concept to be fairly weak. Part of the problem is that doctrines are presented as a confusing collection of tiered bonuses to a bewildering array of things. Which is better for building armored divisions arming for decisive breakthroughs: +5% breakthrough, +10% soft attack and a flat +5 organization for medium and heavy tanks or +10% breakthrough, +2 organization and +0.05 recovery rate? I have six hundred hours in this game and I would still have to consult a guide to figure out which was the better option for that specific concept.

Meanwhile, balance remains a problem. Ideally, this would be a case where different countries would find that different doctrines supported their own mix of industry, terrain and strategic needs. In practice, each balancing patch tends to just alter the array of ‘meta’ choices with entire grand doctrines almost invariably assigned to the scrap heap of ‘never pick.‘ This is a problem that, as we’ll see, is intensified greatly by the division-designer. From my perspective, this system could actually do to be a lot simpler, with the player being tasked to think about their intended operational concept and then guided into choices that fit that concept, rather than having to confront a bewildering array of stat bonuses which often don’t do what they are supposed to historically model in any event (and do almost nothing to really tell the player what they are supposed to do).

The final issue here is very strong path dependence in doctrine choices. Historically, armies frequently tried things, realized they didn’t work and then tried new things. American amphibious operations doctrine – which by 1944 was an absolute marvel of efficiency in managing enormous and extremely complex operations – largely emerged by getting it wrong a whole bunch. The marine landings at Gaudalcanal in August of 1942, for instance, failed to load supplies so that they would be unloaded in the order of the most essential to the least, leaving the marines in the lurch when Japan contested the waters around the island, stopping unloading prematurely. That problem was fixed for the Operation Torch landings in North Africa in November of 1942, but the major takeaway of allied commanders from the Torch landings is that if they had been facing truly fierce, determined resistance, they probably would have failed. In short, no one set out in 1939 to plan D-Day: the doctrine for Operationa Overlord emerged out of a process of trial and error.

And while the current doctrine system allows for lessons learned and experience gaining through the ‘mastery’ system (which ‘levels up’ existing doctrines to unlock new bonuses), it heavily penalizes shifting doctrine in response to changing conditions. A player that goes in with an ‘Armored Spearhead’ oops-all-tanks armored division concept only to have to realize they need to back up to a more combined arms ‘Armored Infantry Support’ doctrine – which is exactly the experience Britain and the United States had with their armored doctrine! – is basically forced to reset to zero as if they hadn’t learned anything at all.³ The player is aggressively penalized for trying an operational concept, realizing it doesn’t work and trying to shift tracks (because it resets their bonuses and costs more currency), but this is exactly what the most successful armies in World War II did.

However none of these issues are, in my view, the biggest issue for Hearts of Iron IV‘s concept of doctrine. The biggest issue for HoI4‘s doctrine is that the most important – for the game itself, at least – parts of doctrine do not take place in the doctrine system.

By June 1941, I had done a fair bit of damage to the Regia Marina, but the Mediterranean Fleet was pretty badly worn down. Normally, Britain has so many ships that I could have just kept pressing until the RM ran out of screens, but being Britain, I also had to run anti-submarine duty, which absorbs quite a lot of destroyers, forcing me to be more careful with my most modern, frontline screening ships (I do generally have separate templates for escort destroyers (focused on ASW) vs. fleet destroyers (focused on torpedoes and surface detection)).
However, the near total destruction of the German surface fleet the previous year gave me the ‘trump card’ which I now played, moving the Mediterranean fleet into repair, while shifting my fast attack fleet into the Mediterranean to keep the pressure on the Regia Marina.
The result was suitably lopsided: by the end of June, 1941, the Regia Marina had largely ceased to exist except for a smattering of submarines and a handful of surface ships that would be badly outmatched by my repaired Mediterranean fleet. That was important as it bought me the opportunity to now transfer my fast battle group East.

The All-Powerful Division Designer

As noted in the first part of this series, the basic unit of Hearts of Iron IV‘s combat is the division. Now, as we’ll see, divisions can vary a lot in size – indeed, divisions can be as small as a single brigade or practically as large as an entire corps. But the game treats all of these units as divisions, which cannot either be split or merged.

This is actually a significant change from previous entries in the series. In Hearts of Iron III, countries actually produced brigades (each of a single type) which were then combined into a division (which could have 2-5 brigades in it). A player could thus pull a brigade out of a division and attach it to another, or cobble together a division from available spare brigades, or produce new brigades and attach them to existing divisions and so on.

By contrast divisions in Hearts of Iron IV are produced to templates. Each division has a template which determines what its components will be and it will automatically attempt to pull the necessary manpower and equipment to bring those components to full strength. In essence, the actual ‘brigades’ in the division structure are really mostly notional: a division is actually a container for battalions (the sub-units of brigades in the division-designer). In addition to the core ‘line’ battalions (which determine a division’s combat width – the amount of frontage it takes up), a division also can have support battalions, which boost its capability (and raise its equipment and manpower cost) without adding frontage, but it is limited to five of them.

A break from naval affairs, this is my Infantry Division template. I took these screenshots in 1944, but this template was complete in this form in 1939 and didn’t change subsequently. In fan terminology, this is a ‘9-1’ (9 infantry, 1 artillery) division. I am not sure if that is still a ‘meta’ composition, but in single-player, it works just fine.
As divisions go, this configuration makes for an effective defensive unit, with high enough piercing to stop light and even medium tanks and enough soft attack to mulch infantry, however its low breakthrough means it should not be used to attack much (or you will eat manpower losses).
Because the United Kingdom is very much ‘long’ on industry but ‘short’ on manpower, I’ve opted for a template that emphasizes metal over men, thus the full raft of regimental and divisional support (including a field hospital to limit manpower losses). That equipment makes this a fairly expensive template, but Britain can pay for it. I’m sure a player could punch these divisions around, but the AI **really** struggles to make offensive headway against 3 or 4 of these divisions on good terrain.

Divisions go into training as whole units (the entire division is trained together before deployment), but once deployed, they remain ‘attached’ to their template. If the player changes a division’s template, that instantly changes the expected composition of every division using that template. All of those divisions will immediately request or return the necessary equipment and manpower from (or to) the national stockpile to reinforce up to their new expected components. In practice, because being under-strength for a given composition can impose pretty significant penalties, it is a wiser idea to copy an existing template, upgrade it, and then swap divisions over to the new template when they’re out of combat.

Now this needn’t necessarily be a problem if you could have infinite division templates, but you generally can’t. Modifying a division template requires army experience, the same currency used to buy doctrines (and also to modify vehicle templates – so designing a new tank or creating an upgraded version of an old one burns this currency too). In practice, of the three ‘experience’ currencies, army experience remains precious the longest in the game, because it is used for the most things. That means that unnecessary division template changes burn a real and limited resource.

This is my mechanized infantry division (initially it was all motorized, I shift it to mechanized as the mechanized equipment becomes available), intended to back up the offensive punch of the armored divisions and to defend the territory they take. It’s a 9-2 structure (a bit punchier than my 9-1 defensive divisions) and with the greater armor and hardness offered by mechanized infantry and self-propelled guns (instead of towed artillery) it can actually attack reasonably well. It is however, more than **three times** as expensive as a regular infantry division, which ought to neatly explain why early on I focus on infantry divisions and only develop my mobile forces later, once the front line is stable.
Again, I make no claims to this being an ideal division template – like all of my division templates, it’s a design I got stuck on quite a few versions ago and it works well enough in single-player not to be worth changing.

That will matter to a different degree to different countries. France and Britain, in particular, tend to be ‘starved’ for army experience prior to the start of the war where they then suddenly have to face Germany. You can see the resulting incentives play out in the UK run I have been showing in the screenshots: my army experience was very carefully ‘budgeted’ until well into 1942. I needed enough army experience to have two effective infantry division templates (one for UK infantry, one for units recruited from India) ready in 1939, plus enough to create templates for one armored and one motorized division, to design the tanks and self-propelled artillery to go in those divisions and finally to buy all of my sub-doctrines. That leaves functionally no space for specialized division templates.

Now what the AI does is it ‘versions’ its division templates (because it costs nothing to copy an existing template you already have), causing the AI to end up with a dozen or more templates, which are all incremental changes on each other. But my sense is most players do what I do: they maintain a handful of division templates which they work hard to get to a ‘final form’ before deployment and then subsequently make on minimal changes to.

Finally, my armored division layout for this playthrough. The major oddity here is the single self-propelled artillery battalion, which was a product of me accidentally overproducing self-propelled artillery and figuring I might as well get some firepower out of them.
Otherwise, this is a 4-4-1 on 26 width; the meta is for larger divisions, but honestly this division is **already** unusually big compared to historical armored divisions (300 tanks!). Whereas the leg infantry division has ~100 breakthrough and the mechanized infantry division ~200, this division has 745 breakthrough, enabling it to attack while taking relatively little damage, while its high attack value ensures that the defenders will **absolutely** take heavy damage.
Note that I am exclusively using medium armor – no light armor or heavy armor – for both my tanks and self-propelled. This is to save on research. Britain has good research ability, but is pulled in many directions, needing to maintain top of the line ships, aircraft and land warfare, so any simplification (like being able to ignore heavy and light tanks) is welcome.

The result are, frankly, ‘cookie-cutter armies.’ In that UK run, by the summer of 1944, my army consisted of 305 divisions (roughly 3 million men) using just seven templates (two of which are actually identical ‘colonial’ templates to pull manpower from India and Malaya; they stay unique even after those countries are absorbed, so it is really five templates). My main force in Europe thus consists of 130 exactly identical infantry divisions, backed by 13 exactly identical mechanized infantry divisions and 13 exactly identical armored divisions.

This is, to put it lightly, not how actual divisions generally worked. Of course divisions might be of different sizes and strengths due to combat losses (something HoI4 considers), but while most countries did have a standard ‘template’ sense of what an infantry division or an armored division should look like, that was no guarantee at all that every such division did look like that.⁴ The division template, for instance, treats light, medium and heavy tanks as no-substitution battalion types, but actual Panzer Divisions varied quite widely in how many light, medium or heavy tanks they had. Pretty much everyone threw divisions forward that were effectively missing elements, either because those elements hadn’t been stood up yet or were still in transit or had been detached for some other job. Hearts of Iron IV has no way to represent that: you either have all of a division or you have nothing. A division can be damaged, but it cannot be incomplete and it can never be ‘non-standard.’

The larger problem is the degree to which the division designer – the screen where you decide what battalions go into your division templates – largely usurps the role of doctrine. In the Second World War, having the right doctrine and training to get tanks and infantry to cooperate together effectively what substantially more important than the simple question of deciding to have armor divisions – command structures, communications, tactics all mattered. But the lion’s share of the work in Hearts of Iron IV is simply accomplished by placing motorized infantry and armor in the correct quantities into the division designer in a single division. The job of learning how to coordinate armor and infantry is now mostly complete; having the right doctrine provides a noticeable but decidedly smaller bonus to that ‘correct’ division template’s performance. But in fact, as was repeatedly demonstrated in World War II, having the ‘right’ division structure was not enough to produce victory, not without soldiers and officers who understood how to use that structure.

The importance of the division designer is, of course, most visible when it ‘breaks.’ For the first few years after release, for instance, due to the way frontage was calculated, divisions at exactly 10, 20 and 40 width functioned much better than any other configuration. That has long since been patched, but the example (especially in single-player) that remains is what the community refers to as ‘space marines:’ a leg infantry division with a single armored battalion in it (typically heavy armor, because who cares if it goes fast). Because battalions do not have stats, divisions do, the one battalion of armor has its armor value averaged across the entire division, which can push it just enough enough to get over the armor-piercing break-points for regular infantry or infantry with just support anti-tank, which triggers a massive reduction in the damage that division takes. Thus the label ‘space marines’ because the division fights as if its infantry were wearing powered armor. ‘Space marines’ can thus easily outmatch basically any division the AI will produce, although in multiplayer, players are well aware of this trick and can counter it.⁵

The irony is, of course, that this idea – distributing heavier tanks across the entire infantry force more or less evenly – was tried in World War II, but it was famously ineffective. This was the French and British approach to armor, the ‘Infantry Tank’ and the actual observed effect was that there were never enough tanks at the critical point when they were ‘sprinkled’ like this.

As a game design element, the division designer gives the player so many buttons and knobs to twist and turn that it is almost inevitable that players are going to min-max divisions out of the system that grossly outperform the more-or-less historical division templates the AI has to work with. On the flipside, the division designer has some trouble really representing historical differences in unit composition. If you want an ‘artillery heavy’ army, for instance, you have to add ‘line artillery’ (artillery used as a main ‘line’ battalion rather than a support company) as a co-equal element with the infantry brigades – you cannot just expand the ‘support artillery,’ but in practice American and British divisions remained ‘triangular’ (three infantry brigades) in structure, with division artillery (‘div arty’) simply expanded to include more batteries. The line/support distinction in the division designer doesn’t seem to have a real world parallel (unless there is one in the Red Army? I am admittedly less knowledgeable about the Soviet military).⁶

Meanwhile the system is again incapable of representing Soviet practice well. While Soviet divisions might notionally be close to the same size as German, British or American divisions, in practice they tended to be substantially smaller. Importantly, a lot of the heavier supporting elements (like artillery) were concentrated not at the division level but at the corps level, with the result that a Soviet corps almost functioned like a jumbo-sized western division. You can sort-of-kind-of simulate this in Hearts of Iron IV by using relatively large division templates for the USSR and simply pretending they represent corps instead of divisions, but HoI4 simply does not have a level of organization for a corps.

And while division-size may seem relatively minor – what is the difference between two twenty-width divisions vs. one forty-width division – the way that Hearts of Iron IV calculates damage reduction via defense (when defending) or breakthrough (when attacking) has typically meant that oversized divisions are better, particularly for attacking. So whereas in the war itself, the Germany, Britain the USA and the USSR all settled on a similar size for an armored division (or for the Soviets, a tank corps), with around 200 tanks and 8,000-10,000 personnel, the current HoI4 ideal tank division is a monster with nearly 20,000 personnel and around 450 tanks. There’s a reason no one in the actual war made their divisions regularly that large.

The end result is that a lot of what in the real world we would term doctrine is expressed through the division designer, but that frankly the division designer feels like one of the ‘gamiest’ elements of Hearts of Iron IV that doesn’t do a great job of expressing differences in doctrinal approaches between countries (‘meta’ division templates are often used quite regardless of the country or the doctrine) or in modeling the divisions that, by war’s end, most of the combatants had settled on as ideal.

My first attempt at an offensive breakout in Europe came in September and it did not go. If you look closely you can see two offensive battles in the Netherlands and basically the moment the top circle turned yellow, I knew I did not yet have enough combat power to proceed and called the whole thing off; I might have been able to grind forward but at this point I cannot afford the manpower and equipment losses of a grind. That is, of course **a level of information no battlefield commander (much less national leader) is going to have that quickly**.
The key problem was actually airpower: the Luftwaffe still had the attritional edge int he air over the front lines. Fortunately, I was developing a strong industrial lead, so I would spend the next six months or so not only building up my armored forces but also increasing my rate of fighter production so that I could run Germany out of planes.

No Obligation to Follow Doctrine

A serious problem in planning against American doctrine is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine
(An apocryphal quote generally attributed to an unnamed Soviet observer during the Cold War)

On the one hand, Hearts of Iron IV makes a real effort to try to model the way different countries approached doctrine. I’ve focused here on land warfare doctrine, which really at the time mostly meant maneuver warfare doctrine, as for the major combatants in Europe the defining question was how ought the tank be used – but there is a matching set of questions for air and naval doctrine.

On the other hand, I don’t think this model succeeds particularly well.

By the war’s end, the maneuver warfare doctrines apparent in Europe really were visibly different. German maneuver warfare doctrine emphasized devolving command authority downward to create rapid moving, agile forces (a concept that regularly goes by its German name, Auftragstaktik, “mission-tactics”), which aimed to achieve breakthrough by focusing all of its firepower on a key point in the enemy front line. Soviet maneuver warfare doctrine (Deep Operations), instead pulled command authority up, focusing support materiel up at the corps and even army level. It also aimed to produce mobile breakthrough, but by engaging the enemy across their operational depth, using infantry, armor and air power to simultaneously hit front lines, reserves and rear areas to induce a broader frontal collapse. American doctrine was, in some ways less developed, but – motivated by the limits of how many divisions the United States could realistically deploy in Europe – focused on packing as much firepower as possible into the smallest frontage and divisions possible, often using absolutely smothering quantities of airpower and artillery.⁷

And Hearts of Iron IV doesn’t really draw that out. Infantry divisions with line artillery isn’t a cute trick for just Superior Firepower doctrine armies to pack a ton of firepower into a small unit, but a fairly standard template choice you’ll find used by players running a lot of countries. Deep Operations doctrine doesn’t actually provide a way for players to strike across the operational depth of an enemy: damage accrues to enemy divisions reinforced into the front lines regardless and there isn’t any simulation of collapsing rear areas. Even the basic question of ‘should the infantry or the tanks go first in an assault’ (‘armored spearhead’ (USA, Germany) vs. ‘armor as exploitation force’ (USSR)) isn’t really modeled in terms of which divisions take damage.

Meanwhile at the level most visible to the player – at the operational level – the player is under no obligation to follow their own doctrine. Playing as the United Kingdom on the Grand Battleplan doctrine which should mean a strong preference for exhaustively planned set-piece battles, I find often launch far quicker, less planned operations which ought to be something out of the Mobile Warfare doctrine tree. Sure, the bonuses from Grand Battleplan make my planning cap somewhat higher, but the difference isn’t large enough to offset other momentary advantages.

The result here is a valiant attempt to model the way doctrine shapes how militaries conduct themselves in war that feels like it falls short, in part because it is too afraid of actually constraining the player, to force them to actually follow their doctrine. In particular, the game is afraid of ever having units simply function badly because their doctrine is poor or because they’re being used in a way not suited to it, but of course that absolutely was the experience of various countries which tried to use armor without the necessary coordination and communications doctrines. As a result, the doctrine trees end up mostly as a set of bonuses which may or may not be optimal rather than something more closely approaching playstyles.

Japan then opened its war in the Pacific in October of 1941 in my game. Historically, of course, Britain – already overstretched dealing with Germany and Italy – was almost wholly unprepared for the Japanese onslaught in late 1941 and early 1942 and suffered a series of humiliating setbacks that really mortally wounded the British Empire as a global empire.
I am, at this point, however, in a rather stronger position. Victory in Ethiopia and North Africa has meant that I could move a potent field army East, meaning that Singapore is **actually** unassailable by land (indeed, I’ll be invading into Siam instead) rather than only notionally being so. Meanwhile the neutralization of most of the Regia Marina means that my fast battlegroup could move east, basing out of Singapore and aiming to hold the Straits of Malacca. Essentially my goal is to keep the IJN ‘trapped’ in the Pacific Thunderdome with the United States Navy (as Japan has attacked the Philippines and thus brought the USA into the war), where attrition will swiftly destroy them.
Operating close to your bases is a significant advantage in HoI4 naval warfare and so my squadron – with four fleet carriers – is more than strong enough to keep control over the waters around Malaya and Indonesia and deals some stinging defeats to the IJN in the process, hastening the failure of Japanese naval power in the face of the inevitable American naval grinder.

	Flagship	Year	Milestones
1.	iPhone	2007	Holy shit
2.	iPhone 3G	2008	EDGE → 3G, GPS
3.	iPhone 3GS¹	2009	Speed, shooting video
4.	iPhone 4	2010	Retina
5.	iPhone 4S	2011	Late spring → early fall release
6.	iPhone 5	2012	Lightning, 3.5″ → 4″
7.	iPhone 5S	2013	Touch ID, 64-bit
8.	iPhone 6	2014	Plus-size option
9.	iPhone 6S	2015
10.	iPhone 7	2016	2nd camera (Plus only)
11.	iPhone X	2017	Holy shit redux
12.	iPhone XS	2018
13.	iPhone 11 Pro	2019	3rd camera
14.	iPhone 12 Pro	2020
15.	iPhone 13 Pro	2021
16.	iPhone 14 Pro	2022
17.	iPhone 15 Pro	2023	Pro video, USB-C, Action button
18.	iPhone 16 Pro	2024	Camera Control button
19.	iPhone 17 Pro	2025	Camera plateau expands, Ceramic Shield 2
20.	iPhone 18 Pro	2026

For reasons I do not remember, I apparently never wrote a standalone review of the iPhone 3GS. Until I went looking for it to link to in this list, I didn’t even remember that I hadn’t written one. I know that I waited in line to buy one on launch day. I easily recall that it truly was a significantly faster device than the two previous models. But I never wrote a review of the 3GS. I don’t think it had even occurred to me then that “the new iPhone” would soon become an annual tradition, worth chronicling not just for years, but for decades. ↩︎︎
The IIGS, coincidentally, was announced 40 years ago this week. Graphics and sound, baby — and what a keyboard. ↩︎︎
64-bit silicon was huge, but Touch ID really changed the game. I don’t even remember what we did before Touch ID to protect the content on our iPhones. I think I had my passcode preferences set to let me — or anyone with my phone in their hand! — unlock my phone without typing my measly 4-digit code for 15 minutes after the code had been successfully entered? In hindsight it really seems crazy. Either we forced ourselves to enter a passcode manually every single time we unlocked our iPhones, or, we left them unlocked for convenience. The three fundamental step changes in iPhone history were: retina displays (iPhone 4), biometric ID (iPhone 5S), and all-screen design (iPhone X). That’s why those are the phones I place in my Hall of Fame. And there hasn’t really been a step change like that since the iPhone X — until, maybe, the Duo. ↩︎︎
The odds are pretty low that you used an original iPhone. If you didn’t, it’s hard to put into words just how slow EDGE cellular networking was. Best I can compare it to is to say that it was like a poor airplane Wi-Fi connection. Not a mid airplane Wi-Fi connection. A poor one. You could practically feel the ones and zeroes coming in, bit by bit. The best you got on EDGE was really, really slow. And we loved it. It was the Internet, away from home. And websites meant for mobile consumption were optimized for slow-as-molasses connections. Some still are. But once you tried 3G there was no going back, no matter how much better the original iPhone’s aluminum body looked and felt compared to the iPhone 3G’s plastic one. The iPhone 3G could have been carved out of a potato and I’d have switched to get 3G instead of EDGE. ↩︎︎
That said, I personally bought my iPhone 17 Pro last year in deep blue, and if I buy an 18 Pro, you know I’m getting black. My review units are a glacier 18 Pro and a burgundy 18 Pro Max. I’ve spent most of the week carrying the 18 Pro Max, just to force myself to use the size I don’t usually carry. I still don’t like it, and still can’t believe how many people do. Burgundy is a very strong color that I somehow don’t have strong feelings about. Glacier isn’t so strong, and I rather like it — perhaps because it reminds me more than a little of America’s Pants. ↩︎︎

This is going to be one of those rare essays where I feel it is necessary to share some personal history and context for the story to make sense.

Over nearly 20 years of writing online, I have a had a sometimes entertaining, sometimes fraught, but always increasingly asymmetric relationship with the rationalist community, or what I will relabel in this essay the EA formation, for reasons that will become clear. The community began as a personal blog (Overcoming Bias) around the same time as my own now-retired blog (Ribbonfarm), around 2006-07. But where the rationalist scene grew from mere blog to powerhouse institutional landscape with its own gravity field shaping the future of AI (and therefore history), I have remained, for the most part, an individual blogger with no grand ambitions.1

Since the beginning, my readership has overlapped significantly with the community, and I even had several guest contributors on Ribbonfarm (Jacob Falkovich and David Manheim come to mind) from the community. Along the way, I became friends with many of them, including many deep insiders. As their ecosystem grew, being in their intellectual neighborhood meant becoming, to some extent, defined in relation to them. At some point, Scott Alexander put Ribbonfarm in a corner of his map, tagged “postrationalist” and that neighborhood of the blogosphere became known as an intellectual migration destination for people who had either “outgrown” rationalism or harbored curiosities beyond it.2 I too, have placed them on my maps, but that was mostly inconsequential personal amusement, since my writings do not exert a gravitational field capable of reshaping consensus cultural geographies.

From the perspective of the EA formation, to the extent the now-massive landscape is aware of me at all, I believe I am regarded as a sometimes-annoying, sometimes-interesting avuncular (since I’m almost a generation older than them) clown in a postrat box. Mostly harmless and ignorable. The feeling used to be mutual, but now I take them seriously. They’ve become too big and consequential to safely ignore.

My EA-formation friends are friends with footnotes, in the sense that while I like them personally and consider them interesting people with integrity equaling or exceeding my own, I neither agree with their foundational ideas, nor feel compelled to defend either their ideas or personal behaviors/actions.

Friendship with footnotes precludes, by design, public intellectual fealty. Or even an obligation to engage in energetic private debate about differences. My enduring differences with the rationalist world have remained largely unlitigated, beyond some mild, friendly mutual trolling and snarking. Friendship with footnotes, for me, is generally scoped to simply avoid the contentious baggage consigned to the footnote, while retaining the benefits of an interesting relationship.

The rationalist community is not a unique intellectual foil for me that way. This is how I tend to operate generally in relation to all intellectual foils, both individuals and groups.3 Interesting relationships almost require the presence of studiously ignored baggage.

Friends with footnotes are great to have. They keep life interesting, remind you to remain systematically doubtful about your own thinking, and to not put ideas ahead of people. They also keep the natural ambitions of writing (a calling capable of cruelty and poison) in check. Throughout my writing career, whenever personal relationships and friendships (with or without footnotes) have appeared in the potential blast radius of an idea, in general I have erred on the side of not being too public with my opinions. I have contented myself with casual social posting/trolling, and being candid in private conversations when necessary.

But sometimes serious developments unfold and you are forced to think harder at this particular locus of interestingness, of friends-with-footnotes, which is what I’m going to attempt to do in this essay.

I’m going to try and present a fair-minded account of the EA formation and its influence on AI history, as I have watched it evolve. It’s meant for those who believe, like me, that the EA formation is threatening to turn into a second-order problem in its own right, and needs to be checked-and-balanced as its power continues to grow in somewhat alarming ways.

I hope to do so without weighing down my friendship footnotes with too much additional studiously ignored baggage.

The EA Formation

Effective altruism in the narrow sense is only one component of a larger intellectual and institutional formation that now extends through philanthropy, rationalism, longtermism, existential-risk research, AI safety, AI governance and parts of the frontier AI industry. Its boundaries are porous enough that arguments about membership rapidly become scholastic. What matters is not who carries an EA membership card—there is no such thing—but who has been formed by a recognizable complex of ideas and methods and has incorporated them into a philosophy of action.

I will call this larger object the EA formation.

My account of this formation is going to be critical, but not because the formation’s stated objectives are generally malign. Quite the opposite. The interesting problem is how a movement organized around such apparently reasonable propositions as giving effectively, reasoning clearly and preventing catastrophe came to generate such an extraordinary intellectual and behavioral tail—and how the same formation has simultaneously acquired substantial influence over the moral framing of artificial intelligence.

My hypothesis is that these developments have a common cause. The EA formation combines an unusually abstract, formalized, low-empiricism, and totalizing style of moral reasoning with an unusually strong imperative to act on its conclusions. It is good at expressing uncertainty numerically while being remarkably bad at sustaining deeper forms of doubt about the conceptual machinery within which those numbers are generated. Probabilities, confidence intervals, Bayesian updates and elaborate forecasts can produce an impressive surface of epistemic modesty while leaving more fundamental premises remarkably insulated: what counts as value, which futures matter, which problems deserve priority, which forms of evidence are legible, and who is entitled to perform the prioritization.

My old co-blogger (and a different breed of friend-with-footnote) Sarah Perry once parodied their self-serious declarations of systematic doubt/confidence levels with “epistemic status” tags on their writing, with a satirical one that probably describes my own default — “clown on fire, jumping out of an airplane.”

The EA formation is a part of the crooked timber of humanity that seems unaware that it is crooked timber. It might take clowns on fire, jumping out of airplanes, to make them notice.

The resulting intellectual style is fragile precisely where it appears strongest. It is highly practiced at performing felt uncertainty within a model and much less comfortable even acknowledging uncertainty about the model. The first can be represented as 60 percent rather than 80 percent confidence. The second may require admitting that another moral tradition, another discipline, another culture, or merely another form of practical knowledge sees something the framework cannot represent at all.

Genuine pluralism begins where commensuration fails. The EA formation has a persistent tendency to treat such failures as problems awaiting better analysis rather than as reasons to limit the jurisdiction of their preferred analytical mode itself.

This would be a fairly parochial intellectual weakness if the formation were merely another philosophical school. It isn’t. It explicitly exists to alter priorities, careers, institutions and allocations of capital. And increasingly it has turned toward artificial intelligence, where questions that once belonged to an eccentric subculture now concern technologies through which enormous economic and political power will be exercised.

The Theological Dimension

There is also a second reason, besides the worrying fragility of its epistemic machinery, to take the formation seriously. Beneath its aggressively secular and analytical surface lies something structurally closer to theology than its self-description suggests.

AI supplies the formation not merely with a problem but with an eschatology: possible extinction, possible transcendence, an almost unimaginably valuable future, and a narrow historical window during which the actions of a small number of people may determine which world comes into existence. Cause prioritization becomes vocation. Career choice becomes moral commitment. AI alignment becomes a problem of salvation.

This does not mean that EA is secretly a literal religion. It means that it occupies some of the psychological and institutional territory religions have historically occupied while translating that territory into the idiom of secular philosophy, stylized/rhetorical mathematics and a narrow genre of decision theory. It offers meaning, vocation and participation in a cosmic-scale story while allowing participants to experience those commitments as conclusions forced upon them by reason. It is a permission structure that induces a comforting sense of helplessness on foundational matters and an amplified sense of agency on more practical matters.

That combination should make us wary. The European experience after Gutenberg provides a distant but useful analogy. Cheap print did not create religious conviction, but it dramatically increased the ability of doctrinal communities to reproduce, coordinate and fight over totalizing accounts of the world. The Reformation and the wars culminating in the Thirty Years’ War eventually helped produce a different political condition: not the abolition of religion, but institutions capable of containing rival totalizing doctrines without allowing any one of them to monopolize public authority. Particularly public moral authority.

AI may require an analogous settlement for secular moral formations.

And there is a useful irony here. The EA formation came into its present shape substantially by trying to solve an idiosyncratically posed version of AI safety. Its success has now created a second-order problem: EA safety. The first problem explores how to govern a powerful new technology. The second must explore how to constrain a human formation increasingly convinced it, and it alone, knows how the first should be solved.

A “Vision of the Anointed” problem, to borrow the title of Thomas Sowell’s famous book, which could be fairly charged with “self-congratulation as a basis of public policy,” to borrow the subtitle. The EA formation is not quite there yet, but it’s getting there.

As the old joke goes, now we have two problems.

Three genealogies and a dominant strand

The EA formation has at least three distinguishable ancestral strands. The first is evidence-driven philanthropy, most clearly represented by GiveWell. Its proposition is both modest and powerful: if you intend to help people, examine the evidence and direct resources toward interventions that actually help more.

The second is the consequentialist philosophical lineage running through Peter Singer, Toby Ord, William MacAskill, Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours and the institutions surrounding them. Here the scope expands. Evidence no longer merely tells us which charity works better. Systematic moral reasoning is applied to donations, consumption, career choice and eventually the organization of an entire life.

The third is the rationalist, transhumanist, existential-risk and AI-risk complex associated with LessWrong, Yudkowsky, MIRI, Bostrom and FHI, with CFAR and numerous later organizations occupying positions around it.

These three traditions have independent origins, but their entanglement is old. The first EA Summit in 2013 already brought organizations from empirical philanthropy, EA, rationalism and AI risk into the same space.

Over time, the third strand supplied the others with something they lacked: astronomical stakes.

Once future people enter the moral calculus, the potential quantity of value becomes enormous. Once existential risk enters, preserving that future becomes correspondingly important. Once transformative AI becomes a plausible source of existential risk, work on AI can dominate ordinary philanthropic considerations. EA’s own presentation of longtermism acknowledges the difficulty: evidence about the distant future is necessarily weaker, and expected-value reasoning involving sufficiently large outcomes can appear reckless when small probabilities drive the conclusion.

This is why I treat concern with AI not merely as one EA cause among many but as a rough indicator of depth of engagement within the contemporary formation. Global health and animal welfare remain substantial activities, so it would be false to say EA simply is AI safety. But the intellectual machinery of longtermism and x-risk has a gravitational structure. If the expected future is large enough and AI plausibly determines its existence or character, other causes become difficult to defend as priorities except by rejecting some part of the machinery.

That is what I mean by one genealogy increasingly capturing the formation. It need not capture every dollar or every adherent. It captures the commanding heights of the argument.

And this formation is explicitly designed to reproduce itself. Giving organizations redirect money. 80,000 Hours redirects careers. Fellowships teach frameworks for prioritizing causes (rife with motivated biases and baked-in conclusions). Funds seed organizations and research programs.

To be clear, there is nothing sinister about this. This is how ambitious movements normally attempt to grow. But it matters when evaluating influence. The formation should be assessed not merely by the propositions in its canonical essays but by the kinds of people, institutions and philosophies of action its machinery produces, and what they actually do.

That is the EA-safety problem in embryo: can this machinery remain a useful component of a collective, pluralist response to AI without making its own theory of the response a runaway, sovereign, and totalizing historical dynamic?

The formation and its extreme tail

The scatterplot below attempts to represent that machinery and its outputs. Its coordinates are judgments, not measurements, and the point is the topology rather than decimal precision.

The horizontal axis is depth of engagement, and correlates strong with concern with AI safety as the dominant concerns. It does not mean formal membership. It measures the extent to which the formation’s characteristic ideas have been consciously consumed and incorporated into a philosophy of action. This matters because intellectual influence is broader than institutional affiliation but narrower than casual exposure.

The vertical axis is outlier tendency. Here it is especially important not to smuggle a moral judgment into a geometric one. Low scores represent fairly conventional philanthropic, intellectual and professional behavior. Higher scores represent increasingly unusual departures from ordinary intellectual or social norms. But there are two fundamentally different ways of moving upward.

The first is philosophical radicalism. Yudkowsky, Bostrom, MIRI, Robin Hanson, Brian Tomasik and David Pearce belong in this category to differing degrees because they entertain conclusions far outside ordinary moral and political thought. This is not an accusation of misconduct. Pearce’s abolitionist project, for example, contemplates technologically eliminating suffering from sentient life. Bostrom’s work leads through simulation arguments, astronomical waste and superintelligence. Yudkowsky reaches extraordinarily strong conclusions about AI catastrophe. Whatever one thinks of these ideas, unusual philosophy is not concerning deviant behavior.

The separate radical-philosophy envelope is therefore essential. Without it, the graph would encourage precisely the inference I want to discourage: that thinking strange thoughts belongs on a continuum with committing fraud or murder. The world always needs people thinking strange thoughts.

The concerning-deviancy envelope means something narrower. It contains cases where unusual philosophies of action intersect with documented criminality, violence, or reported high-control and cult-like social dynamics: Bankman-Fried and FTX, Leverage and Geoff Anders, Black Lotus and Brent Dill, and the Zizian milieu and related violent cases. Luigi Mangione appears as an accused and comparatively downstream case rather than an EA insider. These cases should not be treated as equivalent, and the graph does not claim that the formation independently caused any of them.

But neither should they simply be discarded as unrelated anecdotes.

Here, I can cop to perhaps a smidgen of complicity in this sort of radical media influence on concerning deviance. There seems to be documented evidence of the Zizian milieu, apparently, being influenced by my own satirical writing on sociopathy in organizations (The Gervais Principle). That little detail in the reporting bothered me enough that when I built a RAG chatbot based on my archives, I put in guardrails to avoid or deflect questions seeking advice on “how to be a sociopath” (a genre of rather hapless email solicitations for advice that I have to occasionally field, but never suspected would feed the motivations of murderous behaviors).

The question here is why a relatively small intellectual ecology seems repeatedly to generate episodes of concerning deviancy. The standard defense—that millions of ordinary communities contain criminals, cults and unstable people—is necessary but insufficient. The relevant denominator is not “people who have heard of effective altruism.” It is adversely-selected people who deeply consume a body of thought explicitly designed to reconstruct priorities and induce consequential action.

The case of Roko’s Basilisk is useful because it isolates the mechanism without requiring a criminal or cult. It is just an argument—or attempted argument. Yet it generated the extraordinary possibility that merely encountering an idea about a hypothetical future superintelligence could place the reader under a peculiar decision-theoretic threat. The episode sits on the boundary of philosophical radicalism and concerning deviancy because it reveals how readily a sufficiently abstract system of reasoning, unmoored from empiricist discipline, can begin colonizing the behavior of the reasoner.

This is more than merely the high-variance influence of a set of ideas of protean ideas. The problem may be a recurrent extremizing mechanism. In miniature, it even resembles the alignment failure the formation fears: an optimizer armed with an abstract objective begins treating whatever resists the objective as error.

The formation encourages abstraction away from ordinary context. It encourages explicit optimization and ignoring of illegible things. It teaches reflexive suspicion toward, and quick dismissal of, intuitive objections. It encourages taking ideas seriously enough to follow them wherever they lead. It supplies fragile and stylized mathematical tools for rendering incompatible goods apparently commensurable. And its longtermist wing supplies stakes so large that almost any ordinary consideration can be trivially rendered negligible by comparison.

Most importantly, it mistakes one particular kind of uncertainty, further reduced to stylized risk estimates, for all kinds of not-knowing, to deploy a useful distinction developed by .

An EA-style reasoner can attach a probability to AI extinction, perform sensitivity analyses, debate priors, forecast timelines and revise a credence from 35 percent to 22 percent. This can be genuine epistemic work. But none of it necessarily creates doubt about the totalizing structure that says the future should be represented this way in the first place.

The numerical uncertainty can therefore function as a kind of epistemic shock absorber. The reasoner appears exquisitely uncertain while remaining astonishingly certain that the correct activity is to construct the calculation.

That is why pluralism matters. True pluralism is not adding another term to the utility function for “other perspectives.” It is accepting that other traditions may possess ways of knowing and not-knowing that cannot be losslessly translated into your framework, that conflicting goods may remain genuinely conflicting, and that no community earns jurisdiction over everybody else’s moral reasoning merely by being unusually articulate about its own. That sometimes the right way to deal with visceral doubt is to assign the benefit of the doubt to someone other than yourself, who thinks very differently.

The formation’s most dangerous temptation is consequently not irrationality lurking behind stylized rationality. It is premature foreclosure of entire futures and arguments, disguised as rigorously arrived-at decisions.

Its theological character reinforces the tendency. Longtermism supplies something structurally analogous to an afterlife of almost unlimited value, smuggling Pascal’s wager styles of reasoning where they do not belong. Existential risk supplies apocalypse. AI supplies both potential destroyer and potential vehicle of transcendence. Alignment supplies a salvation problem. The tiny population alive near the advent of transformative AI occupies an extraordinarily privileged place in history. And those who correctly understand the problem acquire an intercessory vocation whose significance dwarfs the ordinary concerns of the laity.

None of this demonstrates that the underlying AI risks are imaginary. A theology can contain true propositions; a secular eschatology can anticipate a real looming catastrophe. The danger lies elsewhere. A system that combines cosmic stakes, privileged knowledge, personal vocation, and an imperative to act, has a familiar capacity to license extraordinary behavior when ordinary constraints conflict with the mission.

The radical and deviant tails of the scatterplot should therefore be read not as embarrassing debris around an otherwise unrelated center but as stress tests of the formation’s epistemology. They reveal what can happen when its methods operate with fewer external constraints, checks, and balances.

From subculture to institutional power

If that were the whole story, this essay would be merely an anthropology of an unusual subculture. The triangle below explains why it is now more consequential.

Its three vertices are EA formation, frontier AI leadership, and foundational technical contribution. The map makes one fact immediately clear: EA neither invented modern AI nor controls it. Hinton, LeCun, Bengio, Vaswani, Shazeer, Goodfellow and many other foundational technical figures come from other traditions. The Chinese AI ecosystem makes the point even more forcefully: DeepSeek, Qwen, Moonshot, Zhipu, MiniMax, Seed and Hunyuan constitute a large counterexample to any story in which the EA formation is somehow intrinsic to advanced AI.

The interesting feature is instead the bridge running from the top vertex into the Western AI institutional landscape.

AI safety transformed an eccentric philosophical concern into a professional field. Philanthropic capital funded research, organizations, field-building, fellowships and governance work. The formation built career pipelines into it. This is real institutional power, even if it is not monopoly.

And here the two safety problems meet. AI safety asks who governs the machine. EA safety asks who governs one increasingly influential and unaccountable set of would-be governors.

But that second question immediately generalizes: who governs the governors?

EA is hardly the only totalizing doctrine circling AI, though it is clearly the most mature and well-prepared (and armed, and funded) one. E/acc supplies a rival techno-optimist teleology in which acceleration itself acquires moral force. Progressive approaches foreground concentrations of economic power, labor, inequality, discrimination and democratic accountability; contemporary versions explicitly frame AI governance around competition, redistribution and regulation. Musk and other figures on the political and technological right bring their own accounts of civilizational flourishing, nationalism, freedom, truth and technological power. And Chinese AI governance is developing from a very different political and philosophical ecology, including state-centered priorities, social stability, developmental goals and strands of Confucian-inflected thinking—though scholarship cautions against treating it as philosophically monolithic.

Any of these can become dangerous if it wins the right to define the problem and the answer for all.

The important feature is not that the EA formation controls the AI ecosystem. It plainly does not, at least not yet. Much of the technical foundation of contemporary AI was produced outside it, and much of frontier institutional power remains outside it. The China-based population makes this particularly vivid. The history of modern AI does not require EA intellectual ancestry to make sense, but it future might.

What is striking is the density of bridges between the top of the triangle and the other two vertices. AI safety created a pathway by which what began as a comparatively small philosophical and philanthropic formation acquired relevance to one of the world’s most capital-intensive and strategically important technologies. People and institutions shaped by the formation moved into technical alignment research, evaluation, governance, frontier laboratories and the intellectual environment surrounding those laboratories. At the same time, people originating in mainstream technical AI moved toward existential-risk concerns and entered into sustained conversation with the formation.

The diagram therefore helps distinguish influence from dominance. EA did not invent neural networks, transformers or scaling. Nor does it command the global AI industry. Its influence is disproportionate in a different sense: it developed a language for interpreting what increasingly powerful AI means, what risks should dominate attention, what careers morally matter, and what obligations follow from beliefs about the future. That language has traveled remarkably far from its origins in philanthropy.

The position of Dwarkesh Patel illustrates another boundary. He is deeply immersed in conversations involving frontier AI, rationalism and existential risk, but that does not make him a product of the EA formation in the same sense as Yudkowsky, MacAskill or Bostrom. He therefore sits much closer to the leadership–technical edge. Conversely, Singer belongs inside the conventional-EA region of the first figure because he is genealogically important to the formation, but does not appear in the triangle because his importance to AI itself is marginal. The two diagrams are intentionally illustrating different things.

This distinction also prevents the concerning tail of the first diagram from distorting the second. Ziz, Mangione, Bankman-Fried and Leverage do not belong on a map of consequential actors in modern AI merely because they matter to an argument about the EA formation’s failure modes. The triangle is not a rogues’ gallery or a map of ideological culpability. It is an attempt to show where a particular intellectual formation intersects a technological power structure.

And that intersection is the reason the formation deserves scrutiny beyond the amount warranted by its raw population.

A philosophical subculture can tolerate a great deal of eccentricity when the consequences are confined to blogs, seminars and intentional communities. A philanthropy movement can tolerate a certain amount of intellectual overreach when the primary consequences are allocations among charities. The situation changes when the same intellectual machinery becomes entangled with organizations spending billions of dollars, decisions about the deployment of increasingly capable AI systems, proposals for national and international regulation, and arguments about risks framed in civilizational terms.

The question raised by the scatterplot therefore becomes more consequential when viewed through the triangle. If the formation really does possess an extremizing tendency—producing both disciplined altruistic action and unusually totalizing philosophies of action—then its migration into AI matters independently of whether one accepts its strongest claims about AI risk.

After the wars of religion

There is a tempting but unhelpful way to tell this story in which effective altruism begins innocently with mosquito nets and somehow degenerates into AI doom, cults, fraud and violence. The genealogy does not support such a simple morality play. The strands were entangled early; at least a few of the supposedly strange ideas have serious intellectual pedigrees; the most disturbing cases of concerning deviancy have numerous causes besides EA or rationalism; and much of the formation continues to produce work that is conventionally unproblematic, empirically disciplined, and useful.

There is an equally tempting apologetic story in which the disturbing cases are simply irrelevant aberrations. That conclusion is also hard to defend. EA and rationalism are unusually explicit about wanting ideas to change behavior. They teach methods intended to overcome default intuitions, redirect careers and resources, identify neglected priorities and induce people to act on conclusions that ordinary social reasoning might resist. It would be peculiar to credit this machinery when somebody redirects a career toward malaria prevention or useful technical work on AI safety but declare the machinery analytically irrelevant whenever somebody follows an unusual chain of reasoning somewhere less desirable.

The more neutral interpretation is that the EA formation constitutes a distinctive experiment in high-agency applied philosophy, with few skeptical guardrails. It tries to shorten the distance between abstract reasoning and consequential action, and in the best tradition of Silicon Valley, enjoys the Great Game of acquiring and exercising power.

At its best, that can mean asking an uncomfortable but answerable question about where a dollar saves the most lives, discovering an answer, and actually moving the dollar. At greater levels of abstraction it can mean asking what determines the value of the entire future, constructing a model of existential risk, and reorganizing institutions and careers around an essentially theological answer.

That is an impressive capability. It is also a capability for which failure modes matter.

The two diagrams suggest that these failure modes should be studied without collapsing several distinct phenomena into one. Radical philosophy is not concerning deviant behavior. Intellectual influence is not institutional membership. Association is not causation. A criminal influenced by a philosophy does not make the philosophy criminal, any more than a beneficial act inspired by it proves the philosophy correct. Meaning-seeking is not necessarily wild teleological solipsism. But all these distinctions serve to make the failure modes more consequential, not less. The EA formation is not an easily dismissable caricature of what it could be (and often becomes, in the eyes of harsher critics).

In addition, the enormous AI ecosystem contains technical, intellectual, and institutional traditions that developed independently of EA, and possess an inertia that provides a great deal of natural resistance. But I suspect it is not enough.

What has changed is the scale of the stakes. The EA formation has grown from a comparatively obscure intersection of moral philosophy, philanthropy, rationalism and futurism into an intellectual network with substantial connections to the institutions shaping advanced artificial intelligence. Its influence remains uneven and is easy to exaggerate, particularly outside the Western AI ecosystem. But where it exists, it takes on deep questions in exceptionally fragile and overconfident ways: which problems deserve attention, which futures have value, which risks justify extraordinary action, which intuitions should be distrusted, and how decisively a person should act on the conclusions of abstract reasoning.

The charitable interpretation and the critical interpretation therefore converge on the same underlying fact. The EA formation is unusually serious about converting beliefs into action. The charitable case is that this seriousness allows people to escape complacency and do considerably more good than conventional and lazy moral habits would produce. The critical case is that the same seriousness can amplify errors, especially when empirical feedback weakens, while the imagined stakes increase.

The scatterplot poses the question internally: what distribution of philosophies and behaviors does this machinery produce? The triangle poses it externally: where has this machinery acquired leverage in the world?

Together they pose the EA-safety problem. But EA safety is only the first named instance of a more general emerging problem: moral-monopoly safety.

The answer is not to try to eliminate the EA formation. Nor is it to “defeat” EA only to install unbridled e/acc, a progressive orthodoxy, a Muskian one, a Chinese state philosophy, or some future totalizing doctrine in its place. The lesson is precisely the opposite. No faction should get to settle the moral meaning of AI for everyone else, or act unilaterally and pre-emptively to foreclose particular futures for all.

Properly contained within a pluralistic ecology, EA could function rather like a useful immune response: unusually sensitive to certain tail risks, capable of mobilizing attention around neglected dangers, and willing to pursue implications other traditions ignore. The danger begins when an immune system starts mistaking the organism for an obstacle to its mission. Then protection becomes autoimmune disease. A formation designed to cure one problem can metastasize into another.

The analogy should not be mistaken for a diagnosis. The EA formation is not a cancer. The warning is about an emerging institutional trajectory: a cure that seeks jurisdiction over the whole organism eventually becomes a different kind of disease.

That is why the so-called “alignment” problem ultimately points back at us. AI may need alignment. So does EA. So does e/acc. So do progressive AI ethics, right-wing techno-politics, corporate governance regimes and Chinese approaches to AI. None can be permitted to perform its own alignment and declare the problem solved.

Universities, governments, frontier laboratories, philanthropies and standards bodies should therefore cultivate deliberately heterogeneous moral and intellectual ecosystems. Funding should not quietly collapse around one donor network or ideological constituency. “Independent” oversight should be genuinely independent in genealogy as well as corporate affiliation. Rival traditions should retain enough institutional power to expose one another’s blind spots.

Most importantly, society should refuse to outsource moral responsibility to any class of people who claim a special intercessory competence and authority to calculate, accelerate, democratize, liberate, harmonize or otherwise determine the “correct” future.

That is the lesson of pluralism after the wars of religion. A totalizing doctrine may be profound, useful and even correct about specific matters, while still being an inappropriate sovereign or regulatory monopoly.

The answer to its excesses is neither persecution nor acquiescence. It is containment within a larger order whose legitimacy does not depend upon the premises of any particular doctrine’s premises.

AI safety is a real problem. EA safety now makes it two problems. But the deeper problem is keeping the governance of AI itself safe from all attempts at establishing moral monopolies.

The EA formation has earned a seat at the table. So have many critics and competitors. And many emerging formations and actors will earn seats in the near future. Nobody gets to dominate the table itself.

Even though in my middle age, I find myself involved in one modest institution-building effort, the Protocol Institute. Opinions here are entirely my own though.

“Postrat” itself became a distinct ideology with Ribbonfarm as an associated landmark (more associated with Sarah Perry than me; I have always consistently distanced myself from it). That scene has now evolved into TPOT, a half-generation younger and entirely distinct.

The style has strengths and weaknesses. The strength is that you become hard to pin down (or equivalently, come across as standing for nothing in particular). The weakness is that you tend to route around points of conflict rather than engage with them. I’ve collaborated extensively with Marc Andreessen and continue to maintain cordial relations with him, but there’s definitely been a footnote there since his rightward drift. Sarah Perry was a long-time contributor to Ribbonfarm, and remains a friend I chat with, but there’s definitely a footnote there as well, since she’s associated with the NRx movement. I have many far-left progressive friends — all with footnotes. Perhaps the only group I have no friends-with-footnotes in is the American far right.