Notice When People Are Directionally Correct
I started watching Peter Zeihan videos last year.
He shares a lot of interesting information, although he seems to have a very strong bias towards doom and gloom.
One thing in particular stood out to me as completely absurd: his claim that global trade is going to collapse due to piracy as the US pulls back from ensuring freedom of the seas.
My immediate thought: “Come on, mate, this isn’t the 17th century! Pirates aren’t a real issue these days. Technology has rendered them obsolete”.
Given this, I was absolutely shocked when I heard that missile attacks by Houthi rebels had caused most of the largest shipping companies to decide to avoid the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and to sail around Africa instead.
This has recently triggered the US to form an alliance to maintain freedom of shipping there and the US recently performed airstrikes in retaliation. It won’t surprise me if this whole issue ends up being resolved rather quickly and if that happens, then the easy thing to do would be to go back to my original beliefs: “Silly me, I was worried for a second that Peter Zeihan might be correct, but that was just me falling for sensationalism. The whole incident was obviously never going to be anything. I should forget all about it”.
I believe that this would be a mistake. It can be hard to notice given how easy it is to memory-holing past beliefs, but something like the Houthis being able to cause as much disruption as they have was quite far outside of my model. One option would be to label it as a freak incident; another would be to say that shooting missiles isn’t exactly piracy so this doesn’t count. However, the problem with this response is how easy it would be. When there’s ambiguity, humans have a strong tendency to make up excuses as to why they were right all along. In most cases, I suspect it’s better to push toward the other end of the spectrum and assume that there probably were ways in which you could have improved your prediction.
I tried searching for possible ways that I should update and the following thoughts came to mind, which I’ll share because they are illustrative:
• I have heard a few people suggest in various contexts that many countries have been coasting and relying on the US for defense, but it was just floating around in my head as something that people say that might or might not be true. I haven’t really delved into this, but I’m starting to suspect I should have assigned this more credibility.
• I hadn’t considered the possibility that a country that allowed its navy to become weak might have a significant lead time on strengthening it. This could allow piracy to go on for longer than you might naively expect.
• I hadn’t considered the possibility that pirates might be aligned with a larger proto-state actor, as opposed to being individual criminals.
• I hadn’t considered the possibility other countries might be reluctant to prevent a non-state actor from impeding shipping due to diplomatic considerations.
• I hadn’t considered that some people in the West might support such an actor for political reasons.
• Even though I was aware of the Somali pirate issues from years ago, I didn’t properly update on this knowledge. I suspect I updated on these pirates being easily defeated when the world got serious, but I failed to update on this ever having been a problem at all.
• I forgot to take into account the possibility that contexts can dramatically change: events that once seemed impossible regularly happen.
My point is that there is a lot I can learn from this incident, even if it ends up being resolved quickly.
I suspect it’s rare to ever really fully grasp all of the learnings from a particular incident. More pessimistically, I suspect most people just grab one learning from an incident and declare themselves to have “already learned the lesson”.
If you haven’t made a large number of small updates, you’ve probably missed some updates that you should have made.
(I find the handle “directionally correct” extremely convenient. It’s so much easier to say than something like “I don’t think X is correct on all points, but I think a lot of their points are correct”. I would love to know why I’m hearing this term more often these days).
Further update: Iranian seizure of the MSC Aries
I’m interested in any other analysts like zeihan who folks find predictive enough to track. Current favorites of mine are Beau of the Fifth Column, Perun, AI Explained, Nate Hagens, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Security in Context, Heather Cox Richardson, Big Red Celt, Paul Beckwith. (Typos possible, but all are YouTube channels.)
Out of these, who is your top pick?
BeauTFC, though he’s retired; his wife Belle now runs the channel, and does reasonably close to as well, often having interestingly detailed predictions about dynamics of the situation in the USA.
And Perun, who continues to have detailed and specific predictions and be rarely wrong.
The others: AI Explained has also felt like he lost depth of insight. I haven’t kept up with Schmachtenberger, Hagens, Security in Context, Paul Beckwith. Heather Cox Richardson continue to be interesting, though I don’t follow her work. Paul Beckwith has a pretty narrow focus on climate dynamics, I would be surprised if his quality of work has degraded in that area.
Thanks!
“AI Explained has also felt like he lost depth of insight”
What makes you say that?
I previously had the sense that he was finding things others wouldn’t. Now I don’t. I stopped following him because of this. I briefly opened recent stuff from him and immediately felt like what he was saying was highly optimized for attention-grabbing-ness, so I immediately closed it; it’s possible he’s restored depth by the standards I had, but I don’t need hype news—he previously stood out for being measured, which is one of the traits that makes someone interesting to me. But this isn’t an objective judgement, it’s all based on approximate feature matches in my brain somewhere.
...eg,
Current events: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2C9pYzEZ64
Prior coverage (october) where they gave reasoning and stated this seemed plausible (among several other possible outcomes, all of which are pretty specific): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_EuX0YJKvE
Missile attacks are not piracy, though, right?
It’s good that you learned a few things from these incidents, but I’m sceptical of the (different) claim implied by the headline that Peter Zeihan was meaningfully correct here. If you interpret “directions” imprecisely enough, it’s not hard to be sometimes directionally correct.
Yeah, I probably could have framed the post a bit better, but I don’t really think that affects the core point that you need to be updating on near misses.
Generally it makes no sense for every country to collectively cede the general authority of law and order and unobstructed passage of cargo wrt global trade. He talks about this great US pull back because the US will be energy independent, but America pulling back and the global waters to turning into a lawless hellscape would send the world economy into a dark age. Hinging all his predictions on this big head-turning assumption gives him more attention but the premise is nonsensical.
This article might suggest an update on your priors about piracy in the modern world.
Not sure where you’re posting from but if US I suspect in part the view you hold is something of a sample bias as US news really never reports much on the problem.
I also agree with your title, and wish more was said about it in the post, that recognizing the correct direction can be very helpful even when the current state change is small and perhaps not too consequential. It is generally better to have a plan before the bad state of things has occurred than hoping the Mr. Magoo route will work well for you ;-)
Shipping piracy graphs over the decades:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266292/number-of-pirate-attacks-worldwide-since-2006/
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/19/maritime-piracy-is-on-the-decline-globally.html
Thanks.
I would note that to my eye the charts do seem to imply an upward trend from the 1995 observations and while clearly declining from the 2010 highs still exceeds the numbers reported in 1995 and 1996 low points. So I’m not completely sure I buy the CNBC headline claim of decline in terms of trend. At least not is long term sense.
https://www.icc-ccs.org/ reports is kind of interesting as they start 2023 reporting the lowest level of Q1 priracy in 30 years but then their reports increasingly seem to show more and more concern about such activities, which were actually increasing over the prior year contra the Q1 observations.
FWIW ‘directionally correct’ includes ‘right but for the wrong reasons’, I.e. right only by fluke, hence irrelevant & ignorable. Which isn’t what you want to include. Though it’s maybe not often used in that situation
I’ve been encouraged to write a self-review: I don’t have much to say here, except that if I knew this article would be this popular (over 100 upvotes), then I would have written it a bit more carefully the first time. I just spent 10 minutes rewriting some awkwards phrasings.
The LessWrong Review runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2025. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year.
Hopefully, the review is better than karma at judging enduring value. If we have accurate prediction markets on the review results, maybe we can have better incentives on LessWrong today. Will this post make the top fifty?