Or: Why the current situation once again proves the need for all of my pre-existing policy preferences.
Writing about the war is continuing to prove difficult, as things move quickly, the epistemic environment continues to be almost maximally hostile and a lot of elements are things where I was not previously up to speed.
I want to build a model of the situation, which leads to the problem of where even to begin, yet the speed premium beckons and although having a newborn is great as you can imagine I’m on less than ideal amounts of sleep and free time.
Thus it seems worthwhile to skip ahead a bit and ask the practical question first. Assume for the sake of discussion that we prefer people doing better and not dying to people doing worse and dying, and agree that we do not want Russia to win the war.
What would then be our options, either individually or collectively? What can we do?
(Where the collective ‘we’ here is some combination of ‘America’, ‘America + EU/NATO’ and ‘everyone everywhere who wants this same general set of outcomes.’)
I indeed strongly prefer such outcomes.
If you don’t prefer such outcomes enough to care, this post is not trying to convince you to change your mind and is probably not for you. That would be a very different post, and I don’t know what the True Objection would be of most people open to being convinced.
If you do prefer such outcomes, there are a lot of different potential approaches.
On a personal level, one could:
Provide military aid (e.g. by giving money directly to Ukraine).
Provide humanitarian aid (e.g. by giving money to those that provide it).
Lobby or advocate for better government policies or corporate actions.
Attempt to build (and ideally share) a better understanding of the situation.
Convince others to also prefer such outcomes, ideally via #4.
I am going to go ahead and advocate here for the policy responses I think are appropriate. The first ones are direct actions, which are pretty obviously:
Provide military assistance to the extent we can without too much escalation.
Humanitarian aid.
Economic sanctions.
The rest fall under the category of ‘things worth doing anyway.’ This stuff is win-win. This means doing things like:
Nuclear power.
Additional other energy production of various kinds.
Reconciling with other oil producers to extent possible.
Carbon tax.
Taking in as many Russians and Ukrainians as possible who want out.
Supporting free flow of information.
Everything else that’s obviously great (e.g. reduced zoning, more public transit, more building and urbanization, reduced occupational licensing, and so on…)
Use better decision theory.
The approach we’ve broadly collectively selected so far seems to be best centrally described as Cancel Russia. This is leading to many useful interventions, but also to actions that are counterproductive, and causing us to miss or not take full advantage of some of the biggest opportunities.
I won’t discuss potential peace terms and what I think would be worth or not worth taking, other than to point out that any offer that fails to leave Ukraine’s armed forces and ability to continue arming intact, or that would replace the government, is an obvious non-starter, but that I think it is wise that Zelensky is willing to consider territorial concessions, and that commitments to not ‘join blocs’ are mostly cheap talk given the history of what has come before, what alternative arrangements could be made and the prospects of joining short term in any case.
Let’s get the obvious first one out of the way first, which is Military Assistance.
Military Assistance
The obvious first thing to do is provide various forms of military assistance. Every little bit helps, both increasing the probability of better direct outcomes and giving negotiating leverage. Winning and success beget winning and success.
In my model of the world, such success will make a big difference not only for the future of Ukraine but also the world in general. Marginal improvements in results, such as winning faster and more decisively or losing less so (and thus raising the imposed costs), is also big.
The threshold for being willing to take sides in a war is of course very high, but this situation seems to easily clear that bar.
Thus, if you agree with this and want to donate money, there might not be an obvious right answer but there is nothing I’ve found that dominates giving the money directly to Ukraine. You can do this with crypto or otherwise (note: I’ve had a warning this site might be dubious, I got this thread that Sam Bankman-Fried recently linked to as a more recent alternative, and a LessWrong reader suggested this one—alas I can’t currently afford to look into this more, but if you’re donating money do be careful to make sure it gets there).
If you’re in the necessary position, one could also step up and join their Foreign Legion (veterans only), otherwise source assistance directly or arrange for others to do so.
From the perspective of governments, the goal is to provide assistance in ways that are effective at improving Ukraine’s ability to fight while not causing too much escalation.
One would think the first step here is giving Ukraine sufficient money that individuals can focus their efforts elsewhere.
Then there’s all the military equipment and even volunteers, where we seem to have paid the cost of openly providing such aid, it’s proven acceptable, and so we should make the most of it.
There’s the question of how to do things like get the Polish aircraft into Ukrainian hands and whether that poses an additional risk – I understand why flying them directly in from NATO bases seems like it should be out of play and why we rejected that, but I’m surprised there is no viable workaround. Part of the stated logic was that the aircraft are not needed or that they are crucial – they sound more important than they are and we can send other things that have more impact while causing less escalation. I am skeptical, but know less, and one advantage is that we now have a threatened escalation to deter Russian military escalations, that isn’t obviously insane to do.
Russia has deployed mercenaries but there hasn’t been much talk about mercenaries potentially showing up on the side of Ukraine, and also I haven’t seen much discussion of why they haven’t. Funding shouldn’t be an issue.
What we obviously cannot do, despite broad-based popular support for it, is impose a ‘no-fly zone’ or otherwise directly intervene in ways that cause our planes or soldiers to be firing at Russian planes, targets or soldiers.
The no-fly zone is the worst of both worlds. We 100% cannot do this, and luckily our governments realize this. We’re so used to facing a different style of foe fighting in a different style of war, where we don’t fear escalation and have automatic air superiority, that this sounds like a good idea rather than what it is, which is a commitment to acts of war that would not even help.
A no-fly zone makes sense if the enemy controls the air and is using the air in ways you want to prevent, and has no practical means of escalation.
However, the Russian military is designed with the idea that they won’t have air superiority, and is based around artillery. They have failed to achieve air superiority. They are either out of guided missiles or saving what they have left in case of escalation. It’s not clear that the Russian Air Force is capable of taking much practical advantage of the skies, or that it is getting more out of the sky than Ukraine, so a symmetrical ‘no fly zone’ might not even be net helpful.
There is an argument that failing to do this is some sort of show of weakness, of a willingness to back down in a confrontation. I mostly think that does not apply here to the autocratic leaders who matter here, who presumably all understand why it would be an insane move, but it does reinforce the need to make it clear in other ways that we are not going to be backing down from confrontations. It is hard to know if we have managed to accomplish this in the eyes of Putin.
I am worried that a lot of the people who are supporting a no-fly zone are, consciously or otherwise, supporting it because they no longer think there is a future. That they think about the literal end of the world and kind of shrug, because we’ve instilled in them that mindset through a combination of lack of opportunity and relentless rhetoric. If you literally think that there we will literally all die of climate change, or that you’ll never have the chance to raise a family, then a lot of things change.
Next up is the question of immediate humanitarian concerns.
Humanitarian Aid
There are already over two million Ukrainian refugees, and the Russians are creating much worse crises in various cities, while agreements to open humanitarian corridors seem to mostly not be honored.
Humanitarian aid in this situation punches above its weight. It helps make this the type of world we want to live in, it relieves pressure to give concessions or divert resources in order to mitigate the damage, and it helps with the Narrative of the situation and in keeping morale up and drawing the distinction between the different worlds and visions of humanity that are in conflict.
There is an urge among many I know to start comparing how much it costs to help people in need here versus in other non-conflict situations that they could see as ‘more efficient’ opportunities. Certainly not 100% of our worldwide aid resources should be redirected to the current situation, but I am confident that on the effective margin, given what resources have already been allocated to pre-existing situations, combined with a large ‘force multiplier’ on helping here, that if you personally are considering where your marginal humanitarian dollar that isn’t already committed should go, yes absolutely it should go to help with the damage done by the war – even if you need to do this via a reasonably generic method and accept that level of efficiency.
That doesn’t mean that there does not exist, somewhere, a better marginal intervention that would beat the best one here that you know about, but that is not the bar in practice.
And of course, even more than in the case of military aid, this mostly shouldn’t need to be left to private action, and it would be good to push for more public action to the extent feasible. But I doubt private action would in expectation reduce the size of public action, nor do I expect public action to be fully sufficient no matter how hard we push and there are aspects where that is all but certain.
I would like to have better targets for this than I do. This approach is at least endorsed by Sam Bankman-Fried, who I trust to be a good faith actor here who is making an effort, and I haven’t seen anything better, but as always if you have distinct knowledge then you should likely go with it. This NPR post lists many of the conventional sources, where one worry is whether your marginal contribution will pass through to help in Ukraine or it will effectively end up as general organizational funding. If it’s the latter, you can clearly do better.
Going the humanitarian route thus is helpful on multiple levels, and also you can be sure that you are doing something good. I’ve learned that a lot of people would much rather do the thing that is surely good over the thing that has higher expected value but is less certain, especially a thing that might turn out to be a sign mistake. And it’s likely good to put some amount of ‘guaranteed win’ into your portfolio for this reason alone.
A brief word on economic sanctions.
Economic Sanctions
Economic sanctions are very much a double-edged sword. Both sides get hurt, and they cause economic decoupling that we would much prefer in the long run to avoid.
By making it clear that the wrong actions will cause us to cut economic ties, the West is causing others who might be seen as taking wrong actions to wonder about their exposure to having their economic ties suddenly cut, and to whether they might lose various assets and relationships.
Will this lead to China and Russia creating a rival version of SWIFT that is out of our control? Will this lead to a shift in reserve currency or an unwillingness to hold reserves in the West? Are, as some say, any who play along with such restrictions ‘signing their own death warrants’ because the future wants to be free of such centralized restrictions and the people will rise up and reject any who bow down?
I mean, some stuff of that nature will doubtless happen. You’d be a fool not to consider your downside risks and take precautions. There will be less economic coupling, and more decoupling, due to the forward risk of sudden decoupling.
Yet the flip side of this is that by showing our willingness to use such tools, and the consequences of their use, we give strong incentive to not earn such exile in the future. We show we are not going to back down from confrontation. This matters too. There’s a lot of downside to this kind of decoupling no matter how well one plans for it. If it cannot be made an acceptable cost, but is a risk that can be prevented, then things should be fine.
Similar to the situation with the convoy, you do not want the penalty for being late to be death. You want proportional response and for people to have a way out, for Russia and whoever comes next. You want people to know that you’ll reserve extreme solutions for extreme situations, such as large scale wars of conquest. You want to hold out the ability to walk things back when the situation is settled, and ideally to specify what it would take – subject to negotiations, of course.
Instead we are doing all of this ad hoc, and in response to public pressure and largely privately in response to that pressure, which is harder to properly calibrate. And a lot of it will be hard to reverse.
Russia will to some extent be driven into the arms of China on a semi-permanent basis, as the only ones willing to trade with Russia and offer it the capacities Russia lacks. Although, if things continue much longer, it’s not clear even China will be able to do that, given its need to maintain good trade relations with the West. Mostly I see this as a sunk cost at this point.
I do think ‘no one trusts us not to do it to them and so they can’t work with us or trust our institutions’ is a real risk, but I consider it only the #3 risk here, or at least largely downwind of #2.
The #2 risk in my view is that we could be unable to prevent this from happening again, perhaps in a situation where it is deeply unwise. If this is essentially a cancellation, even if a cancellation is wise and appropriate one must worry about the selection process. Especially if the target next time might be China. We need a plan to ensure this is not done lightly.
The #1 risk I worry about is that we’ll create a permanent enemy by driving Russia to ruin and not picking up the pieces afterwards. That we’ll repeat the mistake of the Treaty of Versailles, and the mistake we made not giving Russia a lot more help in 1991. Our administration has spoken of ‘the ruins of the Russian economy’ being a lesson to others, and that is indeed a lesson but historically results have been far better when helping afterwards. The whole sanctions plan must involve a full more-than-reversal afterwards if we get everything we want.
Next up is the battle over information.
Information War
Right now, Russians have a highly distorted picture of what is happening in Ukraine.
That doesn’t mean that we don’t also have a distorted picture, but I’m confident it’s not on the same level.
To the extent that there is still independent media in Russia that can still spread the word on what is happening, and that can utilize support, that seems obviously high value. To the extent that you can help communicate what is going on to people in Russia in other ways, that also seems worthwhile.
Cutting off Russia from the outside world does the opposite. For example, someone or some group seems to have been screwing with people’s ability to make phone calls to Russia, and that seems super counterproductive on so many levels.
Trying to figure out what is going on, distinguishing sources and figuring out what is true and who is reliable, building a model of events, and sharing such work with others, and other neat stuff like that, also seems valuable.
As one would expect, I do not think that ‘shape the Narrative to be as favorable to Ukraine as possible’ is The Way. Whether or not there should be any propaganda ever, and acknowledging that the lines will always blur, there is clearly currently too much propaganda on the margin. There’s a ‘stop, stop, he’s already dead’ vibe here, and having an accurate picture matters a lot.
There is also way too much suppression of unfavorable information, whether it be accurate or inaccurate, and whether or not it directly aims to support Russia. When I put out my previous post, someone contacted me privately to let me know of sources that would give the Russian point of view because they felt afraid to share that information in public. This is not a healthy situation. We have to be better.
After I wrote that, it became clear the EU is doing the opposite, and further putting the burden on social media and search engines to actively censor disfavored information sources. This seems super terrible and a major escalation of the existing EU war on free speech. It’s not clear to me the extent this creates a duty to proactively monitor all social media content on one’s platform, but that is my default way to interpret this order on first reading – ‘must be deleted’ presumably means exactly that, your call figuring out how that might happen.
Similarly, the way we treat Russian citizens and Russian cultural everything and such has to be better.
Canceling Russia vs Welcoming Russians
We need to very much draw a distinction between Putin, Russia the country, and Russians as people and as a culture.
Sanctions on Russia the country, and ceasing to do business with it or otherwise aid the war machine, makes perfect sense, especially when it comes to energy. But that’s the country, not the people.
The rush to cancel all Russians and all things Russian is no good and terrible. Not only does it need to stop, we need to do the opposite. There is nothing wrong with a Russian restaurant, or a Russian singer, or a Russian composer, or a Russian writer. There is nothing to hold against Russians living abroad. Those here have made a choice to be here. They are not our enemies, they are our friends. Or at least, they will be if we don’t make them our enemies through a new McCarthyism.
The worst cases, like a clinic in Munich that refused to treat Russians, seem to backtrack and in this case apologize after public outcries, which is a relief, but also should not be necessary.
The best weapon in our arsenal is that we offer a better life, and we especially offer a better life to Russia’s youth and their best and brightest. These are people Russia depends on, as it ages and depopulates. Yet Russia neither presents them with opportunity nor offers them status nor treats them well. 44% of young Russians want to leave.
The obviously overwhelmingly correct and most important thing to do is to invite any citizen of either Russia or Ukraine to come live here, in America (and also the EU/UK), ideally with a full path to citizenship.
Not only is it the right thing to do for them, doing so strengthens us while weakening Russia severely. These people should be welcome even if they are a burden, but they are not a burden. We have plenty of depopulated cities that would love to have them.
Lesser versions of this are not as good, but are still vital if we can’t get the full version for all Russians.
At a minimum, as much as I hate credentialism, we could do this for anyone with a college degree and/or a qualifying job offer. That makes it very clear that such people will be a net benefit to us.
And notice that this proposal did not mention Russia. That was intentional. There will no doubt be lots of objections about how it’s unfair to offer these opportunities to Russians but not to others elsewhere, with and without charges of racism.
So you know what? Not a problem. If it’s conditioned on such things, we can easily offer it to everyone, everywhere. We benefit, they benefit, and Putin can’t say a thing in response because we’re treating everyone the same.
Obviously support for large increases in immigration, even skilled immigration is not there right now. And there are some very strong arguments against unlimited unskilled immigration (also known as open borders). But opposition to or limiting of skilled immigration has never seemed to me to make any sense. This context could be a way to find the necessary support, as it has at times in the past.
That leads into the general best things we can do, which is to get our house in order.
To Fix The Problem of Russia, Fix the World
Russia’s diplomatic support comes from autocratic countries that generally support other autocrats. Its opponents are largely democracies. Strengthening the free world, or making it more attractive, in any sense, helps tip the scales. Getting our economic houses in order, making our countries better places to live, having more people live in those places, they all help.
When times are good, support for freedom, trade and democracy tends to rise. When times are not so good, people turn elsewhere. For many reasons, we need better times.
Russia draws much of its strength from people who would prefer to be elsewhere, as noted above, that could instead lend strength to us, but which are turned away.
Russia even benefits from climate change due to its geography.
On top of all that, Russia’s economic backbone is oil and gas, which we want to do away with regardless. Without huge profits from oil and gas, the state could not sustain itself or its war machine.
This Twitter thread proposes a model of why this dependence is so complete. In this model, Russia is essentially a kleptocratic mafia state. In a mafia, character traits and behaviors necessary to maintain high status and not have one’s resources expropriated require a focus on violence, dominance, zero-sum competition for status and unpredictability. Such a focus is incompatible with the management of complex manufacturing operations. Not only are those who rise within a mafia-style system to have power and money incapable of complex operations, but they also can ill afford to empower those who do have such an ability. If they do, the balance of power might shift to those who can manage such operations. Internal creation that they can’t control is power they can’t wield and will belong to someone else who thinks differently, and thus is a threat. So they prevent it from happening, and outsource such creation elsewhere.
This results in a Russia that is far more dependent on outsiders and the West than it realizes, and also keeps Russia from prospering because those with power actively do not want this to happen. It is The Resource Curse on steroids.
Similarly, in this model, a lot of the Russian army’s problems stem from its budget being diverted to things like yacht purchases, as the state is incapable of keeping itself honest on this kind of scale and isn’t especially trying to do so.
I’m not confident this person’s model is entirely correct and would appreciate insight on the extent to which it is and to what extent their other similar threads can also be trusted – if they can, then this is by far the best source I’ve found for actual model building on the underlying situation, and it seems like it’s right, but I want to be get independent confirmation I can trust so I can be more confident and build upon what’s there, a lot of which is fascinating and paints a rich and consistent picture.
I want to explore those bigger questions more later, but mostly the point is that Russia’s revenue, and also its leverage over the West, stems from us not having our house in order. It is because we depend on Russian oil and gas. There’s also a looming problem with fertilizer and wheat and some mineral resources, which could be a big deal, but which in dollar terms is very secondary.
So the list of all of My Pre-Existing Policy Proposals would start in the obvious place.
Energy
Not being dependent on Russian oil and gas was a very good idea a month ago or a year ago. It would be a very good idea even if Russia was a reliable partner in trade and in peace and its government was a force for good, because climate change is a thing and supplies of oil and gas are limited.
The solutions here are all rather obvious, and they all work together. The more of them we do, the better things go.
When you don’t do any of them, you end up with Germany where they say they’re all about the environment, but they go about it by shutting down nuclear plants, and thus energy prices go nuts and Germany’s solution looks like it’s going to be to burn more coal. Madness.
So let’s start with the obvious: Nuclear power.
We need to build tons of new nuclear power plants, in both America and Europe. All that stands between us and this goal is to stop being idiots, take away regulations that effectively ban it, and then commission a bunch of plants. Or simply stop imposing undue burdens and let private investment happen. It’s known tech.
Nuclear power under reasonable regulatory regimes is cheap, safe, abundant, clean and effective. New reactor models are even more all of that than old models. The idea of nuclear power is scary and thus people have it in their heads that it is unsafe, but compared to the safety downsides of all the practical alternatives none of the safety objections are serious.
Yet we cannot build any new plants, because the official policy is to never approve a new plant. We have defined an unsafe nuclear plant as a plant that is capable of producing energy at competitive prices – if the prices would be competitive, the official policy is to insist on additional money spent on safety, without regard to any sort of cost/benefit. So no new approvals and no new plants under this regime, at all. This madness must end.
On the margin, energy produced by nuclear power is trading off against oil, gas and coal use. This is very much not hard. It would not be hard, again, even if Russia was not a concern.
This is the 100% obvious complete slam dunk. I find myself mostly unable to take seriously, on this or any other topic, anyone who looked into this at all and is in opposition.
Next up of course is Non-Nuclear Green Energy. I say non-nuclear because the idea of a category ‘green’ that does not include nuclear is pure absurdity, and it’s important that category boundaries reflect reality.
As people have suddenly been realizing, a bunch of NIMBY-style objections and huge other regulatory burdens have been severely slowing the building of various renewable forms of energy. People’s local concerns have been allowed to hold up things that are orders of magnitude more important.
This is the perfect time to ensure that the more important concerns here take precedence, and require a huge burden before we are willing to consider stopping or slowing down a new windmill, solar panel, hydro or geothermal project. I keep hearing that the entire fate of the world is at stake here, and now it has an additional justification. I really, really, really don’t care about your obstructed ocean view or that there would be a power line through a forest, or some obscure endangered habitat, stop it, just stop, shut up and multiply.
We can also offer additional direct subsidies, but mostly it isn’t necessary because the economics work fine. The best subsidy is of course to correct for externalities of alternatives through a carbon tax, but some direct help is fine too.
When I shared a draft of this I got objections to the claim that nuclear’s cost is cheap enough on the theory that solar is already pretty cheap (remember not to count tax subsidies in the calculation) and will become cheaper on the relevant time frames for building new plants. I do agree this is possible, but it seems far from certain even if we go full out on solar, especially when requiring it to scale on the level of ‘the entire electrical grid,’ and considering the storage issues involved in too heavy a reliance on solar power on that scale. This seems to me like a clear case of Why Not Both given the magnitude of the costs versus the benefits – you’d like to rely purely on solar most of the time in the worlds where it’s cheap and can scale that big fast enough, including because it conserves uranium, but you don’t know you live in those worlds and even if you do you’d like a backup system to relieve pressure on the necessary amount of storage so you’re fine in case of unusual weather events.
Also worth noting that all this includes better support for research into and other work on Fusion and other potential energy sources, to the extent that such things are viable, which I haven’t investigated.
The trickier one in a political sense is Oil and Gas Production, but in a practical sense it is not so tricky. High prices will lead to more production, although with meaningful lead times required. We can of course also help with this by loosening various restrictions on production, especially fracking, and we should do that. Whatever the trade-off was a month ago, the trade-off is different now, and the rules need to reflect that. Long term, we’ll be reducing usage, short term the costs of ow production are looking mind boggling. Making this concession also helps balance the scales in various ways.
Notice that no one objects much to other countries like Saudi Arabia raising production. Quite the opposite.
Then there’s the issue of what to do about Iran and Venezuela. We are talking to both trying to work out deals to get their oil flowing. Iran is a strange case here because Russia is their ally, and because they suddenly have even less reason to be willing to not pursue nuclear weapons. So any deal would require that they ‘switch sides’ and be actual friends, or it seems like it would backfire. For Venezuela, the worry is propping up the regime with cash and making things there that much worse. I’m not sure how the cost/benefit works out here.
Certainly we should be calling in chips to get increased oil production in places with slack capacity that we are already putting up with, and the countries that have the ability to do that should go along with it. Super high prices causes behavioral change that kills the golden goose, and they get the chips.
Even trickier is the canonical obviously correct but deeply unpopular policy, the Carbon Tax, or its more accepted incomplete alternative the Gasoline Tax. Insanely, there are calls for a gas tax holiday or other cut, at exactly the time when we need to reduce consumption. That’s why the price is going up. A price is a signal wrapped up in an incentive.
We want the price of using oil and gas to be super high. The price being high is great. It means people will consume less of it.
The problem, of course, is that the money is largely going to bad actors, and a lot of it to Russia, because they’re the ones selling and they get market price. Even Russia will still get a good fraction of market price, and market prices are high.
High energy prices hit the poor especially hard. This can of course be solved by using some or even all of the revenues from all such taxes to make a combination of tax reductions and direct payments to the poor. If they get all the revenue back, it’s pretty impossible for them to not be better off. Ideally we do it in a way that reduces rather than raises implicit marginal tax rates, especially in the range where they approach or exceed 100%.
Finally, there are the other things that are obviously insanely great, that can now be recast as supporting us in this struggle. I’ll try not to belabor too much.
Other Obviously Insanely Great Things That Were My Existing Policy Proposals
Supporting reduced zoning restrictions, further building, public transportation and urbanization all improve the energy situation directly while also improving life. Getting rid of stupid remaining Covid restrictions and other pointless rules helps as well. Reducing the demands of occupational licensing generally enriches life while in particular helping to welcome new people who will show up without such licenses, but that’s where the line starts to bleed between ‘this directly actually helps with X’ and ‘this is good and good things help with X’ so I will stop there rather than further writing a laundry list.
Playing Politics
I do see this as an opportunity to take a broadly pro-growth, pro-energy, pro-brain-drain, pro-lived-experiences physically-oriented platform, color it up as ‘anti-Russia’ and sell it to people who would not have otherwise supported it, allowing us to adopt much better policies.
The question is, would such an approach be practical? Would it stick? Is it worth one’s effort? In general, it is good to be skeptical of political action, although less skeptical if the rope is being pulled sideways. You risk being caught up in zero-sum games and Hegelian dialectics.
I do think that it makes sense for the we of ‘people of the type who are reading blogs like this’ to make some amount of effort towards such a thing. At a minimum, we should do the research to create a shovel-ready platform of such policies, framed in ways that are popular and paired with ways to get the message out to the people, such that a candidate could choose to embrace it or a lobbyist or insider could push for policy changes or offer a concrete bill when they notice the votes might be there.
Historically, the cost of such efforts is low, often in the single digit millions, with the potential to result in huge changes some of the time. This stands in high contrast with ‘help ingroup defeat outgroup’ type efforts, where the costs are much higher and the benefits often much murkier.
My hunch is that this is where some marginal dollars are now best spent.
The last point is that we are in this mess in large part because we’re using bad decision theory.
Better Decision Theory
If you don’t want people to present and behave towards you like cartoon villains, you need to ensure that your inevitable reactions don’t reward cartoon villainy.
If you don’t want rule by those willing to escalate and who prove willing to hurt and kill and be unpredictable, you need to not take kindly to that in a way that matters to such people.
I continue to see lots of people, smart people, people who should know much better, arguing from Causal Decision Theory. They say you could do A or B, the worlds where I choose A look better than the worlds where I choose B, so I choose A.
And that totally, totally does not work.
I mean, it’s way better than choosing B every time. And it’s better than flipping a coin. But it’s highly exploitable.
It’s even more exploitable if a lot of what you factor in is avoidance of pain and risk.
What you are doing is rewarding those who put themselves in a position to inflict pain and risk upon you, or even upon others.
Others noticing you will give in to blackmail, and that you have the ability to pay them, is what gets you blackmailed. It is why hostages are taken. It is why cartels and mafia make sure everyone knows they are violent.
Some of this is that a lot of people have various forms of trauma or otherwise have models of the world that expect those who can and do inflict pain and violate norms to win, and instinctively back them exactly because they are inflicting pain and violating norms – so they will hopefully do it on your behalf or at least to someone else. That’s a general problem.
This is the whole quote-unquote “rational” response problem. Those who ‘play CDT’ in interactions, who can be relied upon to think about the consequences of actions but not to decide on and stick to policies and principles, are sitting ducks.
A certain amount of this is tolerable and to be expected. You don’t obviously want the response to a criminal taking a hostage to always be to ignore the threat entirely, because such people often are not thinking straight and a reputation for ignoring such threats would likely come at the cost of a lot more dead innocents. Yet you also need it to not be to give the criminal whatever they want or they’ll keep doing it. You would ideally want people to be able to trust deals they make with authorities, yet there are enough irrational and stupid criminals that authorities have collectively instead decided it’s better to mostly be untrustworthy.
I do worry that this decision is based on maximizing local outcomes at the expense of long term effects. Similarly, we’ve shown that we can’t be trusted to do things like promise not to further expand NATO, because we lack the ability to keep commitments that are no longer seen as in our interest in the face of pressure. Our word is in this sense no good, and this is common knowledge. We do plausibly claim our word is good in some limited contexts, and get sufficient value out of that for it to be plausibly self-sustaining – we keep our word on things like defending NATO allies mostly because otherwise people would know that we don’t.
We do at least understand those kinds of issues somewhat – we understand that we need to ‘maintain credibility.’ So there’s at least an attempt to execute our causal decision theory properly, and look forward into the future to the consequences of what people might learn about us from our decisions. Without that all would quickly be lost. We do understand the game of whether one is seen as willing to stand up to bullies, and we occasionally play to win.
What we don’t do is use a functional decision theory. We do not consider that the decision process we use is also being and will be used and has previously been used by ourselves and others, and to choose our process with this in mind.
What we don’t do is choose decision policies that lead to good outcomes, then follow those policies, even if following them in a particular situation would turn out poorly.
In a sense, we have no honor.
In another sense, we were saved because we did have honor.
It turned out that there are things that so offend us, are so outrageous to us, that when we see them we feel the need to rise up as one in outrage. The intolerant minority often wins, and we are actually pretty good at having intolerant minorities that win, and in this case it likely wasn’t even a minority. Thus, the various calls to ‘do something’ for various somethings, whether or not such moves were ‘rational.’ Pushed by the public, and thus immune to our bad decision theory, allowing us to do what needed to be done. Where the conclusions were sufficiently counterproductive and risky, like the no-fly zone, we were able to ignore this.
How do we properly respond to people like Putin who really do care about whether someone ‘looks weak’ and other such dynamics, without adopting the mindset and culture that awards those who ‘look strong’ with power and high status? How do we stand up to someone like Putin, and have someone like Putin know in advance we will stand up to them so that we rarely ever actually have to do the standing up, but without putting someone else also like him in charge, who would likely then collaborate (at least implicitly, but also likely explicitly) with Putin and others like him against the peoples of all nations?
On a personal level, getting yourself to where you are using a functional decision theory is very much worth it, as is helping others to get there with you – it’s good even on your own, but the more people use one, the better it does. Or at a minimum, we need to give the proper disdain to those who are advocating policies that would result in handing the world to men like Putin. In some ways doing it explicitly is exactly the worst thing – you are announcing that you are easy pickings and advocating for others to be as well. Yet I still hold firm that being explicit is still the better way. Better to be wrong in a way that lets errors be corrected.
Except in a sufficiently adversarial environment, where some very smart people have made it very clear how to run over them instantly in any situation large or small, simply by making a credible presentation as someone who will keep escalating. For this and other reasons, it is good policy to not allow oneself to be taken advantage of even when the cost of not allowing this is higher than the cost of allowing it. And especially when that second cost is time. There is of course a limit, but one needs to be careful not to get into bad habits. One must keep one’s honor.
Anyway, I hope that all proves helpful. It seemed better to share my thoughts here than not share them, while I work towards more explicit model construction and analysis. Better to write what one can while trying to figure out how to write what one for now cannot.
(Comment/moderation note: Policy on politics continues to be ‘no more than necessary’ so please use your best judgment. I intend to stay out of the discussions as much as possible except when seeking information.)
(One last thing I want to explicitly ask again, since I didn’t get much response on Twitter, is that I desire people’s opinions on Kamil Galeev as a source to help model build, even if as I do one disagrees with some of the consequent projections/conclusions.)
It’s worse than that. The EU is not only calling for social media companies and search engines to censor content but also for ISPs to censor content. With my German ISP, I can’t access www.rt.com anymore. It’s a blow against the core principles of net neutrality.
One aspect that’s worth noting is, that those EU bans at the moment only go for RT and Sputnik and not for other websites funded by Russia. I expect that this is a tactical decision as it’s easier to defend that policy publically. I would expect that other websites will soon follow. There is some chance that in a few months all those websites that were charged with being Russian misinformation when they published “COVID misinformation” will be attacked via the same mechanism.
Do you have any links to news coverage about the ISP-level ban? This says that Sweden has interpreted it that way, but I don’t see coverage of other countries. This claims that the order isn’t clear, but links to a secret order that specifically mentions ISPs and seems to also include blocking archive.org.
How is the ban implemented technically? DNS? IP?
I don’t know about the exact technical implication at the moment. I’m not even sure whether that’s uniform.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/02/eu-rt-sputnik-ban-live/ : “In addition to social media networks and video streaming services, EU officials said that in principle ISPs are also covered.”
Elon Musk seemed to say that he will ignore the request to block access on Starlink.
We will see how the lawsuit will go.
One thing you might have missed, regarding reasons why so many people support a no-fly zone, is that a lot of people just aren’t thinking through what that actually means at all. Like, maybe you are so used to thinking about what your words mean that the inferential distance here is too great, but I think the thought process for probably a majority of poll respondents is something like:
All-out open war with Russia — that sounds scary
Doing nothing — that seems bad too
Aha, I hear about this “no-fly zone” and it sounds like kinda middle-groundy between those two things, so I guess I’m in favor of that! I think if you were to taboo “no-fly zone” and replace it with “US aircraft shoot down Russian planes, also US bombs Russian anti-aircraft emplacements in Russia, also US Navy ships sink Russian AA destroyers, etc etc” then you would see polled support plummet. So I don’t think that seeing high poll numbers for “no-fly” is really any evidence of the kind of nihilism you mention, just imprecise thinking. One piece of evidence for this is that if climate doomerism was responsible, you should expect to see the most left-wing/green new deal members of Congress pushing the no-fly zone, and you do not see this.
The unclear thinking is no excuse for the leaders who are pushing this line though, who should know better. I expect they are just playing politics, dishonestly pushing this knowing Biden will have to say no to it, so that they can accuse Biden of being weak.
Yes. I have had this thought in the past but didn’t think about it when writing, which was an oversight—a lot of the support simply has zero idea that these are words that have meanings or what those meanings might be. I do expect that if it was explained what it means (in ways no one would dispute) support would decline at least a bunch.
The linked website for military assistance (war.ukraine.ua) is dubious. Donations in fiat currencies are better done at the addresses listed on the official website: https://bank.gov.ua/en/about/support-the-armed-forces
Couple telltale signs:
ukraine.ua redirects to war.ukraine.ua, which is weird in itself, but especially given in January there was some original content at ukraine.ua
email listed in the footer is ukraine.ua.mfa@gmail.com, despite the mfa.gov.ua accepting emails at zsmfa@mfa.gov.ua
their https://war.ukraine.ua/support-ukraine/ page lists yet another Gmail address (mfa.ukraine@gmail.com)
the Feb 28 archived version showed ukraine@mfa.gov.ua email
one IBAN does check out (although bank.gov.ua lists this as UAH only and lists seven others for different currencies), but the others aren’t mentioned on the bank.gov.ua website
the Monobank payment (https://uahelp.monobank.ua/) uses a British bank “Clear Junction Limited” for the euro transfers instead of Deutsche Bundesbank or a Ukrainian bank.
(This address is listed on the Twitter feed of the verified @Ukraine, so it might be legit, or it might have been legit at one point: https://twitter.com/Ukraine/status/1500899395906191361)
This @Ukraine user posts mostly memes and low-effort posts lately. On Feb 26 they listed a different bitcoin address but now I can’t find the post.
Can anyone else confirm?
I think this is far too sanguine with regard to our understanding of decision theory. See The Commitment Races problem for one example of a serious problem that, AFAIK, isn’t solved by any of the currently proposed decision theories, including FDT, and advocating that more people adopt FDT before solving the problem might even make it worse (if people think that FDT implies making earlier, more hasty commitments, in a wider range of circumstances).
I’m very unsure what is the rational response (for the West) to Putin’s actions and threats. Among other considerations, what if there’s say a 10% chance that Putin actually assigns less disutility to destroying the world than to failing at restoring Russia’s historical territories (or he can be reasonably modeled as such), in which case his nuclear threats would not be bluffs, so letting him “win” is perhaps the rational thing to do?
Yes, such a policy would eventually hand the world to “men like Putin”, but the alternative policy would potentially incur an immediate 10% chance of destroying the world, perhaps increasing to 100% over time as we keep calling the bluff of other “men like Putin”. You seem to be a lot more certain than I am about what the right thing to do is, so I’m curious what is the reasoning that led to your conclusions.
On the personal level, to me this seems like a potential failure mode worth worrying about in an AGI context because that’s Impossible Mode for everything, but not in practical human mode, and most definitely not on the margin. I’m not claiming I have the best possible answer here, I’m claiming that what humans are current doing is some mix of absurdly stupid things and non-FDT proposals that exist seem way worse than FDT proposals that exist—also that actual human attempts to be FDT-style agents will be incomplete and not lead to degenerate outcomes, the same way mostly-basically-CDT-style human agents often don’t actually do the fully crazy things it implies when it implies fully crazy things.
On the global level, again I’m not saying I know the details of how we should respond, only that we shouldn’t lay down and let him get whatever he wants.
I think it is essentially epsilon chance that Putin would choose nuclear firestorm over a world where Russia doesn’t recreate the USSR / Russian Empire (and even where he dies tomorrow as well) if those were 100% the choices (I do think he might well be willing to risk a non-trivial chance of nuclear war to get it, but that is different), but let’s say that it is 10% (and notice that in those 10%, if he knew for a fact we’d respond with our nukes, he’d just say ‘oh that’s too bad’ and destroy the world in a fit of pique, which very much doesn’t seem right). In the other 90%, he backs down after various numbers of escalations (e.g. in some he tries the escalate-to-deescalate single nuke, others he tries leveling Kyiv, others he folds tomorrow and leaves) in some combination, then folds after he sees we won’t fold, but losses are ‘acceptable’ here.
In those 10% of worlds, what are we hoping for? I don’t think there is much of an ‘eventually’ here.
He takes Ukraine, we let him. He sees we let him do what he wants. Everyone else sees too. Every state starts a nuclear weapons program that can afford one, so Putin knows he’s on limited time. Ukraine starts an insurgency and Putin starts killing A LOT of people in response. We do nothing. Moldavia is next pretty much right away. That falls in days. He then goes for Kazakhstan. Within a year he has all the non-NATO USSR republics in hand.
Meanwhile, Xi launches an invasion of Taiwan. Putin makes it clear that if the USA interferes he’ll back China up. We fold. China takes it. TSMC is destroyed. We lose the majority of our chip capacity, either to China or the void. Everyone knows our commitments mean nothing. Every country with a score to settle acts now.
Now Putin takes part of Estonia, and fortifies it. This is, let’s say, December 2022, and Trump-backed Republicans just swept the midterms during an extreme recession. What do we do? Again, clearly, nothing.
NATO is dead. No one believes us at all, anywhere. Putin invades and takes the Baltics. Six months later, he’s in Warsaw and Bucharest, perhaps without firing a shot. North Korea marches south and points its ICBMs.
And then it gets worse.
Or, more likely, at some point in that story we DO confront him, and the nuclear war happens anyway—and there’s a lot of worlds where he didn’t want that, but by folding so often, we let him think he could do it, so he doesn’t know where to stop, and then we get into a nuclear war over Estonia or whatever and someone miscalculates.
And that scenario happens 50%+ of the time rather than 10%, because there’s a ton of worlds where Putin/Xi/etc will take advantage like that, but where they very much would have folded if challenged. The chances of nukes flying in the medium (10 year) term go up, not down.
Even the best case scenarios I can imagine in such places are ones I very much do not like.
(Also, I think that if Putin tried to start a nuclear war without any attacks on Russia itself, that there is a >50% (although of course not terribly reassuring) chance that the answer would be ‘no’ and a substantial chance Russia’s nuclear weapons mostly no longer work and are a bluff whether or not Putin knows they don’t work—I very much would not launch ours until post-impact in the hopes this was the case, given our second strike capabilities. And there’s the worlds in which Putin tries to launch one nuke, it’s a dud, or his people turn on him, and that’s the end of all of it.)
If we lived by the rules you’re suggesting in the past, also, we wouldn’t have gotten this far—we would have folded to the USSR as nation after nation turned red, and at best we’d be in a much poorer, less free world (assuming it’s nuke-specific, and we still fight WW2).
What are some examples of these?
Yeah, I should have said 10% chance of escalating all the way to destroying the world (if the West doesn’t let Putin have his way), through all causes, not just Putin having that kind of values.
But if the USSR became the world government, at least we wouldn’t be repeatedly facing 10% chance of destroying the world. Is that an obvious tradeoff to you?
After reading Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, I am not really sure which outcome is worse.
I’m not sure why this got voted down, but I don’t disagree. In parts of my comments that you didn’t quote, I indicated my own uncertainty about the tradeoff.
If there were a bunch of Putin-style people in charge of the world that doesn’t seem like a ‘safe’ world either. It seems like a world where these states engage in continuous brinksmanship that, if this kind of mindset is common, leads to a 10% chance of Armageddon as often or more often than the current one.
We may have very different models of what happens if we let the USSR take over, but yeah I think that world has destroyed most of its value assuming it didn’t go negative. And I don’t think you eliminate the risks—you have a bunch of repressive communist governments everywhere in a world where conditions are getting worse (because communism doesn’t work) and they start fighting over resources slash have nuclear civil wars.
If the model is ‘Putin escalates to nuclear war sometimes and maybe he miscalculates’ then ‘fold to him’ is letting him conquer the world, literally, because no he wouldn’t stop with Russia’s old borders if we let him get Warsaw and Helsinki. Why would he? Otherwise, folding more makes him escalate until the nukes fly.
I’m assuming that the USSR would not have let other communist governments develop their own nuclear weapons.
It seems like the only world which doesn’t face repeated 10% chances of Armageddon is one in which some state has a nuclear monopoly and enforces it by threatening to attack any other state that tries to develop nuclear weapons (escalating to nuclear attack if necessary). Ideally, this would have been the US, but failing that, maybe the USSR having a nuclear monopoly would be preferable to the current situation.
Also, communist governments don’t always get worse over time, monotonically. Sometimes they get better instead. It’s pretty unclear to me what would have happened to the USSR in the long run, in this alternate world in which they achieved a nuclear monopoly.
Zvi: It’s interesting that your argument above is phrased entirely in the framework of causal decision theory. Might there be a good reason for that?
Looking at the Commitment Races Problem more (although not in full detail) it looks like this is if anything a worse problem for existing systems used in practice by (e.g. Biden), or at a minimum a neutral consideration. It seems more like a “I notice all existing options have this issue” problem than anything else, and like it’s pointing to a flaw in consequentialism more broadly?
Why do you say this? I’m pretty worried about people adopting any kind of formal decision theory, and then making commitments earlier than they otherwise would, because that’s what the decision theory says is “rational”. If you have a good argument to the contrary, then I’d be less concerned about this.
The addition issue with UDT/FDT is that they extend the Commitment Races Problem into logical time instead of just physical time:
physical time: physically throwing away the wheel in a game of chicken before the other player does
logical time: think as little as possible before making a commitment in your mind, because if you think more, you might conclude (via simulation or abstract reasoning) that the other player already made their commitment so now your own decision has to condition on that commitment (i.e., take it as a given), and by thinking more you also make it harder for the other player to conclude this about yourself
BTW you didn’t answer my request of examples of “humans are current doing is some mix of absurdly stupid things”. I’m still curious about that.
I think you’re taking the formal adoption of FDTs too literally here, or treating it as if it were the AGI case, as if humans were able to self-modify into machines fully capable of honoring commitments and then making arbitrary ones, or something? Whereas actual implementations here are pretty messy, and also they’re inscribed in the larger context of the social world.
I also don’t understand the logical time argument here as it applies to humans?
I can see in a situation where you’re starting out in fully symmetrical conditions with known source codes, or something, why you’d need to think super quick and make faster commitments. But I’m confused why that would apply to ordinary humans in ordinary spots?
Or to bring it back to the thing I actually said in more detail, Biden seems like he’s using something close to pure CDT. So someone using commitments can get Biden to do quite a lot, and thus they make lots of crazy commitments.
Whereas in a socially complex multi-polar situation, someone who was visibly making lots of crazy strong commitments super fast or something would some combination of (1) run into previous commitments made by others to treat such people poorly (2) be seen as a loose cannon and crazy actor to be put down (3) not be seen as credible because they’re still a human, sufficiently strong/fast/stupid commitments don’t work, etc.
I think the core is—you are worried about people ‘formally adopting a decision theory’ and I think that’s not what actual people ever actually do. As in, you and I both have perhaps informally adapted such policies, but that’s importantly different and does not lead to these problems in these ways. On the margin such movements are simply helpful.
(On your BTW, I literally meant that to refer to the central case of ‘what people do in general when they have non-trivial decisions, in general’ - that those without a formal policy don’t do anything coherent, and often change their answers dramatically based on social context or to avoid mild awkwardness, and so on, if I have time I’ll think about what the best examples of this would be but e.g. I’ve been writing about crazy decisions surrounding Covid for 2+ years now.)
Actually, my worry is kind of in the opposite direction, namely that we don’t really know how FDT can or should be applied in humans, but someone with a vague understanding of FDT might “adopt FDT” and then use it to handwavingly justify some behavior or policy. For example someone might think, “FDT says that we should think as little as possible before mentally making commitments, so that’s what I’ll do.”
Or take the example of your OP, in which you invoke FDT, but don’t explain in any mathematical detail how FDT implies the conclusions you’re seemingly drawing from it.
Here too, I suspect you may have only a vague understanding of the difference between CDT and FDT. Resisting threats (“crazy commitments”) is often rational even under CDT, if you’re in a repeated game (i.e., being observed by players you may face in the future). I would guess your disagreement with Biden is probably better explained by something else besides FDT vs CDT.
ETA: I also get a feeling that you have a biased perspective on the object level. If “someone using commitments can get Biden to do quite a lot”, why couldn’t Putin get Biden to promise not to admit Ukraine into NATO?
I admit to not being super interested in the larger geopolitical context in which this discussion is embedded… but I do want to get into this bit a little more:
It’s not obvious to me why the bolded assertion follows; isn’t the point of “updatelessness” precisely that you ignore / refrain from conditioning your decision on (negative-sum) actions taken by your opponent in a way that would, if your conditioning on those actions was known in advance, predictably incentivize your opponent to take those actions? Isn’t that the whole point of having a decision theory that doesn’t give in to blackmail?
Like, yes, one way to refuse to condition on that kind of thing is to refuse to even compute it, but it seems very odd to me to assert that this is the best way to do things. At the very least, you can compute everything first, and then decide to retroactively ignore all the stuff you “shouldn’t have” computed, right? In terms of behavior this ought not provide any additional incentives to your opponent to take stupid (read: negative-sum) actions, while still providing the rest of the advantages that come with “thinking things through”… right?
This part is more compelling in my view, but also it kind of seems… outside of decision theory’s wheelhouse? Like, yes, once you start introducing computational constraints and other real-world weirdness, things can and do start getting messy… but also, the messiness that results isn’t a reason to abandon the underlying decision theory?
For example, I could say “Imagine a crazy person really, really wants to kill you, and the reason they want to do this is that their brain is in some sense bugged; what does your decision theory say you should do in this situation?” And the answer is that your decision theory doesn’t say anything (well, anything except “this opponent is behaviorally identical to a DefectBot, so defect against them with all you have”), but that isn’t the decision theory’s fault, it’s just that you gave it an unfair scenario to start with.
What, if anything, am I missing here?
By “has to” I didn’t mean that’s normatively the right thing to do, but rather that’s what UDT (as currently formulated) says to do. UDT is (currently) updateless with regard to physical observations (inputs from your sensors) but not logical observations (things that you compute in your mind), and nobody seems to know how to formulate a decision theory that is logically updateless (and not broken in other ways). It seems to be a hard problem as progress has been bogged down for more than 10 years.
Conceptual Problems with UDT and Policy Selection is probably the best article to read to get up to date on this issue, if you want a longer answer.
As for Galeev’s threads: As a person from the former Ostblok, where countries share similar dynamics, there was nothing there that made me call bullshit on the spot. I am not a Russian though so I can’t vouch for the particular details.
As a Russian I confirm that everything that Galeev says seems legit. I haven’t been following our politics that much, but Gallev’s model of Putin’s fits my observations.
The only thing that looked a little suspicious to me was the thread on Russian parliamentarism—there was an opportunity to say something about Navalny’s team there (e.g. as a central example of party that can’t be registered or something about them organizing protests), and I expected that he would mention it, but he didn’t. In fact, I don’t think he ever mentioned Navalny in any of his threads. Why?
Interesting question. My guess is he doesn’t consider it important?
Yes, I think that it is the most likely scenario. Still, it bothered me enough that I mentioned it—I consider such omission 2-3 times more likely in a world where there are other important (intentional) omissions that I haven’t noticed than in a world where he is honest.
I still think that reading Galeev is worth it and that he is trustworthy enough source. But if for example he’ll make a thread on modern Russian opposition that doesn’t mention Navalny, it’ll be a huge red flag for me.
Galeev mentions Navalny in his newest thread about power dynamics and how they might change in response to the current crisis. It’s a long thread so you’ll need to scroll down quite a bit to see the section on Navalny. Galeev doesn’t portray him in a very positive manner.
Same here. I am not an expert, but everything I have read so far fits my model of the world.
If anyone is interested in hearing the Russian point of view of the
war“special operation”, you can do it here: https://www.gazeta.ru/. Google translator works amazingly well.The live news are especially interesting, but the auto-refresh is activated by default, which means that the site takes a while to be translated into English and it is annoying. You can turn it off by clicking here:
In the Russian news the Ruble does not lose value, but the USD and the EUR are just soaring
To clarify: this site contains very effective propaganda that makes it a cognitohazard. You are likely underestimating its danger. It is not “just a bunch of fake statements”. It is “a bunch of statements optimized for inflicting particular effects on its readers”. Such “particular effects” are not limited to believing in what news says. In fact, news regularly contradict what they said a few months ago even in peace time, so believing what they are literally saying is probably not the point.
Before reading propaganda consider that such materials:
1) Convinced a lot (a majority?) of Russians that Russian army is heroically fighting western nazis.
1.1) Not all such Russians are dumb—some of them are rather smart, there are some scientists, etc.
2) Convinced some (a sizable minority?) of Ukrainians that they are living under nazi rule.
3) It is possible that you are at a disadvantage compared to all those people since you likely haven’t encountered such propaganda before.
For example, there are a lot of contrmemes to government propaganda in Russian culture. Some of them are exploited by modern propaganda (All other media are also lying!), but I suspect that their effect is net positive, especially in more educated people.
Any old nonsense will convince a non-zero number of people, but I don’t see any evidence for #2 for people living in areas Russia doesn’t physically control in numbers that should worry us? The UA rate of thinking Nazi rule seems much lower than e.g. the USA rate of thinking home Nazi rule here, which seems importantly non-zero. (Also worth noting the word Nazi in this context means something importantly distinct, although still quite terrible).
On #3 I would very much expect the opposite. People at LW are very good vs. such tactics in general, and are high-information, and have access to Western sources, and this stuff is optimized to appeal to people in the former USSR. Consider how effective Russian efforts have been in the West in general. And we’re going in knowing it is what it is, which is highly protective.
Strangely, this site seems like it’s an attempt to be a sane Russian-slanted source, that is being careful not to say obviously false things, as opposed to most Russian sources that are not doing that—and I expect that most people who believe the RU line are coming from the other kind of news source. Many of the front page news sources match exactly my western sources, without even an attempt to spin the information, and are indeed newsworthy developments.
#2: My impression is that something like 2%-10% of Ukrainian population believed that a month ago (would you consider that worrying enough?). My evidence for that is very shacky and it is indeed quite possible that I am overestimating it by an order of magnitude (still kind of worrying, though I might be overestimating even more).
First, my aunt is among them. Second, over last few years I’ve seen multiple (something like 5-10, concentrated around present date?) discussions on social media where friends of friends (all Russians) said that they believe in nazi-controlled Ukraine since their relatives in Ukraine in some or another way confirmed it (perhaps such relatives are predominantly from occupied territories?).
Third, a lot of Russian families have close relatives in Ukraine (I can’t find any statistics, but by eyeballing families of my friends, I’d say something like 1⁄3 in Moscow). If a lot of such relatives believed in Russian propaganda, that would explain so many Russians believe it as well (there are rumors that some are choosing to believe tv over their relatives, but I haven’t personally witnessed any of that). And this “a lot of such relatives” don’t need to be implausibly big, since “Ukrainians believing in Russian propaganda” are likely overrepresented among close relatives of Russians.
I agree with all your points, but I don’t think that it is opposite of what I meant to say. When I was talking about being at disadvantage, I didn’t mean that western lesswrongers that will visit this site will be more affected by it then average Russians. I meant that western lesswronger will have not only obvious advantages (that you listed), but also some disadvantages, perhaps less obvious to westerners (is “disadvantage” a wrong word to use here?). That’s why I was talking about “underestimating danger” (another part of that was an attempt to make people even more cautious).
Yes, sure, the danger is not that big, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’ll noticeably negatively affect at least 0.1% of lesswrongers who visit such site (obviously conditioned on a lot of them visiting such site), and I absolutely won’t risk something like that just for curiosity.
I am following my own advice and haven’t read their articles since like 2013 when they lost their independence (and haven’t been a regular reader before that). But my not very educated guess would be that if your observation is correct, then it is one of news sources that initially were independent, then became government-controlled, and are still posing as mostly-inependent, e.g. lie only when it is important. Kind of optimized for highly educated opposition-leaning people in the former USSR.
Yes. I am repeatedly surprised how some people, even those otherwise quite intelligent, just don’t seem to realize (or perhaps they just don’t mind) that they keep believing sources that contradict what they said yesterday. I guess some people just don’t bother building a consistent model of reality, and they live fully at Simulacrum level 3.
I recently listened to some Putin’s speech which other pro-Putin people have praised. And on one hand, I was like: “Yeah, what he says is internally consistent, and I feel like I can empathise with what he is trying to convey.” But on the other hand, I also noticed that there were just too many things that contradict what I currently believe about the world, so either pretty much everything I believe is wrong, or he is simply lying. And, well, the probability is never 0 or 1, but the priors on “a politician is lying” are not that low.
That is, definitely a cognitohazard. An average person would probably accept 50% of it. A person who tries to be consistent will either resist it… or with a tiny probability switch to a new gestalt.
I mean… of course, if anyone desires to spend their time reading that shit, I can’t stop them anyway. I just wish in general that there would be less sharing of such links.
There is this theory that freedom of speech is always good, because exposure to evil memes builds your immune system. But, analogically to the actual immune system, sometimes it makes you stronger, and sometimes it (mind-)kills you. In real life, we do not actually keep ourselves healthy by exposing ourselves to every possible toxin. Hygiene actually increases our lifespan. Also, the theory assumes that there is a marketplace of ideas, where people meet both good and bad ideas, and they compete. But currently we have clickbait-powered online bubbles, where people exposed to some memes just isolate themselves from information that opposes those memes. (Which, I am quite aware of the irony, is how they would describe me. Because, you can always flip your map, and its symmetric version will be just as self-consistent as the original one. In addition, you need to explore the territory, and compare your map to it.)
I see two problems with this view.
First, avoiding arguments from the “other side” on the basis that they might convince you of false things assumes that the other side’s belief are in fact false. Maybe instead your side’s beliefs are false? How are you going to know if you don’t hear what the other side is saying? Are you just going on the theory that this time it’s so clear that one doesn’t need to look?
I would actually take the admonition “don’t read those arguments, they’re just mind-killing propaganda!” as a good sign that someone is themselves dispensing (or repeating) propaganda.
Second, even assuming the “other side” has nothing true to convey, to build a model of how the world works, you have to know how the people on the “other side” are thinking. If Russian propaganda is diabolically effective, don’t we need to know what it is, in order to predict how millions of Russians are going to behave?
There is some amount of evidence that should convince you that the other side is wrong. How much time would you spend reading articles saying that horoscopes are real? People are allowed to move their beliefs away from the 50:50 prior, otherwise what would be the point of collecting evidence.
First I would recommend observing their actions. Only after you noticed some patterns, you should start listening to what they say. Otherwise their words may distract you from their actions. -- That shouldn’t happen to a hypothetical perfect rationalist, but it sometimes happens to humans.
I believe it is less about true/false, but whether you believe the “other side” is making a well-intentioned effort at obtaining and sharing accurate maps of reality. On practical level, I think it is unlikely studying Russian media in detail is useful and cost-effective for a modal LWer.
Propaganda during wartime, especially during total war, is a prima facia example of situation where every player of note is doing their best to convince you of something in order to produce certain effects. [2] To continue with the map metaphor, they want to you to have a certain kind of map that will guide you to certain location. All parties wish to do this to some extent, and because it is a situation with the highest stakes of all, they are putting in their best effort.
Suppose you read lots of Western media sources and then a lot of Russian media sources. All sides in the conflict do their best to fill the air with favorable propaganda. You will find yourself doing a lot of reading, and I don’t know if there is any guarantee you can achieve any good results by interpolating between two propaganda-infused maps [1], instead of say, reading much less of both Western media and Russian media and trying to find good close-to-ground signals, or outsourcing the time-consuming analysis part to people / sources who you have a good reason to trust to do a good analysis (preferably you have vetted them before the conflict, and you can trust the reason still applies).
So the good reason to read Russian media to analyze it, is if you have a good reason to believe you would be good analyst of Russian media sphere. But if you were, would you find yourself reading a Russian newspaper you had not heard about two weeks ago with Google translate?
[1] I don’t have references at hand to give a good summary, but imagine you are your great*-grandparent and reading newspapers during WW2. At great expense you manage to get newspapers from London, New York, Berlin, Tokyo, and Moscow. Are you going to get good picture of “what happens” by reading them all? I think you would get some idea of how situation develops by reading accounts of battles and cross-referencing a map, but I don’t know it would be worth the expense. One thing I know, none of them is reporting much at all about the thing you most likely consider most salient about WW2, namely, the holocaust and the atomic bomb until after the fact.
[2] edit. addendum. Zvi used the word “hostile” and I want to stress its importance. During peacetime and in internal politics it is often a mistake to assume hostile influences (ie. conflict on conflict/mistake theory spectrum), because then you are engaging in a conflict all the time and likely to escalate it more and more. But now that we have a major European war, I think that is a good situation to assume that the players in the field are actually “hostile” because there is a shooting war conflict to begin with.
If you live in one of the countries at war, you will inevitably be exposed to “your” side’s propaganda. If you also look at the propaganda produced by the other side, you may well gain valuable information. For instance, if both sides acknowledge the truth of some fact, you can be reasonably sure that that it is the truth (whereas otherwise you might doubt whether your side is telling the truth about that). And if the other side’s propaganda talks about some issue that you’ve never even heard about, it may be useful to research whether something is being concealed by your side.
Even when those writing the propaganda have zero concern with telling the truth, they often will tell the truth, simply because it tends to be more believable. So looking at propaganda may expose you to true statements (which you hadn’t previously considered), which you may be able to confirm are true by independent means.
If I look at COVID reporting, then it seems like most news sources whether mainstream or alternative had those problems.
If the last two years have taught me anything is that it’s far for people to attempt to build a consistent model of reality when dealing with politically charged topics.
Just a reminder: if you are wondering how you can help, please consider supporting Navalny’s team (f.e. here). There aren’t many easy things that can be done on the Russian side, but this is one of them.
Many probably know the team for anticorruption work (their research was used in deciding on lists of sanctioned oligarchs). Now they (among other things) provide Russian-language info about the war, organize protests across the country, help arrested pay out fines, provide legal support for political prisoners, do interviews with experts, etc.
Edit: bad link
About “Information war” in Russia.
In Russia there are many loyalists with believes that can be described as “Yes, we agree that people in the government are sons of a bitch but they are our sons of a bitch.” Or “Yes, we agree that all government media are liars but all media are liars.” For all examples of bad deeds of the regime they have some example of something similar in the West. (Example: “Kremlin is persecuting participants of peaceful meetings”—“Ha-ha, Canadian authorities do the same with convoy protesters”.) Often these people are interested in western news more than in Russian news.
Also there is a “paradox”. One of the main lines of Kremlin propaganda is a statement: “In Russia we value non-material things and the West agents teach people to value only money and base pleasures.” (This inherited from the Soviet Union.) But it seems to me the most Kremlin supporters don’t trust in somebody’s altruism absolutely (excluding maybe members of their families or very intimate friends).
So Kremlin has big difficulties when it needs to force people to do something. For example Russian vaccination campaign was failed despite the propaganda. But it is much easier to force people not to do something.
About Kamil Galeev.
Twitter thread sounds reasonable for me. A little remark: Post in the Account Chamber after the governorship hardly can be treated as a promotion. Orlova lost the election and it seems to me that people in Kremlin was disappointed. But for now Kremlin don’t practice hard punishments for their people and sometimes it moves they to unimportant posts.
The US and NATO did not promise not to further expand NATO. Certain officials may have promised this, and those officials were out of power by the time NATO actually expanded. There’s an established procedure by which governments make promises to other states that are considered binding on future governments of the same state; it’s called a treaty, and this procedure was not used. When someone makes a promise to you, you have no reason to expect that whoever takes their job after they retire will follow through on that promise, unless they made the promise in the form of a contract on behalf of their employer.
This simply kicks the buck to the question of why the US (and other countries) seem reluctant in general to make long-lasting treaties, and the answer to that question still seems pretty clearly some form of “lack of ability (desire) to keep (make) commitments that are (will be) no longer seen as in our interest in the face of pressure”.
Also, I would argue that the Trump administration did in fact significantly weaken the US’ credibility even on the holding-up-existing-commitments front, what with their treatment of various agreements like NAFTA or the Trans-Pacific Partnership; this shows fairly starkly that even agreements that are supposed to bind future iterations of the same government do not in fact do so, which in turn implies that there is no real mechanism to make those kinds of promises at all, regardless of whether you call them “treaties”, “agreements”, “pacts”, or what have you.
Unlike Zvi, I am less inclined to treat this as anyone’s fault in particular; it certainly isn’t just unique to the US. But it is an unfortunate consequence of the way humans, even (especially?) humans in power, seem to implement CDT by default (and an extremely myopic version of CDT at that). I don’t think it’s a stretch to argue smarter agents would do better here.
What makes you say that?
I agree to some extent about Trump’s treatment of agreements damaging US credibility, but even then, I’m not sure if the US explicitly violated any treaties under Trump (not NAFTA, which was replaced by agreement of all parties, or the TPP, which the US never ratified. Perhaps the Iran nuclear deal? I’m not clear on what the legal status of the US’s withdrawl was).
The mechanism to make these kinds of promises is the desire of people with influence over a country’s decisions to maintain that country’s credibility. (This is broader than just people who have final say over a decision, since other political actors can often exert pressure on them). This isn’t an airtight mechanism, sure, but it works to some extent. If you’re trying to imply that it’s on no firmer ground than the promises made by US negotiators to Gorbechev in 1990, then that’s not true at all. In order for a country to be swayed at all by promises previous leaders have made, a necessary prerequisite is for its current leaders to have some way to be aware that previous promises have been made. A private conversation between past leaders, with a transcript that’s classified at the time decisions violating promises made in said conversation are made, doesn’t cut it.
Thanks for the analysis; are you aware of any organizations doing effective work in making nuclear more appealing to the general population?
We spend a good portion of the last decade saying that the mercenaries in Donbas aren’t really mercenaries but are actually Russian troops.
Russia will likely voice a position that if there’s a sizable number of foreign mercenaries, those are NATO troops.
Right now there’s indeed an exodus of young qualified people from Russia. The easiest path goes to countries that are visa-free for Russians, like Armenia or Argentina.
Thanks for this. Pre-model thoughts are helpful.
A slight quibble: if I understand correctly, what Russia doesn’t currently have is air supremacy. I’d be somewhat surprised to learn that they don’t have air superiority—at least I’ve not seen anyone making that case. My impression is that they are able to conduct air operations without prohibitive interference (though not without significant risk), but that, as you say, that’s not how their military is designed to operate.
Supposing that’s the case, it makes an important difference that ”...is using the air in ways you want to prevent...” isn’t all you have to worry about: there’s also ”...has the option to use the air in ways you’d want to prevent...”.
Completely agree on no-fly-zone being a bad option for reasons of escalation.
But “Might not even be net helpful” seems a stretch (escalation aside).
[I could easily be wrong in my assumptions here; I’d welcome a better model]
Even without unusual weather events, usual weather means you need something to handle times when you don’t have it: whether stored (solar) power, or using a different resource.
ow?
Sort of ‘cost versus opportunity cost’.
Carbon taxes actually poll strongly: an average of +36 net favorability across the 8 polls I’ve seen since 2020.
This might not be the time to push a carbon tax, but as you say, avoiding gas tax holidays would be similarly good. I created a campaign to do this, starting in California. We’re currently called Save the Gas Tax, but will probably rename to Stop Oil Subsidies soon.
Following in the UK’s footsteps with household transfers would be a much better use of funds if we want to spend to reduce pressure at the pump.
This question is tangential to the main content of your post, so I have written it up in a separate post of my own, but I notice I am confused that you and many other rationalists are balls to the wall for cheap and abundant clean energy and other pro-growth, tech-promoting public policies, while also being alarmist about AI X-risk, and I am curious if you see any contradiction there:
Is There a Valley of Bad Civilizational Adequacy?
I absolutely loved the section about Decision Theory. Throughout this crisis, even way before the war began, the narrative in the West has been “De-escalate tensions with Russia”, which is just an euphemism for “We are open to blackmail”. Fortunately we essentially pulled a “reverse-bluff”, where we first showed weakness in the lead-up and then flipped the table with regard to sanctions and military aid once the shooting started. Better late than never I suppose, but I still hold our weakness, our so-called de-escalatory stance responsible for the bloodshed that is happening now.
I didn’t downvote, btw, but isn’t this kinda like WW2 started?
Hitler: “Can I have Poland?”
West: “We would be concerned.”
Hitler: “Ah, is that all? Works for me.” (attacks Poland)
West: “Uhm, by ‘concerned’ we actually meant that this time we would attack you.”
No, it was the opposite of that.
Hitler: “Can I have Poland?”
West: “No. If you invade Poland, we will fight you.”
Hitler: “Whatever, lol.” (attacks Poland)
West: “Uhm, by ‘fight you’, we actually meant formally declare war but not actually attack you.”
For what it’s worth, I got to Kameel independently, from an Israeli East Europe expert.
Big fan of Galeev.
The Wagner group specifically isn’t really a mercenary, like a neutral force anyone can hire. It’s built and maintained by the Russian government. (It’s not like Ukraine could have outbid Russia and the Wagner group would have come in to defend against Russia instead.)
Ukraine has offered a million dollars for every Russian pilot who defects with a jet, or $500k for a helicopter. Pretty interesting strategy though I have no idea how the pilots are supposed to make that happen without getting shot down.