This post is even-handed and well-reasoned, and explains the issues involved well. The strategy-stealing assumption seems important, as a lot of predictions are inherently relying on it either being essentially true, or effectively false, and I think the assumption will often effectively be a crux in those disagreements, for reasons the post illustrates well.
The weird thing is that Paul ends the post saying he thinks the assumption is mostly true, whereas I thought the post was persuasive that the assumption is mostly false. The post illustrates that the unaligned force is likely to have many strategic and tactical advantages over aligned forces, that should allow the unaligned force to, at a minimum, ‘punch above its weight’ in various ways even under close-to-ideal conditions. And after the events of 2020, and my resulting updates to my model of humans, I’m highly skeptical that we’ll get close to ideal.
This post is even-handed and well-reasoned, and explains the issues involved well. The strategy-stealing assumption seems important, as a lot of predictions are inherently relying on it either being essentially true, or effectively false, and I think the assumption will often effectively be a crux in those disagreements, for reasons the post illustrates well.
The weird thing is that Paul ends the post saying he thinks the assumption is mostly true, whereas I thought the post was persuasive that the assumption is mostly false. The post illustrates that the unaligned force is likely to have many strategic and tactical advantages over aligned forces, that should allow the unaligned force to, at a minimum, ‘punch above its weight’ in various ways even under close-to-ideal conditions. And after the events of 2020, and my resulting updates to my model of humans, I’m highly skeptical that we’ll get close to ideal.
Either way, I’m happy to include this.