I wasn’t paying attention to Russia’s build-up on Ukraine’s border. When Russia invaded, I quickly copied the predictions of Western experts on Russia.
Western experts copied their predictions from public reports by US intelligence.
US intelligence copied their predictions from secret reports stolen from Russia.
Russian intelligence was garbage due to systemic corruption and the fact Putin didn’t tell his lower echelons they’d be invading Ukraine for real.
Ironically, I wrote a story last year satirizing a world where every intelligence agency just steals each other’s data.
That’s fair. Personally I’m skeptical of any causal chain with too many moving parts like this because the probability of the whole chain holding up is the probability of each step going forward conditional on the previous steps and that product can get small very fast. Still, it’s a funny explanation and deserves an upvote for that alone.
I was paying attention but for the reasons mentioned in the post (and possibly others, maybe groupthink?) I ended up being way more confident in Russian success than I should have been. I wasn’t copying predictions from Western experts in any direct way, though some of their model of the world likely blended over into mine in a process of gradual osmosis.
I also wasn’t surprised by Ukrainian resistance; I just thought that it would be more analogous to Polish resistance than Finnish resistance (in 1939) in how successful it would end up being.
I wasn’t surprised by Ukrainian resistance. In the article you link, I wrote “The Ukrainian government will fight a total war to defend its sovereignty.” which was bet against in the comments. I was surprised by Russian incompetence. My model for why I was wrong goes like this.
I wasn’t paying attention to Russia’s build-up on Ukraine’s border. When Russia invaded, I quickly copied the predictions of Western experts on Russia.
Western experts copied their predictions from public reports by US intelligence.
US intelligence copied their predictions from secret reports stolen from Russia.
Russian intelligence was garbage due to systemic corruption and the fact Putin didn’t tell his lower echelons they’d be invading Ukraine for real.
Ironically, I wrote a story last year satirizing a world where every intelligence agency just steals each other’s data.
That’s fair. Personally I’m skeptical of any causal chain with too many moving parts like this because the probability of the whole chain holding up is the probability of each step going forward conditional on the previous steps and that product can get small very fast. Still, it’s a funny explanation and deserves an upvote for that alone.
I was paying attention but for the reasons mentioned in the post (and possibly others, maybe groupthink?) I ended up being way more confident in Russian success than I should have been. I wasn’t copying predictions from Western experts in any direct way, though some of their model of the world likely blended over into mine in a process of gradual osmosis.
I also wasn’t surprised by Ukrainian resistance; I just thought that it would be more analogous to Polish resistance than Finnish resistance (in 1939) in how successful it would end up being.