it should have been obvious some new methods or technologies were going to be invented or developed. Since the strength of the bomber depended on a certain strategic landscape, it should have been seen that deliberate attempts to modify that landscape would likely result in a reduction of the bomber’s efficacy.
This sounds like hindsight bias to me. The opposite rationalization: it should have been obvious that since bombers were the best way to wage war, people like Stanley Baldwin would recognize this and put resources in to making them better.
Or to put it another way, according to your way of thinking, after the invention of the ICBM, it “should have been obvious” that humans would soon modify the strategic landscape to make ICBMs less effective. (They’re a heck of a lot worse than regular bombs, so the incentives are much stronger. Obviously we would come up with a reliable way to defend against them, right?)
Anyway, I think people are too confident in their knowledge/predictions in general. I suspect that a well-calibrated predictioneer would waffle a lot with their predictions, but waffling a lot looks bad and people want to look good. If looking good is a contributing factor for being high status, we’d expect many peoples’ heroes to be high-status folks who make incorrectly confident predictions (in the course of optimizing for high status or just because there was some other selection effect where confident predictors ended up becoming high status). So this is one area where everyone would just have to individually figure out for themselves that making confident predictions was a bad idea. (Maybe—it’s just an idea I’m not especially confident in :P)
Or to put it another way, according to your way of thinking, after the invention of the ICBM, it “should have been obvious” that humans would soon modify the strategic landscape to make ICBMs less effective.
Didn’t that happen, in a way? I don’t remember an ICBM (even non-nuclear) actually being used, despite a relatively large number of wars fought since their invention.
Or to put it another way, according to your way of thinking, after the invention of the ICBM, it “should have been obvious” that humans would soon modify the strategic landscape to make ICBMs less effective.
The logic of MAD, public opinion, and the lack of direct great power conflicts, seems to have precluded them from seriously trying—which is an interesting development.
This sounds like hindsight bias to me. The opposite rationalization: it should have been obvious that since bombers were the best way to wage war, people like Stanley Baldwin would recognize this and put resources in to making them better.
Or to put it another way, according to your way of thinking, after the invention of the ICBM, it “should have been obvious” that humans would soon modify the strategic landscape to make ICBMs less effective. (They’re a heck of a lot worse than regular bombs, so the incentives are much stronger. Obviously we would come up with a reliable way to defend against them, right?)
Anyway, I think people are too confident in their knowledge/predictions in general. I suspect that a well-calibrated predictioneer would waffle a lot with their predictions, but waffling a lot looks bad and people want to look good. If looking good is a contributing factor for being high status, we’d expect many peoples’ heroes to be high-status folks who make incorrectly confident predictions (in the course of optimizing for high status or just because there was some other selection effect where confident predictors ended up becoming high status). So this is one area where everyone would just have to individually figure out for themselves that making confident predictions was a bad idea. (Maybe—it’s just an idea I’m not especially confident in :P)
Didn’t that happen, in a way? I don’t remember an ICBM (even non-nuclear) actually being used, despite a relatively large number of wars fought since their invention.
The logic of MAD, public opinion, and the lack of direct great power conflicts, seems to have precluded them from seriously trying—which is an interesting development.