Ukraine Post #2: Options

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:

1. Provide military aid (e.g. by giving money directly to Ukraine).

2. Provide humanitarian aid (e.g. by giving money to those that provide it).

3. Lobby or advocate for better government policies or corporate actions.

4. Attempt to build (and ideally share) a better understanding of the situation.

5. 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:

1. Provide military assistance to the extent we can without too much escalation.

2. Humanitarian aid.

3. Economic sanctions.

The rest fall under the category of ‘things worth doing anyway.’ This stuff is win-win. This means doing things like:

1. Nuclear power.

2. Additional other energy production of various kinds.

3. Reconciling with other oil producers to extent possible.

4. Carbon tax.

5. Taking in as many Russians and Ukrainians as possible who want out.

6. Supporting free flow of information.

7. Everything else that’s obviously great (e.g. reduced zoning, more public transit, more building and urbanization, reduced occupational licensing, and so on…)

8. 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.)