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JoshuaZ comments on 9/11 as mindkiller - Less Wrong
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I'm not sure if the post major combat decisions were the only problem. That obviously was a major part of what happened. But a major issue appears to be that we simply didn't have the resources to really handle two wars at once. And it seems that even with the bad management decisions made in Iraq, the Iraqi people were not nearly as willing to cooperate with the US or ready to establish democracy as I thought. The complete and utter absence of WMDs also made a major argument for the war completely incorrect.
It is possible that with much more careful decision making things might have turned out very differently. It is in general difficult in any complicated situation to pick any specific thing and say "but for that, things would have gone well". Even if the main cause was post-invasion decisions, the bottom line is that people like me implicitly trusted our armies and politicians to make good decisions in that context and they didn't.
There's another issue that also doesn't come up much: there's a certain fraction of the population which wasn't in favor of the Iraq war, and they like saying "I told you so" but in fact they didn't. Most of their argument was meaningless slogans. Iraq wasn't about blood for oil. And there wasn't an intrinsic moral problem with it. Some of the people against the war expressed worry about a Vietnam type situation, but even then that's not what happened. What has gone wrong in Iraq has only a superficial resemblance to what went wrong in Vietnam. I almost want to shout at those people "look! With all the motivated cognition that was happening why couldn't you actually hit on what actually might happen?" But that may be simply due to an emotional need to feel like things aren't completely the fault of people like me.
I suggest evaluating a point of view by its best proponents, not its worst or even its average proponents.
Andrew Rilstone got a lot right, ten years ago:
Right. That's an obvious failure mode that occurred here. Unfortunately, it isn't always clear which proponents of a view are actually the best. Moreover, sometimes the best proponents get lost in the noise of the less intelligent/rational/informed proponents.
This makes me worry how often this occurs. To use a really extreme example: maybe the Young Earth Creationists have some really slamdunk argument but I'm not noticing it because it is so rarely used? The failure that occurred in this context doesn't seem to be that large a scale of getting reality just wrong but it does create those sorts of worries.
The scale of the post 9/11 failure, not just by me, but my lots of people, some quite smart is frightening. I can look back and see specific things that went wrong but how much of even that is hindsight bias? How many big decision are we making even now that I support that in a decade will seem incredibly wrong and stupid?
I feel much the same way about the financial crisis.
What does this mean, exactly?
Hopefully the number of big decisions you support where you estimate the probability that things will be better than the counterfactual without the big decision is one is zero.
There's more to it than the probability things will be better - the worst thing that can happen is a lot worse than the best thing that can happen is good.
Those last sentences are both atrocious. If I think of a better way to say that I will edit it.
You have more to lose than you stand to gain, maybe?
Edit: Well yes, I meant 'you' in the generic sense. "There is always more to lose than stands to be gained," perhaps. (That's a horribly depressing worldview, incidentally. Which isn't to say it's wrong, just that... it's not the kind of thought you could use to cast the True Patronus Charm, if you know what I mean.)
That's too personal, I'm trying to say something that applies at every scale and every level of selflessness.
Under Saddam, hundreds of Iraqis annually were tortured, raped, and/or murdered for intimidation, crimes of their relatives, fun, punishment for losing international sports games, etc. Made into amputees, put into sausage machines alive, and on and on.
But the population was over 30,000,000, and the best plausible government wouldn't have the best justice system either. So war risks all those millions' lives. Sadaam wasn't killing millions annually - even without the low intensity war of the no-fly zones he probably wouldn't have killed more than hundreds of thousands, as he had done in the past.
If he had had many chemical weapons, it could have been really, really bad.
A good recent article.
That's an interesting article and I thank you for linking it, but the issue was never the truth value of any particular factual claim. It's just, when I offer as a synthesis of your point "You have more to lose than you stand to gain" and your response amounts to "Too specific", I have to think you're actually saying something along the lines of "All altruism is counterproductive" which is horribly depressing whether or not it's true.
Again, I'm just remarking on how something appears to me. And maybe implicitly asking you to refute the point or explain how you deal with it.
It's not all counterproductive, I'm not saying that for two reasons.
First, I was only speaking about decision making and considering the odds of various future outcomes. Obviously, no mater what one's intentions are or how poorly decisions are made, things may work out very well.
Second, I am claiming that it is usually the case that there is more to lose than to gain, that building things takes more work than destroying things. It can still be best to be altruistic.
Consider two six sided dice, one with sides numbered 6-5-4-2-1-1 and one with sides numbered 3-2-2-2-2-2. If I offered you dollars equal to the result of the roll of a die, and the opportunity to roll either, you would probably choose to roll the first, even though its worst case scenario is worse.
I'd be careful about that kind of thinking. When you get something wrong, dismissing the people who got it right as low status and wrongheaded is a convenient way to avoid updating on the evidence. A bit under half the US population opposed the Iraq war, including many prominent people (Senators, opinion writers, policy analysts, etc.), but you seem to be focusing on a small fraction of opponents ("no blood for oil", war is intrinsically wrong) who mostly opposed the Afghanistan war as well, which puts them in much narrower company.
Arguments made against the Iraq war at the time (many of which are at least hinted at in this short piece by Dahlia Lithwick) included:
But the simplest case is just that war is a destructive, costly thing, so if you're going to get involved in one you'd better have a damn good reason and you'd better get it right. The war needs to accomplish something at least as big as its cost, which means the bigger the war the higher the standard. Iraq didn't meet that standard at the time, still less once it turned out that there were no nuclear/chemical/biological weapons. Most of the arguments were variations on that theme, demonstrating the high costs of this particular war or poking holes in the various reasons given for the war.
I really don't think this is the place to relitigate the Iraq War, but for the record, there were people opposing the war for reasons that were a)not easily compressed into slogans and b)to a greater or lesser degree validated by the evidence. For my part, I opposed the Iraq war despite overestimating the probability that Iraq had functional "weapons of mass destruction" (I mean chemical and biological here, and the former really shouldn't be considered WMD, but such is the terminology) because I expected that it would produce regional geopolitical chaos afterward. At the time, I underestimated the amount of sectarian conflict and (so far at least) overestimated the degree of Kurdish-Arab ethnic violence. But I was not and am not an expert on the area. Other people really did get this right at the time.
Upvoted. I certainly don't disagree with the point that some people got it right. The concern is more that the fraction that got the right objection seems to have been a small fraction of the people opposing entry.
I'm not so sure about that. Certainly if I reasoned from the positions of my own immediate social circle, I would get an unrepresentative picture of what people opposed in general believed, but I can say that those who could articulate clear and sensible reasons for not going to war which were vindicated by time were not in short supply, even at anti-war rallies where the actual talking points were more along the lines of "no blood for oil."
The main problem with motivated cognition isn't that it fails to find true results, the main problems are that it can't distinguish between true and false and is blind to contrary evidence.