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lessdazed comments on 9/11 as mindkiller - Less Wrong
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Comments (111)
Yeah, as a supporter of both wars that occurred as a result of this, a lot of us clearly fucked up very badly. Like really badly. Even if I can still see Afganistan as the right thing to do, the totality was clearly something which I supported and which was clearly the wrong thing to do.
And not just the United States but all of humanity is paying for the consequences. Not just in the forms of massive numbers of people dead but also a terrible economy and all sorts of science that isn't getting funded. In a world without the Iraq war, things like the James Webb Telescope and the Tevatron might still be getting funded. Just now, it seems like funding for necessary radioisotopes for lots of purposes is getting cut. And the increased security and immigration measures over the last decade have made many scientists just avoid the United States.
We've fucked up badly, and the long term consequences are still playing out.
Edit: The only saving grace is that I think I'm more rational than I was then (no longer religious, more sympathetic to Bayesianism and have a lot more life experience). But lots of otherwise rational people supported both wars also. So that change is likely insufficient.
It's important to avoid the if-not-for-the-worst-waste-of-money-in-the-budget-the-most-worthy-unfunded-program-would-have-been-funded argument.
The argument here is that in truth, without the worst-waste-of-money the funds would have been spent on some way which would have been better, but would not have been the way the speaker thinks is best: it wouldn't all have gone to eg that science program. Is that right?
Basically. The wars are largely funded through separate bills, so the deficit probably wouldn't have been incurred at all. Other similar bills that were limited largely by total debt, such as the bailout and stimulus bills, would probably have been the most different had the wars not been waged.
I think of the Iraq war as more "a waste of money" than something causing "massive numbers of people dead." The succession after Saddam was not something that was ever going to go well, which is what what actually happened should be compared to.
Something over 3% of the population was killed as a result, by our best estimates. It would be good if a similar survey was done for Libya so we could compare different approaches to regime change.
The cases are very different.
It could have gone a lot better than it did. After the US Gov deposed Saddam, they disbanded the Iraqi army. The Iraqi army was composed of evil, angry people with their own hidden arsenals - the sort of people we really, really don't want to have out of work and stirring up trouble. If we had given them all busywork desk jobs instead, at least for little while, I think that most of the violence would have been averted.
I agree that a well-run invasion and reconstruction would have been substantially better than what happened.
I do not think that an unguided, sudden power vacuum would have been substantially better than what happened.
Can you explain why? This seems like a perfectly normal and reasonable sort of argument about dividing a limited pool of resources wisely.
In politics, the argument is perfectly normal and unreasonable. It means (borrowing the idea from novalis' link):
"This program was the worst waste of money in the budget, because it was against my political views. It was only funded because of people abusing the process to advance political views different from mine. If it was not for this program, so many other programs could have been funded which agree with my political views and were only blocked for political reasons."
You assume that the government would divide the pool wisely. (Not that it necessarily wouldn't, but not that it necessarily would either.)
I'm not sure if this is really the way upvotes are supposed to be used, but I voted you up from -1 because I don't think "Can you explain why?" is a question that should be censured.
I appreciate this. I genuinely didn't (still don't ) understand what lessdazed was trying to say, and it would be a really bad thing if downvoting ignorance became common practice.
I will try again.
Counterfactually, if the US budget hadn't included (pick expenditure), (unrelated expenditure that was't made) probably would not have been made, and (unrelated cut that was made) probably would have been made anyway.
As the US engages in deficit spending, whatever program you think most important that wasn't funded, if Congress collectively agreed with you, it would have been funded regardless of other spending. An argument for a program is only weakly an argument against all other programs. If a program is actually bad, it is suspicious that the worst that can be said about it is that it isn't as worthy an expenditure of the most valuable unfunded thing - that's like arguing that someone is sickly because they can't lift more weight than the strongest weightlifter in their city. If someone is truly sickly, there really should be a better argument showing that than that particular measure of their strength.
The way I understood it was that "the-worst-waste-of-money" (and possibly "the-most-worthy-unfunded-program" as well) is a label applied in retrospect. To fund the most worthy unfunded program, you'd need to unfund one of 100 programs. It's likely that of the 100 programs, one will turn out to be an abject failure, but it's hard to predict which one it will be ahead of time. Conversely, just because the unfunded program seems most worthy now, doesn't mean that earlier one could have predicted the need for it.
Right. But we're seeing budget cuts across the board now, and many of these programs are tiny programs which were being funded. When one for example compares things to say the mid 1990s, it does seem that while one can't guarantee that all these programs would be funded it seems like a safe bet that more of them would be funded than are now.
Still it seems reasonable to point out the opportunity cost of spending a couple trillion dollars on a misguided war effort. It is true that the economy would be in better shape without those expenditures, and it's also probably true that US federal budget constraints would be different as a result. (However it may still have been spent elsewhere instead of scientific research.)