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ArisKatsaris comments on Rationality Quotes December 2011 - Less Wrong
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Primarily the latter. Consider this:
North Korea abducts women for the president's harem.
South Korea does not (neither openly nor secretly, with p~0).
And yet it's people of the same nationality on both sides of the border. Therefore such things don't seem to me to be primarily dependent on "national character". They seem to be primarily about what each leader can get away with doing. South Korea and America are semi-democratic capitalist states. North Korea is a totalitarian regime.
To get back to my comment where I explained what I consider to be a reasonable interpretation of "national character," I defined it thus:
In this discussion, I am not at all interested in the exact connection that these norms have with ethnicity or any other factors. I merely claim that for whatever reason, there is variation in such norms across governments, which sometimes gives very strong information on what they may be capable of doing.
(And anyway, several decades of life under radically different regimes imposed by foreign conquerors, one of which practices extreme isolation, will cause cultural divergences that run deeper than the immediate structure of clear incentives. Moreover, this one example is not conclusive proof that all such differences in governments' behaviors in all places and times are caused by the same factor.)
But I think that such a definition where "national character" are the norms followed by a a national government and which it's expected to be followed by a broad consensus, leads to bizarre ideas such as e.g. the "national character" of the whole of Eastern Europe must be described as having changed at the fall of communism, even though the fall came from within. So the national character suddenly modified itself, just because the norms of government changed themselves. Eh. I don't think that's really how these words are normally used.
And if we return to the subject of actually secret, non-open operations -- if I believe (which I do) that FSB bombed some of Russia's own apartment buildings (for I am a conspiracy theorist in regards to several conspiracy theories), but that the MI5 wouldn't do that against British apartments, nor would CIA do it for American apartments, I don't think it makes much sense to say that the Russian national character enables Russia to blow its own people up, but that the British and American national characters does not. The character of their respective government structures, sure. But not the national characters.
To the extent that there's a "national character" that affects policy, I feel it has primarily, perhaps even solely to do with concepts of self-identification similar in type to the concept of Clash of Civilizations by Huntington. e.g. Greece supported the Serbs in the Yugoslav wars for no more and no less reason than that its "national character" contained a self-identification with Eastern Orthodox significantly more than with Catholics or with Muslims. Now there's predictive power. In any dispute between orthodox and non-orthodox, I know that Greece will back the orthodox. I know that Arab nations will back the Palestinians against Israel. America in the Cold War self-identified as anti-communist, so in any dispute between people identifying as communists and people that didn't , I know America would back the people that didn't.
There's the extent that national character plays in regards to policy. If there's some other element in it with predictive power, I don't see it.
With some noteworthy exceptions, particularly in Africa. I do generally agree that rules of thumb like this generally have decent predictive power though.
If the exceptions are about opposition to white-racist regimes, I believe this is explained by modern-day United States identifying itself even more as multiracial and egalitarian (atleast in regards to race), than it does as anti-communist.
Yes I was mostly referring to countries that where under white rule such as South Africa and Rhodesia.
Note that equal predictive power on this set of examples can be gained by say US opposition to any system except somewhat free market universal suffrage democracy. It would also fit with the recent rhetoric that strings together meddling from Libya to Iraq in the past decade. And it fits the popular narrative about the 20th century that's been with us since way back in the late 1920's about Fascisms, Liberal Democracy and Communism battling to capture the future of mankind. But as I write I can think of many more exceptions to my hypothesis than I can to yours in the last 40 years.
Which leads me to a question, why didn't you then put that as the example for Americans in line with Greeks supporting the Orthodox side?
Edit: The last question was referring to your hypothesis rather than mine.
No. I probably don't have enough fingers and toes to count all the dictatorships the US has supported just because they happened to be anti-leftist dictatorships. I think white-rule regimes are the only type of regimes that counts lower in status than "communist" to Americans.
In conservative forums I can still hear Americans say that Greeks should be grateful for things like the US-supported junta because it "saved Greece from the commies", even though it abolished democracy.
So, no. Opposition to communists and white-rule regimes are good examples for the American "national character", but oppositions to dictatorships in general is not.
Heh. Sorry I know its an awful stereotype and I don't want to offend anyone but that's just such an American thing to do or say. Like:
"If it wasn't for us you'd all be speaking German!"
Every time I hear such discussion a dialogue runs in my head
USA: If it wasn't for us that nail would have never been hammered.
WORLD: It was a bolt.
USA: Doesn't count. Still Hammered It.
That's brilliant. I'll remember that one.
I think we misunderstood each other. I basically dismissed the hypothesis I was considering in the second paragraph with the last sentence of that same paragraph.
The question was with regard to
Frankly, because two examples (Rhodesia and South Africa) don't make for a well-substantiated pattern -- especially when United States was less severe than most of the rest of the world in its condemnation of these states.
American opposition to communism does make for a much more obvious, simple, and clear-cut example, in contrast, with dozens of substantiated anti-communist actions. And I'm not a troll that I would give unclear and controversial examples to be disputed and argued over when more clear-cut and obvious examples suffice to make my point.
A well-substantiated more general pattern is that in U.S. foreign relations, anti-colonialism trumped anti-communism solidly. Besides Rhodesia and South Africa, some other major examples are the Katanga Crisis and the Suez Crisis. In the latter, the U.S. effectively joined forces with the Soviet Union to support Nasser against the British and the French.
Moreover, in some cases the U.S. "support" for anti-communists was of the "with friends like that, who needs enemies" variety, sometimes with major elements within the U.S. government effectively favoring the communists. China is the most notable example. Not to mention the cases where the U.S. supported communists who fought under a flimsy and transparent pretense of being non-communists, like Castro in Cuba.
So, on the whole, I wouldn't say the pattern of U.S. Cold War anti-communism is so consistent and clear-cut.
Really depends on which period. In the 1950s you didn't hear much condemnation from anyone except maybe Communist countries. Makes sense since much of the US was segregated in the 1960s, also South Africa did get some non-military support from the US in the name of fighting communism, because the US needed the country for operations in Africa. Perhaps the phenomena we talked about with regards to their hostility with South Africa and Rhodesia, where basically meant as a disingenuous ploy by some US anti-communist players. It is no secret that many important politicians in private argued that eliminating segregation in the US was necessary to try and reduce the appeal of Soviet propaganda in the Third world. Maybe relations with South Africa where at first seen as a delicate balance looking good and helping the Communists take over the country versus looking bad and helping Soviets gain influence elsewhere.
In a way the "egalitarian" bent wasn't something that affected only those two states, but more the general US attitude towards decolonialization, which was a significant phenomena and trend of the second half of the 20th century. Overall making states independent didn't help slowing the spread of Communism but it arguably often made direct political influence easier, so why this impulse found expression in action rather than just sympathy isn't exactly a mystery.
Also to check the other side of "less hostile than others" statement, this wasn't always true. I think Israel was cooperating rather closely with South Africa even in a military sense during the 1970s (there is even speculation of cooperation on their nuclear programs), and places like Japan just didn't care (say in the late 80s) and simply wanted to do business. Even Britain's opposition was much muted due to economic concerns.
I think agree with this.
What about the Portuguese colonial wars, with Holden Roberto and the CIA backed FNLA and UPA?
I could take a standard die and tell you, or even someone who had never seen a die before, that of its six faces, one, two, three, four, or five dots are always face up after a roll. In such a case, it's not clear that's better than not knowing anything - it would depend on exactly what you were doing with the information. The correct rule (when we only care about whether or not a six is rolled) is "one, two, three, four, or five dots are face up after a roll 5/6 of the time, and 1/6 of the time the six dots are face up."
The problem with this discussion is that "support" is an ambiguous term. The U.S. government is not a monolithic entity whose parts all act in unison so that it would be meaningful to speak of its support or opposition as a clear-cut matter. What's more, its ostensible "support" is in many cases qualified, indecisive, badly executed, and attached with monstrous strings (often due to internal conflict within USG itself) so much that it ends up being ruinous for the "supported" party.
To take only the most notable example, the U.S. "support" for the Chinese nationalists against Mao's communists was, for all practical purposes, equivalent to a prolonged backstab.
Soviet support for the Second Spanish Republic is a good example of this phenomenon.
This is just the confounding factor of foreign domination, just like in the North/South Korea example. Of course, like with all political categories, the distinctions aren't always clear, since prolonged foreign domination may gradually cause irreversible changes, or even gradually get to be seen as the normal state of affairs. Still, the different national characters of Eastern European countries have been amply demonstrated when comparing their state both before 1990 and since then.
A better example of what you're aiming for would be periods of political instability in which some extremist faction like e.g. the Nazis grabs power and proceeds to implement extremist policies that would have seemed unbelievable coming from that same country shortly before that. Clearly, such black swan events limit the predictability of any model one uses for understanding history and politics. It doesn't mean they have no predictive power during normal times, though.
These things can't be separated from each other. You are speaking as if the system of government is an independent variable. In reality, formally the same system of government imposed in different places will produce very different results, and these results are very much dependent on what is conventionally understood as "national character."
It's hard to make any concrete predictions without offending various nationalities, so I'll limit myself to offending my own kind. For example, suppose I read a story about an affair where vast millions were pillaged in corrupt dealings some years ago and yet the culprits are happy, free, and untouchable despite all this being public knowledge. If it happens in Croatia, I'll shrug my shoulders. But if I heard about this happening in, say, Denmark, I would, like Malcolm, express disbelief because it would, indeed, sound incompatible with their national character. Even though the laws on the books and the theoretical legal consequences are probably similar in both places.
I understand that you are trying to defend a better form of Malcolm's statements, but is there any other reason you are defending the phrase "national character"? One could just as easily explain the differences you note by reference to national culture, national values, national commitment to rule of law, or suchlike. By contrast, "character" is often deployed as an applause light without any way of cashing out the reference more specifically.
All these terms are also often deployed as applause lights. "National character" is just a term that is supposed to subsume them all. Nowadays this term is somewhat antiquated, and it's not a part of my regular vocabulary, but I definitely don't see any reason for why someone's casual use of it 72 years ago should raise any eyebrows (either back then or now).
In addition to my previous reply, and to separate the more controversial part from the rest:
Frankly, if you believe that people running the MI5 or the CIA would be willing and capable of doing something like that, I think you have a very distorted view of reality in this regard. Unfortunately, the inferential distances are probably too large for us to have a productive discussion about it in this context.
(In reality, I don't think CIA would be capable of killing my neighbor's cat without it leaking into the press tomorrow. In fact, they'd probably bungle the task so badly that the leak wouldn't even be necessary.)
That would have been news to many anti-communists, but let's better not go there.
The CIA assassinated a US citizen not two months ago, and the government made no attempt to hide it out of an (accurate) expectation that the public would approve. Of course I doubt the FBI has killed a white person on US soil by blowing up their apartment recently, or will in the forseeable future, but if we allow probable facts about national character to be this specific it seems that trivially any fact about what a government is likely to do is a fact about its national character.
Historically, there have at least been some iodine-poor areas within nations that outsiders might have dismissed as being full of cretins without being wholly unjustified...
They have different citizenships, different cultural messages from birth, different access to such messages from the rest of the world (such as the US). They cannot accurately be described as having the same nationality.
Different something, sure.
But North Korea has more in common with South Korea than it has in common with any other country. And South Korea is probably much closer to North Korea than any other country is to North Korea. Anyway, this is all nitpicking, because ArisKatsaris' main point remains: South Korean leaders don't refrain from harem-kidnapping based on national character, but based on the negative incentives they face.
I'm pretty sure that if you had asked me what "national character" means before this thread, I would definitely have included "personality cult around a wacky dictator"!
For the reasons laid out in the quote that started this discussion, I'm not sure "national character" refers to anything at all.
It's either all applause lights or what behaviorists might call explanatory fiction (i.e. it describes certain behavior, but does not actually explain anything).
That's not so much of a problem, provided 1) it can help you make predictions, and 2) it's not screened off by better models (which would necessarily include those that actually do explain, provided they are simple enough to be practically applied).
An explanatory fiction in the wild:
A: Why is Charlie doing badly in school?
B: He's lazy.
A: What makes you say that?
B: He's always daydreaming.
A: So let's <do some intervention that would help Charlie daydream less frequently>
B: Nah, it wouldn't work. Charlie is lazy.
So, saying that the British don't use assassination as a foreign policy tool based on their "national character" is really just saying the British don't assassinate because they don't assassinate.
Notice how saying "The British won't assassinate in the future because they haven't in the past" doesn't really invoke "national character" at all.
If "[h]e's always daydreaming" is in fact the only evidence that Charlie is lazy, then the Lazy Charlie model is poor at making predictions new situations. If it was only the most salient, and B has much experience with Charlie in other situations that leads to the same conclusion, "Charlie is lazy" may be a better model, and a daydreaming specific intervention would be of less value.
"The British won't assassinate because they haven't in the past" does not invoke "national character" but it is also discarding portions of the theory that might be put to predictive use. "The British won't assassinate because they haven't in the past, they have spoken publicly against doing so, and they seem to value the appearance of consistency", for instance - if you have evidence for each of those, you should be adjusting your belief that the British were behind the plot downward somewhat; "that they haven't in the past" is not the only kind of evidence that applies. Models of that type might, in a handwavy casual conversation (although I'm not sure Wittgenstein ever had casual conversations) be pointed at with the phrase "national character" without a specific model necessarily being described in detail.
It could easily be that national character was used as a shorthand, which would make Wittgenstein's response look bad because holding conversation to a higher standard of precision without warning is quite rude.
But if it's a shorthand, then it doesn't actually explain anything. And the risk is that Malcolm thought his statement was an explanation, not a shorthand. Your experience may be different, but most of the encounters I've had with the phrase "national character" are intended as explanations. Or in-group identification signals intended to avoid further questions.. But maybe the idiom meant something different in 1940s England.