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gwern comments on Historical examples of flinching away - Less Wrong
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I disagree. The unusual nature of banking and finance is explicitly recognized and dealt with: you can't throw a rock in the fractional-reserve banking literature without hitting someone talking about self-fulfilling prophecies and the usefulness of central banks having printing presses enabling them to make credible commitments and so on and so forth. This is not the case in most fields and so definitely not the motivation behind most flinching examples.
(eg. Stalin ignoring Hitler's build-up is not an example of optimism being a self-fulfilling prophecy but possibly entirely the opposite, a self-defeating prophecy - the lack of Soviet reaction encouraging the German plans.)
The sentence you quote and the sentence after "I disagree" support rather than contradict each other. (Not after the edit.)
Stalin could have felt that planning for a Nazi attack (which included talking about it because of the possibility of Nazi spies) would increase the odds of a Nazi attack.
Plus, I've read that Stalin had received lots of reports of invasions that proved to be false when the Nazi's didn't invade when the reports claimed they would and Stalin did have good reason to think that the U.K. was trying to plant false evidence of a Nazi invasion. Furthermore, Stalin might have reasonably concluded that it would be strongly against the Nazi's self-interest to invade Russia. Finally, I find it hard to believe that the extremely paranoid Stalin really didn't consider the possibility of a Nazi invasion. Might Stalin's critics be suffering from hindsight bias?
I've edited to be clearer.
Yes. But until we have closely looked at it, I am content to take the subject-area experts at their word when they say it was a blunder by Stalin, much like I accept their word about other mistakes by Hitler and Churchill and in general.
Also, it's not like Stalin trying to do something would help the matter. Marshal Timoshenko was struggling to increase Red Army's readiness regardless of Hitler's plans; every month spent in delusion meant a month well-spent by Timoshenko... Forcing the events could easily make the disaster even worse.