V_V comments on Rationality Quotes July 2014 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: VAuroch 06 July 2014 06:51AM

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Comment author: Jiro 11 August 2014 06:55:38PM * -1 points [-]

a more apt analogy would be if somebody shooted in the air in the general direction of your house, knowing that with overwhelming probability he was unlikely to hit you, and in retaliation you dropped a napalm bomb in his neighborhood, killing everybody but him.

The "overwhelming probability" of being "unlikely to hit" is a bad analogy to the real world. Hamas's rockets don't kill many people, but they're not so unlikely to hit that they don't kill some people. It's not as if they're blowing a puff of cigarette smoke towards you and increasing the probability by 0.001 that you may someday get cancer--people actually die from those rockets.

Furthermore, you left out the part where the guy deliberately shot at you from a crowded neighborhood so that the only way to defend yourself is to endanger the people around him.

Comment author: V_V 11 August 2014 07:36:46PM * -2 points [-]

It's not as if they're blowing a puff of cigarette smoke towards you and increasing the probability by 0.001 that you may someday get cancer--people actually die from those rockets.

How many Israeli civilians have been killed by rockets since Operation Protective Edge? Three. Out of a population of 8.1 million.
If Hamas hired tourists to go to Israel and puff smoke in crowed areas it would probably have a greater effect on the Israeli mortality rate.

Furthermore, you left out the part where the guy deliberately shot at you from a crowded neighborhood so that the only way to defend yourself is to endanger the people around him.

As opposed to seeking a political solution?

Comment author: Azathoth123 13 August 2014 03:34:09AM -1 points [-]

As opposed to seeking a political solution?

Isreal has been trying that for ~30 years. It doesn't seem to be working.

Comment author: VAuroch comment score below threshold [+] (10 children)

Comment author: Azathoth123 13 August 2014 11:09:48PM -2 points [-]

And it's pretty hard to argue that they've been seeking a political solution in good faith in the last 6-10 years;

That's because it was clear by that point that this isn't working and that the Palestinians have even less interest in a good faith political solution.

Comment author: VAuroch comment score below threshold [+] (8 children)

Comment author: [deleted] 14 August 2014 06:48:46AM 4 points [-]

As often happens, the truth is more complex than either of you are giving credit for.

Neither Fatah nor Hamas has much real popular support, at this point. I agree that Fatah has in fact been making credible efforts towards negotiating a peace deal, actually (and I say this as an Israeli). Hamas, yes, they are in fact genocidally-inclined clerical fascists, Sharia law blah blah, executing dissenters in the streets, blah blah.

But Hamas has one thing going for them: they fight the Israelis. Fatah does not, certainly not as much as the Palestinian public would prefer. So the current situation is: most Palestinians favor the PLO's traditional ideology of semi-secular nationalism, and believe in the PLO's traditional historiography, but consider the Fatah organization itself to have become corrupt stooges for the Israeli occupier. Some of them channel this belief into despair, some into political anarchism, and many into a quiet, tacit support for Hamas militancy.

Netanyahu's nonstop bad-faith "negotiation" ever since his election and reelection has not been helping.

Comment author: V_V 15 August 2014 01:29:43PM * 1 point [-]

I've been thinking about the issue in terms of (armchair) game theory:

Ostensibly, both parties essentially claim to be playing a a tit-for-tat strategy in an interated prisoner dilemma where the other party is a DefectBot that can't be cooperated with.
Who played "Defect" first and when is a matter of dispute: arguments usually involve to events going back to at least the British Empire, if not the Ottoman Empire or even the Roman Empire.
Regardless of who started it, both parties think (or at least claim to think) that they can't break the defection cycle by attempting to cooperate unilaterally, hence they defect.

Obviously this analysis is simplistic since it models the Israeli and the Palestinians each as a single agent. But since, as you say, Palestinians tend to more or less unwillingly support Hamas and the Israeli tend to support Netanyahu and his coallition government (also more or less unwillingly?), I think this two-agent model is a reasonable first-order approximation.

Another issue is that there doesn't appear to be a Schelling point that both parties recognize as a "default" solution for the bargaining problem they face. It seems that both parties operate under a framework of "This land is ours. You have no right to be here. Anything we might concede you is more than you deserve and you'd better be grateful and accept it without question before we change our mind."
This isn't conducive to productive negotiation.

Comment author: Azathoth123 16 August 2014 04:02:45AM 2 points [-]

I've been thinking about the issue in terms of (armchair) game theory:

It would help to actually look at the history rather than simply completing the pattern and pretending to be wise.

Ostensibly, both parties essentially claim to be playing a a tit-for-tat strategy in an interated prisoner dilemma where the other party is a DefectBot that can't be cooperated with.

Israel has an various periods starting with Yitzhak Rabin attempted to play unilateral cooperation under the theory that this would lead to cooperation on the other end. Hasn't worked out that way.

Comment author: V_V 16 August 2014 07:15:45AM * 0 points [-]

It would help to actually look at the history rather than simply completing the pattern and pretending to be wise.

"This s our land, and anybody who suggests that somebody else might have some modicum of claim over it must be pretending to be wise and <insert teacher's password here>."

Israel has an various periods starting with Yitzhak Rabin attempted to play unilateral cooperation under the theory that this would lead to cooperation on the other end. Hasn't worked out that way.

"Anything we might concede you is more than you deserve and you'd better be grateful and accept it without question before we change our mind."

Comment author: Jiro 15 August 2014 09:33:39PM 0 points [-]

It seems that both parties operate under a framework of "This land is ours. You have no right to be here. Anything we might concede you is more than you deserve and you'd better be grateful and accept it without question before we change our mind."

If that was an accurate description, there would be no Palestinians there at all.

Comment author: [deleted] 15 August 2014 07:54:43PM 1 point [-]

Your approximation is roughly correct. I would only add that while your statement about "our land" does represent the pro-settler faction of Israeli society, I do believe there's a large double-digit percentage who are "settlement-apathetic", and whose support can be "purchased" by whichever political side offers them greater quiet and prosperity in which to lead their private lives. They vote for peace when it looks like it will work, and when they are convinced (not necessarily in relation to fact, as you noted) that the Palestinians just want to exterminate us and will try indefatigibly, they vote for military repression.

There's also an internal contradiction here: Bibi Netanyahu is an American-style neoliberal. People don't actually like that here. At all. They only really put up with it because it comes as a package deal with the "security through military action" platform of the Likud and the religious idealism of Jewish Home.

Bibi can only keep his job by maintaining quiet, but whenever he's successful in that, people remember all their Western-style everyday-life problems that are because of Bibi.

Comment author: VAuroch 14 August 2014 07:05:42AM * -1 points [-]

I don't think that contradicts anything I said, and it doesn't contradict anything I intended to say; I was familiar with most of it (other than the extent to which the various views are common among Palestinians, where I have very little basis for judgment) and agree.

I was trying to point out that people professing to be negotiating is not the same thing as actually negotiating, and while there have been 30 years of professions of negotiations, the actual time spent making an honest attempt has been much smaller. This is also true of the PLO, obviously (IIRC, Arafat was particularly guilty of it), but no one was previously claiming the opposite position on that front.

Comment author: Azathoth123 16 August 2014 04:04:13AM 1 point [-]

I was trying to point out that people professing to be negotiating is not the same thing as actually negotiating, and while there have been 30 years of professions of negotiations, the actual time spent making an honest attempt has been much smaller.

Yes, when your partner has no interest in honest negotiations it's hard keep attempting that indefinitely.

Comment author: Jiro comment score below threshold [+] (5 children)

Comment author: V_V 11 August 2014 07:54:52PM * -1 points [-]

How many people did John Hinckley, Jr. kill? One.

According to Wikipedia, he killed none and injuried four, including the President of the United States. How many people did the US government kill in order to "self-defend" from John Hinckley, Jr?

Comment author: private_messaging 12 August 2014 02:21:21PM -1 points [-]

That might be because he had US citizens around him rather than foreigners. If someone's firing from the middle of a group of foreigners, apparently its ok to drop a bomb there.

Comment author: Azathoth123 13 August 2014 03:36:33AM 0 points [-]

If someone's firing from the middle of a group of foreigners, apparently its ok to drop a bomb there.

If someone is firing from the middle of a group of people, and said people won't have no interest in stopping the firer and are actively giving him support.

Comment author: private_messaging 17 August 2014 07:14:46AM 0 points [-]

Yeah, like that U.N. school.

Comment author: Azathoth123 18 August 2014 07:10:50AM 1 point [-]

Funny how the U.N. school had to objections to being used for rocket storage and as a platform for launching rockets.

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