9/11 as mindkiller

NancyLebovitz

23 9/11 as mindkiller

by NancyLebovitz

12th Sep 2011

2 min read

112

23

Noah Millman wrote:

In retrospect, what suffered the most lasting damage from the terrorist attacks of ten years ago was my belief in my own rationality. I believed that I was thinking things through seriously, and coming to difficult but true conclusions about what had happened, what would happen, what must happen. Here is part of what I wrote, to friends and family, several days later:
Our President has made it clear: we are at war. I do not anticipate that this will be a short or an easy war. Our enemy has operations in dozens of countries, including this one. He is supported, out of enthusiasm or fear, by many governments among our purported friends as well as among our enemies. He has shown his cunning, his ruthlessness, and most of all his patience, in his successful plot to kill thousands of innocents and bring down the symbols of our civilization. And in striking at him, as we must, we will bring down others who will in turn seek their own vengeance upon us.
There is not a single factual assertion in that paragraph that I had any reason to believe I could substantiate. I did not know anything about the enemy. I had no idea whether or not there were “operations” in dozens of countries – I don’t even know what I meant by “operations.” I know what I was referring to with the business about being “supported” by friends and enemies, but “support” is a deliberately fuzzy word; I wouldn’t have used it if I was trying to make a concrete assertion with clear implications. The purpose of that assertion, like everything else, was to build up my first assertion. We were at war. And it wouldn’t be short or easy. Because that conclusion, though grim, was one that imparted meaning to the murder of 3,000 people. I thought I was being serious – examining the facts, calculating the likely negative consequences of necessary action, preparing myself for the unfortunate necessities of life. But I wasn’t doing anything of the kind. I was engaged in a search for meaning in which reason was purely instrumental.

Link (which includes additional good retrospectives) thanks to Ampersand.

This article may have more political content than is suitable for LW-- if you'd rather discuss it elsewhere, I've linked it at my blog. I've posted about it here because it's an excellent example of updating and of recognizing motivated cognition even if well after the fact.

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23 9/11 as mindkiller

by NancyLebovitz

12th Sep 2011

2 min read

112

23

Noah Millman wrote:

In retrospect, what suffered the most lasting damage from the terrorist attacks of ten years ago was my belief in my own rationality. I believed that I was thinking things through seriously, and coming to difficult but true conclusions about what had happened, what would happen, what must happen. Here is part of what I wrote, to friends and family, several days later:
Our President has made it clear: we are at war. I do not anticipate that this will be a short or an easy war. Our enemy has operations in dozens of countries, including this one. He is supported, out of enthusiasm or fear, by many governments among our purported friends as well as among our enemies. He has shown his cunning, his ruthlessness, and most of all his patience, in his successful plot to kill thousands of innocents and bring down the symbols of our civilization. And in striking at him, as we must, we will bring down others who will in turn seek their own vengeance upon us.
There is not a single factual assertion in that paragraph that I had any reason to believe I could substantiate. I did not know anything about the enemy. I had no idea whether or not there were “operations” in dozens of countries – I don’t even know what I meant by “operations.” I know what I was referring to with the business about being “supported” by friends and enemies, but “support” is a deliberately fuzzy word; I wouldn’t have used it if I was trying to make a concrete assertion with clear implications. The purpose of that assertion, like everything else, was to build up my first assertion. We were at war. And it wouldn’t be short or easy. Because that conclusion, though grim, was one that imparted meaning to the murder of 3,000 people. I thought I was being serious – examining the facts, calculating the likely negative consequences of necessary action, preparing myself for the unfortunate necessities of life. But I wasn’t doing anything of the kind. I was engaged in a search for meaning in which reason was purely instrumental.

Link (which includes additional good retrospectives) thanks to Ampersand.

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JoshuaZ15y40

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.

NancyLebovitz15y20

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.

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:

But a general war against terrorism – or, in some views, against evil in general – seems too open ended. It could go on forever. Millions could di

... (read more)

4Unnamed15y

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: 1. that an immediate war was not necessary because Saddam Hussein was not on the verge of doing terrible things 2. that the US was likely to face a lengthy and costly military engagement 3. that the new Iraqi government which replaced Hussein's regime wasn't likely to be a very good one (liberal, democratic, effective at maintaining peace & stability, etc.) 4. that the war would be led by the Bush administration so we'd end up with the outcomes of the Bush administration's war, not the imaginary Iraq war that you might want (this is one response to djcb's point: if you can predict in advance that things will be handled badly, then that means that the war as such is a bad idea) 5. that much of the available information about the reasons for war was coming from the Bush administration, and there were reasons to be suspicious about significant parts of the case that they were making, which cast doubt on the foundations of the whole enterprise (see also Daniel Davies on this point) 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 tha

3Prismattic15y

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.

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