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Vladimir_M comments on Irrationality Game II - Less Wrong Discussion

13 [deleted] 03 July 2012 06:50PM

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Comment author: Andreas_Giger 04 July 2012 12:57:25PM *  1 point [-]

Regarding the first part, the truth of that statement critically depends on how exactly you define "provoke."

I am more concerned about the word "deliberate."

  • Provoking: presenting someone with a multitude of bad choices, one of them being to attack you.
  • Deliberate: proceeding with an action in the hope of achieving a specific outcome.
  • Deliberately provoking: presenting someone with a multitude of bad choices, hoping they will attack you because of this.

As for the second part (the supposed intentional dispersion of the carriers), I don't think that's plausible. If anything, the U.S. would have been in a similar position, i.e. at war with Japan with guaranteed victory, even if every single ship under the U.S. flag magically got sunk on December 7, 1941. So even if there was a real conspiracy involved, it would have made no sense to add this large and risky element to it just to make the eventual victory somewhat quicker.

The carrier fleet being operational was decisive in preventing an expected Japanese invasion of Midway and Hawaii, and recapturing Hawaii from the American continent would have been very difficult, if not outright impossible. What if China had surrendered or made peace with Japan? What if Germany captured Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad? What if the Japanese nuclear weapon program had succeded? What if the public opinion had turned anti-war, as during the Vietnam War?

"Guaranteed victory" sounds like hindsight bias to me. Even if the US mainland could not have been invaded, that doesn't mean the USA could not have lost the war.

Also, your heuristic about bias is broken. In the Western world outside of the U.S., people are on average, if anything, only more inclined to believe the official historical narrative about WW2.

The point is that the "official historical narrative" is different in different countries. For example, Japan has a strong culture of ignoring Japanese war crimes, in Polish textbooks there rarely is mention of Poland taking part in the partition of Czechoslovakia, Britons are generally unaware of the fact that GB declared war on Germany and not vice versa, many French think that the surrender to Germany was an action the government did not have the license to make, and so on.

The government is not a coherent actor; it does not have deliberate actions.

"The government" is an abstract concept. I am talking about a circle of people within the government who together had the power to provoke Japan, and to assure that the losses at Pearl Harbor were within reasonable bounds. I am not overly familiar with the way the U.S. government was organised at that time, but it seems to me that such a circle had to include either the president or high ranking intelligence officials, most likely both.

Comment author: Vladimir_M 04 July 2012 03:34:06PM *  3 points [-]

The carrier fleet being operational was decisive in preventing an expected Japanese invasion of Midway and Hawaii, and recapturing Hawaii from the American continent would have been very difficult, if not outright impossible. What if China had surrendered or made peace with Japan? What if Germany captured Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad?

It wouldn't have mattered for the Pacific war, except by prolonging it somewhat. Even if Japan had conquered every single island in the Pacific and Indian oceans, as long as the U.S. government remained in control of the U.S. mainland, as it surely would have, it still would have had enough resources and industrial capacity to outproduce Japan in warships and other naval assets by orders of magnitude and eventually roll back the Japanese conquests by sheer overwhelming strength.

Germany arguably had some chance to win the European war, but Japan was doomed from day one.

Also, as someone has already noted, the greater importance of carriers over battleships in WW2 is itself known only from hindsight, and contrary to the prevailing beliefs of the time.

What if the Japanese nuclear weapon program had succeded?

Well, yes, you can always conceive of some deus ex machina. But it's implausible that fears about hypothetical Japanese superweapons would have influenced the strategic plans of FDR & Co. in 1941.

What if the public opinion had turned anti-war, as during the Vietnam War?

By 1941, FDR & Co. already had sufficiently strong grip on power that they comfortably knew that a war would allow them to seize complete control of the media (and all other means of propaganda) and ensure that this could never happen.

The point is that the "official historical narrative" is different in different countries

True enough, but thus typically has the form of the same official narrative with some additional spin, omission, and lying with regards to the relevant local details in order to accommodate nationalist sensibilities. In contrast, sensible, intelligent, well-informed, and yet radical criticism of the official narrative can be found, to my knowledge, only within the Old Right intellectual tradition in the U.S. (Which has been driven to the fringe for many decades, but its vestiges somehow still occasionally surface in the respectable public discourse.)

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