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brazil84 comments on [Link] A rational response to the Paris attacks and ISIS - Less Wrong Discussion
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Would you care to summarize the evidence? Is it mainly anecdotal observations of peoples' claims about their own motivations? Or is it something else?
I am looking for specific, reliable evidence that Western military activities which resulted in the deaths of civilians had a significant "rage" effect you described (and had recruitment effects significantly above the baseline). Please note that peoples' accounts of their own motivations are generally unreliable.
Again, would you care to summarize the evidence?
I accept that you perceive that people's account of their own motivations is unreliable, but that is the kind of evidence available. Can you present evidence for the counter-claim?
I can't really summarize whole books. Please check out Biddiscombe, Perry (2006). The Denazification of Germany 1945–48. The History Press Ltd if you wish to read more on this topic.
You disagree with this?
I might be able to if I put some time into it, but you have the burden of proof and I do not want to spend time on it.
I'm not asking for you to summarize whole books. Let's do this: What's the strongest piece of evidence that the deaths of civilians as a result of Western military action against Germany during World War 2 caused a "rage" effect which made de-Nazification significantly more difficult?
Why? You started to speak about Nazi Germany as an example of bombings haven't lead to problems.
I would like an answer to my question:
Do you really not see why Sipursky has the burden of proof and I do not have the burden of proof?
Are you joking? DId you actually read what I said? Here's what I said:
By contrast, here's what Tsipursky said:
He also said this:
Do you really not see why Sipursky has the burden of proof and I do not have the burden of proof?
Really?
You're forgetting that one of the reasons why ISIS exists in the first place was the chaos the U.S. invasion created in Iraq (along with the already existing motivations of Al Qaeda, which ISIS split off from). Going about purposely making enemies is hardly "productive."
Which occurred because the US wasn't willing to be sufficiently brutal in clamping down on it.
How do you know?
(The most obvious example of US willingness to be sufficiently brutal seems like Vietnam, which wasn't a responding success.)
Let's steelman VoiceOfRa's argument and choose the nuking of Japan as an example of the U.S. using sufficient brutality. While it is true that the threat of the Japanese Empire was successfully ended, it inevitably spawned a dozen other problems in other scenarios. Most notably, it paved the way for the Cold War. The madness that was the latter half of the 20th century could have been avoided if neither part had felt scared enough to engage in a spiraling arms race by building up their nuclear arsenals.
The same logic has been repeated elsewhere: Pakistan only started developing nuclear weapons because India did, and India only did so because they were afraid of China, and China only developed nukes because they were afraid the Americans would defend Taiwan with their own bombs. As soon as you use "sufficient brutality" and prove yourself to be dangerous, you will prompt everyone else to become more dangerous. It's the same stupid logic by which everyone buys a big, fuel-thirsty car because they're afraid to be crushed by all the other big, fuel-thirsty cars already in the streets.
In the case of ISIS, let's say the U.S. gets fed up with the situation and drops nukes on strategic Iraqi and Syrian cities. ISIS is wiped off the map. Good! Next thing you know, Iran will panic and get its own nukes, the Saudis will respond by getting their own, Russia will defend the Assad regime with everything they've got, and who knows what the remaining jihadi groups will do. It's just not worth it.
Edited to add: Moreover, as soon as Iran and Saudi Arabia openly display their new nuclear capability, Israel is bound to do something very stupid.
By these standards, pretty much everything one does of any consequence in international relations spawns a dozen other problems.
Everyone else is quite capable and willing to become more dangerous without any prompting from us. Becoming dangerous is useful for its own sake, not just as a response to others being dangerous.
In the sense that Communism and the Free World wound up crashing once the common enemy was removed, yes. Your argument about nuclear weapons seems to boil down to arguing that if the US hadn't developed them, no one else would have. I'll let you clarify in case it's something not quite this silly.
You don't have to go that far. How about having the government not treat rumors that an interrogator may have flushed a Koran down the toilet as a moral crisis.
Um, Iran is already developing nukes as fast as it can, despite the US not being very brutal.
Let's assume that's true. How does it follow that in terms of dealing with ISIS (or any other enemy or adversary for that matter) avoiding anger is more productive than creating fear and despair?
I will certainly concede that creating power vacuums is dangerous policy.
It depends what you get in return. But anyway, the issue on the table is the Sipursky Rage hypothesis. Sipursky seems to believe that air strikes in retaliation for the Paris attacks will be counter-productive since they will make people angry and more likely to support ISIS. My position is that insufficient evidence has been presented to reach such a conclusion.
Do you have a position on this issue? Or do you just want to change the subject?
The U.S. response to 9/11 serves as a didactic example of the most counter-productive way imaginable to respond to terrorism. If France follows the U.S. example after these attacks (and the recent news about their military cooperation with Russia seems to indicate so), the potential for stupid mistakes escalates manyfold. Especially considering that the West and Russia have opposite opinions on what the future of Syria should be, adding more guns to the situation can only make it worse.
Umm, do you have a position on the Sipursky Rage hypothesis? Or do you want to change the subject?
It's a simple enough question.
My position was explicit in my comment. Short version: Yes, to respond to violence with more violence is counterproductive, to create more enemies is a stupid idea, and the aftermath of 9/11 gives ample evidence of it.
There are many pieces of evidence, it's not helpful to speak of the strongest one. Here's one typical example, a link from a prominent book that shows that there were a number of newspaper articles expressing outrage over the bombings that made de-nazification more difficult. Newspaper articles are representative of a segment of public opinion, so this is direct evidence of public opinion on this topic. Moreover, such events remain very controversial right now, giving continued support to radical German groups over 70 years after the end of the war.
Then please summarize the best evidence for your claim.
Also, please answer my question: Do you dispute that peoples' accounts of their own motivations are generally unreliable?
Can you please quote the relevant part of your source? I did not see what you were talking about.
Yes, I dispute the statement that peoples' accounts of their own motivations are generally unreliable.
It's the sentence ending in footnote 22.
Then I suggest you educate yourself about social desirability bias. It's well known -- and obvious just from general observation -- that people have a strong tendency to self-report information which puts them in a more flattering light. If you have not taken this into account in your assessments, then it's fair to say that any conclusions you have drawn are suspect.
Ok, so apparently a typical example of the best evidence of your claim is a polemic in which someone cites the Dresden bombing as a rationale to criticize Western attempts to purge Nazis from post-WW2 Germany. There is no evidence as to how much such events actually motivated anyone; it's just an argument someone is making.
Your evidence for Sipursky Rage is quite weak as to Nazi Germany and extremely weak as to the situation in Syria:
A few anecdotal reports of terrorists who make the self-serving and unverifiable claims that they were motivated by Western misdeeds is so weak as to be ridiculous.
Anecdotal reports by terrorists is the best data we have available. Weak evidence is still evidence. We should update on whatever evidence we have, and avoid dismissing it out of hand and calling it ridiculous. As aspiring rationalists, we need to orient toward the truth, and avoid confirmation bias.
Which explains why you ignored all the reports that didn't fit your conclusion, e.g., the ones about how ISIS is planning to conquer Europe and considers this a war. You don't win a war by worrying about not offending the other side.
If you had said that Western activities "risk" radicalizing more Muslims, you might have a point. Instead you came to a firm conclusion based on spectacularly weak evidence.
Unfortunately, it seems you have fallen into exactly that trap. It looks like you gave a few self-serving anecdotal reports far far more weight than they deserved because it fit your pre-determined Leftist conclusion.
Not only that, but it seems that, having been informed about social desirability bias, you are not updating your confidence in your conclusion. You still believe that generally speaking we can trust terrorists to accurately report their motivations.
If you were serious about investigating your hypothesis, you would compare measures of radicalization in Iraq to other countries like Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, etc. If the Sipursky Rage hypothesis has any validity, one would expect lots of radicalization in Iraq and far less in Syria. But I doubt it ever occurred to you to do that, since you seem mainly interested in finding evidence to support your pre-determined Leftist beliefs than in actually investigating them.
My statements were informed by evidence, and making a statement that it "risks" radicalizing more Muslims would be factually incorrect, since evidence that we do have shows that it does radicalize. We might talk about how many would be radicalized, but it would be false to state that aggressive western activities do not radicalize Muslims.
I see from the latter part of your comment now that you have come to a firm conclusion about my views, and were arguing from that perspective all along. I'm disappointed to learn of that. Not interested in engaging further with ou around this topic.
Er, what?
For what it may be worth, I have read thousands of books in my life and I have never encountered a book which is impossible to summarize in a few paragraphs or even less.
I could use a summary of Statistical Physics by L.D. Landau and E.M. Lifshitz in a few paragraphs if you have one to sell me. :-)
I think you and brazil84 may have different notions of summarizing in mind. If summarizing a book means describing what's in it then most books can be summarized in a few paragraphs. If it means conveying a large fraction of the useful or interesting content then many books can't. (A dictionary or encyclopaedia might be an even better example than a physics textbook.)
Yes, I think so. Here is how I would summarize an unabridged dictionary:
This is a book which contains entries for most of the words in the English language; each entry sets forth the typical pronunciation as well as definitions for the word. Here are a few examples:
Example 1:
Example 2:
Example 3.
Lol, fair enough. You caught me well on that one. Let me update my statement to being unwilling to summarize whole books.
Middle Eastern cultures are heavily based on clan/kinship relations and honor. I would expect that just accurately killing guilty people would lead to a rage effect as bad as killing innocent ones, because of the enormous number of people in the guilty person's kinship group whose honor you have just besmirched.
Note that this dynamic can be profitably used in the opposite direction. Suppose in retaliation for someone committing a terror attack, the government exiles their entire family (out to, say, first cousins) in response. Now the family dynamics are recruited to cut things off early on, and local patriarchs face serious penalties if they fail to keep their kin in line.
(Compare to the frankpledge, wherein people were clustered into joint responsibility units, where if any person in the unit committed a crime everyone in the unit had to pay for it (if they couldn't deliver the criminal to justice).)
I would guess you are probably right, but the bigger question here is how strong is any "rage effect" compared to other factors which might influence human decision-making. For example, lets suppose ISIS rolls into your town, throws a few gay dudes of off roofs, blows up the local church or mosque, and publicly tortures to death a few suspected informants. One can imagine that perhaps this will create a large Tsipursky Rage. At the same time, it will probably result in a lot of fear and despair; these emotions might actually discourage people from working against ISIS. Which is stronger in the short or long term? What other factors might be in play? These are not easy questions to answer.
For Tsipursky to claim that he knows the answer with reasonable certainty based on a few magazine articles in which a few captured terrorists cite "rage" as their motivation is the height of the worst kind of irrationality.
That said, your point does illustrate how silly Tsipursky's position is if taken to its logical conclusion. i.e. that we should not even kill actual ISIS operatives in Syria or Iraq because that will make people angry and result in more attacks.
It's not really silly. Focusing on cutting funding sources might be better than focusing on killing ISIS operatives, As long as a NATO country buys their oil for money, weapons and hospital care killing individual ISIS operatives won't go very far.
The two are not mutually exclusive, agreed?
If you want to use certain NATO bases to do your bombing, then you will be less likely to criticize the policy of the countries that host the bases.
Umm, does that mean "yes" or "no"?
Truth is more complex than binary values. It means that in practice doing one thing means that you can do the other less well.
Let's assume that's true. So what? The argument under discussion was not whether the West should avoid focusing on killing people because it will undermine the West's ability to focus on cutting funding for ISIS. The issue under discussion is whether the West should avoid killing people because it will make other people angry.
Please don't try to change the subject without openly acknowledging that's what you are doing.
You don't do things like bombing or not bombing for a single reason. At the same time it's okay for an article in a mainstream venue to focus on a single reason because the medium doesn't allow for a deep analysis of all factors that matter.
Do you consider the account of a man who says: "I have to revenge a blood debt because they killed my cousin" to be a unreliable description of someone's self-motivations?
Absolutely.
Are you looking for a double-blind experiment where in hundreds of randomly selected countries the civilians were slaughtered, in other hundreds they were not, and this was all conducted in a way that neither the people in the attacking countries nor the people in the attacked countries knew which was which?
No. I am looking for specific, reliable evidence which backs up Tsipursky's claim. It is up to him what form that evidence might take. Is that a problem for you?