Rationality Quotes July 2014

VAuroch

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
Provide sufficient information (URL, title, date, page number, etc.) to enable a reader to find the place where you read the quote, or its original source if available. Do not quote with only a name.

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.

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 defecti... (read more)

0VAuroch12y

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.

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