This is also the thesis of the classic "Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics"
Fight Club was probably a better movie to watch to understand the people who attacked us than The Battle of Algiers. All the efforts to ascribe a meaning to the events – the terrorists hate our freedom, or they hate that we are supporting dictators in their region, or they hate that we are infidels, or they hate that we are engaged in wars of aggression against Muslims, or whatever – were responses to our need for meaning rather than to the events themselves.
Just as some say "they hate that we are supporting dictators in their region" and some say "they hate that we are infidels", Millman says "Fight Club was probably a better movie to watch to understand the people who attacked us than The Battle of Algiers."
Millman has a particular political position. From the inside, one's political position looks like just common sense, above the petty politics of trying to fit every event into a narrow world view, which is what the other sides do.
It is hard for him to see this as a political position because it identifies multiple other political positions, rather than just one (which would be a sure sign of it being political). This is analogous to the "d...
From the inside, one's political position looks like just common sense, above the petty politics of trying to fit every event into a narrow world view, which is what the other sides do.
"Ideologies are like accents. Other people have them, you just talk normal." — Matt Stoller
Yeah, as a supporter of both wars that occurred as a result of this, a lot of us clearly fucked up very badly. Like really badly. Even if I can still see Afganistan as the right thing to do, the totality was clearly something which I supported and which was clearly the wrong thing to do.
And not just the United States but all of humanity is paying for the consequences. Not just in the forms of massive numbers of people dead but also a terrible economy and all sorts of science that isn't getting funded. In a world without the Iraq war, things like the Jam...
Why can't WWII and Vietnam be both in the right reference class? The correct reference class needn't be uniform in the relevant properties. Perhaps it is impossible to conclusively decide about the net effect of an incoming war using only reference class statistics.
The destruction of two oppressive empires which were engaging in largescale genocide would be the most obvious success criterion.
Yeah, but were these oppressive empires really engaging in largescale genocide before WWII or was it (partially) caused by WWII? If the latter, then that isn't a point in its favor. If I remember correctly, before WWII the "final solution" was supposed to be the Madagascar Plan, not The Holocaust. The only oppressive empire I can think of that was engaging in largescale genocide pre-WWII survived the war (and even expanded its power as a result of it).
A more cynical point is that for the US at least it really did help the economy.
This is definitely not a consensus amongst economists. For instance:
...It is commonly argued that World War II provided the stimulus that brought the American economy out of the Great Depression. The number of unemployed workers declined by 7,050,000 between 1940 and 1943, but the number in military service rose by 8,590,000. The reduction in unemployment can be explained by the draft, not by the economic recovery. The rise in real GNP presents similar problems. Most estimates show declines in real consumption spe
The best policy has some bad repercussions.
The worst policy has some good consequences.
"Don't invade Poland," was not a coherent American strategy for ensuring a peaceful Europe. It was only such for Germany. Likewise "Don't fly hijacked planes into buildings," isn't a policy that the United States needs to implement.
American strategy informs American actions and can only indirectly influence non-American actions.
Incidentally, the fallout from 9/11 was what trned me towards Kahneman and Tversky in 2004, from there to following the burgeoning rationality discussion and ultimately here. Millman's moment mirrored my own and the realization that all this coukd sound smart, plausible and be acceptable to others (even reinforced by them) while being terrifyingly wrong pushed me towards questions about my own ability to think clearly.
Very relevant here: The Peloponnesian War, book VI, chapters 8 through 32.
(The chapters are short, read it.)
A point I've raised a few times when talking to friends about this; imagine how different the world would look if 9/11 had been a domestic attack, representing the same degree of lasting threat from sources within our borders.
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.