When None Dare Urge Restraint, pt. 2

[-]Xachariah13y400

hero: he-ro [heer-oh]

a person who, in the opinion of others, has heroic qualities or has performed a heroic act and is regarded as a model or ideal

It's not just about ignoring death. These men and women in the armed forces are heroes... if you abandon the definition above and use a more useful definition. "A person who has qualities or performed acts which are useful to the community, who can serve as models for others, so that more people will act like them." It's a Hansonian status signal.

To allow a little anthropomorphizing, a society wants to reinforce that which makes it stronger. If you were to design a civilization from scratch which is involved in wars, the first thing you'd do is grant +200 status points to everybody who died in the service of their country, regardless of if they were effective or not effective. That will get you more recruits; that will make wars easier. It doesn't matter if the words are true or the definitions are consistent, granting those bonus status points would help you achieve your goals. It makes sense for a society to do that, and it makes sense that a society would punish people who point out it's reinforcement systems.

This is how being a cell in an organism feels from the outside.

8TheOtherDave13y

The second part of that definition is unhelpfully recursive... choosing to call people "heroes" or otherwise laud them is an important part of what turns them into models for others. To make that laudability part of the definition of heroism risks emptying the word of all content: heroism becomes anything we describe as heroic. Leaving that aside... lots of things are useful to the community, so the first part of that definition covers a lot of ground. Using the model you suggest, it seems if I was to design a civilization from scratch that consumed food, presumably I would also label farmers "heroes," and if I was to design a civilization from scratch that produced organic wastes, presumably I would also label sewage engineers "heroes". That doesn't seem to describe the world I live in. It would seem there's more to be explained.

[-]roystgnr13y230

The non-cynical explanation is that what makes soldiers unique is morale. We can encourage farmers and sewage engineers via steady monetary compensation, and we don't have to worry that hazardous manure will make them break and run, and if 5% of them were to suddenly quit then we'd be okay eating 95% as much food and paying some overtime to maintain the pipes. With soldiers, shit really does turn lethal, a 5% retreat can quickly cascade into a rout, and less mercenary compensation (using status and esteem instead of just money) seems to make such a rout less likely.

Although I think Hayes' points were apt and his treatment despicable, he may be missing a similar point: thinking of soldiers as "heros" rather than just regular employees may also reduce peoples' desire to risk their lives unnecessarily. You can see an overreach of the same effect in public attitudes toward the space program: death counts that would go unremarked in heavy construction projects are considered intolerable because the dying astronauts are heroes to us.

3TheOtherDave13y

I agree that certain roles, like warfare, are much less tolerant than others of individuals unexpectedly refusing to perform the functions of the role. I agree that certain roles (again, like warfare) are much more likely than others to involve intermittent periods of extremely high risk, which makes steady-state reward very easy to game. I agree that both of those factors seem to explain a lot more of what we call heroic than the "useful to the community, who can serve as models for others" metric proposed earlier. It is not clear to me that we're less willing to tolerate astronaut's deaths or soldier's deaths than we are construction workers' deaths... we seem pretty willing to tolerate all of them, though we make a much bigger fuss about the former group. I suspect our lack of support for the space program has other causes.

0Desrtopa13y

It may be significant that their deaths are associated with projects which are not only highly visible but orders of magnitude more expensive. I suspect that if we decided to build a proper Tower of Babel, and people died in the construction, their deaths would get plenty of publicity.

7Desrtopa13y

Just how much is 200 points? That might lead to a lot of people being really careless in battle.

5Strange713y

Ah, not necessarily. If being the one who achieves actual military objectives is worth any points at all, the optimal strategy is to get killed the day before you retire. (see also "retirony")

2Ezekiel13y

As an explicit example of this, Jewish Orthodox doctrine has it that anyone who dies "for the sanctification of The Name" gets an automatic ticket to Awesome Afterlife. The thing is, that class includes those murdered by anti-Semites - so you can go to Heaven for someone else's bigotry.

8hfkdnp13y

Whoa, that sure does explain a lot! As it turns out, that Adolf dude with the funny moustache has optimally maximized discounted utility up to T=∞ for a lot of folks! And he didn't even take credit for it - he just did it out of sheer willingness to do the moral and utility-maximizing thing. What a cool guy, right? Could anyone even believe that people view him as the personification of evil?

1TheOtherDave13y

Well, if we're concerned about consequences of actions rather than some other metric of moral value, that's not unreasonable.

[-]Grognor13y380

[-]Paul Crowley13y390

I can only assume this is a logarithmic scale, or something.

[-]Maelin13y170

I know this image is pretty much pure applause light and no substance, but I think it might serve as a great talking point to post on Facebook for all my less rational friends.

3shokwave13y

Having seen the outcome of your plan, I think we have learned that talking points are only great when you have strictly great people talking.

[-]beoShaffer13y160

Would it be considered impolite to ask what happened?

[-]Maelin13y130

Not by me! One friend immediately replied, describing living forever as an 'unbelievably horrible concept'. An argument developed in which he claimed to be opposed to medicine in general because it results in overpopulation. A few friends who are LW readers and/or transhumanists joined in and it grew a bit one-sided. I tried to inoffensively explain that his arguments seemed to be neglecting the fact that the other human problems we have (which would be exacerbated by cured aging) might also be solvable, failed at the 'inoffensive' part, and he got angry at me for thinking I knew what he was thinking better than he did and then abandoned the thread. Afterwards a few of the people who've 'already seen the light' discussed a few interesting points about the topic, like hard limits on energy consumption/use, etc.

I'll take partial blame - I didn't work hard enough to maintain civility, in my own posts or in the atmosphere in general. I have previously argued with this person about life extension etc and found that he pattern matches very promptly into the 'typical' opposer - who summons up every problem they can connect to the idea immediately without any thought for plausibility or relevance.

Overall it was a bit of a disappointment but some friends who I don't think would have been exposed to the idea much otherwise did put some 'likes' on a few comments, which is heartening.

4A1987dM13y

I used to agree with that.

[-]cata13y140

If you want it to be pithier (and more accessible?) you can just shorten "living forever" to "living."

3orthonormal13y

And switch the order, too, perhaps.

7A1987dM13y

Not necessarily. If the awesome way of dying involves saving billions of people's lives, and living forever involves humanity going nearly extinct with all of the survivors (including yourself) being tortured for eternity...

9shokwave13y

Right, so think of this graph as actually being two graphs: one of the situation you describe, and one of the situation you do not describe. Then we blend these two graphs together according to the probability of each situation occurring in order to most accurately represent the future...

-2A1987dM13y

Then put error bars on them for sqrt(E(awesomeness^2|living forever) - E(awesomeness|living forever)^2) and sqrt(E(awesomeness^2|dying in an awesome way) - E(awesomeness|dying in an awesome way)^2). :-)

6MarkusRamikin13y

That seems to me like something you could contrive to say about any generally-true comparison...

-2wedrifid13y

Yes, which is why it's an awesome go to test to apply to generalizations. Death, extinction, torture forever, saving billions of people!

2The Dao of Bayes13y

That test is only useful if you're interested in illustrating exceptions to the norm. The graph, I think, does a brilliant job of illustrating normalized expectations. I would assume that for most generalizations, it either shouldn't be a generalization, or else it's meant to illustrate normalized expectations. So the test seems useless unless you simply need to demonstrate that, duh, generalizations tend to have exceptions.

-3wedrifid13y

'Generalizations' is an interesting word in as much as it expresses nearly the opposite meaning depending on the kind of person who speaks it (and to a lesser extent, the context).

1The Dao of Bayes13y

Can you expand on what you actually mean by that? I've always taken a generalization to mean "a broad statement that is true for the majority (but not all) specific instances of the group". For instance, one can generalize that humans have 2 arms - this, despite there being a number of exceptions, and the average (mean) values being less than 2.

[-][anonymous]13y300

I found an article on the Atlantic that provides additional context to Chris Hayes's remarks and it also asks a series of followup questions about whether people should be called heroes under different circumstances.

Link here.

The followup questions seemed to be worth reposting in their entirety:

1) Are all American war dead heroic because, if nothing else, they had the courage to volunteer for service knowing they might ultimately give their life for their country? That seems heroic to me. But if they're all heroes, does it follow that everyone in the military is a hero? Why is dying necessary? And if everyone who volunteers is a hero, what about the guys who would go AWOL if sent to fight, or who assault their commanding officer, or who run away in combat? What about the ones who are dishonorably discharged? Was Bradley Manning a hero? Had Lynndie England died in Iraq, would she have been a hero?
2) What about people who volunteer for foreign armed forces? Are they all heroic? Or does it depend upon their country? If an American helping to liberate Libya would've been a hero had he died in action, shouldn't the Germans from NATO engaged in the same conflict be heroes too? What ab

... (read more)

[-]sixes_and_sevens13y230

The title of this post looks like an episode title for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

0[anonymous]13y

I was trying to figure out what that reminded me of. This is it.

0RobertLumley13y

I was wondering what it reminded me of, and this is it... Edit (sorry about the double post, I had two tabs open in my browser and messed up.)

3Shmi13y

You can delete the other comment after refreshing the page.

2RobertLumley13y

Thanks. I thought only Admins had the power to delete posts. I thought we could only retract our own posts.

-10Shmi13y

[-]Spurlock13y160

I'm reminded of how people tried to call the 9/11 victims "heroes," apparently because they had the great courage to work in buildings that were targeted in a terrorist attack.

Let's be fair: Almost no one actually said this. It's a large nation and you can generally find at least one example of just about any dumb statement, but this seems like 99% strawman.

I remember a lot of talk about how the rescue workers were heroes, and some discussion about the heroics of specific attack victims (people who e.g. tried to help others escape the building), but labeling the victims as "heroes", while certainly something one could have gotten away with, I don't recall at all.

A quick and dirty google search for "9/11 victims were heroes" without quotes returns a page full of results referring to 'victims' and 'heroes' as separate groups. If you add the quotes you mostly just get people attacking the sentiment, rather than the sentiment itself.

5Jay_Schweikert13y

Fair point. While I definitely do recall hearing this point made in earnest at least a couple times, you're right that it probably wasn't prominent enough to identify as "something that people thought," outside of a few silly assertions. It's certainly not on par with the other examples here.

[-]RobertLumley13y130

My biggest takeaway from "When None Dare Urge Restraint" was this quote: "It is just too dangerous for there to be any target in the world, whether it be the Jews or Adolf Hitler, about whom saying negative things trumps saying accurate things."

But it always bothered me that this only applied to negative things. Obviously there are some instances where saying positive things may trump saying accurate things (You look great in those jeans, and other white lies), but I think you've identified a better rule: It is just too dangerous for there to be any target in the world about whom saying positive things always trumps saying accurate things.

Great post. Upvoted.

4The Dao of Bayes13y

I get that the majority of people make it very unpleasant to say accurate things, but it doesn't seem to matter if it's a white lie or not - saying "those jeans make you look fat" and "not all soldiers are heroes" both get you punished for being accurate. There's just a CULTURAL attitude that the latter is a "more important truth" and therefor it's more-excusable to upset people with it. Change the cultural context and suddenly white lies go away too - I understand it's fairly common amongst autistic people to value accuracy in that regard, for example. I know it's true of my own social group (I've commented numerous times on things that aren't attractive about my girlfriends, or that I simply find personally unpleasant :))

1RobertLumley13y

I'm not saying white lies are always exceptions either. And I don't think "all soldiers are heroes" is analogous to white lies, since there are very real consequences from framing the discourse in that manner, which was Hayes original point.

2beoShaffer13y

I think it was less that it only applied to negative things and more that the lesson for positive things got its own posts.

[-]mwengler13y90

As I consider this, I suspect that virtually anything which you can imagine being reported angrily on commercial cable "news" channels has purposes that are actually at odds with reporting truth. Calling terrorists cowards is just the usual insulting of the enemy, isn't it? Calling soldiers "heroes" seems to me to be a way to lower the costs associated with getting young people to go do this thing.

Is it irrational to use communication whose primary purpose is at odds with spreading objective information? Only if survival is irratio... (read more)

8The Dao of Bayes13y

That would mean that if the United States of America does not use this language, we will lose our wars and be defeated by a foe that IS willing to use such biased language. That... seems like a VERY strong assertion to make without any actual evidence. Certainly, it might lower overall military recruitment costs, or improve troop efficiency, but has anyone ever studied this? How much would accurate information cost us? How much damage is being done because we're stuck in traditions of inaccurate communication? It's a fairly simple equation, but filling out the variables is far from a casual armchair exercise, I think.

0mwengler13y

I am not aware of any systematic attempt to study these things. My own opinion is formed from a somewhat casual reading of Matt Ridley's Rational Optimist, Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel and Collapse, and probably a few other books that don't leap to mind. These books have plenty of citation of studies if you are interested. I think you would be hard pressed to find any existing "significant" country that does not engender a strong belief in patriotism among its populace, which does not lionize especially those who have given their lives in wars on behalf of the country. If you can think of any significant counter examples among the 50 richest or 50 most populous countries, please let me know. I am essentially hypothesizing that the scarcity of genteel foreigner-loving pacifist countries among the richest and most populous is not a mere coincidence.

6JoachimSchipper13y

The Netherlands is (used to be) pretty un-patriotic, to the point that "nationalist" means "nazi" and "patriot" isn't used, ever. Our "Remembrance Day" is explicitly for all victims of all conflicts (admittedly with precedence given to Dutch WW2 victims, but explicitly including the people on the other side of our last colonial war). One could argue that we are geopolitically reliant on the United States' overwhelming military force, but that would be moving the goalposts. (The Netherlands are #17).)

-3mwengler13y

Thanks. On the one hand preloading the idea that I might move the goalposts is good argumentation. But at the risk of appearing to do that, let me try some rationalization. Could the words patriotism and nationalism haven a meaning in the Netherlands which has been distorted by the traumatic history with a neighbor that linked these words so powerfully with expansionism and genocide? The Netherlands is a democracy which supports a conscript army. They are a founding and continuing member of NATO. The Netherlands is famous for its international courts. Would you say that the Dutch tend to be neutral on the question of their continued existence as Dutch? Perhaps the Dutch reject Nazi-style patriotism and nationalism but have their own spin on their national identify that, looked at through non-Nazi filtered glasses, is a flavor of nationalism and patriotism after all?

1JoachimSchipper13y

Yes, our attitude towards nationalism has certainly been shaped by WW2. I'm not enough of a historian, but it may also be important to note that the Netherlands have been a rather fragmented (we prefer "tolerant") society before WW2; that is, one's loyalty was more to "the catholics" or "the socialists" than to the nation itself. Although we technically still have conscription, it's been "paused" for many years, and re-introducing it would be unpopular, to say the least. We are indeed quite active in a military sense, but the current army is all-voiunteer and rather small. Humanitarian aid and international justice are more our speed (although humanitarian aid is increasingly coming under fire for being less effective than promised.) Football matches and the monarchy aside, I haven't detected many traces of nationalism in the Netherlands. With our local far-right party riding high in the polls, there has been an effort to revitalize Dutch nationalism, but that hasn't been very successful. (Xenophobia/racism/anti-islam has been much more successful in setting the debate and drawing votes.)

1ksvanhorn13y

You're begging the question here, by slipping in the assumption that these wars are "on behalf of the country," rather than on behalf of the executive (e.g. president), on behalf of some vested interest, or just colossal f*-ups. To repeat what the author said, "If a death is just a tragedy... [y]ou have to acknowledge that yes, really, ... thousands of people -- even the Good Guy's soldiers! -- might be dying for no good reason at all."

-2The Dao of Bayes13y

My theorizing was based largely on another comment in the thread: http://lesswrong.com/lw/cph/when_none_dare_urge_restraint_pt_2/6p0s Also, the criteria that "all significant countries do it" strikes me as rather horrible reasoning. History is replete with examples of barbaric behaviors that were at one point considered perfectly normal, and often defended as a necessity without which the country would crumble. I do have a suspicion that Australia might be less caught up in the heroic pedestal for war heroes, but all my Aussie friends are away for the weekend. Google did turn up a recent example of a high-profile hero being degenerated by a talk show, which suggests that the stigma is much lower there (but they were then forced to apologize, so there's still at least some stigma - but this is an actual decorated hero we're talking about). Certainly, it would be hard for me to provide a citation for the claim "This country wouldn't rip apart a talk show host who said the same thing there", so I think we might have to just leave this one at intuitions (or, at least, I don't care enough to do more than bug my Aussie friends when they get back)

[-]Shmi13y90

All good points, but hardly anything new... I guess a reminder can't hurt.

[-]fubarobfusco13y80

I'm told that in some countries, every schoolchild reads Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est".)

I wonder if that actually works at reducing such high zest for war heroism.

5TheOtherDave13y

I read this as a schoolchild in the U.S. I remember it making an impression, and can still quote the last stanza. Jarrell's Death of the Ball Turret Gunner even more so. Though it's hard to know what that really means in terns of effects. Edit: And then of course there's Kipling's Tommy. I frequently misquote 'For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!" But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the guns begin to shoot;" ...when I'm feeling particularly cynical about the social construction of heroism.

[-]D2AEFEA113y80

labeling a death as "heroic" can be a similar sort of rationalization.

Homer, about 2800 years ago :

It is entirely seemly for a young man killed in battle to lie mangled by the bronze spear. In his death all things appear fair.

[-]Unnamed13y210

Homer, about 20 years ago:

Homer: That Timmy is a real hero!
Lisa: How do you mean, Dad?
Homer: Well, he fell down a well, and... he can't get out.
Lisa: How does that make him a hero?
Homer: Well, that's more than you did!

Hero inflation is not just for the dead or the military.

0Larks13y

Even the fact that he was probably only fighting because he'd been enslaved.

1Nornagest13y

I don't think this would have been true, at least in that time and place. Warfare in Archaic Greece -- i.e. when Homer was writing -- was dominated by hoplites, expensively equipped heavy infantry drawn from the citizen classes. Later on, peltasts and other light infantry became more common, and were sometimes recruited from unfree classes (especially in Sparta, which fielded large numbers of helot auxiliaries), but also came as mercenaries or from the lower free classes.

[-]David_Gerard13y60

This article should be on Main.

4Jay_Schweikert13y

I had considered posting it there, but I'm still somewhat new to writing articles and didn't want to jump the gun. Given the response, however, I'll go ahead and move it. Thanks for the encouragement!

1thomblake13y

Yes, belongs in Main.

[-]Shmi13y50

Welcome to the positive use of Dark Arts. You can enumerate the exploited biases galore as an exercise.

Indiscriminately calling the soldiers and especially the war dead heroes is quite rational, as it facilitates the country's task of maintaining an enlisted military force, as opposed to a mercenary force. Yes, it's brainwashing, and it is irrational for the individuals believe it, but it is very much the right thing to do for the government. Imagine what would happen if the prevailing sentiment was "well, these dead soldiers weren't very nice people, anyway, so, whatevs".

[-]Jack13y160

Treating "the government" as anything like a unified agent for whom one can define self-interest or a utility function is problematic.

4Strange713y

Effective organizations have official policies; members who act against those policies in important ways while on duty rapidly stop being part of the organization. Different departments and organizations within the government formulate and carry out policies on different issues, sometimes clashing with each other... but that's not entirely dissimilar to a person suffering internal conflicts when e.g. meal planning and libido point in opposite directions.

0Shmi13y

I would be interested to know if there is a research on the subject. It does not seem unreasonable that organizations have utility functions different from its individual members. After all, that's how bee hives and ant colonies work.

3Jack13y

Kin groups with millions of years of natural selection aren't really the same.

0Shmi13y

Maybe, or maybe not. Like I said, I'd be interested in seeing the relevant research.

7wedrifid13y

Enlisted soliders get paid already. Plus they get to wear uniform and the associated status perks. Simple economics applies even without introducing 'mercenary forces'.

0lessdazed13y

Presumably without the ribbons they'd have to be paid more. And the status perks seem tied to the same thing that causes people to call war dead "heroes."

1Eugine_Nier13y

Eliezer discussed something similar in the post Bayesians vs. Barbarians .

[-]ksvanhorn13y40

Soldiers in the American military are, of course, an untouchable target

I know I'm playing with fire, but... touch. (Warning: deliberately inflammatory polemic.)

[-]Jay_Schweikert13y20

One more link on the subject. Jason Brennan has a post on Bleeding Heart Libertarians cataloging different norms for valorizing soldiers (this post is largely a follow-up to a prior post arguing that it might be appropriate to hold even individual soldiers accountable for volunteering to serve in wars they know or should know to be unjust). While it's nothing particularly innovative, I think this framework is useful for understanding both the Hayes controversy and the issue more generally.

The reaction to Chris Hayes suggests that most Americans are prett... (read more)

1Eugine_Nier13y

The difference between soldiers and (almost) everyone else is that the soldiers' job involves risking one's life.

[-]fubarobfusco13y230

The difference between soldiers and (almost) everyone else is that the soldiers' job involves risking one's life.

According to the 2010 National Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, the jobs with the highest fatal injury rate per 100,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) workers in the U.S. were:

Fishers and related fishing workers
Logging workers
Aircraft pilots and flight engineers
Farmers and ranchers
Mining machine operators

The fatal injury rate for people in the fishing trade is 116 per 100,000 — or slightly more than 1 in 1000, per year. (If you value your life, do not go into the fishing business; and if you value other people's lives, you might consider buying farmed rather than wild-caught fish!)

According to this Congressional Research Service report, the worst year for U.S. military deaths recently was 2007, when 1953 out of 1.6 million military FTEs died. However, 235 of these deaths were due to illness rather than injury, whereas the above figures for other occupations deal only with injury. Subtracting these, members of the military are risking their lives slightly less than the people who bring you your salmon and tuna.

If you want to make a moral difference between so... (read more)

[-]lessdazed13y120

What about infantry v. armor? Or helicopter pilots v. people piloting drones from a base in Nevada? "Military" isn't too homogeneous a category.

4Eugine_Nier13y

Disagree. I think the relevant difference is people risking their lives providing a service that's (at least believed to be) a public good. Notice that the two civilian jobs that are also frequently called heroes are police and firefighters and your criterion doesn't apply to the latter.

0Jay_Schweikert13y

Well, yes, I think that's right. But even under norm 3 (neutral judgment), somebody who risks their life for a worthy cause clearly deserves praise. And if you think that most of what the military does counts as a worthy cause (or at least, is worthy enough that someone could volunteer in good faith), then norms 2 and 3 are probably going to blend together. In that case, the neutral judgment will be to presume heroism. But the more unjustified you think military actions are, the more the distinction becomes relevant, because you have to start asking what to think of soldiers who voluntarily join up with an unworthy cause. Also, norm 3 might entail more of a distinction between risky and non-risky military roles. My general impression is that "military/non-military" matters more in how people make judgments than "combat role/non-combat role," even though the point about "risking one's life" only really comes in with the latter. (Yes, I'm aware that even supposedly "non-combat roles" can operate in war zones and involve substantial risk -- I'm speaking in generalities.) Of course, there may be good reasons for this approach, even just in terms of signaling cost. It's relatively easy to see whether someone has served in the military, but harder and more awkward to ask "okay, but how much danger were you really in?" I'm just trying to explain why there might be a distinction between norms 2 and 3, even acknowledging that military service generally involves heightened risk to one's life.

[-]waditude13y20

I see a hero as one who volunteers to take a personal risk on behalf of his or her group/tribe/country. Whether or not the risk results in death or injury does not have a bearing on whether or not the actions taken were heroic. If one is conscripted against one's will and dies in battle one is not a hero, but more like an unlucky slave. Also, the label is bestowed by the group that stands to benefit from the hero's actions - your hero in warfare is my evil opponent.

9DanArmak13y

In Israel - to simplify somewhat* - everyone is conscripted against their will, for 2.5 years (and no pay). They are then given a choice. They can volunteer for combat service, risk dying more, and be lauded as heroes. Or they can opt for non-combat service, like auto mechanics, clerks, etc., and be generally shamed by society. Would you call those who volunteer heroes, or slaves? Or both? *This is quite simplified. Men are conscripted for 3 years, women for 2. Ultra-Orthodox Jews, and Arabs, and non-able-bodied persons, are not conscripted at all. Large segments of society which oppose govt. military policies also tend to assign the same moral blame to volunteer combat soldiers, and consider them villains not heroes. Actual posts differ widely in desirability, and family connections are a major factor in assignments. Other caveats apply.

[-]Eugine_Nier13y00

And this is why Baysians always loose to barbarians.

[-]JGWeissman13y110

I suspect that if a nation of rationalists who all think "It is just too dangerous for there to be any target in the world about whom saying positive things trumps saying accurate things" were invaded by barbarians, they would, after short reflection, decide that designating those among them who took the role of soldier to repel the invasion as heroes, that this would be an accurate thing as well as positive.

The point of Bayesians vs. Barbarians is not that the Bayesians lose, but that true rationalists win against the barbarians where merely "clever" wannabes lose, and that we aspiring rationalists know enough about how they do it to win as well.

-1Eugine_Nier13y

That only happens if rationalists actually implement advise like that contained in the post, instead of simply patting themselves on the back over that fact that "true rationalists" would win while still acting like "merely 'clever' wannabes".

-1RomeoStevens13y

I believe the only way to be left alone by barbarians is to have a credible deadman-switch doomsday device.

9JGWeissman13y

That could be an effective strategy, but how much effort did you put into thinking of others before you decided that there are none?

0RomeoStevens13y

It's an issue I've read and written about for a few years. How much concerted thought? Not sure, probably not enough. Constructing human institutions in which the cost for violent action increases sharply in all circumstances is non-trivial.

3JoshuaZ13y

Is it that non-trivial? Humans have managed to make societies as a whole have less violence over the last few thousand years, and much of that impact seems to have been accidental.

5Bugmaster13y

That only works when the barbarians are rational enough so that they a). believe that you do in fact have such a device, and b). care whether you have it or not. If, instead, the barbarians are committed to invading you even at the cost of their own lives, or believe that their gods/manifest destiny/force of will/whatever will protect them against any retaliation by you, then your doomsday device is useless.

1TheOtherDave13y

Doesn't that presume barbarians who will reliably act in their own best interest? If I assume that, then being able to offer barbarians a service they value in exchange for something they value less is sufficient to protect myself from barbarians, as long as I ensure I won't provide that service once attacked. But it's quite an assumption.

-1RomeoStevens13y

no, you use the threat against people who are rational to provide you with conventional air superiority. This protects you from stupid people.

0TheOtherDave13y

Ah, I see. So what protects them?

1wedrifid13y

The stupid people? Their overwhelming numbers! ;)

-1RomeoStevens13y

How does air superiority protect you? Is that the question? It reliably does, the fact that modern empires are too chickenshit/stupid to use it correctly doesn't mean it doesn't work. http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Air_Power/vietnam/AP40.htm

6TheOtherDave13y

I am now confused. It sounds like you are saying: a) conventional air superiority is a reliable way of being left alone by barbarians, and b) a credible deadman-switch doomsday device is the only way to be left alone by barbarians I also believe: c) conventional air superiority is not a credible deadman-switch doomsday device, It seems that at least one of those statements must be false.

-1RomeoStevens13y

there are two types of barbarians, the kind that take a nuke seriously (current nation states) and the kind that are just insane. You use conventional means against the latter. you get supplied with conventional means by the former.

[-]jsalvatier13y00

Point 1 seems obvious enough. Point 2, is interesting.

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

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When None Dare Urge Restraint, pt. 2

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