Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being an insufferable reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
Schilling fences are a recognised term going back to the Great Scott himself:
Title of your linked article
Schelling fences on slippery slopes
You are being teased for a typo, Count.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
It's not that people don't 'understand.' It's that it's not itself a complete argument. It is merely preference sharing ('wouldn't it be nice if'), no different than if you said 'wouldn't it be nice if people valued peace more and didn't have wars?' People don't value peace more, for reasons related to the stark differences in preferences compared to you. Therefore, the policy fails to persuade when it rests on a flawed premise- and when a premise is 'everyone should go along with my preferences,' blaming the audience for not getting your genius says more about you than them.
If your argument is merely preferences, it has no weight over other people's preferences, i.e. to make more money or advance projects that require prolonged effort. And without some other mechanism- who is to bring this about, by what means, with what coercive authority against dissidents- it fails as a social policy. There is a reason that Count has to appeal to emergent cultural evolution as an analogy for a deliberate cultural engineering, and it's related to the reason he avoids addressing the factors that actually were involved for that past shift that are not applicable to the current. Like, for example, that there was no centralized policy shift that initiated the change from the top down.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
The OP is raising a question of a policy. That policy questions rests on a premise, but the premise itself can be faulty.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
And this in turn comes down to whether AI have fundamental limits of their own, which is a matter of some contention not worth typing too much on here.
You actually cannot in most of the white collar world, it's extremely inflexible.
Working in the white collar world is a choice, primarily done for money. If you don't care about the money, you can already go to a different sector with less rigid hours. If you do care about the money, it's not clear how a four day work week will make as much as a five day work week absent fiat government transfers, such as UBI.
Also, it's supposed to increase human flourishing and give us more time to spend on things we want to do! Ideally help people grow.
This is an evergreen argument that has always been made regardless of the tech level. Why was it not compelling enough before, aside from the need/desire for more money?
Imagine this attitude back when work was 7 days a week, 12 hour days. Work is a necessity, ideally we live as well or perhaps work on projects more aligned to our souls when we have more free time.
Note the lack of limiting factor here. What [necessity] makes four days a week of drudgery any more reasonable than seven days, beyond current attitudes? Why should it not be viewed as soul-crushing and the [necessity] of work be paired back to 3 days of work a week?
I do agree that there's always more work to do. I think our modern economy doesn't value the type of work left to be done very well, namely spiritual / emotional / community work.
And rightly so. People terribly interested in other how other people organize their spiritual / emotional / community affairs tend to be petty tyrants on how others should value such things if they themselves are not preoccupied.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
What I'm surprised by is why nobody has so far mentioned what, to me, seems the obvious compromise - we just shorten the work week! As our forefathers did forcing a 5 day, 8 hour work week, why don't we continue there? Go down to a 4 day work week, and/or shorten standard working hours to 6 per day?
What is this actually supposed to do? If you want to work 4 days a week, 6 hours a day, you already can.
Well, the real problem is that there isn't a finite amount of work to be done. The AI taking over a lot of human work because they can do the work of a bajillion people doesn't mean there's no longer work for humans to do.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
If so, it would be a poorer point. Collaborators during an insurgency aren't hired to keep a building from catching on fire- the building already being on fire, hence why you need collaborators to operate the buildings while your counterinsurgency forces try to stamp out the fires the arsonists are regularly starting.
It may be very disappointing that the hired help did not nobly perish in the flames the employer gave up fighting, but a man does not have himself killed for a half pence a day or a petty distinction.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
If their plan is to be on an evacuation flight out, why not staff the army with soldiers who only exist on paper, and rob the treasury blind?
...what occupation services do you think soldiers who only exist on paper would have provided that reduced the chance of the evacuation before it became necessary? And what do you think the treasury's prospects are if you had to pay actual market rates for collaborators to occupation forces who expose themselves and their families to retaliation?
The prospect of immigration preference for themselves or their families is the non-fiscal carrot to incentivize cooperation. It's fine if you don't think this demonstrates qualities that would make them 'uniquely' valuable citizens, but your zinger is kind directly ignoring the sort of direct contributions that they are providing, i.e. what services collaborators provide that a paper army doesn't, and how the prospect of compensation in some forms (migration) compensates/reduces the requirements of compensation in other forms (treasury).
You might as well ask 'if the plan is to get out of a collapsing burning building, why not replace firefighters with sinecures?' The answer is rather simple: because while there is a limit to what you can expect hires to do, the jobs they are hired to do is what reduces the risk of the sort of disaster that the hires would not stick around to die in.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
If the incentives seem misaligned, that implicitly requires a perspective and understanding of what aligned incentives are. How much do you want to bet you can provide a set that others here couldn't trivially poke holes through?
You say that giving them a prospect of an escape route likely weakened their resolve. Why should their resolve to support the occupiers be any firmer if you, the occupier, make a policy that there is no escape? It should be rather obvious why that is creating an even greater incentive to not collaborate in the first place, which is what you the occupier need, and why this is a major incentive to side with the resistance whose mantra for decades was 'when the foreigners leave, we will still be here.'
Which, historically, was the winning strategy. Which is why the Afghan clans regularly played both sides, with family members on both sides of the conflict, so that if/when the GIROA failed they had family on the Taliban side who was willing to cover for them if they capitulated. It was the people who had undertaken acts of significant support of GIROA, often at foreign behest, whose families couldn't cover for them.
Yes, people are unlikely to fight to the death for you if they have an escape route. They are also unlikely to fight to the death for you if they do not have an escape route. This is because they are more likely to not fight for you in the first place, and even if they do are more likely to defect earlier on.
If your incentive strategy is moving the defection point even further up in the timeline, it should be visible why this is an even worse alignment of incentives.
Dean
Flairless
5d ago
Well, if you like a contribution enough, you know what to do with it.
I will carry your point about NATO GDP a bit further, though. The economic implications for NATO go beyond even that. It isn't '0.2% on top of normal.' That 0.2% spent going to directly shape what the new-normal in the future is, since future defense spending will have to adjust to what is needed, not what used to be needed. Any critique of 'it's unreasonable to spend so much to help Ukraine fight Russia' can be fairly asked to state a position on 'how much spending is reasonably needed to fight Russia without Ukraine.'
A lot of the NATO defense spending discussion is framed in media in terms of 'Europe needs to spend more to catch up to Russia.' There is truth there, but it's not the entire truth, just as another refrain- 'we need to create capabilities the Americans may withdraw' is a part-but-not-whole of the truth. An additional element is that a lot of the NATO spending European states need to is to just dig themselves out of the hole of the post-Cold War defense cuts that lowered their various institutional, not just military, capabilities. Resolve deficit capabilities in things like administration, communication architecture, procurement agencies, legacy system commitments, and so on, and then you can better modernize the actual hardware in inventory and try to train new people to actually match the Russian threat once ignored / discounted.
But if part of spending requirements is 'resolve the deficit' and another part of 'match the adversary,' how much you need to spend to match the adversary depends on, well, the adversary's capabilities. Which, a half decade ago, included a Soviet Union's worth of stockpiles of ammo, reactivatable vehicles, and weapons. 'Reasonably sufficient' defense spending to reasonably counter such a threat had to be able to match / overcome both [ongoing Russian military industry from the current economy] and account for [the vast reserves of Russian reserve material]. And that was a huge amount of capacity, the sticker shock of which contributed to the European defense spending paralysis, since it's easy to be dwarfed by the magnitudes involved. Russia lost more tanks in the first year of the war than most of the major EU NATO members had total. To 'match' that, you'd be talking trippling or quadrupling tank orders.
But that's if you have to match the Soviet stockpiles. Now that much (though not all) of that Cold War inheritance is squandered, Russia is increasingly dependent on [modern economy funded production], as opposed to [inherited mountains]. And Russia's [modern economy funded production] is far, far, far more practical for the European states to match or keep up with. When you take away Soviet stockpile reactivations, which is how Russia gets 'more than 1000 tanks produced* a year' over the war, back in 2020 Russia was producing around 200 new tanks a year.
It takes a lot less NATO expenditures to overcome 200 tanks a year compared to 1000 tanks a year. Or to overcome 10,000 missiles that have been shot rather than still could be shot. Or suppress a black sea fleet that's already on the sea floor.
None of this means there isn't a great deal more spending to be done, or that the NATO countries can coast without spending. The Europeans have decades of investment deficit to make up for, everyone needs to modernize for drones, and that's without other competing priorities. The Russians may have a smaller economy than many European nations, but they have a significant head start in certain relevant sectors.
But it is magnitudes easier- and cheaper- to keep up with someone who can't out-spend you rather than to try and catch up with someone with a seemingly insurmountable lead who still continues to spend.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
The historic critiques of the Treaty of Versailles regarding Germany were themselves derived from the terms Germany imposed on France beforehand. If there's any historical denunciation to be had for ruinous reparations as a way to peace, it well predates WW1.
Dean
Flairless
6d ago
The critical difference is the ability to assert mutual air denial via active air defense systems.
The Russian airforce dared to overfly Ukraine for about a weak, but stopped because even the rare active-detection radar system was enough to get good aircraft shot down, while Russia lacked the sort of EW / counter-emitter capabilities to suppress those air defense systems. However, this was a mutual paradigm- Russia couldn't intrude, but Ukraine couldn't either, and both stayed behind their lines in the air-defense bubble.
The issue is that NATO has a lot better tools to conduct suppression of enemy air defense (SEAD), most notably stealth aircraft that aren't so vulnerable to that sort of 'pocked AD' strategy. You turn on that sort of active radar, you (generally) still don't detect the aircraft for a weapons lock, but those weapons it has can lock onto you. Once high-altitude air defense systems are cracked, you can 'simply' fly over the lower air defense systems, use the gravity advantage to extend the range of your strikes, and progressively widen your air operation area to progressively strike more things.
It's not as absolute or one-sided as that, and it's certainly not a turkey shoot setup. Russia has absolutely invested a lot in mitigating those sort of stealth investments. But the Soviet anti-air concept that Russia inherited was much more of a 'buy time for the ground forces to win' model, as opposed to 'we have nothing to fear.' With time, you can take care to gradually peel back a defense envelope and act within the safe margins, which is exactly what we see in the current environment with the Russian glide bombs. However, the NATO countries have much better air penetration options, and air munitions, than the Russian airforce whose design purpose was to keep the NATO aircraft delayed by days/weeks/months so the army could run over the ground defenders and then get entrenched.
'Stick it to the man' has always been to a large degree performative. Many of the people proclaiming it were literally performers, many of whom notably 'sold out' to the people paying them.
Social media has changed the social technology, but it's not particularly hard to find older equivalents. Modern social media is your personal brand? Back in the day, your reputation preceded you. You need the your acquaintances for job referrals? Back in the day, you wanted to leave your boss on good terms as a prior supervisor on your resume. You feel you need a passionate public image? Nepotism is having people willing to feign passion about you, specifically, behind closed doors.
The expression 'don't burn bridges,' by its nature, isn't typically talking modern metal bridges. It's talking about even older sorts. The message behind the metaphor is even older.
Not sure what @Dean 's opinion is, I do not want to put words into their mouth.
Thank you. I appreciate not being assigned a position I've never taken.
My position for some time (years) has been neither side is running out of manpower in an absolute sense. The somewhat less than 2-to-1 in favor of Ukraine is reasonable-ish, with emphasis on swings on which part of the front when. When Ukraine does localized counter-attacks over time, such as trying to delay the fall of defense line that has gotten supply-interdicted by fires (drone or artillery), it's worse. When Ukraine is doing 'generic' line defense, it's higher. Per-capital casualty rates of national populations aren't really relevant, since neither side is being limited by the size of the population per see, but rather political considerations for accessing significant parts of it.
In Ukraine, this limitation the political willingness to draft the younger age cohort to fill the infantry with more fit bodies. This is bad, and people can feel free to add more emphasis if they like, but it's not the 'there is nothing left' metaphor either. Every year of the war, an entirely new year of potential conscripts leaves the protected age bracket, and when you compare that number to casualties per year, the number of potential 'new' conscripts far outnumbers the casualties by a large degree in absolute terms. The issues are separate about opportunity costs and so on, so the decision on what to prioritize is a political / policy decision, not a physical limit. Bad politics or policy can and do lead to bad results. But this is also not as bad in the same way / to the degree most people might conceptualize, because the Ukraine War- and particularly the drone dynamic- has changed what sort of 'fit body versus support force' ratio actually is, in ways that military science, let alone social understanding, haven't caught up with. A few years ago, a 'healthy' infantry-drone balance might have a drone user per platoon, with X platoons for Y amount of territory. Now we are looking at multiple drone operators per squad, with Z squads per Y' territory. Whatever the ratio 'should' be, the amount of infantry 'needed' for a certain level of frontage is changing. Ukraine can simultaneously not have enough, and people have outdated / over-inflated assumptions of what 'should' be.
In Russia, the limitation is the economic willingness off older age cohorts to take volunteer enlistment bonuses. Russia tried to leverage its population via a conscription model in the first year of the war, and it went so badly that somewhere between half a million to a million Russians left the country in the first year, and Putin preferred to pay significant other material and other costs to avoid a reoccurance. This works as long as the Russian volunteer base is willing to take the offered salaries, but the issue with market-rate enlistment bonuses are you actually have to pay them, and any model that relies on pre-saved money to fund deficit spending to avoid other issues will, eventually, run out of pre-saved money. Market-rate military expenses are fickle as well as fiscal, and are prone to spiking when shortages occur, such as if fewer people want to volunteer because parts of the contract bonuses (such as regional government bonuses) are cut for fiscal constraints. Difficulty does not mean absence, and Russia has already gone through various long-term costs to provide the short-term funds to meet needs, but shell-games come with tradeoffs and the functional recruitable base is not a simple total-population-size ratio between Russia and Ukraine.
This all matters because much of the discussion about casualty ratios is applied to total population sizes (Russia is X times bigger, so Ukraine needs an Y kill ratio to compensate). This misses the manpower limitation on both sides, and that casualty ratios matter more as a factor of the relative recruitable bases, which are far less clear / even less consensus.
which in itself is not enough to be a central theory of victory for the same reason, they need Russia to run out of money or will or something else before men at that rate if Russia can keep recruiting.
This is approaching my position, but with a whole lot of context / framing that would take a rather long post in and of itself.
In so much that I present a definition of 'victory' for Ukraine, my inclination has generally leaned towards 'terms that are sufficient to allow Ukraine to deter yet another continuation war by Russia.' As a result, my general stance since the first two years of the war have been that victory in the war is more about the final terms than the terrain.
(The 2022 invasion is arguably the 3rd continuation war since the 2014 Crimea incursion, which was followed by the Nova Russia campaign and then the direct intervention when that failed.)
By this standard, the 'peace terms' offered by Russia in the first month of the war would have been a loss as they were basically disarmament demands that would have reduced the Ukrainian army to fewer tanks than the Ukrainian army lost in the next year or so of actually fighting the war. The Ukrainians would have 'won' more land in the short term, but at an extremely high risk of Russia just reorganzing and launching another mechanized invasion that Ukraine would likely have been unable to resist without a reoccurance of the 2022 fuckups, which would have led to the strategic defeat. By contrast, while Ukraine has taken [insert McBigNumber] casualties in the three years of war since the invasion, in the process it has largely depleted the Soviet strategic stockpiles of tanks / ammo / etc. that were what allowed Russia to replenish mechanized formations. Now those reserves are largely gone, and so even if Ukraine loses all of the Donbas and the fortress belt fighting rather than merely turning over uncontested, it's still a 'better' [victory] than if Russia still had the perceived mechanized invasion capacity it had a few years ago.
Similar points exist in other aspects of deterrence credibility. If the war had not continued, the limits of the Russian ammunition stockpiles (since supplemented by purchased North Korean munitions) would not have been so clear to all, and thus strengthened the Russian negotiating leverage were Russia still at 10-to-1 artillery advantage as opposed the more contemporary 3-to-1 estimates. If the war had not continued past the first month, Russia might still have had a unilateral advantage in terms of its long-range strike capability of operational stockpiles of cruise missiles, and Ukraine would not have gradually increasing its own long-range strike campaign credibility to the point where it now routinely hits highly-visible, and budget-significant, Russian infrastructure. Had the war ended sooner, when Russia was still aggressively using Soviet AA missiles against everything it could, the deterrence narrative might have been stuck on the question of 'has Ukraine / the West run out of air defenses,' rather than flip that to 'if Russia struggles against these drones, how safe is it against NATO airpower?'
None of this is to say that Russia hasn't advanced its own capabilities in various areas over the war. Drone warfare is absolutely a thing. But deterrence isn't about 'can the attacker win,' but rather 'can the defender make it not worth the cost.' And in that sense, and for that purpose, increasing Russian costs now, in the present, shapes Russian future cost calculus later, when Russia (particularly Putin) might try again.
This is an attritional struggle, but it's not an attritional struggle to 'win' this war in terms of 'Russian military collapses and Ukraine regains territory.' While I'm sure the Ukrainian public would love it if some sort of Russian balance of payments default led to the Russian army leaving the field or mutinying in mass and marching on Moscow, that's neither likely or necessary. Rather, the war is an attritional struggle that seeks to add enough military and economic and political-will costs such that even Putin will think about starting another invasion, and go 'I'd rather not.'
And in that context, the attritional goal for Russian infantry and such isn't 'there are literally not enough men to fight,' but rather 'future!Putin does not want to pay the costs he'd have to to get enough men to fight.'
That could the direct economic costs to the Russian state budget and fiscal planning if he has to pay market costs. That could be the political costs if Putin in this war has to supplement the volunteers with conscripts. That could be the material costs, if Russia feels it needs to replace the stuff it already lost in this war before it tries again. That could be reconstitution costs, if the survivors of this war decide they'd rather not join the next war because they got their signing bonus and intend to live with it. It could be any or all of these, so long as the sum-total is enough that Putin, when he's out of sunk-cost-fallacy mode, would rather not try.
But all of this framework derives from a theory of victory that doesn't really define victory in this war in terms of territory lost or gained, or even Ukrainian casualties.
One of these days, I'm tempted to do a sort of review-post of the sort of trends seem to go into getting into the AAQC. A sort of 'So You Want To Write An AAQC...' tips / tricks / observations effort post.
My incredibly selfish ulterior motive would be to encourage people towards the sort of posting styles I enjoy, regardless of any statistical rigor.
More options
Context Copy link