sciuru
1yr ago
[You] I also do not believe that inter-service rivalry in Russia has a noteworthy epistemic dimension and doesn't amount to mutual distrust and libel, to prevent them from ganging up on the Czar.
The following excerpts are from the "Russian Military Intelligence: Background and Issues for Congress (Updated November 15, 2021)" [pdf]:
The FSB, however, has sought to gain a greater foreign intelligence role and has significant international operations, especially in Russia’s neighboring post-Soviet states.30 This reportedly has caused significant friction within Russia’s intelligence community, especially with the GRU and SVR, which consider foreign intelligence collection their primary responsibility. The FSO operates as an overseer of the various security services, helping to monitor infighting and the accuracy of intelligence reporting.
However, as analyst Mark Galeotti has opined, “Russian collection operations are not just highly active but also extremely professional. Tasking, though, appears less impressive. While the Foreign Intelligence Service and GRU have a strong sense of the military and technical secrets they are meant to uncover, their political objectives are sometimes naive.”
Here's from Joss I. Meakins (2018) "Squabbling Siloviki: Factionalism Within Russia’s
Security Services":
In fact, the question of “who watches the watchmen” has long been a concern of the Kremlin. Since the 1990s, the FSO has traditionally fulfilled this role and acts as the last line of defense against rival factions. According to Mark Galeotti, the FSO controls the elite Presidential Regiment of 5500 soldiers which guards the Kremlin and has its own intelligence unit to verify intelligence analysis.
I am not sure much more details on this subject could be obtained.
There is no doubt about inter-service strife, but the question remains as to whether it leads to competitive race down the ground truth -- as I proposed -- or to mere gang-style clashes. The same sources also note that:
Analysts and reporting therefore suggest the GRU’s influence is often relative to the ability of its chief to develop personal relationships with Russia’s political leadership.
and, as you said,
Russia’s President also helps foment conflict within the security services, seeing it as the best way to retain control by playing them off against each other. [...] to ensure that no single agency becomes powerful enough to threaten the regime.
Meakins also writes:
An in-depth analysis of recent episodes illustrates that crime and corruption drive much of the conflict. The desire to control illicit revenue schemes, from money laundering to smuggling, is a common cause of siloviki power struggles.
sciuru
1yr ago
Great analysis, thank you.
I apologize if you discerned bad faith in my words, there was none of it. I explicitly admitted that “Your assumptions are clearly favored by Occam's razor, being interwoven into an elegant and expressive narrative [...]”.
For now I’ve googled out a few more claims about Putin’s alleged aversion-to-PC. That plus data you provided have updated me. Many asynchronous claims from rivals and subordinates alike, pointing in the same direction is improbable to fake.
I appreciate the way you and others have scrutinized every causal linkage in my story, stating that evidence X is not necessarily caused by hidden dynamics Y. It's a fair criticism, but I'd like to know what evidence, in principle, could have shifted your prior towards mine or least away from yours. Rejecting extreme cases by analogies would get us only so far. If you can't contemplate such evidence (due to nature of the question), then probably this discussion is boring for you, as I would repeatedly hit the same tiles on your epistemic map, thinking that your battleships are there, while there are none. As for me, I enjoy your counterpoints.
Here’s what Alena Ledeneva writes in "Can Russia Modernise?: Sistema, Power Networks and Informal Governance". The book is from 2013, but assuming a degree of institutional inertia, its findings might still be relevant.
It is tempting to think about informal power, status and influence as a pyramid, by analogy with formal power, because the power networks involved in informal governance are also vertically integrated, somewhat hierarchical and can be similarly rigid and brutal – ‘like a wolves’ pack’, in the expression of one respondent. Yet they surface in more subtle ways and involve constant and mutual monitoring by key players, including highly personalised checks and balances. According to a well-informed respondent, the monitoring function of smotryashchie (the watchers) is central for informal governance and should not be associated with some stereotypical siloviki planted everywhere to watch over businesses or projects. The checks and balances of smotryashchie emerge from Putin’s networks’ watching over one another and from their informal reporting:
In reality, smotryashchie is not a single eye. It’s a complex system. Where there is some money, there should be control. Putin controls manually. He does not trust anybody. There are checks and balances and there are trusted watchdogs. There is Rottenberg. There is Akimov. There are [the] Koval´chuks. There is Timchenko, who also starts steering (rulit´ ). 9 All these people have access to Putin through a private room in his office. Each of them has Putin’s ear and in the end he [Putin] gets a more or less adequate picture. He divides and rules. In each constituency, there are those associated with Berl Lazar and there are those associated with Adolf Shaevich.
He also uses non-sistema sources that we know nothing about. It is like the operative work of reading dossiers, morning FSB reports (utrennya spravka FSB), general country reports (obschaya spravka po strane), [and] memos (dokladnye zapiski) that come from almost everywhere. It used to be Sechin who did the reading, now it must be somebody else’s job. The operative work, however, continues as normal.
One of my respondents also observes that Putin labels people as ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ (svoi and chuzhie) rather harshly:
Putin takes information from svoi only. He seems unable to trust people and the delivery of information and signals-gathering occurs through siloviki but, make no mistake, they assemble it from all over the place (po shirokomu frontu).
Alexander Stubb (former prime minister, foreign minister and finance minister of Finland) recently shared his impression of Putin at Lawfare podcast. Stubb and Putin (then prime minister) participated in ceasefire negotiations in 2008. I am not going to extrapolate from this vignette, but I deem it an informative perspective from someone who has no clear incentive to praise Putin (I mean, aside from denying that he was negotiating with a moron). Starts at 11:44
Stubb: Putin at the meetings is very well prepared, he’s got his usual speaking notes and quite often he starts by reading out ...and then he starts going into real business. Interpreters at both sides are very good, so you get a sense of what’s going on. Then there’s always a rigmarole of him being late, anywhere from one hour to four hours, it’s kind of stuff you have to live with. But yeah, he’s ...analytical, he is intellectual, he’s cold, he knows his stuff. He is not a pushover as we can see.
Lawfare: [my paraphrasing] one thing is to be well prepared and to hinge solely on your initial point, but what about fluid reasoning, about ability to read others and to react in the moment?
Stubb: Listen, you don’t become a president or leader of Russia if you don’t have a cognitive capacity which goes beyond the normal. Certainly he was able to react to situation, in a very impressive way. He was able to connect the dots, he would bring in something, say, on the Middle East or Syria, he’d bring in memory from Afghanistan, make reference to Stalin. He’d talk about some details about, say, a NATO mission somewhere, missile negotiations with America, make reference to George W. Bush, to Condoleezza Rice… The guy knew his stuff […] You see the problem is, quite often we get our image, a picture, a projection of particular individual from the international media […] but certainly I would say that out of hundreds of leaders or ministers I’ve met over the years, Putin is someone who you would remember, because he’s so well versed in his dossier.
Lawfare: many in the Western media of late have been focusing on him losing his mind in some way…
Stubb: I think that’s rubbish
Lawfare: ...losing his grip. I don’t know if that’s because of covid isolation or mental decline, but [Stubb laughs]
Stubb: My take here, it’s a little bit counterintuitive to what we usually hear in the West or what you would hear from an avid transatlanticist like me […] I think some people simply don’t understand the Russian soul or the Russian mind. Russian leadership has always been very centralised […] he is rational from his perspective, but irrational from Western perspective. For him it’s about story: Great Russia, re-instituting Russia, make-Russia-great-again mentality. […] so all this stuff about long tables, him, being in a covid isolation… to be honest, I think it’s Western rubbish
[You] This is what I'm analogizing to LW mindset (again, it's not fair to dismiss that as a rhetorical device, it's a good faith reference to a phenomenon we discussed earlier). It can be called «generality hypothesis».
Analogies of the form “Not unlike folks from $outrgoup, you’re making a methodological error of” collapse diverse opinions within $outgroup and blur the line between their cluster of opinions and mine, and it's those collateral implications of the analogy I dislike. I called it a rhetorical device as your argument is perfectly valid without this wrapping.
I admit, my hypothesis is similar to Efficient Dictator Hypothesis (akin to Efficient Market not Pareto efficiency) or something like political no-arbitrage: if Putin didn't use some sort of higher-level information filtering techniques, this knowledge differential would have been exploited by his opponents and he wouldn't have survived and stayed on top of a ruthlessly competitive Kremlin environment.
[You] My null hypothesis is that ours is a (perhaps extremely) degenerate case of autocracy, that Putin is not that savvy at this autocrat thing, and owes his success at staying in power solely to narrow specializations like building a small intensely loyal mafia family and murdering key people outside it.
But what does mafia building consist in, exactly? Isn't it about managing and filtering patronage networks?
sciuru
1yr ago
Stalin was notably paranoid. He constantly reshuffled and purged party cadres, and closely watched and probed members of his inner circle (~7 people). He often brought them to his dacha, at night, for a supper, forced them to drink until they loosen their tongues enough; tested food on them, as he feared it might be poisoned. He probed them tête-à-tête, played one against another by sharing his "suspicions", etc. Even dragged them to his personal month-long vacations for closer monitoring. Not to say about spying. This is an example of a dictator, trying to deal with sycophants and the threat they pose.
Another example is about notorious over-reporting in Soviet economy. It seemed to me they used some concrete scheme to get right estimates, but I can't find details.
Ministries would want to help out struggling enterprises. On the other hand, the ministry itself has targets that it must meet. If it is too easy on its own enterprises, then the ministry target will be jeopardized. Enterprises can “fool” their superiors only at the margin. Ministry staff personnel have considerable production experience and are able to detect gross misreporting on the part of their enterprises.
For earlier instances I was thinking, eg, about Henry VIII's reign with his court, being dominated by factional strife. Again, I didn't find how exactly he coped with conflicting views from rival groups, trying to topple each other, but it seems he at least acknowledged various interests behind them (although, arguably still was over-influenced by certain figures like Wolsey, Cromwell).
When Henry heard of these proceedings he consulted the judges before summoning a delegation of the Commons to present themselves before him.
Cranmer had been accused of tolerating heresy within his diocese, but the King left him free to hold his own enquiry, and this exonerated him. Later that year, probably in November 1543, the conservatives on the Privy Council asked the King’s permission to present heresy charges against the archbishop. Henry assented, but warned Cranmer what was afoot […] Cranmer had not only survived the attacks directed against him; he had also strengthened his position and his influence with the King.
...to summon a synod for the purpose of defining the Church of England’s position on matters of faith. The discussions were heated and exhausting, and Hugh Latimer – at that time Bishop of Worcester and a prominent advocate of reform – recorded his opinion that ‘it is a troublous thing to agree upon a doctrine in things of such controversy, with judgements of such diversity, every man (I trust) meaning well, and yet not all meaning one way’.
Roger Lockyer, "Tudor and Stuart Britain"
suggest they didn't make the many catastrophic mistakes that they did make
It's hard to gauge, because mistakes also result from poor implementations and irreducible contingencies. I said "Putin’s awareness is underestimated", not that he or every autocrat is omniscient.
sciuru
1yr ago
Good point. It's a classic tradeoff, facing dictators: by over-optimizing your domestic environment for survival and rents, you may severely damage incentives of people to compete for anything except your patronage. Conflicts with foreign powers/ technological backwardness often make this clear.
sciuru
1yr ago
Since the beginning of war I've seen rather high levels of bureaucratic activity: officials fired and reshuffled, legislative trappings expanded, corporations merged and shuffled. I take this as evidence, that at least some information trickles down to Putin's mind.
The point is not that he is personally fond of gadgets or internet. To survive in his vipers nest, he needs a lot of information, from various sources/services, competing and being played against one another. I doubt it's as simple as "everyone just serves him rosy reports": when one official over-serves his rosy vision, his rival might undercut him by serving something closer to reality, with more details. It's more effective to compete down toward ground truth, gradually adding more details, than to race up - into more and more delirious and vague positive reports.
sciuru
1yr ago
"Bad" gouging is about raising prices beyond compensation for (1) risk and delivery costs, and (2) demand increase. Legality of price gouging increases incentive for profit seekers, yes. But if they are profit seekers, why not cooperate and arrange high cartel prices for this short period of time?
only if you pretend that the larger market has ceased to exist
Why pretend that market never fail? Especially during disruption and uncertainty of a disaster, when there might be not so many arbitragers rushing to close all price differentials.
natural method of limiting overuse of scarce goods
Could you provide a brief example of this method?
sciuru
1yr ago
Could you elaborate on what exactly isn't right in that sentence? I don't see how your example contradicts what I said. When the marginal cost or demand increases, producer would adjust its price up, naturally. But when producer compensated all his expenses and still raises price -- it benefits producer at a cost of consumers (this raise is not a Pareto improvement).
sciuru
1yr ago
I don't see reliable indications
What indications would you imagine? That Peskov or some news media would mention in a passing, that Putin "recently browsed runet to gauge domestic sentiment", "Putin is actually very modern, high tech guy, he uses PC and internet regularly"? or that Putin would conspicuously tap at his smartphone during meeting or forum? You would dismiss those signals as a part of "enlightened monarch" theater (like videos you refer to). It means there is no reliable evidence to reject the hypothesis outright.
My core belief is that an autocrat would learn to filter higher level signals on which his survival depends. Higher level means he is like a mediocre CEO/ early modern ruler -- he doesn't know how stuff at lower level works, he knows how to build and manage patronage networks, play them against one another and how to discern through them any conflicting information. That's rather weak assumption on his part, much less than classic field-independent rationality with infinite computing power.
Do not sweep me into "LW", that's a weird rhetorical device. Methodologically, my main issue here is to find how to evaluate likelihood of what we observe about Putin, given my or your hypotheses. Your assumptions are clearly favored by Occam's razor, being interwoven into an elegant and expressive narrative of a stupid "political animal". My assumptions rely more on historical parallels and general logic of delegation/ autocratic rule. Public image of savvy rulers of the past also didn't reflect hidden variables of their decision making.
that much we know. We can't really say more
No. That much we observe. And when we observe so little, it's your personal priors, which mainly speak, not the likelihood.
sciuru
1yr ago
First assumption is that he cares about his political survival and understands which domestic and foreign variables to track. Second, that he receives highlights from western media/ analysts anyway. If he doubts the quality of information, surely he can arrange a randomized controlled trial and order 10 independent analysts to report to him. Seems like a standard routine for an autocrat who is fed up with sycophants.
sciuru
1yr ago
I believe Putin’s awareness is underestimated. Authoritarian survival is crucially dependent on tracking any signals, threatening your position. His real problem is controls.
You (Putin) can give any orders, but the longer the hierarchical chain of command they have to travel to reach the ground – the more they will disperse through attempts at every level to spread and avoid responsibility. There is no guarantee any order would be executed. You can iterate through all possible officials and commanders to find those, which work (and we’ve seen how many military officials have been changed since the start).
But you can’t iterate much through the pillars of your domestic power and administration – elites and technocrats. Technocrats/ managers do their job well, but there is only so much they can do with their tiny but precise levers. The real issue is that one of the primary mechanisms, through which Putin has been feeding his domestic elites for decades – is government contracts and corporate shares/management. But gradually it has rotten so much as to become a device solely for cash transfers. There has been many purges of petty fraudsters during the war – across all industries, like aerospace, military complex, high tech – but you can’t purge everything. And even after purge, it takes time to rebuild Potemkin industries, especially when many of them turned out to depend heavily on imported components.
In this situation your most reliable option is to order big impactful things, with sufficiently big impact-margin to account for all efficiency lost during implementation. This include diplomatic sabre-rattling, mobilization decisions, huge geoeconomical levers like shutting pipelines, etc.
As for awareness, Putin can observe the whole internet, including western media and analytics, which he surely understands is more reliable. At the same time he can query any of his subordinates, posing whatever uncomfortable questions he likes: they would serve you the bullshit, but the manner in which they do it certainly tells a lot. He can request a phone call to officials anywhere on the ground – and figure out why the governor of Kherson is unable to reply since a week. So at the bare minimum Putin can connect all those dots and infer the situation at least at strategic – “upper operational" level, but has little to change it.
sciuru
1yr ago
I think, the real debate is about how much of a cap is justified.
From a narrow, short-term efficiency perspective, raising price above the marginal cost of production is suboptimal (and therefore "bad") only if you want to maximize total welfare (which most people probably don't). Market price is merely an aggregation (like average) of prices at which transactions actually occur. But some people implicitly imbue it with a sacred meaning of being unconditionally "efficient" and "welfare maximizing" - just by virtue of resulting from any market interactions whatsoever. From a narrow view, that's incorrect, as markets often fail to arrive at a short-term efficient price, if they try at all.
In the narrow view it's also irrelevant that consumers reveal their preference by choosing monopoly suppliers. True, in this exact moment monopoly supplier is their optimal choice. But when a robber offers you to choose between your life and money, you would also optimally choose your life. Robber imposes on you the choice (market structure), by force (market power), which pushes you toward inefficient allocation.
From a broader, more reasonable but complicated macro perspective, there must be a profit margin big enough for investment, risk premium and so on. If all producers would maximize welfare in the short term, they wouldn't grow and therefore underperform in the long run.
sciuru
1yr ago
This GDP per capita graph shows good growth. Which data do you use?
Per capita gap indicates possibility of a relatively easy catch-up growth via import of technologies of the leader. This might be even part of a strategy: you redistribute wealth among your population more evenly than the leader, thus slowing your own growth; then you adopt technologies of the leader, who maintains higher inequality.
the poor in the US are not on the verge of starvation
World bank uses $2.15 per day (PPP) poverty line (graph), so everyone below this line consumes more or less the same across countries (poor relief programs probably aren't accounted for here). With this definition the poor, but employed might feel better than non-poor, but unemployed? I won't argue further against this claim, but I am curious what factor I neglect, which makes the US poor subjectively better off than unemployed.
I see utilitarianism as...
Thanks for sharing. I broadly agree with your case against fine-tuning and over-fitting.
The choice of optimal "ethical framework" is an optimization problem of its own. I would frame it as a task to devise rules that, when imposed on society, produce "good" expected societal trajectories (accounting for people, gaming the rules). I agree, that more clear-cut rules leave less space for manipulation and misinterpretation for actors, and - broadly - this looks close to the current legal system plus policy making based on Cost benefit analysis.
In some sense the notion of utilitarianism is useless for policy design, as the latter is about specialized predictions and theories. On the other hand, when we devise policy we are still in "optimizator" mode, subject to all biases and unintended manipulations.
sciuru
1yr ago
Thanks for high effort. I enjoyed the read.
Sweden, Denmark and even Norway have seen approximately no increase in the level of GDP per capita since 2007
Haven't they? Absolute gap is persistent, as you noted, but growth rates closely track US ones. Also it might be a good thing to have certain per capita gap -- to have a room for catch-up.
Unemployment is arguably worse than poverty for utility
If we consider subjective well-being, poverty amounts to permanent survival mode with almost no access to social lifts and any fruits of civilization. I think it's incomparable to any existential sufferings of idle, but otherwise well-to-do people (moreover, lack of job doesn't preclude anyone from meaningful and even societally useful endeavors).
And methodologically, I think evolutionary stories are irrelevant until we have current evidence of what they supposedly imply. And when we have current evidence, there is no need for stories.
Now a macro, long-horizon perspective. One might argue the poor are productivity hoarders in some sense, locked in the low-productivity jobs. I agree, that unconditional redistribution erodes incentives, but conditional transfers (say, of money or education in exchange for obligation to find a job from the list) to the poor might push/nudge them toward upper levels, where they can contribute more to the growth.
Growth is appealing as it enables efficiency improvements, and inefficiency (wastefulness) is a rare thing everyone agrees to be bad. I like Rawlsian scenario of a narrow economic elite, pushing the Pareto frontier, reaping its well deserved 90% share of surplus and doling out 10%. But 10% might be suboptimal for a classic welfare maximizer, who assumes diminishing utility. The latter implies it's optimal to redistribute wealth from the top to the bottom until both sides meet on the utility curve. The poor are at the steepest slope, they gain much more than wealthy ones lose by helping them.
The main question here is how much capital should we set aside for growth, and how much of wealthy capital actually causes growth.
I wouldn't actually be so epistemically arrogant as to think that utilitarian reasoning was the best way to implement a utilitarian analysis of what is good/evil
Could you elaborate on this?
sciuru
1yr ago
You singled out annexation as an exceptional threat to international stability. Why do we need that stability in the first place? Not to save lives and to promote well-being in the long run? By this metric, I argue, conflicts w/t annexations inflict more damage than bloodless annexations.
eventually the current phase of the war
That's absolutely an overstretch. Annexation and the launch of separatist movement were a direct response to revolution in Kyiv (revolution doesn't justify that response, I am just stating the causal link). Without annexation, separatist movement alone would have sparked the protracted smouldering conflict, that we observed till February. Invasion was in no way necessitated by the state of the conflict or status of annexed Crimea, unless you believe Putin's narrative.
sciuru
1yr ago
Annexation might be the most outrageous way to disrupt equilibrium, but if done bloodlessly, it might cause less suffering in the long run, than toppling/installing governments w/t outward annexation. For some reason civilized world strongly prefers smouldering conflicts with violence and suffering spread -- and therefore, perceptually discounted -- across space and time thinly enough to look almost "natural".
Wikipedia on Syrian civil war: 15 March 2011 – present (11 years, 6 months and 3 days); aside from combatant casualties at least 306,887 civilians killed, estimated 6.7 million internally displaced & 6.6 million refugees.
For Iraq estimates and methodologies range wildly.
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Costs of war project: 268,000 - 295,000 people were killed in violence in the Iraq war from March 2003 - Oct. 2018, including 182,272 - 204,575 civilians
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The PLOS Medicine study's figure of approximately 460,000 excess deaths through the end of June 2011 is based on household survey data including more than 60% of deaths directly attributable to violence.
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The Lancet study's figure of 654,965 excess deaths through the end of June 2006 is based on household survey data. The estimate is for all excess violent and nonviolent deaths. That also includes those due to increased lawlessness, degraded infrastructure, poorer healthcare, etc.
Is that burning slow enough?
This is not to justify any other conflicts. The whole framing of "justification" is hilarious, as it presumes innocence of any geopolitical act, unless you can't make up any excuses at all.
sciuru
1yr ago
Could you point out a dataset with all proper adjustments applied? Or several datasets which could be combined into proper one? Wiki page (median income table) refers to this monstrous oecd table, which has almost no values after 2019. Do I understand correctly, that wiki took measure="median disposable income (current prices)" and adjusted it by PPP?
sciuru
1yr ago
The following is a personal sample, I am not an expert. I prefer bottom-up control: to craft your environment and schedule in advance, so as to get the right stimulation and avoid dangerous cues - with minimal effort. This paper with sophisticated title is about addictive behaviors in general, I find it conceptually useful. In good environment attention still fluctuates and has to be restored: this paper outlines neurobiological mechanisms of attention and some techniques to control it.
This one is an attempt to integrate the extant terminological mess: it will give you many key words and a sense of despair.
sciuru
1yr ago
Thank you!
Unexpectedly, very few studies met our inclusion criteria, despite the fact that we included both “self-incentive” and “self-reward” as search terms.
They took very narrow inclusion criteria. It might genuinely reflect their narrow research interest, but there is a vast overlapping terminological mess research on behavioral change and goal pursuit, which uses other notions: intrinsic/extrinsic motivation, self-control / effortless control / impulse control, reward processing/ neural economics, etc. After brief unsuccessful attempts to "get the whole picture", I now read mostly about specific techniques, which are easier to test empirically, and that seem to work for me. Are you researching out of scholarly interest or to enhance personal performance?
sciuru
1yr ago
Most studies I've seen have such artificial settings, it's hard to take their conclusions at face value (if at all). Do you have any persuasive studies in mind? Or even better, just data sets/ narrative reviews of human behavior in the wild, w/t models and theories?
sciuru
1yr ago
Imperial regime as a whole survived defeats in two consecutive wars (Japan, WWI), two revolutions (1905/17) and had adapted to incessant domestic unrest -- all within 20 years. And was definitely defeated only after few more years of civil strife. World war pushed many states down the similar roads, so I don't see relative to whom Russia was an easy case. What indications of ease do you mean?
intent in crushing national movements
Even Ru Provisional government inherited that stance, sadly. Historical irony though, is that much of early Bolshevik maneuvering was a pure opportunism - including acceptance of Finnish independence (if that acceptance is to be considered legitimate at all), Brest-Litovsk treaty, etc. When they secured power, the game had changed. Eh, Mannerheim.
sciuru
1yr ago
Could I ask your view on late Russian Empire? Although lagging behind, it seemed to be more in touch with European states (than its own people, ironically), industrialized at impressive rates, and eventually yielded to some democratic changes. If Russian whites were as successful as Finnish ones during their civil war, I believe - in the hindsight - they could steer toward better trajectory, than the Soviet one.
sciuru
1yr ago
First, I support removing any traces of Soviet Union from the countries, annexed by it. I don’t think any invasion could be justified by historical narratives (if at all). Moreover, Putin’s narrative, even wrapped around geopolitical calculus, is not consistent with his real actions anyway.
I disagree with sweeping extrapolations of Stalin’s policies to other Soviet leaders and Soviet people (and Russians). I think Kennan well outlined Stalin's maniacal drive for purges and deportations in the Long telegram:
At bottom of Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. [...] To this was added, as Russia came into contact with economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area. But this latter type of insecurity was one which afflicted rather Russian rulers than Russian people; for Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form fragile and artificial in its psychological foundation, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries.
Without it they would stand before history, at best, as only the last of that long succession of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who have relentlessly forced country on to ever new heights of military power in order to guarantee external security of their internally weak regimes.
But the Soviet experiment was not doomed from the beginning. Many revolutions had started with war and terror, but some cases (French, English, American) had positive impacts in the long run, not apparent from the outset. Idealists like Lenin and Gorbachev even attempted to implement decent reforms, and tried to grant certain autonomy to and promote (or rather enforce) ethnic character of republics. Lenin:
Politically and culturally, the nativization policy aimed to eliminate Russian domination and culture in the said Soviet republics. The de-Russification was also implemented on ethnic Russian groups and their children. For example, all children in Ukraine were taught the Ukrainian language in school. The policies of korenization facilitated the Communist Party's establishment of the local languages in government and education, in publishing, in culture, and in public life.
Gorbachev removed Soviet aggressive stance abroad, and enacted actual democratic reforms domestically -- in a pretty unilateral way in both cases. Khruschev got rid of Stalin’s cult and at least started to care about quality of life, while his aggressive international stance was not unilateral, US administration also took role in the positive feedback loop.
One crucial factor, distinguishing Soviet project from successful revolutions, is that they tried to impose their vision on everyone around. Why overstretch, why waste your effort at all on other states with their own distinct visions and identities? Enjoy your utopia on your own, if you manage to survive it.
sciuru
1yr ago
Likelihood as a function is fixed in a classic bayesian mode. The only thing that we update is probability distribution over parameters. Likelihood corresponds to a static model of the world and should evaluate all possible states of the world, including hidden ones.
Jiro is right. In your example you are isolated from any indicators of lobsters whatsoever, and rely solely on priors. If I was regularly checking counts of web searches for lobsters, and they were decreasing or absent, I would at some point start to reduce probability of their existence.
sciuru
1yr ago
Few hypotheses (based on experience, wrapped in theory):
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Hedonic treadmill. Your rotation system might still have a low "essential" variation, so that brain can predict/remember the most salient patterns, after which new songs don't excite/surprise it. Intermittent silence helps
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Attention. When you listen as a background to other activities, it might feel much less exciting, as attention spreads among inputs. Concert, in contrast, grabs all your sensory inputs at once
Not sure about local search, but googling
site:themotte.org "AI"works fine.More options
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