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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   27874 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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There's nothing strange about nations resisting invasion to anyone with a passing familiarity with history

Well, yes there is something strange about it. A person is far more likely to die if he's at war than if he's under occupation; a person is far more likely to have all his infrastructure smashed if he's at war than if he's at occupation.

So why do people keep not surrendering?

It's not historically unusual for people to keep dying for abstract concepts like "statehood", but it certainly is strange from a cost-benefit analysis. History is unreasonable.

nothing odd about people supporting a victim of unjust aggression to anyone with a familiarity of social dynamics.

Anyone having empathy for any actors in wars a thousand miles away is extremely historically unusual and strange. For all of human history up until about T-100, what the Cossacks were doing in Zaporizhia would have elicited a shrug from anyone outside of Tartary. Why's anyone mad now?

For all of human history up until about T-100, what the Cossacks were doing in Zaporizhia would have elicited a shrug from anyone outside of Tartary.

Au contraire:

"It was Ivan Mazepa, the leader of the autonomous Cossack state in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and not Peter I, the victor of the Battle of Poltava, or Charles XII, the defeated king of Sweden, who captured the imagination of French artists and literary figures from the Enlightenment well into the nineteenth century. The legend of Mazepa's ride on the back of a wild horse into the steppes of Ukraine, in particular, and details about his subsequent ascent to the Hetmanate fueled a veritable creative fervor in Europe that resulted in the creation of over 300 works of art, literature, and music on the subject. The epicenter of this artistic output was France, beginning with the romantic generation, whose influence continued with the help of numerous French publishers and lithographers: of the forty-four publishers in Europe printing lithographs with a Mazepa theme, twenty-nine were located in Paris and five elsewhere in France. (4) The wide diffusion of this imagery, especially mid-century (when the introduction of the steam-powered mechanical press allowed for the printing of 1,000 sheets per hour), was such that in 1892 a reviewer of the French opera Mazeppa, by the composer Marie de Grandval, remarked--in an "art-imitating-art-imitating-life" way--that there was a time when "one could not enter into the slightest village cabaret without finding, on the walls, Mazeppa tied to his horse." (5) By contrast, only a handful of plays, short stories, or novels were published on the subject of Peter I or Charles XII during the nineteenth century, with only one work tangentially on the Battle of Poltava itself. (6)"

Anyone having empathy for any actors in wars a thousand miles away is extremely historically unusual and strange. For all of human history up until about T-100, what the Cossacks were doing in Zaporizhia would have elicited a shrug from anyone outside of Tartary. Why's anyone mad now?

Strange? Yes, it was strange when, for example ... inhabitants of Western and Northern Europe deeply cared about some stones in the Middle East they never saw, thousands of miles away, cared enough that they not only sent money, but went in hundreds of thousands to near certain death in order to liberate them.

Unusual? Not, even in pre modern times without internet, TV, radio and newspapers.

Fairly sure this was not an uncommon topic in the Less Wrong of 10 years ago. How do you have a functional military in your rationalist utopia when it is always rational for the individual to flee and/or surrender? Except if everyone does that, your utopia gets conquered by the nearest group of marginally less 'rational' barbarians.

There's nothing strange or unreasonable about history being full of groups of people willing to risk their lives for the abstract concepts of their group. Because groups without such memes generally don't last long enough to leave a mark on history.

And from a game theory perspective, the credible pre-commitments of MAD are how all military defense functions, really. If you attack us, we commit to fighting a bloody war instead of rolling over. Even though the cost for the defender will be greater, the cost for the attacker will be much greater. And the only way to make that pre-commitment credible is to follow through even after the deterrence has failed. Because it is an iterated game, both from the defenders perspective, assuming they survive, and evolutionarily - "fuck with me and we'll both end up worse" is credible coming from humans because humans have evolved to follow through often enough.

Since when is it rational to flee? The evolutionary imperative is to spread your dna (your algorithm or code). If you die but a million people who share significant parts of your code survive then it is rational to die.

Humans already live forever. When you reproduce your reproduction shares a percentage of you. Reproduce enough and you not only survive but multiples of you survive.

The rationalist model here is just wrong. It’s rational to die.

That's not how it works. See "The Tragedy of Group Selectionism" by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Because Eliezer wrote something it’s not a fact?

Also one of the arguments used is that foxes don’t limit their breeding. Which doesn’t apply to humans since we often do the discussed behavior of fighting and personal sacrifice for their tribe.

How about fleeing to another [more affluent] country, taking the necessary steps to have your descendants take control of that country and then exact revenge on the initial threat?

Would that be a successful strategy?

Do you have a specific example in mind? I suppose I could uncharitably assume you are talking about Jews, since you are fond of Darkly Hinting about them, but in that case you should speak plainly and also explain which country they have taken control of.

Otherwise this seems like a low-effort hypothetical just for the sake of being argumentative.

I can’t tell if your just trolling with AI.

I'm replying to a post that's wondering why people don't just surrender to save their lives. And the very point of those discussions on LW was that any model of rationality that easily destroyed can't be all that rational. Which is why the last paragraph of my post gives a game-theoretic reason to fight.

But humans very much do not live forever. You are not your genes, your consciousness is their byproduct and will die with your physical body. And your desires are only indirectly linked with genetic success (adaptation executors vs fitness maximizers and all that). Plus, for genetic success it's much better to get other people to die for you instead.

Yea and I disagree with your game theoretic analysis.

I think it’s just genes. And we do live forever. And my model really explains behavior that seems irrational to you.

Fairly sure this was not an uncommon topic in the Less Wrong of 10 years ago. How do you have a functional military in your rationalist utopia when it is always rational for the individual to flee and/or surrender? Except if everyone does that, your utopia gets conquered by the nearest group of marginally less 'rational' barbarians.

As smart people as Less Wrong crowd thought about this problem before, Future Rational Utopia just needs to learn from their experience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrier_troops#Red_Army

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%97%D0%B0%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D0%BE%D1%82%D1%80%D1%8F%D0%B4

Well, yes there is something strange about it. A person is far more likely to die if he's at war than if he's under occupation; a person is far more likely to have all his infrastructure smashed if he's at war than if he's at occupation.

So why do people keep not surrendering?

It's not historically unusual for people to keep dying for abstract concepts like "statehood", but it certainly is strange from a cost-benefit analysis. History is unreasonable.

Is it perhaps the cost-benefit analysis that is unreasonable, and not the dedication to abstractions? As Dean notes below, cost-benefit utilitarianism is itself an abstraction, and even if nationalism is irrational (which it certainly can be), there are nonetheless people who consider the spiritual death of their nation to be worse than the actual material death of their individual selves. An occupation is not merely a change in what flag flies on top, who sits in the big chair, or where the taxes go: it's a form of colonization, where you try to replace the occupied's memes with your own, and where you have to shoot all who resist.

Goes a bit further back than that as just an interesting sidenote. Lajos Kossuth toured the US and was hailed as perhaps the greatest living hero in the world in 1850 (with Russia also playing the villain here as well). We even named towns after the guy! We don’t have a Zelensky Iowa yet.

Well, yes there is something strange about it. A person is far more likely to die if he's at war than if he's under occupation; a person is far more likely to have all his infrastructure smashed if he's at war than if he's at occupation.

So why do people keep not surrendering?

It's not historically unusual for people to keep dying for abstract concepts like "statehood", but it certainly is strange from a cost-benefit analysis. History is unreasonable.

If the model fails to match reality, the failure is in the model, not the reality. People sacrifice for abstract concepts all the time because they place value in these abstract concepts over other abstractions like 'infrastructure', and whatever model of darwinian evolution you prefer has consistently upheld this as not just a reasonable group dynamic, but a dominant one. History is not unreasonable- it's unreasonable to suddenly expect people to diverge from their norms.

...which is, of course, a common theme in history, as various groups who think themselves above such baser thinking regularly fall victim to the same when they're the ones in such contexts, and their abstractions of what's reasonable give way to impulses much more real. States do not fight for their infrastructure- nations fight for their homes. Failing to understand the distinction is failing to reason with the known reality.

nothing odd about people supporting a victim of unjust aggression to anyone with a familiarity of social dynamics.

Anyone having empathy for any actors in wars a thousand miles away is extremely historically unusual and strange. For all of human history up until about T-100, what the Cossacks were doing in Zaporizhia would have elicited a shrug from anyone outside of Tartary. Why's anyone mad now?

Because people outside of Tartary are now able to be aware of it, of course, and with that awareness comes political pressure and expectations to do something about it.

For most of human history until about T-100, the technology did not exist for people to know about happened further away. Within a century of the telegraph, most of the traditional empires present at the time were dead or on their way out the door. Within a century of the radio, all of the traditional empires were. The information revolutions brought the far-away places no one could know or care much about into closer awareness, and as the technology spread, so did the pressures to care.

What changed was not human nature, but the technological revolution of communications that allowed human nature to extend it's range of awareness.

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