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I think that a very common and under-discussed fallacy that is often engaged in by people of all sorts of political persuasions is overestimating the degree to which the future is predictable.
Imagine telling a Roman in 100 AD that 1500 years in the future, the world's best scientists would be from Britain and Germany. Or telling him that for much of the next 2000 years, Europe would be dominated by a religion created by Jews. Imagine telling a Persian in 500 AD that his country would soon come under the domination of a religion and political system created by Arab tribes. Imagine telling a Marxist in 1870 that Russia would be the first country in which communists would seize power. Or telling pretty much anyone in 1870 about antibiotics, nuclear weapons, the moon landings, and computers. Or telling a Jew in 1900 that 50 years later, the majority of Europe's Jews would have been killed. Or telling an American in 1980 that 10 years later, the USSR would no longer exist.
The course of political, social, and technological change is very hard to predict yet people keep being convinced by arguments of the "we must do X because then Y will surely happen" and "we must do X, otherwise Y will surely happen" variety. Of course it is possible to predict the future to some extent, and we must try to predict it. And it would be foolish for people to blind themselves to obvious threats just because things might turn out well. And sometimes, an easily predicted future does indeed come to be. For example, it was obvious in January 1945 that Germany was going to lose the war, and it did. But many other things that it seemed would obviously happen never did, and many things that no-one or almost no-one had predicted did happen.
Any political argument that is based in a deep conviction, as opposed to just speculation, about what is going to happen in the future is suspect. And arguments that go "we must do X because then Y will surely happen" (for example, "we must create communism because then people will live better") or "we must do X because otherwise Y will surely happen" (for example, "we must create a white ethnostate, otherwise white people will be destroyed") should be carefully examined. If one does not remember the constant failure of humans, all through the course of history, to predict future events, it is easy to be seduced by well-crafted narratives into believing that the causal connection between X and Y is more certain than it actually is.
The fallacy is probably common in part because for most people, thinking "I know what to do to make things better" feels better than thinking "I don't know what the fuck is going to happen". But also, many people simply do not have much understanding of history, so they just are not aware of how seldom people in the past have been able to successfully predict the future.
Recently someone asked about that time when I translated Vasily "Vatoadmin" Topolev's overview of 20-year intervals in the 20th century, here it is:
Writing about current events is tough, so let's do some minor league historiosophy.
Many people may know that Andrei Amalrik wrote the book "Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?" in 1969. He was only seven years wrong, it turns out. But Hélène Carrère d'Ancoss, in 1979, wrote a book called "The Fractured Empire," in which she was wrong by just one year – she was expecting the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. Amalrik died in a car crash in 1980, but Hélène (incidentally, born Zarubashvili of Russian-Georgian aristocratic émigrés) is still alive and even became secretary of the French Academy of Sciences.
Far fewer people know what the forecast itself was. Amalrik believed that the USSR would collapse as a result of war with China. In reality, the USSR collapsed after six years of consistently improving relations with China. Carrère d'Ancoss expected a mass Islamist uprising in Central Asia (as in Iran). In reality, the Central Asian republics were the last to leave the Union, after not only the Baltics, Ukraine, and Transcaucasia, but even after the RSFSR and the BSSR – that is, when there was no Union at all. But who remembers that now?
Paul Samuelson is considered one of the most illustrious economists of the 20th century. He won the Nobel Prize and wrote his famous textbook, which was used for decades by students all over the planet in their economics 101 course. Samuelson believed that by 1990 the USSR would overtake the United States in gross domestic product. Then he shifted his forecast a bit: by 2000.
In 1987, Yale historian Paul Kennedy (no, not a relative of the president) published his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (translated into Russian a couple of years ago). The book brought Kennedy worldwide fame – he described the change of the dominant powers over the course of 500 years. Except that the first cover of the book had a picture (https://pictures.abebooks.com/isbn/9780517051009-us.jpg): the Briton John Bull coming down from the top of the globe, the American Uncle Smith standing on the top, but a bespectacled Japanese sneaking up behind him. Kennedy believed that American domination of the world would be succeeded by the Japanese domination (he did not actually say it that explicitly, but it was easy to notice). In the real world, a few years after the book was published, Japan was hit by a severe economic crisis – some offices in downtown Tokyo became 100 (yes one hundred) times cheaper, and the nineties were labeled "the lost decade (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades)" by the Japanese themselves.
Everyone knows that the brilliant Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a brilliant book called The Grand Chessboard. Only no one has read it. But I have. The main idea of the book is that the power that controls pipelines in Central Asia will dominate in the 21st century. Brilliant. Who even remembers these pipes now, even against the backdrop of the global energy crisis.
In July 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II promised soldiers that they would be back from the front before the first autumn leaves touched the ground. And the Kaiser was not alone. That the outcome of the war would be decided in the first months was the opinion of wise generals in all the general staffs of Europe. The French, based on the Franco-Prussian experience (you know that bit, the fight between two democracies?) believed that the outcome of the war would be decided in the first month – and have had a hundred thousand men felled in the Ardennes in a narrow area over four days, throwing them in pointless attacks on the German machine guns. The Russians threw two newly mobilized corps, in which half of the soldiers remained in sandals, on Königsberg – and the East Prussian disaster happened. The Austrians, too, threw their dressy – the prettiest uniforms in the world! – toy-like regiments to the Carpathians, where they were ground to dust in a few months by the harsh Siberian, Cossack, Grenadier, Guard and other select regiments of the Russian army.
In this light, let me remind you of an old idea of mine. We will scroll through the twentieth century, 20 years at a time.
So, let's start on January 1, 1900. What does the world look like?
World politics is defined in three capitals – London, Berlin, St. Petersburg.
The British, after the Boer War, are the world's pariahs. They have very bad relations with literally all other great powers. At the 1900 World's Fair in Paris, they even banned the British delegation. India is once again preparing for a Russian invasion.
France is sandwiched between the British and the Germans. The former can easily take her colonies, the latter can defeat her in a one-on-one war. The most militarized country in Europe. When railroad workers go on strike, the government simply declares them mobilized and sends those who refuse to work to be court-martialed – no other country in the world has thought of such a thing.
Germany is the European leader. The world's most advanced science – soon Germans will be raking in handfuls of Nobel prizes. The best universities in the world are not Harvard or Oxford, but Göttingen and Heidelberg. A mighty army. The world's second largest navy – thirty years ago there was none at all. Berlin is called the "Electroburg"; it's the most progressive and cleanest city in the world, kind of like Singapore today.
Russia has tremendous industrial growth, the highest in the world. The St. Petersburg Stock Exchange will reach a peak this year to which it will never return, not even by 1914, after the Stolypin reform. There are plans to build a huge fleet by 1920, with only battleships counting 50. Korea, Manchuria, and Persia are gradually turning into Russian colonies.
China, recently defeated in a war with Japan, seems determined to modernize along Japanese lines. Although right now the country is in an extremely deplorable state, China is genuinely feared. Both in Russia [ru link reddit'd], and in America [for good measure], and everywhere else. Kaiser Wilhelm paints a picture [] in which the Archangel Michael calls upon all the nations of Europe to go to holy war against the Asian hordes. Somewhere near China lies Japan, which has yet to receive much attention. The King of England and the Tsar of Russia call the Japanese macaques in their correspondence.
The U.S. is already very rich, but it is almost invisible in world politics. The American army is ranked by the German General Staff on a level with the Portuguese army. The American navy has only five small battleships. Unexpectedly, the Americans went to war with the other "weaklings," the Spaniards, and although they won, they ended up with an endless guerrilla war in the Philippines. All in all, simmering somewhere on the periphery.
Scroll to 1920.
There is no such thing as a Chinese empire. The Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian empires are similarly non-existent. In place of the Russian Empire there is a giant bloody stain. Germany, cut off from all sides, is steadily teetering on the brink of Communist revolution. All of Europe, down to Poland and Romania, is now dominated by France. The British Empire is even larger than it was in 1900. The U.S. has become a great military power. Wall Street, swollen during the war, turned from a peripheral financial center into a competitor to the City of London. Japan began to build its empire, suddenly becoming one of the world's great powers.
Fast forward to 1940.
The U.S. is still trying to get out of the Great Depression. France as a state simply does not exist, unless you count the mysterious entity centered in the resort town of Vichy. Russia, torn apart by civil war, was replaced by the giant Soviet Union. Germany, recently humiliated and defeated, has now conquered almost all of Europe. The British, recent triumphators, are preparing for a German landing and hiding from German bombs. Japan has already conquered a good half of China and is not going to stop.
Another turn of the knob and we go to 1960.
The U.S. has experienced a decade and a half of frenzied economic growth. The country is bursting with exuberance. U.S. military bases are spread across the globe. The Soviet Union, which many had already given up on in 1942, has recovered, has rid itself of the worst features of totalitarianism, is preparing to send a man into space, and is competing equally with the United States in the most sophisticated fields of technology – lasers, atomic, space, aviation. Germany and Japan are now almost the most peaceful countries in the world, especially since both are de facto occupied by U.S. and Soviet troops. Italy, until very recently one of the poorest countries in Europe, which has also suffered terribly after two years of warfare on its territory, is showing the highest growth rate in Europe and will soon overtake even Britain. Fewer and fewer territories remain of the British Empire, which was supposedly victorious in World War II, and those too will soon be independent. France is a great power again. Germany is experiencing its economic miracle. The Shah of Iran is determined to use petrodollars to turn his country into the most developed and enlightened in the Middle East.
And we are already in 1980.
America has been in stagflation for years. Society is afflicted by the depression and the Vietnam syndrome, with the main movie of the generation being The Taxi Driver and such. Britain is even worse off than the United States. The USSR continues to expand its sphere of influence and pump up its military might, taking advantage of the rain of petrodollars. The vast majority of Sovietologists do not expect the collapse of the Soviet state in the coming decades. China is in ruins after the Cultural Revolution. Japan seems to many to be the next world economic leader. Germany is called the "sick man of Europe."
Here comes the year 2000.
The USSR does not exist. China is developing at an incredible rate. The Japanese call the 90's the "lost decade", their economy has stopped growing. The U.S. has attained a dominance unprecedented in history – in economics, finance, technology, military power, and politics. Once again, London has become one of the world's two major financial centers.
Every time we turn the knob twenty years ahead, we find ourselves in an entirely new world that no one could have predicted beforehand. Yes, some features could be guessed, but not the picture as a whole. And haven't yet written anything about all sorts of third- or fourth-rate countries.
Today's observers expect to see in ten or twenty years a world that will be basically the same as it is today, but with one change. Russia will fall apart, or the United States will be torn apart by civil war, or China will have its own Great Depression and overthrow the Communist Party. But imagine a world in which there would be none of the constituent parts we are accustomed to today – not the United States, not the European Union, not China, not Russia, not Ukraine, not (insert country name of preference) in their current form. Some will become more powerful, and some will disappear altogether – temporarily or permanently. Judging by the news, the likelihood of such a world is getting higher by the day.
Yeah, I think unless you were alive at the time (and old enough to be aware of what was going on), you don't get how the Fall of the Berlin Wall was something astonishing. Overnight, the system had just gone up in smoke! What everyone had come to accept as "This stalemate between the US and the USSR is going to go on forever" was now just not happening anymore. The West had (seemingly) won.
That's just one of the many reasons why I've cooled so much on doomerist predictions, including "within five/ten/twenty years AI will be eating us alive!"
We can't even foretell what is going to happen next year with any certainty. Did anyone expect the pandemic? Did anyone expect it to go on for as long as it did? Before the 2008 crash the economists in my country were by and large assuring everyone the good times would continue to roll forever. Things were different now. We were never going to go back to the old days.
One aspect of doomerism is hard to knock back though. Climate change. Because it's not up to what people and nations do, anymore, barring some sudden and miraculous changes. The polycrisis era that climate change will bring is coming almost no matter what we do, isn't it?
Not at all. Climate change is eminently solvable, unlike AI alignment. Furthermore, its effects over the next 100 years will be quite small. Pity the poor animals who will be made extinct, but humans will adapt.
Most Republicans don't believe climate change is a problem at all, your optimism is incoherent
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