This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
tl;dr some quick attempts to get inside the mindset at the Kremlin concerning events in the war, in the run-up to Putin's speech expected in a few hours. Everything below could be immediately and awkwardly falsified if he announces some desperate escalation like general mobilisation or a nuclear strike against a Ukrainian military target.
Ever since the Ukrainian successes in the northeastern campaign, I've been trying to get inside the mindset of the Kremlin to figure out what their likely response is.
One thing that is almost certainly true (and easily underestimated) is that they are in their own psychological bubble, and there is no elite team of intelligence operatives whose primary job is to give Putin objective analysis. Human minds don't work that way: we easily form fenced-off epistemic communities that downplay our shameful fears and play up our pride. You can even see this reading the reports of US decision-making throughout the Cold War, when interservice rivalry ran hot and the USAF nuclear strategy advisors were giving opinions based not on what was in humanity's interests or even the USA's, but instead what would get them the most planes and status compared to the army and navy. And of course, you can see it easily on reddit, even getting a rush of ideological whiplash as you flit from one politically aligned sub to another.
(What about people like Girkin? Well, he's a doomer, and an outsider, and his criticisms are mostly quite careful. As far as I've noticed, he talks about the conduct of the war, not the wisdom in initiating it in the first place; or he says that Russia should be more committed, without once questioning whether the war is winnable even with full commitment.)
Given all the above, I think a useful and necessary starting point for understanding Russia's position is to try to imagine what your view would be if Russia's strategic situation was a lot better than you probably currently think it is (this is one reason why contrarian posters are valuable to any subreddit that takes itself intellectually seriously).
What does this involve? Maybe it means you think that Ukrainian morale is weak. Maybe you think that the EU is less united than it appears, and winter will be harder than Europeans are prepared for. Maybe you think that the United States is being opportunistic and will drop Ukraine without looking back when the conflict starts to swing back Russia's way. Above all, you're probably convinced that there won't be another breakthrough like in Kharkiv oblast: that was a one off, heads have rolled, and now discipline and morale have been restored to the troops. Reinforcements are coming in, Iran is sending useful drones, and the forthcoming referenda will encourage a surge of volunteers from the DPR and LPR.
Let's say that you, like Putin, were in the grip of this relative sunny outlook. What would follow from it for your reflections on the wider strategy of the conflict?
Above all, I think you would be aiming to take the long view of things, because the fundamentals are on your side. Forget today's battles and next week's offensives - focus on longer-term military-industrial capacity, and associated active measures in the Russian and foreign populations. You probably don't want to risk a general mobilisation - that might compromise your longer-term war fighting ability - but you want to get as many new volunteers as possible, ideally from less economically active areas of the country. And finally, nuclear weapons wouldn't be on the table; after all, you're winning this war, albeit more slowly and less gloriously than you'd hoped. Why would you risk alienating friends and allies and giving NATO a chance to intervene?
But you might ask, at what point does this Pollyanna-Putin outlook begin to crumble? When does the filter bubble burst, and Putin has his Downfall-style meltdown? When Ukraine liberates Kherson? Lysychansk? Donetsk? Sevastopol? I think the only answer we can give here is that people in general are very bad at facing up to uncomfortable realities, and can keep themselves from accepting painful truths for their entire lives if necessary. Or think of psychologist's Leon Festinger's now famous work on cognitive dissonance on doomsday cults: when the doomsday prophecy fails, people will go to great lengths to avoid accepting that they've been duped. I expect Putin to go out the same way, with his final thoughts being confidence that Russia can still be victorious, even as he has an unfortunate fall from a window.
("What about you doglatine? Why are you so sure that Putin's the one in the filter bubble rather than you?" Answer: Well, I've been trying to make clear predictions throughout this conflict both online and to my circle of geopolitics friends - this post is in that same vein - and I'd say I'm fairly well calibrated so far in terms of events on the ground. Part of the appeal of making explicit predictions is to try to break yourself out of these epistemic lagoons in the first place. All that said, I recognise that of course I'm in a filter bubble, sometimes through deliberate choice (once the novelty value wears off, it's just not fun to consume propaganda you disagree with). But even if my intentions were pure, filter bubbles are all but inescapable. Usually the best you can hope for is to get good at spotting the early signs of a bubble collapse so you can make a clean exit with your life savings and a modicum of your dignity intact. But that's far easier said than done)
In any case, I am curious what others think.
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.
Why are you so sure about that? Both the capability and the interest in doing anything of the sort.
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.
That's not unlike LW concerns about artificial intelligences: one needs to start with certain unspoken assumptions for these ones to lead to where you see them going. Sure he is motivated to survive: it's not clear he knows effective means to maximize his odds of survival, that's the whole problem (starting this war has done very little good for his long-term survivability, I think). I don't see reliable indications of Putin knowing how to use personal computing devices, or knowing that they're safe and worthwhile to use, or believing that people who use them are trustworthy. Klimenko asserts he doesn't use any gadgets or Internet. His professional career started and ended while they were of no consequence, and computers were basically specialized scientific/military tools (in his world at least); ever since then he's been bossing other people around, and mainly people from the same generation and way of life, people who are his direct threats, by means that have changed little since Assyria or, at most, Medieval Muscovy. Decades ago there were some staged videos of him using a PC I think; this, too, looks fake as hell (though maybe not as fake as these people believe).
As LWers like to say, we have trained doctors who can't handle elementary statistics crucial for interpreting test results. How the hell is Vladimir Putin supposed to know what an RCA is? Where will he get «independent analysts», through which causal chain – would he, like, growl at one of his 3-5 direct retainers and order to round up some eggheads in an unbiased manner? Why would he see reason to doubt his advisors in the first place? You assume an outside view, expected of a guy with an intellectual interest in governance and social structures, who has read books and articles and blog posts on history, politics, economy, epistemology... But you are not him. He's a political animal: that much we know. We can't really say more.
In your analysis, he's basically unable to affect precise terminal outputs; this seems fair. We don't really know if he receives meaningful inputs either. You probably remember that event. Kremlin may be the biggest Potemkin village of them all. Potemkin zoo, even.
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.
No. That much we observe. And when we observe so little, it's your personal priors, which mainly speak, not the likelihood.
It's not very fair to dismiss my arguments on grounds that I could as well have made worse ones in a counterfactual world where there were more evidence against my case. It's just bad faith. Suppose I claim that in a world where there's as much data in favor of Putin being minimally tech-literate as there is for Trump, Medvedev or Obama I'd have agreed with you, but in our one the specific evidence provided (testimonies of pro-Putin people, a single terrible montage in many years) supports me better. Well, this cannot be proven, can it?
Even astroturfed personas are based on some nugget of truth. Putin's macho persona, for instance, is due to him liking sports and especially sambo. To give off a fake impression of his familiarity with sambo, his side would have had to somehow fake his personal connections preceding access to substantial power, a ton of photo and video content and so on; that'd be hard-ish and prone to failure. It's about as hard to fake tech literacy; and Peskov's insinuations that Putin is tech literate would be really sus without faking more context. So I buy that he really is a tech illiterate sambo guy.
But your idea doesn't depend on him being tech literate, so that all is a tangent. You're arguing that he has the high-level understanding to make use of modern information infrastructure, or keeps around some people who can do that. 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». LW AI riskers assume, in short, that almost all powerful AIs will act like utility maximizers cutting the shortest path towards maximum reward value (inherently so, or with extra steps). This is far from certain; it may well be that many strategies towards capable AIs that are currently in development won't exhibit this property. Likewise it's not clear that Putin's political success to date indicates that he's a self-aware political power maximizer who understands that knowledge is power, proactively seeks out knowledge and devises strategies from domain-specific first principles. Or as you put it:
I do not think this is a weak assumption at all, or that it should be the default hypothesis, or follows from your observations like reshuffling of administrators (this might happen in any disturbed hive, mechanistically). 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. It just so happens that his dacha cooperative also controls the levers of power in Russia and can act like a Singleton; their power-grabbing aptitude and toolset don't generalize to other scenarios.
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 task that he was solving and proved adequate for, centralization of power in Russia, did not require data from beyond Russian «patronage networks» so his tools may not have evolved to gather or transmit such data. He knows very well that Gerashchenko won't stab him in the back (now for certain!); he didn't know whether Medvedchuk had any pull in Ukraine or whether Yanukovych stood a chance, and may be equally misinformed now with regards to the war effort. This is all without even getting into speculations about his own wishful thinking and echo chamber effects.
I am not sure we can reduce uncertainty here by discussing precedents. Mine is certainly a maximalist position. Let's see how our respective models hold.
That's fair enough.
The following excerpts are from the "Russian Military Intelligence: Background and Issues for Congress (Updated November 15, 2021)" [pdf]:
Here's from Joss I. Meakins (2018) "Squabbling Siloviki: Factionalism Within Russia’s
Security Services":
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:
and, as you said,
Meakins also writes:
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link