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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35190 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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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).

If he doubts the quality of information, surely he can arrange a randomized controlled trial and order 10 independent analysts to report to him.

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.

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.

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:

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

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.

And when we observe so little, it's your personal priors, which mainly speak, not the likelihood.

That's fair enough.

[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.

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?

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 think that the entire situation involves a great number of mistakes, generally tragic ones, by all parties. The magnitude of the mistakes varies by quite a lot, from the trivial (Zelensky's glamor magazine photo shoot) to the profound (Putin's decision to attempt the conquest of Ukraine).

In my view, Putin's decision to invade has utterly wrecked his own medium-term objectives. I believe that he wanted to elevate Russia back into the upper ranks of the Great Powers, and intended the enforcement of a Russian sphere of influence as a necessary step towards that goal. The actual effect has been to make Russia a pariah state, and hardened anti-Russian sentiment all along its borders.

Even if Ukrainian resistance collapses tomorrow, and Russian forces secure Kyiv within a week or so, the above failure remains. Putin's life's work is dead. Immediately calling a unilateral ceasefire and pulling every Russian back across the border won't revive it, either.

I feel pretty confident in my read of Putin's motives, but not confident at all in predicting his next move, since I don't see a next move that is productive from his perspective. Stall and hope for a miracle? But Russian attitudes stereotypically tend to the dour, not the optimistic.

In my view, Putin's decision to invade has utterly wrecked his own medium-term objectives.

In hindsight, I was wrong to guess in February that Russia wouldn't be foolish enough to invade. I can see how, with Ukraine drifting toward the West, this might have been their best shot at returning them to the fold. Perhaps if the thunder run on Kyiv had gone differently, or Zelenskyy had fled, defenses might have collapsed. But I don't see any real scenarios where, failing to accomplish regime change within about a week, continuing to press would do anything except start the meat grinder and drive irreconcilable wedges between Russian and Ukrainian identities. I'm not a gambling man, but I can see how that might make sense to one. Retreating after 72 hours claiming troops "got lost" or something still seemed possible, and probably would have held off the firehose of Western materiel that they're unable to counter.

Since then, I've realized that my understanding of Putin's goals and methods was flawed, although I'm not sure what they should be. The current situation seems fairly unwinnable to Russia (and I don't see mobilization changing that -- there's pretty good photographic evidence that they've been scraping near the bottom of the Soviet stockpile for a while), and I can't personally explain any action other than an orderly retreat with their tail between their legs (compare the US retreat out of Afghanistan or Vietnam)

In hindsight, I was wrong to guess in February that Russia wouldn't be foolish enough to invade.

Oh, I was completely wrong on this point as well. After Putin's adventures in Georgia and Crimea, I expected that we'd see a repeat, salami-slicing a good chunk of the Donbass, but stopping there. I was stuck in the mental mode of "the previous tactics worked, let's repeat," while it seems obvious in hindsight that Putin's thinking was more "the previous probing tactics revealed Western weakness, let's escalate" and we got the thunder run on Kyiv.

Perhaps if the thunder run on Kyiv had gone differently, or Zelenskyy had fled, defenses might have collapsed.

I think you're right that this alternate timeline gets closest to a win for Putin. The Western response in reality was a panicked economic cancellation of Russia. In the alternate "quick Russian military victory" timeline, what changes when the West is presented with the fait accompli? What's the likelihood that the West simply accepts the result, maybe with a militarized border in Poland?

There are countervailing pressures in the alternate timeline--maybe a quick Russian victory makes Putin more of a threat, accelerating the economic/diplomatic responses in the same direction, but with more urgency. Alternatively, maybe the real timeline where Russia got bogged down, showing weakness, allowed for a more vigorous economic/diplomatic response, and full economic cancellation would be seen as too risky in the "stronger Russia" timeline.

Setting aside the details of the military situation within Ukraine, I think there are two big points that Putin has hard lost in the context of European politics. The first is diplomatic, with Sweden and Finland set to join NATO. The Finnish border was never friendly, but going full NATO is a stark rejection of Putin's publicly declared preferences. The second is more cultural/economic, with the collapse of the European Green movement, and in particular German efforts to figure out an energy strategy that is reliable and diminishes Russian influence.

I do not think that the European Green movement will collapse.

Apart from total collapse, the core of the Greens are insulated middle-upper class, academics and feminists. They were not massively popular from the beginning, but they can decide on policy thanks to the support of Washington and of media-friendly popular culture.

For instance, from the beginning of the war, the popularity of the Greens in Germany only grew.

I think there are two big points that Putin has hard lost in the context of European politics

Maybe it is not much but for me reading news about polls measuring approval of Russia was hilarious. In Poland it dropped to 3%.

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