I'm reading "The Sleepwalkers". About 10 minutes into the section about European politics, you realize that the question of why these people went to war has an obvious, boring answer: All of these people were just totally batshit insane.
Everyone in Britain, Russia, France and (eventually) Germany was just constantly thinking of how to conquer more of the world -- not even considering the possibility that that might not be a good goal. Very few of them were particularly afraid of war.
When you have a bunch of countries that are used to constantly trying to conquer more territory, and who aren't particularly afraid of war, you will get a war. It's not even a question. Asking "What if they hadn't gone to war?" is like asking "What if my dog hadn't pooped?".
And this is actually pretty reassuring, because for all the WW1 analogies that people throw around regarding the U.S. and China today, and for all the heated rhetoric and arms buildup, most people are just not that insane anymore.
I still think it's possible that China is crazy enough to start WW3. But it's also possible they're not. And it's highly likely that the U.S. isn't.

This is an improvement from WW1, in which everyone involved was definitely crazy enough to start WW1.
That said...it is still prudent to pretty worried, given recent events.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

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More from @Noahpinion

3 Nov
I'm not feeling too great about the 2022 midterms right now, folks.
We're seeing a classic "thermostatic backlash" here, just like when Dems won a bunch of minor elections in 2017. Unless something big changes, a red wave in 2022 seems like a safe prediction at this point.
Also I do not think that Biden passing the BBB bill -- even a version of BBB untouched by Manchin! -- would have much effect on this, any more than the ARRA and ACA helped Dems avoid a wipeout in 2010.
Read 4 tweets
1 Nov
The idea that "Japan is not really democratic" is very wrong. It is. The LDP occasionally does lose power, and doesn't use anti-democratic methods to prevent this. But the LDP is very good at triangulating on policy, so it bounces back.
Giving people a choice doesn't preclude that they'll make the same choice most of the time. The LDP plays the game fairly and usually wins, because it's generally pretty good at giving Japanese people what they want -- or at least, less bad than the opposition.
Most of the countries where one party usually (or always) wins have some sort of authoritarian structure that advantages the dominant party. Japan does not. This book is a little dated, but it basically explains why the LDP usually wins.

amazon.com/Democracy-with…
Read 5 tweets
1 Nov
I'll write more about this, but it's easy to simultaneously believe that:

A) IQ is a poor proxy for true mental ability, and

B) CHANGE in IQ due to some environmental influence is a good proxy for CHANGE in true mental ability.

The math of this is pretty simple...
Suppose IQ = The kind of mental ability we actually care about + Some other pointless crap that's specific to the person being measured + random measurement error

Then someone's change in IQ = The change in the kind of mental ability we care about + random measurement error
In other words, even if the "pointless crap" part of IQ is very large, as long as it's specific to the person, it nets out when we look at the individual change.

(Economists recognize this as just a good old fixed-effects model.)
Read 4 tweets
31 Oct
Our online replay of the 60s/70s is interesting, because in the original version, the "peace and love" hippies, the angry identitarians, and the leftist radicals all happened basically at the same time. But we got our peace-and-love in the 00s and our angry radicals in the 10s.
In 1969 you could be for "revolution", and that could either mean you wanted to change our culture so people weren't uptight assholes anymore, or it could mean you wanted to bomb bathrooms to bring down capitalism. (Only one of these worked.)
In the 2010s, both radical leftism and radical identitarian movements had a very downbeat, grim attitude (which persists to this day). No beads and flowers. Not much music or art or self-expression. No Age of Aquarius. Not much vision of utopia.
Read 13 tweets
31 Oct
At this point, radical online ideologies have become a consumption good, consumed by A) young people bored with video games, and B) older people who incorrectly think that things really might be totally different going forward.
One result of this is that as general popular unrest recedes and lots of people get bored or jaded or exhausted and walk quietly away, the radical ideological entrepreneurs who sprung up to take advantage of the boom are now fighting each other over a shrinking pie.
As the market size for radical online ideology decreases, we see some ideological entrepreneurs frantically trying to pivot; this explains Nazbols, Jacobin praising QAnon, tankies embracing right-wing elements, and so on.
Read 9 tweets
29 Oct
Good. Glad to see welfare being framed as investment rather than as compassion.
One of America's central problems is that we don't believe in our people. We've been brainwashed to think large segments of our people are just useless trash, so we think giving people money is just a handout to people who have no other option.
If we believed in our people more, we'd understand that they have a ton of potential. Giving them money is often (though of course not always) a way of giving people a boost so they can realize that potential instead of just scrabbling for survival.
Read 5 tweets

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