Tag Archives: War

Trillions At War

By Robin Hanson · November 20, 2011 11:00 am · Comments (34)

The most breathtaking example of colony allegiance in the ant world is that of the Linepithema humile ant. Though native to Argentina, it has spread to many other parts of the world by hitching rides in human cargo. In California the biggest of these “supercolonies” ranges from San Francisco to the Mexican border and may contain a trillion individuals, united throughout by the same “national” identity. Each month millions of Argentine ants die along battlefronts that extend for miles around San Diego, where clashes occur with three other colonies in wars that may have been going on since the species arrived in the state a century ago. The Lanchester square law [of combat] applies with a vengeance in these battles. Cheap, tiny and constantly being replaced by an inexhaustible supply of reinforcements as they fall, Argentine workers reach densities of a few million in the average suburban yard. By vastly outnumbering whatever native species they encounter, the supercolonies control absolute territories, killing every competitor they contact. (more)

Shades of our future, as someday we will hopefully have quadrillions of descendants, and alas they will likely sometimes go to war.

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Counter Indoctrination

By Robin Hanson · September 1, 2011 10:35 pm · Comments (32)

A case study and new micro-level data in Uganda, where the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) forcibly recruited thousands of youth and plied them with threats and violence in order to make them stay. The evidence suggests that child [soldier] recruits were less able than adult ones, so superior ability is not a driving force of child soldiering in this case. Rather, the Uganda data and interviews suggest that children were retained because they were more easily indoctrinated and misinformed than adults, and had more difficulty escaping—with ease of indoctrination being especially influential. … Initial data from a random sample of [African rebel] groups display two relationships consistent with our model. First, where we observe child recruitment we also tend to observe forcible recruitment (one of the most easily measured forms of coercion). Second, forced child recruitment is most common when punishment is cheap. … Child recruitment is inversely associated with military protection of refugee and displacement camps. (more)

The US military also relies heavily on near age 18 soldiers, even though age 28 soldiers are probably more skilled at most tasks. The US also probably prefers younger soldiers because they are more easily indoctrinated, misinformed, and intimidated. Which reminds us that interest groups often fight over who gets to train kids, as the winners get to choose their favored indoctrination. Which reminds us that the winner of such a fight indoctrinated you when young.

Once you are an adult who realizes that your younger self was unreasonably gullible, you should try to undo that bias, at least if you want to have accurate beliefs. If you can imagine how other powers would have instead tried to indoctrinate you, had they controlled your indoctrination, you might try to believe something in-between these various indoctrination extremes. Of course you should also add in whatever can be inferred from the fact that one particular power was in fact strong enough to win the contest to indoctrinate you. Though it is not clear why this would mean their indoctrination was more true.

So what biases we expect from young school indoctrination? Perhaps excess respect for:

  1. Teachers and their allies
  2. Life value of formal education
  3. Being quiet and doing what you are told
  4. Governments like those that run schools
  5. The region or nation where you lived
  6. Having regular workday, like at school
  7. What else?

Added 8a: The military is an especially capital intense industry, which makes it especially important to have skilled labor to complement all that expensive capital. All else equal, this would induce this industry to outcompete other industries for more skilled workers, such as 28 year olds. So there must be some other factor that pushes them to hire 18 year olds. It can’t be pure physical strength and stamina, as few military jobs today require that.

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Space vs. Time Genocide

By Robin Hanson · June 16, 2011 9:30 pm · Comments (25)

Consider two possible “genocide” scenarios:

  • Space Genocide – We expect the galaxy to have many diverse civilizations, with diverse behaviors and values, though we don’t know much about them. Their expansion tendencies would naturally lead to a stalemate, with different civilizations controlling different parts of the galaxy. Imagine, however, that it turns out we luckily have a chance to suddenly destroy all other civilizations in the galaxy, so that our civilization can expand to take it all over. (Other galaxies remain unchanged.) Let this destruction process be mild, such as sudden unanticipated death or a sterility allowing one last generation to live out its life. There is a modest (~5%) chance we will fail and if we fail all civilizations in the galaxy are destroyed. Should we try this option?
  • Time Genocide – As their tech and environments changed, our distant ancestors evolved differing basic behaviors and values to match. We expect that our distant descendants will also naturally evolve different basic behaviors and values to match their changing tech and environments. Imagine, however, that it turns out we luckily have a chance to suddenly prevent any change in basic behaviors and values of our descendants from this day forward. If we succeed, we prevent the existence of descendants with differing basic behaviors and values, replacing them with creatures much like us. There is a modest (~5%) chance we will fail and if we fail all our descendants will be destroyed or exist in a mostly worthless state. Should we try this option?

Probably, more people can accept or recommend time genocide than space genocide, even if success in both scenarios prevents the existence of a similar number of relatively alien creatures, to be replaced by a similar number of creatures more like us. This seems related to our tending to admire time-stretched civilizations (e.g., Rivendale) more than space-stretched civilizations (e.g., Trantor), even though space-stretched ones seem objectively more prosperous. But what exactly is the relation?

The common thread, I suspect, is that the far future seems more far, in near/far concrete/abstract terms, than situations far away in space, or in the far past. The near/far distinction was first noticed in how people treated the future differently, and our knowing especially little detail about the future makes it especially easy to slip into abstract thought about the future.

As we are less practical, more idealistic, and more uncompromising in far mode, we see civilizations time-stretched into the future as more ideal, and we are more willing to commit genocide to achieve our ideals regarding such a civilization, even at a substantial risk.

Of course the future isn’t actually any less detailed than the past or places far away in space. And there isn’t any good reason to hold the far future to higher ideals now than we’d be inclined to want when the future actually arrives. If so, time-genocide should be no more morally acceptable than space-genocide. Beware the siren song of shiny far future thought.

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Congress Sells Secrets?

By Robin Hanson · June 11, 2011 3:35 pm · Comments (12)

Compared to ordinary investors, US Congress members get huge returns on their investments, presumably via their inside line on upcoming government actions. In particular, Congress gets inside info on upcoming US-backed coups, and someone has been trading lots on that info. Gee I wonder who …

Researchers examined 16,000 common stock transactions made by … 300 House representatives from 1985 to 2001, and found … portfolios based on congressional trades beating the market by about 6 percent annually. … A study of senators … five years ago found members of the higher chamber even better at beating the market — outperforming it by about 10 percent. … Members of Congress … [can legally] trade on non-public information. (more)

We estimate the impact of coups and top-secret coup authorizations on asset prices of partially nationalized multinational companies that stood to benefit from US-backed coups. Stock returns of highly exposed firms reacted to coup authorizations classified as top-secret. The average cumulative abnormal return to a coup authorization was 9% over 4 days for a fully nationalized company, rising to more than 13% over sixteen days. Pre-coup authorizations accounted for a larger share of stock price increases than the actual coup events themselves. (more)

We let Congress profit from insider trading that would be illegal for corporate executives. Even so, I doubt it is legal to trade stocks using top-secret info on planned coups, thereby leaking that info to the world. But I’ll bet Congress has been doing a big share of that leaking – who else has access to that info and needn’t fear prosecution for such misdeeds?

Good thing we are cracking down on insider trading by CEOs …

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Conscription Is Slavery

By Robin Hanson · May 16, 2011 10:20 am · Comments (83)

Bryan Caplan:

Slavery is involuntary servitude; conscription is involuntary military servitude; therefore not only is conscription slavery; it’s a particularly heinous form of slavery that often ends in maiming and death. Yet most people disagree – and so did the U.S. Supreme Court back in 1918. … I think I finally figured out what most people are thinking. Namely: They implicitly regard slavery not as mere involuntary servitude, but as low-status involuntary servitude. … conscripts have high status – and therefore can’t be slaves.

Comments there give many reasons conscription is not slavery:

  • “The key difference is the idea of … `servitude for the public benefit’.”
  • “Cannot sell its conscripted soldiers … conscription offers pay.”
  • “Slavery as an institution appears to cause a lot more social harm than limited conscription powers.”
  • “People hate slavery because it is malicious and exploitative.”
  • “Conscripted soldiers are not owned by a private person. This is the same reason that we don’t consider taxes theft”
  • “Conscripts still have civil rights, slaves did not. Conscripts were paid, slaves were not. Conscripts could own property, especially real property,and wait for it, conscripts could VOTE.”
  • “If the ‘slaves’ could neither be bought nor sold, then they would just be serfs.”
  • “Slavery … is a permanent condition and [conscription] is not. One can apply to anyone, the other only to a specific cohort.”
  • “The connotation attached to conscription and slavery evokes different emotions … positive for conscription and negative for slavery.”

Consider that “comfort women,” forced to serve as prostitutes for the Japanese military during World War II, are often called “sex slaves.” Would they not be slaves they were paid, served only for a limited time, could own property and vote, could not be bought or sold, and were seen by the Japanese public as serving their benefit and evoking positive emotions? Would such conditions also imply comfort women were not “raped”?

It is hard to believe that one must argue this point. OF COURSE conscripts are slaves. Conscription may be a good form of slavery – I for one do not accept a moral axiom that slavery must always be bad. But surely it is slavery. And Bryan is probably right – we don’t call conscripts slaves, but do call comfort women slaves, because the first is high status and the second low.

Added 10a: On reflection, the main effect here is probably that many people take “slavery is bad” to be part of the definition of slavery. So therefore by definition anything good cannot be slavery. For what other words do we take value to be part of the definition? Democracy? Rape?

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War Is Bad

By Robin Hanson · March 26, 2011 11:45 am · Comments (81)

War is bad. Defending against war, that can be justified. But starting a war, well that is presumably very bad. Not that starting a war could never be justified. Just that the bar should be set really high. Not it sort of seems like war might help something. No you, and those watching you, should really worry that you are accepting excuses to start a war for other reasons.

Among all the policy arguments I accept, the above argument against war seems among the most solid. And among all the things policy can get wrong, war seems among the worst. So for me, war policy tends to trump other considerations. I haven’t said much about how I vote on this blog, but now I’ll say: I often vote on US presidents primarily based on their war stance. I voted against Bush in ’04, and and I’ll vote against Obama in ’12, because they both started wars without meeting the high standards I hold for justifiably starting a war.

I’ve argued before that the US should cut its vast military spending in half. Our spending half the world’s military budget seems to embolden us to start wars – this makes me all the more eager for that cut.

Added:  Bryan Caplan has long had a similar position.

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Academics As Warriors

By Robin Hanson · January 15, 2011 2:30 pm · Comments (30)

Why should you be (or buy) a warrior? Wouldn’t the world be better off if there were no warriors, even could be no warriors? Yes, maybe we’d be better off if good property rights would just enforce themselves. But given that there are already other warriors, then it can make sense for you to be (or buy) a warrior, to defend yourself against other warriors.  Yes there are some positive side effects, such as increased technical innovation in war-tech related areas.  But mostly one wars to block opposing war.

Why should you be (or buy) an academic, such as a philosopher or economist?  It seems to me that often the main reason to hire or be an academic is to defend against other academics.

Consider philosophy.  Yes human thinking is often sloppy, with sloppy categories and circular arguments. But mostly this doesn’t cause that many problems. What does go wrong is that some people specialize in noticing such sloppiness, and then using it to persuade us of particular conclusions.  When philosophers ridicule a particular sloppy argument, they shame the conclusion that argument had supported, which is then taken as supporting whatever is framed as the obvious alternative conclusion.

For example, imagine you thought that the conclusions of scientists were reliable because they followed a “scientific method.”  This creates an opening for a philosopher to point out there there really is no coherent scientific method.  Most scientists don’t actually follow most of the supposed scentific methods, and different sciences follow quite different methods.  You might then be tempted to conclude that the conclusions of scientists are not reliable at all.

Yes that conclusion doesn’t directly follow from the mere fact that science reliability had been supported by sloppy arguments. But yet, all else equal, the fact that the best argument for something isn’t as good as you’d expected is an anti argument. If one side has stronger looking arguments than the other side, that seems to support the first side.  Which is why all sides need to hire philosophers to find support, and to ridicule sloppy opposing arguments.

Similarly, often the main reason to hire or be an economist is to defend against other economists. It is bad for your side if the economic arguments supporting it seem sloppy, shallow and unsophisticated relative to the arguments from the other side.  Each side needs to hire economists to offer supporting arguments, just to stay in place.

I’m not saying that philosophers’ or economists’ efforts never make us all better off; I’m just saying there is more of a counter-acting war effect than many realize.  Much of the waste of academia is status seeking – some patrons funding academics in order to raise their status relative to others.  And another big chuck is due to partisans recruiting academics to war on their side of common divides.

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On Sex & Violence

By Robin Hanson · December 21, 2010 9:30 pm · Comments (10)

Sex and violence, the most-complained-of classic movie draws, also seem to draw the most complaints re my forager-farmer hypothesis, that many non-functional industry-era trends are due to a natural human tendency to return from farmer to forager ways with increasing wealth and comfort. So let me try again to clarify.

On violence, Bryan Caplan “suspect[s] forager societies had plenty of internal violence.” But I’ve talked mainly of farmers having more organized violence like war. (Quotes below.) Foragers may well have high murder rates, but those are individual acts of passion and retribution. It is farmers who taught themselves to be professional and organized killers, who could benefit from that, though yes with time farmers learned to have less war.

On sex, I responded to Roissy here, and Razib Khan complained:

Hoe vs. plough agriculturalists shows that a simple hunter-gatherer vs. farmer narrative does not suffice. In some ways the hoe agriculturalist remains more like the hunter-gatherer, and in some ways more like his or her fellow agriculturalist. The most polygynous societies for example are arguably those of hoe based agriculturalists, as well as nomads. In contrast, hunter-gatherers and ploughman tend to be more monogamous, at least in a genetic sense.

On sex, I’ve consistently talked of “promiscuity,” not monogamy vs polygamy. (Quotes below.) The issue is how long relationships lasted, and tolerance for mating outside official relationships. Compared to farmers, foragers had shorter relations, and tolerated more unofficial mating. Polygamy is a stable long-term relation, and by tolerating more inequality is actually more farmer-like.

Now for those promised quotes. Continue reading "On Sex & Violence" »

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Berserker Breakout

By Robin Hanson · December 4, 2010 2:45 pm · Comments (32)

The universe looks dead. If it is actually teeming with ancient advanced life, why don’t any of them use all those resources we see? Yes, there might be other even more attractive resources we don’t see, but it still seems odd none specialize in using what we do see. Yes everything might be under the control of a unified collective, who agree on a preference to keep the universe looking dead. But pretty much any observation could be explained as due to a vast unified ancient power with an arbitrary preference to make the universe appear a certain way.

Moving to scenarios where many powers compete, one proposed explanation is that we are in a berserker equilibrium, where everyone hides for fear of being destroyed by others in hiding. For example:

The Inhibitors from Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space series are self-replicating machines … dormant for extreme periods of time until they detect the presence of a space-faring culture and proceed to exterminate it even to the point of sterilizing entire planets.

Or consider the zoo of competing self-replicators from David Brin’s story Lungfish:

The Anti-Maker … does not waste its time destroying biospheres, or eating up solar systems in spasms of self-replication. It wants only to seek out technological civilizations and ruin them. … Berserkers, … wreckers of worlds, were rare. … And there were what appeared to be Policeman probes, as well, who hunted the berserkers down wherever they could be found. … Harm … did not seek out life-bearing worlds in order to destroy them. Rather it spread innumerable copies of itself and looked for other types of probes to kill. Anything intelligent. Whenever it detected modulated radio waves, it would hunt down the source and destroy it.

I have an open enough mind here that I think Earth should keep quiet until we’ve studied this issue more. But I really have trouble seeing how this could be a stable equilibrium for a billion years among competing space species.

First, when something becomes visible, your killing it would seem a “public good” act which benefits all species, but mainly costs yours. Your killing action takes up your resources, and risks making you visible to be destroyed by others. Unless you think this new visible thing is especially likely to compete with your siblings, relative to other competitors, you’d rather wait and let something else destroy it.

Second, it must be possible to reproduce in order to compensate for wear and tear. After all, if the mere act of reproducing yourself made you so visible that you’d probably be destroyed, on average population sizes would fall to extinction. But if reproducing to compensate for decay works on average, why not reproduce more to grow in number? If observers can’t tell the purpose of a reproduction, then only density dependent death could keep populations in check. The ability to find and kill others without getting killed yourself in the process would somehow have to rise naturally with the density of creatures.

Once the local density of creatures had risen to some local limit, the most common species there could consider attempting a “breakout,” via a burst of rapid aggressive reproduction to overwhelm the ability of other species to contain it. Once enough copies were created in a large enough volume, the low density of other nearby species might be insufficient to stop the breakout species from expanding indefinitely.

There are many more complex strategies that seem attractive, compared to a simple direct breakout.  For example, fake breakout attempts could be created to induce retaliation by other species, depleting their resources and revealing their locations. One might then target them for attack before making one’s main breakout attempt in the now weakened region.

I’m not saying it is obvious that a long term berserker equilibrium is impossible, but I do have great doubts. And I’d love to see (and even help with) attempts to find stable equilibria within computer simulations of such scenarios.

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Against Trade War

By Robin Hanson · September 27, 2010 9:30 am · Comments (35)

I’m a huge fan of Robert Samuelson’s long repeated harping on the coming Medicare train wreck – tell it brother! But I much oppose his war-mongering:

No one familiar with the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 should relish the prospect of a trade war with China — but that seems to be where we’re headed and probably should be where we are headed. Although the Smoot-Hawley tariff did not cause the Great Depression, it contributed to its severity by provoking widespread retaliation. Confronting China’s export subsidies risks a similar tit-for-tat cycle at a time when the global economic recovery is weak. This is a risk, unfortunately, we need to take. …

The trouble is that China has never genuinely accepted the basic rules governing the world economy. … China’s worst abuse involves its undervalued currency and its promotion of export-led economic growth. …. China’s underpricing of exports and overpricing of imports hurt most trading nations. … One remedy would be for China to revalue its currency, reducing the competitiveness of its exports. … [Some say] a revaluation of 20 percent would create 300,000 to 700,000 U.S. jobs over two to three years. …

If China won’t revalue, the alternative is retaliation. This might start a trade war, because China might respond in kind. … More realistic would be a replay of Smoot-Hawley, just when the wobbly world economy doesn’t need a fight between its two largest members. Economic nationalism, once unleashed here and there, might prove hard to control. But there’s a big difference between then and now. Smoot-Hawley was blatantly protectionist. Dozens of tariffs increased; many countries retaliated. By contrast, American action today would aim at curbing Chinese protectionism. (more)

Relative currency values set relative prices. China’s current currency level now sets low prices for the stuff it sells to others, and high prices for the stuff it buys from others. You might dislike this if you compete with China to sell stuff, but you should mostly love it if you buy stuff from China, or compete with them to buy stuff.  Often you should love it if you sell stuff to China. Low China prices do not obviously hurt the non-Chinese overall.

Fear of being outcompeted in selling stuff is a terrible reason to start a war! If someone is outcompeting you in selling stuff, well either step up your game or step aside. That is how supply and demand should work. We want a system where stuff is produced by the lowest cost suppliers and goes to the buyers who value it the most. If some supplier offers to sell stuff to folks at a lower price, well then we want folks to switch to buying from that supplier. If a supplier offers an unsustainably low price, it will soon go broke and buyers will switch away.

This logic applies just as well to distant nations as it does to a convenience store down the street.  Don’t be fooled into treating China differently because you were built to fear foreigners.  Wars are not needed or wanted as part of our supply and demand adjustment process!

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