Tag Archives: War

Mysticism’s Function

By Robin Hanson · February 18, 2010 10:00 pm · Comments (45)

For our ancestors, mysticism functioned mainly to offer “higher” and stronger motives and excuses to do what they had more practical reasons to do.  In war:

Anthropologists universally reported one “spiritual” factor as being among the most prominent causes of warfare among hunter-gatherers, as well as among primitive agriculturalists.  This was fears and accusations of sorcery. … Accusations of sorcery … do not appear randomly.  They generally arise and are directed against people whom the victim of the alleged sorcery feels have reasons to want to harm him. … Chagnon’s account … of sorcery among the Yanomamo:

No two villages that are within comfortable walking distance from each other can maintain such a [neutral] relationship indefinitely: They must become allies, or hostility is likely to develop. … A death in one of the villages will be attributed to the malevolent hekura sent by shamans in the other village, and raids will eventually take place between them. …

Trespassing was often regarded in hunter-gatherer societies as an offense against a group’s sanctified territory.  In other cases, an act of sacrilege against the clan’s totem was regarded as an insult to the clan itself. … The Dugum Dani … who fought for pigs, women, and land … [also felt] they had to placate their ghosts who became angry with them if a killing … was not avenged. … Similarly, the Gebusi of Lowland New Guinea had the highest homicide rates recorded anywhere. The reason given for the killings was retribution for sorcery, but … there remains a striking correlation in Gebusi society between homicidal sorcery attribution and lack of reciprocity in sister exchange marriage …. Gebusi sorcery attribution is about unresolved and even unacknowledged improprieties in the balance of marital exchange.

In “peace”:

During the witch trials in Europe the accused were precisely those persons who had somehow aroused the suspicion that they were envious and hence desirous of harming others.  Gradually, however, the envious man himself became the accuser, the accused being people who were good-liooking, virtuous, proud and rich. … This double role played by envy in witchcraft is again apparent among primitive peoples.  The outsider, the cripple, anyone at all handicapped, is suspected. ….

Of 222 cases of accusation of [Navaho] witchcraft … 184 involved adult males, 131 of these being of great age.  All the females  accused were also very old.  The Navaho are usually so afraid of the sorcery of old people that they do their best to propitiate them with lavish hospitality and the like, even though the person concerned may be extremely unpleasant. … [They are] suspicious of all persons in extreme positions – the very rich, the very poor, the influential singer, the extremely old. …

The Zuni Indians share with the Hopi a distaste for competitive behavior and open aggression, and sacrifice individuality to the collective.  Bu this does not eliminate envy.  Both very poor and particular rich Zuni can be suspected of witchcraft.  The constant accusation of witchcraft serves to maintain social conformity. … A deceived husband or a jilted lover is described in Zuni legend … as a man to whom it is intolerable that he alone should be unhappy. …

If an old [Comanche] man failed to adapt himself with good grace to the role of peaceable old age, he was suspected of envious magic.  He might even be killed by the relatives of someone who suspected him of being a witch.

Can’t bring yourself to slaughter a nearby village, or a long-time associate?  Mysticism can help you believe they already attacked you first, and that the stakes are so much higher than your personal gain.

We similarly self-deceive today to give ourselves higher and stronger excuses to do what baser motives require.  Beware: if you won’t accept and act on your baser motives, your subconscious may well get you to achieve similar ends via self-deceptive delusions.  For a better chance at believing the truth, accept your ignoble desires.

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Distinguishing Defense

By Robin Hanson · February 9, 2010 8:35 am · Comments (17)

Many folks are not that comfortable with the idea of working in or for the military.  Yes, at some level we all support armies via paying taxes, selling them food, teaching their kids, etc., but the more direct their support the more uncomfortable many folks get.  For example, actually stabbing enemy soldiers on the front line is more direct than most of us prefer.  No doubt this discomfort at directness deprives armies of the support of many talented folks.

Some military folks I know emphasize that their efforts are primarily defensive; they help resist enemy attack and protect civilians from harm.  They are clearly asking not to be treated as if they were just an average part of the military machine.  But I wonder: why don’t we make it easier for such people to show that their efforts are mainly defensive.  Why don’t more parts of the military, and more military contractors, officially distinguish themselves as more emphasizing defense over offense?  Why can’t I work for a particular “defense” contractor with a clear reputation for only working on the defensive side of war?

Now it is true that in this case orgs that did not explicitly identify as defensive would look more offensive, making some folks less willing to associate with them.  But many a brash young man is eager to show he is a front-line fighter, so there might be overall sorting gains from making this distinction.  Is it that those who run our military hate the idea of officially acknowledging and accomodating citizens who don’t offer full unconditional (offense or defense as required) support of our military?

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Capital In Conflict

By Robin Hanson · February 6, 2010 3:00 pm · Comments (16)

Until a few centuries ago economic growth rates were well below feasible population growth rates.  This gave a “Malthusian” state, as in most animal species, where population was near its max sustainable level.  To learn more about our distant future, which will probably be in such a state, let us learn more about our Malthusian past.  In particular, consider two important clues:

  1. Slack – As measured either by kids per mom or hours of work a day, most recent pre-industrial societies were ~30-70% below their simple Malthusian limit.
  2. Interest – Even after correcting for depreciation and failure-to-pay, for many thousands of years interest rates have been far above population growth rates.

(Data on both clues in Greg Clark’s Farewell to Alms.)

The slack clue can be explained via local cultural norms (i.e., signaling equilibria).  For example, pre-industrial English women married at ~26; those who married earlier had more kids, but at the cost of lower husband quality and threatened kid survival.  In societies with low work hour norms, harder workers faced ridicule and theft.  They attracted worse spouses and couldn’t use all their extra product to feed more kids.

Since social norms varied greatly across societies, however, it is puzzling that competition between neighboring societies didn’t favor societies with norms that put them closer to the Malthusian limit.  When neighboring groups clashed, why didn’t those with norms favoring denser populations tend to win out?

Interest rates appear in prices for renting land, borrowing silver, etc.  Social norm variety also makes high interest rates puzzling.  Local subgroups with a norm of saving capital and reinvesting as much as possible should in principle quickly outgrown groups who instead borrowed, rented, etc.  Soon even a small fraction of the interest on their wealth could paid for many more kids.

We can explain each of these puzzles by assuming that labor and capital have a different value relative to labor in conflicts, relative to more directly making food etc.  However these two explanations are somewhat at odds.

On the slack clue, cultures that limited their fertility and work hours should have had more capital per person.  In conflicts with neighboring cultures, perhaps low capital cultures were more often intimidated or seduced by folks from individually-richer high capital cultures.  Or perhaps such capital was especially useful in warfare.

On the interest clue, subgroups in a society who accumulated more wealth, relative to other groups, would end up with more capital relative to labor than other subgroups.  Other groups would then be tempted to steal that capital.  Perhaps labor is just especially useful in stealing capital, while capital is especially easy to steal relative to labor, especially given very large capital to labor ratios.  Perhaps this Biblical rule was to limit harm from predictable periodic predation:

The Jubilee year … required the compulsory return of all property to its original owners or their heirs, except the houses of laymen within walled cities, in addition to the manumission of all Israelite indentured servants.

Problem is, these two explanations are somewhat at odds – the first assumes that capital is especially strong, relative to labor, in conflicts with neighboring societies, while the second assumes that capital is especially weak, relative to labor, in conflicts within a society.  Can both really be true?

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Keeping Us “Safe”

By Robin Hanson · January 7, 2010 1:30 pm · Comments (19)

Since 2001, airline passengers — regular people without weapons or training — have helped thwart terrorist attacks aboard at least five different commercial airplanes. It happened again on Christmas Day. …

And yet our collective response to this legacy of ass-kicking is puzzling. Each time, we build a slapdash pedestal for the heroes. Then we go back to blaming the government for failing to keep us safe, and the government goes back to treating us like children. … Since regular people will always be first on the scene of terrorist attacks, we should perhaps prioritize the public’s antiterrorism capability. …

President Obama: “The American people should be assured that we are doing everything in our power to keep you and your family safe.” …  Obama … did not call for Congress to cut spending on homeland-security pork and instead double the budget of Citizen Corps — the volunteer emergency-preparedness service. …  He did not demand that the government be more open with us about the threats we face.

More here.  This is indeed puzzling, but it seems related to our medical over-insurance.  We know we could save on average by paying less less up front, and then making more last minute decisions on which med treatment is worth the cost.  And perhaps we even know we wouldn’t be any less healthy in this scenario.  But we don’t want to make such stressful decisions; we like putting it out of our mind and paying high status docs huge sums to affiliate with us and deal with it.

Similarly maybe we prefer to pay our high status leaders to inefficiently deal with terrorism for us, rather than facing the stress of thinking we each may have to deal with a terrorist ourselves, even if that would work better, and even if that’s what really happens anyway.  See also our neglecting to support ordinary folks’ discouraging of auto accidents.

Fear of (thinking about) death is a very powerful thing.

Added 3p: Justin Fox:

If all the various elements of the intelligence community had simply Tweeted their findings, the hive mind of the Internet (or, more specifically, some 14-year-old in his bedroom in Bakersfield) would have blown the whistle on Abdulmutallab weeks ago. … And what’s the best mechanism known for sharing and weighing dispersed information? A market. … [Yet] in all the public discussion of what went wrong in the Abdulmutallab case, I have seen not a single mention of the Policy Analysis Market, as the Pentagon called its project, or the terrorism futures market, as everybody else called it. Hanson hasn’t even brought it up lately on his blog. So I figured it was time to rectify that.

Big government agencies hate to change how they do things, especially changes that threaten their autonomy.  So they won’t change unless the public cares much more about outcomes than the appearance of “doing something.”  At the moment, the public hardly cares about either.

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Santa: Naughty Or Nice?

By Robin Hanson · December 21, 2009 3:10 pm · Comments (33)

Imagine you managed an organization that could:

  • Deliver several pounds of goods undetected and unstoppable, into several hundred million homes worldwide all on the same night, and to select which among thousands of possible goods go to which homes.
  • Manufacture many tens of dollars worth of state of the art goods, distributed among thousands of types of goods, for each of those homes.
  • Revamp your manufacturing line yearly, to keep up with changing conditions.
  • Track the behavior of billions of people in detail, and know their parents standards for “naughty” or “nice”, enough to classify as naughty or nice.
  • Estimate what goods people want, as accurately as could their parents.
  • Do all this year after year, always on the same day, whether others liked it or not.
  • Do all this completely “off the grid,” at an undisclosed location in complete secrecy, with unidentified members who never talk to anyone about their activities, who use no noticeable inputs from elsewhere, and who have no noticeable waste emissions.

Now consider what you could accomplish with such capabilities.  Toward the naughty side, you could achieve a military takeover of most of the world, and maintain totalitarian control thereafter.  Cooperative homes get good stuff; uncooperative homes get bombs; pretty soon they’d fall in line.

On the nice side, you could deliver food, medicine, tools, and self-defense weapons to a bottom billion of the world’s poor, sick, or oppressed.  You could also identify and punish the world’s corrupt and criminal, and reward the innovative and generous.  You could take a huge bite out of poverty, crime, corruption, and oppression.

Clearly Santa is one very powerful dude; the whole world pretty much hangs on his choice.  So what does Santa actually do? He gives toys to billions of children, mostly ignoring adults. He gives far more to rich kids than to poor kids, and he greatly favors cultures that celebrate his name over others. He mostly ignores his ability to sort people into naughty and nice; they are pretty much all labeled nice.  (Have you ever even heard of a kid who got coal? Wouldn’t that make the news?)

So where does this put Santa on the naughty vs. nice spectrum?  I’d say “mildly positive eccentric.”  Yes he is clearly far less naughty than he could be, but he is also far less nice than possible. He uses his abilities to help others, and his attention is admirably global. But he helps far less than he could, he chooses his own rather odd way to help, and he prefers to help high status folks who celebrate his eccentric contribution. Apparently even in our dreams this is about as much as we dare hope for from a human, no matter how powerful. Deep down we know human charity is not about help, even if it does sometimes help.

Added 7:30p:  Why, over the last century, do parents lie more about Santa to make kids happy, with kids more dissappointed to learn the truth, and yet finding out more often from those same parents?  Source:

A study from 1896 involving 1,500 children aged 7 to 13, which was repeated in 1979. …  More than 22 percent in the 1896 study admitted to being disappointed compared with 39 percent in the 1979 study. But only 2 percent and 6 percent, respectively, felt betrayed. … Close to 25 percent of children in the 1896 study learned the truth about Santa from their parents, compared with 40 per cent in 1979. … In 1896, 54 percent of parents said they perpetuated the myth of Santa since it made their children happy; compared with 73 percent in 1979 and 80 percent in 2000.

Added 23Dec: Adam Ozimek riffs wittily.

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Ho Hum Nuclear Winter

By Robin Hanson · December 20, 2009 8:30 pm · Comments (43)

From the January Scientific American:

Twenty-five years ago international teams of scientists showed that a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union could produce a “nuclear winter.” … killing plants worldwide and eliminating our food supply. … International discussion about this prediction … forced the leaders of the two superpowers to confront the possibility that their arms race endangered not just themselves but the entire human race. Countries large and small demanded disarmament. Nuclear winter became an important factor in ending the nuclear arms race. … Gorbachev observed, “the knowledge of [nuclear winter] was a great stimulus … to act.”

Why discuss this topic now that the cold war has ended? Because as other nations continue to acquire nuclear weapons, smaller, regional nuclear wars could create a similar global catastrophe.  New analyses reveal that a conflict between India and Pakistan, for example, in which 100 nuclear bombs were dropped … would produce enough smoke to cripple global agriculture. … Not only were the ideas of the 1980s correct but the effects would last for at least 10 years, much longer than previously thought. …

More than 20 million people in the two countries could die from the blasts, fires and radioactivity. … A nuclear war could trigger declines in yield nearly everywhere at once. … Around one billion people worldwide who now live on marginal food supplies would be directly threatened with starvation by a nuclear war between India and Pakistan or between other regional nuclear powers.

Furthermore:

The effects of a war involving the entire current global nuclear arsenal … [include] a global average surface cooling of –7°C to –8°C persists for years, and after a decade the cooling is still –4°C (Fig. 2).  … Cooling of more than –20°C occurs over large areas of North America and of more than –30°C over much of Eurasia, including all agricultural regions.

So, the first news about nuclear winter was shocking enough to induce cold war adversaries to agree to big cuts.  Today we know the situation is even worse – not only is nuclear winter easier than we thought to trigger, but more nations now have big enough arsenals to trigger it.  Yet today there is far less international discussion or momentum to prevent such disaster.  Why the difference?

Perhaps what triggered Western citizen interest last time was not so much that disaster loomed, but that disaster seemed attributable to our moral failings – to our being too belligerent.  This time, we don’t feel so belligerent to Russia, and other wars seems like someone else’s fault.  Perhaps we care less about anticipating and avoiding disasters, and more about avoiding moral blame for whatever does happen.

Many huge problems loom on a century or so timescale, but the only one that penetrates our public consciousness is global warming.  I suspect that is because people see it as attributable to a moral failing of theirs, something like greed, gluttony, or insensitivity to nature.  If global warming were just as serious a problem, but caused by an inhuman geological process, I suspect it would get a lot less attention.

If you want the West to attend to a looming future disaster, it seems you must blame it on their current immorality.  The disaster I fear most is an unanticipated em transition; how can we blame that on a current moral failing?  Imprudence is a moral failing of sorts, but alas it ranks low as a dreamtime concern.

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Key Disputed Values

By Robin Hanson · November 17, 2009 12:20 am · Comments (36)

Some like to paint world history as an epic conflict between deeply divergent visions of civilization, which come down to disputes over a few key values.  But if so, just what are those key disputed values?  For many decades, our best data on this key value variation has been the World Value Survey:

The WVS grew out of its eurocentric origins to embrace 42 countries in the 2nd wave, 54 in the 3rd wave and 62 in the 4th wave. … The questionnaires from the most recent waves have consisted of about 250 questions, … with an average in the 4th wave of about 1330 interviews per country and a worldwide total of about 92000 interviews. …

A number of variables were condensed [by factor analysis] into two dimensions of cultural variation (known as “traditional v. secular-rational” and “survival v. self-expression”), and on this basis the world’s countries could be mapped into specific cultural regions. The WVS claims: “These two dimensions explain more than 70 percent of the cross-national variance in a factor analysis of ten indicators”.

Here is a map of the world using those two main value factors:

0valuemap

Note that similar nations are grouped together, with rich nations to the upper right and poor nations to the lower left.  Note also that the main antagonists of the most recent global conflict, the Cold War, are nearly at opposite sides; Russia and its allies are to the upper left while USA and its allies are to the lower right.  Clearly this 2D space represents key value disputes.  But what values exactly? Continue reading "Key Disputed Values" »

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Farmers War

By Robin Hanson · October 29, 2009 6:30 pm · Comments (44)

Not only did farming increase our work hours, reduce our travel, impoverish our diet, and increase social hierarchy, it also greatly increased war.  From a Science book review:

There are four extant great ape species. Each has a different social system, with chimpanzees being the only species to regularly evidence multimale violent coalitions. …. In chimpanzees, each female … mates with every male in her group. Males join forces to defend their territory … and each male will have access to all those females… Marriage is a universal human behavior, and it is defined by cultural and legal rules proscribing sex outside of marriage, particularly by women. … All available evidence suggests that intergroup violence, practiced primarily by males, does have a long evolutionary history in our species. However, the intensity and nature of that violence is highly variable. …

The hunting and gathering adaptation, especially in its mobile form, does not appear to promote large-scale warfare, not only because groups are small, but because incentives are largely absent. Monogamy is the most common marital form (probably because women depend on men’s meat contribution and it is difficult to support two wives), so there is less incentive for bride-capture warfare. There can be territorial conflicts, but nothing in comparison to the conflicts that occur over precious lands when agricultural becomes the dominant way of life.

The scope for warfare has changed considerably as human economic systems have changed. Once people settle and the value of land varies from place to place, large-scale warfare becomes a persistent feature of human behavior, almost exclusively practiced among men. The riches to be had from control over productive river valleys (such as the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile) not only led to large-scale warfare but also to extreme differences in power and status, harems, and rape of women during and after war.

If people had known the consequences farming would bring, should they have tried to resist it?  I say no, but mainly because farming allowed so many more people to exist with lives worth living, even if those were near subsistence level lives.

Added 31Oct: Kukan points us to an excellent summary.

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What’s Pakistan’s Secret?

By Robin Hanson · October 18, 2009 5:15 pm · Comments (17)

Today’s top headline is a big Pakistan attack on Taliban rebels; Thursday Obama signed a bill tripling US aid to Pakistan, to $7.5B over five years, on the condition of more such attacks.  Sounds promising for Obama’s Afgahn war, where he has doubled our troops, for a record number of troops at war, right?

But Tuesday’s Frontline, on “Obama’s War”, was pessimistic about the Afghan war, and said the  Taliban we fight there have long gotten most support from Pakistan!  Pakistan has also long supported al-Qaeda, and seems to be where the 911 attack money came from.  Pakistan has also been the main cause of nuclear proliferation over the last few decades, arming Iran and North Korea, who tried to arm Syria, and trying to arm Libya.

Most of the worst problems for the US over the last few decades seem to have come from Pakistan, yet the US treats them nice, not like Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, or North Korea – what is their secret?  Yes Pakistan has nukes, but so did Russia and China and we never treated them this nice.   And they don’t have the sort of home political support that let’s Israel get away with so much. What gives?

Here are some supporting quotes.  On Taliban support: Continue reading "What’s Pakistan’s Secret?" »

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War From Near And Far

By Robin Hanson · October 16, 2009 6:00 am · Comments (18)

Longtime OB commenter TGGP gives quotes showing the “near/far dichotomy is reflected in Randall Collins’ “Violence: A Microsociological Theory”:

Soldiers who have been in combat and had direct contact with the enemy tend to depict him as courageous; it is enemies on more distant combat zones who are not respected; and soldiers in rear areas, and even more so civilians at home, who express a low regard for the enemy. …

The higher the rank, the more the person identifies with the formal frontstage ideals of the organization and is likely to talk in official rhetoric. … The contrast between detailed observation of what is happening in each micro-situation, and summary accounts of an ideal-typical version of performance; the latter would tend to be more idealized toward a favorable image, and we would expect that this bias would grow with as the actual memories of combat experience become more distant. …

In the modern era, casualties were caused primarily by artillery fired at long distance. In the musket era of parade-ground formations, cannon operating closer to the battle line generally accounted for more than 50 percent of the casualties. … The sheer distance from the enemy, and especially being shielded from personally seeing the men one is trying to kill increases the level of [soldier] performance. …The tension/fear of combat is almost completely debilitating at close range. …

Pre-battle elation … [is] troops’ “strange and fearsome delight at being at last up ‘really’ up against it”. This is a case of feelings prior to these men’s first battle, still in the phase of rhetoric. … Soldiers in rear areas express more hatred of the enemy, and more ferocious attitudes toward them, than frontline troops. … Whereas combat soldiers are more likely to treat prisoners well … rear area troops tend to treat prisoners more callously. … Civilians at home are more likely to express violent rhetorical hatred. … This fits the general pattern of all fights: surrounded by bluster and gesture up until the actual fight situation, when the emotion shifts drastically and tension/fear takes over. …

The proportion of empty rhetoric expands with each step toward the rear; war is successively more idealized, the enemy successively more dehumanized, attitudes toward killing successively more callous, and the whole affair more like the cheering of sports fans. …

The circumstances that cause the most fear not necessarily those that are objectively the most dangerous. Artillery shells and mortars … cause by far the most casualties – and the soldiers themselves generally know that – but the greatest difficulty in combat performance is in confronting small-arms fire at the forward edge of the combat zone. …  The source of strain is neither fear of death and injury, nor aversion to killing in principle. … What is different, and what seems to buffer them from tension/fear, is that [officers] personally do not have to do the killing.

War is a powerful horrifying example of just how badly our minds can be deluded by our “idealistic” far view.  Our far view of war functions well to help us signal our loyalty and commitment to our associates, but it makes us far too willing to make war and be cruel to our enemy, and makes us too willing to use tech that can kill from afar.

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