Saying “yelling at large crowds” is irrational, without giving any definition of “rational,” is quite problematic. The author can’t mean “rational argument”, because the power of the West is not built on Modus Tolens; it’s built on guns, smallpox, and better industry. Thus, he does not seem to be using a consistent definition of rational; furthermore, “You won’t conquer the world by reasoning with people” is hardly an insight. Additionally, he makes no claim that the Nazis succeeded because of their irrationality; indeed, if they hadn’t been quite so adamant about killing all the Jews and taking back the Caucuses, they likely would have been a whole lot more successful.
In short, he has no clear definition of rationality, nor an explanation of how having less of it was good, or having more of it was bad. In the absence of a consistent definition or an explicit claim about methods and results, it seems entirely appropriate for me to use the conventional (around here) definition of rationality as systematically making good decisions that advance your goals.
Now, if his whole argument were, “You can accomplish a lot without being consistently rational,” I wouldn’t dispute that. But his point is, “You can accomplish a lot without being consistently rational, therefore, rationality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” Given that the Nazis probably could have accomplished more if they’d had slightly fewer crazy ideas, he does not appear to support his own claim.
Given that the Nazis probably could have accomplished more if they’d had slightly fewer crazy ideas, he does not appear to support his own claim.
But there is an interesting question, which is how many fewer crazy ideas would be required. I mean, arguably if the Nazis were completely reasonable, it’s unlikely that they’d have been all that successful either. They had to 1) appeal to a certain contingent, while 2) scaring the crap out of everybody else. Arguably, having a certain amount of sheer batshit crazy ideas helped with both… whereas being merely mildly eccentric and power-mongering probably wouldn’t have helped.
IOW, it’s likely difficult to separate the Nazis’ results from their irrationality… even if that just means they were being rationally irrational, so to speak. (Of course, making a commitment to being scary-crazy as a deterrent/threat strategy means you’re likely to still be quite crazy when you actually have some power.)
“Saying “yelling at large crowds” is irrational, without giving any definition of “rational,” is quite problematic. ”
Yelling at large crowds is neither rational nor irrational, as it is not a belief and rationality is about beliefs. What I was saying was, effectively yelling at a large crowd doesn’t depend on whether your beliefs are accurate, any more than the ability to roll your tongue does.
“The author can’t mean “rational argument”, because the power of the West is not built on Modus Tolens; it’s built on guns, smallpox, and better industry. ”
The power of the West isn’t built on rational argument with other people, it’s built (in large part) on rational argument internally, Westerners arguing more rationally with other Westerners. This caused the West to become better at science and business, which caused it to become more effective at creating wealth, which in turn generated guns and industry.
“In short, he has no clear definition of rationality, nor an explanation of how having less of it was good, or having more of it was bad.”
That, as you said yourself, was never my thesis; my thesis was that, for attaining many goals on the individual level, rationality is not the most important factor.
Given that the Nazis probably could have accomplished more if they’d had slightly fewer crazy ideas, he does not appear to support his own claim.
Their “crazy” ideas included most of their top-level goals. Whatever they achieved or didn’t achieve has to be measured in terms of their goals, so you can’t just propose to throw away some goals to improve the chances of achieving others.
Take the example of killing Jews. This was a top-level Nazi goal. Yes, if they had achieved complete and lasting world domination, or even domination of Eurasia, they would have been able to kill Jews later. But given a significant chance of military failure, and an even more significant chance of partial failure—holding on to Western Europe, losing the rest of the conquered territories—diverting resources to killing Jews was a rational tradeoff.
Take the example of killing Jews. This was a top-level Nazi goal.
Which is part of the reason for calling them irrational. Killing the jews was originally a means to the end of preventing jews from breeding wtih (other) germans, which itself was a means to the end of making Germany stronger. When the killing became a top level goal that was what Eliezer would call subgoal stomp. The means became a supergoal, and their pursuit of that goal was part of what defeated the goal that it originally should help achieve.
From the Nazis’ POV, racial contamination was only one way in which the Jews maliciously influenced society. They also directly intervened in politics, the economy, culture, war efforts (like when they caused the German surrender in WW1), etc. The jews and their allies controlled states like the USA and used them to interfere with Germany, and they could not be allowed to threaten Germany directly from the inside.
The jews could not be reformed, their malicious tendencies could not be eradicated, and therefore they had to be killed. Tthat was a legitimate supergoal.
...They also directly intervened in politics, the economy, culture, war efforts (like when they caused the German surrender in WW1), etc. The jews and their allies controlled states like the USA and used them to interfere with Germany, and they could not be allowed to threaten Germany directly from the inside...
Which was just more reasons for having it as a subgoal to making themselves more powerful. If a subgoal defeats its supergoal you are irrational, no matter how important the subgoal is.
Besides all of that could have been achieved by taking away power from all jews and putting them in ghettos. Which they had already done before even starting on the “final solution”.
By your argument, they should never have made any effort that did not lead directly to increasing their power.
But their rule wasn’t (just) a goal in itself, but a tool used to achieve other goals. Given that they had a chance of failing to achieve lasting world domination, it made sense to pursue goals like killing Jews which would leave a lasting legacy even if they were ultimately defeated. In other words, the destruction of the Nazi regime is not the absolute possible min-utility.
Besides all of that could have been achieved by taking away power from all jews and putting them in ghettos. Which they had already done before even starting on the “final solution”.
If the ghetto solution had worked, they would not have needed the Final Solution, and would not have worked on it. The F.S. wasn’t just for the fun of it—it was created to handle the problem of large jewish populations in newly-conquered Eastern territories. In some of these territories they never instituted ghettos because killing the jews right away was thought to be economically cheaper or more efficient (e.g. Ukraine). In others (Poland, etc), they thought that ghettos wouldn’t work in the long term, and they had or feared local management problems. It’s easier to kill a hostile conquered population than to keep it from revolting while it starves. (They also had plans to kill most of the Poles, but they never had the manpower to carry those out.)
Later, towards the end of the war, it acquired an additional (rational) reason: killing all the jews quickly before the relevant territories were lost to the advancing Red Army.
By your argument, they should never have made any effort that did not lead directly to increasing their power.
There are at least two ‘increasing their power’. One is individuals gaining power in Germany. That was a subgoal. The other is increasing the power of their nation or race in the world. That is the supergoal that, according to their ideology, all nazis should be working for. Beyond that they could have personal selfish goals. Perhaps including survival, reproduction and a legacy of having achieved something constructive. All of which they failed at.
In the values they expressed they took an extremely long perspective. They would extablish a thousand year empire, when they designed a building the first thing they thought of was what it should look like as a ruin and they included Darwinian evolution in their methods and considerations, as though their plans covered at the very least tens of thousands of years. But in their actions they threw away every chance at creating something stable for some futile gestures and a bunch of murders.
...killing all the jews quickly before the relevant territories were lost to the advancing Red Army.
And wasting their forces to conquer territories that they knew that they would lose immediately was in itself irrational.
If the ghetto solution had worked, they would not have needed the Final Solution
They didn’t need the final solution to protect themselves from jews. They “had to” do it because they had used the jew as their outside threat to make the germans fall in line at the start of their rule, and they had internalized their own propaganda to the point that killing jews became a supergoal.
But in their actions they threw away every chance at creating something stable for some futile gestures and a bunch of murders.
Not every chance. A small reduction in probability. The key word in my argument that you’re not addressing is that they made a tradeoff.
They didn’t need the final solution to protect themselves from jews. They “had to” do it because they had used the jew as their outside threat to make the germans fall in line at the start of their rule, and they had internalized their own propaganda to the point that killing jews became a supergoal.
if you assume (without evidence) that they didn’t believe in their stated anti-Jewish goals at first, and that it was only propaganda, then you’re undermining the whole discussion. We started out by considering their success in terms of their own goals and under the assumption they were being rational.
Not every chance. A small reduction in probability. The key word in my argument that you’re not addressing is that they made a tradeoff.
The probability was small in the first place, so throwing it away was a small reduction in probability. But there was no chance at all that Germany would conquer all of the Soviet Union in one step. Especially while fighting inefficiently, also fighting in the west and distracting themselves with other things.
And throwing one thing away to pursue another is a tradeoff. I just pointed out one tradeoff that they made, wich I consider inconsistent (for the reason stated in the grandparent of this comment).
We started out by considering their success in terms of their own goals and under the assumption they were being rational.
Consider it under their goals: Of bloody course. Assume that they were rational: That’s exactly what I was arguing that they weren’t. It doesn’t make any more sense to assume one side of the argument than the other.
assume … that they didn’t believe in their stated anti-Jewish goals at first …
I’ll expand a bit on that if you don’t mind. There were two (sets of) reasons why they hated the jews.
*1) Their biological beliefs, where the jewish race and the aryan race were “natural enemies”, and the aryan race could be diluted by the jewish but not vice versa. For that reason they wanted to get jews out of every significant part of society, and prevent them from crossbreeding. That goal could be pursued by genocide, or by isolating jews in ghettos and keeping others from associating with them. The nazis did the latter successfully in every place that they controlled before they started on the final solution. Jewish leaders were quite willing to cooperate with the nazis in this matter, because they got more power in the ghettos than they had in the outside society.
Isolating and concentrating jews was probably a necessary stage before extermination. And once that was achieved the jews were not a significant threat (even from the race biologist perspective). People very seldom revolt purely because of bad conditions. They revolt against change, of which there is very little in a ghetto. And while they were kept around they were an economic asset. But once you upset the boat by starting the killing you risk getting revolts. As they did in several places.
*2) They wanted an outgroup to spread hate and fear against. And the jews came in handy, again for two reasons. First the nazis already wanted to hurt jews because of 1). Second it was easy to rile the germans up against jews due to widespread christian antisemitism. For that reason they did a lot of antijewish propaganda (as you referred to earlier), some related to 1) and some being pure lies and fallacies. It also meant that they had to give the appearance of a continued campaign against the jews rather than just doing the minimal to solve the problem in 1). But spending one bullet or one drop of fuel beyond what was needed to appear credible for the proles for the purpose of 2) was irrational.
But since the nazis kept talking and thinking about the propaganda in 2) as their reason for their actions in 1) they felt that they had an urgent need to continue with the genocide. Even when that hurt their original goals.
But there was no chance at all that Germany would conquer all of the Soviet Union in one step.
According to most of the historical analyses I’ve read, Germany certainly might have defeated the USSR conclusively—if they hadn’t made mistakes like the 6th Army not retreating from Stalingrad, and if they had succeeded in conquering Murmansk, and if the USA had not started to provide huge amounts of aid to the USSR. They did have a lot of luck—more than might be expected—but it certainly wasn’t impossible for them to have a bit more luck and win outright.
Of course they would have benefited from preparing good fallback positions somewhere in the Ukraine which they could hold if the Red Army started to push them back. But they never had the spare time or resources for it. Of course hindsight is 20⁄20; today we can say they should have diverted resources from the Atlantic Wall which failed to prevent D-Day.
On what do you base your statement that they had no chance a priori of ultimately defeating the USSR? Sure, they didn’t have the manpower to actually conquer and hold all the vast territories of Russia, but that wasn’t necessary to defeat the Red Army conclusively.
Especially while fighting inefficiently, also fighting in the west and distracting themselves with other things.
The Western Front didn’t exist until the Germans were completely defeated in the East. It simply wasn’t relevant. (Battle of Kursk was in August 1943. Allied invasion of Italy was in September 1943 and of Normandy in June 1944.)
As for distractions, apart from the tradeoff we’re discussing and similar decisions (which I think were at least in principle rational), what else do you mean? Certainly there were many mistakes made, inefficiencies, etc. but nobody’s perfect.
But since the nazis kept talking and thinking about the propaganda in 2) as their reason for their actions in 1) they felt that they had an urgent need to continue with the genocide. Even when that hurt their original goals.
I’m sorry, I lost you. The original goals included finding a “final solution to the Jewish problem”. Even if ghettos could have worked in the longer term, once it was clear that they risked losing e.g. Poland to the Red Army, they switched to extermination. That way no matter what happened to the Nazi regime, the Jews could not hurt the German people in the future. How does this hurt their original goals?
By this subgoal stomp, do you mean that when their subgoal (Killing Jews) became a priority, that it diverted resources away from their supergoal (world domination, or at least the domination of Europe/Asia), and thus they stomped on their own supergoal by irrationally promoting the importance of the subgoal?
If that is what you mean, then I think that a strong case could be made for this, as a lot of manpower was sucked into that particular void.
Saying “yelling at large crowds” is irrational, without giving any definition of “rational,” is quite problematic. The author can’t mean “rational argument”, because the power of the West is not built on Modus Tolens; it’s built on guns, smallpox, and better industry. Thus, he does not seem to be using a consistent definition of rational; furthermore, “You won’t conquer the world by reasoning with people” is hardly an insight. Additionally, he makes no claim that the Nazis succeeded because of their irrationality; indeed, if they hadn’t been quite so adamant about killing all the Jews and taking back the Caucuses, they likely would have been a whole lot more successful.
In short, he has no clear definition of rationality, nor an explanation of how having less of it was good, or having more of it was bad. In the absence of a consistent definition or an explicit claim about methods and results, it seems entirely appropriate for me to use the conventional (around here) definition of rationality as systematically making good decisions that advance your goals.
Now, if his whole argument were, “You can accomplish a lot without being consistently rational,” I wouldn’t dispute that. But his point is, “You can accomplish a lot without being consistently rational, therefore, rationality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” Given that the Nazis probably could have accomplished more if they’d had slightly fewer crazy ideas, he does not appear to support his own claim.
But there is an interesting question, which is how many fewer crazy ideas would be required. I mean, arguably if the Nazis were completely reasonable, it’s unlikely that they’d have been all that successful either. They had to 1) appeal to a certain contingent, while 2) scaring the crap out of everybody else. Arguably, having a certain amount of sheer batshit crazy ideas helped with both… whereas being merely mildly eccentric and power-mongering probably wouldn’t have helped.
IOW, it’s likely difficult to separate the Nazis’ results from their irrationality… even if that just means they were being rationally irrational, so to speak. (Of course, making a commitment to being scary-crazy as a deterrent/threat strategy means you’re likely to still be quite crazy when you actually have some power.)
“Saying “yelling at large crowds” is irrational, without giving any definition of “rational,” is quite problematic. ”
Yelling at large crowds is neither rational nor irrational, as it is not a belief and rationality is about beliefs. What I was saying was, effectively yelling at a large crowd doesn’t depend on whether your beliefs are accurate, any more than the ability to roll your tongue does.
“The author can’t mean “rational argument”, because the power of the West is not built on Modus Tolens; it’s built on guns, smallpox, and better industry. ”
The power of the West isn’t built on rational argument with other people, it’s built (in large part) on rational argument internally, Westerners arguing more rationally with other Westerners. This caused the West to become better at science and business, which caused it to become more effective at creating wealth, which in turn generated guns and industry.
“In short, he has no clear definition of rationality, nor an explanation of how having less of it was good, or having more of it was bad.”
That, as you said yourself, was never my thesis; my thesis was that, for attaining many goals on the individual level, rationality is not the most important factor.
Their “crazy” ideas included most of their top-level goals. Whatever they achieved or didn’t achieve has to be measured in terms of their goals, so you can’t just propose to throw away some goals to improve the chances of achieving others.
Take the example of killing Jews. This was a top-level Nazi goal. Yes, if they had achieved complete and lasting world domination, or even domination of Eurasia, they would have been able to kill Jews later. But given a significant chance of military failure, and an even more significant chance of partial failure—holding on to Western Europe, losing the rest of the conquered territories—diverting resources to killing Jews was a rational tradeoff.
Which is part of the reason for calling them irrational. Killing the jews was originally a means to the end of preventing jews from breeding wtih (other) germans, which itself was a means to the end of making Germany stronger. When the killing became a top level goal that was what Eliezer would call subgoal stomp. The means became a supergoal, and their pursuit of that goal was part of what defeated the goal that it originally should help achieve.
From the Nazis’ POV, racial contamination was only one way in which the Jews maliciously influenced society. They also directly intervened in politics, the economy, culture, war efforts (like when they caused the German surrender in WW1), etc. The jews and their allies controlled states like the USA and used them to interfere with Germany, and they could not be allowed to threaten Germany directly from the inside.
The jews could not be reformed, their malicious tendencies could not be eradicated, and therefore they had to be killed. Tthat was a legitimate supergoal.
Which was just more reasons for having it as a subgoal to making themselves more powerful. If a subgoal defeats its supergoal you are irrational, no matter how important the subgoal is.
Besides all of that could have been achieved by taking away power from all jews and putting them in ghettos. Which they had already done before even starting on the “final solution”.
By your argument, they should never have made any effort that did not lead directly to increasing their power.
But their rule wasn’t (just) a goal in itself, but a tool used to achieve other goals. Given that they had a chance of failing to achieve lasting world domination, it made sense to pursue goals like killing Jews which would leave a lasting legacy even if they were ultimately defeated. In other words, the destruction of the Nazi regime is not the absolute possible min-utility.
If the ghetto solution had worked, they would not have needed the Final Solution, and would not have worked on it. The F.S. wasn’t just for the fun of it—it was created to handle the problem of large jewish populations in newly-conquered Eastern territories. In some of these territories they never instituted ghettos because killing the jews right away was thought to be economically cheaper or more efficient (e.g. Ukraine). In others (Poland, etc), they thought that ghettos wouldn’t work in the long term, and they had or feared local management problems. It’s easier to kill a hostile conquered population than to keep it from revolting while it starves. (They also had plans to kill most of the Poles, but they never had the manpower to carry those out.)
Later, towards the end of the war, it acquired an additional (rational) reason: killing all the jews quickly before the relevant territories were lost to the advancing Red Army.
There are at least two ‘increasing their power’. One is individuals gaining power in Germany. That was a subgoal. The other is increasing the power of their nation or race in the world. That is the supergoal that, according to their ideology, all nazis should be working for. Beyond that they could have personal selfish goals. Perhaps including survival, reproduction and a legacy of having achieved something constructive. All of which they failed at.
In the values they expressed they took an extremely long perspective. They would extablish a thousand year empire, when they designed a building the first thing they thought of was what it should look like as a ruin and they included Darwinian evolution in their methods and considerations, as though their plans covered at the very least tens of thousands of years. But in their actions they threw away every chance at creating something stable for some futile gestures and a bunch of murders.
And wasting their forces to conquer territories that they knew that they would lose immediately was in itself irrational.
They didn’t need the final solution to protect themselves from jews. They “had to” do it because they had used the jew as their outside threat to make the germans fall in line at the start of their rule, and they had internalized their own propaganda to the point that killing jews became a supergoal.
Not every chance. A small reduction in probability. The key word in my argument that you’re not addressing is that they made a tradeoff.
if you assume (without evidence) that they didn’t believe in their stated anti-Jewish goals at first, and that it was only propaganda, then you’re undermining the whole discussion. We started out by considering their success in terms of their own goals and under the assumption they were being rational.
The probability was small in the first place, so throwing it away was a small reduction in probability. But there was no chance at all that Germany would conquer all of the Soviet Union in one step. Especially while fighting inefficiently, also fighting in the west and distracting themselves with other things.
And throwing one thing away to pursue another is a tradeoff. I just pointed out one tradeoff that they made, wich I consider inconsistent (for the reason stated in the grandparent of this comment).
Consider it under their goals: Of bloody course. Assume that they were rational: That’s exactly what I was arguing that they weren’t. It doesn’t make any more sense to assume one side of the argument than the other.
I’ll expand a bit on that if you don’t mind. There were two (sets of) reasons why they hated the jews.
*1) Their biological beliefs, where the jewish race and the aryan race were “natural enemies”, and the aryan race could be diluted by the jewish but not vice versa. For that reason they wanted to get jews out of every significant part of society, and prevent them from crossbreeding. That goal could be pursued by genocide, or by isolating jews in ghettos and keeping others from associating with them. The nazis did the latter successfully in every place that they controlled before they started on the final solution. Jewish leaders were quite willing to cooperate with the nazis in this matter, because they got more power in the ghettos than they had in the outside society.
Isolating and concentrating jews was probably a necessary stage before extermination. And once that was achieved the jews were not a significant threat (even from the race biologist perspective). People very seldom revolt purely because of bad conditions. They revolt against change, of which there is very little in a ghetto. And while they were kept around they were an economic asset. But once you upset the boat by starting the killing you risk getting revolts. As they did in several places.
*2) They wanted an outgroup to spread hate and fear against. And the jews came in handy, again for two reasons. First the nazis already wanted to hurt jews because of 1). Second it was easy to rile the germans up against jews due to widespread christian antisemitism. For that reason they did a lot of antijewish propaganda (as you referred to earlier), some related to 1) and some being pure lies and fallacies. It also meant that they had to give the appearance of a continued campaign against the jews rather than just doing the minimal to solve the problem in 1). But spending one bullet or one drop of fuel beyond what was needed to appear credible for the proles for the purpose of 2) was irrational.
But since the nazis kept talking and thinking about the propaganda in 2) as their reason for their actions in 1) they felt that they had an urgent need to continue with the genocide. Even when that hurt their original goals.
According to most of the historical analyses I’ve read, Germany certainly might have defeated the USSR conclusively—if they hadn’t made mistakes like the 6th Army not retreating from Stalingrad, and if they had succeeded in conquering Murmansk, and if the USA had not started to provide huge amounts of aid to the USSR. They did have a lot of luck—more than might be expected—but it certainly wasn’t impossible for them to have a bit more luck and win outright.
Of course they would have benefited from preparing good fallback positions somewhere in the Ukraine which they could hold if the Red Army started to push them back. But they never had the spare time or resources for it. Of course hindsight is 20⁄20; today we can say they should have diverted resources from the Atlantic Wall which failed to prevent D-Day.
On what do you base your statement that they had no chance a priori of ultimately defeating the USSR? Sure, they didn’t have the manpower to actually conquer and hold all the vast territories of Russia, but that wasn’t necessary to defeat the Red Army conclusively.
The Western Front didn’t exist until the Germans were completely defeated in the East. It simply wasn’t relevant. (Battle of Kursk was in August 1943. Allied invasion of Italy was in September 1943 and of Normandy in June 1944.)
As for distractions, apart from the tradeoff we’re discussing and similar decisions (which I think were at least in principle rational), what else do you mean? Certainly there were many mistakes made, inefficiencies, etc. but nobody’s perfect.
I’m sorry, I lost you. The original goals included finding a “final solution to the Jewish problem”. Even if ghettos could have worked in the longer term, once it was clear that they risked losing e.g. Poland to the Red Army, they switched to extermination. That way no matter what happened to the Nazi regime, the Jews could not hurt the German people in the future. How does this hurt their original goals?
By this subgoal stomp, do you mean that when their subgoal (Killing Jews) became a priority, that it diverted resources away from their supergoal (world domination, or at least the domination of Europe/Asia), and thus they stomped on their own supergoal by irrationally promoting the importance of the subgoal?
If that is what you mean, then I think that a strong case could be made for this, as a lot of manpower was sucked into that particular void.
Yup. Exactly.