Naively, under my view of Samo’s view, it would require bigger chunks of data to make substantive updates. This is an oversimplification, but my chain of reasoning about Samo’s view goes approximately like this:
Great Founder Theory: The correct lens for history is institutions, and the seminal events are the launch or collapse of important institutions.
The failure of the initial invasion will feed back into questions about whether or not the Kremlin, FSB, Russian army, etc. are in collapse as institutions. This is a hard problem:
Discerning whether an institution is near failure is a difficult epistemic problem. There are many outwardly visible pieces of institutions that do not reflect their actual health.
It seems to me that the harder the problem the slower the update, and the smaller the consequences the less weight there is on the evidence.
Applying that: it doesn’t appear this is any kind of existential threat to any of the Russian institutions involved in launching the invasion. I think there might be some kind of conundrum like: if Ukraine escalates into an existential threat, the greater Russian institutional resources predict victory for Russia; but if it doesn’t escalate, it doesn’t seem to weigh much.
It seems like the kinds of things we are talking about in this war, like it being a political/economic defeat for Russia as a country or Putin as a regime, read as a kind of category error in the Great Founder Theory paradigm, which I might describe as “longtermist institutional realpolitik.”
I would guess that major updates would occur with events like: formal addition of new countries into NATO; collapse of things like Russian banks, oil and gas companies, or similar; coup attempts or successful revolutions; the creation of new institutions for Russian/Chinese economic alignment, the creation of new European institutions for energy independence, etc.
Naively, under my view of Samo’s view, it would require bigger chunks of data to make substantive updates. This is an oversimplification, but my chain of reasoning about Samo’s view goes approximately like this:
Great Founder Theory: The correct lens for history is institutions, and the seminal events are the launch or collapse of important institutions.
The failure of the initial invasion will feed back into questions about whether or not the Kremlin, FSB, Russian army, etc. are in collapse as institutions. This is a hard problem:
It seems to me that the harder the problem the slower the update, and the smaller the consequences the less weight there is on the evidence.
Applying that: it doesn’t appear this is any kind of existential threat to any of the Russian institutions involved in launching the invasion. I think there might be some kind of conundrum like: if Ukraine escalates into an existential threat, the greater Russian institutional resources predict victory for Russia; but if it doesn’t escalate, it doesn’t seem to weigh much.
It seems like the kinds of things we are talking about in this war, like it being a political/economic defeat for Russia as a country or Putin as a regime, read as a kind of category error in the Great Founder Theory paradigm, which I might describe as “longtermist institutional realpolitik.”
I would guess that major updates would occur with events like: formal addition of new countries into NATO; collapse of things like Russian banks, oil and gas companies, or similar; coup attempts or successful revolutions; the creation of new institutions for Russian/Chinese economic alignment, the creation of new European institutions for energy independence, etc.