Thanks for these. I’ve been trying to follow the war, but still missed many interesting links that you’ve collected.
Samo Burja watch: On 31 March he recognizes that Russia will not win militarily within the first 50 days, still predicts a similar outcome within the year as the most likely result and considers Russia taking a bunch of territory the optimistic scenario.
Samo seems to have been consistently too optimistic on Russia’s behalf, and slow to update. On Feb 27 when others started to detect a turning of the tide, he wrote in response:
The standard for an actual victory would be “compared to yesterday the Russians have been pushed back.”
I guess it is impolitic right now to suggest Ukraine is losing.
I’ve been following Samo because he writes about topics I’m interested in, but he often doesn’t give detailed reasons for his conclusions, and I’m not sure how much weight to give to his (not explicitly supported) views. Anyone want to chime in on this?
I think that Samo does have and offer a lot of detailed information, but he puts much or most of that behind a very expensive paywall, either the Bismark Brief or what he does for private clients. And that having worked up lots of details and a model that he presents as a key value add and brand, it becomes difficult to walk away from that special knowledge and model when events overtake the situation, making him slow to (publicly, anyway) update, but e.g. he did lose an actual $100 bet where he took much-worse-than-Metaculus odds on Russia winning by day 50, in a non-flashy context on Twitter, so I believe that he believed it at the time.
My understanding is he basically had a strong thesis, with many details, that:
Putin/Russia are a live player with a deep game plan.
Russia’s army was reformed and ready to go (an explicit Bismark Brief right before the war).
That a lot of our actions against Russia would only backfire (e.g. sanctions).
A belief that West are dead players and a general realpolitik approach that says that Ukraine is simply outgunned and outmatched here.
That Ukraine being so good at media was doubly suspicious—means they’re likely not good at real war (as opposed to my model, where good at anything makes you good in general) and also that they were focusing on the fake war at real war’s expense and thus were kind of fake, and also that we were very fooled.
When one has such an overdetermined position, both logically and motivationally, it’s hard to turn around. From his perspective, there’s a lot of reasons to hold the line from a personal-EV perspective, and not much reason to reverse course. It’s a tough spot.
My understanding is he basically had a strong thesis, with many details
Thanks, now I’m curious how he got into this epistemic state to begin with, especially how he determined 1 and 2 on your list. My current guess is that he focused too much on things that he could easily see and things that fit into his framework, like Putin being strategic and measured in the past, and Russia’s explicit reform efforts, and neglected to think enough about other stuff, like corruption, supply problems, Putin being fooled by his own command structure.
It’s too bad that nobody in rationalist circles seems to have done much better than mainstream intelligence/geopolitical analysts (who were also too optimistic for Russia). Perhaps the best one could have done was to follow OS (open source) intelligence analysts on Twitter, who were at least quick to update once Russian under-performance became apparent, early in the war. But that unfortunately means we can’t depend much on foresight for future geopolitical events.
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.
Hey Thomas, pardon my edit, and perhaps you have good reason to think otherwise, but I currently believe that Samo would prefer to not have his pseudonym be public. I’ll check in with him to confirm and revert if not, I just want to take extra care to not accidentally dox someone, and I think it’s good to lean on the side of caution with deanonymization.
Added: his non-pseudonymous account is of course Samo Burja.
Added2: Samo confirmed he does not wish to be deanonymised.
Okay, I didn’t know that. I find all his accounts quite interesting to read, and quite consistent with each other, too. Despite the fact, that they are from different times.
On topic, he was quite wrong in this particular Ukraina-Russia case. But who wasn’t?
Thanks for these. I’ve been trying to follow the war, but still missed many interesting links that you’ve collected.
Samo seems to have been consistently too optimistic on Russia’s behalf, and slow to update. On Feb 27 when others started to detect a turning of the tide, he wrote in response:
I’ve been following Samo because he writes about topics I’m interested in, but he often doesn’t give detailed reasons for his conclusions, and I’m not sure how much weight to give to his (not explicitly supported) views. Anyone want to chime in on this?
I think that Samo does have and offer a lot of detailed information, but he puts much or most of that behind a very expensive paywall, either the Bismark Brief or what he does for private clients. And that having worked up lots of details and a model that he presents as a key value add and brand, it becomes difficult to walk away from that special knowledge and model when events overtake the situation, making him slow to (publicly, anyway) update, but e.g. he did lose an actual $100 bet where he took much-worse-than-Metaculus odds on Russia winning by day 50, in a non-flashy context on Twitter, so I believe that he believed it at the time.
My understanding is he basically had a strong thesis, with many details, that:
Putin/Russia are a live player with a deep game plan.
Russia’s army was reformed and ready to go (an explicit Bismark Brief right before the war).
That a lot of our actions against Russia would only backfire (e.g. sanctions).
A belief that West are dead players and a general realpolitik approach that says that Ukraine is simply outgunned and outmatched here.
That Ukraine being so good at media was doubly suspicious—means they’re likely not good at real war (as opposed to my model, where good at anything makes you good in general) and also that they were focusing on the fake war at real war’s expense and thus were kind of fake, and also that we were very fooled.
When one has such an overdetermined position, both logically and motivationally, it’s hard to turn around. From his perspective, there’s a lot of reasons to hold the line from a personal-EV perspective, and not much reason to reverse course. It’s a tough spot.
Thanks, now I’m curious how he got into this epistemic state to begin with, especially how he determined 1 and 2 on your list. My current guess is that he focused too much on things that he could easily see and things that fit into his framework, like Putin being strategic and measured in the past, and Russia’s explicit reform efforts, and neglected to think enough about other stuff, like corruption, supply problems, Putin being fooled by his own command structure.
It’s too bad that nobody in rationalist circles seems to have done much better than mainstream intelligence/geopolitical analysts (who were also too optimistic for Russia). Perhaps the best one could have done was to follow OS (open source) intelligence analysts on Twitter, who were at least quick to update once Russian under-performance became apparent, early in the war. But that unfortunately means we can’t depend much on foresight for future geopolitical events.
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.
FYI, Samo Burja’s username here is [removed by Ben Pace].
Hey Thomas, pardon my edit, and perhaps you have good reason to think otherwise, but I currently believe that Samo would prefer to not have his pseudonym be public. I’ll check in with him to confirm and revert if not, I just want to take extra care to not accidentally dox someone, and I think it’s good to lean on the side of caution with deanonymization.
Added: his non-pseudonymous account is of course Samo Burja.
Added2: Samo confirmed he does not wish to be deanonymised.
Okay, I didn’t know that. I find all his accounts quite interesting to read, and quite consistent with each other, too. Despite the fact, that they are from different times.
On topic, he was quite wrong in this particular Ukraina-Russia case. But who wasn’t?
Thanks for being understanding! I agree, reading Samo’s writing is quite interesting :)