Stardate 20020921.1332

(Captain's log): As long time readers will know, I'm a retired engineer (after about 25 years), and a mechanistic atheist. I think that all ethical systems are ultimately flawed but of all the ones I've studied I think utilitarianism is less flawed than any other, and for most practical purposes I find that utilitarianism is helpful in determining what I should do, as long as I'm constantly alert to the ways it can lead me astray.

I tend to judge proposals on the basis of expected outcome. The most important characteristic of a good proposal is that it will be successful. Any proposal which is unlikely to be successful is bad. As an engineer, I've learned to judge results more than means, and I've learned that the universe isn't sympathetic to my preconceptions. For things to work, they have to be based on reality even when it's uncomfortable.

There are a lot of people who think like me to a greater or lesser extent. I would say that most of those are in favor of the US actively waging war as a result of what happened a year ago, in order to minimize the chance that something like that, or something even worse, will happen to us again.

I've studied game theory and some of the more broad results of economics. (The science of economics isn't just about how money flows around; it's the study of collective decision making processes, and as such heavily overlaps things like political science.) I know about the Prisoner's Dilemma, and Spoiling the Commons, and the problem of Free Riders.

As an engineer, I'm acutely aware of the problem of scaling: some solutions work well at or below certain sizes, but begin to malfunction above that level, or may even fail catastrophically. In some pernicious cases, a system will function one way when small and have exactly the opposite result when large.

As an engineer I'm also acutely aware of the problem of borders. A system which works in the middle, surrounded by others like it, may fail at the edge. Even if you implement it, what you'll see is the system collapse slowly as it's eaten away at the edges.

I'm aware of the problem of imperfection. I know about statistical evaluation of things like mean time to failure, and I know about designing systems to be resilient in the face of adversity. I know that eventually all systems fail but that when that happens it's desirable for it to not fail catastrophically. (The engineering term is "failing gracefully", which means that the failure is gradual so that it can be detected and dealt with before the consequences become unacceptable.)

And as an engineer I'm extremely pragmatic. The general approach in engineering is to be assigned a problem to solve, to analyze the environment in which the solution must exist to determine what constraints there are, to evaluate the resources available to apply to the solution, to craft a plan for creating a solution which is good enough even if not ideal (for ideal solutions are exceedingly rare), and then to implement it. That's what engineers do. Big and small, I've been through that process countless times. And though humans are passionate, it's essential that this process be as dispassionate as it can be, because the result is invariably better. Passionate engineers tend to make stupid decisions, to choose answers which are not actually optimum.

That's the mind set I'm bringing to this war. I have been for a long time attempting to understand why it is that we were attacked. But it's a dispassionate and utilitarian analysis. I'm not interested in blame, I'm only interested in trying to learn enough about those who oppose us to try to understand both what they may do next and what would be needed from us to make them cease to try to harm us. Issues like "justice" and "guilt" and "blame" don't enter into this analysis because they don't contribute to a solution.

I also need to understand the resources available to us. That includes, among other things, having a rational understanding of our extensive but not unlimited military power. That means understanding what we can do and what we probably cannot. It means learning about the various weapons systems we have. It means fully embracing at all times the fundamental problem of logistics. In fact, for the US now, logistics is the primary limit on what we can do since there doesn't exist any hostile military power which is both willing and able to oppose us and credibly can present us with a major challenge. (There are nations capable of defending their own back yard, but none who can learn of our plans to go to a certain place and decide to meet us there to stop us. The only nations who are actually capable of stopping us are those with nuclear weapons, and the only way they could do so would be by nuking us and being nuked in return.)

I've evaluated a large numbers of potential courses of action, and none of them are any good. They all suck. But that's what life is like sometimes, and as an engineer it's not the first time I've ever faced a situation where there were no good answers. It is, however, by far the largest and most important such case. My experience is that in such a case, when there are no good answers, you have to pick the least bad of a bad lot, and from my point of view that means invading Iraq, possibly invading Syria, and then deliberately destabilizing the governments of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and probably also Jordan and Egypt in order to induce changes away from Islamic extremism and Arab nationalism towards a more tolerant and diverse culture in that entire area.

Does that mean some of our soldiers will die? Almost certainly. Iraqi civilians? Yup. Saudi civilians? Very likely. Syrians and Palestinians? Them, too. Vast numbers of them? I sure as hell hope not, but there's a small chance that it may come to that.

Do I like this? Hell no. I hate it. I wish we didn't have to do it. But I haven't seen any other proposal which I thought was better which actually passed my fundamental test for goodness in a plan: an acceptable chance of success.

A lot of people think like me, but many don't. In the discussions since the attack last year, you consistently see people making an argument that what we really should be doing is to clean up our own act rather than to try to take the war to our enemies. This letter I received from Chris yesterday is a decent and polite and concise example:

Very good piece of writing, your 4-hour analysis of Islam. Much of it is true, but for an American, besides the point. Before we try to change them, we have a responsabilty to try to change ourselves. You can repeat endlessly the mantra "It's not what we've done, but what we are..." that does not make it so. The facts are that our country has created or supported repressive regimes in the Arab world because of various practical short-term considerations, and that is exactly the mindset that has to change. In fact it is more important for us to change ourselves than it is to try and change the world.

From my point of view, with my intensely pragmatic and mechanistic view of the world, and my concentration on results, this idea approaches incomprehensibility. I was extremely busy yesterday and I'm afraid my response was a bit curt:

You're entitled to your opinion. We have done those things, but it is my considered opinion that they are not relevant to the current situation, and "changing ourselves" won't stop the attacks. And that's all I'm interested in.

This war has nothing to do with morality or justice, it's entirely about survival.

That was one of 45 messages I mailed yesterday, in response to 88 messages I received (which is why a lot of you didn't get answers), but I still was a bit more rude with this than I should have been.

Some of it was just that I was really busy, but part of it was just that I've seen this idea so many times before, and it's never made any sense to me, and I was a bit annoyed.

Yet I don't think that Chris is probably a fool, and while some of the others who have made similar comments elsewhere absolutely are fools I don't think that most of them are. And if I assume that most of them are not, then why is it that these people actually think that this is really a worthwhile thing to do?

For example, I've been seeing a lot of people in the last week pointing out that during the Iran-Iraq war that the US actually gave some aid to Iraq. The claims about that vary in comprehensiveness, up to the extreme claim that we're primarily responsible for the rise of Saddam and his continuation in power.

But if that were true, wouldn't that argue that we now have a responsibility to correct our past mistake and remove him now to make up for our mistake in supporting him in the past? Those making this claim oppose the war, and yet it seems as if this would be a good ethical argument for going to war.

These people think they're making a point of some kind, and I don't think they're all schizophrenic.

This is related to the "root causes" argument; it's part of the point of view which, last September shortly after the bombing, caused some people to start listing all the horrible things America had done overseas and all the mistakes we'd made and all the cruel things we'd done. And when asked, pointblank, whether that means they thought we actually deserved it, many had a hard time answering. It was yes and no.

Many including me have been referring to that argument as "moral equivalence", summarizing it as "they're evil but we're worse and thus we don't have any right to criticize them". Some American leftist intellectuals went overseas to post an antiwar screed in June, which included the following:

We too watched with shock the horrific events of September 11. We too mourned the thousands of innocent dead and shook our heads at the terrible scenes of carnage - even as we recalled similar scenes in Baghdad, Panama City and, a generation ago, Vietnam.

That particular case was absurd, and I feel no shame for having ridiculed it. But the argument keeps coming up, and I don't believe that the left is collectively insane. They must have some reason for believing it.

I've been thinking about this all morning, and I think I'm beginning to understand their point of view. I don't agree with it and there's no chance that I'll ever agree with it, but I think I'm coming to understand it.

Suppose that you believe that there is some sort of force for cosmic justice. Start with that. You may think it's God or some other deity, or perhaps it's karma, or some idea of inevitability in history, or maybe it's just an intuitive feeling that what goes around comes around, or perhaps it's an ethical application of the gambler's fallacy.

It's a basic belief that at a level above simple cause and effect, that if you do evil then evil will eventually happen to you; if you do good then you will receive good. If you treat others well then you'll be treated well; if you fuck others over then you'll in turn get fucked.

There are senses in which that's actually true, for instance in a long series of Prisoner's Dilemma games with the same partners, then if you cheat and if your partner is using some variation on "Tit for Tat" (and that, intuitively, is what we actually do) then when you do bad, you'll get bad done unto you.

The analysis of the Prisoner's Dilemma changes when you design the system so that it has no memory, so that each game is encapsulated in itself. In that case, Tit for Tat makes no sense, and what you did (be faithful or defect) in the previous game doesn't affect the current one.

But I think that a lot of people believe that there is some sort of universal principle, something acting at a higher level, which keeps score anyway.

If you grant that, then proposing that we clean up our own act actually makes sense as a way of preventing future attacks. It may well be that those who attacked us had some specific motives for doing so, and might seem to have motive for doing so again, but that's unimportant. The real reason we were attacked is because we had built up a heavy load of bad karma, and we're going to keep being attacked as long as we've got it. The only real way to make the attacks stop is to do good deeds to relieve that load of bad karma, and once we've done so, then cosmic justice will stop punishing us.

And within this mind set, going to war and attacking Iraq and killing civilians there incidentally as part of the war is counterproductive and will lead to more attacks on us not because it will anger the Arab street, or anything like that. It's because we'll be committing evil acts which will increase our load of bad karma even more and make us the object of even more cosmic justice.

In the long run, then, the only true way to stop the attacks is to live well and do good. This war has nothing to do with Arab failure and frustration or the pathology of their culture. The Arabs who attacked us may well think they had some specific grievance against us, but they were actually the hand of cosmic justice wielded against us to punish us for our past sins. If it hadn't been Arabs attacking us, it would have been someone else, because in a real sense we did earn, we truly were responsible for what happened to us a year ago. Because we had built up such a heavy burden of sin and evil on our souls (or bad karma, or diverged sufficiently from the course of history, or however it's characterized) the effect was that we were going to get nailed no matter what, and it's going to keep happening as long as we continue to do evil things.

I'm pretty sure that's what they're thinking. And that would explain why it was that they had a hard time answering the question, "Do you think we deserved to be attacked? Do you think we're responsible?" Yes and no. No, in the sense that we didn't ourselves directly cause the specific attackers to choose to do so, but yes in the sense that the real reason the attack happened was because of all the awful things we'd done; it ultimately was punishment due to cosmic justice.

On that basis, things like game theory and political analysis don't matter. From their point of view, a pragmatic mechanist like me is operating on the wrong level. I'm rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic; I'm trying to solve small problems but I'll fail because my narrow view of cause-and-effect misses the fact that there are much larger processes going on which my small solutions won't address. My kinds of plans might well succeed in making radical Arabs stop attacking us, but something else will appear in their place and we'll continue to suffer. I'm trying to avoid my fate rather than deal with it, and it isn't ultimately possible for anyone to avoid their fate.

I'm not sure it's possible for me to actually have any kind of fruitful discussion with someone who has that kind of worldview. Our most basic ideas are so different as to make communication nearly impossible. To them, I'll be buried in microscopic details and missing the big picture, working on things which in the long run won't make any difference, because I'm truly missing the root cause of our problems, our bad karma. To me, they'll seem to be wide-eyed idealists who are more concerned with feeling good than with doing things which actually will solve our problem.

When they say, "Ask yourselves why everyone hates you" what they're trying to tell us is that we've built up such a huge load of bad karma that at this point the universal principle of cosmic justice has mobilized nearly the entire rest of the human race against us, which is why dealing with just the Arabs is a pointless waste of time.

I think this idea of cosmic justice and historical inevitability pervades much of leftist thinking. Take, for instance, the idea of any kind of international law, whether it be the UN or the International Criminal Court or "Just War" ideology or the "law of nations". I don't believe in any of them.

It's not that I think the concepts are evil or stupid; it's just that I don't believe that they can be implemented in practice in the world I live in. There's too much possibility of free riding, of spoiling of the commons, of defections (per the Prisoner's Dilemma). There's too much opportunity for abuse, for those systems to be subverted and used to fulfill some particular group's agenda.

Those on the other side, who favor those things, don't see it that way. International law isn't just a construct of humans; it's actually a cosmic principle. It doesn't need to be enforced through war, because it will be enforced by cosmic payback. The legal system won't be subverted because in a real sense doing so would violate a law of physics.

The US objects to the ICC because our government is concerned that the ICC will be used to get revenge on Americans, as a way of pursuing vendettas against our nation. Many elsewhere object that though a narrow reading of the charter shows that such a thing is conceivable, that it won't actually happen. But when pressed to explain why not, they don't have any answer. I think the reason is that they truly believe that it's impossible for it to happen; God, or Karma, or Cosmic Justice or the flow of history won't in the long run permit it. There may be short term abuses, but in the long run justice will out and those who attempt to abuse the system will get their comeuppance, as indeed the US is getting its comeuppance now because it is violating the system of international law.

And so, when they say that the right answer for the US in the face of the attacks is to ratify Kyoto and the ICC treaty and all the rest of that stuff, to cease to be unilateral and start being multilateral, to increase aid and reduce military spending, they're completely serious. What all those things will do is to reduce our burden of sin, and thus reduce the amount of punishment that the universe will mete out to us.

I can't be certain that this is how they're thinking. But I can't come up with any other rational explanation. I have no doubt that some will instantly accuse me of creating a strawman, but that's not what I'm trying to do here. I'm just trying to figure out how anyone could think that having the US work to bring clean drinking water to everyone in Peru and reduce our CO2 emissions would somehow stop radical Arabs from trying to destroy America. Those things don't seem connected to me in any important way, within my mechanistic view of the universe, but perhaps to others there actually is some sort of connection.