Comment by grandalf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grandalf | Hacker News Reader

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I ask the above question seriously, and I think your point about botnets brings up some interesting issues:

- Why must all of the actions attributed to Russia be part of a larger "campaign"

- Which of the actions could have also been conducted by smaller than nation-state entities? For each, what would you estimate the budget of the operation to be?

- For each of the actions, how easy would it be for some actor to do it and intentionally leave a trail that points to Russia? What level of sophistication would be needed to do this? What auditing mechanisms exist that US intelligence might have already used to rule out any such activity?

Based on the above, how much confidence do you have about each of the actions in the campaign being attributable to a Putin-initiated directive vs other possible explanations?

Also, what strategic considerations do you think Putin made before ordering the action concerning the possibility of being caught (as you'd seemingly argue he has been)? What tit-for-tat response would HRC have done if she'd won the US election, and what tit-for-tat response do you see Trump likely to do?

In addition, supposing the campaign was ordered by Putin, what does it reveal about Russia's ability to meddle in US civil society in a consequential way? He's seemingly been very successful in nearly doing away with years of work to marginalize Russia and punish it for its aggressive behavior, which must be an outcome he is quite pleased by.

Since it is unlikely he thought this outcome would occur, why was it worth doing the campaign in the first place, when it clearly incited HRC and McCain (the expected thought leaders on Russia before election day) to react so strongly?

It would be one thing if the expected outcome were Trump winning, but I think it's very, very hard to argue that Putin could have expected this and would have planned a risky strategy with it in mind. On the contrary he must have expected the opposite outcome when he initiated the campaign, and was likely expecting to be dealing with no Trump victory, merely a heated backlash and sanctions from a US regime he wantonly provoked.

If you manage to notice this comment I'm curious about your thoughts.

In response to what you wrote in another thread about these questions: I think they are more propaganda, intentionally or not. They're a continuation of endless, open, 'possible', unfounded allegations, questions, and speculation. There is not even an attempt to establish any credible basis for them; they contribute no knowledge to the discussion; all they do is eat time and attention, and slow and distract people.

It's like a person at a meeting, where people are trying to accomplish something substantive, who just raises endless speculative objections.

> They're a continuation of endless, open, 'possible', unfounded allegations, questions, and speculation.

I'm not entirely sure what this means. My intention was to better understand your mental model, which appears a bit sloppy, or at least more concerned with its conclusion than with its integrity as a rational process.

I guess what I'd say (constructively) is that if it is too much work to articulate your argument as a tree of probabilistic scenarios to each player and strategic moves which themselves have probabilistic outcomes, then I think that might be a clue that your might not actually believe your own argument.

One example I'd offer about how I think we can understand ourselves better by using probabilistic reasoning is this:

We routinely make important decisions based on imperfect understanding of our own motives or preferences. This is why the technique of flipping a coin to make difficult A vs B decisions is so powerful. The decision was difficult precisely because we expect to be equally happy with either outcome. Thus letting the coin toss result make the decision preserves our utility maximization (to the best of our knowledge). At times, if it lands on heads, we may feel regret, which can indicate that we actually preferred the other outcome. The practice is very illustrative of how opaque our own uncertainty can be to us.

So we should assume when considering the decision-making of those who we can't ask directly for details, that there was nearly always a fair bit of uncertainty behind every decision. The more external evidence there is that the person is deeply rational (as world leaders nearly always are) the more confident we can be that the decision was not guided by a deluded sense of outcome probability.

Thus, for actions that involve many steps taking place blind (without an eye on the outcome) we must assume either that the actor is indifferent to the outcome, or that there is some benefit to outcomes other than the most desired one, and that the potential costs are well understood.

We don't need to know everything about the actor's decisions or expected probabilities to reason about his actions, since we can learn a great deal by outlining the things we feel confident about and determining whether the other pieces of our theory seem to fit. This was the intention behind the questions I posed, to help us both scrutinize your view more thoroughly, since if you are right I'd very much like to agree with you.

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