The Next 10 Days Will Decide This War | Hacker News Reader

The Next 10 Days Will Decide This War

cepa.org

40 pointsilamont40 comments

That’s like the next 10 days that used to decide the pandemic: a rolling window since December 19.

10 days to flatten Putin.

Not really; logistics have the finality of gravity about them.

His 10 days does at least refer to a specific event or opportunity- "The next intake of conscripts into the Russian Army is on April 1, when around 130,000 Russian families are required to send their sons (18-25) to Conscription Centers where they will be inducted into the Russian Army as privates."

That being said, the article title does have a bit of clickbait to it (perhaps justified if the goal is to try significantly disrupt this next intake of conscripts.)

I don't remember hearing that. Who said it?

> There is now an opportunity to exacerbate their manpower problem. The next intake of conscripts into the Russian Army is on April 1, when around 130,000 Russian families are required to send their sons (18-25) to Conscription Centers where they will be inducted into the Russian Army as privates.

I wonder whether one could delay the conscription, perhaps with some Corona sicknote. There must be plenty of friendly doctors in Russia who could help with that.

That does not seem like something that will work well in a totalitarian state.

>I could be way off, but I am confident of this assessment.

Having been briefly spoiled by the way some amateur analysts like Scott Alexander use percentages to express their confidence, reading that sentence was like stepping out of a warm room into the cold outside air.

I literally have no idea what this comment means. I re-read it several times unsuccessfully. I am familiar with Scott Alexander but that did not help my comprehension.

The parent commenter is which the author of this blog post expressed their confidence in this analysis as a percentage, i.e. I'm 65% sure that Russia will lose; or I give Russia a 65% change of winning.

That way it's easy to compare different opinions and see who was "more right".

It gives actual insight into prognosticators' accuracy. If their 90%s are right about nine times out of ten, their 60%s six out of ten, and so on, then they're pretty good. If they're not then they're not.

Subjective certainty is not objective accuracy.

Throwing out percentages without methodology and test data bolstering that methodology amounts to persuasion.

A prediction with no indication of subjective certainty is not a prediction.

I sort of lost faith in percentage guesses the night of the 2016 US elections when I watched the NYTimes prediction flip from >95% Clinton wins to >99% Trump wins in a matter of seconds.

It really opened my eyes to how illusory the utility of the percentage was - if it can flip that hard that fast, clearly it was never really only a <5% chance of happening, and the guesser really didn't know anything meaningful. It's astrology for the educated.

If bad predictions make you lose faith in percentages as a whole, why don't lies make you lose faith in words as a whole? In both cases I would assign the fault with the errant speaker.

Because their predictions were based on how correct polling was, and once they found gross errors in the polling they adjusted.

While the change in who was favored to win the 2016 election was indeed large, it didn't change that dramatically and didn't change in seconds. The NYT 2016 prediction chart is still available on their site: https://www.nytimes.com/elections/2016/forecast/president

The labeling on the horizontal axis on the chart is terrible, but roughly this is a change from 20% to 95% in about 2 or 3 hours. It doesn't look like they ever had it at less than 15% (again, give or take a few points due to bad infographic-esque picture).

> I watched the NYTimes prediction flip from >95% Clinton wins to >99% Trump wins in a matter of seconds.

Did that really happen? The numbers I remember before the election were about 67% chance of Clinton, though I don't recall the NYT. On election night, I recall Clinton not doing well from the start.

It has its positives and negatives. It’s pretty misleading to couch a prediction about a one time event in percentage terms; remember 538’s confidence that Hillary would win the election in 2016?

You do realize an event with a 79% chance of happening still doesn't happen 1 out of 5 times? That doesn't mean that the 79% prediction is wrong, that's just how statistics work.

If I minted a well-balanced coin and flipped it with a promise to destroy it afterwards, it would not at all be misleading to characterize it as having a 50/50 chance of coming up heads. Even in the frequentist interpretation of probability, the odds before a one-time event have a meaning: they're the fraction of similar events that would resolve in a certain way if it was to be repeated.

>remember 538’s confidence that Hillary would win the election in 2016

Yeah, 538 was confident. It wasn't misleading for them to announce a high probability, unless you thought 538's confidence was the same thing as The Probability.

Interesting choice of example, because 538 actually gave the least confidence of any poll analysis/reporting site.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gav...

That quote has Sex Panther vibes.

tl;dr - A rather zealous call for "ASAP" escalation of near-direct US / Western involvement in Ukraine, by a recently-retired U.S.Army 3-star general. He sounds well informed about the big-picture-but-within-Ukraine problems that Russia's Special Military Operation is having. (Resistance far beyond what they were prepared for, morale and manpower failings, supplies running low, etc.)

Unfortunately, he comes across as oblivious to the bigger picture, the possible downsides of "defeating" Russia in Ukraine, and the fact that Russia is a less-than-rational nuclear power.

What are examples of 'defeating' russia in ukraine (which IDK that definition, let's just say Russia leaves or retreats back to Crimea/donbas status quo)

Although the war was supposed to go quicker and better for Russia then Putin probably isn't as irrational as he's made out to be recently. The West not interfering has been one of his big bets and he has been right (thus far).

> he comes across as oblivious to the bigger picture, the possible downsides of "defeating" Russia in Ukraine, and the fact that Russia is a less-than-rational nuclear power.

Many who are experts in the "bigger picture" are working very hard for Russia's "defeat" - almost all of them. Depending on your definition of "defeat", how is that worse than Ukraine's defeat, especially for the people of Ukraine?

Wow. Is there a better source on the alleged mutiny? Just googling I only see the Sun and other murdoch sleaze

(which imho is so gross to play both sides with clear BS like that for money)

Hmm, the only thing that I was able to find is here: https://www.the-sun.com/news/4795768/russia-mutiny-army-ukra... It is from two weeks ago, but I did not hear it before, and I could not find any other confirmation from sources in Russia.

There seems to be a good bit of speculation in the article. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, though.

You guys are definitely not playing xcom and seeing 99% shots miss.

Yet another Monday quarterback [wannabe]. Lots of them, post Russian invasion.

When reading these posts, I want to believe that the Russian army will fail as much as anyone. But I am reminded of Knoll's Law, and moreover reminded that up until the moment Russia invaded, there were armchair "experts on Russia" and "experts on Putin" saying it was a bluff and guaranteeing there would be no invasion. Black swan for sure.

I wonder if they said the same when Russia invaded in 2014.

Let us also note the utter lack of precision in this argument. The only date provided has to do with another round of conscripts on April 1st which is 17 days out. The author just makes a lot of hand-wavy arguments about various logistics issues Russia is possibly (or even likely) experiencing. That's not really solid grounds to make a specific 10-day prediction.

The many people who didn't believe the invasion would happen (myself included) expected that such an invasion would so disastrous for Russia that the Russian state would avoid it. So I think people saying no invasion might claim to be half right, since it so-far does appear to be a disaster for Russia.

Reports now have Putin isolated and being fed misinformation, so the intelligence or coherence of the Russian state seems to be where the predictions failed.

"up until the moment Russia invaded, there were armchair "experts on Russia" and "experts on Putin" saying it was a bluff and guaranteeing there would be no invasion"

It wasn't just "armchair experts"... it was the Ukranian and Russian governments themselves saying that any reports that Russia was going to invade was just propaganda.

Many Ukranians believed them, with surveys showing that most Ukranians didn't expect an invasion.. and the Ukranian government was saying it was "ready".

Well, we now see how much those words were worth.

Many of those Ukranians who believed there wasn't going to be an invasion have either now fled their homes, are desperately trying to, are dead, or soon will be as bombs, famine and disease overtake their besieged cities.

The most anticipated black swan, Ukraine literally threw an ad-hoc holiday on the initially planned invasion day.

> there were armchair "experts on Russia" and "experts on Putin" saying it was a bluff and guaranteeing there would be no invasion

I don't recall many guarantees, and actual experts are not at home in armchairs. The OP author is not an armchair expert, but a three-star general. It's not a black swan; many did predict an invasion, including the governmet of the United States - openly and repeatedly.

> 10 days

What's that in Friedman units?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com