Overton's window creates opportunities for the brave
underorion.se
underorion.se
The mistake is claiming that the path it ended up choosing, it chose because of something the West did or didn't do. It was all about choices that people made - and back then, elections in Russia still meant something - in response to concerns at the time. Which were mostly domestic: economy, crime, terrorism (in Caucasian regions).
If there was another choice, what was it? Not to be corrupt? Who would have made that choice?
Oh please, where do you even find these kind of myths? I've been living and traveling Russia for years - I just can't wrap my head where people get these kinds of idiotic narratives.
I mean srsly "never seen indoor plumbing" - do you actually really believe this? Where did you even get an image like that?
I'm just really puzzled how people seem to be so "expertly" sure of something, which is verifiably untrue - I've visited so many wilder parts of Russia, including visiting relatives in national republics and I'm super puzzled - like where did you even find this plumbing problem?
I mean, I'm sure someone somewhere might have some specific case, but I am pretty sure I would have noticed at least one habitable house without plumbing if that was really a kind of a substantial massive problem you describe it to be.
> Muscovites
...on the other hand, I seem to suspect what kind of bubble had formed your outlook...
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/04/02/indoor-plumbing-st...
Even pro-Kremlin sources:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221004222830/https://www.rt.co...
Funny that you have mention a bubble...
C'mon, it's the 21st centrury. You can find pretty much any kind of narative, whatever ideology and whatever image "on the news". According to "the news" Russians eat babies and Democrats are spawns of antichrist that want to turn all children gay, you know how it is.
Even your two links have only a theme in common, the substance is completely different.
> Funny that you have mention a bubble...
Why? When you don't have a consistent image of the subject and have to rely on an arbitrary proxy to provide you with some out of context piece of info - what is it, if not "bubble"?
When talking of scope or magnitude and how things work IRL, I'd rather trust my own empirical evidence, obviously. So your comment on bubbles is kinda ironic to me.
I mean, sure, some people don't have central heating (and use boiler), some don't have central sewerage (and direct their pipes to special underground pit, that gets emptied by a honeywagon every few years), some don't have centralized water, so they drill a deep hole and install a well pump - all this is very common in a countryside.
But "never seen indoor plumbing"? For real? I mean, we all like our wild medieval uncivilised Russia jokes, but it seems to me that some people take this image just too seriously and seem to have trouble distinciting between a joke and a reality.
Trusting your "own empirical evidence", rejecting "the news" is the bubble that I have been talking about. At least to me it looks like a bubble. And I am not saying that I don't live in a bubble, because I do. It takes effort and time to learn all the different sides of the argument, collect facts, etc. so it not possible to do it for all the issues. On the other hand, I completely agree there are good reasons not to trust "the news" blindly or even Russian State Statistics. We need to have some sort of middle way were we do not dismiss arguments just because they are in "the news", but at the same time take a critical look.
"Russia begins where asphalt roads end" :) there are always some truth in jokes. "never seen indoor plumbing" could be an exaggeration, but my intuition (my "own empirical evidence" if you will) tells me that the gist of it is true. I have been to Russia and seen Moscow in all of its fanciness. However, further away from Moscow, Saint Petersburg the picture is quite bleak. But that's just my 2 cents.
[some edits were made for style and grammar]
> "Russia begins where asphalt roads ends" :) there are always some truth in jokes.
There is also some joke in jokes :)
St Peters may be bleak, but the culture of outside decorum really tells us nothing of the culture of basic utilities. People may not have city-like central services in rural wilder areas, but claiming that they had never seen plumbing is just super dumb.
It's not 15th century, how would one even operate their house without plumbing, c'mon.
I don't quite understand what you mean by superficial attempts. If their stats say that 10-20% do not have indoor plumbing then that what do you think they mean? (https://web.archive.org/web/20210630123627/http://www.gks.ru...)
Russia is huge... if you go to a village that is far away from any larger city, you'll see a lot of stuff - even stranger than not having indoor plumbing. If you can, I suggest travel to non-touristy areas, far away from large cities and see it for yourself :) Then report back and prove us wrong ;)
It is kinda bleak, though.
> I don't quite understand what you mean by superficial attempts. If their stats say that 10-20% do not have indoor plumbing then that what do you think they mean?
How do you think they get these stats? Go door to door checking pipes? Actually, there should be documentation on methodology, but typically it's some super-inderect metrics based on dirty datasets. Don't overestimate RosStat's precision or data quality, they really can't count shit.
> (https://web.archive.org/web/20210630123627/http://www.gks.ru...)
Which one of those columns did you interpret as "indoor plumbing"? Maybe I don't get what "indoor plumbing" is supposed to mean. It's just some in-house utility pipes for water, or heating, or waste, right?
> Russia is huge... if you go to a village that is far away from any larger city, you'll see a lot of stuff - even stranger than not having indoor plumbing. If you can, I suggest travel to non-touristy areas, far away from large cities and see it for yourself :) Then report back and prove us wrong ;)
You don't have to tell me. I am not a tourist, I live here. I have relatives in villages, whom I visit every so often.
So I'm reporting: a house without any kind of plumbing is like a super weird thing.
Its not like pipes were invented yesterday, every ancient house has them. They might not be connected to some centralized water/heating/sewer pipeline, but still.
I'm starting to get a feeling that it's just city people having weird image of rural life.
"Rosstat carried out the study involving 60,000 households in every Russian region between Sept. 15 and Sept. 29, 2018".
So they took a "representative" sample.
"Only 9 percent of Russia’s urban population reported lack of access to a sewage system."
Maybe it was a survey, people self-reported? Whatever you think it was, think of this: Russia has 146 mil people. Let's be generous and say that only 5 percent do not have any indoor plumbing. That's 7 mil people. Lack of indoor plumbing is much more of an issue in rural area. There are 20+ 'republics', some of which (like Тыва or Бурятия) have rural population percentage of around 50%. So that's 100s of thousands of people without indoor plumbing in these republics. Mind you, we are very generous with our percentage values here...
So, if we go back to the original statement by the parent comment:
"many citizens of the “republics” have never seen indoor plumbing"
Would you agree that the gist of it is true? I would even grant that some, maybe 10s of thousands in fact have never seen any indoor plumbing, if they never left their small village in the middle of nowhere to go to a hospital or some other place that has it. Russia is huge, it has a lot of people, it has a lot of 'republics', some are very rural, so it is not outrageous to state these things.
BTW, the column that I interpreted as "indoor plumbing" in the Rosstat document that I linked was "водопроводом". To me it means plumbing...
This is my last attempt at trying to explain how I see this point :) in any case, have a good one!
"Водопровод" is "water supply", not "plumbing" in general.
It's like the first thing you see in this video.
Define "paved road", if a road with asphalt pavement (albeit old) is not a "paved road".
The real Rosstat statistic speak of "centralized sewage" not indoor plumbing.
I live in Italy less than 10km outside a provincial capital and I also don't have access to centralized sewage. I assume the situation in rural Russia is no different.
How is it in rural America?
Low density areas often don't build that infrastructure and leave each house to build waste water management system. Old systems are basically just a hole in the ground but modern systems (like the one I had to install, because the Italian law mandates it) are active filters of various kinds.
This isn't a mistake either. Putin was open towards pursuing a deeper partnership with the west in the early 2000s.
He asked to join NATO (as equals) and rather than leaping on the opportunity NATO told him to join the back of the queue.
In subsequent years we launched an unprovoked invasion of Iraq and "upgraded" a UN resolution from protecting civilians to planting a bayonet in Khafaffi's rectum. It was a little hard not to view us as a dangerous and unpredictable threat, and a little hard not to take what happened to Khadaffi personally.
This was all made worse by the actions of the National Endowment for "Democracy" who essentially prosecute a more effective mirror image of the type of election meddling Putin attempted in America, albeit along Russia's border (& once in Kaliningrad in the 90s). This has continued unabated since the 90s - fomenting and fostering ethnic/cultural divisions everywhere it can along Russia's exposed borders that mirror the one we see in America today.
But also - Putin always fancied himself the restorer of imperial glory, so joining NATO was never seriously on the table without also asserting claim to all the "lost lands".
This is certainly how western media has tried to depict him. Our media is more a reflection of our own imperial neuroses than it is a window into his subconscious though.
Occam's razor suggests that when he asked to join NATO it was because he wanted to be a member.
It is a little more nuanced than that [1].
"Join the back of the queue" is an uncharitable way to express "treated equally to all potential partner nations". There is no queue to apply to NATO other than logistical limitations.
Putin sought deferential treatment to affirm Russia's greatness and assuage the wounded national pride. He didn't get it, and the ensuing delay for a diplomatic solution soured into suspicions that opened divisions that deepened into today's chasm.
There was a very intriguing article [2] now behind a paywall that described Eastern European intelligence agencies warning their Western counterparts for decades that rapprochement with Russia shall always founder upon a deep, dark cruelty within Russian national character until that stain is removed by Russians. I don't know if that is true as I've never seen that first-hand in the Russians I've befriended in the West (perhaps I fell victim to the same Western naivete the article describes of the West) but if so, then perhaps joining NATO back then was needed to gradually draw out that poison.
Personally with the layman's perspective upon international affairs I have, I didn't see the harm in the symbolic gesture of inviting Russia to join NATO in a diplomatic manner that didn't slight the nations already underway in their application process. There must have been some pretty compelling inside baseball to have switched Clinton from a "sure, why not" off the cuff response to no follow up, though.
History would certainly have taken an interesting twist if a Jerry Pournelle'sh "Quad-Dominium" emerged with a CN, EU, RU, and US unipolar alliance.
[1] https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/russia-could-have-joined-n...
Member nations in NATO are not equal. Never have been never will be.
In not so many words, it meant that Russia would have to join the transnational gang as a foot soldier (Estonia) rather than a capo (UK) let alone a boss (US).
Were peace with Russia a primary goal we would have started negotiations rather than rebuffing. It never was.
America would have liked to bring Russia into NATO but as a client state or a group of balkanized client states, not as a partner.
>Eastern European intelligence agencies warning their Western counterparts for decades that rapprochement with Russia shall always founder upon a deep, dark cruelty within Russian national character until that stain is removed by Russians. I don't know if that is true
There is similar German commentary on the character of minority groups in their country from 1939.
And what do you think makes US and UK above others? Here's a hint: US and UK are two highest NATO spenders.
What NATO expenses was Russia able to afford in the early 2000s?
Sounds like they wanted to be treated as a boss while chipping in as a foot soldier.
This was a diplomatic easy win that would have prevented a catastrophically expensive war IF you assume peace is the ultimate goal.
Russia being a part of NATO could allow them to invade not just Ukraine, but also Poland and Baltic States.
Do you believe Putin would not become a dictator if Russia joined NATO? It is entirely possible, but far from guaranteed.
Member nations are certainly not. Potential partner/member nations are equal with extremely rare realpolitik exceptions like Turkey.
> In not so many words, it meant that Russia would have to join the transnational gang as a foot soldier (Estonia) rather than a capo (UK) let alone a boss (US).
Explain a diplomatic sequence that sees Russia after the dissolution of the USSR immediately accede to the NATO informal equivalent of the UNSC. IMHO it was on Russia to counter-offer the NATO suspicion and initiate MOU working sessions to create a trust building framework to demonstrate good faith over an agreed upon period of years instead of demanding "capo" or "boss" status along with being read into the military secrets such status entails.
> There is similar German commentary on the character of minority groups in their country from 1939.
That's an unnecessarily inflammatory response. I get it, this is a heated topic, but I'm looking to shed light without heat here.
What else explains the predictive power of multiple former Warsaw Bloc nations' intelligence and diplomatic warnings to their Western counterparts, full decades before they happened, based upon not much beyond this national character defect assessment (at least with publicly-available information)? I can easily buy that such a defect assessment is wrong, but what other analyses were those agencies using? What explains the difference between the restructuring outcomes of Japan and that of the USSR? How much substance is there to Zeihan's thesis that if Russia does not secure various chokepoints in Eastern Europe it will be invaded in the 21st century and how does that square with its situation along the shared border with the PRC?
So many fertile topics to explore and I'm sure someone is hanging around here that can point us to the extant literature that attempts to probe these areas and more, without such heated, non-substantive contributions to the discussion. I will plainly state I know functionally nothing about what is going on in Russia-West relations other than what I see in the mainstream, and I invite anyone including you to contribute your knowledge to the discussion to learn.
It is underplaying the West's power here to ignore the effect of marching our anti-Russia alliance towards Russia. It is unreasonable to expect good relations while preparing that sort of military threat. The strategy here - driven by the US - fosters poor relations.
The point is very simple: NATO or not NATO, Russian fascism and Russian imperialism would still be there. Without the NATO expansion however the Baltic states would have probably been annexed a decade ago.
This is a great summary of something that annoys me a lot.
What does "modern state" mean in this context?
Thanks in advance!
I'm not familiar with The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, but Dr. Snyder makes some strong counterpoints to the Mearsheimer way of thinking on Ukraine in this [1] podcast and others.
He has also given a timely history on modern Ukraine [2], but I have not got around to listening to it.
[1] https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2022/10/25/historian-timothy-sn...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh9mgdi4rNewfxO7LhBoz...
I don’t know, it seems like great powers are prolonging the war in Ukraine’s favor right now.
> less institutional capacity
IR always bankrupts itself on trying to find gold in shithole countries.
Would love to hear you explain a bit more what you mean by that.
That is, if you are an exec or money manager, being wrong when the rest of the crowd is wrong isn't that bad career-wise. But being even temporarily wrong when the rest of the crowd is making money is a guaranteed way to get canned.
Good example: in the mid 00s housing bubble, there were plenty of people who knew that mortgage lending standards were insanely low. But if you were head of a mortgage lender and said "This practice of giving a loan to anyone who can fog a mirror is crazy, we're raising our lending standards" then you would have vastly underperformed your peers for literally years before being proven right, and, most importantly, you probably would have been canned by your board long before the world got to see that your foresight was correct.
More recently, I think this is why you saw so much overinvestment during the pandemic and why now you are seeing all these tech layoffs. It always seemed like a huge stretch that pandemic conditions would continue for a long time - my favorite example is Peloton, where if you did the math of "OK, half the country owns a Peloton", it still didn't work out to their valuation or level of investment. But a greater fear for many execs was "missing the boat" if there was a more permanent shift in people's behaviors, and that if you had underinvested that your competitors would take business from you.
IMO career risk is the concept that has been the most helpful to my understanding of the "madness of crowds".
I think that it was either Lao Tsu or Huey Newton who said, “Those who know don’t tell. And those who tell don’t know.”
Cherry-picked anecdotes to make the case that we somehow have less information now than we used to, agrandissement ("When you’re one step ahead of the crowd, you’re a genius.") and carefully avoiding making any testable predictions or even just concrete recommendations, beyond hollow phrases like "dare to think differently".
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.
What seems to be new now, is that Group B has taken to espousing Group A's caricature as a way of proving their group identity. "Group A says we eat babies. I eat more babies than anyone else, proving my Group B bonafides!" If you want to stand out in the primaries, you can't be a competent, coalition-building centrist. You gotta eat more babies than the next guy.
Current political system reinforces extremism. I'm of the camp that believes we urgently need incremental reforms like Ranked Choice Voting and open primaries. It doesn't solve everything, but it's the reform we can do that gives us the most mileage today.
If you're tied to a full ranking, there are much better choices than IRV; any of the Condorcet methods, for instance. However, rating systems are far more likely to produce compromise candidates. I like Approval, perhaps with a runoff between the top 2.
EDITTED-TO-ADD: In practice IRV and FPTP both suffer from the "center-squeeze effect": https://electionscience.org/library/the-center-squeeze-effec...
https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/x9oupk/2022_alaska...
> Two popular suspicions are now confirmed. Nick Begich was the Condorcet winner. Sarah Palin was a spoiler candidate - her presence caused Mary Peltola to be elected, by prematurely eliminating Nick Begich.
Here's another, that got down-voted to hell, because of the audience.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ForwardPartyUSA/comments/xb119e/its...
> If 2913 voters who supported Palin first and Begich second flipped their first and second preferences, they’d have gotten a more preferred result.
(i.e. they would have gotten Begich instead of Peltola, by having Palin eliminated first)
> Even worse, if instead 5825 of those same types of voters just decided not to vote, they’d have also gotten a better result. So merely participating in the election hurt them.
While I do prefer the winner it selected, it's not a great election method. Better than FPTP is a terribly low bar.
1. Even harder to explain to the average voter than RCV
2. Greater likelihood of nobody winning / needing to conduct new election
I am of the belief that RCV is not great, but that it is significantly better than status quo... and it is possible.
But my favorite is approval.
First round:
Begic and Peltola garner the most first-place votes, Palin is eliminated.
Voters who ranked Palin first get their second choice promoted to first. Presumably that would be Begic for most voters.
Second round:
Begic first choice votes + Palin > Begic votes vs. Peltola votes
Looking at the data in the reddit vote breakdown thread it looks like Begic would've won with this method.
Begich had the fewest amount of _first_ place votes, so was eliminated first.
However, Begich was ranked ahead of Palin (and Pelota for that matter) on more ballots than vice-versa.
Ah, I misunderstood that part. Under Australian rules voters who ranked Begich first would have had their second choices promoted to first and added to the respective candidates. In this case ~27k for Palin and ~15.5k for Peltola. Then the totals are compared.
Looking at it that way it's not so clear cut that it was unfair that Peltola was declared the winner. I think reasonable arguments can be made either way.
One thing though is that on Australian ballots all candidates must be ranked.
Exactly what happened. Palin was a spoiler -- had she not run, Begich would ha e won instead.
> One thing though is that on Australian ballots all candidates must be ranked.
That's kind of ridiculous. It's quite unwieldy and leads to many spoiled ballots. And I don't think forcing ordering past the point of caring really changes anything.
I think extremism is a sign things are bad, but haven't gotten worse. Like, normal communication has broken down, but nothing has escalated to the really scary place where everyone shuts up.
The Left is effectively absorbed by civil liberty issues (LGBQT+, abortion, and immigration come to mind). Those issues are worthy of support but they're pathetically easy to demonize by the Right.
And there's the fact that Trump broken countless political norms so the Left is still stuck in "the old ways" and has effectively brought a knife to a gun fight.
By "sane" I specifically mean "acknowledges the shortcomings of the current system, at the same time as we acknowledge our dependence on foreign labor"
I don't believe in it as a concrete, measureable thing; I do believe in it as a signal for disposition over time.
It’s one reason the old tend to be conservative. They were born at a fixed slice of the Overton window, which moved left, carrying them right.
1800 is a weird baseline to pick, but even so I’m skeptical.
On a short enough scale, the trend line is probably what we’d call “leftward” today. But on a longer scale I don’t think that’s the case. Not that Marx would approve of this appropriation of his analysis (because it wouldn’t support his theory of progress either), but it was a “primitive communism” which came before feudalism and eventually capitalism.
> Instead, I’d like to argue that the market, at least important parts of it, may have become notably less efficient due to changes to the information landscape.
That's the point. The narrower the window of acceptable discourse, the more opportunity there is in looking outside it.
> For investors who dare to think differently, who dare to dig where few other dare to dig, there will likely be more alpha to be had, perhaps more than ever. And this will be particularly so where Overton’s window deviate the most from actual reality.
It's more of the many stages of grief of finance types.
Like he just wants the bad times to end and for the good times to resume again.
He wouldn't care if markets were irrational and inefficient but also making him money.
People who chose to be defined by how much money they make, and nothing else, are in for a shit time right now.
These think pieces are pretty funny gasps at this. I'm sure someone's going to accuse you of feeling schadenfreude or something - Hacker News is full of people who have been obliterated by the markets.
ffs, I can't imagine who would ever think that.
There is very little penalty to being wrong.
If the orthodox position was what you took, then you have a lot of company in your wrongness. Everyone else will sympathize, because they were wrong, too.
Not only in Germany, unfortunately. Radio Free Europe (a US-government supported media institution) was saying just that on its Romanian website [1], together with accusations of fake news, around a year ago.
[1] https://romania.europalibera.org/a/pana-de-curent-fake/31543...
If somebody says something which turns out to be correct, but for the wrong reasons, can we really call them correct in hindsight?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/comedy/kath...