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- The military sent them home,
- They cracked and sent themselves home, or
- They got over themselves and learned how to be part of the larger whole.
Making it through with those edge opinions intact is not an option.
US Army still does that today to some extent (not with planes anymore though). It's not stealing, they're just getting their stuff back.
There is a strong culture of do what's needed to accomplish the mission. Even a "if you're not cheating, you're not trying" to many challenges.
HN has a curiously strong hatred of libertarians (although also professing to dislike authoritarians?) so it's not surprising the comment got downvoted though.
That's the textbook definition of survivorship bias. It's like a lottery winner boasting about his winning strategy that everyone else is just not able to learn.
The whole thing about survivorship bias is that you make a critical failure in analysis when confusing partial observations of post-facto results with causality.
No, you're missing the whole point. Think about the problem about survivorship bias. Imagine you are at a M&Ms factory. You decide you want to assess what's the color distribution of M&Ms by sampling the colors that come out of the production line. You somehow make the mistake of sampling the production line for the peanut core M&Ms right out of the pipe that produces yellow M&Ms. You sample away and after hours you present your findings: 99.9% of yellow M&Ms have a peanut core. Based on your findings, you proceed to boldly claim that having a yellow core is a critical factor in producing yellow M&Ms. You even go as far as to rationalize it, and claim that yellow represents peanuts, and if anyone wants to create yellw-colored candy they need to start by adding peanut to the mix.
I then alert you to the fact that you made a critical failure in analysis when confusing partial observations of post-facto results with causality. Your answer:
> The point of statistics (one of many) is to figure out how many observations we need. If someone wins the lottery 10 times with their system I will assume that they have a good system (if they have a lot of losses as well it means the system isn't perfect, but it still works), but if you only win once and never enter again I assume it is survivorship basis.
You're sampling M&Ms out of the freakin' peanut M&M production line. If you fix your mistake, you'll get all kinds of M&Ms. You do not fix your mistake with higher sampling. Your mistake is that you're unwittingly filtering out an important subset of the problem domain, and proceeded to do a faulty analysis on the subset you picked.
There are a lot of people who join the military while simultaneously "hate authority" for example.
My point is understanding outcome causality doesn’t necessarily have to even enter the decision.
1) why would someone who calls themselves libertarian even join any kind of formalized armed force
2) even if they did, how would the command not realize that clearly such a person is unfit for duty and at best should be confined to some work far away from actual combat
People from totalitarian shitholes improvise a lot more than people from functioning democracies (because they have to improvise to survive daily life). And they trust their state and follow the rules a lot less (and for a good reason - their state exploits and lies to them to a degree you can't imagine living in a free country).
USA wouldn't send its army to Mexico with 12 hours of fuel telling the soldiers it's exercises. After selling half the fuel and ammo on black market and providing them with faulty non-spec tires so that significant percentage of their vehicles just broke the first week it actually had to drive somewhere.
Russian army did all of the above, on a massive scale. Nobody in Russia was surprised except maybe putin. IMHO he was more surprised that Ukraine was organized than that his own army wasn't.
Think for a while how you'd adapt to living in such a society. One of the first things is that you pretend to do what they tell you and then completely ignore it and do whatever you can to survive. And then to adapt to that - the army has units that shoot at you from behind if you don't want to be a "meat wave" in the next frontal attack.
Army won't provide you shoes your size? Steal. Army won't provide you drones or anti-drone measures? Cope cages and loot Mavics from malls. Etc. In totalitarian countries (and I've lived in one so I'd know) everybody had to learn DIY cause you couldn't trust the economy/country to provide you with the things you need.
Oligarchy and libertarianism is the same system, just looking from POV of rulers vs ruled. When society doesn't work people have to be libertarians. When everybody's a libertarian - oligarchs rule and society doesn't work.
Lack of social solidarity and communal trust has got to be a kiss of death in wartime. Especially when fighting against an opponent who has it in spades. (US in Vietnam, Russia in early days of the war in Ukraine, etc.).
It was my understanding that the opposite was true in Ukraine early in the conflict. Russia suffered high casualties because they still relied on a central command structure and field leaders were reluctant to make decisions without the express validation of their superiors. This led to them being sitting ducks as they waited for confirmation, and resulted in many high level soldiers being killed because they had to travel to the front lines to communicate orders for any effect.
The less people care about rules - the harsher you have to be to enforce them.
The high level officers had to go to the front lines not because foot soldiers were helpless without them. They had to go there because without them the soldiers would ignore the orders to go forward, hide in relatively safer place, start looting and lie in the reports they executed the orders perfectly killing thousands of enemies :)
Remember when Ukraine invaded Kursk region this year? Kadyrov troops that defended the border there said they were "bypassed" by Ukrainians when they "were eating dinner" :)
Doesn't that undermine the OP's claim that people in more totalitarian regimes have higher trust in the state and hierarchy?