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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

In fairness, 'geopolitical experts' may not really exist. There are a range of people who make up interesting stories to a greater or lesser extent but all seem to be serially misinformed. Some things are too complicated to have expertise in.

Indeed, while the existence of socioeconomic experts seems more likely we don't have any way of reliably identifying them. The people who actually end up making social or economic policy seem to be winging it by picking the policy that most benefits wealthy people and/or established asset owners. It is barely possible to blink twice without stumbling over a policy disaster.

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>In fairness, 'geopolitical experts' may not really exist.

Except for, I don't know, the many thousands of people who work at various government agencies (diplomatic, intelligence) or even private sector policy circles whose job it is to literally be geopolitical experts in a given area.

There are thousands of gamblers whose job is to literally predict the tumbling random number generators in the slot machines they play, and will be rewarded with thousands of dollars if they do a good job.

They are not experts. As said above, some things are too complicated to have expertise in.

It's plausible that geopolitics may work the same way, with the ones who get lucky mistaken for actual experts.

Absolute rubbish. There's lots of factual information here you can know and use to make informed "guesses" (if you will).

People like Musk, who are often absolutely clueless about countries' political situations, their people, their makeup, their relationships and agreements with neighboring countries, as well as their history and geography, are obviously going to be terrible at predicting outcomes compared to someone who actually has deep knowledge of these things.

Also we seem to be using the term "geopolitics" a bit loosely in this thread. Maybe we could inform ourselves what the term we are using even means before we discount that anyone could have expertise in it[1]. I don't think people here meant to narrow it down to just that. What we really seem to concern ourselves with here is international relations theory and political sciences in general.

Now whether most politicians should also be considered experts in these areas is another matter. From my personal experience, I'd say most are not. People generally don't elect politicians for being experts - they elect politicians for representing their uninformed opinions. There seems to be only a weak overlap between being competent at the actual job and the ability to be elected into it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geopolitics

> There's lots of factual information here you can know and use to make informed "guesses" (if you will).

The gambler who learned the entire observable history of a tumbling RNG will not be in a better position to take the jackpot than the gambler who models it as a simple distribution. You cannot become an expert on certain things.

Geopolitics may or may not be one of these things, but you've made no substantial argument either way.

Geopolitics is a complex system. Having lots of factual and historical information to inform your decision is not obviously an advantage over a guess based on a cursory read of the situation.

It is like economists - they have 0 predictive power vs. some random bit player with a taste for stats when operating at the level of a country's economy. They're doing well if they can even explain what actually happened. They tend to get the details right but the big picture is an entirely different kettle of fish.

Geopolitics is much harder to work with than economics, because it covers economics plus distance and cultural barriers even before the problem of leaders doing damn silly things for silly reasons. And unlike economics there is barely the most tenuous of anchors to check if the geopolitical "experts" get things right even with hindsight. I'd bet the people who sent the US into Afghanistan and Iraq are still patting themselves on the back for a job well done despite what I think most people could accept as the total failure of those particular expeditions.

I thought Peter Zeihan was a geopolitical expert until he started talking about things I lived through, with complete ignorance of the basics. It's not that his take was wrong, it's that his basic underlying assumptions were all wildly different from reality on the ground.

Any sort of geopolitical expert is generally going to be labeled as such because he works in the domain at a reasonably high level.

The problem with that is that when at such a level, political factors start to come into play.

The net effect is that in any conflict, the winning side will have competent and qualified expert geopolitical analyses, while the losing side will have propagandists.

So the geopolitical expert is, at best, a liminal species.

do you have some examples? I came to the exact same conclusion

That's so wrong in so many levels, also cynical. If the world worked by what you described, we would have been already obliterated ourselves a long time ago, or mass-enslavery would have happened. It didn't.

Geopolitics can be studied and learned, and is something that diplomats heavily rely upon.

Of course, those geopolitical strategies can play in certain ways we don't foresee, as on the other side we also have an actor that is free to do what they want.

But for instance, if you give Mexico a very good trade agreement as a strong country like the US, it's very likely that they will work with you on your special requests.

They may exist, but the real expertise is mostly kept non-public. Regarding the Ukraine war, both pro-Russian and pro-American public pundits never mentioned economic and real strategic issues apart from NATO membership for almost 2.5 years.

Then Lindsey Graham outright mentioned the mineral wealth and it became a topic, though not a prominent one.

Access to the Caspian Sea via the Volga-Don canal and the Sea of Azov is never mentioned. Even though there are age old Rand corporation papers that demand more US influence in that region.

The best public pundits get personalities and some of the political history correct (and are entertaining), but it is always a game of omission on both sides.

So, you think the system is genuinely trying to identify expertise to achieve equitable outcomes, and just happening to fail at it? Rather than policy being shaped by personal networks and existing power structures that tend to benefit themselves?

I think the system has been carefully configured to benefit wealthy people and/or established asset owners. But the reason that there is no effective resistance to that is because identifying generalist socioeconomic experts is practically impossible.

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