Comment by talkingtab | Hacker News Reader

Comment by talkingtab | Hacker News Reader

In my humble, and probably wrong opinion, the war in the Ukraine is about two different systems. You could call one system of human interaction the Putin-model. This is the one we in the US have recently adopted. Another model is a collaborative one. The models are not sharply delineated, but the differences are essential. Do we act with collaborative intelligence or do we follow orders? Most US corporations and individuals now rely on the Putin model. In this model, some (possibly incompetent and possibly insane) individual decides what we do, and we do it. I have seen revered corporate leader choose the dumbest choice possible over and over. The other model requires that the individual members can collaboratively understand a problem and respond to it. Unfortunately our "follow the leader" educational system has insured that we have few thinkers who are able to actually assess and solve problems.

I apologize because my experience with corporate culture has resulted in a strong and decisive conclusion that corporate leaders such as Musk and Cook, et al., could not fight their way out of a paper bag. Really. What they can do is order other people to fight their way out of paper bags. If I were somehow ever in an overloaded life boat, the first people I would push over the side would be the Musks and Cooks. Musk's "send me an email" just does not work in a life boat in a storm. sigh.

I realize that in our cultist society this is blasphemy, but really - if you are able to think any original thought, go for it. And for those of you who do not get it. Well, the best I can say is good luck.

The differences you are touching on are about interpersonal trust, and the concept of trust in society. Russia has a traditionally low trust culture. It's rooted in the most private interpersonal relationships, and is reflected in society as a whole.

The U.S. has traditionally been a high trust society. But not everyone in the U.S. is a person who can trust others. The recent political machinations in the U.S. represent the low trust segment of American society. The key to undoing it is to re-inculcate trust at a personal level, and at societal level. How that is actually done is a difficult problem with no readily obvious solution.

Good thoughts. Made me think. I had not connected the trust issue as you did, but was aware of it. One thing that concerns me is the tracking ads that are the business model for the consumer internet. Even worse than the tracking is the targeting. At some point I saw some supposed code from twitter or another, that was basically ``` if (isDemocrat) showD() else if (isRepublican) showR() ``` The net(!) effect is that people develop completely different world views which tend to be echo chambers. To my mind this is the cause of much dysfunction. The democratic party still does not get the source of the gigantic dissatisfaction that many, many people have for the way things are. In their echo chamber, the concept that many people have real and valid concerns is verboten.

Unless the New York Times readers can figure out that the people they call "haters" are in fact suffering things there will be no alternative to those people who are capitalizing on that suffering. IMO.

As for trust, I believe one large step is to prevent targeting. Otherwise the alternative is to develop another business model. [Edit for spelling a tiny bit more of clarity]

Interestingly, US military doctrine requires this sort of distributed authority. A straight-out-of-academy lieutenant requesting and directing the fire of an entire artillery battery, or calling in air support, doesn't happen in a "top down" structure. Of course, objectives are set by upper echelon (or political) leadership - which, of course, bear much deserved criticism, over the past decades - but ground-level war-making operates in a firmly collaborative model. Civilian (and maybe especially political) leaders seem to poorly understand this, and overlook the lessons they might draw from it.

Yes. It is true, but I believe there is a significant difference between calling in artillery and saying "Why don't we try drones". Artillery is doctrine. Drones were not.

I do not know if the US Army could adapt as effectively as the Ukrainians have. My guess is not. BWDIK. Certainly some recent US military actions do not seem to be adaptive.

So yes, the military is perhaps better than corporations at being adaptive. It is hard to imagine a military commander asking everyone to send an email every day. On the other hand, will the US Army do better than the Russian military when they face a highly adaptive situation?

Oh, my yes. That is the (literal) trillion (and more) dollar question alive in the world right now.

My guess (though I repeat your BWDIK) is that the US military would adapt less quickly than the Ukrainians (if only because it's got a lot more doctrinal inertia), but more rapidly than the Russians did. There is a sub-genre of military history dedicated to figuring out how/why democracies - going back to antiquity - tend to punch above their military weight. The suppositions tend to cluster around 1.) they don't fight unless it's truly popular, which unlocks a comparative man-power advantage, and 2.) an egalitarian social / political structure makes distributed authority and acceptance of new ideas more possible / palative.

Unfortunately, the Russians have now adapted to drone warfare (even if they haven't matched the innovative pace of the Ukrainians), and I think Western Europe should be more scared of their military than they were two years ago. That's my cold hard-eyed real politiik case for supporting Ukraine: the West needs the world experts on this new military paradigm on-side. Perhaps the primary challenge this argument faces (particularly in the US - the Europeans don't all share this psychology) is a reluctance to admit (in culture or military doctrine) that "we" aren't The Best at something. The notion that OCS could be materially improved by importing any random captain from the Ukrainian front to teach a few classes is a tough one to swallow.

Disclaimer: I'm not military, only an observer through media, and through conversations with current and ex-military friends. Several of those military friends have become, in the past few years, super interested in flying drones in their spare time. They're already preparing to adapt, even if their commands are moving more slowly.

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