Looks like everybody from CIA and Biden to random bloggers called this, down to 2/22/22 date. I misjudged importance and scale of what they were predicting so didn’t pay enough attention to believe/disbelieve till almost the last day, then misjudged how big it would get 🤔
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To be right or wrong, you have to first decide a thing is worth paying attention to at all. I didn’t think this was till the 21st. If I’d paid attention in mid-January I’d have almost certainly made a few investment decisions differently.
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Why is Putin doing this, and why now?
Monocausal simplistic answers only. No “it’s complex” or “it’s overdetermined.”
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Once you decide a thing is important enough to call at all, and call early, there’s 3 basic ways of being wrong:
Predicting the wrong branch of events
Predicting the wrong scale of events
Predicting the wrong scale of fallout
Things like wrong sequence are not that important
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Looks like once I paid attention, 24h before, I believed in the right branch, but got scale and fallout wrong even after the shooting started. This was before I studied for my overnight twitter degree in Russia studies. This thought seems wildly wrong now.
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I think this will be a quick, limited war, that will stop with some sort of precarious liminal status for the eastern regions… BUT, like Covid, it will trigger a pattern of frequent limited-war “waves” that last a decade or two. Not a continuous long slog like WW1/WW2.
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I’ve got fermi estimation on my brain after second session of fermi gym this morning. Wonder if you could do fermi on geopolitics, like psychohistory. In this case… I was off by an order of magnitude and far too late to be useful even if I’d called it right.
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What are the units of “political events”?
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This is not as frivolous a question as it might seem. We do have units for complex events. The Richter scale for earthquakes has units of energy. Then there’s hurricanes on the Saffir-Simpson scale in pressure units. So why not politics?
(GDP lost)*(lives lost) perhaps?
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Is “life” an SI unit?
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Gotta wonder why I’m significantly ahead of the curve on some stuff and behind on others. One factor is simply skin in the game. I have a few Russian friends, but zero Ukrainian ones that I know of, and I’ve spent all of 5 seconds thinking about Ukraine in my life till this week.
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Most of the people I see got it right, and right early, in public, on this one, are either Russians/Ukrainians themselves.
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While true that the 2nd part of that tweet was pretty much like listening to you playing out loud, the primary intuition was very common, to my understanding. There were extremely experienced people who could not believe it was happening. It's so weird and new war experience

