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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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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# of changed minds, shift in common knowledge map, number of critical supporting elites swayed, rate of damage (either economic or physical per day), # of supporting/dissenting statements or actions by other countries, amount of shift in alliance ties.
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I don't know what the unt of "political events" are but if (as looks likely to me) Russia loses a war of compellence in Ukraine then its the top of that scale in terns of LONG - TERM consequences. Forget about GDP loss or other measures
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Based on the Fermi discussion yesterday, before deciding on units, how would you even dimension it? In other words, what is the [Length] here? After that, selecting cm vs km would work itself out
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