Comment by stevenhuang
4 days ago
Yes I was incorrect to say such a model would be strictly worse off. But my read is that you over index on the notion of laws, hence your general befuddlement on the current outcome. Sovereign nations follow international law and order to the extent their goals align and perceived costs of contravening them exceeds some threshold. Might ultimately makes right, has always been the case. That's realpolitik for you, unfortunately.
I appreciate the discussion and thoughtful response.
> But my read is that you over index on the notion of laws
To be fair, nothing I said asserted the relative importance of international law in comparison to other influences (i.e. military power, strategic goals, economic interests, a vindictive leader).
> hence your general befuddlement on the current outcome
Where do you get the impression that I'm befuddled? I was disappointed in the lack of nuance of some comments, so I pushed back, but I'm not 'befuddled' by current events.
> Sovereign nations follow international law and order to the extent their goals align and perceived costs of contravening them exceeds some threshold.
This sounds like the 'rational actor' model from international relations. [1] But that model is not the only game in town, nor is it universally the best model to use!
> Might ultimately makes right, has always been the case.
I would happily see this phrase fall out of usage. It is what authoritarians want you to believe. What is right != who has power. Normative != positive. They are not the same. We would do well not to blur 'what is' with 'what should be', not even in an aphorism.
[1]: http://slantchev.ucsd.edu/courses/ps12/03-rational-decision-...
I don't disagree with anything you said here.
Yes I would like that phrase to fall out of use too. My intention was less of the idiom's original normative meaning but to emphasize that it is ultimately power that enables or constrains a nation's possible actions. Apologies for my confusing use of the phrase.
Thanks.
> but to emphasize that it is ultimately power that enables or constrains a nation's possible actions.
If one interprets this as "perceived power" I think we'd be getting closer. But even that is not enough.
I would also need us to recognize "the power that ideas have in shaping worldviews". Consider the Magna Carta, the Geneva Conventions, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and so on. They can't simply be accounted for using a probabilistic calculus of consequences w.r.t. military force, economic sanctions, popular uprisings, and so on.
International law and notions to some degree also become normative. They are worldviews and aspirations that spread. (Memetics is a powerful analytic frame here!) These laws and norms take hold in people's minds and they shape how leaders and their people think about what is good and what should be done. In this sense, even though they are ultimately just neural patterns (if you are a materialist like me), they can be thought of as 'real' and impactful when it comes to making predictions about how leaders act.
I wonder if we would both agree on this: as people lose faith in the normative force of law, they care relatively more about the perceived consequences. Seems pretty straightforward?
Such a degradation, seems to me, cannot be good for civilization. A world where everything is purely contractual or consequentialist does not work in a world of agents with very limited computation.* It is just too costly to formalize everything in terms of individual incentives. Building systems where all the consequences are perceived by actors at the right levels of the system is really hard. Maybe it can work with certain kinds of information systems. But with humans, with our current biology and technology, I don't think it scales well at all. (At this point you might wonder if John Von Neumann is rolling is in his grave, but I suspect if he lived today, he would agree! His work spanned computation theory, game theory, and more.)
* Here is a guess that seems plausible (hypothetically): In a perfect world of unlimited computation, agents would be smart enough to think of interactions as long-run games and might be able to have a healthy society even if they don't 'believe' in norms.