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Remember the Maine! The military responses are difficult to predict because most of the time the headlining events only provide casus belli for plans that are
by throwup238 3y ago
Remember the Maine!
The military responses are difficult to predict because most of the time the headlining events only provide casus belli for plans that are already in motion but kept secret for strategic reasons. They're the sparks that politicians use to justify their actions abroad and at home because few people want to die for unrighteous causes but they're a sideshow to the planning and logistics that goes on to prepare for war. Predicting when war begins requires being in tune with the internal realpolitik of both sides which is unrealistic for most people.
Game theory is useless if you don't understand the interests of all the relevant players in a polity and even in an authoritarian regime like Russia or Saudi Arabia there are a LOT of them.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Game theory is useless if you don't understand the interests of all the relevant players in a polity and even in an authoritarian regime like Russia or Saudi Arabia there are a LOT of them. Game theory can be applied to infer interests when behavior and context are known as well as to predict behavior when interests and context are known (it can also be used to infer hidden elements of context when interests and behavior are known.) So, no, its not strictly useless when interests are unknown.
- throwup238 3y agoThat's just ivory tower wishful thinking.
- dragonwriter 3y agoIts no more ivory tower wishful thinking for the other applications than for predicting behavior; they are all idealized in that one never has certain knowledge in any of everything relevant in any of the dimensions.
- throwup238 3y ago> they are all idealized in that one never has certain knowledge in any of everything relevant in any of the dimensions. Which is why it's particularly useless for geopolitics. It's literally the furthest you can get from "idealized" anything - far more so than plain sociology, economics, or psychology. It's the global sum of all of the most unpredictable traits of humanity. It's one of the messiest human pursuits and always has been. It's a nice "cows are spherical" approximation to write papers about but game theory really ain't that great at predicting basic human behavior either. Except like with evolutionary biology you can always come up with a "just-so" game theoretic story that sounds right but has no real predictive ability.
- s1artibartfast 3y agosimilar to math, just because you dont know all the variable to solve an equation, doesnt mean it is useless. It is a tool to study the interactions and possible solutions, inferring some and ruling out others. Just because cows aren't spherical doesn't mean it is useful to act as though the world is devoid of physics, random and inscrutable. A spherical cow is still useful, if not perfect.
- throwup238 3y agoWe're not talking about an extra variable here or there, we're talking about the equivalent to string theory which is famously intractable. It's an n-body problem where n = ?????? and you don't know any of the boundary conditions. It's not random and inscrutable, but it sure isn't conducive to naive academic analyses like game theory. Just because you can model something simple, doesn't mean you can predict something as complicated as reality. The science of biology, sociology, psychology, and economics have proven that over and over again - geopolitics is all of those combined and more.
- s1artibartfast 3y agomaybe there is a disconnect on what we call prediction. There is more than enough information to predict if China would be in favor or against US building a military base in Taiwan. There isn't enough information to predict what Xi Jinping will have for breakfast.