Oddbean

How many people do you personally know and keep contact with in Ukraine and Russia, or when was the last time you visited these places? When you know something that others don't, it is always very intriguing to hear much much more details than just a hint about the final conclusion you made.

I live in central europe. Lot of ukrainian colleagues and friends. Few russian. Even more after Russia started the war. Helped/helping refugees. I dont know anything that isnt publically known already. It is just that i see what Kremlin spreads on socials and lot of americans (leading with Musk and Carlson) applauds them. Very contra factual and sad.

That is very limiting way to go by. You would never board the plane unless you check the math of aerodynamics or do a bitcoin transaction if you are not cryptographer and programmer. At some point you need to trust some experts if you want to live in this complex society.

True, security and avoidance of trust is limiting compared to wide trust. But that is the way I live. Including, I understand bitcoin cryptography (not complex - several hours on youtube and rumble to gain knowledge), I can write software code, I cook my own food and verify suppliers of raw materials, I fly only those carriers and aircraft that I have studied statistics of and accept the risk, and I don't stand out from the crowd to make sure my presense does not impact the statistics. Most certainly, I ignore all public information. Look at a cat - it is always running from cover to cover when not at home.

True. You need to be carefull when picking which experts to trust (as you described you do). We are lucky we live in society with advanced scientific methods (open source, peer reviews, …). Yet fuckups mught still happen (plane crashes, data leaks, …)

Funny thing is, by my 5 senses Ukraine war does not seem to exist. I did not do an exhaustive analysis, but do not have any incentives to do it. By this measure, if I was to list potential liers, Musk and Carlson would be much further down the line than say CNN.

Obviously i am just a dog on internet but can tell you second hand (speaking to refugees) it is very real. Friend runnig NGO helping raped girls by russian soldiers. Bunch of ukrainian friends with families in eastern teritories. Very ugly real war my friend.

One more thing, the reason why most west should actually care about this war is that it might be prelude to much bigger war (as russia+china partnership suggests). Many geopolitical commentators with very sound arguments implying catastrophical consequences to global security if russia suceeds. That means even you might get drafted.

I have no doubt people got spooked and ran away. But what that spooky thing was that they ran away from - I am not sure. Even your example: a friend, not you, deals with NGO but does not deal with the raped girls herself. Hmmm. And lack of coincidence is that none of ukrainians I know got raped, and none of the russians I know seem to be the rapist type. Weird lack of coincidence. I know it is hard to believe there would be lies at this level. But then, I care about the perimeter that I am capable to care of properly. The rest - I have my suspicions, but I do not judge. If you check my notes history, you will see that I do share my suspicions, too, but I try to differentiate between things I suspect and things I know.

Dont know where you are but my guess is that much further west than me. So your perimeter is obviously different. Your approch is to “pray problem away” by just ignoring all witnesses. I guess fine attitude if you live in a cave and dgaf about the world. The problem is “the world” my come for you. Participation on societal issues is important in democracy.

Oh Jee, the deeper we dig... :). I can see that we are on very different levels of trusting the surroundings. Let me answer indirectly: One of the formulas in my head: Governments and central banks are necessarily one of two: 1. Ignorant enough to maliciously steal from me through inflation of fiat currencies, or 2. Ignorant enough to steal from me through inflation of fiat currencies without realizing it. So why would I think they are not ignorant enough to intensionaly or unintensionally lie to me about Ukraine? I should verify if I don't trust, you would say. But what is an incentive for me to do that? I have other higher priority business to take care of. Especially that I happen to have known dozens of random Ukrainians and Russians since long ago, and from them I get an impression that governments are possibly lieing indeed. For sure, none of them came asking me for help, and I hate to interfere where I am not invited. If you are helping a society that you do not closely know each one personally, you are interfering and most likely making things worse. Society is a communist term. My friends, friends of my friends and so on, are the correct terms. Everyone else is strangers. Strangers do not get to medl with my business and do not get help from me. Unless of course they become close friends before any need arises. That is fair. They have their friends to help them. If they do not have enough friends, then rhey either get into too big troubles or are too little friendly.

This is how all my deeper than superficial debates end: the debater takes powder, probably thinking to himself that I am too stupid to debate him... nostr:nevent1qqsq6kgrj8mz04v8yf756rg23h067877n5vyzq7rch7ecl8mrca4zhgppamhxue69uhkummnw3ezumt0d5pzqdrsakhr3uyapj327w6g8gp39hwh82sswhyfutnewaew85lcgq5kqvzqqqqqqy0m5avk

In term of caring for the world, we have such an old anecdote: a crazy man stands by a river in Vilnius and waves his hands like crazy. A bypasser says: - what are you doing? - I am scaring away the crocodiles. - but there are no crocodiles in Vilnius! A wise man came and said: - that is because of him waving his hands!

Is it possible you’re actually trusting a bit more than you think? Do you run a node? Do you know where the logic is that ensures the transactions your node verifies are in accordance with your desires and not someone else’s? Have you personally checked it? Is there any code on your computer than might cause it to be lying to you about what you see when you read that vs what it actually executes when validating blocks? If you haven’t, checked these, then why? I’m all for avoiding blind trust, I think that’s part of understanding the world. I also think it’s impossible. Devastatingly. So we end up with some version of a trust oneself/masses/experts heuristic for a given situation. If you haven’t read it, The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes is excellent on this topic. #bookstr

Thank you, I will check out the book. And I do run my own node :). I didn't write its code though. And did not review it. But it is open source. And that, yes, I do have a lot of trust in popular open source software. Not blindly, though. I know many programmers, and I see how motivated they are to find issues in open source libraries and report them. But you should not trust me because you do not know me, and therefore should not trust open source unless you did your own verification. Sure some verifications are indirect. The level of verification depends on the level of risk I am willing to accept. And generally I have lowish risk tolerance.

@mark tyler your bio is wrong. You have no right to force me anything regardless of anything. I'll have to think this through, but it feels like also term "legitimate" is evil in itself. I can't quickly think of any context where it would not be misleading. https://image.nostr.build/df4fb9375f0a1a402f3a3b9016a22aa3127e64f986a6a8fedf679a4bf89e5adf.jpg

What do you mean? By legitimate I just mean in a “real” way. I’m not completely convinced there is such a way of giving me that right, but I mostly mean to recognize here that if you were to “imply your consent” i would view it as definitely not consent.

Glad you really have no intentions of forcing anybody. So just a friendly remark: for a stranger, non native english speaker, without context, like me, that sentence sounds like you would maybe consider oppressing others under some excuses. Maybe its just me.