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0xpgmtoday at 8:41 AM2 repliesview on HN

> This kind of forgetting is normal

Just as shift in power and the rise and fall of nations is normal.


Replies

TeMPOraLtoday at 1:11 PM

Yes. Again, this will eventually happen to every one, some way. Of course nations always want to prevent this; it's part of the job of the government. But there's always long tail of very low probability, very destructive threats. You can't possibly safeguard against them. In fact, trying to do so is a sure way to trigger a fall of your nation (or at least your government), by draining your economy dry due to paranoia.

The rational thing is to address a threat proportionally to it's expected damage and probability of occurrence. When war is unlikely, you scale down your defense production; when it becomes more likely, you ramp it up - paying cold-start cost is still much cheaper than paying for ongoing readiness. If your scaling down defense makes it more likely for you to be attacked - well, that's the job of your intelligence and defense departments to track. Nobody said it's a static system - it's a highly dynamic one, that's what makes geopolitics a hard thing.

Terr_today at 8:56 AM

For that matter, a lot of human civilization has been about identifying things that were normal and making them rare. "Normal" infant mortality of 40%, famines, floods, history being lost, etc.

Anyway, when it comes to "this is normal" I think we should take care to distinguish between interpretations of:

1. "This specific case should not have taken certain people by surprise."

2. "This is a manifestation of a broader phenomenon."

3. "This is natural and therefore cannot or should not be solved." [Naturalistic fallacy.]

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