Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to On arriving at answers

And just who is Jane Galt?
Robert — (archived)

Clever nom de plume. I'm not sure I see the relevance to this part of the discussion, Tom. Except, perhaps, in the phenomenon of "hindsight bias", but not as "Jane" asserts. She's engaging in quite a bit of revisionism there to claim that the "doves" were only right by random chance, a revisionism that strikes me as a "projected hindsight bias".

At the risk of committing hindsight bias myself, and stipulating that I don't have time to dig into the archives to verify it, I remember the specific objections raised against the war to be: 1) Lack of planning for the post-invasion period; 2) Skepticism toward Cheney's vision of showers of flowers; and 3) Skepticism of the rosy confidence that the job could be accomplished with one-half to one-quarter the number of troops that analysts such as Shinseki estimated. Those three objecttions bear directly upon the situation in which we now find ourselves; luck had absolutely nothing to do with it.

A fourth objection was skepticism of the claims of WMD. While that failure of prognostication wasn't a direct contributor to the current problems, it was a factor, because everything that undermined our rationale for invading Iraq made accomplishing any objective more difficult. I was skeptical, and I remember thinking that it mattered because if our reasons for invading were to evaporate, so would our support, and so too would resistance rise in proportion to our lack of reasonable justification.

There were other objections based on morality which aren't at all quantifiable. And that perhaps is most relevant to our discussion of the belief in objectivity in politics. How do you assign a number to moral values? "Mine=1, yours=0"? Perhaps bin Laden would understand that arithmetic, but I sure don't.

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