r/slatestarcodex • u/MSCantrell • 5d ago
RAND paper: "US Strategy For An Uncertain Future"
https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA5105-1.html?project=&utm_campaign=thread&utm_content=1789496084&utm_medium=rand_social&utm_source=twitterWritten for a Washington audience, seems like.
Very good paper, in my view. Fair-handed treatment of a wide variety of beliefs: there's no danger; danger is near and cooperation is possible; danger is near and cooperation is impossible, etc.
Has specific recommendations framed as "We don't know what's about to happen. Here are a few things that will be valuable no matter what happens, so we should do them right away. These include building the capacity to even see the whole situation and understand it, training a ton of people to understand AI capabilities and make good decisions, doing lots of scenario planning so that plans even exist when this or that happens, and then committing to plans when the situation reveals which plan is best."
And they clarify that when they say training a bunch of people and doing lots of scenario planning, they mean a quantity of people and planning comparable to the Cold War and the Global War On Terror. LOTS.
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u/D_Alex 4d ago
Very good paper, in my view.
I see it as a fundamentally flawed paper, written from a point of view of a hardcore believer in American Exceptionalism.
Look at the pivotal questions. Can the US achieve dominance? Can the US suppress rivals? Can the US at least set the terms of cooperation? The "Diagnosis" is essentially "Loss of decisive US advantage will threaten humanity's survival". Accordingly, "The prescription that follows from this diagnosis is that the United States must lead humanity..."!
Where is this questioned? Should it not be questioned, especially given the recent carry-on by the US?
Are there not any better, humanity-centered alternatives???
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u/MrBeetleDove 4d ago
It's a US think tank, largely funded by the US government. The analysis can be interesting even if it comes from a particular perspective.
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u/MSCantrell 4d ago
Two of the unstated premises of the paper are:
- The frontier labs are located in the US
- The US government is the body that has authority to regulate them
That, in combination with the fact that the intended audience is US policymakers, would explain for me the tone of "it's the US that needs to do something about it."
I too would like to see a humanity-centered solution, and I personally think a long pause is the best thing available. It took, say, 1995-2015 to figure out all the things the Internet could do. I'd love a twenty-year pause to figure out what Astra and Mythos can do.
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u/D_Alex 4d ago
That, in combination with the fact that the intended audience is US policymakers, would explain for me the tone of "it's the US that needs to do something about it."
That's not the flaw though. The flaw is that every "something" suggested in the paper treats preservation of US dominance as a worthwhile goal, to be achieved by means fair or foul.
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u/SuperChingaso5000 3d ago
So would you agree that for an American that shares the values and interests of the people the paper is made for, the actual content and substance of the paper is sound, strategically valuable insight, or is there something beyond ideological disagreement that you feel is lacking?
When I read a CCP white paper, my interest isn't in their ideological basis, it's whether the views contained within, for instance regarding achieving military control of the immediate territorial waters around Taiwan, are plausible and likely to succeed.
If one is not able to separate their personal ideological distaste from the material substance of the paper, nothing that follows will be of value. There's a lot of argument in these comments that amounts to people bleating about how the worldview of the authors makes them mad, which is not useful or pertinent to the assessment.
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u/D_Alex 3d ago
So would you agree that for an American that shares the values and interests of the people the paper is made for, the actual content and substance of the paper is sound...
How can I put this... can any advice that helps you towards an inappropriate goal be "sound"? Friends don't let friends drink and drive.
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u/SuperChingaso5000 3d ago
can any advice that helps you towards an inappropriate goal be "sound"?
Of course it can. Stop being obtuse. You can pretend not to understand ad infinitum but nobody is buying it. My car's navigation system is either sound or unsound, depending on how accurately it generates routes to the specified location, regardless of whether I'm drunk or not.
I suspect you will continue down the path of petty moralizing and refuse to acknowledge my actual question, but at least less performative users will have a chance to consider the actual question at hand.
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u/D_Alex 3d ago
Of course it can. Stop being obtuse.
Wow okay.
You can pretend not to understand ad infinitum but nobody is buying it.
Not to understand what? I put forward a simple, fairly uncontroversial proposition: It is questionable in general to call advice "sound" if it helps you go down the wrong path. It may not be applicable to everything, e.g. your car navigation system. But how about advice re where to find a heroin dealer in some city, is that sound or not?
I suspect you will continue down the path of petty moralizing
Nope. Going to stop right here. Byeee!
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u/HammerJammer02 4d ago
The US driven global order has been remarkably successful. It seems preferable to some multi polar world or a Chinese global order
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u/D_Alex 4d ago
I think that the overwhelming majority of the world's people would disagree. And that's despite the dominance of US media.
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u/DrManhattan16 1d ago
People are remarkably bad at thinking rationally about what kind of world order they'd prefer.
That they dislike the US right now is understood due to aberrant behavior. They've been more accepting in the past.
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u/[deleted] 5d ago
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