Hopefully Interesting

A while ago I was listening to a podcast on the challenges of democracy and dealing with corruption and it brought up an issue I've seen a lot in a number of other contexts.  I thought I'd take a shot at summarizing all the different places I've seen this effect and some implications of it.  Rather than paraphrase I'll just quote from the transcript: you design messages that tell people, and often this is what happens, there's a lot of corruption, the corruption is a big problem, the corruption being a problem is hurting our development, it's hurting the economy, it's hurting jobs. We need to fight corruption. It's time for you to stand up.   What we found, which is consistent with previous studies that have been done in other parts of the world, is that the people who received the anti-corruption messages either had no effect, or they became more likely to pay the bribe in the game. This is actually a pretty typical example of a trap you can fall into

This is just a collection of some thoughts I've had about the recent conflict. Seeing it coming People had been worried about a Russian attack on Ukraine for a long time.  I'd worried that it was imminent a year ago with the last big massing of Russian troops on Ukraine's borders.  And with the massing this year I was more than just worried.  Going back to my predictions on  this Metaculus question  I was putting an invasion at even odds a month before the invasion but from the 13th of February until the invasion launched on the 23rd rapidly became convinced that the invasion was actually going to happen.  But while I can brag about being ahead of the curve in terms of predicting that there would be an invasion I was terribly wrong about how it would proceed and on the night of the 23rd I was afraid that the multiple axes of incursion and forward air drops would throw the defenses into confusion and rout.  Oops. Looking back at information from before the 23rd that still st