[ExI] Libertarian-spotting field guide

Rafal Smigrodzki rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com
Sun Jul 4 16:38:37 UTC 2010


On Sun, Jul 4, 2010 at 8:18 AM, David Lubkin <lubkin at unreasonable.com> wrote:
> I wrote:
>
>> A casual dispassionate look suggests it's far more cost-effective than
>> open warfare, and far more humane (as measured in death or suffering
>> per military objective achieved).
>
> Rafal replied:
>
>> ### Let's see: a world where assassination is easy, let's say each
>> human can inflict a death wish on the mean people. You don't like the
>> dictator? Off explodes his head. You think your boss is an asshole?
>> Massive internal hemorrhage solves the problem. Your GF is a slut?
>> ....
>>
>> You notice the problem with your cost-benefit analysis?
>
> What does this straw man have to do with assassination?

### I don't think this is a strawman. See below.
-----------------
>
> What you are describing is ordinary murder, which *is* easy. We *are*
> in a world were each human can inflict a death wish on the mean
> people, and plenty of bosses and GFs get killed. You don't need to
> postulate a magic power.

###  Define the difference between "ordinary murder" and
assassination. As an aside, an offensive war is murder as well.

One of the obstacles that the prospective assassin faces today is the
possibility of being detected and then possibly punished. This feature
of our world saves millions of lives every day. The death wish
situation is a thought experiment that removes this obstacle, allowing
us to examine the problems inherent in cheap and reliable
assassination.

The way I see it, the main difficulty with assassination is precisely
the feature you see as beneficial - its low cost. Instead of
convincing a lot of people to follow you into war, you hire a few
gunmen to achieve control over an adversary. Lower cost means usually
higher demand - there will be a lot of people contracting for
assassins in your world.

----------------------
>
> I am considering situations where actors do initiate or respond with
> mass violence to achieve objectives, situations like state-on-state
> warfare. I'm not considering whether I agree with those objectives.
> Just noting that it is more humane and efficient to achieve them
> through assassination.
>
> Compare sending special forces sniper teams to eliminate
> military or civilian leaders, in a progressive campaign to weaken
> your foe (and perhaps induce those who remain to give you what
> you want, lest they be next) with the routinized slaughter of mass
> warfare. Why is it ever preferable to bomb cities or even to send
> a cadre of 19 year olds off to maim and kill other 19 year olds?

### In a cost-benefit analysis you must take into consideration
long-term secondary effects of your action. If assassination was easy,
it would not end at killing heads of states. Yes, I believe that the
slaughter of millions in conventional warfare is less bad in the long
term than the slaughter of millions by assassins.

-------------------------
>
> It seems to me the only time that conventional warfare is a preferable
> method for achieving your goals is if one of your major goals requires
> a mass effect, e.g., mass casualty -- killing the infidels or altering the
> demographics of your own country -- or intimidating whole populations.

### Having the option to reliably assassinate would not diminish the
incentive use of mass slaughter to achieve such goals, don't you
think? If you want to kill the Jews because you hate their guts, being
able to murder people one by one would not stop you from murdering
them all.

------------------------
>
> Parenthetically, while I'm thinking mostly about past state-on-state
> warfare, it seems to me that a contracted private defense service
> in an AnCap society -- concerned with costs, reputation, lawsuits
> from third-party innocents, competitive pricing, return on investment,
> etc. -- would naturally gravitate toward techniques that were as
> pinpoint as they could make them.

### Decapitating the opposing organization has always been one of the
chief objectives in warfare, so this is nothing new. Mass slaughter of
peons is usually a byproduct of trying to get through to the king by
brute force, when the pinpoint option doesn't work. Note that the US
seriously tried to assassinate Hitler, Castro, and Saddam Hussein for
years, indicating that assassination is not as easy as you think. It
is potentially cheap, but so far couldn't be made to work reliably -
which is good, as my thought experiment would attest.
--------------------------
>
> And if they didn't, they'd be supplanted by nimble start-ups, as in
> any other business.

### Just ask yourself what would be the long-term repercussions of
inventing a technological means of reliably and cheaply killing select
humans. Reliability here implies that no human could take effective
precautions against that technology. Cheapness implies that the path
from wish to its fulfillment is easy.

As an added task, please analyze the effects of this assassination
technology being available to one vs. multiple players, and do it
under two scenarios: the technology is traceable (making direct
retribution possible) versus untraceable. Tell me what you think about
the long-term effects of this invention on human welfare. Don't
hesitate to use game theoretic analysis here.

Compare this to another potential world, where due to alternate
physics the only way of killing a single person belonging to a society
is by destroying the whole society (similar to what you find in one of
Greg Egan's polis societies). Looking at these of two extremes of
physical feasibility of assassination is highly instructive as a
starting point in our cost-benefit analysis.

Rafal



More information about the extropy-chat mailing list