YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Blattman

lines on the record: 194
first: 2022-04-03
most recent: 2022-04-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It was hard for Putin might not have been out of line in thinking just like everybody else in my sphere of influence, they're going to roll over to.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Russians, many Russians have tried to stand up and they've been beaten down. And now people will see, but people have not been standing up very much. And so lots of people are cowed and lots of people have appeased. And lots of people hear that speech and think I would like to do that, but don't. And so, and my point is that sadly, we live in a world where a lot of people get stepped on by Tyrants in empire and whatnot, and don't rise up. And so I think we could admire, especially when they stand up for these reasons. And I think we can admire Churchill for that reason. I think that's why we admire the leaders of the American Revolution and so on. But doesn't always happen. And I don't actually know why. But I don't think it's irrational. I think it's just something, it's about a set of values and it's hard to predict.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no. I'm going to disagree. I think it totally fits in and it's this, there's nothing irrational about what we believe, especially those principles which we hold the most dear, right? I'm merely trying to say that there's a calculus. There's one calculus over here that says Russia's more powerful than it was 20 years ago and even 10 years ago and Ukraine is not. And it's asking for something and there's an incentive to give that up. That's obvious. Like there's an incentive to comply. But my understanding is many of these post-Soviet republics have appeased, right? Which is what we call compromise when we disagree with it. All of these other peoples in the Russian sphere of influence have not stood up.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decision, but that is the answer. If the answer is why would they fight if it's so costly? Why not find a deal? It's because they weren't willing to give Russia the thing that their power said they quote unquote deserved. Just like Americans said to the Britain, yeah, of course we ought to accept semi-sovereignty. But we are just, we refuse. And we'd rather endure a bloody fight that we might lose than take this. And so you need some of these other five buckets. You need them to understand the situation. You need to sort of, there are other things going on, but I do think it's fundamental that this noble intransigence is like a big part of it.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now we have regained some of our strength. We've consolidated political control. We've cowed our people. We have a stronger economy. And we somehow got Germany and other European nations to give up energy independence and actually just, we've got an enormous amount of leverage over you. And now we want to roll back some of your success because we're powerful enough to demand it. And you've been taking advantage of the situation, which is maybe a fair impartial analysis. And in the West, but more specifically Ukraine said, but that's a price too high, which I totally respect. Maybe I'd like to think I'd make that same.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, on the eve of the war, Ukraine was poorer in a propersion terms than it was in 1990. The economy has just completely stagnated. Russia, meanwhile, like many other parts of the region, sort of boomed to a degree. I mean, certainly because of oil and gas, but also for a variety of other reasons. And Putin's consolidated political control. And from a very cold-blooded and calculated point of view, I think one way Putin and Russia could look at this is, look, we were temporarily weak after the fall of the Iron Curtain. And the West basically took advantage of that. Like Bravo, you pulled it off, you basically crept democracy and capitalism, all these things right up to our border.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Americans, for ideological reasons, said, no way. And people like Bernard Bailey and other historians, that's like the dominant story of the American Revolution. It was the ideological origins, this attachment, this idea of liberty. And so I start, now there's lots of other reasons, I think, why this happened, but I think for me it starts with Ukrainians failing to make that sensible quote-unquote rational deal that says we should relinquish some of our sovereignty because Russia is more powerful than we are.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is so valuable to us and important. Sometimes it's terrible. Sometimes it's the extermination of another people. But sometimes it's something noble, like liberty or refusal to part with sovereignty. And in those circumstances, people will decide. I will endure the costs. I mean, I think they knew what they were probably risking. And so to me, that's not to blame the Ukrainians any more than I would blame Americans for the American Revolution. It's actually a very similar story. You had a tyrannical, militarily superior... Pretty non Democratic entity come and say you're going to have partial sovereignty.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most people do most people faced with a superpower, a tyrant, or an autocrat, or a murderous warlord who says, hand this over, they hand it over. And that's why there are so many unequal imperial relationships in the world. That's what empire is. Empire is success of people saying fine, we'll give up our some degree of freedom or sovereignty because you're too powerful. And the Ukrainians said no way. This is just too precious. And so I said one of those buckets were that there are, there's a set of values. There's sometimes there's something that we value.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Russian colleague of mine, Konstantin Stonen, tells this story about visiting Ukrainian professor who's at the university and one night he's walking down the street and he's talking on two cell phones at once for some reason and a mugger stops him and demands the phones and his sort of like dead pan way Constantine says you know and because he was Ukrainian he decided to fight And I think that's a little bit like what happened. Most of us in that situation would hand over our cell phones. And so in this situation, Putin's like the mugger. The Ukrainian people are being asked to hand over this thing, and they're saying no, we're not going to hand this over. And the fact is...”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard. I mean, it wasn't. It took me a long time to learn to recognize them, and it takes many people. And it took generations of social scientists. Years and years to figure some of this out and to sort of help people understand it and clarify concepts. So it's just not that easy. Now it's not hard. I think it's possible to just as I was taught a lot of the stuff I write in the book in graduate school or from reading and it's possible to communicate and learn this stuff. But it's still really hard. And so that's kind of what I was trying to do is close that gap and just make it help people recognize. Things in the wild”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nationalist ideals or delusions or vengeance actually matters because those do matter, but they only matter when the capacity to find a deal is so narrow because of the circumstances. And so let's not, it's sort of like saying like an elderly person who dies of pneumonia, right? Pneumonia killed them, obviously. But that's not the reason pneumonia was able to kill them. All of the fundamentals and the circumstances were like made them very fragile. And that's how I think all the strategic forces make that situation fragile. And then the miscalculations and the all of these things you just said, which are so important, are kind of like the pneumonia. And let's sort of, let's pay attention to both.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talk about Putin's grand visions of being the next Catherine the Great or nationalist ideals and the mistakes and the miscalculations were really quick to sort of say, oh, that must be, and then kind of pause or not pause, but maybe even stop there and not see some of the strategic incentives. And so I guess we have to do both. But I guess I would say like the war's just such a big problem. It's just so costly that the strategic Incentives and the things that game theory has given us are like really important in understanding why there was so little room for negotiation in a bargain that things like a leader's mistakes start to matter or a leader's”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“George W. Bush's either desire for revenge and vengeance or some private agenda or blood for oil. So we're really quick to blame it on these things. And then we're really, we tend to overlook the strategic incentives to attack, which I think we're probably dominant. I think those things might have been true to a degree, but I don't think they were enough to ever bring those wars about. Just like, I think people are very quick to sort of in this current invasion to sort of”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, you're absolutely right in the sense that it's totally possible to oversimplify these things and take the game theory too seriously. And some... And people who study those things and write those models and people like me who use them can sometimes make that mistake, I think that's not the mistake that most people make most often. And what's actually true is I think most people, we're actually really quick, whether it's the US invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq, we're really quick to blame that on the humanness and the culture. So we're really quick to say, oh, this was”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All these ideas out there that can actually help us just make sense of all these wars and just bring some order to the morass of reasons.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. You have a tenant you need to evict, or anyone normal, like kind of legal, it's not yet a legal dispute, right? Like we just have a dispute with a neighbor or somebody else. Most of us don't end up going to court. Going to court is like the war option. That's the costly thing that we just ought to be able to avoid. We ought to be able to find something between ourselves that doesn't require this hiring lawyers and long drawn out trial. And most of the time we do. So we all understand that incentives. And then for those five buckets, so everything except all the rational and the misperceptions are really easy to model. Then from a technical standpoint, it's actually pretty tricky to model the misperceptions. And I'm not a game theorist. And so I'm more channeling my colleagues who do this. And what I know. But it's not rocket science. I mean, I think that's what's what I try to lay out in the book is like there's this all this.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, for those five are really, on some level, easy to think strategically and model in a simple way in the sense that any of us can do it. We do this all the time. Think of bargaining in a market for a carpet or something or whatever you bargained for. You're thinking a few steps ahead about what your opponent's going to do. And you stake out a high, like a low price and the seller stakes out a high price and you might both say, oh, I refuse to like, I could never accept that. And there's all this sort of cheap talk. But you kind of understand where you're going and it's efficient to find a deal and buy the carpet eventually. So we all understand this game theory and the strategy, I think, intuitively. Or maybe even a closer example is suppose.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really costly, or it is really costly nonetheless. And then there's these sort of human things. One's a little bit like just war. One's sort of thing. There's like ideologies or principles or things we value that weigh against those costs. Like exterminating the heretical idea or standing up for a principle might be so valuable to me that I'm willing to use violence, even if it's costly. And there's nothing irrational about that. And then the fifth bucket is all of the irrationalities, all the passions and all of the most importantly, I think, like misperceptions, the way we get, like, we basically make wrong calculations about whether or not war is the right decision. We misunderstand or misjudge our enemy or misjudge ourselves.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The optimal choice because of circumstances. And one of them is when the people who are deciding don't bear those costs or maybe even have a private incentive, if they're ignoring the cost, then maybe the costs of war are not so material. That's a contributing factor. Another is just there's uncertainty, and we could talk about that, but there's just the absence of information means that actually there's circumstances where it's your best choice to attack. There's this thing that political economists call commitment problems, which are basically saying there's some big power shift that you can avoid by attacking now. So it's like a dynamic incentive. It's sort of saying, well, in order to keep something from happening in the future, I can attack now. And because of the structure of incentives, it actually makes sense for me, even though words in theory.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the idea was that that basic instead of like something overrides these incentives. And I guess I was saying there's five ways. They get overrided. And three are I'd call strategic, like they're kind of logical. They're circumstances that, and this is sort of where strategic is strategy is like this game theory is you could use those two things interchangeably, but game theory is sort of making it sound more complicated, I think, than it is. It's basically saying that there's times when this is like,”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I mean, they're kind of like buckets, there's sort of things that rhyme, because it's not all the same. There's like lots of reasons to go to where there's this great line, you know, there's a reason for every war and a war for every reason. And that's true. And it's kind of overwhelming, right? And it's overwhelming for a lot of people. It was overwhelming for me for a lot of time. And I think one of the gifts of social science is actually people have started to organize this for us. And I just tried to organize it like a tiny bit better.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're actually very cooperative. As a species, we're deeply, deeply cooperative. We're really, really good. The thing we're not, we're okay at violence and we're okay and we're okay at getting angry and vengeant. And we have principles that will sometimes lead us. But we're actually really, really, really good at cooperation. And so that's, again, I'm not trying to write some big optimistic book where everything's going to be great and we're all happy and we don't really fight. It's more just to say, let's start, let's be like a doctor. As a doctor, we're going to focus on the sick, right? I'm going to try. I know there's sick people, but I'm going to recognize that the normal state is health and that most people are healthy. And that's going to make me a better doctor. And that's, I'm kind of saying the same thing. Let's be better doctors of politics and the world by recognizing that the normal state is health. And then we're going to identify what are the diseases that are causing this warfare.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they were like, yeah, this is, we do not want to go to war. This will be bad. We'll be angry, but we'll accept your explanation that this was an accident. And so these things find under the radar. And so we overestimate, I think, how likely it is sites are going to fight. But then, of course, things do happen. Like Russia did invade the Ukraine and didn't find some negotiated deal. And so then the book is sort of about half the book is just sort of laying out actually like there's just different ways this breaks down and some of them are human. Some of them are this I actually don't think war beats in our heart or does a little bit, but”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's what happens most of the time, but we don't write so many books about it. And now some political scientists go and they count up all of the nations that could fight because they have some dispute and they're right next to one another. Or they look at the ethnic groups that could fight with one another because they have there's some tension and they're right next to one another. And then some number like 999 out of 1,000 don't fight because they just find some other way. They don't like each other, but they just loathe in peace because that's the sensible thing to do. And that's what we all do. We loathe in peace. And we loathe the Soviet Union in relative peace for decades and India loathed Pakistan in peace. I mean, two weeks into the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Again, it was in the newspapers, but most people didn't, I think, take note. India accidentally launched a cruise missile at Pakistan. And common sued.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Powell might have been one of his teachers at like a US military college because a lot of these military trained at some point. So they had some, there was some personal relationships, at least between people in the US government and this guy that they were trying to use. The point is, and that's like what should have happened. That makes sense, right? Like, yeah, maybe I can mount an insurgency. And yeah, I'm not going to bear a lot of the costs of war because I'm the dictator. And maybe he's human and he just wants to fight or gets angry or it's just in his mind, whatever he's doing. But at the end of the day, it's like, this does not make sense.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decades and decades, and nobody is going to put this one in the history books. And it's because it didn't actually happen. Because before the troops could land, the person who'd taken power in a coup basically said, fine. There's this famous story where Colin Powell goes to Haiti, to this new dictator who's refused to let a Democratic president take power and tries to convince him to step down or else. And he says, no, no, no. And then he shows him a video. And it's basically troop planes and all these things taking off. And he's like, this is not live. This is two hours ago. So, and basically he basically gives up right there. So that was.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most people don't know about the US invasion of Haiti in 1994. I mean, a lot of people know about it, but people just don't pay attention to it. The history books and school kids are going to learn about the invasion of Afghanistan for.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so obviously we go to war, and obviously there's a lot of violence, and so we have to explain something, and some of that's going to be aspects of our humanness. So I guess what I wanted us to sort of start with, I think it was just useful to sort of start and point out, actually, you know, there's really, really, really, really strong incentives not to go to war because it's going to be really costly. And so all of these other human or strategic things, all these things, the circumstantial things that will eventually lead us to go to war have to be pretty powerful before we go there. And most of the time”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One side's intransigence, if that's indeed what happened, one side's intransigent, sort of maybe compels you to basically eliminates all of the reasonable bargains that you could be satisfied with. And now you're left with really no other strategic option but to invade. And I think that's a slight oversimplification, but I think that's like one way to describe what happened.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Invading and attacking us strategically the right thing to do in terms of sending signals to your future enemies. Or you just, if you think it's important to bring someone to justice, in this case Al-Qaeda, then maybe that's just war, or that's a just invasion. But it hinges on the fact that the other side just didn't do the seemingly sensible thing, which is, say, Okay, we'll give him up. And so it was completely avoidable in one sense. But if you believe, and I think it's probably true, if you believe that for their own ideological and other reasons. Mulamar in particular in Taliban in general decided we're not going to do this. Then now you're not left with very many good choices. And now I didn't want to talk about is that a just war is that what's justice or not? I just wanted to point out that like it's”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, I kind of ended up dodging that because, I mean, one is to just point out that wars, actually most wars aren't necessary. And so in the sense that there's another way to get what you wanted. And so on one level, there's no just war. Now that's not true because take an example like the US invasion of Afghanistan. The United States has been attacked. There's a culpable agent, reliable evidence that this is al-Qaeda. They're being sheltered in Afghanistan by the Taliban. And then the Taliban, this is a bit murky. It seems that there was an attempt to... They hand him over or else, and they said, No way. Now you can make an argument that.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's based on, I mean, what I'm trying to imagine is, I mean, suppose I wake up, or whatever, suppose I think my God tells me to do something. Or my God thinks that my moral sense thinks that something that another group is doing is repugnant. I'm curious, are they evaluating the validity of that claim or just the idea that, well, you said it was repugnant, you deeply believe that, therefore, it's just.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, one of the interesting things I mean, so people, you know, if you want to do some of what I do is just quantitative analysis of conflict. And if you want to do that, if you want to sort of run statistics on war, then you have to code it all up. And then lots of people have done that. There's four or five major data sets where people or teams of people have over time said we're going to code years of war between these groups or within a country. And what's interesting is how difficult these data sets don't often agree. You have to make all of these, the decision gets really complicated. Like when does the word begin? Does it begin when a certain number of people have been killed? Did it begin? What if there's like lots of skirmishing and sort of little terror attacks or a couple bombs lobbed? And then eventually turns into war. Do we call that, do we backdate it to like when the first act of violence started? And then what do we do with all the times when there was like that low scale, low intensity violence or bombs lobbed? And do we call those wars?”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Precisely because they're cheap ways of communicating or they're not particularly costly. Where's the thing that's just so costly we should be trying to avoid is maybe like the metaway I think about it.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that's maybe the insight. Everybody loses something from war. And there was usually, not always, but the point is there was usually a way to get what you wanted or be better off without having to fight over it. So there's this, it's just a fighting is just politics by other means. And it's just inefficient, costly, brutal, devastating means. And so that's like the deep insight. And so I kind of wanted to say, so I guess what's not war in my, I mean, I don't want, I don't try to belabor the definitions because reams and reams of political science papers written on like what's a war, what's not a war. People disagree. I just wanted to say where's the thing that we shouldn't be doing, or where's the violence that doesn't make sense? There's a whole bunch of other violence, including gangbanging and skirmishes”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Russian invasion of Ukraine is now fourth or fifth week. Everybody's, if it didn't dawn on them before, it dawned on them now just how brutal and costly this is.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a little bit, I mean Was the head of a group where he was becoming the head of a group at that point? And that group eventually did go to war with those neighboring gangs, which is to say it was just long, drawn out conflict over months and months and months. But I think one of the big insights from my field is that, you know, you're constantly negotiating over something whether you're officially negotiating or you're all posturing like you're bargaining over something and you should be able to figure out a way to split that pie. And you could use violence. But violence is everybody's miserable. Like if you're nap, like if you start a war, one, you know, there's lots of risks you could get killed. That's not good. You could kill somebody else and go to jail, which is what happened to him. That's not good. Your soldiers get killed. No one's buying your drugs in the middle of a gunfight. So it interrupts your business. And so on and on. It's like, it's really miserable. This is what we're seeing right now.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he was basically trying to send them information. And this is what countries do all the time, right? We have military parades and we might have border skirmishes. And I wanted to sort of, so is it what's short? Is a three-month border skirmish a war? I mean, I don't try to get into those things. I don't want to, but I want to point out that like. This long, grueling months and years of violence are like the problem and the puzzle. And I just didn't want to spend a lot of time talking about. The international version of gang banging. It's a different phenomenon.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me, you know, I have a friend who, someone who's become a friend through the process of my work and writing this book also, who was 20, 30 years ago, was a gang leader in Chicago. So this guy named Napoleon English or NAP. And I remember one time he was saying, well, you know, when I was young, I used to 15, 16, and he'd go to the neighboring gangstery. He says, I'd go gang banging. And I said, well, I didn't know what that meant. I said, what does that mean? And he said, oh, that just meant I'd shoot him up. Like I'd shoot at buildings. I might shoot at people. I wasn't trying to kill them. He was just trying to sort of send a signal that he was a tough guy. And he was fearless and he was someone who they should be careful with. And so I didn't want to call that war, right? That was something different. It was short. It was kind of sporadic. And he wasn't.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And a comment basically recognized that common principles govern some kinds of behavior that look pretty different. Like an Indian ethnic riot Obviously, pretty different than invading a neighboring country, right? But And that's pretty different than two villages or two gangs. A lot of what I work on is studying organized criminals and gangs. Two gangs going to where you think is really different. And of course it is. But there are some common principles you can just think about conflict and the use of violence and not learn everything, but just get a lot. Just get really, really far by sort of seeing the commonalities rather than just focusing on the differences”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then figure out why. And let's talk about why. And so that's so I was trying to throw out the short violence. I was trying to throw out the individual violence. I was also trying to throw out all the... Competition that happens that's not violent. That's the normal. Normal competition. I was trying to say, let's talk about violent competition because that's kind of the puzzle.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, bring them together, but I still had to say, let's hold out individual violence, which has a lot in common, but individuals choose to engage in violence for more and sometimes different reasons. So let's just put that aside so that we can focus a bit. And let's really put aside short incidents of violence, because those might have the same kind of things explaining them, but actually there's a lot of other things that can explain short violence. Short violence can be really... I can use it to communicate information. The thing that all of it has in common is that it doesn't generally make sense. It's not your best option most of the time. And so I wanted to say let's take this thing that should be puzzling. We kind of think it's normal. We kind of think this is what all humans do. But let's point out that it's not normal.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I sit at this sort of intersection of economics and political I also dwell a little bit in psychology, but that's partly because I'm married to psychologists sometimes do research with her. All these things are really different. So if you're a political scientist, you spend a lot of time just classifying a really narrow kind of conflict and studying that. And that's an important way to make progress as a social scientist. But I'm not trying to make progress. I'm trying to sort of help everybody step back and say, you know what? There's like some common things that we know from these disciplines that relate to a really wide range phenomenon. Basically, we can talk about them in a very similar way and we can get really similar insights. So I wanted to.”
2022-04-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #273 – Chris Blattman: War and Violence · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source