Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…A, they're not blockading Britain. Britain's getting all its stuff out, but then they get sunk somewhere else. Blockade is when you're actually keeping things in. Germany has exactly zero merchant marine going anywhere. The stuff that you're talking about being sunk, they're naval ships but a lot of it is merchant marine because the British are getting things out. Tremendous amounts of it are getting out. That's just a difference. You're correct about the importance of productive bases. Britain's problem in World War II is different from the Napoleonic Wars. When you change to oil for what's powering your ships and things, Britain doesn't have that at home. Whereas coal, it does. It has some A-list coal. When you're doing age of sail and coal, the British are okay. But then when you're changing energy sources, they're definitely not okay. There are other factors that are going on with them. But you're right about the productive base. There's another game to play which I think is worth playing. It's the game of takeaway. You're telling me that there's this factor which is economic size. It's decisive and this will determine the outcome of wars. You're absolutely right that it’s important. Air power enthusiasts will say, "No, no, no, that's nonsense. It's all about controlling the skies." That when you control the air and you get air cover for your convoys, that's what does it. Let's talk about why the Battle of the Atlantic turns out the way it is. If I took away cryptography, would it have turned out the same way? Negative. If I take away not just the sheer amount of technology, but certain key pieces like radar and those things, what happens? Does it change? Yes, it does. What happens if the United States just doesn't like alliances and you don't coordinate things particularly well? Does it change things? Yes, it does. You can go through a list of this. Different people are designing different types of ships. You are also determining that you're going to share things with Britain. Britain's providing a lot of free stuff. If you play remove any one of these things, that Battle of the Atlantic turns out differently. The story is, it's probably a package of many things. This whole game of takeaway, when you have people who will come up with a monocausal explanation for you and they'll go with one cause, they'll probably be right that their one cause is really important. But then they are just ignoring all these other things. That's the more important thing in strategy. Your thing is truly important. The question then is what does "changing things" mean? Does it mean that the war could have gone on longer, or shorter? Yes, anything would have changed that. There's another question of would it have changed who won the war. I'd claim that cryptography, radar, even oil… Even if Germany had a huge reserve of oil, maybe it would have lengthened the length at which Germany could have sustained itself. But if you change the fact that the Axis had one-fourth of the GDP of the Allies combined, I think switching that genuinely changes who wins the war, whereas these other things actually wouldn't change who won the war. It depends whether the war is a war for limited or unlimited objectives. You can play that game with the Russo-Japanese War. All the data you talk about, Japan’s is a fraction of Russia’s but Russia gets trounced in the Russo-Japanese War. There's something that's going on. Japan has a very limited objective and Russia has other problems at home and is willing to bail. That's one thing. But there's another thing. If Germany had simply never bought a surface fleet, if they'd been sensible… Surface fleets are great, Britain's got one, but it can always deploy that thing. Germany will never deploy its surface fleet. It'll get it sunk, which is what happened in the Norwegian campaign. From the German point of view, they got Norway out of it. If they had simply bought U-boats instead, I don't know whether it would have… You'd have to do the math and I haven't done that. What their goal would need to be is to knock Britain out before the United States ever gets into the war. Definitely do not declare war on the United States. If you can keep the commerce raiding going for another six months, maybe Britain falls. Maybe that's the pivotal error. It has nothing to do with what you're talking about. It's simply that Hitler shouldn't have declared war, I don't know. There are many factors that go into these things. A reason why you should listen to people who disagree with you is that they may see some of these other factors. We all have blind spots and we rely on other people to find them. But you have to be receptive to listening.…

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