Sarah Paine: recommendation

Transcript context

…This is also another very important point. The fact that the civilian leader of the Meiji generation dies before the military leader reinforces the contingency of history. It didn't have to be that he died first, but then that sort of changes potentially the whole trajectory of history. Individuals, trends, the whole thing matters. There's no saying. Maybe if he'd stuck around, everything would have been the same. Since you can't rerun the experiment, this is where, again, counterarguments are useful. On so many human endeavors, you just don't have complete data. When you're doing things in the here and now, maybe the data will come in a little later, or it just doesn't exist. Yet you have to make decisions. If you're not willing to change your mind, you're just going to double down on bad decisions. It's incredible the number of people who don't want to change their minds. That's why I made a big to-do about giving the argument-counterargument-rebuttal framework, because it helps get you out of the rut so that you can change your mind. You're going to tell me that Kotkin's got this thing and I'm wrong. I'm game. Maybe he's right. I don't care who's right. I care what's right. Going back to the question of what was different between the Russo-Japanese War and World War II, and what Japan's miscalculation was. One of them has to be that, in the case of Russia, they attacked an adversary where it took one year of conflict to push them to the point of significant destabilization of the government. Whereas, if you thought the same thing would happen with America… “We're going to attack Pearl Harbor and there's going to be all kinds of internal conflict.” They just misjudged the internal level of cohesion and functionality of American institutions. They thought the same thing that happened in Russia would happen.…

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