Chris Blattman: belief

Transcript context

…In Ireland. Northern Ireland, or the border, or wherever it’s going to happen. My friend Richard English is a historian there, and what he and a lot of people think — which is what we were thinking before the pandemic, when I had lots of current knowledge about some of these things when I traveled — was this idea that in these fragile moments, where it’s not really in anyone’s interest to go to war, there will be some small splinter groups, essentially people who, for their own ideological reasons or mistakes or stupidity, will set in motion a series of events that it’s difficult to walk back from. I think that does happen, and so people who are living in one of these border communities and want to protest violently against some change or lack of change — that’s what worried me. Nested games would be my phrase — that you have subgroups playing their own games, and they don’t care about how the whole game comes out. They want to optimize within their game, but what they do is a move in the larger game as well.…

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