Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…It's what I would call a pivotal error. Japan's decision to attack Pearl Harbor is a pivotal error. They are already grossly overextended in China. They want to cut out foreign aid. Remember that Hawaii is not a US state, and it doesn't become a state until ‘59 or something. And they probably take this racist view of Hawaiians of whoever they think Hawaiians are. So their idea is that they are going to take a newspaper and slap the dog on the snout and the dog will quit. Instead you create great power allies all across the Pacific for the Chinese. So yeah, there are pivotal errors that you can make at which point there is no return for the status quo. You've seen Putin make a pivotal error. He was getting away with hanging on to the Donbass and the Crimea. Now he made the pivotal error to try to take the whole enchilada. There is no going back on that error. Actually, I want to ask you about that. Japan invades Manchuria in 1931. Hitler invades Poland in 1939. In retrospect, we think of them as part of the same great global conflict, whereas they were separated by eight years. I wonder if you think of Ukraine today as eight years down the line or the things that could come, maybe not as a consequence but at the same time as this, which could lead to another global situation. Do you think that it could cascade into something like that? Of course, yeah. This is the problem with all of this. Of course, it could and there are many people working to prevent this from happening. You see all of these meetings where our leaders are meeting with each other. If you get into some global war with people with nuclear weapons, when the losers decide that rather than losing, they're going to go for one more roll of the die, which is a nuclear weapon. Then the question is whether the people below them will actually implement the order, etc. Think about low probability but high consequence events. I don't know what the probability is, but I know the consequences are huge.…

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