I've been blogging for almost a decade, eight years of which had substantial visitor traffic. Comments have been allowed for about seven of those years.
Still, after so many years of experience I kept pretending that this works:
1st describe a problem
2nd describe an approach for a solution
3rd preventively counter some likely counter-arguments
4th enjoy agreement
I tell you, step #4 looks like a near-total bust when it comes to strictly military topics. (This isn't only about comments made here.)
There are three obvious explanations; one is that I may be wrong in my diagnosis or prescription, in which case one could hope for a logically coherent counter-argument that shatters my case. Frankly, I've hardly ever recognized this, so either I cannot recognize this when I see it or it does hardly ever happen.
A second possibility is that I may simply fail at step #2 or #3, failing to convince due to poor writing or incomplete logic.
The third obvious explanation is that it's naive to think that a more or less logical argument changes minds.
There actually is research on this; psychological experiments of the past fifty years have shown that humans tend to not change minds when faced with evidence contradicting their belief. The original belief is not easily given up. Sometimes, they attack the evidence, its messenger and become more stern in their belief.
This is a very fundamental issue for this blog, since almost everyone already has an opinion on these topics. Some of my blog posts are meant to explicitly challenge widespread and long-held beliefs about historical events et cetera.
I'm largely alone. There's no array of TV stations, newspapers, journals, websites and bloggers pushing into the same direction. This leaves me to be rather unconvincing by default.
In light of years of experience and five decades of psychological research the only conclusion left is that 'activism' milblogging against the stream doesn't work. This blog matured into a format in which I attracted a readership that's interested in military affairs and then exposed it to moderate pacifism. I've been pointing at deterrence & defence against Russia since 2009 at the latest, but even though the attitude is finally mainstream (and the distraction of occupation warfare largely exhausted) I am seemingly the lone voice among milbloggers world wide in calling for not increasing military spending in Europe. That, of course, is another hopeless proposition because everybody seems to have bought into the conventional wisdom that awakening to the only actual justification for substantial military spending in Europe means that one needs to add spending - instead of reallocating it. To reallocate resources would require to give up things that have grown dear, and nobody want to change one's mind, remember?
I would waste my time if I wrote this blog for a moderate pacifist audience. They're already convinced. Websites written for an audience in agreement serve only as echo chambers, news distributors, as support for organising efforts or as nodes for radicalisation. None of this is what I want to do.
S O
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I would say that your blog does give clear, structured thought to those of us who are (moderate) pacifists but lack the experience and ability that you have to coherently work through these problems.
ReplyDeleteI don't think this is always in a echo-chamber fashion. Many of the topics you bring up, I had not previously thought much about.
Please keep up the good work for as long as you can. I'm afraid that nothing that is really worth doing is done on long time frames (especially when compared to what most of us are used to nowdays) So it's unlikely we see the results of our best work. Hope is important.
.+1
DeleteI may have become part of the echo chamber due to your well-reasoned posts, though I certainly wasn't always in agreement when I started reading your blog. Nowadays I often get annoyed with most milblog posts (or worse, articles in the mainstream press) and I notice that my reasoning for my annoyance could easily come out of one of your posts.
DeleteUnfortunately I'm not in a position of power to change anything in our military (so you convinced the wrong person :-p ), but I do hope eventually others will see the value in it and act accordingly. So I agree with Sealgair: please keep up the good work.
Rapid changes of mindset would demand pressure to do so. Military pressure to do so would be peer conflicts. Without them, change is slower than in industry, where constant competition for markets enforces it. You put great effort into this blog and it is enjoyable to read, even if coming out of a different field and often facepalming, when you go pre-gunpowder. Your case could be made with the wars of the gunpowder empires, where certain investments into asymmetric capabilities paid off.
ReplyDeleteThe long years of peace, a lack of urgency and isolation of the military world from the public discourse have created in Europe fossilized institutions in which even high-ranking smart and energic leaders have a hard time to move things.
ReplyDelete"My most surprising discovery: the overwhelming importance in business of an unseen force that we might call 'the institutional imperative.' In business school, I was given no hint of the imperative's existence and I did not intuitively understand it when I entered the business world. I thought then that decent, intelligent, and experienced managers would automatically make rational business decisions. But I learned over time that isn't so. Instead, rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play.
For example: (1) As if governed by Newton's First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction; (2) Just as work expands to fill available time, corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up available funds; (3) Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops; and (4) The behavior of peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated.
Institutional dynamics, not venality or stupidity, set businesses on these courses, which are too often misguided."*
An additional problem for you is that your texts and writings might well influence minds, mostly the younger ones but it is impossible to gauge that impact precisely.
In any case I enjoy your writings.
Firn
*From Warren Buffet
I come back to this blog because I disagree with Sven 40 percent of the time.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy intelligent views I do not share.
But the true force of this blog is the dept.
My only true gripe is the belief in technology, most of it fail at the hands of the military.
one is that I may be wrong in my diagnosis or prescription, in which case one could hope for a logically coherent counter-argument that shatters my case. Frankly, I've hardly ever recognized this, so either I cannot recognize this when I see it
ReplyDeleteAnd here is the explanation for this in your own words:
There actually is research on this; psychological experiments of the past fifty years have shown that humans tend to not change minds when faced with evidence contradicting their belief.
You have a strict political agenda and therefore interpret everything according to your political beliefs (which is not wrong or right). In german it is called Bestätigungsfehler. You interpret every information that it fits in your political personal beliefs. Like the warmongers on the other side - only with a different target and worldview.
I don't think it's that simple. For starters, I do not select what feedback I get.
DeleteI sure am biased once I wrote down an opinion or analysis or offered a proposal, but emphasis of the quote above was really on "logically".
Often times when I receive dissenting feedback (and this is not just about blog comments) I see that certain points I made were simply ignored instead of countered, presumably because the other person simply sticks to his preference.