Comments on a speech by Romney

[ 4/March/22 ]

There is a lot of truth in what Romney says, and there is a lot of other factors also.

Lex Fridman’s interview with Nicole Perlroth: Cybersecurity and the Weapons of Cyberwar is particularly relevant where she is talking about how the hacker community in Argentina views the USA. That too is a truth.

The US military and foreign policy tends to be a very blunt instrument that can and does do a lot of damage that tends to be in the interests of very small groups.

And I do get how any discussion of such extremely complex subjects is difficult, particularly when there are few shared sets of assumptions and values.

I share Romney’s values of freedom and security, yet I do so from the perspective of evolutionary systems and from a global rather than a USA perspective, and from an acknowledgement of that deep strategic context that it demands cooperation for survival – at every level of complexity, and that same context is clear in the logic that competition is only survivable if it is firmly based in cooperation. Any level of all out competition is logically, necessarily, destructive of freedom, security and complexity. And at our current levels of technology, that does pose existential level risk for our species, and many other life forms.

For me, that logic clearly demands fundamental reform of economic and political systems; and Romney’s charge of vigilance is absolutely required from everyone at every step and level of such reforms – so nothing simple there either.

And I do not have hard TRUTH, all I really have in any domain is some degree of confidence derived from some balance of probabilities that acknowledge the presence of fundamental uncertainties. It seems to me that anything stronger than that is necessarily blind to its own shortcomings, and poses serious risks as a consequence; and I can acknowledge that sometimes the lack of time available to make decisions demands that we simplify the complexities present (and sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t – and that is the bit few like to acknowledge).