The Kay Burley Path to World Peace

Plus: Microsoft goes to (cold) war. Did the West really scuttle a Ukraine peace deal? Is “pro-Israel” anti-Israel? Cosmic Russian thought. AI investment boom. And more!

British Foreign Secretary David Cameron: [The April 13 attack on Israel was] a reckless and dangerous thing for Iran to have done. And I think the whole world can see—all these countries that have somehow wondered, well, you know, what is the true nature of Iran?—It’s there, in black and white. 
British journalist Kay Burley: What would Britain do if a hostile nation flattened one of our consulates? 
Cameron: Well, we would take, uh, you know, we would take, the, very strong action. 
Burley: And Iran would say that that’s what they did.
Cameron: Well, what they did, as I said, was a massive attack…
                                            —Sky News, earlier this week

The New York Times reported this week that when Israeli officials decided to assassinate Iranian generals by bombing Iran’s consulate in Damascus, they figured they didn’t need to consult with the US about the attack since presumably “Iran would not react strongly.” 

Obviously, it’s possible that the Israeli officials who gave this account to the New York Times were lying. When I was a child, and I did something whose predictable consequences enraged my parents, I always told them that I hadn’t imagined such consequences could ensue. And, as the Times reports, US officials, after finding out what Israel had done, were enraged. Officials who in public “voiced support for Israel” also, privately, “expressed anger that it would take such aggressive action against Iran without consulting Washington.”

But if the Israeli officials are telling the truth—if they are as oblivious to Tehran’s calculations as they claim to be—then Kay Burley of Sky News can help! Her exchange with David Cameron, above, offers two valuable lessons about cognitive empathy—about trying to understand the point of view of others in hopes of better predicting their behavior.

One of these lessons is profound and subtle, and the other one seems too obvious to spell out. But since the obvious one may be needed at the highest levels of the Israeli government, let’s spend a moment on it: When you’re wondering how someone else might react to something, start out by asking yourself how you would react in comparable circumstances.

This isn’t guaranteed to work, since you may be very different from the someone else in question. If you were Mahatma Gandhi, for example, and you employed the Kay Burley method, you might conclude, “Iran will react to any violence nonviolently.”

But no one has ever confused Bibi Netanyahu with Mahatma Gandhi. Israel, in its various episodes of military conflict with Palestinians since Hamas took over Gaza in 2007, has always killed at least 10 times as many Palestinians as the number of Israelis killed by Palestinians. In the decade before 2023, the overall death ratio was 19 to 1, and since the beginning of the October 7 attack by Hamas the ratio has been 23 to 1. 

In short: If Israeli leaders employ the Kay Burley method going forward—if they ask what they would do if they were in the shoes of Iran’s leaders—they will be unlikely to egregiously underestimate the magnitude of Iran’s retaliations. 

As for the profound and subtle lesson that emerges from the Burley-Cameron exchange: It may sound forbiddingly technical at first, but it’s of world-saving importance, so bear with me. Here it is: Cognitive empathy is our best weapon against attribution error, and attribution error is the enemy of peace.

If attribution error sounds familiar, that may be because I mentioned it in this newsletter two weeks ago, right after the Israeli strike on Iran’s consulate. I explained the workings of this cognitive bias like this:

We have a tendency to attribute people’s behavior to disposition rather than situation. (“That guy is being rude to the checkout clerk because he’s a jerk, not because he had a bad day.”) But there are two big exceptions to this tendency: (1) If an enemy or rival does something good, we’re inclined to attribute the behavior to situation (rather than acknowledge some essential goodness in them). (2) If a friend or ally does something bad, we’re inclined to attribute the behavior to situation (rather than acknowledge some essential badness in them).

I could have added something that’s relevant to the Burley-Cameron exchange: Our default tendency to attribute behavior to disposition seems to become even stronger when an enemy does something bad. And this dynamic means that, once you’ve defined someone as an enemy, that label is likely to stick. As the social scientist Herbert Kelman once noted, “Attribution mechanisms… promote confirmation of the original enemy image. Hostile actions by the enemy are attributed dispositionally, and thus provide further evidence of the enemy’s inherently aggressive, implacable character.”

This is part of what I mean when I say attribution error is the enemy of peace. Attribution error, working on both sides of an emerging conflict, reinforces the spiral toward deepening enmity and then keeps the enmity deep. 

Cameron is a good example of how this works. He insists that Iran’s attack on Israel represents “the true nature of Iran”—its fundamental disposition. He resists Burley’s attempt to highlight situational factors that encouraged strong Iranian retaliation—her underscoring the fact that the circumstances created by Israel’s consulate strike would have inclined pretty much any leader to retaliate forcefully. And when she gets Cameron to concede a version of this point, his retreat is only tactical; he falls back to the suggestion that there’s a vast moral chasm between the “very strong action” that Britain would have taken if in Iran’s situation and the “massive attack” that Iran launched.

One reason attribution error is such a powerful enemy of peace is that, like all cognitive biases, it works at an unconscious level. And it gets to work early! It infuses our very perceptions with a judgmental coloration that will shape our cognitive processing of them.

To see what I mean, just let your mind wander into enemy territory. Imagine the flag of a country you consider hostile, or the leader of that country, or think about a bitter career rival, or the presidential candidate you’re definitely not voting for in November. Now pay attention to your feelings—maybe you can sense some negative affect, if you really pay attention? Such feelings can steer your thoughts into compliance with attribution error.

Of course, these negative feelings may be justified. Some enemies (like mine, for example) really are bad people! Still, the fact is that your reflexively negative judgments, however solidly grounded, are likely to warp your cognition, making a clear and sober assessment of your enemies harder. And when your enemy is a nation, and your negative feelings are shared by your nation’s leaders and many of its citizens, that can wind up being bad for your nation. Because clear-eyed strategy is good strategy. 

So “cognitive bias” can be a misleading term. At the root of many “cognitive” biases is emotion—affective reactions that shape subsequent cognitive processing. These feelings are often barely detectable, which is one reason cognitive biases can be so hard to fight. 

So, how to fight them? In the past I’ve advocated mindfulness meditation as one approach. But today let’s focus on the Kay Burley method: If you want to combat attribution error, try to remember to ask yourself what you would do if in the shoes of your enemies or rivals. You may (especially if you’re being mindful!) feel yourself resisting this exercise from the get-go. That’s good; being aware of this feeling of resistance is a start, because the resistance is a kind of defense mechanism for the attribution error machinery. If you can break the resistance down, you’re one step closer to accurately exercising cognitive empathy, and thus weakening the machinery.

If you’re feeling up for a little social blowback, you might try this: Ask other people how they would act if they were in the shoes of their enemies. And do this even if—maybe especially if—you agree with them about who the enemies are.

Obviously, you should pick your spots. And you should cease and desist if you see signs that you’re being counterproductively annoying (signs that can materialize with remarkable speed and vividness!).

Maybe you’ll find you’re just not cut out for this kind of work. We can’t all be Kay Burley. But the more of us who are, the better. —RW

This week, the Nonzero podcast recorded one of its more eccentric episodes. The guest was Anatoly Karlin, a Russian futurist and transhumanist and crypto-enthusiast—and also an erstwhile nationalist who accurately predicted the invasion of Ukraine but has now reconsidered the wisdom of both the invasion and of Russian nationalism. We discussed all of the above, plus AI, the "noosphere,” and the changing meaning of eugenics. The episode will air publicly next week, but NZN members get early access to it.

So if you’re not yet a paid NZN subscriber and you feel the urge to listen to this cosmic-yet-earthy conversation right now (including the 43-minute Overtime segment, which will remain exclusive to members even after the episode goes public) we encourage you to muster no self-discipline whatsoever. Surrender to the urge and join the club…

There have long been signs that artificial intelligence will play a big role in Cold War II, and this week brought an especially clear one. Microsoft will invest $1.5 billion in the United Arab Emirates-based AI firm G42—and the deal, according to the New York Times, was “largely orchestrated by the Biden administration to box out China as Washington and Beijing battle over who will exercise technological influence in the Persian Gulf region and beyond.” 

As part of a heretofore secret pact negotiated with the US government, G42 has agreed to jettison Chinese technology and partnerships, Bloomberg reports. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said, “When it comes to emerging technology, you cannot be both in China’s camp and our camp.”

Microsoft itself, actually, retains a big presence in China—much bigger than Google’s or Meta’s. But it is already coming under pressure to get in step with the times by scaling back its China engagement. Maybe it can fine tune one of its marketing slogans—“Empowering Us All”—to something more like “Empowering Half of Us.”

This week in Foreign Affairs two scholars do as thorough a job as anyone has done of answering an intensely debated question: Did the US and other western powers derail a peace deal that could have ended the Ukraine war only weeks after Russia’s invasion?

The answer is: Well, kind of, but it’s complicated…  

In exploring the Russia-Ukraine peace talks that started within days of Putin’s February 2022 invasion, Samuel Charap of the RAND Corporation and Sergey Radchenko of Johns Hopkins examined draft agreements, interviewed negotiators and western officials, and reviewed public evidence. This allowed them to, for starters, confirm the “extraordinary” fact that “in the midst of Moscow’s unprecedented aggression, the Russians and the Ukrainians almost finalized an agreement that would have ended the war and provided Ukraine with multilateral security guarantees, paving the way to its permanent neutrality and, down the road, its membership in the EU.”