[avaika]

> he was under orders to shoot the plane down and now they’re trying to cover it up

I highly doubt that's the case. Even though Russia went full evil mode a while ago, it's not that reckless (yet). I don't foresee any sane explanation for this kind of order. I believe a mistake and/or miscommunication is more likely to be the root cause. Sadly it'd be quite naive to expect a thorough publicly available investigation summary from Russian side. You are right here.

[tucnak]

> I don't foresee any sane explanation for this kind of order.

The "malice/incompetence" heuristic is really a statement about prior probability more than anything. Even though it may seem as "cautious," or avoiding uncertainty, not updating your priors is doing exactly the opposite! You _should_ assume malice as long as russia is concerned, and it's otherwise up to them to prove incompetence. However, like you would probably guess, it's in their best interest to introduce as much uncertainty as possible. On a different note, there's interesting discourse in iterated prisoner's dilemma regarding _noise_, or communication error. It recognises that any "real" systems is imperfect, and therefore will introduce error. I wonder if they ever recognised that there's advantage to deliberately introducing noise, and falsely attributing it to the system itself!