Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nuclear war probabilities are useless - counter to the nuclear gambler’s ruin

unfashionable.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 127 posts

Re: Nuclear war probabilities are useless - counter to the nuclear gambler’s ruin

#101

Post by awb »

baxtr wrote: post #90
LeonB wrote: post #58

In safety we try to prevent rare events (such as death) and these are rare enough that “past deaths” are not a useful way to predict the likelihood of a death. A crucial metric that occurs more more often and does help predict deaths is “HPI” - high potential incident. A worker eight metres in the air dropped a spanner. It thudded on the ground, harmlessly. No one was hurt. No problem, right? That’s a HPI. A workplac…

I am not sure if I understand what the point is you’re trying to make

The author was saying we don’t have enough data to make a prediction. OC is saying we do have enough data to make reasonable assumptions if you look at high risk situations (which can reasonably be assumed to be a prerequisite to an actual disaster like death or nuclear war).

For example, take two people who have never been in a car accident. Driver A gets a speeding ticket a year and a DUI every 3 years. Driver B has never had a violation. It’s reasonable to assume that Driver A is at higher risk of a future accident. We don’t have to only look at the 0 accidents data point, we can look at factors that are typically common in accidents like speed and alcohol.

Re: Nuclear war probabilities are useless - counter to the nuclear gambler’s ruin

#102

Post by klausjensen »

cdelsolar wrote: post #73
VincentEvans wrote: post #69

Every day I wonder if what is happening in Ukraine right now - will turn out to be another invasion of Czechoslovakia 2022 edition written in history books as a missed opportunity to turn the tide as the world watched paralyzed by Putin’s nuclear rattle. Legitimate concern, yes, but here’s the food for thought and mark my words - it is inevitable that very soon Russia’s rhetoric will turn to “economic sanctions are i…

what is Talibistan?

I believe the author refers to Afghanistan under the rule of Taliban...

Re: Nuclear war probabilities are useless - counter to the nuclear gambler’s ruin

#103

Post by hashimotonomora »

LeonB wrote: post #75
hashimotonomora wrote: post #53

What is an ensemble probability of something that has never occurred and is essentially impossible to model? Have you seen all infinite alternate universes? Probability does not make sense. Compare the following: What is the probability that you will die today? What is the probability that you will die today given that you belong to the category of people with A_i characteristics and whose ensemble probability of dyi…

The insurance industry does a pretty good job of “what is the probability that you will die in the next billable period” - but they would never reduce the bet to “what is the probability that you will die today ?” You say it’s “essentially impossible to model” something that hasn’t occurred before. Nations have engaged in a lot of wars. Nations have engaged in a lot of wars they could not possibly win. People have co…

If you are lost in a city would you rather have the wrong map or no map at all?

The person that has the wrong map and thinks that it’s the right map is the one that’s naive.

Regarding insurance companies, you are conflating ensemble probabilities with time probabilities. Insurance companies can estimate the ensemble probability of an event in a group of agents which belong to a certain category and not the time probability of said event on a single agent.

Re: Nuclear war probabilities are useless - counter to the nuclear gambler’s ruin

#104

Post by retrac »

Qem wrote: post #94
yabones wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's two particular incidents that are great examples of this. The '83 false alarm [1], and the 1980 missile silo explosion [2]. In both cases, they were razor-thin near misses. If either accident happened even once more, we absolutely would have either a radiological disaster or accidental nuclear war. It's this sort of thing that makes me think maybe we shouldn't have any nuclear technology at all, the risks are…

I wonder what if the Chelyabinsk meteor had fallen now, instead of some years ago. Could it have been mistaken for a nuke and triggered a "counterstrike"?

Given the universe's tasteless sense of comedic timing, I wouldn't be too surprised if a Tunguska-scale meteor lands right on DC, Moscow or Beijing at exactly the wrong time during an international crisis.

Still, in principle, the Russians and Americans, and I believe the Chinese, have satellites that detect the distinctive radiation burst from a nuclear explosion. (There's a detector on each GPS satellite.) So it /should/ fail to pass some of the automatic and manual thresholds before we're off to press the button. But in a tense situation, ambiguous data... one does worry a bit. There's been ambiguity with the detectors before. (Was there, or wasn't there, a nuclear explosion in the south Indian ocean in 1979? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_incident )

Re: Nuclear war probabilities are useless - counter to the nuclear gambler’s ruin

#105

Post by Barrin92 »

John Kay wrote a good book about this called Radical Uncertainty. It's annoying that there is an increasing tendency to frame what is a purely narrative statement in quantitative terms.

As the author points out war is not historically predetermined, at least in any way we could convincingly figure out, and pulling numbers out of thin air only serves the purpose of trying to talk about the future with less uncertainty than is appropriate.

Talking about events in terms of probabilities should be reserved for events that are not dominated by 'unknown unknowns'. You can attach a probability to a volcano outbreak, a transaction in an ordinary functioning market, a game of blackjack. That is to say 'small worlds' where outcomes are known, rules well defined and inputs quantified. You can't predict the overthrow a government in 5 years in numerical terms. That doesn't mean you can't talk about it. It's okay to say something is unlikely or very likely, but it makes more sense to explicitly talk about these things in qualitative terms rather than trying to be 'mathy' to make a prediction appear more objective than it is.

Re: Nuclear war probabilities are useless - counter to the nuclear gambler’s ruin

#106

Post by VincentEvans »

klausjensen wrote: post #102
cdelsolar wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is Talibistan?

I believe the author refers to Afghanistan under the rule of Taliban...

Yeah, I started typing it out, but then took the shortcut figuring people will get that from the context.

Re: Nuclear war probabilities are useless - counter to the nuclear gambler’s ruin

#107

Post by dontbeevil1992 »

LeonB wrote: post #64
dontbeevil1992 wrote: post #22

Another issue with this logic is that the probabilities are not independent. Saying that you have probability x of nuclear war every year and so probability (1-x)^n of no nuclear war in n years assumes independence. In fact, if you don't have nuclear war on year 1, I would assume that the reasons for that lead to inferences and correlations that would affect the probability of nuclear war on year 2, possibly making i…

No, that’s not quite right. Measuring “did we have a nuclear war?” is not the input you’d ever want to use there, it’s only one binary digit of information. Instead take info like “did we have events/incidents with a high potential of nuclear war?” If three “Cuban missile crisis” level events happened in year X, then the probability of nuclear war in year x+1 is higher than it was in other years — even though nuclear…

I might not have said this clearly enough - I'm not saying that conditioning on "did we have a nuclear war" will change the probability to be less. I'm saying that the event "did we have a nuclear war in year n" is not independent from "did we have a nuclear war in year n+1" "n+2", ... because there are shared factors influencing them. Therefore the model of independent probabilities multiplying year over year and seeming to imply that nuclear war is inevitable because (1-p)^n goes to 0 as n grows doesn't make sense mathematically speaking.

Re: Nuclear war probabilities are useless - counter to the nuclear gambler’s ruin

#108

Post by randomjoe2 »

LeonB wrote: post #58

In safety we try to prevent rare events (such as death) and these are rare enough that “past deaths” are not a useful way to predict the likelihood of a death. A crucial metric that occurs more more often and does help predict deaths is “HPI” - high potential incident. A worker eight metres in the air dropped a spanner. It thudded on the ground, harmlessly. No one was hurt. No problem, right? That’s a HPI. A workplac…

Amazing way to think about HPIs, thanks for the introduction of this concept.

Re: Nuclear war probabilities are useless - counter to the nuclear gambler’s ruin

#109

Post by ajnin »

This makes very little sense to me. Nuclear war is not a random event that might happen at any given point with some probability P. It is a decision that is made based on an evolving situation, there are not independent random event you can apply high school math to.

Also an event being rare does not mean that it is unlikely. For example a 29th of February is a rare event, if you were to think about it in terms of probabilities, there is about 0.07% of chance for it to occur on any given day. So you would conclude that there is about 1-(1-.0007)^(2*365)=40% chance to occur within 2 years. But it is obviously absurd to think this way, since the next 29th of February will happen in 2024, in less than 2 years, the probability is 100%.

Re: Nuclear war probabilities are useless - counter to the nuclear gambler’s ruin

#110

Post by [deleted] »

panax wrote: post #83
yabones wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's two particular incidents that are great examples of this. The '83 false alarm [1], and the 1980 missile silo explosion [2]. In both cases, they were razor-thin near misses. If either accident happened even once more, we absolutely would have either a radiological disaster or accidental nuclear war. It's this sort of thing that makes me think maybe we shouldn't have any nuclear technology at all, the risks are…

I think nuclear energy is mostly orthogonal to nuclear weapons. We should pursue more nuclear energy and seek to eliminate nuclear weapons.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN