Nuclear war probabilities are useless - counter to the nuclear gambler’s ruin • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by LeonB » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 3:47 AM UTC

hashimotonomora wrote: post #103

LeonB wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proba…

Regarding the question:

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

I’d talk to a local, because they have knowledge on the topic. They’re a bit like the experts who have spent years in the field here, whose opinions are being dismissed with straw man arguments.

Generally when a non-expert on a topic says “here is a glaringly obvious flaw with an entire field that has been overlooked by everyone working in that field, that I spotted after two minutes of deliberation” - it’s quite a big call. When they then support their argument with primarily straw man arguments and other bad faith tactics, it’s very weak and okay to just ignore it.

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

#122

Post by baxtr » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 6:35 AM UTC

apendleton wrote: post #96

baxtr wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I took it to be: the original author's point was that nuclear attacks are so rare and our sample size so small that we can't use history to predict their occurrence in the future. This commenter is saying the typical way to handle situations like this is to look for more-common events that are proxies for the less-common ones in some predictable way. To give a different example of my own: on an intersection-by-inters…

Thank you, that was helpful

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

#123

Post by raducu » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 7:33 AM UTC

jeremyjh wrote: post #36

raducu wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Napoleon and Hitler were not defeated by Russia. Napoleon/Hitler could have raised 3 more armies if they were fighting just Russia. On the contrary, Putin is the new insane and isolated Hitler.

The Soviets destroyed 3 times as many German divisions as the western front allies combined.

Because the german forces were split and the allies supplied USSR, otherwise the USSR would have collapsed. Without the allied material support and the german forces being split, the USSR would have been deffeated.

It's not something that I would have liked, just the truth.

People claiming Russia to be invulnerable miss the real lesson of those conflicts -- the ballance of power.

The ballance of power is set against Russia right now, if the West remains strong in its unity and resolve, Russia will collapse.

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

#124

Post by baxtr » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 8:53 AM UTC

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…

Do you think it’s possible to model a mad man’s mind with this?

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

#125

Post by dontbeevil1992 » Fri, Mar 04, 2022, 4:29 PM UTC

LeonB wrote: post #118

dontbeevil1992 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

Ok. I think the question that we want to ask from the model is more like: “What is (one minus (What is the chance we have had 0 nuclear wars by year “now plus 70”?)” So if there is a nuclear war in year n+3 (for example) it’s effect on year n+4 is irrelevant as the answer to the question is already “0% chance of no nuclear wars by year 70”. So the angle you’re initially coming from is not quite relevant. We can then…

I'll say it again: I'm not saying that we can use past lack of nuclear war to predict future lack of nuclear war. All I'm saying is that each year's probability is not independent, meaning the model of a probability of no nuclear war which geometrically goes to 0 is not accurate.

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

#126

Post by NiceWayToDoIT » Sun, Mar 06, 2022, 8:39 PM UTC

WJW wrote: post #74

NiceWayToDoIT wrote: post #45

I would say that probability is 100%, having a corrupted system, with corrupted people and madmen, on all sides, it is not question of "will" but rather "when"...

The system being corrupted makes it less likely to have nuclear wars, not more? Idealists are willing to blow up everything for their ideals, people who are only in it for themselves have nothing to gain by destroying the world.

Idealism, nationalism, fascism... are forms of corruption, but in this case there is inherited problem with aristocratic corruption, the one that allows people with lot of money to command most deadliest weapons on the planet. When you think about nowadays leaders and there structures are not very different from mafia bosses behaviors, and I am not talking about Russia only, each super power has the same problem.

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

#127

Post by VincentEvans » Thu, Mar 10, 2022, 11:32 PM UTC

cdelsolar wrote: post #111

klausjensen wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

but Afghanistan under the Taliban is certainly not an allied state of Russia...

I don’t think I would be saying something scandalous and shocking by pointing out that for Russia - enemy of my enemy is… if not a friend, then an associate at the least, and theres nothing that’s seems outside of ethics for Putin’s regime.