I expect there are ways of dealing with Godzilla which are a lot less brittle.
If we have excellent detailed knowledge of Godzilla’s internals and psychology, we know what sort of things will drive Godzilla into a frenzy or slow him down or put him to sleep, we know how to get Godzilla to go in one direction rather than another, if we knew when and how tests on small lizards would generalize to Godzilla… those would all be robustly useful things. If we had all those pieces plus more like them, then it starts to look like a scenario where dealing with Godzilla is basically viable. There’s lots of fallback options, and many opportunities to recover from errors. It’s not a brittle situation which falls apart as soon as something goes wrong.
This seems to contradict what I interpreted as the message of your post; that message being, if someone gives you a “clever” strategy for dealing with Godzilla, the correct response is to just troll them because Godzilla is inherently bad for property values. But what you’re doing now is admitting that if the scheme to control Godzilla is clever in such and such ways, which you specifically warned against, then actually it might not be so brittle.
The key distinction is between clever methods for controlling something one does not understand, vs clever methods for controlling something one does understand. (The post didn’t go into that because it was short rather than thorough, but it did come up elsewhere in the comments.)
I expect there are ways of dealing with Godzilla which are a lot less brittle.
If we have excellent detailed knowledge of Godzilla’s internals and psychology, we know what sort of things will drive Godzilla into a frenzy or slow him down or put him to sleep, we know how to get Godzilla to go in one direction rather than another, if we knew when and how tests on small lizards would generalize to Godzilla… those would all be robustly useful things. If we had all those pieces plus more like them, then it starts to look like a scenario where dealing with Godzilla is basically viable. There’s lots of fallback options, and many opportunities to recover from errors. It’s not a brittle situation which falls apart as soon as something goes wrong.
This seems to contradict what I interpreted as the message of your post; that message being, if someone gives you a “clever” strategy for dealing with Godzilla, the correct response is to just troll them because Godzilla is inherently bad for property values. But what you’re doing now is admitting that if the scheme to control Godzilla is clever in such and such ways, which you specifically warned against, then actually it might not be so brittle.
The key distinction is between clever methods for controlling something one does not understand, vs clever methods for controlling something one does understand. (The post didn’t go into that because it was short rather than thorough, but it did come up elsewhere in the comments.)