Has there been cold war scenarios where either side should have launched a hot nuclear war ? Does the country launching the nuclear war actually win or do they die also in your scenario?
Do you know of a modern world example of mass suicide attacks? That would be similar to your reference class. Isis? Problem there is the leaders of isis didn’t strap bombs to themselves at the start of the war, which is the case for a nuclear exchange.
Suicide doesn’t have as long of a survival timeline as just letting another superpower win or an AI win. Suicide means the country launching the attack and it’s allies die in 24 hours, a country breaking AI treaties might not win for years. (Implicit assumption: only superpowers with large nuclear arsenals would break the treaty)
So the expected value of launching the nuclear war isn’t as good as bluffing and not carrying out the attack. Right? What do you disagree with on?
Do you dispute that launching a nuclear war against a country with loaded ICBMs will result in those missiles headed for your most valuable assets?
Do you dispute that most of your population will be dead or dying as soon as the missiles hit?
Do you dispute that if you hold fire, and the worst case scenario happens, it will take months to years for an AI to actually kill everyone?
Are you thinking of S risks, where death is preferable to eternal torture?
I think all these claims are incorrect.
First, estimates of damage from nukes are very likely to be hugely (and intentionally) overblown, the same way as pre-WWII estimates for strategic bombing were off by an order of magnitude.
Second, even ignoring that, current arsenals (only warheads deployed on ICBMs, other are irrelevant in this scenario) are not sufficient for counter-population strike. Destroying large cities does not destroy the nation.
Third and most importantly, leadership ordering the first strike will surely survive! They just move to some remote location before, and then claim that the other side attacked first.
Quick fact check: atomic scientists cites this paper which claims 360 million deaths between Russia and the USA. That’s 75% of the current population. This pattern of unacceptable losses goes back, this source says 274 million dead in 1964, the USSR + USA population at that time was 417 million. So 65% in 1964.
You are correct that technically 25% of the population survive, and the prewar leadership could try to have their friends and family hide and they might survive.
Keep in mind that the distribution of losses won’t be even. A powerful nation requires a huge pool of specialists with unique skills that not everyone is trained in. Disproportionately more specialists will be killed, especially engineers and technicians and soldiers and so on. The survivors will likely miss skillsets and obviously all the distribution system to even allow prewar populations to exist is gone, so the survivors will likely be forced to flee to subsist as refugees in neighboring countries.
This outcome is the complete destruction of the military and economic power of the nation—even if everyone isn’t dead, there is going to be essentially no GDP and no means to resist outsiders doing whatever they want. That sounds like national suicide to me, what do you think?
Note also in a scenario of increasing tensions over AI, all the parties would be scaling their nuclear arsenals and preparing measures to continue to fight until the other party is annihilated. This would mean more deployed warheads probably on more forms of delivery vehicle that arms limitation treaties currently restrict. (like stealth cruise missiles)
Again, that some estimates are given in papers doesn’t mean they are even roughly correct. But if they are—then no, that scenario is not suicide. There are some nations now which have lower GDP per capita than USA had two centuries ago.
As for defense—well, that definitely wouldn’t be a problem. Who and why will be willing to invade a big and very poor country, leaders of which claim they still have some nukes in reserve?
Nuclear exchanges won’t end the world, but they will make the nations that started them forever irrelevant. If the top 100 major cities in the U.S. were wiped out, the U.S. would become the next Roman Empire for all sakes and purposes, an echo of the past. That represents an immense loss in GDP and a complete destruction of the economy.
Also you can’t have it both ways,
Either a nuclear exchange is deadly and a reason to abide a treaty (and suicidal enough that leaders won’t actually do it) or it’s not and people won’t abide by it.
The first claim is true—but ruling a third world nation is still better than being dead and ruling nothing. If the leadership has Eliezer-level conviction that AI would kill everybody, then the choice is clear.
The second isn’t—destroying the ability to build AI is much easier, so the reason for abiding the treaty is not “we all die” but rather “we become much poorer and don’t get the AI anyway”.
I was trying to establish where we disagree and if the disagreement can be resolved by citing facts.
Could you help me by showing in quotes where you believe I “rambled”. I see each argument building on the next, can you show me how it rambles?
Here’s an outline:
Nuclear war is suicide
Suicide for national leaders hasn’t been practiced as a warfare strategy
Expected value of nuclear war is worse than dying to AI
Do you believe a nuclear war is suicide?
Are you thinking of S risks?
Update: I thought of a new one. Are you thinking government leaders will kill their nation and themselves altruistically? Since if they die, and the superpower building ai dies, other countries live and just have to deal with nuclear winter and fallout which is probably survivable. While the AI might kill everyone.
The game theoretic outcome, in the unlikely case where one nation is hellbent on achieving a breakout of a major arms treaty in modern conditions with thousands of WMDs stockpiled, is not something you even touched on in the parent.
I’m not sure how adding on to a historical parent example and extrapolating to the world of 2023 counts as ‘disagreement’.
If you disagree with the extrapolation in the child comment then you need to write down why before asking further questions.
Hence why asking dozens of questions right off the bat, when it’s unclear what you were disagreeing about, makes no sense.
So today we have Russia violating international law openly, China running concentration camps, and the US contributing to climate change without any serious intent to stop. Oh and the West seems to be in a proxy war with Russia and Iran with Israel.
This doesn’t look like a world of multiple parties afraid to offend the other, knowing it will be nuclear war if they don’t.
Can you point to examples that support your general idea that the world is closer to a world government and moving away from sovereign powers that compete and do what they want? I am not a geopolitical expert, I picked history because it seems to show a stable long term trend over decades. Or succinctly, “the outcome was X over N years, why would it change to Y?”
My disagreement is that I think history will repeat and nuclear threats will be dismissed. I think any AI treaties will be worked around like in the past and it will be a competition until the end.
I think the current events show that is what is happening today, with increasing competition that will lead to AI races.
This doesn’t look like a world of multiple parties afraid to offend the other, knowing it will be nuclear war if they don’t.
How does ‘look like’ relate to the actual views and decision making of the leadership of any country?
People can talk one way and walk the other way. And you don’t exactly seem like someone who has the inside scoop in major world capitals so even the talk you’ve heard is likely several steps removed.
So to summarize, you believe that the parties have or will reach secret international agreements with each other and will not compete over AI like in past international arms races? Has something changed in the world to make this happen now but not then? Like better communications tech?
Does any published evidence exist to support your belief or is it all secret?
So to summarize, you believe that the parties have or will reach secret international agreements with each other and will not compete over AI like in past international arms races?
What is being ‘summarized’?
I don’t think I’ve expressed such a belief in the previous comments?
This is the belief I gathered from your most recent reply, where you said:
How does ‘look like’ relate to the actual views and decision making of the leadership of any country?
People can talk one way and walk the other way. And you don’t exactly seem like someone who has the inside scoop in major world capitals so even the talk you’ve heard is likely several steps removed.
Ergo I believe you are saying I cannot use historical evidence, since it is 2023, and I can’t use “the superpowers are openly committing violations of international law and Russia and the USA are in a proxy war” as evidence since I don’t know what world leaders say to each other privately.
I’m not seeking out a further dialogue, just the actual arguments/reasoning/etc. behind your first reply, so that I can evaluate whether any of this has a logical basis.
Frankly, as of right now there’s almost nothing for me to base a decision upon since it’s been a pretty one-sided back and forth.
The “actual argument” is that MAD has existed since the 1960s, so about 65 years, and the United States/Soviet Union/China have done whatever they want except invade each other. Including many things another side hates. “Don’t do X or I will nuke” has not been an effective threat.
The most recent round of this was 2022, when Russia has threatened to use nuclear weapons many times and it has not been an effective threat.
On 21 September, while announcing a partial mobilization of conscripts, Putin said that Russia “will use all the means at our disposal” – widely interpreted as a threat to use nuclear weapons – in order to defend the country’s territory.[10] He warned that his threat was “not a bluff”, baselessly accused NATO of “nuclear blackmail” and of threatening to use nuclear weapons against Russia, and said Russia’s nuclear weapons were more advanced than NATO’s.[11][12] Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov did not rule out the use of nuclear weapons to defend annexed Ukrainian territories.[13] Several days later, former Russian president and Putin ally Dmitry Medvedev made a more explicit threat of a nuclear strike against Ukraine.[14]
I feel like we’re going in circles, so I will just lay it out step by step and you can determine where your getting stuck:
What leaders talk about in public is not identical to what they talk about in private
and even that is not identical to their actual views.
And even their actual views are not identical with their real world decisions. Because they are constrained by hundreds or thousands of actors in a complex system.
Unless you have some super special knowledge you can’t even complete link 1 of this chain.
Therefore this line of argumentation cannot be developed, limiting anyone to just guessing the inferential gaps.
We can of course make an unlimited number of guesses, but since we can’t outweigh each other, this line of discussion wouldn’t be able to lead anywhere.
I doubt that would still hold for the modern world.
The moment one great power detects another is violating such an important, binding, ratified, arms treaty in a way that can’t be explained away as happenstance, they would very quickly launch a hot nuclear war.
I don’t see where the private communications is relevant here to your claim. Your claim is brittle in that only one example is needed to falsify it, which the above example seems to do.
I realized it was pointless to argue if a public nuclear threat was ‘real’ or empty, since no one can know that until 20+ years from now, and then you would argue that it’s ancient history. So i went back to the root argument and falsified it. In some of my prior edits I have been trying to explain you’ve made a really fragile claim fundamentally. That the whole idea of needing “equal evidence” is only true if both claims are equally probable.
For example, “coin will come up A” and “coin will resolve B” have near equal probability. “UFOs are real” and “UFOs are not real” do not.
Given a prior of “no nuclear war for 65 years”, “a nuclear war will start on the first treaty violation” is similar to the UFO claim in that it is not probable.
So i went back to the root argument and falsified it, which ends the discussion.
What ‘root argument’? And to end the discussion, just leaving this deep comment chain suffices, no need for theatrics.
The first few times I could overlook some oddities, but now my patience is exhausted so I’m putting my foot down and insist you not jump around all over the place.
It at best appears like a bizarre thinking process and at worst as someone side-stepping whatever is inconvenient to them.
The past few especially seem to me like dodging the actual substance.
Has there been cold war scenarios where either side should have launched a hot nuclear war ? Does the country launching the nuclear war actually win or do they die also in your scenario?
Do you know of a modern world example of mass suicide attacks? That would be similar to your reference class. Isis? Problem there is the leaders of isis didn’t strap bombs to themselves at the start of the war, which is the case for a nuclear exchange.
Suicide doesn’t have as long of a survival timeline as just letting another superpower win or an AI win. Suicide means the country launching the attack and it’s allies die in 24 hours, a country breaking AI treaties might not win for years. (Implicit assumption: only superpowers with large nuclear arsenals would break the treaty)
So the expected value of launching the nuclear war isn’t as good as bluffing and not carrying out the attack. Right? What do you disagree with on?
Do you dispute that launching a nuclear war against a country with loaded ICBMs will result in those missiles headed for your most valuable assets?
Do you dispute that most of your population will be dead or dying as soon as the missiles hit?
Do you dispute that if you hold fire, and the worst case scenario happens, it will take months to years for an AI to actually kill everyone?
Are you thinking of S risks, where death is preferable to eternal torture?
I think all these claims are incorrect. First, estimates of damage from nukes are very likely to be hugely (and intentionally) overblown, the same way as pre-WWII estimates for strategic bombing were off by an order of magnitude. Second, even ignoring that, current arsenals (only warheads deployed on ICBMs, other are irrelevant in this scenario) are not sufficient for counter-population strike. Destroying large cities does not destroy the nation. Third and most importantly, leadership ordering the first strike will surely survive! They just move to some remote location before, and then claim that the other side attacked first.
Quick fact check: atomic scientists cites this paper which claims 360 million deaths between Russia and the USA. That’s 75% of the current population. This pattern of unacceptable losses goes back, this source says 274 million dead in 1964, the USSR + USA population at that time was 417 million. So 65% in 1964.
You are correct that technically 25% of the population survive, and the prewar leadership could try to have their friends and family hide and they might survive.
Keep in mind that the distribution of losses won’t be even. A powerful nation requires a huge pool of specialists with unique skills that not everyone is trained in. Disproportionately more specialists will be killed, especially engineers and technicians and soldiers and so on. The survivors will likely miss skillsets and obviously all the distribution system to even allow prewar populations to exist is gone, so the survivors will likely be forced to flee to subsist as refugees in neighboring countries.
This outcome is the complete destruction of the military and economic power of the nation—even if everyone isn’t dead, there is going to be essentially no GDP and no means to resist outsiders doing whatever they want. That sounds like national suicide to me, what do you think?
Note also in a scenario of increasing tensions over AI, all the parties would be scaling their nuclear arsenals and preparing measures to continue to fight until the other party is annihilated. This would mean more deployed warheads probably on more forms of delivery vehicle that arms limitation treaties currently restrict. (like stealth cruise missiles)
Again, that some estimates are given in papers doesn’t mean they are even roughly correct. But if they are—then no, that scenario is not suicide. There are some nations now which have lower GDP per capita than USA had two centuries ago.
As for defense—well, that definitely wouldn’t be a problem. Who and why will be willing to invade a big and very poor country, leaders of which claim they still have some nukes in reserve?
Nuclear exchanges won’t end the world, but they will make the nations that started them forever irrelevant. If the top 100 major cities in the U.S. were wiped out, the U.S. would become the next Roman Empire for all sakes and purposes, an echo of the past. That represents an immense loss in GDP and a complete destruction of the economy.
Also you can’t have it both ways,
Either a nuclear exchange is deadly and a reason to abide a treaty (and suicidal enough that leaders won’t actually do it) or it’s not and people won’t abide by it.
The first claim is true—but ruling a third world nation is still better than being dead and ruling nothing. If the leadership has Eliezer-level conviction that AI would kill everybody, then the choice is clear. The second isn’t—destroying the ability to build AI is much easier, so the reason for abiding the treaty is not “we all die” but rather “we become much poorer and don’t get the AI anyway”.
Did you skip over reading some part of the comment? Or do some parts seem confusing?
If you read and understood all of it, then writing down dozens of rambling questions doesn’t seem to make sense.
A suicidal nuclear war seems highly improbable.
I was trying to establish where we disagree and if the disagreement can be resolved by citing facts.
Could you help me by showing in quotes where you believe I “rambled”. I see each argument building on the next, can you show me how it rambles?
Here’s an outline:
Nuclear war is suicide
Suicide for national leaders hasn’t been practiced as a warfare strategy
Expected value of nuclear war is worse than dying to AI
Do you believe a nuclear war is suicide?
Are you thinking of S risks?
Update: I thought of a new one. Are you thinking government leaders will kill their nation and themselves altruistically? Since if they die, and the superpower building ai dies, other countries live and just have to deal with nuclear winter and fallout which is probably survivable. While the AI might kill everyone.
I don’t disagree?
The game theoretic outcome, in the unlikely case where one nation is hellbent on achieving a breakout of a major arms treaty in modern conditions with thousands of WMDs stockpiled, is not something you even touched on in the parent.
I’m not sure how adding on to a historical parent example and extrapolating to the world of 2023 counts as ‘disagreement’.
If you disagree with the extrapolation in the child comment then you need to write down why before asking further questions.
Hence why asking dozens of questions right off the bat, when it’s unclear what you were disagreeing about, makes no sense.
So today we have Russia violating international law openly, China running concentration camps, and the US contributing to climate change without any serious intent to stop. Oh and the West seems to be in a proxy war with Russia and Iran with Israel. This doesn’t look like a world of multiple parties afraid to offend the other, knowing it will be nuclear war if they don’t.
Can you point to examples that support your general idea that the world is closer to a world government and moving away from sovereign powers that compete and do what they want? I am not a geopolitical expert, I picked history because it seems to show a stable long term trend over decades. Or succinctly, “the outcome was X over N years, why would it change to Y?”
My disagreement is that I think history will repeat and nuclear threats will be dismissed. I think any AI treaties will be worked around like in the past and it will be a competition until the end.
I think the current events show that is what is happening today, with increasing competition that will lead to AI races.
How does ‘look like’ relate to the actual views and decision making of the leadership of any country?
People can talk one way and walk the other way. And you don’t exactly seem like someone who has the inside scoop in major world capitals so even the talk you’ve heard is likely several steps removed.
So to summarize, you believe that the parties have or will reach secret international agreements with each other and will not compete over AI like in past international arms races? Has something changed in the world to make this happen now but not then? Like better communications tech?
Does any published evidence exist to support your belief or is it all secret?
What is being ‘summarized’?
I don’t think I’ve expressed such a belief in the previous comments?
This is the belief I gathered from your most recent reply, where you said:
Ergo I believe you are saying I cannot use historical evidence, since it is 2023, and I can’t use “the superpowers are openly committing violations of international law and Russia and the USA are in a proxy war” as evidence since I don’t know what world leaders say to each other privately.
Ergo, based on what reasoning?
Can you actually lay out the argument, step by step, in writing?
I would be open to a dialogue if you want to discuss this further.
I’m not seeking out a further dialogue, just the actual arguments/reasoning/etc. behind your first reply, so that I can evaluate whether any of this has a logical basis.
Frankly, as of right now there’s almost nothing for me to base a decision upon since it’s been a pretty one-sided back and forth.
The “actual argument” is that MAD has existed since the 1960s, so about 65 years, and the United States/Soviet Union/China have done whatever they want except invade each other. Including many things another side hates. “Don’t do X or I will nuke” has not been an effective threat.
The most recent round of this was 2022, when Russia has threatened to use nuclear weapons many times and it has not been an effective threat.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_risk_during_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
A threat over AI is another empty threat for game theoretic reasons which you can read up thread.
How do you even know that has been threatened, by the actual leadership of any country, for whatever you believe ‘X’ to include?
To be entirely clear and direct, you are still not writing down actual arguments, just your opinions and guesses on world affairs.
From the linked article:
I feel like we’re going in circles, so I will just lay it out step by step and you can determine where your getting stuck:
What leaders talk about in public is not identical to what they talk about in private
and even that is not identical to their actual views.
And even their actual views are not identical with their real world decisions. Because they are constrained by hundreds or thousands of actors in a complex system.
Unless you have some super special knowledge you can’t even complete link 1 of this chain.
Therefore this line of argumentation cannot be developed, limiting anyone to just guessing the inferential gaps.
We can of course make an unlimited number of guesses, but since we can’t outweigh each other, this line of discussion wouldn’t be able to lead anywhere.
You said :
https://www.state.gov/u-s-countermeasures-in-response-to-russias-violations-of-the-new-start-treaty/
I don’t see where the private communications is relevant here to your claim. Your claim is brittle in that only one example is needed to falsify it, which the above example seems to do.
Huh?
This comment is showing, on my screen, as a reply to my comment here.
Which was a response to your comment here.
This is worded as if it was intended as a reply for something else. What relation does it have to the previous two comments?
I realized it was pointless to argue if a public nuclear threat was ‘real’ or empty, since no one can know that until 20+ years from now, and then you would argue that it’s ancient history. So i went back to the root argument and falsified it. In some of my prior edits I have been trying to explain you’ve made a really fragile claim fundamentally. That the whole idea of needing “equal evidence” is only true if both claims are equally probable.
For example, “coin will come up A” and “coin will resolve B” have near equal probability. “UFOs are real” and “UFOs are not real” do not.
Given a prior of “no nuclear war for 65 years”, “a nuclear war will start on the first treaty violation” is similar to the UFO claim in that it is not probable.
What ‘root argument’? And to end the discussion, just leaving this deep comment chain suffices, no need for theatrics.
The first few times I could overlook some oddities, but now my patience is exhausted so I’m putting my foot down and insist you not jump around all over the place.
It at best appears like a bizarre thinking process and at worst as someone side-stepping whatever is inconvenient to them.
The past few especially seem to me like dodging the actual substance.