Thanks for writing this up! I think having more well-researched and well-written dives into things like this are great
A bunch of scattered thoughts and replies to these:
Overall I agree with the central idea (Nuclear War is unlikely to cause human extinction), but I disagree enough with the reasoning to want to hammer it into better shape.
Writing this I feel like in a “editing/constructive feedback” mood, but I’d welcome you to throw it all out if its not what you’re going for. To the feedback!
This seems to only consider current known nuclear weapons arsenals. It seems worth including probabilities that different kinds of weapons are built before such a war. In particular, longer-lived species of bombs (e.g. salt bombs, cobalt bombs, etc)
I think I want to separate “kill everyone with acute radiation right away” and “kill everyone with radiation in all of the food/water”, and the latter seems less addressed by the energy/half life argument. I think the weapon design space here is pretty huge, so ruling these out seems hard to me. (Though I do think if we’re assigning probabilities, they should get lower probabilities than conventional weapons)
In general I would prefer approximate numbers or at least likelihood ratios for what you think this evidence balances out to, and what likelihood of odds you would put on different outcomes.
(For example: “what is the likelihood ratio of the 3.C evidence that nuclear war planners are familiar with ideas like nuclear winter”—I don’t think these are strictly required, but they really help me contextualize and integrate this information)
In particular, Toby Ord gives a bunch of excellent quantitative analysis of X-risks, including nuclear war risk, in The Precipice.
(In fact, if your main point of the post was to present a different model from that one, adding numbers would greatly help in comparing and contrasting and integrating them)
Finally, I think my mental models of case 3) are basically the same as any event that is a significant change to the biosphere—and it seems reasoning about this gets harder given your premise.
A hypothetical: if there are 3 major climate events in the next 100 years (of which one is a bellicose nuclear exchange), and humanity goes extinct due to climate related symptoms, does the nuclear war “cause” the human extinction in a way you’re trying to capture?
Maybe what I want is for the premise to be more precise: define a time limit (extinct within X years) and maybe factor what it means to “cause” (for example, it seems like this suggests that an economic collapse triggered by an nuclear war, which triggers other things, that eventually leads to extinction, is not as clearly “caused by nuclear war”)
Also maybe define a bit what “full-scale” means? I assume that it means total war (as opposed to limited war), but good to clear up in any case.
That’s all that came to mind for now. Thanks again for sharing!~
Thanks Alex! Yeah, I agree with you that adding approximate numbers or likelihood ratios would improve this, as would comparing my credences with Toby Ord’s. I might do a followup post with some of this if I get time. Originally I was going to find a co-author and go in more depth on some of these things, especially the nuclear winter literature, but I keep starting and not finishing posts and I figured it was finally time to just put up what I had.
It would be good to separate “kill everyone with acute radiation right away” and “kill everyone with radiation in all of the food/water”. I discussed risk of the first one and basically didn’t at all cover risk of the second one, but I’d like to see a better assessment of the second. I’ve never found good sources for these kinds of long term effects of radiation from food and water after a nuclear war, despite spending probably 4-8 hours searching. On Thermonuclear War discusses this in depth but it’s very out of date (1960), and I haven’t found anything like a comprehensive analysis of this anywhere else. Lots of speculation here and there but nothing that looks rigorous.
Thanks for writing this up! I think having more well-researched and well-written dives into things like this are great
A bunch of scattered thoughts and replies to these:
Overall I agree with the central idea (Nuclear War is unlikely to cause human extinction), but I disagree enough with the reasoning to want to hammer it into better shape.
Writing this I feel like in a “editing/constructive feedback” mood, but I’d welcome you to throw it all out if its not what you’re going for. To the feedback!
This seems to only consider current known nuclear weapons arsenals. It seems worth including probabilities that different kinds of weapons are built before such a war. In particular, longer-lived species of bombs (e.g. salt bombs, cobalt bombs, etc)
I think I want to separate “kill everyone with acute radiation right away” and “kill everyone with radiation in all of the food/water”, and the latter seems less addressed by the energy/half life argument. I think the weapon design space here is pretty huge, so ruling these out seems hard to me. (Though I do think if we’re assigning probabilities, they should get lower probabilities than conventional weapons)
In general I would prefer approximate numbers or at least likelihood ratios for what you think this evidence balances out to, and what likelihood of odds you would put on different outcomes.
(For example: “what is the likelihood ratio of the 3.C evidence that nuclear war planners are familiar with ideas like nuclear winter”—I don’t think these are strictly required, but they really help me contextualize and integrate this information)
In particular, Toby Ord gives a bunch of excellent quantitative analysis of X-risks, including nuclear war risk, in The Precipice.
(In fact, if your main point of the post was to present a different model from that one, adding numbers would greatly help in comparing and contrasting and integrating them)
Finally, I think my mental models of case 3) are basically the same as any event that is a significant change to the biosphere—and it seems reasoning about this gets harder given your premise.
A hypothetical: if there are 3 major climate events in the next 100 years (of which one is a bellicose nuclear exchange), and humanity goes extinct due to climate related symptoms, does the nuclear war “cause” the human extinction in a way you’re trying to capture?
Maybe what I want is for the premise to be more precise: define a time limit (extinct within X years) and maybe factor what it means to “cause” (for example, it seems like this suggests that an economic collapse triggered by an nuclear war, which triggers other things, that eventually leads to extinction, is not as clearly “caused by nuclear war”)
Also maybe define a bit what “full-scale” means? I assume that it means total war (as opposed to limited war), but good to clear up in any case.
That’s all that came to mind for now. Thanks again for sharing!~
Thanks Alex! Yeah, I agree with you that adding approximate numbers or likelihood ratios would improve this, as would comparing my credences with Toby Ord’s. I might do a followup post with some of this if I get time. Originally I was going to find a co-author and go in more depth on some of these things, especially the nuclear winter literature, but I keep starting and not finishing posts and I figured it was finally time to just put up what I had.
It would be good to separate “kill everyone with acute radiation right away” and “kill everyone with radiation in all of the food/water”. I discussed risk of the first one and basically didn’t at all cover risk of the second one, but I’d like to see a better assessment of the second. I’ve never found good sources for these kinds of long term effects of radiation from food and water after a nuclear war, despite spending probably 4-8 hours searching. On Thermonuclear War discusses this in depth but it’s very out of date (1960), and I haven’t found anything like a comprehensive analysis of this anywhere else. Lots of speculation here and there but nothing that looks rigorous.
Thanks for your feedback!