This business with nuclear retaliation reminds me of a game we played in microeconomics class. The game goes something like this: Person 1 starts with $10 and offers another Person 2 $A of that amount. Person 2 can choose to accept or reject. If the deal is accepted, Person 2 receives $A and Person 1 receives $10 - A. If the deal is rejected, neither party receives anything.
As far as I can tell, it’s never rational to release a nuclear bomb. And it’s never rational to reject money in aforementioned game. But in both situations, it is advantageous to trick the other person into thinking there are circumstances where you would do the irrational.
On a related note, perhaps some Overcoming Bias readers who can’t think of anything interesting to do with their lives could infiltrate the military and try to get their finger on the proverbial nuclear button, just to make sure it never gets pushed.
This is related to something I’ve been thinking about lately. You may or may not be familiar with the concept of significant figures. In a nutshell, they’re a way of communicating the precision of a measurement using the number of digits written. This seems to be a pretty good explanation.
Let’s say we are building a robot scientist. The robot scientist has no need for significant figures; those are for puny humans. Instead, it stores measurement and uncertainty separately. One way of doing this is to store the uncertainty as ±x. Another more interesting way is to store it as the standard deviation of your measurement. This opens up an entire host of problems.
For example, let’s say that the robot screws up when it’s measuring something and doesn’t realize it this until it measures a second time and gets something completely different. Obviously, there was some procedural error in the first measurement. Does the first completely wrong measurement contribute to the standard deviation? Isn’t it possible that the second, third, fourth, and fifth measurements are also completely wrong in some way that the robot has not yet realized? Under what conditions are you allowed to “throw out” a measurement?