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What is the point of writing a post like this? I feel like there is an impetus in the 'rational' tech press to want to downplay threats like nuclear war, and em

What is the point of writing a post like this? I feel like there is an impetus in the 'rational' tech press to want to downplay threats like nuclear war, and emphasize dubious threats like AGI. I really don't care if nuclear war doesn't kill every single human instantly. So what? Full scale nuclear war means instant civilization collapse....full stop. Should we forget about disarmament?....guess not every single person theoretically dies....as in the AGI apocalypse fantasy land scenario....so let's not worry too much.

reitzensteinm 6y ago
Humanity will survive. You, dear reader, will not.
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
  In the long term, all dear readers will not survive. So why worry?
  - reitzensteinm 6y ago
    I couldn't agree more.
  - Koshkin 6y ago
    But, as they say, happiness is not in money. It’s in its quantity.
austhrow743 6y ago
Civilisation can be rebuilt. Focus on existential threats over far more likely civilisation collapse threats is done by those who view unrealised potential as loss. So it’s 7 billion humans vs the trillions that could exist if we keep spreading and growing and start colonising other planets. Here’s a good review/summary by a rationalist of a book on the topic by someone who if not a rationalist (I don’t actually know) was at least instrumental in starting the effective altruism movement which is rationalist adjacent. https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/01/book-review-the-precipice/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/01/book-review-the-precip...
- codekilla 6y ago
  > In my view, the greatest risk to humanity’s potential in the next hundred years comes from unaligned artificial intelligence, which I put at 1 in 10. One might be surprised to see such a high number for such a speculative risk, so it warrants some explanation. The above is from the article you link. Where.....oh where....are you getting the 1 in 10 number? This is pure, and I mean pure...uncut conjecture. This is why these types of 'intellectual' offerings are so irritating to me. There is absolutely no sound, or 'rational', way to back that number up.
  - austhrow743 6y ago
    It’s a review of a book. Presumably it’s in the book. Even if you don’t care to read it and doubt his ability to estimate, add the amount of zeros in there that you think appropriate. If you think humanity has the potential to get in to the quintillions like Toby and friends, then the negative EV of it is still going to be far greater than any non existential threat. Then consider elsewhere where it’s mentioned that humanity spends more on ice cream than preventing existential threats. Maybe some of that ice cream money would help increase the accuracy of his statistics.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- monocasa 6y ago
  You'd be surprised, there's a lot of advancement that we might not be able to replicate if our civilzation fully collapsed. For instance, so much of our early nuclear technology was dependent on the Shinkolobwe uranium mine in the DRC, and it's orders of magnitude better uranium purity than anything else we've found. > Our best source, the Shinkolobwe mine, represented a freak occurrence in nature. It contained a tremendously rich lode of uranium pitchblende. Nothing like it has ever again been found. The ore already in the United States contained 65 percent U3O8, while the pitchblende aboveground in the Congo amounted to a thousand tons of 65 percent ore, and the waste piles of ore contained two thousand tons of 20 percent U3O8. To illustrate the uniqueness of Sengier's stockpile, after the war the MED and the AEC considered ore containing three-tenths of 1 percent as a good find. Without Sengier’s foresight in stockpiling ore in the United States and aboveground in Africa, we simply would not have had the amounts of uranium needed to justify building the large separation plants and the plutonium reactors [for the Manhattan Project]. ~ Colonel Ken Nichols Additionally, without the very dense energy in the easily accessible fossil fuels we've very nearly mined out, restarting an industrial revolution would be at best extremely problematic. We've been OK so far with progress meaning we slam the door shut to independent replication of that progress in a lot of cases.
analog31 6y ago
It adds to our growing collection of factoids. Not everything needs to be useful. At least the article arrived at its conclusion without any Bayes theater.
notahacker 6y ago
I guess its the same point that drove Xeno to demonstrate that he was so much much more rational than the average Greek his contribution to the history of thought was a set of arguments that motion was impossible. Possibly with added profit motive. Say what you like about nuclear bombs actually being real, they won't torture infinite numbers of clones of you if you don't donate to Yudowsky's AI research institute.
- solstice 6y ago
  It's Zeno afaik
lainga 6y ago
Do you think your reaction would have been as strong if the post was written by someone else?
landfish 6y ago
I wrote this post, and the point is to improve discussion of societal risks. As others have pointed out, nuclear war doesn't have to kill everyone to be extremely bad and worth avoiding. I spend a lot of my time thinking about risks from nuclear and biological weapons, and downplaying these risks is not my purpose. One problem with assuming nuclear war kills everyone is that this discourages anyone from preparing for potential nuclear wars. While of course we should try to prevent it, we should also try to mitigate the consequences in the even a war does occur! I've written more about risks from nuclear war here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rn2duwRP2pqvLqGCE/does-the-us-nuclear-policy-still-target-cities https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rn2duwRP2pqvLqGCE/does-the-u... and here: https://jeffreyladish.com/one-hundred-opinions-on-nuclear-war/ https://jeffreyladish.com/one-hundred-opinions-on-nuclear-wa...
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > One problem with assuming nuclear war kills everyone is that this discourages anyone from preparing for potential nuclear wars It also encourages lazy cynicism. If everyone died in a nuclear war humanity got its just desserts. Mix in the West’s discomfort with death and nuclear holocaust becomes a punch line. But if our choices today will cause millions to suffer for generations, the cost becomes more tangible. The threat becomes detailed and gruesome and that makes it relatable.
- codekilla 6y ago
  > extremely bad and worth avoiding Shrugs???? What exactly do you mean? Quantify this, how bad...with respect to AGI? > discourages anyone from preparing for potential nuclear wars Interesting, what would be your suggestions for preparing? Mine would be: AT ALL COST AVOID. (I mean it...ALL COST). Anything else, and I would classify it as a species wide failure to adapt to technology (In this case EXISTENTIALLY dangerous tech). Further, there is no way to grasp or accurately predict confounding factors of post total nuclear war that would put humankind at further risk.
  - benlivengood 6y ago
    > Interesting, what would be your suggestions for preparing? Mine would be: AT ALL COST AVOID. (I mean it...ALL COST). This gets at the heart of existential risk. Should we abandon all technology to avoid the possibility of nuclear war and just wait for an asteroid or climate change or resource exhaustion to kill us? Nuclear destruction only gets easier over time as technology progresses. My cell phone is faster than the supercomputers of the 80's used to model nuclear explosions. Even North Korea can refine uranium. Guided rockets are cheap enough to launch high school science projects. Hypersonic cruise missiles are on the horizon. Generally I would propose we avoid nuclear war being an existential risk by going to the stars as soon as possible. That has other costs that, yes, should be balanced against the costs of nuclear war. AGI is another path to a post-existential-threat future for humanity but probably has the greatest risks because it accelerates virtually all of the existing risky technology and climate trends, balanced only by the hope that its intelligence grows far faster than the risks and that it's value-aligned with humanity.
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> What is the point of writing a post like this? Counter hyperbole. Climate change has also been billed by some as a near-term extinction event. That isn’t true. When the public catches on they throw out the baby with the bathwater. To get the risk back in perspective, it’s necessary to first disabuse ourselves of the hyperbolic harm.
- randmeerkat 6y ago
  The collapse of civilization and the destructive power of nuclear weapons is hyperbole now..?
  - 627467 6y ago
    The collapse of civilization can't be a hyperbole. What people especulate that maybe bring it about can be.
    - randmeerkat 6y ago
      Yeah, I phrased that poorly. I meant to say that the the destructive power of nuclear weapons and the likelihood of full out nuclear war causing the total collapse of civilization is considered hyperbole now..?
      - 627467 6y ago
        According to the post, yes. To state that such event may lead to total collapse wouldn't be a new idea at all. It's the mainstream hypothesis since the cold war. To challenge those ideas by articulating the opposite (that it may not lead to total collapse) it's new (to me at least) and good food for thought. Can't cite anything, but I'm pretty sure that the nimble investment in nuclear energy that society has made as a whole in the past decades were fueled by fear of total collapse as if it's impossible for humans to play with fire without completely obliterating ourselves. And considering the new(ish) challenges we have (climate and others) I find it helpful to think that past demons/fears can be managed in a constructive way.
  - 6y ago
dcolkitt 6y ago
Well, at a certain point it changes the geopolitical calculus. Not that nuclear war should ever be entered into lightly. But guaranteed human extinction pretty much rules out any and all justification. In the most anti-nuclear paradigms, even second-strike is off the table, because it only exacerbates nuclear winter. Whereas if nuclear war is winnable, as Pentagon strategists have been saying since the 1950s, then first nuclear strike should probably still be on the table for certain extreme geopolitical situations. So, the question seems pretty relevant in that it's a major determinant in terms of setting optimal military doctrine.
leetcrew 6y ago
> What is the point of writing a post like this? if nothing else, it paints a more accurate picture of the issue. is there something wrong with that?
throwhypothetic 6y ago
In the context of civilization collapse, I think the author is overestimating how likely it is that people will be able to figure out subsistence farming using only locally available materials before they starve. Does anyone on Earth still do that, i.e. with no reliance on materials shipped in from elsewhere?
- 627467 6y ago
  Does a surviving civilization need/want to rely on the same processes that (may) have led to their outcome?
- jcranmer 6y ago
  There are about 100 uncontacted tribes thought to remain.
- robocat 6y ago
  There is a vast range of non-native eadible plants and animals that have now been introduced to every country. That would make a huge difference compared with traditional indigenous societies. However farming does require steady state weather - which is unlikely after a nuclear war?
  - XorNot 6y ago
    There still isn't enough to sustain people on subsistence farming. And subsistence farming, is well, subsistence-level - it precludes specialization which means it precludes most of the advantages technology brings us today. If you're ever in a civilizational collapse scenario, literally the most important thing you can do is rapidly restart the farm supply chain by whatever means necessary - anyone imagining building a fortress for themselves is building a tomb.
    - PeterisP 6y ago
      Subsistance farming for a limited number of people can be done by burying potatoes in the ground and digging them back up in the autumn. Well, it's a bit more to get a good yield, but not that much more, you can (and some places do) teach that to literal kindergartners in a single day. We can't sustain 7 billion of people this way, but if some catastrophe kills 99% of humanity, the availability of better cultivars makes subsistence farming for the remainder much easier than five hundred years ago.
LudwigNagasena 6y ago
Full scale nuclear war means big cities will be bombed and millions of people die. What civilizational collapse are you talking about? The lack of Hollywood movies and absence of the NYSE?
- greedo 6y ago
  I think you're underestimating the number of target between just the US and Russia. Each has approximately 1600 warheads deployed. Even with using 3 warheads per target, that means over 500 cities/targets in each country destroyed. Of course neither side would use all their active warheads on the opposing country; they would save some for other nations. Then you have to factor in British and French warheads. Israel, Pakistan, India, China and NK would all join in as well. So perhaps the African continent might be spared, and the majority of South America as well. But full scale nuclear war would eliminate North America, most of Europe, a large portion of Eurasia and the Far East. And then what is left would have to face the fourth horsemen of the Apocalypse; carrying famine, disease, pestilence. Oh and conventional warfare would occur as well.
  - Supermancho 6y ago
    > Of course neither side would use all their active warheads on the opposing country; they would save some for other nations Nor would all of those warheads will detonate, land on target (some will hit and target the ocean) or launch successfully. > But full scale nuclear war would eliminate North America, I doubt it. Maybe you're being hyperbolic here, to whit. If you eliminate the top 20 US ports, the aircraft carriers and a couple military bases (including Washington DC), you have destroyed modern USA but you do have to wait out the sub launches and miscellaneous hidden missile silos. There's little point to sending nukes to Montana, Kansas, etc. Nothing more (probably a lot less). Show me something that asserts anything more is necessary. You don't eliminate land and population you dont have to, to win a war. Mad-max wastelands are hyperbolic fantasy that ignore basic human agency, imo. Country X isn't scared of refugees or natives of Louisiana forming an invasion force to retaliate so there's no reason to wipe out the land. Again, misfires happen and nuclear fallout is bad for everyone, but that's not the same thing as "eliminating" NA.
JohnHaugeland 6y ago
lol pretending lesswrong, who also believe in roko's basilisk, are either tech or press
- exolymph 6y ago
  Your strawman of LessWrong writers and readers is, well, a strawman.
api 6y ago
Standard issue "rationalist" flex: pick a controversial topic, take a contrarian (or at least apparently contrarian) position, argue it in some creative way. Bonus points if it treads close to some socially or politically taboo topic while avoiding anything that goes directly for it. Being overtly inflammatory and divisive is for low-brow YouTubers. High brow rationalists only hint at the possible controversial implications. * Also YouTuber could be translated as "you are a potato."
- qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
  One thing I like about the rationalist community is they tend to focus on what is factually true, instead of the metadiscussion of what a person's hidden motives are which consumes so much of the rest of the internet.
  - api 6y ago
    I agree that there's too much focus on hidden motives. The left has its postmodern deconstruction mindset that looks for hidden racism, etc., and the right has conspiracy theory thinking which is just its own spin on the same thing. In both cases it gets taken too far, with the left seeing phantom racism everywhere and the right seeing phantom "liberal bias" or lately "pedophilia" everywhere. That being said, hidden motives always exist. All human activity is driven by motives that are rooted in the actor's world view and philosophy. It's how our minds work. We are idea-driven teleological beings. Discussing these hidden motives too little just leaves them unexamined, and it's very easy to push hidden agendas through apparently rational discourse by strategically selecting what data to choose and what lines of argument to pursue. It's similar to "how to lie with statistics." I consistently see certain hidden motives throughout the rationalist material. The most common is elitism rooted in a belief that certain people possess biologically innate superior intelligence that makes them effectively "more right" than other people. It's a biological determinist version of the idea that certain people are divinely blessed with special powers that make them superior. This kind of biological intelligence elitism is a superstition. What you believe and how you think matters more than how big your brain is. It's like saying having a bigger engine in a car makes you a better driver. It doesn't. In fact it means that a bad driver can get into a more severe accident more easily. Highly intelligent people with irrational or deluded systems of belief can delude themselves more effectively than less intelligent people. Your average flat-Earther is probably more intelligent than the average person, not less. I personally make a distinction between what I call dumb-dumb and smart-dumb. Dumb-dumb is a lack of intelligence. Smart-dumb is intelligence grossly misused, or coupled with a gross deficiency in emotional intelligence or a lack of self-awareness.
baybal2 6y ago
> Full scale nuclear war means instant civilization collapse....full stop. Each China, and India has more people, and potentially more troop, than USA, and Russia combined. As I wrote before, the next third power in any massive war has an extreme incentive to stay neutral, to take the lead, or may well be land, after. You think that Xi, and Modi will stay still at the opportunity to do the biggest land grab in history?
- int_19h 6y ago
  It's often assumed that, in an all-out nuclear exchange, everybody gets it, even if they haven't launched themselves yet. Because if you go down, you want all your potential opponents to be on the same level.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    You now have 15+ potential opponents with standing armies big enough to win against anybody, but standing army of USA. Attack them all, fully knowing that it will be a lottery of whose military will be more intact after? Those who do, will be double idiots. Once for not shooting first, second for shooting last.
tlb 6y ago
In our everyday ethics, an accident that kills 2 people is about twice as bad as an accident that kills 1 person. So we can use linear assumptions for evaluating safety measures like seatbelts and vaccines. In the study of existential risk, killing all the people is much, much worse than killing half the people. Because if you integrate over all the people that will ever live, our descendants potentially spreading around the galaxy, killing all of them zeros out all future happiness. Killing half will only reduce population for a century or two.
uCantCauseUCant 6y ago
not really AGI is currently pitching us left vs right against one anothers throat through political advisory mindhacks - thanks Palantir.
xupybd 6y ago
Absolute panic is not the best response, even to a civilization ending event. Calm rational understanding is required to evaluate the true nature of the threat. Not to downplay it but purely to understand it. No one is saying disarmament is less critical. Please be willing to examine a truth that might counter a narrative that can be used to motivate the world in a positive direction. To do so should not be seen as herecy. We live in very tribal times please do not assume someone pointing out an inconvenient truth is opposed to everything you believe in.
user-the-name 6y ago
The rationalists of lesswrong.com are fairly cult-like, and have weird obsessions about AGI and other issues. (Look up "Roko's Basilisk" for some real examples of how detached from reality their thinking can easily get.
jariel 6y ago
Civilizational Collapse is something totally different from extinction and it's actually something very important to concern ourselves over because it's on the cards, i.e. a possible outcome we should probably be thinking about and planning for. If it were to happen, a lot of people would accept the new reality and bear it, people are resilient.
sfg 6y ago
If nothing else, and I think there is something else, it provides intellectual exploration and discovery, which is both fun and an excellent way of expanding knowledge and understanding. If such things are not for you, then that's cool, but for those with a curious mind the point of such things is self-evident.
bleepblorp 6y ago
I've noticed that contemporary tech people (or at least the richer ones) have a cultural tick that leads them to deny or minimize the importance of real problems that don't involve shiny new technology. By way of examples: Microsoft destroying YouTube-DL: Problem. Amazon exploiting its non-tech workforce: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Bitcoin's energy use: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Macs not running third party code: Problem. Nuclear war: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Global climate change: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Future risk of AI paperclip maximizers: Problem. Current danger of businesses operating as human-powered paperclip mazimixers: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Etc.

reitzensteinm 6y ago

Humanity will survive. You, dear reader, will not.

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
In the long term, all dear readers will not survive. So why worry?
- reitzensteinm 6y ago
  I couldn't agree more.
- Koshkin 6y ago
  But, as they say, happiness is not in money. It’s in its quantity.

austhrow743 6y ago

Civilisation can be rebuilt. Focus on existential threats over far more likely civilisation collapse threats is done by those who view unrealised potential as loss. So it’s 7 billion humans vs the trillions that could exist if we keep spreading and growing and start colonising other planets. Here’s a good review/summary by a rationalist of a book on the topic by someone who if not a rationalist (I don’t actually know) was at least instrumental in starting the effective altruism movement which is rationalist adjacent. https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/01/book-review-the-precipice/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/01/book-review-the-precip...

codekilla 6y ago
> In my view, the greatest risk to humanity’s potential in the next hundred years comes from unaligned artificial intelligence, which I put at 1 in 10. One might be surprised to see such a high number for such a speculative risk, so it warrants some explanation. The above is from the article you link. Where.....oh where....are you getting the 1 in 10 number? This is pure, and I mean pure...uncut conjecture. This is why these types of 'intellectual' offerings are so irritating to me. There is absolutely no sound, or 'rational', way to back that number up.
- austhrow743 6y ago
  It’s a review of a book. Presumably it’s in the book. Even if you don’t care to read it and doubt his ability to estimate, add the amount of zeros in there that you think appropriate. If you think humanity has the potential to get in to the quintillions like Toby and friends, then the negative EV of it is still going to be far greater than any non existential threat. Then consider elsewhere where it’s mentioned that humanity spends more on ice cream than preventing existential threats. Maybe some of that ice cream money would help increase the accuracy of his statistics.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
monocasa 6y ago
You'd be surprised, there's a lot of advancement that we might not be able to replicate if our civilzation fully collapsed. For instance, so much of our early nuclear technology was dependent on the Shinkolobwe uranium mine in the DRC, and it's orders of magnitude better uranium purity than anything else we've found. > Our best source, the Shinkolobwe mine, represented a freak occurrence in nature. It contained a tremendously rich lode of uranium pitchblende. Nothing like it has ever again been found. The ore already in the United States contained 65 percent U3O8, while the pitchblende aboveground in the Congo amounted to a thousand tons of 65 percent ore, and the waste piles of ore contained two thousand tons of 20 percent U3O8. To illustrate the uniqueness of Sengier's stockpile, after the war the MED and the AEC considered ore containing three-tenths of 1 percent as a good find. Without Sengier’s foresight in stockpiling ore in the United States and aboveground in Africa, we simply would not have had the amounts of uranium needed to justify building the large separation plants and the plutonium reactors [for the Manhattan Project]. ~ Colonel Ken Nichols Additionally, without the very dense energy in the easily accessible fossil fuels we've very nearly mined out, restarting an industrial revolution would be at best extremely problematic. We've been OK so far with progress meaning we slam the door shut to independent replication of that progress in a lot of cases.

analog31 6y ago

It adds to our growing collection of factoids. Not everything needs to be useful. At least the article arrived at its conclusion without any Bayes theater.

notahacker 6y ago

I guess its the same point that drove Xeno to demonstrate that he was so much much more rational than the average Greek his contribution to the history of thought was a set of arguments that motion was impossible. Possibly with added profit motive. Say what you like about nuclear bombs actually being real, they won't torture infinite numbers of clones of you if you don't donate to Yudowsky's AI research institute.

solstice 6y ago
It's Zeno afaik

lainga 6y ago

Do you think your reaction would have been as strong if the post was written by someone else?

landfish 6y ago

I wrote this post, and the point is to improve discussion of societal risks. As others have pointed out, nuclear war doesn't have to kill everyone to be extremely bad and worth avoiding. I spend a lot of my time thinking about risks from nuclear and biological weapons, and downplaying these risks is not my purpose. One problem with assuming nuclear war kills everyone is that this discourages anyone from preparing for potential nuclear wars. While of course we should try to prevent it, we should also try to mitigate the consequences in the even a war does occur! I've written more about risks from nuclear war here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rn2duwRP2pqvLqGCE/does-the-us-nuclear-policy-still-target-cities https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rn2duwRP2pqvLqGCE/does-the-u... and here: https://jeffreyladish.com/one-hundred-opinions-on-nuclear-war/ https://jeffreyladish.com/one-hundred-opinions-on-nuclear-wa...

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> One problem with assuming nuclear war kills everyone is that this discourages anyone from preparing for potential nuclear wars It also encourages lazy cynicism. If everyone died in a nuclear war humanity got its just desserts. Mix in the West’s discomfort with death and nuclear holocaust becomes a punch line. But if our choices today will cause millions to suffer for generations, the cost becomes more tangible. The threat becomes detailed and gruesome and that makes it relatable.
codekilla 6y ago
> extremely bad and worth avoiding Shrugs???? What exactly do you mean? Quantify this, how bad...with respect to AGI? > discourages anyone from preparing for potential nuclear wars Interesting, what would be your suggestions for preparing? Mine would be: AT ALL COST AVOID. (I mean it...ALL COST). Anything else, and I would classify it as a species wide failure to adapt to technology (In this case EXISTENTIALLY dangerous tech). Further, there is no way to grasp or accurately predict confounding factors of post total nuclear war that would put humankind at further risk.
- benlivengood 6y ago
  > Interesting, what would be your suggestions for preparing? Mine would be: AT ALL COST AVOID. (I mean it...ALL COST). This gets at the heart of existential risk. Should we abandon all technology to avoid the possibility of nuclear war and just wait for an asteroid or climate change or resource exhaustion to kill us? Nuclear destruction only gets easier over time as technology progresses. My cell phone is faster than the supercomputers of the 80's used to model nuclear explosions. Even North Korea can refine uranium. Guided rockets are cheap enough to launch high school science projects. Hypersonic cruise missiles are on the horizon. Generally I would propose we avoid nuclear war being an existential risk by going to the stars as soon as possible. That has other costs that, yes, should be balanced against the costs of nuclear war. AGI is another path to a post-existential-threat future for humanity but probably has the greatest risks because it accelerates virtually all of the existing risky technology and climate trends, balanced only by the hope that its intelligence grows far faster than the risks and that it's value-aligned with humanity.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago

> What is the point of writing a post like this? Counter hyperbole. Climate change has also been billed by some as a near-term extinction event. That isn’t true. When the public catches on they throw out the baby with the bathwater. To get the risk back in perspective, it’s necessary to first disabuse ourselves of the hyperbolic harm.

randmeerkat 6y ago
The collapse of civilization and the destructive power of nuclear weapons is hyperbole now..?
- 627467 6y ago
  The collapse of civilization can't be a hyperbole. What people especulate that maybe bring it about can be.
  - randmeerkat 6y ago
    Yeah, I phrased that poorly. I meant to say that the the destructive power of nuclear weapons and the likelihood of full out nuclear war causing the total collapse of civilization is considered hyperbole now..?
    - 627467 6y ago
      According to the post, yes. To state that such event may lead to total collapse wouldn't be a new idea at all. It's the mainstream hypothesis since the cold war. To challenge those ideas by articulating the opposite (that it may not lead to total collapse) it's new (to me at least) and good food for thought. Can't cite anything, but I'm pretty sure that the nimble investment in nuclear energy that society has made as a whole in the past decades were fueled by fear of total collapse as if it's impossible for humans to play with fire without completely obliterating ourselves. And considering the new(ish) challenges we have (climate and others) I find it helpful to think that past demons/fears can be managed in a constructive way.
- 6y ago

dcolkitt 6y ago

Well, at a certain point it changes the geopolitical calculus. Not that nuclear war should ever be entered into lightly. But guaranteed human extinction pretty much rules out any and all justification. In the most anti-nuclear paradigms, even second-strike is off the table, because it only exacerbates nuclear winter. Whereas if nuclear war is winnable, as Pentagon strategists have been saying since the 1950s, then first nuclear strike should probably still be on the table for certain extreme geopolitical situations. So, the question seems pretty relevant in that it's a major determinant in terms of setting optimal military doctrine.

leetcrew 6y ago

> What is the point of writing a post like this? if nothing else, it paints a more accurate picture of the issue. is there something wrong with that?

throwhypothetic 6y ago

In the context of civilization collapse, I think the author is overestimating how likely it is that people will be able to figure out subsistence farming using only locally available materials before they starve. Does anyone on Earth still do that, i.e. with no reliance on materials shipped in from elsewhere?

627467 6y ago
Does a surviving civilization need/want to rely on the same processes that (may) have led to their outcome?
jcranmer 6y ago
There are about 100 uncontacted tribes thought to remain.
robocat 6y ago
There is a vast range of non-native eadible plants and animals that have now been introduced to every country. That would make a huge difference compared with traditional indigenous societies. However farming does require steady state weather - which is unlikely after a nuclear war?
- XorNot 6y ago
  There still isn't enough to sustain people on subsistence farming. And subsistence farming, is well, subsistence-level - it precludes specialization which means it precludes most of the advantages technology brings us today. If you're ever in a civilizational collapse scenario, literally the most important thing you can do is rapidly restart the farm supply chain by whatever means necessary - anyone imagining building a fortress for themselves is building a tomb.
  - PeterisP 6y ago
    Subsistance farming for a limited number of people can be done by burying potatoes in the ground and digging them back up in the autumn. Well, it's a bit more to get a good yield, but not that much more, you can (and some places do) teach that to literal kindergartners in a single day. We can't sustain 7 billion of people this way, but if some catastrophe kills 99% of humanity, the availability of better cultivars makes subsistence farming for the remainder much easier than five hundred years ago.

LudwigNagasena 6y ago

Full scale nuclear war means big cities will be bombed and millions of people die. What civilizational collapse are you talking about? The lack of Hollywood movies and absence of the NYSE?

greedo 6y ago
I think you're underestimating the number of target between just the US and Russia. Each has approximately 1600 warheads deployed. Even with using 3 warheads per target, that means over 500 cities/targets in each country destroyed. Of course neither side would use all their active warheads on the opposing country; they would save some for other nations. Then you have to factor in British and French warheads. Israel, Pakistan, India, China and NK would all join in as well. So perhaps the African continent might be spared, and the majority of South America as well. But full scale nuclear war would eliminate North America, most of Europe, a large portion of Eurasia and the Far East. And then what is left would have to face the fourth horsemen of the Apocalypse; carrying famine, disease, pestilence. Oh and conventional warfare would occur as well.
- Supermancho 6y ago
  > Of course neither side would use all their active warheads on the opposing country; they would save some for other nations Nor would all of those warheads will detonate, land on target (some will hit and target the ocean) or launch successfully. > But full scale nuclear war would eliminate North America, I doubt it. Maybe you're being hyperbolic here, to whit. If you eliminate the top 20 US ports, the aircraft carriers and a couple military bases (including Washington DC), you have destroyed modern USA but you do have to wait out the sub launches and miscellaneous hidden missile silos. There's little point to sending nukes to Montana, Kansas, etc. Nothing more (probably a lot less). Show me something that asserts anything more is necessary. You don't eliminate land and population you dont have to, to win a war. Mad-max wastelands are hyperbolic fantasy that ignore basic human agency, imo. Country X isn't scared of refugees or natives of Louisiana forming an invasion force to retaliate so there's no reason to wipe out the land. Again, misfires happen and nuclear fallout is bad for everyone, but that's not the same thing as "eliminating" NA.

JohnHaugeland 6y ago

lol pretending lesswrong, who also believe in roko's basilisk, are either tech or press

exolymph 6y ago
Your strawman of LessWrong writers and readers is, well, a strawman.

api 6y ago

Standard issue "rationalist" flex: pick a controversial topic, take a contrarian (or at least apparently contrarian) position, argue it in some creative way. Bonus points if it treads close to some socially or politically taboo topic while avoiding anything that goes directly for it. Being overtly inflammatory and divisive is for low-brow YouTubers. High brow rationalists only hint at the possible controversial implications. * Also YouTuber could be translated as "you are a potato."

qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
One thing I like about the rationalist community is they tend to focus on what is factually true, instead of the metadiscussion of what a person's hidden motives are which consumes so much of the rest of the internet.
- api 6y ago
  I agree that there's too much focus on hidden motives. The left has its postmodern deconstruction mindset that looks for hidden racism, etc., and the right has conspiracy theory thinking which is just its own spin on the same thing. In both cases it gets taken too far, with the left seeing phantom racism everywhere and the right seeing phantom "liberal bias" or lately "pedophilia" everywhere. That being said, hidden motives always exist. All human activity is driven by motives that are rooted in the actor's world view and philosophy. It's how our minds work. We are idea-driven teleological beings. Discussing these hidden motives too little just leaves them unexamined, and it's very easy to push hidden agendas through apparently rational discourse by strategically selecting what data to choose and what lines of argument to pursue. It's similar to "how to lie with statistics." I consistently see certain hidden motives throughout the rationalist material. The most common is elitism rooted in a belief that certain people possess biologically innate superior intelligence that makes them effectively "more right" than other people. It's a biological determinist version of the idea that certain people are divinely blessed with special powers that make them superior. This kind of biological intelligence elitism is a superstition. What you believe and how you think matters more than how big your brain is. It's like saying having a bigger engine in a car makes you a better driver. It doesn't. In fact it means that a bad driver can get into a more severe accident more easily. Highly intelligent people with irrational or deluded systems of belief can delude themselves more effectively than less intelligent people. Your average flat-Earther is probably more intelligent than the average person, not less. I personally make a distinction between what I call dumb-dumb and smart-dumb. Dumb-dumb is a lack of intelligence. Smart-dumb is intelligence grossly misused, or coupled with a gross deficiency in emotional intelligence or a lack of self-awareness.

baybal2 6y ago

> Full scale nuclear war means instant civilization collapse....full stop. Each China, and India has more people, and potentially more troop, than USA, and Russia combined. As I wrote before, the next third power in any massive war has an extreme incentive to stay neutral, to take the lead, or may well be land, after. You think that Xi, and Modi will stay still at the opportunity to do the biggest land grab in history?

int_19h 6y ago
It's often assumed that, in an all-out nuclear exchange, everybody gets it, even if they haven't launched themselves yet. Because if you go down, you want all your potential opponents to be on the same level.
- baybal2 6y ago
  You now have 15+ potential opponents with standing armies big enough to win against anybody, but standing army of USA. Attack them all, fully knowing that it will be a lottery of whose military will be more intact after? Those who do, will be double idiots. Once for not shooting first, second for shooting last.

tlb 6y ago

In our everyday ethics, an accident that kills 2 people is about twice as bad as an accident that kills 1 person. So we can use linear assumptions for evaluating safety measures like seatbelts and vaccines. In the study of existential risk, killing all the people is much, much worse than killing half the people. Because if you integrate over all the people that will ever live, our descendants potentially spreading around the galaxy, killing all of them zeros out all future happiness. Killing half will only reduce population for a century or two.

uCantCauseUCant 6y ago

not really AGI is currently pitching us left vs right against one anothers throat through political advisory mindhacks - thanks Palantir.

xupybd 6y ago

Absolute panic is not the best response, even to a civilization ending event. Calm rational understanding is required to evaluate the true nature of the threat. Not to downplay it but purely to understand it. No one is saying disarmament is less critical. Please be willing to examine a truth that might counter a narrative that can be used to motivate the world in a positive direction. To do so should not be seen as herecy. We live in very tribal times please do not assume someone pointing out an inconvenient truth is opposed to everything you believe in.

user-the-name 6y ago

The rationalists of lesswrong.com are fairly cult-like, and have weird obsessions about AGI and other issues. (Look up "Roko's Basilisk" for some real examples of how detached from reality their thinking can easily get.

jariel 6y ago

Civilizational Collapse is something totally different from extinction and it's actually something very important to concern ourselves over because it's on the cards, i.e. a possible outcome we should probably be thinking about and planning for. If it were to happen, a lot of people would accept the new reality and bear it, people are resilient.

sfg 6y ago

If nothing else, and I think there is something else, it provides intellectual exploration and discovery, which is both fun and an excellent way of expanding knowledge and understanding. If such things are not for you, then that's cool, but for those with a curious mind the point of such things is self-evident.

bleepblorp 6y ago

I've noticed that contemporary tech people (or at least the richer ones) have a cultural tick that leads them to deny or minimize the importance of real problems that don't involve shiny new technology. By way of examples: Microsoft destroying YouTube-DL: Problem. Amazon exploiting its non-tech workforce: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Bitcoin's energy use: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Macs not running third party code: Problem. Nuclear war: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Global climate change: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Future risk of AI paperclip maximizers: Problem. Current danger of businesses operating as human-powered paperclip mazimixers: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Etc.