8 ms·

What are the chances of a third world war? [pdf]

throwawaysea 6y ago
Seems like no conclusion can be drawn? > We show that the inter-arrival times among major conflicts are extremely long, and consistent with a homogenous Poisson process: therefore no specific trend can be established: we as humans can not be deemed as less belligerent than usual. For a conflict generating at least 10 million casualties, an event less bloody than WW1 or WW2, the waiting time is on average 136 years, with a mean absolute deviation of 267 (or 52 years and 61 deviations for data rescaled to today’s population). The seventy years of what is called the "Long Peace" are clearly not enough to state much about the possibility of WW3 in the near future.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  At least not on the basis of backward-looking statistics, assuming that inter-arrival times of major wars are correctly/most closely modeled by Poisson processes as the authors believe. You could make a claim based on other things. For example, you could claim that the speed and fidelity of information transfer render it now more difficult to have a major war. You could argue that the incredible amount and speed of power projection we now have access to render international warfare game-theoretically very difficult. (For example, there will not likely ever be another amphibious invasion conflict between of equiv-tech major powers. There are too many weapons systems that can accurately destroy surface ships, so it would be impossible to get close enough to make landfall.) But any such claims could not be based on statistics.
stcredzero 6y ago
There's a 100% chance of some sort of conflict between the US and China over Taiwan and dominance over the Western Pacific. It's just a question of "how severe?" By the US Navy's own accounting, the pace of deployment has not been met with adequate maintenance. The US Navy's material readiness has been significantly impacted. In some cases over 30% degraded. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo4i1qD63Ss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo4i1qD63Ss I'm also close to 100% certain that some sort of violence will come of conflict over space resources. Something will happen in relation to lunar resources. There will also be a tragedy involving collisions with orbital debris. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P3tbf3JHhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P3tbf3JHhc
- secondcoming 6y ago
  China is also poking India too.
  - yumraj 6y ago
    I believe that’ll continue like this at least till Dalai Lama’s death. Then, there would be the whole issue of the next Dalai Lama. Just like Panchem Lama, there will be two successors - one picked by the Chinese and the other legitimate one. What happens next is anyone’s guess....
  - sumedh 6y ago
    and India and Pakistan have their own beef.
- newacct583 6y ago
  > Something will happen in relation to lunar resources. Lunar what now? I mean, I thought the stuff over Taiwan was a little over the top, but... this is just satire, right?
  - eloff 6y ago
    Depends what your time horizon is. Over a long enough time period I fully agree with the OP. In the next twenty years, not likely.
    - newacct583 6y ago
      You think over a long enough time period the moon will be made up of something other than rocks? It's rocks. There are no "resources". It's ejected mantle material just like we have here right under our feet, with the added disadvantage that there's no tectonics that would have had the effect of concentrating what trace materials were there. It's rocks. Someone who wants to imagine going to war with China over rocks on the moon is someone who wants to imagine going to war with China. That's not a serious (nor responsible) position.
warlog 6y ago
Spec fiction: somebody takes out a US carrier group, and all bets are off [1]. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Twilights-Last-Gleaming-Michael-Greer/dp/1782200355 https://www.amazon.com/Twilights-Last-Gleaming-Michael-Greer...
- nateburke 6y ago
  [2] Feb 2021 issue of WIRED
- DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
  thanks I didn't know this one. just finished a very similar one recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Fleet_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Fleet_(novel) ... much recommend it
- warlog 6y ago
  Tom Clancy level writing... But far more bleak for the good guys (tm).
ilaksh 6y ago
Money is fundamentally a technology. My concern is that the US-central system may simply become obsolete in the face of China's digital currency. Then there could be a fight to preserve the older dollar system in the form of a war. And since it's an inferior technology, the US would be on the wrong side of history. The war would not be justified with financial arguments but rather propaganda as all wars have. So both Chinese and American citizens would feel a strong moral imperative to attempt to kill as many millions on the other side as possible in order to stop their "evil" ways. Another aspect of this is the still unfortunately strong propagation of Social Darwinist perspectives that fundamentally do not value human life. I think that the sane way to move forward is to apply our technology and social infrastructure towards resolving the political, philosophical and logistical conflicts directly. And I suppose it's quite unlikely. But this would mean leveraging things like smart cryptocurrencies and decentralization technologies (which in fact have large potential now for the next paradigm of government).
- thunkshift1 6y ago
  Hypothetical: what if us abandons the dollar and adopts bitcoin instead?
  - paulcole 6y ago
    President Joseph Rogan pegs the price of bitcoin to the price of 1 pound of grass fed beef.
  - ilaksh 6y ago
    Because of the low transaction rates among other limitations, Bitcoin could work as a digital equivalent to gold but not for currency. Ethereum 2.0 could work as a currency among many other things. Adopting something like that would be a very smart move for the United States. It would also be extremely difficult to do, and undermine the current sovereignty. One of the nice things about Ethereum is its programmability. So I hope that future sovereign digital currencies will be integrated using something like that, assuming an alternate digital global governance system built on open non-national protocols does not become viable.
nosmokewhereiam 6y ago
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Special%2520Report_ICA%2520Global%2520Water%2520Security.pdf https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Special%2520Report_ICA%2...
anm89 6y ago
What are the chances they should have added the date this was published : 100%
jll29 6y ago
There is already a pan-continental war happening at large scale in case you haven't noticed; it comprises a mix of information warefare and cyber attacks. Further conventional wars are to be expected, too: some people speculate that they will be about access to clean water (in the past, borders/owning land areas were more often the motive behind armed conflict). Current tensions of this kind can be observed e.g. between India and Pakistan, although they have not escalated. Questions about the chances of a world war should specify the time range to be complete/meaningful.
smuckers 6y ago
There won't be another "world war" if you think that means fighting with guns, tanks, and fighter jets. 21st century war is being fought under our noses as "unrestricted warfare" (https://www.c4i.org/unrestricted.pdf https://www.c4i.org/unrestricted.pdf). Information warfare, legal warfare, economic warfare, etc. are how battles are fought. Why would a country want to shoot bullets at the US when they can control or dismantle it from within?
wayeq 6y ago
the same chances of Taleb writing something not overtly dick-ish.

Seems like no conclusion can be drawn? > We show that the inter-arrival times among major conflicts are extremely long, and consistent with a homogenous Poisson process: therefore no specific trend can be established: we as humans can not be deemed as less belligerent than usual. For a conflict generating at least 10 million casualties, an event less bloody than WW1 or WW2, the waiting time is on average 136 years, with a mean absolute deviation of 267 (or 52 years and 61 deviations for data rescaled to today’s population). The seventy years of what is called the "Long Peace" are clearly not enough to state much about the possibility of WW3 in the near future.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
At least not on the basis of backward-looking statistics, assuming that inter-arrival times of major wars are correctly/most closely modeled by Poisson processes as the authors believe. You could make a claim based on other things. For example, you could claim that the speed and fidelity of information transfer render it now more difficult to have a major war. You could argue that the incredible amount and speed of power projection we now have access to render international warfare game-theoretically very difficult. (For example, there will not likely ever be another amphibious invasion conflict between of equiv-tech major powers. There are too many weapons systems that can accurately destroy surface ships, so it would be impossible to get close enough to make landfall.) But any such claims could not be based on statistics.

stcredzero 6y ago

There's a 100% chance of some sort of conflict between the US and China over Taiwan and dominance over the Western Pacific. It's just a question of "how severe?" By the US Navy's own accounting, the pace of deployment has not been met with adequate maintenance. The US Navy's material readiness has been significantly impacted. In some cases over 30% degraded. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo4i1qD63Ss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo4i1qD63Ss I'm also close to 100% certain that some sort of violence will come of conflict over space resources. Something will happen in relation to lunar resources. There will also be a tragedy involving collisions with orbital debris. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P3tbf3JHhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P3tbf3JHhc

secondcoming 6y ago
China is also poking India too.
- yumraj 6y ago
  I believe that’ll continue like this at least till Dalai Lama’s death. Then, there would be the whole issue of the next Dalai Lama. Just like Panchem Lama, there will be two successors - one picked by the Chinese and the other legitimate one. What happens next is anyone’s guess....
- sumedh 6y ago
  and India and Pakistan have their own beef.
newacct583 6y ago
> Something will happen in relation to lunar resources. Lunar what now? I mean, I thought the stuff over Taiwan was a little over the top, but... this is just satire, right?
- eloff 6y ago
  Depends what your time horizon is. Over a long enough time period I fully agree with the OP. In the next twenty years, not likely.
  - newacct583 6y ago
    You think over a long enough time period the moon will be made up of something other than rocks? It's rocks. There are no "resources". It's ejected mantle material just like we have here right under our feet, with the added disadvantage that there's no tectonics that would have had the effect of concentrating what trace materials were there. It's rocks. Someone who wants to imagine going to war with China over rocks on the moon is someone who wants to imagine going to war with China. That's not a serious (nor responsible) position.

warlog 6y ago

Spec fiction: somebody takes out a US carrier group, and all bets are off [1]. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Twilights-Last-Gleaming-Michael-Greer/dp/1782200355 https://www.amazon.com/Twilights-Last-Gleaming-Michael-Greer...

nateburke 6y ago
[2] Feb 2021 issue of WIRED
DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
thanks I didn't know this one. just finished a very similar one recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Fleet_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Fleet_(novel) ... much recommend it
warlog 6y ago
Tom Clancy level writing... But far more bleak for the good guys (tm).

ilaksh 6y ago

Money is fundamentally a technology. My concern is that the US-central system may simply become obsolete in the face of China's digital currency. Then there could be a fight to preserve the older dollar system in the form of a war. And since it's an inferior technology, the US would be on the wrong side of history. The war would not be justified with financial arguments but rather propaganda as all wars have. So both Chinese and American citizens would feel a strong moral imperative to attempt to kill as many millions on the other side as possible in order to stop their "evil" ways. Another aspect of this is the still unfortunately strong propagation of Social Darwinist perspectives that fundamentally do not value human life. I think that the sane way to move forward is to apply our technology and social infrastructure towards resolving the political, philosophical and logistical conflicts directly. And I suppose it's quite unlikely. But this would mean leveraging things like smart cryptocurrencies and decentralization technologies (which in fact have large potential now for the next paradigm of government).

thunkshift1 6y ago
Hypothetical: what if us abandons the dollar and adopts bitcoin instead?
- paulcole 6y ago
  President Joseph Rogan pegs the price of bitcoin to the price of 1 pound of grass fed beef.
- ilaksh 6y ago
  Because of the low transaction rates among other limitations, Bitcoin could work as a digital equivalent to gold but not for currency. Ethereum 2.0 could work as a currency among many other things. Adopting something like that would be a very smart move for the United States. It would also be extremely difficult to do, and undermine the current sovereignty. One of the nice things about Ethereum is its programmability. So I hope that future sovereign digital currencies will be integrated using something like that, assuming an alternate digital global governance system built on open non-national protocols does not become viable.

nosmokewhereiam 6y ago

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Special%2520Report_ICA%2520Global%2520Water%2520Security.pdf https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Special%2520Report_ICA%2...

anm89 6y ago

What are the chances they should have added the date this was published : 100%

jll29 6y ago

There is already a pan-continental war happening at large scale in case you haven't noticed; it comprises a mix of information warefare and cyber attacks. Further conventional wars are to be expected, too: some people speculate that they will be about access to clean water (in the past, borders/owning land areas were more often the motive behind armed conflict). Current tensions of this kind can be observed e.g. between India and Pakistan, although they have not escalated. Questions about the chances of a world war should specify the time range to be complete/meaningful.

smuckers 6y ago

There won't be another "world war" if you think that means fighting with guns, tanks, and fighter jets. 21st century war is being fought under our noses as "unrestricted warfare" (https://www.c4i.org/unrestricted.pdf https://www.c4i.org/unrestricted.pdf). Information warfare, legal warfare, economic warfare, etc. are how battles are fought. Why would a country want to shoot bullets at the US when they can control or dismantle it from within?

wayeq 6y ago

the same chances of Taleb writing something not overtly dick-ish.