Your expected life hours lost become Remaining life hours * P(nuke in your location | nuke in Ukraine), if Ukraine is hit and you choose to stay in your location afterwards. While the multiplier does depend on P(nuke in Ukraine), P(nuke in your location | nuke in Ukraine) is still more important since your location is what determines whether it swings you over the decision threshold or not.
In this framework, before the tac nuke use in Ukraine, your expected life hours lost was remaining life hours*P(nuke in your location | nuke in Ukraine) * P (nuke in Ukraine), so your subsequent expected life hours last should change by a factor of 1/P(nuke in ukraine), or about six.
Though I think straightforwardly applying that framework is wrong, because it assumes that if you don’t flee as soon as there’s nuke use in Ukraine, you don’t flee at all even at subsequent stages of escalation; instead, you want P(nuke in your location| nuke in Ukraine and no later signs of danger which prompt you to flee). To figure out your actual expected costs from not fleeing as soon as there’s tactical nuke use in Ukraine, you need to have an estimate of how likely it is that there’d be some warning after the tactical nuke use before a nuclear war started.
Yes, it does rely on that simplified assumption. I think I’m unlikely to get more than 1 additional bit of information via further warnings after a nuke in Ukraine (if that), so staying doesn’t seem worth the risk, but if you think you get legible warning signs >84% of the time (or whatever 1 - p(nuke in Ukraine) is) then it seems worth waiting.
ETA: to clarify, my general position is that while I’m open to the possibility that there’ll be further signals which convey more bits of information about which world you’re in than the initial “nuke in Ukraine” signal, I expect those extra bits won’t do me much good because in most of those worlds events will move fast enough that I won’t be able to usefully respond. If you have a lot of weight on “escalation, if any, will be slow”, then your calculation will look different.
Your expected life hours lost become
Remaining life hours * P(nuke in your location | nuke in Ukraine)
, if Ukraine is hit and you choose to stay in your location afterwards. While the multiplier does depend onP(nuke in Ukraine)
,P(nuke in your location | nuke in Ukraine)
is still more important since your location is what determines whether it swings you over the decision threshold or not.In this framework, before the tac nuke use in Ukraine, your expected life hours lost was remaining life hours*P(nuke in your location | nuke in Ukraine) * P (nuke in Ukraine), so your subsequent expected life hours last should change by a factor of 1/P(nuke in ukraine), or about six.
Though I think straightforwardly applying that framework is wrong, because it assumes that if you don’t flee as soon as there’s nuke use in Ukraine, you don’t flee at all even at subsequent stages of escalation; instead, you want P(nuke in your location| nuke in Ukraine and no later signs of danger which prompt you to flee). To figure out your actual expected costs from not fleeing as soon as there’s tactical nuke use in Ukraine, you need to have an estimate of how likely it is that there’d be some warning after the tactical nuke use before a nuclear war started.
Yes, it does rely on that simplified assumption. I think I’m unlikely to get more than 1 additional bit of information via further warnings after a nuke in Ukraine (if that), so staying doesn’t seem worth the risk, but if you think you get legible warning signs >84% of the time (or whatever
1 - p(nuke in Ukraine)
is) then it seems worth waiting.ETA: to clarify, my general position is that while I’m open to the possibility that there’ll be further signals which convey more bits of information about which world you’re in than the initial “nuke in Ukraine” signal, I expect those extra bits won’t do me much good because in most of those worlds events will move fast enough that I won’t be able to usefully respond. If you have a lot of weight on “escalation, if any, will be slow”, then your calculation will look different.