I am skeptical of attempts to gatekeep here. E.g. I found Scoblic’s response to Samotsvety’s forecast less persuasive than their post, and I am concerned here that “amateurish” might just be being used as a scold because the numbers someone came up with are too low for someone else’s liking, or they don’t like putting numbers on things at all and feel it gives a false sense of precision.
That isn’t to say this is the only criticism that has been made, but just to highlight one I found unpersuasive.
I am not an expert, but personally I see the current crop of nuke experts as primarily “evangelizers of the wisdom of the past”. The nuke experts of the past, such as Tom Schelling, are more impressive (and more mathematical). If a better approach to nuke risk was easy to find, it would have probably already been found by one of the many geniuses of the 20th century who looked at nuke risk. If so, the best place to make a marginal contribution to nuke risk is by evangelizing the wisdom of the past: this can help avoid backsliding on things like arms control treaties (this also raises the question of the tractability of a geopolitical approach to reducing risk versus preparation/adaptation to nuclear war’s environmental damage and versus other non-nuke cause areas).
I am skeptical of attempts to gatekeep here. E.g. I found Scoblic’s response to Samotsvety’s forecast less persuasive than their post, and I am concerned here that “amateurish” might just be being used as a scold because the numbers someone came up with are too low for someone else’s liking, or they don’t like putting numbers on things at all and feel it gives a false sense of precision.
That isn’t to say this is the only criticism that has been made, but just to highlight one I found unpersuasive.
I am not an expert, but personally I see the current crop of nuke experts as primarily “evangelizers of the wisdom of the past”. The nuke experts of the past, such as Tom Schelling, are more impressive (and more mathematical). If a better approach to nuke risk was easy to find, it would have probably already been found by one of the many geniuses of the 20th century who looked at nuke risk. If so, the best place to make a marginal contribution to nuke risk is by evangelizing the wisdom of the past: this can help avoid backsliding on things like arms control treaties (this also raises the question of the tractability of a geopolitical approach to reducing risk versus preparation/adaptation to nuclear war’s environmental damage and versus other non-nuke cause areas).