Not sure this is a good place to comment on your blogpost, but I found myself having very different intuitions about this paragraph:
So: what’s the probability of something like the Ukraine situation given a nuclear exchange this year? I’d actually expect a nuclear exchange to be precipitated by somewhat more direct conflict, rather than something more proxy-like. For instance, maybe we’d expect Russia to talk about how Estonia is rightfully theirs, and how it shouldn’t even be a big deal to NATO, rather than the current world where the focus has been on Ukraine specifically for a while. So I’d give this conditional probability as 1⁄3, which is about 3⁄10.
I think the game theory around NATO precommitments and deterrence more generally gets especially messy in the “proxy-like” situation, so much so that I remember reading takes where people thought escalation was unusually likely in the sort of situation we’re in. The main reason being that if the situation is messier, it’s not obvious what each side considers unacceptable, so you increase the odds of falsely modeling the other player.
It’s true that we can think of situations that would be even more dangerous than what we see now, but if those other situations were extremely unlikely a priori, then that still leaves more probability mass for things like the current scenario when you condition on “nuclear exchange this year.” Out of all the dangerous things Russia was likely to do, isn’t a large invasion into Ukraine pretty high on the list? (Maybe this point is compatible with what you write; I’m not sure I understood it exactly.)
Putin seems to have gone off the rails quite a bit and the situation in Russia for him is pretty threatening (he’s got the country hostage but has to worry about attempts to out him). Isn’t that the sort of thing you’d expect to see before an exchange? Maybe game theory is overrated and you care more about the state of mind of the dictator and the sort of conditions of the country (whether people expect their family to be imprisoned if they object to orders that lead to more escalation, etc.). So I was surprised that you didn’t mention points related to this.
Re: 1, my impression is that Russia and NATO have been in a few proxy conflicts, and so have presumably worked out this deal.
Re: 2, that seems basically right.
Re: 3, I’d weight this relatively low, since it’s the kind of ‘soft’ reporting I’d strongly expect to be less reliable in the current media environment where Putin is considered a villain.
Note that at most this will get you an order of magnitude above the base rate.
Not sure this is a good place to comment on your blogpost, but I found myself having very different intuitions about this paragraph:
I think the game theory around NATO precommitments and deterrence more generally gets especially messy in the “proxy-like” situation, so much so that I remember reading takes where people thought escalation was unusually likely in the sort of situation we’re in. The main reason being that if the situation is messier, it’s not obvious what each side considers unacceptable, so you increase the odds of falsely modeling the other player.
It’s true that we can think of situations that would be even more dangerous than what we see now, but if those other situations were extremely unlikely a priori, then that still leaves more probability mass for things like the current scenario when you condition on “nuclear exchange this year.” Out of all the dangerous things Russia was likely to do, isn’t a large invasion into Ukraine pretty high on the list? (Maybe this point is compatible with what you write; I’m not sure I understood it exactly.)
Putin seems to have gone off the rails quite a bit and the situation in Russia for him is pretty threatening (he’s got the country hostage but has to worry about attempts to out him). Isn’t that the sort of thing you’d expect to see before an exchange? Maybe game theory is overrated and you care more about the state of mind of the dictator and the sort of conditions of the country (whether people expect their family to be imprisoned if they object to orders that lead to more escalation, etc.). So I was surprised that you didn’t mention points related to this.
Re: 1, my impression is that Russia and NATO have been in a few proxy conflicts, and so have presumably worked out this deal.
Re: 2, that seems basically right.
Re: 3, I’d weight this relatively low, since it’s the kind of ‘soft’ reporting I’d strongly expect to be less reliable in the current media environment where Putin is considered a villain.
Note that at most this will get you an order of magnitude above the base rate.