tll;dr: The 60% was because I didn’t really know much about the AMB capabilities early on and gave it around a 50-50. I updated upwards as we researched this more, but not by that much. This doesn’t end up affecting the aggregate that much because other forecasters (correctly, as it now seems), disagreed with me on this.
Hey, thanks for the thoughtful comment, it looks like you’ve looked into ABM much more than I/(we?) have.
The 60% estimate was mine. I think I considered London being targetted but not being hit as a possibility early on, but we didn’t have a section on it. By the time we had looked into ICMBs more, it got incorporated into “London is hit given an escalation” and then “Conditional on Russia/NATO nuclear exchange killing at least one person, London is hit with a nuclear weapon”.
But my probability for “Conditional on Russia/NATO nuclear exchange killing at least one person, London is hit with a nuclear weapon” is the lowest in the group, and I think this was in fact because I was thinking that they could be intercepted. I think I updated a bit when reading more about it and when other forecasters pushed against that, but not that much.
Concretely, I was at ~5% for “Conditional on Russia/NATO nuclear exchange killing at least one person, London is hit with a nuclear weapon”, and your comment maybe moves me to ~8-10%. I was the lowest in the aggregate for that subsection, so the aggregate of 24 micromorts doesn’t include it, and so doesn’t change. Or, maybe your comment does shift other forecasters by ~20%, and so the aggregate moves from 24 to 30 micromorts.
Overall I’m left wishing I had modeled and updated the “launched but intercepted” probability directly throughout.
tll;dr: The 60% was because I didn’t really know much about the AMB capabilities early on and gave it around a 50-50. I updated upwards as we researched this more, but not by that much. This doesn’t end up affecting the aggregate that much because other forecasters (correctly, as it now seems), disagreed with me on this.
Hey, thanks for the thoughtful comment, it looks like you’ve looked into ABM much more than I/(we?) have.
The 60% estimate was mine. I think I considered London being targetted but not being hit as a possibility early on, but we didn’t have a section on it. By the time we had looked into ICMBs more, it got incorporated into “London is hit given an escalation” and then “Conditional on Russia/NATO nuclear exchange killing at least one person, London is hit with a nuclear weapon”.
But my probability for “Conditional on Russia/NATO nuclear exchange killing at least one person, London is hit with a nuclear weapon” is the lowest in the group, and I think this was in fact because I was thinking that they could be intercepted. I think I updated a bit when reading more about it and when other forecasters pushed against that, but not that much.
Concretely, I was at ~5% for “Conditional on Russia/NATO nuclear exchange killing at least one person, London is hit with a nuclear weapon”, and your comment maybe moves me to ~8-10%. I was the lowest in the aggregate for that subsection, so the aggregate of 24 micromorts doesn’t include it, and so doesn’t change. Or, maybe your comment does shift other forecasters by ~20%, and so the aggregate moves from 24 to 30 micromorts.
Overall I’m left wishing I had modeled and updated the “launched but intercepted” probability directly throughout.
Thanks again for your comment.