Blog at The Good Blog https://thegoodblog.substack.com/
Nathan_Barnard
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Intelligence failures and a theory of change for forecasting
ARIA is looking for topics for roundtables
Safety without oppression: an AI governance problem
An epistemic critique of longtermism
How do poor countries get rich: some theories
Modeling responses to changes in nuclear risk
Yeah this is just about the constant risk case, I probably should have referred to it not covering time of perils explicitly, although same mechanism with neglectedness should still apply.
Thanks! Fixed
The value of x-risk reduction
wow that’s really interesting, I’ll look more deeply into that. It’s defintely not what I’ve read happened, but at this point I think it’s proably worth me reading the primary sources rather than relying on books.
I have no specifc source saying explicitly that there wasn’t a plan to use nuclear weopons in response to a tactical nuclear weopon. However, I do know what the decsion making stucture for the use of nuclear weopons was. In a case where there hadn’t been a decapiting strike on civillian administrators, the Presidnet was presented with plans from the SIOP (US nuclear plan) which were exclusively plans based around a statagy of descrution of the Communist bloc. The SIOP was the US nuclear plan but triggers for nuclear war weren’t in it anywhere. When induvidual soliders had tactical nuclear weopons their instructions weren’t fixed—they could be instructed explictly not to use tactical nukes, in general though the structure of the US armed forces was to let the commanding officer decide the most approate course of action in a given sitaution.
Second thing to note—tactical nukes were viewed as battlefeild weopons by both sides. Niether viewed them as anything special becaue they were nuclear in the sense that they should engender an all out attack.
So maybe I should clarify that by saying that there was no plan that required the use of tactical nuclear weopons in response a Soviet use of them.
Probably the best single text of US nuclear war plans is The Bomb by Fred Kaplan.
Probably best source on how tactical nukes were used is Command and Control by Eric Schollsser
On the second one, I have a post here that serves to give the wider statagic context:
But it’s not clear to me how Berlin is relvent. It’s relvent insofar as it’s an important factor in why the crisis happened but it’s not clear to me why Berlin increased the chance of escaltion into nuclear war beyond the fact that the Soviet response to a US invasion of Cuba could be to attempt to take Berlin.
Why does the China-India war matter here post Sino-Soviet split?
How close to nuclear war did we get over Cuba?
Thanks for you feedback! Unfortunately I am a smart junior person, so looks like we know who’ll be doing the copy editing
Yeah I think that’s very reasonable
When is AI safety research harmful?
Yes!
I think three really good books are One minute to Midnight, Nuclear folly, and Gambling with Armageddon. Lots of other ones have shortish sections but these three focus more almost completely on the crisis.
Also deals with the issue from the same persecptive I’ve presented here.
The Mystery of the Cuban missile crisis
I think that there is something to the claim being made in the post which is that longtermism as it currently is is mostly about increasing number of people in the future living good lives. It seems genuinely true that most longtermists are prioritising creating happiness over reducing suffering. This is the key factor which pushes me towards longtermist s-risk.
I think the key point here is that it is unsually easy to recuirt EAs at uni compared to when they’re at McKinsey. I think it’s unclear if a) among the the best things for a student to do is go to McKinsey and b) how much less likely it is that an EA student goes to McKinsey. I think it’s pretty unlikely going to McKinsey is the best thing to do, but I also think that EA student groups have a realtively small effect on how often students go into elite coporate jobs (a bad thing from my perspective) at least in software engineering.
Yes, thanks