Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

I was going to use nuclear war as a counterexample, but I see that he is somehow using it as a point in his favor. I find that very weird. We haven’t done jack to fix that problem, it just hasn’t happened yet.

View on HN

So how do we measure this? We can’t use the existence or non-existence of nuclear war, since that’s an all-or-nothing proposition – the fact that we haven’t had a nuclear war yet does not say much about the likelihood of one occurring. So how do we measure the likelihood? Some people like to concentrate on the amount of nuclear weapons, and, by implication, argue that the likelihood is proportional to the number of nuclear weapons in the world. I am less than convinced about this reasoning. Or is it the simple number of countries which have them which matters? I don’t think so either; if, say, Norway and Iceland both acquired nuclear weapons, would nuclear war be more likely? Probably not. So you have to be careful in how you score this issue, since it’s impossible to measure directly, and easy to convince yourself you have chosen a good proxy for it, when in reality it’s merely an irrelevant factor which happens to be easy to measure.

There's been significant things done to stop nuclear war.

There are huge nonproliferation and counter-proliferation efforts going on.

Which aren't working. Did you know that India now has a fleet of SBN's?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arihant-class_submarine

There have been some efforts to make it less likely. Nothing that would outright stop it.

Nonproliferation efforts aren’t even about making it less likely. They’re only about not making it more likely.

The expansion of global trade has done more to stop nuclear war than anything else. You don't want to nuke the guy who gives you all your soybeans.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com