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Comment by ggambetta | Hacker News Reader

My personal opinion is that the "midnight clock" is a pointless relic of the cold war, extremely obsolete by now, and doesn't have any practical purpose other than releasing a scary press release once a year.

The "measurement" aspect feels especially wrong. Might as well say "this year things are very bad", or "terrible", or "very really extremely bad".

Edit: so much wrong with the clock metaphor to begin with. A clock is only supposed to move forward, so they're either using it wrong, or the concept itself is extremely biased towards OMG DOOM! If you want a less silly analogy, use a thermometer. Also it was started at 7 minutes to midnight [0], and the farthest it's ever been is 17 minutes, so the domain of the "function" is also heavily biased towards OMG DOOM!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock

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I agree, the "100 seconds to midnight" feels a little silly, but:

1. These scientists know that a good headline is necessary in today's world to become part of popular discourse.

2. Regardless of the headline, the actual post IMO is a very good and thoughtful overview of how huge resources put towards technological propaganda are undermining societal institutions around the world and raising the risk that "cooler heads" will not prevail.

Hasn't releasing a scary press release once a year basically been its raison d'etre since it began? It's a metaphor, its not meant to be some mega-accurate measure.

But it's clearly not accurate even with respect to itself. The world is closer to nuclear annihiliation now than in any year since 1953, including multiple proxy wars between the US and USSR along with the Cuban Missile Crisis? I don't see any plausible way to believe that.

How did a comment that must be from 2015 leap into this thread?

They call out climate change in this year's update, so it seems they've expanded beyond solely nuclear scenarios.

> pointless relic of the cold war, extremely obsolete

So you're saying the nukes are gone, the arms limitation treaties are rock solid and working, and no new threats are emerging.....

Oh wait, none of that is true.

I know, right? It really makes me wonder why I said all that nonsense!

Oh wait, I didn't.

What is the temperature of nuclear war? It seems to me to be nonsensical. The boiling point of water at atmospheric pressure? Why not the boiling point of iron? Or the surface temperature of the sun? Or the temperature of a nuclear weapon detonated on the surface temperature of the earth at t=10us? What is that anyway, does the average american know?

Thermonuclear war is and always will be a possible event in time, not some random value of temperature on the celsius scale.

It gave Americans (and the rest of the world) an answer to the question, "How close are we to nuclear war?" The nuclear scientists could say "The midnight clock is set to 7 minutes." And people could understand what it meant if it moved forwards or backwards.

It was never about measurement. It was always a symbol.

> What is the temperature of nuclear war?

You miss my point. A thermometer would be a better analogy than a clock, because a thermometer measures something that can go up and down, whereas a clock is expected to move inexorably towards midnight. And the temperature of a nuclear war is as arbitrary as using midnight as the time of a nuclear war.

> [...] an answer to the question, "How close are we to nuclear war?" The nuclear scientists could say "The midnight clock is set to 7 minutes."

...which is entirely meaningless, so it doesn't answer the question at all.

> people could understand what it meant if it moved forwards or backwards.

Clocks don't normally move backwards. Hence, thermometer.

> It was never about measurement. It was always a symbol.

I get that. I'm just saying is a really poorly thought out symbol.

> You miss my point.

Why do you assume that? Is it possible I completely understood your point and just challenged your thinking on it?

I always find it funny on here that some people prefer to be absolutely technically correct on something, rather than just letting a symbol be a symbol, imperfect as all symbols are.

As someone who grew up in the 1980's, anytime the clock moved, it made the nightly news.

PS: we do move the clock back and forth for Daylight Savings Time, or to adjust the it when it's off -- A clock is afterall a human construct.

Some countries are trending towards becoming doubleplusungood

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