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Comment by twoodfin | Hacker News Reader

Since the beginning of the nuclear age, literally billions of dollars have been spent paying incredibly smart people to model all aspects of nuclear war, including the chain of escalation under uncertainty.

Not to discount the importance of this risk, but we’re not likely to sleepwalk into it, barring a collapse in strategic & operational competence in planning (yeah, yeah) that would make MANY risks dangerously severe.

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There are several examples already of the modeling leading to systems that all incorrectly handled faults and pointed toward nuclear war as the correct next action. Each of these times _so far_ a human has gone against the strategic planning and operational competence you're talking about and decided personally to get more information before killing millions of people (and they were all correct so far!)

Diluting or delegating decision making to committees, processes, models, or AI all have essentially the same shape.

We can either appreciate how lucky we've been so far and actually learn from these near-doomsdays or we can choose to keep rolling the dice with our eyes covered.

There are so many implicit premises in that short comment, such as:

- Incredibly smart people are always right when it comes to extremely complex systems involving both deterministic behavior and human psychology - The people with the nuclear codes will be given their orders by (or themselves be) incredibly smart people - Wargames work (they have a horrible track record) - The best plans are based on a complete understanding of the starting conditions and the factors that influence the modelling (including the "unknown unknowns")

I could go on.

I’m not sure what you’re objecting to about my comment, except a bunch of “implicit premises” you read into it.

My experience is that wargaming has a decent track record. In hindsight, Nimitz looks much more prepared than MacArthur, even if their early careers suggest the opposite.

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