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Comment by pugworthy | Hacker News Reader

Very devils advocate here, but I mean.. what if it actually is the way to use them?

We have such a huge mental / moral block on the idea of using nukes, but we're willing to do a lot of other very horrible things to others. Things like cluster bombs, mines, poison gas, biological weapons, drones, etc.

Is there really anything about them that's bad? Or any worse than other things?

If you get rid of the "It's really bad to use nukes of any kind" implied rule, is it really surprising it's considered a reasonable strategy?

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>Is there really anything about them that's bad?

Everything. Major one is radioactive contamination, the effects of it are devastating and last significantly longer. The only other weapon on par with nukes are bioweapons, stuff like mirror life (and scientists appropriately reacted alarmingly to that as well).

The reason we have a mental block is because it deserves one. A quick skimming through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_nuclear_explosions and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disas... should be enough to convince you.

My family was in the zone of lower contamination when Chernobyl happened and after radioactive rainfall there were many instances of various cancers in people in the area. It is extremely ignorant to not have a mental block in anything regarding nukes.

I’m not sure if you’re one of the down voters, but I appreciate your comment.

I purposely took a contrary position in a debate just to spark a deeper discussion. Glad it has done that.

Haha, no problem. It's always better to talk openly about these things and raise awareness. And I didn't downvote you, I didn't even know you could do that since I'm pretty new to HN.

Mirror Bacteria is quite the terrifying prospect [1]. I'd never heard about it but the theory is that if we made a mirror bacteria, our and all other immune systems would be unable to defend against it, potentially leading to catastrophic infection of vast swathes of all life across the planet and the unavoidable death of some large percentage of all life. The benefit would be that they could be used in treatment as a chassis to carry other molecules into the body or that they could manufacture mirror-drugs that would have novel effects. Quite the addition to the torment nexus huh.

[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads9158

Mirror bacteria is overblown. We can generate antibodies for them, so it will be fine. Also, they can feed only of fat, not sugar or normal proteins, so they will mostly starve.

Right. Everyone is using this to judge the LLMs instead of questioning what situation they were actually fed and whether it was in fact the best move.

More likely, the simulation was just very poor and the results are nonsense.

The reason it's really bad to use nukes is that other parties with nukes will use them on you back.

And on top of that, many of those other weapons are also not used to avoid escalating? There are pretty high costs to using bioweapons even against non peer opponents.

Unless your simplistic game simulation says "I can win with a decisive first strike and they'll have nothing left."

Nuclear deterrence has been a mixed bag at best: https://www.amazon.com/Five-Myths-About-Nuclear-Weapons/

> Is there really anything about them that's bad? Or any worse than other things?

A full-on nuclear war will literally make a large portion of our planet uninhabitable for anyone for centuries, and leave the rest severely crippled and contaminated.

Sorry I know we're supposed to be kind and whatnot in these comments but I can't help but explicitly state that your comment is one of the dumbest things I've read on this site in a while. I hope you otherwise have a good day.

Please re read the start of my comment.

I took a contrary position in a debate just to spark a deeper discussion. Which it has. I didn’t say I believed this.

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