Best state to survive nuclear war9/15/2023 ![]() He argued that instead, Bayesian approaches – which rely on subjective probabilities that get updated when new information is presented – could be a more helpful way of thinking across multiple different nuclear scenarios, as Baum himself has done in a working paper. Director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute Seth Baum noted that Podvig was critiquing frequentist approaches to calculating, which infer how likely an event is to happen based on a sampling of past similar events. Nuclear scholar and Russian forces expert Pavel Podvig argued along these lines in Newsweek and on Twitter, publicly asserting that nuclear strikes are so rare, it is impossible to calculate their frequency and therefore meaningless to translate that frequency into a probability. Trying to estimate the probability of nuclear use is just as difficult - if not more so. For example, the possible causes of Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian civilians span across international, domestic, and psychological explanations. Estimating the probability of future events like ones that have occurred many times before is already difficult enough, since - in a complex world - it is difficult to determine which factors decreased or increased the probabilities for past events. Predicting the future is hard, and estimating the probability of future events is no exception. Can you put a number on the likelihood of nuclear use? We offer an alternative approach that focuses on thinking broadly across multiple scenarios and minimizing the rewards of using nuclear weapons, to minimize the possibility of nuclear war. Here, we lay out the debate over the probability of nuclear use, outlining flaws in current estimates. The difference between estimates may simply reflect the prominence of each nuclear scenario in each analyst’s mind. On the high end, these estimates ranged from 10-20 percent to an overly precise 16.8 percent to 20-25 percent for “some analysts.” Some of these headline-grabbing estimates are likely inflated to create a sense of urgency and put pressure on policymakers to take action, rather than to showcase the ability to carefully craft probability estimates. ![]()
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