Re: Cold-War Disarmament Activism

From: Michael Vassar (michaelvassar@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri Jun 30 2006 - 01:35:42 MDT


Anthropic selection is huge here too. From our perspective
P Extinction occurrs given that MAD works = P extinction occurrs given that
MAD doesn't work = 0
Now this isn't quite true. If MAD was a very reliable form of species
suicide we would expect to have a history where it was never implemented,
possibly due to large coincidences. OTOH, who's to say weird coincidences
didn't happen. Kennedy' death anyone? Maybe it really was just Lee Harvey
Oswalt, but You, the reader, probablistically "guided" the bullet by being
here today to remember ;-)
Anthropic paranoia is annoying.

>From: Keith Henson <hkhenson@rogers.com>
>Reply-To: sl4@sl4.org
>To: sl4@sl4.org
>Subject: Re: Cold-War Disarmament Activism
>Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2006 14:44:29 -0400
>
>At 01:50 PM 6/28/2006 -0700, J. Andrew Rogers wrote:
>
>snip
>
>>I'm not following your reasoning at all because of what appears to be
>>a badly broken analogy.
>>
>>MAD in a nutshell:
>>
>>MAD only works if . . . .
>
>snip
>
>It may be broken in another dimension. How do we know that MAD works at
>all? The evidence that nobody pushed the button does not demonstrate it
>was prevented by MAD. It might be that Neptune was in the right place in
>its orbit, or could be that the conditions leading to full scale war
>between the parties just didn't happen during the time. And to the extent
>MAD depends on rationality, I am skeptical people going into war mode *are"
>rational. (See Drew Westen's fMRI work on partisans.)
>
>This relates to FAI in that AI could come about as a Manhattan type project
>with the project leaders under war stress.
>
>But this strays into areas that should be discussed elsewhere if you want
>to transplant the thread.
>
>Keith Henson
>
>



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