Iran Catch-All | IRAN WAR

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superrific said:
It is also a mathematical certainty that if you keep choosing letters at random, you'll eventually churn out Hamlet. It's a pretty unambitious claim.

Nuclear war is a distant threat compared to what is in front of us today. AI, drone warfare, autonomous weapons, climate change, great power conflict -- these are all much more likely to be the end of us.
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I wasn’t limiting my comments to extinction level uses of nuclear weapons. They can be used without wiping out humanity.

The odds of an offensive use of nuclear weapons is far, far greater than randomly typing Hamlet.
 
pspsps said:
Something does not smell right. As incompetent as Trump et al. tend to be did they really start a war without the necessary stock of defensive weapons? Really?
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The problem is that the US getting into a war without the necessary weapons is so mind-numbingly stupid that it's almost impossible to imagine.

But that's offset by looking at the Trump administration and acknowledging that mind-numbingly stupid is one of their areas of expertise.
 
SnoopRob said:
The problem is that the US getting into a war without the necessary weapons is so mind-numbingly stupid that it's almost impossible to imagine.

But that's offset by looking at the Trump administration and acknowledging that mind-numbingly stupid is one of their areas of expertise.
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But it is so incompetent as to seem intentional!

Maybe that is just me being gobsmacked by the reality that such stupidity has the this much power.
 
pspsps said:
Something does not smell right. As incompetent as Trump et al. tend to be did they really start a war without the necessary stock of defensive weapons? Really?
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Trump doesn't believe in a world where people punch back at the bully. He assumed that hitting hard and taking out the Ayatollah means the rest of the regime would bow down to him.
 
Calheel said:
I wasn’t limiting my comments to extinction level uses of nuclear weapons. They can be used without wiping out humanity.

The odds of an offensive use of nuclear weapons is far, far greater than randomly typing Hamlet.
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Mathematically, the probability is exactly the same: any finite event will occur with 100% certainty in infinite time (technically a certainty approaching 100% asymptotically).

You aren't talking about math, though, and you never were. To use a bit of jargon, you're applying domain specific knowledge. Except you don't want to say it that way, because it's not knowledge at all. It's a domain-specific guess.

I agree with you: in the domain of human experience, offensive use of a nuclear weapon during any arbitrary time span is more likely than randomly typing Hamlet. But all of those probabilities are guesses
 
superrific said:
Mathematically, the probability is exactly the same: any finite event will occur with 100% certainty in infinite time (technically a certainty approaching 100% asymptotically).

You aren't talking about math, though, and you never were. To use a bit of jargon, you're applying domain specific knowledge. Except you don't want to say it that way, because it's not knowledge at all. It's a domain-specific guess.

I agree with you: in the domain of human experience, offensive use of a nuclear weapon during any arbitrary time span is more likely than randomly typing Hamlet. But all of those probabilities are guesses
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Yes, pretty much any statement about future human behavior is a guess. But I think the odds are well over 50%, likely over 90%, that a nuclear weapon will be deployed in the next 100 years. And I'd think the odds are 99.9% if we go out 500 years. Of course, as you point out, there are several potentially greater human extinction events if we are willing to extend the time horizon to 500 years.

The whole point of anti-proliferation is to keep that percentage as low as possible for as long as possible. If there were no risk of nuclear weapons being used as anything other than a deterrent, then there would be no need for anti-proliferation foreign policy.
 
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