Why I think there's a one-in-six chance of an imminent global nuclear war
&gt; I&#x27;d love to hear your thoughts both on this risk modeling framework<p>I guess I don&#x27;t see the word qualitative the same way the author does. To me &quot;qualitative&quot; implies inputs like depth, thought, introspection, care, conscientiousness, reflection, things like that.<p>Anyway, here are some thoughts on the topic and article, based on personality theory, one of the areas I like to think about and hack on:<p>- Putin thinks of threats as qualitative solutions. He does not think of actions being nearly as valuable. He continually demonstrates that his threats are calculated far more deeply and conscientiously than his actions.<p>- Putin thinks (likely subconsciously) that actually taking actions (like initiating nuclear warfare) is a quantitative solution that is shallow, irritating and effectively risky to his bluffer&#x27;s poker strategy. You don&#x27;t make a Russia out of the equivalent of Italy&#x27;s resources by _showing_ what you can do with your stuff, after all.<p>- Putin is in a holistic position that makes nuclear war a far more valuable threat than action. This is partially due to his internal psychology, because he prefers diplomatic and political puzzles to outright warfare. The outright warriors are more like the ones winning this conflict on the ground right now.<p>- Putin views direct negotiation itself as weakness. Negotiation is conducted by actions that threaten further action, but the planning of negotiation in such a form is where the energy goes.<p>- Putin would rather not work on conflict at a global scale. His best tools, perspectives, and allies are all local-scale.<p>- Putin is directly calling many, if not most of the shots, and is effectively in control of the Russian political character on the global stage.<p>- Putin doesn&#x27;t think in terms of escalate or not. He thinks in terms of solving puzzles and offering puzzles to be solved in return. (The same is not true of Zelensky or Biden, which is very important here. You have a battle of psychological perspectives, with force good&#x2F;bad in the West aligned vs politics cunning&#x2F;weak in Russia. Dangerous match with no default winner [1])<p>IMO Putin likely believes he has 1,000 strategies that are more effective than triggering something as generic as nuclear war. However, some of them may involve &quot;mysterious&quot; limited nuclear war, for example. In fact I think one of his most effective strategies could be a slow escalation of radiation exposure events via various means, accompanied by denial and diplomatic go-betweens.<p>Also, I noticed that like most of us, the author writes in such a way as to reveal their personal preferences. A common blind spot for authors with similar preferences is that they will work very hard to answer a near-random question and then spend lots of build time on internal logic.<p>This then sets up a de facto misdirection fallacy: Look into the question, but don&#x27;t question the question. This is a particularly tenacious fallacy because there is no other-hand alternative being offered in any case, and humans aren&#x27;t generally comfortable working with the unknown. So questions, particularly those which are interesting for some set of reasons, can cause big problems just because other questions aren&#x27;t being uncovered and discussed with the same resources.<p>Qualitatively impressive internals and a neat model are one possible result of this setup for sure, but in that way this is still a Jedi mind trick the author may not even be aware of. So, was there a question-selection framework? How do we know this question is worth spending time on? What are some other questions that are interesting, for example questions that may help tease out new models for a successful response to the threat? Or are there types of questions that model the situation better?<p>And this doesn&#x27;t get into some other issues like the internal terms used and their graphed relationship. A lot of assumptions are made, figures are pulled, and details left out.<p>Qualitatively it&#x27;s an interesting article to read for sure, and I wouldn&#x27;t criticize it too harshly when it at least meets that bar and comes with a graph.<p>But it doesn&#x27;t do much for a common dichotomy here, i.e. do we continue to act in what is assumed to be an escalation, or do we deescalate and hope that the result is better than what we are supposed to think is the only alternative to deescalation?<p>(Dichotomies like escalate and de- are pretty messed up, really.)<p>1. I do think that the Biden-Zelensky relational support system is extremely risky on the side of force. These are both highly emotive, force-on-force personalities. They may stumble right into Putin&#x27;s blind spot and force his hand by a combination of his own personal, embarrassing weakness in the areas of lack of care and lack of suitable employed force, and their own combined, nuclear-critical capability for turning passionate moral crusade into political gaffe. God I hope I&#x27;m wrong about this.