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Roko comments on Our society lacks good self-preservation mechanisms - Less Wrong
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You cannot use anthropic principle here. Unless you postulate some really weird distribution of risks unlike any other distribution of anything in the universe (and by the outside view you cannot do that), then if risks were likely we would have many near misses - either barely getting away from total destruction of humanity, or events that caused widespread but not complete destruction. We have neither.
Global warming and Iraq war are tiny problems, vastly below any potential to threaten survival of civilization. Totalitarian regimes have very short half-lifes. Threat of the Cuban missile crisis seems vastly overstated, especially considering how many wars by proxy United Stated and Soviet Union fought without getting anywhere close to using nuclear weapons, and how nothing indicated intention of either party to resort to nuclear attack.
Communist Russia didn't went that badly by historical standards - standards of living when it ended were a lot higher than standard of living when it started, and if it shows anything is how remarkably resistant civilization is, restoring itself so smoothly after Stalin in such a hostile environment. You see the same pattern in China and so many other totalitarian regimes worldwide - how they get softer and more civilized given time, peace, and economic prosperity. We seem very well protected here.
Toba supereruption and genetic bottleneck probably strongest example of near-miss.
The genetic bottleneck around the time of the eruption was not as "near" as all that - in part since there were Neanderthals around at that time as an additional backup mechanism, complementing the surviving humans. Plus, of course, Homo floresiensis! ;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory estimates we got down to the last 5,000-10,000 backup copies of the human genome.
Figures from before the eruption appear to have not been dramatically higher:
There just weren't that many homos around at the time.
The proposed genetic bottleneck around the time of the eruption was long ago - when the human population may have been very small anyway. Today, we have six billion humans. There are better defenses against such things - in terms of stocked underground bunkers. So: a modern volcanic eruption would have to be vastly more destructive to kill all humans. The probabilities involved are miniscule, and shrink with every passing day. It is only because of a "Pascal's wager"-style argument that people can be made to consider such risks.
I can't find it, but there's an article explaining how the Axis was more or less doomed from the start. In short, United States had twice the production capacity than all other participants combined. I'm saying Hitler's mistakes only hastened the inevitable.
I'm not sure we should argue politics but... American intervention was not inevitable. Even merely materiale supply wasn't inevitable. There were a number of ways America could've been out of the picture or impotent; one of the cited turning points/mistakes was the failure of the Battle of Britain to bring England to terms, or the escape of their army at Dunkirk.
Letting America into the war was arguably one of Hitler's greatest mistakes (either by commission or omission, and there was even a historical parallel warning against America that Hitler was intimately familiar with - WWI).
America may've been tops in industry, but it's hard to see it launching a transoceanic invasion into Europe with no allied powers closer than... Africa? Asia?
Looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II
I see that the US's GDP (a good proxy, I think, for industrial production, was 800 at the start of the war, while total Axis GDP was 685. The rest of the Allies represented 829. So by itself, the US was 17% more than the entire Axis alliance, and just under half of the Allies (ie. the rest of the world). Pretty impressive.
The last column has the USA at 1474, or >3x total Axis output (466), and is at 64% of Allies. Incidentally, this means at the end of the war, the US was >2x what the Axis were at the beginning of the war. So the US did not have twice what the rest of the world had; but it did have twice the Axis by the end, and presumably this was foreseeable. So we can change Smith's point from being that the USA could industrially epic pwn the Axis, to merely pwn them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II
(fixed link)
Thanks; edited.
We /did/ nuke each other - in Japan. Some people even died. Civilisation however, did not end. It seems pretty speculative to classify 20th century history as some sort of "near miss". 6 billion humans represents the enormous success of our species - each human is a backup copy of our DNA. To classify this as a "near disaster" seems strange.
That hypothetical explosion never happened. Estimates of its probability seem necessarily speculative to me. If you want to "establish that there are actually such things as serious existential risks and major civilization-level catastrophes" then invoking things that never happened seems like rather weak evidence.
I did - I said your estimate of a "near miss" was "speculative". In fact, the world didn't end, and you haven't presented evidence that that was actually a likely outcome. Calling the "cold war" a "near miss" doesn't count for very much. We had zero use of nuclear weapons in anger during that era.