Roko comments on Our society lacks good self-preservation mechanisms - Less Wrong

12 [deleted] 12 July 2009 09:26AM

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Comment author: CannibalSmith 12 July 2009 05:51:00PM *  3 points [-]

Nazi Germany only lost WWII because Hitler made very silly mistakes.

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.

Comment deleted 12 July 2009 06:24:05PM *  [-]
Comment author: gwern 13 July 2009 02:18:04AM *  1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 13 July 2009 10:11:46AM *  1 point [-]
Comment author: gwern 10 October 2010 02:04:11AM 0 points [-]

Thanks; edited.