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