gwern comments on Existential Risk - Less Wrong

28 Post author: lukeprog 15 November 2011 02:23PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (108)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: gwern 27 January 2014 04:01:21AM 10 points [-]

because, according to the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation, nuclear retaliation is based on multiple sources that confirm an actual attack.

Given that this is coming from the sort of people who thought that setting up the Dead Hand was a good idea, and given that ass-covering and telling the public less than the truth was standard operating procedure in Russia, and given everything we know about the American government's incompetence, paranoia, greed, destructive experiments & actions (like setting PAL locks to zero, to pick a nuclear example) and that nuclear authority really was delegated to individual officers (this and other scandalous aspects came up recently in the New Yorker, actually: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2014/01/strangelove-for-real.html )...

I see zero reason to place any credence in their claims. This is fruit of the poisonous tree. They have reason to lie. I have no more reason to disbelieve Petrov than other similar incidents (like the Cuban Missile Crisis's submarine incident).