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Nominull comments on Rationality Quotes November 2012 - Less Wrong
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K.C. Cole
If you're consistently in your right mind you can safely create the means of your own extinction, with the knowledge that you are sufficiently sane not to use it to extinguish yourself. This can come in handy when the means of your own extinction has significant non-extinction related uses.
This is true in theory, but do you think it's an accurate description of our real world?
(Nuclear power is potentially great, but with a bit more patience and care, we could stretch our non-nuclear resources quite a bit further, which would have given us more time to build stable(r) political systems.)
I think you set a false dichotomy here - we can generate relatively safe nuclear power (thorium reactors) without existential risk, and without creating the byproducts necessary to create nuclear weapons. This is not an argument against the root comment, however.
Sure, thorium reactors do not appear to immediately allow nuclear weapons - but the scientific and technological advances that lead to thorium reactors are definitely "dual-use".
I'm not entirely convinced of either the feasibility or the ethics of the "physicists should never have told politicians how to build a nuke" argument that's been made multiple times on LW (and in HPMOR), but the existence of thorium reactors doesn't really constitute a valid argument against it - an industry capable of building thorium reactors is very likely able to think up, and eventually build, nukes.
No, I was responding to the "no one in their right mind" bit. It seems to me that when you are in your right mind is precisely the time to build artifacts that could destroy your civilization, and it doesn't seem to me that you could conclude from building such artifacts that you are not in your right mind.
Rather, I think there's other evidence that humanity can't be trusted with e.g. nuclear weaponry, and this suggests that we should not build it. lukeprog's quote seems to me to be of the form "Humanity can't be trusted with nuclear weapons, yet builds them anyway, so it must be crazy, so it can't be trusted with nuclear weapons."