gwern comments on A Parable of Elites and Takeoffs - Less Wrong

23 Post author: gwern 30 June 2014 11:04PM

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Comment author: gwern 01 July 2014 05:10:32PM 3 points [-]

But when I saw 'Seilla', that told me 'It's Nukes'.

Ah. Hm... I wasn't even referring to the WWII Allies there, I was referring to Western involvement (particularly the USA & Triple Entente) in the Russian Revolution supporting the Whites. Perhaps I could use "Nacirema and Threefold Understanding"?

That's simply not how it went 70 years ago.

Yes, it is. The decision was indeed hurried. They were early prototypes. The use was outside the lab. The country was indeed a foreign country. The country was impoverished by our standards, and impoverished by the standards of the day before and definitely impoverished after years of embargo, war, fire-bombing, wasted military expenditures, and destruction of the labor force. The Axis countries were poor even before the war. (If you are under the mistaken impression that Germany, for example, was 'rich' or 'heavily industrialized' or even comparable to England or America per capita, I suggest you read Tooze's The Wages of Destruction.)

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 01 July 2014 05:34:47PM 0 points [-]

One teeensy problem. The technology you are referring to here is not the same technology that had been alluded to in the previous paragraph.

Comment author: gwern 01 July 2014 05:51:15PM 1 point [-]

The research that went into the bomb helped a lot with reactors. They're both nuclear fission.