Gentzel — LessWrong

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Gentzel — LessWrong

If weapons-capable

Might want to clarify the level of weapon capable.

not easy to estimate the hard ceiling of intelligence

Can Shannon information theory help here? (not sure it can)

Insect-sized drone hypotheticals:

The ability of such drones to communicate/data link seems core to the scale of how threatening/capable they can be. Without solid data linking or ability to send instruction/access compute, you just get narrowly targeted kill bots without much strategy.

C&C

Command and Control is usually referred to as C2 in order to not confuse people with CNC machines

nuclear winter

Nuclear winter certainly isn't cheap but I'm not sure this is the right phrase to conclude the sentence? Maybe "because nuclear arsenals are not cheap"? OTOH not as much of a ring.

the results would be the same:

In the context of nukes, people are going to think about deterrence so it won't be obvious to them that an alternative would be better/less likley to result in this

^[4]

For the uranium to naturally be 235, it would be vulnerable to fission, and thus would knock itself out of existence in high concentrations. This is a case where what may seem like a natural accident couldn't really be any other way.

gas

gaseous (just gas is apparently a broader reference?)

kill millions

Or to just destroy whatever the attacker cares about. May not be millions

ensure the permanence of its regime

Against external intervention

Surviving and Shaping Long-Term Competitions: Lessons from Net Assessment

Gentzel

Gentzel, ihavenoahidea

This post examines net assessment, a framework for evaluating strategic competition that evolved to inform U.S. defense policy during the Cold War. We explain what net assessment is, its methods and principles, and how some of its tools can be applied to reason about highly uncertain, long-term tech competitions with potentially existential stakes.

What is net assessment?

In the late 1950s, the Cold War slid into an especially dangerous period. Nuclear stockpiles swelled and delivery capabilities advanced, while a decades-long buildup by the Soviet Union challenged the United States’ conventional military dominance. Defense analysts needed to reframe the way they looked at military competition: the U.S. could not overpower the Soviet war machine with brute... (read 3677 more words →)

Rules for Epistemic Warfare?

Gentzel

In partisan contests of various forms, dishonesty, polarization, and groupthink are widespread. Political warfare creates societal collateral damage: it makes it harder for individuals to arrive at true beliefs on many subjects, because their social networks provide strong incentive to promote false beliefs. To escape this situation, improving social norms and technology may help, however if only one side of a conflict becomes more honest, the other side may exploit that as a weakness, just as conquerors could exploit countries were less violent. Coming up with rules analogous to rules of war, may help ratchet partisan contests toward higher levels of honesty and integrity over time, enabling more honest coalitions to become... (read 400 more words →)

The Future of Nuclear Arms Control?

Gentzel

In the early Cold War, weapons were not very accurate and intelligence collection often wasn’t very good or up to date. If you were a war planner, the advent of the hydrogen bomb solved a lot of problems for you: even if you didn’t know exactly where a target was, and even if your weapon could miss by hundreds of meters, with a large enough nuclear yield, you could still guarantee the destruction of whatever targets you hoped to hit.

But with giant yield weapons, comes massive collateral damage, likely far beyond what is required to deter decision makers. The difference between a TSAR bomb (or its modern equivalent) and the lowest... (read 1670 more words →)

Epistemic Warfare

Gentzel

Lying and censorship are both adversarial games: they are applied by some for an advantage over others.

All else being equal, one is harmful because it spreads disinformation, the other is harmful because it suppresses the spread of accurate information. When someone or a group justifies using either, it is normally in the context of achieving a greater benefit, or responding reciprocally to another. This mirrors war, in that war is inherently destructive as well, but can sometimes be used to accomplish good things and to punish or deter bad things.

Treating lying and censorship as war though highlights not just that civil discourse is in a constant state of war, but a constant... (read 478 more words →)

Competitive Universal Basic Services?

Gentzel

Providing basic services should often be more efficient than basic income. The state can use its centralized negotiating power to get lower prices on standardized packages, and accordingly a floor for welfare could be provided at a lower cost than just redistributing income, which, though it gives people more agency, can more easily just inflate prices generally and leave people more liable to impulse spending. To keep such a system efficient, there must be fitness pressure on the programs, plausibly via competing services (e.g. think of charter schools) and you probably want to peg the system to some percentage of GDP or natural resource rents to prevent uncontrolled growth and debt. Without... (read 576 more words →)

The Alignment-Competence Trade-Off, Part 1: Coalition Size and Signaling Costs

Gentzel

This is part 1 of a series of posts I initially planned to organize as a massive post last summer on principal-agent problems. As that task quickly became overwhelming, I decided to break it down into smaller posts that ensure I cover each of the cases and mechanisms that I intended to.

Overall, I think the trade-off between the alignment of agents and the competence of agents can explain a lot of problems to which people often think there are simple answers. The less capable an agent is (whether the agent is a person, a bureaucracy, or an algorithm) the easier it is for a principal to assess the agent, and ensure the... (read 721 more words →)

In Defense of the Arms Races… that End Arms Races

Gentzel

All else being equal, arms races are a waste of resources and often an example of the defection equilibrium in the prisoner’s dilemma. However, in some cases, such capacity races may actually be the globally optimal strategy. Below I try to explain this with some examples.

1: If the U.S. kept racing in its military capacity after WW2, the U.S. may have been able to use its negotiating leverage to stop the Soviet Union from becoming a nuclear power: halting proliferation and preventing the build up of world threatening numbers of high yield weapons. Basically, the earlier you win an arms race, the less nasty it may be later. If the U.S.... (read 679 more words →)

The Cybersecurity Dilemma in a Nutshell

Gentzel

The Cybersecurity Dilemma: Hacking, Trust, and Fear Between Nations organizes its arguments in a fairly no-nonsense, premise –> premise –> conclusion manner that I thought would be good to summarize with a blog post. You can buy the book here.

The argument:

Security dilemmas are dangerous because in seeking their own security, states often build capabilities and take actions that can directly threaten the security of other states: often creating impressions of imminent offensive intent and prompting escalation. This is especially true for cybersecurity for several main reasons:

States that desire options for future cyber operations must make intrusions in advance.

The sequential stages of cyber-attack (target acquisition, development, authorization, entry, establishing command and control (C2),

... (read 700 more words →)

Modernization and arms control don’t have to be enemies.

Gentzel

On a recent panel on nuclear modernization and arms control at Brookings, there were a few points made about the potential synergies between arms control and modernization.

While modernization and arms control seem contradictory, it really depends on what you are trying to do with each. For example, if you want to reduce the number of nuclear weapons the U.S. has in its stockpile, it may actually make sense to improve the ability of the U.S. to produce new weapons. Why would that be you might ask? It’s because current stockpiles are a hedge, a hedge to replace warheads that are too old and to buy time for a future ability to... (read 371 more words →)

Lessons from the Cold War on Information Hazards: Why Internal Communication is Critical

Gentzel

Due to their tremendous power, nuclear weapons were a subject of intense secrecy and taboo in the US government following WW2. After their first uses, President Truman came to consider atomic weapons a terror weapon of last resort and generally avoided discussion of their use.¹ As a consequence, top-level decision makers in his administration (himself included), outside the Atomic Energy Commision (AEC) remained unaware of the US nuclear stockpile size as it grew,² and relatively few means of achieving arms control were considered at a high level, given Stalin’s resistance to opening up the Soviet Union to inspections.³ Frustrated by failed negotiations and geopolitical expansion by the communists, US atomic weapons were

... (read 1008 more words →)