The type of people who build fallout and other fortified shelters intuitively assign a rather high prior to at least one of the scenarios in which such a shelter is very useful unfolding in the near time frame, such as a few decades. This is far from the mainstream, but so is a similar time-frame estimate of cryonic revival or the Singularity, which are taken quite seriously here. If you give, say, 50-50 odds for a global disaster happening within 20 years or so, building a shelter becomes pretty rational. and the extra expense of making it radiation-resistant is probably small enough to be worth absorbing.
As for the "life will not be worth living" argument, having a shelter may make a difference between propagating your genes or perishing, and I suspect that the perceived importance of survival of one's bloodline correlates with other survivalist traits.
There's also the happiness caused by imagining oneself being well-off compared to the rest of society, whether that means someone buying a lottery ticket to live like a king among commoners, or someone building a fallout shelter to live like a commoner among wretches; it's essentially the same wish, but the disaster scenario is actually statistically much more likely. So wouldn't building a fallout shelter be more rational than buying a lottery ticket?
While it is certainly true that a nuclear war would kill or severely disrupt you if it occurred, this is not necessarily an argument in favor of building a fallout shelter.
It is clearly an argument in favor of building a fallout shelter. There are just other arguments against building a fallout shelter, such as its cost, that are stronger. The presence of those arguments doesn't stop nuclear war from being an argument for building a shelter.
This might make sense for an individual, but on a civilization level, I like the idea of there being crazy survivalists to keep humanity going if something bad happens.
Maybe the crazy survivalists like the idea, too. Hypothesis: Some reasonable portion of the people who build shelters aren't buying nuclear-war insurance; they're buying the fantasy of being the romantic postapocalyptic survivor. Like buying the fantasy of being rich via lottery tickets, or the fantasy of being fit and pretty via exercise machines.
When optimizing for overall safety, focus on the biggest possible threats that you can have an impact on. In other words, when dealing with societal-level risks, your projected impact will be much higher if you try to focus on protecting society instead of protecting yourself.
This sounds dubious to me. Yes, if you prevent society from being impacted by a nuclear war, that's a much bigger utility return than protecting yourself, but the odds of your efforts being decisive in preventing a nuclear war are much, much lower. Protecting society is a huge coordination problem, where everyone benefits most by the problem being solved by someone else without their participation, so they can save their time and money for other things. Building a fallout shelter is not a coordination problem.
You're confusing two messages. One is that building a fallout shelter is not a good way to optimize personal safety. The other is that optimizing society safety is, for some unspecified reason, more-virtuous than optimizing personal safety.
The first point is historically wrong. In the time when people in the US built fallout shelters, most people who built them thought it was more likely than not that there would be a nuclear war soon. They made the correct calculation given this assumption.
The second point is simply a referral back to a set of presump...
A similar calculus suggests you shouldn't work on life extension, if your goal is to live longer. I think both arguments are valid and useful to remember, but they overlook some important considerations, particularly in relation to motivation and social affiliation, and particularly when the project entails a real social benefit in addition to the perceived personal benefit.
Independently, I think you may underestimate the value of building shelters (though its surely not a good play on the utilitarian calculus). On the altruistic account, it's better if I ...
One common mistake is to attempt to preserve personal safety for extreme circumstances such as nuclear wars.
This is a type of statement that I only ever see on Less Wrong. I have yet to come up with a good name for them.
It seems to me that if you can make a reasonable estimate of where to live so as to avoid the brunt of the likely disasters and live there without much loss of utility, that's the way to go.
er, I'm not sure this is generally applicable advice. If you're doing anything serious, privacy is a very difficult issue and it helps to have as much physical security as possible (including e.g. bomb shelters).
Also this kind of thing makes sense from a general insurance perspective. I already pay for health insurance, cryonics (life insurance), etc. Security is another natural way to spend money when it comes to general insurance, and some kind of shelter or safe room could be a good option depending on the situation.
and yes I can advocate for whatever p...
I really want - emotionally - to upvote this, but I'm looking for some kind of content I haven't already read in simpler form and not finding any.
Perhaps I'm too tired to catch on to the real message? All I can see is "Maximize expected utility to the best of your knowledge and ability. No, really, do that." Then it gets refactored with reasonable-sounding categories and labels that seem useful to describe general patterns of expected utility in the more restrained domains of conceptspace that they're meant for, along with good tips of things to remember to take into account for the EU calculation.
Anyone care to enlighten me as to what I'm missing? Or perhaps I'm just missing the usefulness of the post.
Please note that often a rephrasing and reformulation of existing knowledge can be a very good thing, almost as good as original research. If someone writes a post explaining some points in clear language, people can read it and gain a deeper understanding of those points. For that reason, posts like this one are most certainly a Good Thing, and definitely praiseworthy.
Agreed. In general, I think people vastly overvalue having new ideas relative to having better explanations and a better understanding of old ideas.
There's also the quantum suicidish argument, "the less likely I am to survive a nuclear holocaust, the less likely it is that I will find myself in universes where a nuclear holocaust has occurred." Depending on how you weight post-apocalyptic existence, things that tend to make you experience more of it might be negative utility even if they work...
How does this exact same logic not provide a reason not to buy fire insurance?
There are more cost-effective ways to reduce your expected disutility due to fire, like having and understand fire alarms and fire extinguishers; the monetary payment of insurance will typically not be more than the value lost; the risk of fire is absolutely fairly low.
Thus even if your fallout shelter succeeds, you will likely live a shorter and less pleasant life than you would otherwise.
and carry a large amount of disutility even if protections succeed
Your wording here is implying a comparison of the wrong things. With a given probability of nuclear war, we don't care about the utility difference between war and not war; we care about the difference between preparations succeed and preparations fail, which is the probability we are trying to control when buying a fallout shelter.
As you say though, a harsh post-apoc...
With a given probability of nuclear war, we don't care about the utility difference between war and not war; we care about the difference between preparations succeed and preparations fail, which is the probability we are trying to control when buying a fallout shelter.
I'm not sure I agree. When optimizing for utility across one's lifespan, it's important to note that years of post-nuke life are both more expensive and carry less utility than years of non-nuke life. So when you evaluate the utility/dollar of building a fallout shelter and compare it to the utility/dollar of other potential investments, you need to put a discount factor on the years of life you expect your shelter to gain for you in the event of a war.
For instance, if I expected with 50% confidence a nuclear war that will certainly kill me if it occurs while I am unprotected and were presented with the following options:
Option A: Purchase a bomb shelter that will grant ten years of post-nuke life in the event of a nuclear war but will grant no benefit in the event of no nuclear war
Option B: Purchase an experimental health intervention that will grant on average five years of additional healthy life in the event of no nuclear war, but have no effect in the event of a nuclear war (as I'll die before getting to benefit)
I would probably consider option B to be superior to option A, because my intuitions suggest that the utility of post-nuclear life would be massively discounted.
Hmm...if you are only building a shelter for bombings than yeah it would be pretty pointless but todays shelter is typically a multi-functioning unit that can serve as a safe place from everything from intruders to tornados or just extra storage. If your going to spend 40,000 for a giant empty basement (or worse one full of garbage you'll never use and the mice that live in it) why not spend 40,000 on a smaller shelter that serves a purpose. The point is they are no longer just 'bomb-shelters' they are multi-functioning units that can be ...
It does depend on what values you are maximizing for, though.
Are you maximizing for your own survival, or for the survival of the human race? If you think there's a 10% chance an nuclear war in the next 50 years large enough to wipe out the human race, and you think that our species spending a billion dollars on fallout shelters increases our species chances of surviving that scenario by 5%, then spending that money increases our chance of surviving the next fifty years by .5%. That doesn't sound like a bad deal to me; if it's not worth doing at that c...
intellect implication applied to economic hostile forces imply they either do not view their activities as financial nukes or they believe they will survive unscathed and not need a bunker. ;-) Based on UN forces on the ground in USA, non-military departments building up military powers, and other activities, the latter is the probable case.
Welp. One thing is most people built fallout shelters (build bugout bunkers) for their families; so, maybe that's not directly "personal safety". At any rate, there is also a general belief among preppers that they are a set of people, a group inspired to be prepared; this generally also defines those who do not prep as not prepared. So, you are talking about society but the preppers see two societies. The preppers have websites, books, tv shows, and more. Just as an Army prepares in units, those who built a fall-out shelter were not preparing i...
Related: Circular Altruism
One thing that many people misunderstand is the concept of personal versus societal safety. These concepts are often conflated despite the appropriate mindsets being quite different.
Simply put, personal safety is personal.
In other words, the appropriate actions to take for personal safety are whichever actions reduce your chance of being injured or killed within reasonable cost boundaries. These actions are largely based on situational factors because the elements of risk that two given people experience may be wildly disparate.
For instance, if you are currently a young computer programmer living in a typical American city, you may want to look at eating better, driving your car less often, and giving up unhealthy habits like smoking. However, if you are currently an infantryman about to deploy to Afghanistan, you may want to look at improving your reaction time, training your situational awareness, and practicing rifle shooting under stressful conditions.
One common mistake is to attempt to preserve personal safety for extreme circumstances such as nuclear wars. Some individuals invest sizeable amounts of money into fallout shelters, years worth of emergency supplies, etc.
While it is certainly true that a nuclear war would kill or severely disrupt you if it occurred, this is not necessarily a fully convincing argument in favor of building a fallout shelter. One has to consider the cost of building a fallout shelter, the chance that your fallout shelter will actually save you in the event of a nuclear war, and the odds of a nuclear war actually occurring.
Further, one must consider the quality of life reduction that one would likely experience in a post-nuclear war world. It's also important to remember that, in the long run, your survival is contingent on access to medicine and scientific progress. Future medical advances may even extend your lifespan very dramatically, and potentially provide very large amounts of utility. Unfortunately, full-scale nuclear war is very likely to impair medicine and science for quite some time, perhaps permanently.
Thus even if your fallout shelter succeeds, you will likely live a shorter and less pleasant life than you would otherwise. In the end, building a fallout shelter looks like an unwise investment unless you are extremely confident that a nuclear war will occur shortly-- and if you are, I want to see your data!
When taking personal precautionary measures, worrying about such catastrophes is generally silly, especially given the risks we all take on a regular basis-- risks that, in most cases, are much easier to avoid than nuclear wars. Societal disasters are generally extremely expensive for the individual to protect against, and carry a large amount of disutility even if protections succeed.
To make matters worse, if there's a nuclear war tomorrow and your house is hit directly, you'll be just as dead as if you fall off your bike and break your neck. Dying in a more dramatic fashion does not, generally speaking, produce more disutility than dying in a mundane fashion does. In other words, when optimizing for personal safety, focus on accidents, not nuclear wars; buy a bike helmet, not a fallout shelter.
The flip side to this, of course, is that if there is a full-scale nuclear war, hundreds of millions-- if not billions-- of people will die and society will be permanently disrupted. If you die in a bike accident tomorrow, perhaps a half dozen people will be killed at most. So when we focus on non-selfish actions, the big picture is far, far, far more important. If you can reduce the odds of a nuclear war by one one-thousandth of one percent, more lives will be saved on average than if you can prevent hundreds of fatal accidents.
When optimizing for overall safety, focus on the biggest possible threats that you can have an impact on. In other words, when dealing with societal-level risks, your projected impact will be much higher if you try to focus on protecting society instead of protecting yourself.
In the end, building fallout shelters is probably silly, but attempting to reduce the risk of nuclear war sure as hell isn't. And if you do end up worrying about whether a nuclear war is about to happen, remember that if you can reduce the risk of said war-- which might be as easy as making a movie-- your actions will have a much, much greater overall impact than building a shelter ever could.