Our fractured future
It's all fun and games until somebody's face melts off
As a young man, much to my mother's chagrin, I played entirely too many games. Considering I didn't complete High School largely because of it, she did have a point. That was silly.
However, after spending some time building renown as a Gnug on virtual battlefields from the Netcafé I worked at, I found myself making a living doing what I loved and did best: playing games — in this case, backgammon (BG). Mum eventually came around.
People consider BG to be gambling, like poker. They’re wrong. Both are skill-based games with some built-in variance — in BG’s case, via its dice rolls. Over long enough time, the better player always comes out ahead. It’s probabilistically guaranteed, much like how the house always wins in casino games.
In 2004, a string of solid tournament results landed me on the cover of the Danish BG magazine. Nevertheless, I quit the game soon after, having grown bored of plateauing for a while due to my unwillingness to study it deeply. Yup, still silly.
Getting to the Point
As a former pro, I could write at length about the intricacies and delights of this deeply satisfying, gentlemanly game.
To keep things short and to the point, I will just say that BG is mostly about having a knack for pattern recognition and probability estimation, plus some knowledge of reference positions, match equity tables, etc. Kinda like civilisational Collapse; more on that later.
One of the first things a beginner learns in BG is
“What are the chances of rolling at least one 6️⃣ with a roll of two dice?”
Unless you’re a BG player, chances are you don’t know this by heart and probably can’t be bothered to calculate it unless you’re trying to impress someone on a date or something (some people would call that a gamble).
It’s not very complicated; one can fairly call it remedial math. We learn it in school, only to promptly forget it again. The answer is right below, in case you want to pause first to see if you can figure it out.
From my experience, mathematically inclined individuals find the problem trivial, while non-math people tend to give you a blank stare and an incorrect answer every time, mainly because they don’t find it particularly interesting. So, dear reader whom I don’t know, certainly don’t feel bad if the answer doesn’t spring to mind.
Lemme help you out.
Calculating the chance of something happening at least once over several trials (in this case, a roll of two dice) is done by determining the chance of it not happening and then subtracting that from 1, i.e. all outcomes.
By knowing the odds of it not happening, you can deduct the chance of it happening. Like so:
The odds of not rolling at least one 6️⃣ with one die is ⅚
The odds of not rolling at least one 6️⃣ with two dice is thus (⅚)*(⅚) = 25/36
Ergo, the odds of rolling at least one 6️⃣ with two dice is 1 - 25/36 = 11/36
What are the odds of rolling at least one 6️⃣ if given two chances in BG? That’s right, 1 - (25/36)*(25/36). And so on and so forth.
All of this is just to say that calculating the odds of something not happening can sometimes be useful. For example, if one is curious about the following question:
“What are the odds of humanity avoiding a nuclear holocaust for X years?”
Warning: If you suffer from anxiety or depression, please stop here.
I’ve spent a while looking into Global Catastrophic Risks (this particular book is heavy reading). Nuclear Armageddon is one of the biggies. I walked away with an understanding that experts peg it between 1-4% annually, depending on whether a nuke-wielding nation is undergoing any serious geopolitical conflicts.
We invented the famous Doomsday Clock to illustrate this risk in 1947, later incorporating other cataclysmic risks such as climate change and AI. Things are not going well, and you’ll notice some ominous headlines when it’s updated later this month.
Prudently applying some Bayesian reasoning to whether vocal experts tend towards the alarmist side (I reckon they do), I like to think that we average around the low end of that estimate, so 1% a year. But that’s just me and my notoriously optimistic disposition. That’s a joke.
As Nuclear War: A Scenario (2024) by Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen recently reminded us, all war simulations of nuclear scenarios lead to an all-out “strategic” (as opposed to tactical) Nuclear War that results in hundreds of millions dead within hours and a Nuclear Winter plunging Everyone else, capital E, into a permanent post-apocalyptic dystopia that won’t be survivable for long.
Following the use of nuclear weapons in WWII, the entire world became justifiably terrified of a new normal that included the risk of sudden total annihilation. Thinkers scrambled to figure out the implications in the areas of ethics, game theory, and, not least, realpolitik and questions of sheer survival. There was much worrying, gnashing of teeth, and quashing of dissenting voices of reason.
You can tell how crazy things got by how the pacifist Bertrand Russel advocated for a pre-emptive genocide of Russians before they could develop nukes of their own, seemingly falling for the biggest cognitive bias of them all: myside bias.
A deeper analysis would probably reveal that it’s more a question of lesser evils, as calculated on principles of human life and flourishing, ethics, and utilising one’s understanding of geopolitics, science, game theory and human psychology, all the reasoning done under considerable duress. Not an easy spot to be in.
Culture is everything
Culture determines whether sacrificing humans to Sun Gods seems reasonable or not, who should be discriminated against, and whether it’s completely safe to leave your baby napping unattended in a stroller outside, as we do in Denmark.
When a country can be said to have cultural problems like the US sadly does, with too many issues to mention, you know the problems are thoroughly deep-seated.
Culture & Game Theory is what led the US to spend Trillions of yesteryear dollars to build an absurdly excessive nuclear arsenal hundreds of times larger than necessary to achieve their one and only goal: Deterrence, or as it is more commonly known, Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Or, as one might say in an adapted modern colloquialism of apparently uncounterable logic:
“The only thing that stops a bad nation with a nuke is a good nation with thirty-two thousand nukes.”
The world has since disarmed a bit after several nations realised via some rudimentary math that they were maintaining far more nukes than necessary to retain the desired MAD situation.
It’s nuts
In games involving possible bluffs, your opponent must believe that you are at least a bit crazy unpredictable; in this case, the chance that you are capable of genocidal retribution out of sheer spite.
Retributive Justice Poll:
Situations like the one in the poll above have happened several times — except that they all turned out to be false alarms.
Like this one, where some guy’s decision “is seen as having prevented a retaliatory nuclear strike against the United States and its NATO allies, which would likely have resulted in a full-scale nuclear war”. The above poll serves to illustrate why we don’t give nuclear launch codes to blog readers. Trump is cool tho.
How does one give the impression of being a madman without actually being one in a one-time game of infinite stakes?
Call my bluff, I dare you
The Game of Chicken, where two men (no women are so stupid) drive towards each other at high speeds until the scaredy-cat swerves first, can only be won if your opponent isn’t certain that you value life over honour.
Assuming you want to win at any cost, the best strategy might be to pull off your steering wheel and wave it over your head, showing your opponent you can’t veer, but I suppose that’s cheating. Quick, before the other guy does!
In the MAD game, nuclear-weapon states use something equally brilliant: The Insurance Policy. Russia, for example, claims to have put in place a system that launches an all-out nuclear retaliation if certain conditions are fulfilled, e.g. if Moscow stops sending a signal to a receiver, a sign that it stopped being capable of doing so, assuming it was because it was nuked.
The beauty of this strategy is that they can be completely transparent about it. It’s an uncounterable MAD strategy.. well, as long as they’re not EMP’d by a solar flare, but let’s try not to think about that.
The simple math of Nuclear Holocaust X-Risk
To successfully avoid nuclear armageddon for the remainder of your lifetime, you must dodge it year in and year out, like continuously rolling anything but Snake Eyes 1️⃣1️⃣ in BG.
Years are an arbitrary length of time to chunk the average cumulative risk in, but they’re relatable, so let’s roll with it.
Using what we learned above, letting X be the number of years we hope to avoid nuclear armageddon and Y be the average annual % risk, the formula thus becomes:
100*((100-Y)%^X) = % to not die in a nuclear holocaust for duration XYou can plug that right into a Google search bar. Here, let’s take an example:
You fancy making it to 2050 without dying in a nuclear holocaust or its fallout. You estimate the annual risk is at the low end of the experts’ range, only 1.5%, reckoning that Putin is totally bluffing during his current march through Eastern Europe because no one knows geopolitics like you do. The calculation thus becomes:
100*(100-1.5)%^25 = 68,5% chance of avoiding nuclear war until 2050I’ll run some more for you because I’m so considerate. I’ll even include an extra low Y of 0,50% just for those of you who suffer from entirely common optimism bias and don’t trust the experts because… well, I really don’t know.
X = 25 years is relevant to middle-aged people
X = 50 years is relevant to young people
X = 75 years is relevant to babies
Chance to avoid Armageddon
X years: 25y | 50y | 75y
Y = 0,5% 88% | 78% | 69%
Y = 1.0% 78% | 61% | 47%
Y = 1.5% 69% | 47% | 32%
Y = 2.0% 60% | 36% | 22%
Y = 3.0% 47% | 22% | 10%
Y = 4.0% 36% | 13% | 5%The risk depends entirely on the value of Y, which is hard to guesstimate, but running a recurring risk of anything is what one calls a sooner-or-later guarantee.
Trusting the experts, we can calculate that we’ve probably been lucky to dodge it since WWII, as an X of 80 years and an annual Y risk of 1% yields a 46% chance of doing so. You may or may not recall how JFK pegged the Cuban Missile Crisis alone at a 1 in 3 risk of nuclear annihilation.
Obviously, there’s an almost infinite complexity to assessing the exact risk of Nuclear War & Winter. Still, the math regarding dodging risks year in and year out is simple enough.
On a side note, Nuclear Armageddon is a popular Great Filter answer to the Fermi Paradox regarding why there aren’t any space-faring civilisations out there.
If you do decide to look deeper into this particular X-risk, bear in mind that keeping information unavailable is part of the game. This is why there’s no way of knowing for sure what the Y value is; the best we can do is take the consensus of a group of Superforecasters.
In good news, the US will soon have a stable genius back in the driver’s seat of The Game of Nuclear Chicken, so I’m sure everything will be fine.
But hey, at least, now that you remember how to multiply fractions, you too can become Collapse Aware. Yay! Maybe you’ll reach the same conclusion I did in Part 2 of 5: Depression: that we are Drawing Dead.
My blog series on collapse only briefly mentions the risk of nuclear armageddon because it’s my measured opinion that this particular global catastrophic risk is among the least of our concerns. After all, it’s theoretically possible we keep rolling well.
Unfortunately, as I exhaustingly listed as concisely as I could in Part 3 of 5: Anger, there’s an overwhelming amount of predicaments with sooner-or-later guarantees coming together in a bona fide polycrisis. Most people find a way to deny this, as I wrote about in Part 1 of 5: Denial.
But what do I know? I’m just a world-class probability estimator 🤷🏼♂
PS. Lowering the Y value by 0.01% would be a great way to maximise your contribution to the survival of the human race, should you feel so inclined. Check out 80000hours.org for info.
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What's the factor of probability that if something can happen, that it probably will happen growing over the course of time? Every day I'm alive, my odds of death grow, lol. Happy New Year from the mentally healthy United States!
"My blog series on collapse only briefly mentions the risk of nuclear armageddon because it’s my measured opinion that this particular global catastrophic risk is among the least of our concerns. After all, it’s theoretically possible we keep rolling well."
Indeed... it doesn't actually concern me much because if it happens and I survive I have no interest in remaining alive... whereas, civilisational collapse due to climate change and biodiversity collapse is already baked in... what is hard to predict is the speed at which it continues to unfold.
Due to this, I'm actually in favour of some forms of geoengineering, such as the Arctic Ice Project, which set me in opposition to almost everyone else in my local XR group.
(Plus the fact that I still don't really understand the purpose of blocking traffic!)