I might not have said this clearly enough - I'm not saying that conditioning on "did we have a nuclear war" will change the probability to be less. I'm saying that the event "did we have a nuclear war in year n" is not independent from "did we have a nuclear war in year n+1" "n+2", ... because there are shared factors influencing them. Therefore the model of independent probabilities multiplying year over year and seeming to imply that nuclear war is inevitable because (1-p)^n goes to 0 as n grows doesn't make sense mathematically speaking.
LeonB|4 years ago
“What is (one minus (What is the chance we have had 0 nuclear wars by year “now plus 70”?)”
So if there is a nuclear war in year n+3 (for example) it’s effect on year n+4 is irrelevant as the answer to the question is already “0% chance of no nuclear wars by year 70”.
So the angle you’re initially coming from is not quite relevant.
We can then turn that a bit though and continue your point — we can rephrase your claim to be like this, for example:
“if we have had 0 nuclear wars in the next 69 years, then surely that would lower the probability of a war in year 70.”
And to that I’m saying — actually no. Or rather: not necessarily. Or more accurately: not much!
The info of “we’ve had no nuclear wars in 69 years” is not what the model would care about. More likely it would care about, running the model a bunch of times, in the cases where there no wars in the first 69 years, how many times is there a war in the 70th year? And “brink of war” or “HPI” scenarios would be a much better indicator than the simple absense of nuclear war in those first 69 years. Maybe better to said “there is a lot more information in the question of ‘how many times have we been on the brink of war’ than there is in the answer ‘did we have a nuclear war yet? No’. It’s more about that “how much info is there here?”
dontbeevil1992|4 years ago