Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

lifeisstillgood

The problem is always expectation, anticipation and experience.

With any new technology we expect certain performance - we get this from the “The Economist effect” - where the simple one paragraph explanation of a complex field enables us to have a grasp on a concept but not the full difficulties.

So we expect the nuclear missile to hit its target whereas the thing about nukes is they were designed to be used despite being horribly inaccurate.

Anticipation is time bounded - we get depressed when the thing we expect is not done today - we can imagine it so why can’t we have it. This is the problem behind all crunch development times, all VC funded CEO replacements and every lying progress report ever.

And experience is what tells us where we really are - it is looking at a Trident missile spiralling round in front page photos and saying … what have we missed.

Weapons operate always at the frontier of what is possible. Nuclear weapons probably are not really there - we can fly the prototype over unchallenged airspace but launching rockets is hard.

The problem is always hubris, which leads to a distorted conceit of "progress" which can actually be regressive.

Whether it's weapons or civilian technology like smartphones, automobiles, or a "cashless society" we know there are side effects, and unknowns. But we choose to focus on only the rosy, optimistic side.

For most of us that is pandering to laziness, convenience, low-effort and less thinking. For those involved in making money, the negatives are far away in space and time, so they can always kick the can down the road.

This is how supremacy becomes weakness.

Money buys a louder voice and drowns out cautious minds with better vision of the long-term future and marginal scenarios. They are Cassandras. Luddites.

Those with experience are dismissed as old and irrelevant.

Hubris leads to absolute dependency and complacency.

In a long enough time-line we'll always encounter an accident or enemy using older "low-tech". The greatest threat to our security is always our own hubris. Sadly I see buckets of it here on HN.

I have a very simple theory about this -

If we assume the 80/20 rule to hold about most things in world (80% profits from 20% customers, 80% of benefits to society from 20% workers), then we can assume the same 80/20 rule applies to the bits left over - ie the remining 20% of profits will have 80% of those generated by 20% of the left over 80% of customers)

Roughly speaking then 96% of all good stuff comes from 36% of stuff we do

We could say then that if we could find the 2/3 of useless activity that only generates 4% of good stuff we can for example cut carbon emissions by 2/3 - and only need to lose the crappy plastic toys on front of magazines, or most peoples commutes or …

What I think I am saying is that 2/3 of the jobs people do are useless - and yet in any organisation they are the majority and hence bend the organisation

Don’t worry dear reader I am sure like me you are one of the non useless ones … like me , like me

You and I, we've gone through the same thought process and, sadly, where it ended up for me was;

Golgafrinchans [0]

Now if we could only work out what that useless third is. ?!

But there's always the finite risk that plastic landfill fodder and chindogu attached to kids magazines is the essential saving grace of humanity.

:)

[0] https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchans

This seems like an absolute genius idea, but I can't imagine us considering trying it, even if climate change really started to get bad.

China or maybe Japan though, I could see it being able to maybe catch on there though, it could be very beneficial to the problems they're facing with their aging populations and abysmal and worsening (heading to ~zero?) reproduction.

We humans could try it but we wouldn’t succeed. We’d just find a way to fudge the numbers and stack the ranks. :-)

Wouldn't even have to fudge the numbers if you choose the "right" metrics.

> Roughly speaking then 96% of all good stuff comes from 36% of stuff we do

That's just pulling arbitrary number out of thin air with extra steps.

And the '80/20 rule' is already a fairly arbitrary/rule of thumb case of the general cumulative distribution function over a Pareto distribution.

I think your premise is sound, but your example is unfortunate. SLBMs are less accurate, but still much better than "horribly inaccurate". And American ICBMs started out with poor accuracy, but are now quite accurate(1), and were by the 1970s. If you're standing in the target building, you are already dead.

(1)I'm being a bit coy here because during Uncle Ronnie's administration, I had a job and security clearance involving this.

The thing is, well there are lots of things and I do t mean to impune your work some forty years ago but

1. We have learnt not to trust untested equipment

2. We have learnt that under pressure well meaning people will demonstrate equipment that while kind of representative of the reality are honed, improved and generously helped to perform well on test

3. Only repeatable performance under active competition is a real measure. It’s why sane people like open well designed markets. And it’s why weapons that get battle tested tend to be reliable

I am sure that overall if we read the red button nukes will fire and land and kill millions.

It’s just the day after I expect that the auditors will find a large number failed to fire, or failed to leave the tube, went the wrong way or simply otherwise went wrong

The point of credible threat is not one shot one kill, but so many shots we can basically guarantee a kill.

In other other words, both sides hold enormous number of nukes ostensibly to ensure they have some to fire after a first strike - but the effects of an enemy first strike are indistinguishable from poor engineering and beauracracy

Military nuclear programs are completely unlike civilian programs. Rigorous, repeated, varied testing, no expense spared. Our ICBMs are far from untested. We used to fire 2-3 per year to insure their reliability. Pulled out of the field, launched from Vandenberg, and carefully analyzed. I never once had any bureaucracy interfere with doing an excellent job, and money was never a limit. In the event of WW3, at least 96% would have struck their targets. We know that from decades of expensive research, testing, and incremental improvements. We spent over 5 trillion dollars on our nuclear program and received our money's worth.

It’s just … given something like 30k warheads (I know not same as rockets) but taking 2 or 3 for testing (and notably, taking, checking, scrubbing down, repairing … improving?) and then saying that represents the whole fleet, and leaving in the field for years between expensive retrofitting cycles on decade timescales

I mean maybe the USA was a on it’s A game for fifty plus years … us in the UK well …

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68355395

Worth noting that UK missiles (but not warheads) are taken from a joint pool with the US. They have completely shared maintenance, so any reliability concerns are shared. Similarly, the testing is also joint so this should be seen as two failures out of all trident tests rather than two UK failures.

Not that that is a fun headline of course.

Obviously everything around it is super secret but the muttering around this one seemed to be that the rocket noticed the warhead seemed wrong (which it was because you don't strap a real nuke to it!) And aborted itself. I only add this because I think its interesting.

> the rocket noticed the warhead seemed wrong

Oh, that sounds like plausible muttering, and may be consistent with the utterances of the naval authorities.

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