The Specter Of Neuralese

Importance: 5 | # | acx Scott: There’s a taboo on using nukes in war. If someone uses a tiny nuke, which produces an explosion no bigger than a conventional bomb, then in some sense this doesn’t matter, because it’s no worse than a conventional bomb would have been. But in another sense, it matters a lot, because you’ve broken the taboo, and now there’s only a weaker, fuzzier taboo preventing you from using a very big nuke. So if we want a taboo on recurrence, there needs to be some specific taboo. When Pachocki says “Yes, we did recurrence, but it only added a couple of layers, so it doesn’t really matter,” this is analogous to the case where a drinker tells the police “Yes, I’m below 21, but only by a few months, so it doesn’t really matter”, or a despot tells the UN “Yes, I used a nuke, but it was very small.” It’s true that it doesn’t matter in real life, but it matters a lot for whether you can maintain a taboo or not.

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