Fixing doors is so vastly easier than predicting the future that analogies and intuitions don’t transfer.
Compare someone asking in 1875, 1920, 1945, or 2025, “What is the minimum necessary and sufficient policy that you think would prevent Germany invading France in the next 50 years?”. The problem is non-binary, there are no guarantees, and even definitions are treacherous. I wouldn’t ask the question that way
Instead I might ask “what policies best support peace between France and Germany, and how?”. So we can talk mechanistically without the distraction of “minimum”, “necessary”, “sufficient”, and “prevent”.
Separately, I do not want anyone to be thinking of minimum policies here. There is no virtue in doing the minimum necessary to prevent extinction.
Fixing doors is so vastly easier than predicting the future that analogies and intuitions don’t transfer.
Compare someone asking in 1875, 1920, 1945, or 2025, “What is the minimum necessary and sufficient policy that you think would prevent Germany invading France in the next 50 years?”. The problem is non-binary, there are no guarantees, and even definitions are treacherous. I wouldn’t ask the question that way
Instead I might ask “what policies best support peace between France and Germany, and how?”. So we can talk mechanistically without the distraction of “minimum”, “necessary”, “sufficient”, and “prevent”.
Separately, I do not want anyone to be thinking of minimum policies here. There is no virtue in doing the minimum necessary to prevent extinction.