The incentives are very unrealistic though. “Winning” a nuclear world war with strategic weapons is still quite bad for you overall. Not as bad as losing but still very bad. So flipping the sign of the karma reward for the winner would make the game way more realistic. And much more likely to yield the real outcome.
EGI
Karma: 352
LW-Cologne meetup
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“(e.g., “step 3: here all the nano-bots burst forth from the human bloodstreams”)”
Sure, but what about “step 3: Here we deploy this organism (Sequence, vaguely resembling Cordyceps) to secure a safe and secure transition to a more stable global security regimen. (Amid threats of China and Russia to nuke all data centres able to run the AI)?
Or something even less transparent?
What you are missing here is that S. mutants often lives in pockets between tooth an epithelium or between teeth with direct permanent contact to epithelium. Due to the geometry of these spaces access to saliva is very poor so metabolites can enrich to levels way beyond those you suggest here.
This mechanism is also a big problem with the pH study above.
It is also very easy to just do. Buy fries, extract fat in hexane, evaporate hexane and submit the fat you obtained for analysis.
Edit: It might even be possible to DIY the analysis if it is not commercially available: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4609978/. (IR spectroscopy and AgNO3-DLC look somewhat accessible though I would have to look deeper into the topic to be sure.)
I guess I was not clear enough in defining what I was talking about. While it is possible to stretch the definition of “nuclear world war” to include WW2 and Little Boy and Fat Man were certainly strategic weapons at their time, this is not at all what I meant. I was talking about modern strategic weapons, i.e. MIRVed ICBMs shot from hardened silos or ballistic missile submarines, used by a modern nuclear superpower to defeat a near peer opponent. I.e. the scenario Petrov faced.
If e.g. the US in Petrov’s time had managed to pull off a perfect nuclear first strike (a pretty bold assumption), destroying the whole USSR’s and Chinese nuclear triad without any counter strike at all, the economic (supply chain disruption, Europe and Middle East overrun with refugees...) and political repercussions (everyone thinks the US is run by complete psychopaths) alone would have been enough to ensure in expectation a precipitous drop in quality of life for nearly all US citizens, including generals and politicans. This is true even if the whole nuclear winter idea is complete bunk.