Astral Codex Ten

atomic bomb

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atomic bomb

Article

atomic bomb is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between October 13, 2021 and March 04, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented”; “and then you got the atomic bomb”. It most often appears alongside Ajeya Cotra, Anatoly Karlin, Ayatollah Khameini.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: October 13, 2021
  • Last seen: March 04, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Highlights From The Comments On Kids And Climate Change
October 13, 2021 · Original source
In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year [...]; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented… It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
[...] If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.
What Are We Arguing About When We Argue About Rationality?
March 04, 2022 · Original source
Here’s one scenario which I think is unlikely but theoretically possible: the formal study of rationality will end up having zero advantages over well-practiced intuitive truth-seeking, except insofar as it allowed Robin Hanson to design prediction markets, which someday take over the world. This would be a common pattern for sciences: much worse at everyday tasks than people who do them intuitively, until it generates some surprising and powerful new technology. Democritus figured out what matter was made of in 400 BC, and it didn’t help a single person do a single useful thing with matter for the next 2000 years of followup research, and then you got the atomic bomb (I may be skipping over all of chemistry, sorry).