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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Nuclear Expert Comment on Samotsvety Nuclear Risk Forecast, published by Jhrosenberg on March 26, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. The below comment was written by J. Peter Scoblic and edited by Josh Rosenberg. Peter is a senior fellow with the International Security Program at New America, where he researches strategic foresight, prediction, and the future of nuclear weapons. He has also served as deputy staff director of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, where he worked on approval of the New START agreement, and he is the author of U.S. vs. Them, an intellectual history of conservatism and nuclear strategy. I (Josh Rosenberg) am working with Phil Tetlock's research team on improving forecasting methods and practice, including through trying to facilitate increased dialogue between subject-matter experts and generalist forecasters. This post represents an example of what Daniel Kahneman has termed “adversarial collaboration.” So, despite some epistemic reluctance, Peter estimated the odds of nuclear war in an attempt to pinpoint areas of disagreement. We shared this forecast with the Samotsvety team in advance of posting to check for major errors and intend these comments in a supportive and collaborative spirit. Any remaining errors are our own. In the next couple of weeks, our research team plans to post an invitation to a new Hybrid Forecasting-Persuasion Tournament that we hope will lead to further collaboration like the below on other existential risk-related topics. If you'd like to express interest in participating in that tournament, please add your email here. Summary On March 10th, the Samotsvety forecasting team published a Forum post assessing the risk that a London resident would be killed in a nuclear strike “in light of the war in Ukraine and fears of nuclear escalation.” It recommended against evacuating major cities because the risk of nuclear death was extremely low. However, the reasoning behind the forecast was questionable. The following is intended as a constructive critique to improve the forecast quality of nuclear risk, heighten policymaker responsiveness to probabilistic predictions, and ultimately reduce the danger of nuclear war. By implication, it makes the case that greater subject matter expertise can benefit generalist forecasters—even well-calibrated ones. The key takeaways are: Because a nuclear war has never been fought, it is difficult to construct a baseline forecast from which to adjust in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Nuclear forecasting warrants greater epistemic humility than other subjects. The baseline forecast of U.S.-Russian nuclear conflict (absent Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) is unstated, but it appears to rest, in part, on the debatable assertion that strategic stability between the United States and Russia has improved since the end of the Cold War when many developments suggest the opposite is true. The relatively low probability of London being struck with a nuclear weapon during a NATO/Russia nuclear war rests on the assumption that nuclear escalation can likely be controlled—one of the most persistent and highly contested subjects in nuclear strategy. In other words, the aggregate forecast takes a highly confident position on an open question. The forecast does not seem to account for U.S. and Russian doctrine concerning the targeting and employment of nuclear weapons. The forecast is overly optimistic about the ability to evacuate a major city. Taking all of the above into account, my forecast of nuclear risk in the current environment is an order of magnitude higher. But experts view nuclear forecasting with suspicion because the lack of historical analogy generates a high degree of uncertainty. Although providing a common measure of risk may be useful to the EA community, couching nucle...