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Fabien's Shortform — LessWrong

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Comment by Fabien Roger - I listened to 2 books about decision-making during wars: How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in WW2 and Decision Points by George W Bush. This topic is interesting to me because I expect safety-related decisions during the intelligence explosion to look more like war-time decisions than risk assessments for nuclear power plants: there will be lots of uncertainty about very complex systems with adversarial actors (instead of something where you understand things end-to-end that you can analyze carefully) and no safe action that is realistically reachable ("just don't build ASI" might be more like "just make peace" than "just use coal instead of nuclear power plants"). The amount of uncertainty and no-safe-action these books conveyed was roughly what I expected. The amount of bad-in-retrospect decisions was worse than I expected: * Bush is quite defensive of his decisions, but is quite open about how certain decisions seemed quite bad with the benefit of hindsight (Iraq not having a WMD program makes the war less useful, leaving post-war security to local forces ended up being way less successful than what people expected, etc.) * How the war was won (which is quite academic in comparison) also describes many cases of incorrect pre-war or during-war planning: * Air power ended up more powerful than expected in sea warfare, making battleships much less useful than expected * The damage from small amounts of targeted bombing ended up very overestimated, similarly for the effectiveness of area bombing to weaken morale, resulting in a lot of mid-war changes to strategy * The British expected the d-day landing to be less successful than it was and pushed back hard against it * US admirals did not appreciate the effectiveness of convoys (4% of tonnage lost vs 20% for independent boats) against submarine attacks until months after the US entry into war * MacArthur over-prioritized the Philippines, which caused a bunch of casualties while

x Fabien's Shortform — LessWrong Fabien's Shortform by Fabien Roger 5th Mar 2024 AI Alignment Forum 1 min read 147 7 Ω 5 This is a special post for quick takes by Fabien Roger . Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page . Rendering 0 / 147 comments, sorted by top scoring (show more) Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 7:20 AM Moderation Log More from Fabien Roger View more Curated and popular this week 147 Comments 147 Comment Permalink Fabien Roger 1mo 48 4 I listened to 2 books about decision-making during wars:

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