Sarah Paine: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Actually, I want to ask you about that. Japan invades Manchuria in 1931. Hitler invades Poland in 1939. In retrospect, we think of them as part of the same great global conflict, whereas they were separated by eight years. I wonder if you think of Ukraine today as eight years down the line or the things that could come, maybe not as a consequence but at the same time as this, which could lead to another global situation. Do you think that it could cascade into something like that? Of course, yeah. This is the problem with all of this. Of course, it could and there are many people working to prevent this from happening. You see all of these meetings where our leaders are meeting with each other. If you get into some global war with people with nuclear weapons, when the losers decide that rather than losing, they're going to go for one more roll of the die, which is a nuclear weapon. Then the question is whether the people below them will actually implement the order, etc. Think about low probability but high consequence events. I don't know what the probability is, but I know the consequences are huge. And the probability is iterated over many years and decades.…

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