Sometimes this particular strategy feels like a plea for attention, so desperate that most who engage feel an unconscious urge to recoil and turn away in fear. And the way nuclear risk is often communicated neglects the inherent complexity of the post-nuclear-winter world: it will most likely not be a simple, sudden, total, and homogeneous apocalypse. I’ve been thinking lately about how “doomsday” has obviously become the nuclear field’s default, oversimplified, and dominant strategy for communicating the risk of nuclear war and nuclear winter… and how it’s been less and less effective in garnering engagement over time. Doomsday messaging asks us to consider the end of everything; the end has a wholeness and a sense of totality that affect all of humanity; thus, it should be legible to everyone. Using doomsday imagery to communicate risk is a plea for fear, engagement, and attention; an attempt to make apocalypse feel proximate.

The doomsday communications strategy, in many ways, is not primarily geared towards the public but rather aimed at funders and the nuclear field’s own sense of purpose. Doomsday strategy is an internal ritual with an assumed external audience. Internally, it plays a strange cultural role; thus, no expert invested in nuclear risk will give up this opportunity, because that would feel like giving up our purpose and abandoning the claim that this work matters.

If nuclear winter isn’t scaring you, it should. But perhaps not in the way it is communicated. What should scare you is how little we actually know about it. As a concept, “doom” requires a level of certainty, even though the state of the science on nuclear winter is uncertain: we know it will be very bad, but the specifics are muddled and complex. I’ve argued many times that the nuclear field refuses to look at the aftermath with clear eyes, and I think this refusal is why public communication fails—also why this failure has become more apparent over time.

Contrary to the nuclear field’s widely held beliefs, fear-based messaging does not work. Senior field figures believe this because, at one point, fear messaging did work, but only due to a rare alignment of various cultural and technological factors. The 1980s were the heyday for nuclear risk communication because everyone was already on the same page: the risk was perceived as proximate and novel, Americans watched a single channel (people were watching the same shit on the same night at the same time), and the field had an actionable ask. The Day After, a TV movie about a nuclear war on the American heartland, premiered on November 20, 1983, and drew an audience of around 100 million—67% of the American viewing public at the time.

At the height of the Cold War, the risk of nuclear war already felt proximate, and the early to mid 1980s introduced the idea of a nuclear winter and made it tangible. This movie, despite its laughable special effects (in grad school, my professor joined our film class for The Day After, and we all had wine and laughed a lot… its compartmentalization), made a formerly abstract risk clear, visualizable, and closer. The 1980s were also the era of the nuclear freeze movement, which, in a way, gave fear a destination. Depending on who you ask (some agree to disagree; I’m in between), the nuclear freeze movement was a channel for action and agency, and it led to some policy change in the Reagan administration. Reagan himself was reportedly deeply struck by the film and, in some ways, changed his tune on disarmament.

If it worked back then, why doesn’t doomsday messaging work today? In fear-appeal literature, Witte discusses that a threat without efficacy simply produces avoidance, rather than engagement and action: fear can only motivate when paired with a perceived sense of agency and urgency; the innate sense that something can be done. These two levers—fear and efficacy—define whether a risk communication strategy lands, but the nuclear field still acts as if efficacy doesn’t matter. During the Cold War, the risk of nuclear extinction was culturally legible; its presence spread all over American life at the time. The risk was also urgent, but the mechanism was self-enforcing: an active standoff between two great powers, and over 70,000 nuclear weapons in the global stockpile at the height of the Cold War.

The idea of nuclear risk itself was also novel and unexplored: the structures we operate within today were invented during the early to mid Cold War. Today, nuclear risk languishes in comparison. Why it languishes is a much longer conversation. Still, in a deteriorating landscape with decreased funding and gradual institutional abandonment, all we can do is attempt to manufacture urgency, over and over and over again. The only way we know how to do so is through doomsday messaging. The nuclear field is never going to give up its only play, for fear that communicating the risk more quietly might make it more thinkable, or that it will fail even more spectacularly and attention/engagement will drop to another all-time low. Despite this paradoxical strategy, the nuclear field still achieves fleeting moments of cultural popularity. Should we listen to all of them?

Journalist Annie Jacobson published Nuclear War: A Scenario in 2024, and since its publication, this weird little book has sat on the NYT bestseller list for 12 consecutive weeks. It is not controversial to say that Jacobson’s book generated some level of cultural interest. Still, two years later, one could argue that, aside from Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation in production, engagement hasn’t sustained. Nuclear War: A Scenario charts a minute-by-minute account of a limited North Korean nuclear strike on the United States that spirals out of control into a global thermonuclear war between the United States and Russia, ending in some nuclear winter-like world. Seems plausible so far, but stay with me.

Many critics of the book think that Jacobson implicitly treats her fictional scenario as fact, given the extensive interviews she conducted with former officials, experts, and decision-makers, including Bill Perry, Ted Postol, and Paul Bracken. She neglects to consider how bureaucracies shift, how power moves, and how different administrations pursue strategies that reflect the state of the world. The only solution to what she creates is arms control and nuclear disarmament: both of which are not working right now. In this scenario, North Korea has a fractional orbital bombardment system (FOBS) capability, which, put simply, means it can launch a nuke into low orbit, delivering a surprise high-altitude blast with a disabling electromagnetic pulse. Three years ago, when I was studying North Korea’s nuclear program, they couldn’t even get a satellite into space by themselves, so they made a deal with Russia to help them, and sent troops to Ukraine for Russia.

While it may just be one plausible “scenario” among countless others, it isn’t plausible to the experts who study nuclear risk. This begs the question, though: should we hop on the bandwagon of journalists like Annie Jacobson who put nuclear risk back into popular culture? Is this the information we want the American public to take away about deterrence and nuclear risk? If it brings the risk of nuclear war closer to the American consciousness, yet still fades over time, is it really worth it? I thought about this same question in the context of AI with our summer fellows earlier this month. Many AI safety researchers want a pause or a slowdown in capabilities. The American public has simultaneously become very anti-data centers and has begun to fight back, successfully stopping data center plans and enacting moratoriums across the country. Most of their claims are based on water usage, but any technical AI safety or governance researcher will tell you this is a myth. Do we want people caring even if they are caring about the wrong things?

Though Jacobsen is wrong on many of the details, it is not that simple. The bigger problem is how her scenario changes the range of things the reader can imagine doing. If everything ends in doom and total annihilation, yet everything we try to do to mitigate nuclear risk continues to fail… what are we even doing? The data center argument works in the same way: attention purchased with a claim that doesn’t hold takes everyone around it down when it collapses. Attention that is tied directly to a specific scenario, rather than to an observable mechanism, can’t be moved elsewhere. The result is an endless loop of failures to communicate nuclear risk.

This subtle paradox I’ve spent many words musing on really lives here. The paradox isn’t that doom-ness is tiring or old, but that the field continually tries to maximize the threat/risk while eliminating efficacy. We can manufacture fear all we want, but the feelings have nowhere to run.

The maximally alarming message is also the most debunk-able one. And each debunking converts urgency into permanent apathy. There is still a lot of uncertainty, and doom requires a level of certainty we simply don’t have… this has become increasingly clear. We know a nuclear winter would be very VERY bad, but the specifics are muddy; continuously debated and contested, and built upon assumptions from a world we no longer exist in. Every time we pull on this thread, the urgency we try to manufacture becomes something closer to permanent apathy.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention AI and how communicating the risk of superintelligence compares to nuclear risk. AI doom motivates because it comes with efficacy, and more of a personal sense of efficacy. The people communicating the threat are the same ones who are working to mitigate it (and quickly). In a way, the difference is that they assert there is some level of agency: drop out of college, think with us, join a cause for one of the most pressing risks of modern life. The nuclear field communicates the risk but, at the same time, has made nuclear risk an “expert” problem—one better left to subject-matter experts and a few heads of state in charge. Both fields are, in some ways, prevention-based monocultures, but AI’s prevention narrative leaves space for the listener in ways nuclear doesn’t. While the AI narrative works on funders and the technically legible community, it often falls flat amongst the general public. It still fails, and often just as badly as nuclear does. I see the real function of doom as being internal.

AI doom fails to resonate with the public because there is no clear, tangible visualization; the end is abstract. The mechanism can’t be pictured. Nuclear doom fails because everyone already thinks they have the clear picture, except the picture is from 1983 and has been the same ever since. Over-legibility, then, becomes its own kind of illegibility. A mechanism that feels fully understood can’t accept new information that challenges widely held assumptions. One risk can’t be imagined at all, and another, only imagined one single way: blast, mushroom cloud, and then complete dark nothingness.

I think the solution is the inverse. I have this idea to try being an influencer for 3 months as a social experiment, just to show the field that they should reconsider how they talk about nuclear risk publicly. We always think about the most efficient way to shock the algorithm with some horrible facet of nuclear war or survival, but the solution may be the opposite: to show people that I am a person who studies this risk, but that I have many other hobbies, friends, and interests, and that I live a well-rounded, happy life. That thinking about nuclear war all day, every day is not doom and gloom, but the opposite in that it brings you closer to being alive: a subtle, nuanced sense of agency.

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Special thanks to Zoe Taylor for remarking months ago that I should title one of my Substack posts “the doomsday paradox,” because it sounded cool. Indeed, a fire title, but I just needed to wait for the idea to come to me. I love a good paradox! <3

Sources:

Kim Witte, “Putting the fear back into fear appeals: The extended parallel process model,” Communication Monographs, 59(4), 329–349. June 2009.

Kim Witte & Mike Allen, “A Meta-Analysis of Fear Appeals: Implications for Effective Public Health Campaigns,” 27(5). October 2000.

“Monday, October 10, 1983,” The Diary of Ronald Reagan, The White House, 1983.

Peter Huessy, “Annie Jacobsen Gets It Wrong about Nuclear Deterrence,” Global Security Review, NIDS, 2024.

Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario, New York: Dutton, 2024.

When a missile reaches the midcourse phase in its trajectory, the deployment module (the “bus”) holding the warhead separates from the rest of the rocket to position for targeting. I learned last week in Albuquerque that the bus actually orients itself to the stars after separation using celestial guidance. The bus and warhead have nothing else to align to. Errors in inertial guidance tend to accumulate over the course of a missile’s flight path, and star-sighting is how the machine corrects for its own wayward drift. Humans created a weapon that orients itself in the same way that sailors, nomads, and pilgrims have for centuries; we can only create what we know.

After five days spent in a room full of folks talking continuously about strategy and deterrence in a particular techno-strategic idiom, I hopped into a rental car and headed north to bop around in Santa Fe and Taos. While in Taos, I drove out past the mountains to the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge for sunset. The gorge is massive in scale and sort of sublime; it’s roughly three million years of the (once mighty) Rio Grande eroding the basalt that surrounds it. This rift in the Earth’s crust predates me, nuclear weapons, and the silly field that emerged from them. It will likely outlast us too. I walked along the gorge looking east, watching the sun dip below the clouds and bathe the mountains in gooey warm light. Watching the colors of the sunset change, my mind was drifting to warheads, probability of miss/kill, and modeling lethal radii…

My time spent in New Mexico at the Dartmouth-Sandia strategic force analysis bootcamp (a mouthful) was exhausting, sweaty, dry (desert heat, not the topic!), fascinating, and relaxing all at once. I expected the week to fill the gaps I saw in my own understanding of the strategic/operational and conventional side of the nuclear risk landscape, though as the days passed by, I felt more and more at home with the depth and nuance across each session. Each session in its own way confronted what it means to dedicate one’s career and livelihood to a languishing risk that exists within an increasingly complex system.

The nuclear field’s confidence lives completely in the material and causal domains, preoccupied with weapons effects, delivery systems, yield, accuracy, and lethality, among other things. In all actuality, the answers we seek lie in the psychological; an attempt to shape what an adversary believes, thinks, and perceives. The payoff is psychological; there is no base rate for a nuclear apocalypse, and we can’t really test anything. Thus, doctrine often fills the space where evidence would (or should) go, and vast simplifications and assumptions become something akin to law unsaid. Deterrence is not perfect: it is a perception, and a very humanly fallible one at that. Each expert was saying the same thing in different words across different interwoven research areas.

Much of the workshop focused on old Cold War-era ideas and assumptions that experts are still reluctant to question today. This overreliance on assumptions has, over time, produced a blind spot stemming from the mid-90s intellectual vacation period when the security environment changed, but the field didn’t adapt. This lull in nuclear research lasted until almost 2010. At the end of the Cold War, when the USSR broke into smaller pieces, a cultural shift occurred in how we thought about risk and security.

The primary risk dissipated into a bunch of smaller risks, and thus, perspectives began to take an all-hazards and collective security approach to risk that favored mechanisms like proliferation, disarmament, and norms around non-use. It was the era when, unbeknownst to us, arms control became a disarmament risk-reduction problem, rather than a deterrence one. Little substantive work on nuclear risk occurred in this period while focus shifted to the war on terror in the post-9/11 world. Priorities are shaped simply by what felt most proximate.

Sprinkled throughout the sessions and discussions was also the idea that resilience and preparation are futile. In some ways, the conversation on resilience (or lack thereof) illustrates the process of an assumption or idea becoming doctrine. Resilience was an overarching conceptual theme, though only being discussed through the lens of prevention rather than preparation or post-detonation. On command and control, many think that command, control, and communications systems are far too delicate; NC3 systems need to be updated and modernized to be less analog and more resilient to shocks and communication risks. On missile defense, we think about how to absorb, or be resilient to, a first strike. On the varying types of strategic deterrence, is “deterrence by resilience” merely “deterrence by denial” in different words? The vocabulary is unsettled because the concept has no settled home in our thinking.

In one conversation, I was once more attempting to make my post-detonation work legible to an expert who, to my surprise, thought that resilience and preparation ought to be a core part of overall deterrence strategies, considering deterrence failure modes more seriously. The field possesses this strange tendency to invent terminology and jargon for mechanisms that already exist, but that we have failed to re-interrogate in our epistemological culture.

Wargames remain the only way to test theories about deterrence and nuclear war scenarios. If we cannot go around starting nuclear wars (a bad idea for obvious reasons), the next best thing is to simulate them; playing becomes the only option. I’ve played a few and heard recaps of wargames from colleagues, though I’d never heard from an expert whose career is built upon designing wargames and eliciting what you want out of players. The way that wargames have evolved as a method and data collection tool has evolved alongside how we think about nuclear risk— the nuclear taboo became so culturally strong during the intellectual vacation period that wargames stopped considering deterrence failures, post-detonation resilience, and nuclear warfighting, and instead focused on all of the escalatory events leading up to the nuclear exchange. The games we design and stories we tell reflect our conceptualization of risk at a particular moment in time.

When our job feels like it is to protect the status quo, trying new things feels expensive and risks the stability of a delicate and complex system we’ve worked so hard to maintain. So instead, the field theorizes, and theory without re-trial often hardens into inheritance and doctrine-like assumptions. Despite being the field’s only experimental method, wargames are vastly underutilized to study what we don’t understand about deterrence failures and evolving perceptions of things like theater nuclear forces. Wargames most often end at the moment of use, where resilience begins to carry strategic weight. Nuclear winter also exists entirely after nuclear use, and it is an uneven aftermath that only shows up on timescales that wargames have defined themselves out of. Much of the discussions I had treated nuclear use like the terminal existential consequence and neglected to consider how the risk of nuclear winter should feed back into countervalue and counterforce targeting considerations.

Resilience, wargames, post-detonation research, and nuclear winter are treated as four separate omissions, though I increasingly think they form one boundary. The nuclear field’s methods stop at the moment of detonation, and everything past that boundary has been exiled to islands with their own vocabularies and their own separate research communities. Resilient and post-detonation interventions were siloed precisely because it became its own technical enterprise with its own feasibility questions and a toolkit that has nothing to do with deterrence theory. Thus, it drifted away on an island that formed its own research community with differing conceptualizations of nuclear risk. Nonetheless, our considerations often stop at nuclear use and target lethality, and don’t dig deeper.

A boundary is not a fact about the world, but a choice a culture makes to consider some things over others. The field has to correct for its own wayward drift since the intellectual hiatus flowed into a different world where our methods haven’t evolved.

Nuclear winter risk feeds into counterforce and countervalue targeting arguments, and much of the field has naïve assumptions about what a nuclear winter is and how one may occur. For example, the U.S.’ atmospheric tests in the Pacific didn’t trigger a nuclear winter because there is no combustible material in the middle of the ocean; thus, there was no soot to loft. I thought of this feedback loop during one session, and jotted it down in my notebook to return to a later point when I had more time to think. And think I did! It was an off-hand observation, though the more I thought about it, I realized it was a mathematical question. I wanted to know if anyone had thought about it in the same way: dynamically, and accounting for deep uncertainty when other variables are added into the equation instead of being flattened.

So, against my better nature, I vibecoded a model with Claude where the primary output is the shape of the process’ own uncertainties, and I’m calling it p(missy): an uncertain nuclear effects model. The model accounts for a range of uncertainties in simulating lethality and weapons effects that are often flattened into vast simplifications, reflecting only a small slice of the complex reality. P(missy) expands four common formulas used in the nuclear field: p(miss) (probability of miss), p(kill) (probability of kill or eliminating a target), lethal radius, and SSPK (single shot probability of kill; probability of “kill” with one attempt). While these formulas are sufficient to gain a narrow glimpse into the reliability of one’s force posture, the insights stop at p(kill), neglecting to consider a wide range of variables that can drastically change weapons effects and lethal radius. The point, though, isn’t that calculations neglect to go past p(kill), but that these formulas are vast simplifications most often taken as fact. As a result, uncertainties continue to multiply down the mechanism chain post-detonation.

The current debate over counterforce (military forces and strategic infrastructure) and countervalue (population and economic centers) has a humanitarian dimension: smaller, lower-yield weapons are supposed to kill fewer civilians, and the evidence for this claim is almost exclusively based on reductions in fallout. In Philippe and Stepanov’s study on fallout and fatalities from targeting China’s new missile silo fields, “fallout” is mentioned ~40 times, but never says “thermal,” “firestorm,” or “soot.” In Press and Lieber’s New Era of Counterforce, fallout is frequently discussed, though mass fires/firestorms are mentioned deep in a single footnote, citing Lynn Eden’s work. In Whole World on Fire, Eden argues that the nuclear risk apparatus misinformed policymakers and the public by neglecting to calculate and consider the effects of firestorms/mass fires. Eden articulated what had long been unsaid: how a field can systematically exclude that which they don’t do well, and in the process construct a facade, a self-reinforcing fallacy.

Increasing the height of burst is one of the main ways to lower localized fallout, and at the same time, it raises the share of a weapon’s energy leaving as thermal radiation, from roughly 18% to 35%. While generalizing is sufficient to gain insights, we most often neglect the complexities that change the risk. The whole point of p(missy) is not to hold all of the answers; rather, it is to show how uncertain we still are about weapons we think about every single day.

To think clearly about a thing, one must first demystify it completely. Had my flight not been delayed over six hours on Monday, I wouldn’t have been able to visit Los Alamos on my drive back down to Albuquerque from Taos. I first stopped at Fuller Lodge, formerly the social and communal center of Project Y during the Manhattan Project, where a senior center was having lunch and playing board games. In chatting with the docent, she rolled her eyes and said I could walk around and up into the rooms, but that the senior center’s lunch was droning on and they moved rather slowly. I wandered around the small museum, and then down Bathtub Row, the street where Oppenheimer, Hans Bethe, and Enrico Fermi formerly resided. The small homes on this street were originally built for the Los Alamos Ranch School and were highly coveted as the only homes with bathtubs— a hierarchy legible even in the plumbing.

Los Alamos is certainly a company town, and naturally, the history colors everything: down the street from Oppenheimer’s home, there is now a bathtub row craft beer brewery adorned with a pop-art style mural of Oppenheimer, a cigarette dangling delicately from his mouth. I later walked past the Los Alamos main gate reproduction, which is now just a public bathroom. Los Alamos was a quietly calm town, but kids were playing everywhere. Some were sitting in the grass by Fuller Lodge in the shadow of a sculpture of Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves, listening to a camp counselor play his banjo in the midday sun. It’s certainly a strange feeling to finally see these places in person for the first time after studying them for 7-some-odd years. My single encounter with the real places I’ve studied for most of my career was, in the end, entirely unplanned.

We work on a risk that we cannot test because a nuclear war hasn’t happened, and we hope it never does— that really is all we have. A place may be demystified over time, but the thing it produced can only be demystified by math. So it seems the field decided a long time ago how far it was willing to carry the sum, but perhaps it doesn’t always have to be this way.

P(missy) is a work in progress: I would love feedback to refine and expand it. If you want to give p(missy) a whirl, you can try out the model here!

The concept of “vibes,” or “vibing” with something, has permeated almost every aspect of life and culture, from first dates to predicting catastrophic collapse. Vibes are in part a cultural derivative of vibrations (like the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations); a low, instinctual hum that pulls the mind towards something abstract, a particular feeling or inclination toward an idea. A way of describing something indescribable, that somehow, everyone understands instantly.

While vibes appear like an innocent cultural shift in communication, they are also a measurable shift in how risk researchers and experts actually reason about probability; they can license prediction without the burden of proof. Vibes present a distinct cultural response to unknowns.

When thinking about complex catastrophic risks, vibes become a determination of sorts. Vibes allow one to make a judgment or a prediction without having to rigorously defend it, because identifying causal shifts and perceiving changes is enough when dealing with unprecedented risks. In life, vibes are a way to define a feeling or a shift without defining what explicitly underpins the feeling itself; the perception of what may be intangible. Vibes garner a certain reliance on intuition, feelings, language, tone, and even aesthetics.

The shift to vibes is the field’s quiet and gradual abandonment of frequentist and actuarial (expected value, base rates, etc.) modes of thinking on risk, and a move toward scenario, narrative, and imagination as the dominant mode of thought— like fat-tailed risks, unknown unknowns, x-risk prediction markets, “p-doom,” and red-teaming. One could argue that the scenario-based thinking that emerged during the Cold War from strategists like Herman Kahn was in a way an early instance of the same concept, developed to deal with a novel technological risk at the time that had no base rate to consult. There had never been a thermonuclear war; at the time, there was nothing to count. So instead, Herman Kahn wrote and told nuanced stories, and branded them as analysis of deterrence failure modes and nuclear warfighting. It seems as if we are doing the same thing again; like society still responds to complexity and the unknown in the same ways. Vibes are our default.

We optimize, especially in the West (most aggressively in the Bay Area), for an ultra-rational way of thinking. We know that humans are not the best at decision-making under deep complexity and uncertainty: it is hard to disagree. Today, many intellectual and research communities strive for rationality and to act as rationally as possible, yet as the world grows more complex, we are forced to deal with new magnitudes of classic trolley problems. Humans simply feel too much for this to be possible. AI was supposed to be this thing that can think without feeling; to be objective in a way we simply cannot. A machine with the objectivity we lack. We just didn’t build exactly that.

In 2016, DeepMind’s AlphaGo played Lee Sedol, one of the greatest Go players alive. In the second game, the machine made a move that no human player would have chosen. A move so alien to thousands of years of accumulated play that commentators assumed it was a mistake. Lee stood up and left the room. When he returned, he was visibly shaken. The move turned the game; the machine won four of five; the grandmaster eventually retired from competition. In the end, AlphaGo won the game. And that never-before-seen move, experts said, was the one that turned the course of the game in favor of the AI.

What was so unsettling about move 37 was not that it was calculated, but that it looked like taste and intuition. The model appeared to feel an inclination; a feel for the board that no one could reverse-engineer. Humans built an entity that was supposed to out-rationalize us, and in a way it has out-vibed us.

Perhaps this is why we cling to vibes now more than ever. Maybe the shift to vibes is a quiet resistance that these communities don’t even see as resistance; a natural tendency to set ourselves apart from AI models because on the inside, we still see ourselves as innately separate and unique. We rely on vibes, research taste, and intuition more in the AI age than we used to, and we hear a lot more conversations around vibes and taste, and our perception of them. There is no precedent. Perhaps we rely on them because we think they’ve become special: a rarer, scarcer form of intelligence than the purely rational kind, which the machines were supposed to monopolize.

I am not outside of this. Bits and pieces of my own work rest on a vibe or feeling I couldn’t have defended when I first sensed it. Some time ago I began noticing a gap between the canonical nuclear policy and nuclear winter fields, and the effective altruism-aligned resilience sub-field. While the resilience sub-field is constantly referencing the biggest nuclear winter studies, the canonical researchers rarely engage with resilience research. It was not a classic gap in the literature, but instead a subtle gap in attention and legibility.

There was no dataset, no citation count, no survey of the field to point at; I couldn’t have cited it off the top of my head. It was merely a low hum I picked up through conversations, through what came up at workshops and conferences and what didn’t; through reading and noticing the shape and texture of what wasn’t there. When I tell others about this idea, they tell me it makes sense, and they don’t ask for sources. This is functionally how vibes operate: my idea was received as true because it felt true to the people who would know. I still think some of my feelings and vibes are grounded, but I can’t pretend like the idea was arrived at through a frequentist and quantitative process.

The world and society itself continue to grow more complex with technology, and we don’t understand everything (far from it)— there is still a cultural preference for simplicity and feeling, and the conversation on vibes is largely a manifestation of this. Do we have a cultural preference for simplicity? Is this simplicity merely an intuitive gut feeling?

The ongoing conversation between probabilistic and vibes-based approaches to communicating risk is uniquely visible in the rise of prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi: trading platforms where users can buy and sell event contracts based on the outcomes of future occurrences (including existential risks). While prediction markets were marketed and sold as instruments for “truth tracking,” the rationalist culture of Silicon Valley, AI safety, and effective altruism dominates the narrative. The gradual drift into quite literally gambling on the probability of catastrophe and collapse is more so a story about a community’s stated values clashing with what the product actually rewards. We assume that the market reveals the truth, but the evolution of prediction markets has exposed this assumption, and now we are watching it decay under its own incentives.

Back in March, Polymarket removed an event contract on whether a nuclear weapon would be detonated this year, in light of the platform’s increasing association with gambling on death and war. Before being archived, the market gave a 22% chance of nuclear use— and garnered over $800,000 in volume while live.

The event was not tied to a particular regional conflict; rather, it would resolve “yes” on any nuclear exchange or detonation anywhere on Earth within the timeframe: any detonation at all, including a test, an accident or miscalculation, or demonstration whether over a city or empty space. The market can't price the hum without first pretending the hum has edges, and so a category that contains both a routine test and a mass casualty event gets flattened into a single binary that neglects nuance, and the binary gets a price. When the contract was pulled, it was not because the number was wrong, or because someone produced a better one, but because it started to look really bad. Betting on nuclear use to win money is objectively unethical and perverse, but the reasoning for pulling the event was framed as a legal question; that regulated prediction markets aren’t “allowed” to do war markets. The truth tracking instrument was withdrawn on what feels like just bad vibes.

At face value, prediction markets appear like they are grounded in probabilities: in numbers, prices, and calibration. Think about it more, and prediction markets begin to feel more like “aggregated vibes” communicated with percentages; a vibe laundered into a number that sort of makes logical sense. Many epistemological communities and cultures believe that everything can be calculated, and this makes the thing being calculated easier to believe; or rather, it gives us a better reason to believe it. We don’t know enough about all of the big risks that threaten us, nor how they interact and cascade in complex and interwoven ways: there is no base rate for the apocalypse. Prediction markets are really just pricing a hum; a low intuitive vibration. This brings me to Rick Rubin: the strange, cerebral art philosopher and music producer.

Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being has shaped me not only as a researcher but even more so as a human who is forced to function in an increasingly complex society that demands my attention in every which way. I read it for the first time in its entirety while lying on the beach in Carmel, California in 2023. Rubin made me see myself and my work as an artist and her art, even in a field that is technical and chock full of techno-strategic jargon. My ideas and my writing are my art, and I am an artist.

The Creative Act is a nebulous and beautiful work, as is Rubin’s overall disposition, arguing in favor of a languid, unhurried, and meditative approach to making art in a way that is implicitly anti-quantification. The work arrives through you rather than from you, and the artist’s job is merely to get quiet enough to receive it; that certainty is mostly just an obstacle rather than something to strive for. If you have an idea and someone else gets to publishing it first, Rubin says this is nothing to be upset over, as it was simply time for that idea to surface. There are always more ideas.

Rubin largely argues that an artist should be in tune with the world around them; surrendering to a process of achieving alignment with the steady hum of the universe, allowing vibes to pull you one way or another. We should be trusting the hum. Rubin’s work is humanist almost to the point of mysticism. I’ve always seen him as the modern patron saint of unknowing and of reveling in uncertainty.

Throughout The Creative Act, Rubin draws on the AlphaGo and move 37 story memorably: “Upon first hearing this story,” he writes, “I found myself in tears and confused by this sudden swell of emotion. After further reflection, I realized that the story spoke to the power of purity in the creative act.” Rubin was moved by a machine’s intuitions.

All of this to say, I was shocked and a little disheartened to see Rubin in one of Polymarket’s recent “Questions are Everything” commercials that aired during their World Cup campaign. The ad shows Rubin sitting in a meditative state in front of American flag stars, and asks you to consider what you would want to know if you could ask anything at all. It all felt rather backwards. The meditative, anti-quantification Rick Rubin-isms of The Creative Act now fronting a literal market on outcomes. “Trusting the hum,” and “pricing every uncertainty,” become what are essentially two sides of the same gesture. If a prediction market is merely an aggregated hum with a price attached, then Rubin fronting Polymarket isn’t a betrayal of the vibe. The market simply charges admission…

I still can’t make sense of his decision, but maybe I don’t have to. I see Rubin deeply as a humanist, and this decision feels all too anti-humanist— all while the ad somehow captured his cerebral nature; one of the things I love most about his work. It also legitimizes a platform like Polymarket, attempting to make it legible to a new epistemological community of artists. Perhaps his humanism is more libertarian. That his trust in the human spirit is so strong, that he believes humans should do whatever the “hum” pulls us towards, and each of us decides how to live our lives. He merely provides guidance on how he lives his. We are all subject to change.

I’ve still yet to bet on a prediction market, and I’m perfectly fine with the fact that this may erode the weight of my words in particular rooms. I feel no desire to, and I don’t really care; I trust my intuition, and I trust my taste. I’d also vastly prefer to max out my Roth IRA than bet on catastrophe, death, and collapse of society. It’s just the vibe I’m getting.

When I started appetites for risk, I realized that I contemplate catastrophic risk failure modes almost 24/7; I dream of them at night. I enjoy being one with the void (hence, my last post). My mind drifts to nuclear winter and what life will be like with superintelligence while I feel the cool breeze on my bike ride to work in the morning, and again later on my ride home in the evening. When I go for a long run, I often leave my headphones at home to see where my mind drifts in its most meditative state— naturally, it often drifts into the catastrophic and abstract domains. It’s a constant reminder that we’re human, and that I’m alive.

I feel incredibly lucky to have spent last week at Cambridge University with the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) surrounded by 30 other humans (and the incomparable Yuval Noah Harari) who think just as I do, and perhaps a little unconventionally. Like me, they all think for a living about how everything might go wrong every which way. I arrived burnt out and tired, showing up immediately after landing at Heathrow the morning of the first session. One week later, I left feeling renewed with enough ideas and thoughts that I was sure I could fill an 8 hour flight home just with contemplation, staring at the seat in front of me. I call these sorts of trips intellectual vacations! I love them and I’m grateful my work allows me the privilege to be so curious!

For much of the week, I found myself doing something habitual that I do in my research: mapping this newer, strange entity onto the structures of nuclear risk I know rather intimately, to see what fits and what doesn’t. The race to AGI is reminiscent of the Manhattan Project in many ways (conviction, concentration of talent, etc.), though on a much larger scale. The analogy breaks in an unsettling way. Something that was unthinkable before the Trinity Test became routinized over time, and so deeply interwoven with the international security system that today, it feels almost impossible to imagine a world without nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are a technology humanity built and hopes never to use again. AI is the opposite; it is something we are racing toward while watching it advance in real time. There was no bomb, and no enemy, until the Trinity Test. With AI, the “thing” is already here, already legible, already strangely alien.

The discussions, lectures, and seminars that filled the week changed the way I think about my life, my research, and what it means to be human today. In their most simple forms, society’s biggest problems are either technical or adaptive— but problems can also be both. One of our many faults as humans is that we often treat adaptive problems as purely technical ones. I think this is one of the issues I have with AI safety work sometimes—I think the work is necessary and important, though I struggle to understand the insular culture and the often purely technical means.

Underneath the jargon, culture, and high level talks on catastrophic risk work, are just people. We currently live in a world where everything has been created and thought of by the human mind; our culture was created by humans only—filmmaking, art, architecture, tv shows, etc. Everything is culturally produced, and everything is an information system. Meaning itself may become this new area of incentive and investment, personally and on a societal level. We may see a world where humans return to analog tendencies and tribalistic/community-centered ways of living yet have this access to superintelligent AI to do most things that don’t “matter.” What does matter? The messy, imperfect, and raw human experiences that shape us. Purely human written text and human made art will certainly become rarer, but may also become a signifier of privilege, intellect, and elitism. I left Cambridge on the 4th of July with more questions and ideas than answers; a certain kind of rare luxury that I deeply cherish.

Despite our many ills, these conversations at Cambridge reminded me of the things I love about humanity and society. I was reminded of art, of desire, creativity, and that it is perfectly ok to not have all of the answers. It also reminded me to enjoy the ride. Before arriving in Cambridge I re-read Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, and in one of the early chapters he talks about how even in neanderthal times, humans were almost hardwired to gossip. At any given academic conference lunch, professors aren’t always talking about discoveries and unanswered questions (surely, they are still part of conversations), but more often they trade stories on which professor didn’t get tenure, or who was cheating on whose spouse. At a conference years ago I met a researcher I look up to for the first time, and upon introducing himself, he led with the fact that he was getting divorced. In that moment, any anxiety I felt dissipated.

Behind the big models and strategic doctrines, we are merely small and strange beings. We trade these stories because human messiness is predictable in its chaos, yet we still recoil from it. We trust the technology we create (that may slip from our control at any moment), but we don’t often trust other human beings as easily as we trust AI. Perhaps it is because we believe the technology we create has the intangible qualities which we lack. The human beings working on mitigating and thinking about big risks are, at the end of the day, just humans and are just as imperfect as everyone else.

I’ve always felt misplaced in the modern era; like I was born in the wrong generation, and would have fit in more seamlessly in the 70s. I could have big hair without feeling like I’m taking up too much space, wear bell bottoms and tie dye shirts, contemplate existence on shrooms and psychedelics, follow the grateful dead around, and resist the war machine. I suppose this is more similar to today than I previously thought.

The discussions I had last week made me realize that I actually was born in the right era. What I like most about living in this time, is how it forces me to think deeply about what it means to be human and the nuances and eccentricities that make us who we are. The years ahead are sort of eerie, strange and unfamiliar territory, and much of our wellbeing and survival is based on the decisions we make in the near future. These conversations force us back to the questions of who we are, what we value, how we are different, and why that question still belongs to us. We live in exciting and uncertain times— and I’m trying to enjoy the ride.

I used to cower at the thought of big risks and failure modes of existential proportions. In 2011 I was 11 years old, and I remember my elementary school classmates were talking about how 2012 was going to be the end of the world while we lined up after art class. An hour later, I was so anxious thinking that we only had a month to live, and how everyone was just going about life like normal. So anxious, that I couldn’t bear a single bite of my tuna fish sandwich (my favorite lunch).

On new year’s eve that year, I heard echoes of my family and friends laughing in the other room, trading reflections over sips of champagne, while I was on the floor watching times square on the tv waiting for the ball to drop. As the clock inched closer to midnight and the countdown began, I remember closing my eyes and feeling this strange wave of chill roll over me. I still thought it could be the end. As the ball dropped, I heard everyone yell “happy new year!” and when I opened my eyes everything was just the same as it was before. I see the seedlings of what I do now scattered throughout these memories, despite the fact that I think no one (even myself) could’ve predicted where I’ve ended up.

It’s almost ironic when I think of this aversive tendency, when today, all I do 24/7 is contemplate extinction-level failure modes— whether it be from nuclear winter, AI, or some cascade of both. And it’s even more ironic that I very much love doing so.

My existential dread isn’t so much “dread,” as it is something else entirely. I find it sort of fun and absurd to look at the world and existence in this way and this outlook has defined who I am: I contemplate extinction for a living, and simultaneously love what I do.

I’ve become all too familiar this thing I wasn’t able to name until I came across a blog post from Ben Kuhn on Twitter (from late 2022). Kuhn talks about how “staring into the abyss” is really just a core life skill. Staring into the abyss is analogous to thinking reasonably about things that are often uncomfortable and too complex to contemplate, like arguments against one’s religious beliefs, or in favor of breaking up with your long-term partner. Kuhn says this is difficult (I agree) and that it may require acknowledging past wrongs, and wasting time based on that. Where we diverge is that Kuhn’s essay sees that every abyss has a floor or an endpoint; a point at which you confront the hard thing, your opinion changes, and you’re able to evolve and move forward with this newfound conviction.

My full-time job is basically to stare into a never-ending abyss of failure modes, and moreover my field is essentially built on one big void that can’t be neatly resolved. I, and others in my field, can’t make the decision to stop thinking about it; the abyss doesn’t go away. There is no clearness committee for nuclear winter. I live with ends I can see all too well, and ends that may never arrive if things go according to plan (I think this is more unlikely today, alas). I consider the big things we are afraid of happening, and I imagine in detail what it would be like if they were to occur. It is merely contemplating a failure mode for its own sake, to understand it and find its gaps (identifying avenues for interventions), not to reach for a simple decision or conclusion.

What does staring into the void look like (or, feel like) when there is no bottom and no simple way out, and when sitting with failure modes is the work indefinitely?

There’s this essay by psychologist Robert Jay Lifton in his book, The Future of Immortality, that was one of the first nuclear risk pieces I ever read in college. In this, Lifton details his own psychological journey confronting nuclear war through nightmares, and how he came out on the other side a changed person. In an old lecture, Lifton elaborated on the different forms of symbolic immortality. The fifth mode he discussed is that of experiential transcendence: a direct psychic experience so intense that, within it, time and death seem to disappear. Any time we are able to feel ourselves outside of ourselves we can experience this transcendent quality. I feel lucky that I get to experience this almost every single day. A warm kind of presentness is woven throughout these experiences.

In an early chapter, Lifton muses, “After collecting these essays my feeling was: “So this is what I have been doing for the past fifteen years!” There are surely more pleasant ways to spend one’s time than worrying about war, mass murder, and nuclear threat, but I seemed to have made a choice to spend much of mine doing just that.” I also seem to have made this choice rather unconsciously, as have many others I work with and talk to each day.

The most common question I get when I talk about my work to non-nuclear folks, is on how depressing it is, and how it must be all doom and gloom. Most assume we compartmentalize everything so well that’s why we joke about which missile is our favorite (mine is the Hwasong-17, I like the checkerboard) and so on. In a way I think it’s simply that we’re in awe of this thing that humans created that dominates how we live and function; it’s almost sublimity. Kant says that in confronting something vast enough to threaten annihilation, humans often find a strange elevation in safe contemplation. It is merely an aesthetic response to a magnitude that is difficult to comprehend and sit with, though I’m quite fond of strangeness these days.

The “not flinching” part isn’t necessarily compartmentalization or forgetting and abandoning the ultimate responsibility to mitigate nuclear risk, rather I think it’s a rare skill that shouldn’t be frowned upon, but just the opposite: it is hard to hold failure modes without flinching and getting depressed. The alternative is basically going numb; feeling burnt out and tired of little progress and thinking that we have little agency in shaping the future. It is easy to go numb, but it is much harder and more rewarding to sit with the void.

In many ways, contemplating failure modes for a living is what has made me feel the most alive. I face the hard things because I am in love with being alive. I love being alive, thus I choose to face the hard things. I used to be bogged down by social pressures and stupid nuances that I couldn’t give less of a fuck about today. I am grateful for the privilege to live every day, and I appreciate the smaller more routine moments and take them for granted less than I used to. I biked in the sun to work yesterday morning, and today I spontaneously went to a cafe downtown with my nuclear fellows for a change of scenery (I also had a perfect cinnamon roll). Wahoo! I actively seek out experiences that take my breath away, whether it be great nature, or deep conversations with those around me. And at the same time, I try to say yes to everything and just have fun.

The simplest things now feel meaningful, only after I really internalized that the future is largely uncertain and continues to grow more complex. I feel more grounded on my own two feet; like I stand a bit more still than I used to. My motivations and passion to do something about big risks have also deepened. Over time, my work has brought me to a point of acceptance of death— of my own and others— and being able to constantly contemplate my own finiteness in my ideas, my work, material possessions, and my life itself. I merely hope I can be part of building a more resilient future.

Each day, I wake up, contemplate nuclear extinction in its entirety and metabolize it before going to sleep at night. And tomorrow when I wake up, I know for certain it will still be there. I like that it is reliable; there will always be more problems to contemplate and try to solve. There’s no folly to realize my way out of, no pivot that resolves everything: it is a slow, incremental process. Sitting with failure modes and contemplating the void is largely permanent and unrewarded, and it manifests in a way as a kind of presentness that exists outside of myself. The sense of aliveness I feel comes from the relative un-resolvability of the big risks I contemplate.

There have been many times when I’ve heavily considered leaving the nuclear field for something different, but there is this particular relationship to vastness that I don’t think I could ever find elsewhere; the work possesses a strangely abstract and complex quality. At times, my big ball of tangled yarn feels lighter, and at other times it feels heavier. Nonetheless, I will always carry it with me.

We speak elegantly on destruction but refuse to meaningfully engage with the aftermath. In the nuclear risk field, we are trained to be comfortable talking in techno-strategic abstractions (à la Carol Cohn) like “city busting,” “massive retaliation,” and “assured destruction,” among other things. We simultaneously strive to keep human lives central to our motivations in preventing nuclear war. Yet the field never wants to think about what happens afterwards. Post-detonation or, “right of boom” research carries with it an outlandish connotation and fills the field with a sense of discomfort; it feels both paradoxical and strange to think about a vague bleak reality after a catastrophic event. Especially one that we spend our careers and livelihoods endlessly striving to prevent. In many ways, post-detonation and resilience interventions feel too strange and uncomfortable to be perceived as interesting or approachable.

In many ways, the nuclear field’s central purpose is to both mitigate nuclear risk and prevent nuclear war. Perhaps the field believes that if we give “the aftermath” as much thought and consideration as we do prevention, it means that in essence, we failed at our jobs in preventing nuclear war. I don’t think this means we’ve failed.

Classifying a concept or event as being ‘unthinkable’ causes us to underestimate its probability and suggests that it’s kept far out of mind (Mitzen, 2016). This heuristic isn’t the whole truth; nuclear war can be both thinkable and unthinkable at once. The nuclear field’s avoidance of the right-of-boom domain is less of an oversight, than a culturally and institutionally produced blind spot. By strategically and unconsciously conflating civilizational collapse with extinction, the field often uses its own catastrophic modeling to foreclose the very resilience research that canonical models make necessary. Ultimately, we continually choose to be underprepared.

The post-Cold War defense apparatus sought to create a secure technological framework for a deterrent, with the ultimate goal of preventing a specific type of war. If the goal is to prevent extinction, deterrence becomes the only logical response: “If it be granted that each side can utterly destroy the other, then expensive preparations to reduce casualties, lessen damage, and facilitate power recuperation are useless,” (Kahn, 1960). Although the field has always been grounded in its motivation to prevent nuclear war, nuclear strategists in the early Cold War like Herman Kahn, sensed the possibility of post-detonation interventions like civil defense (e.g., sheltering and evacuation protocols, education, etc.) possessing strategic value for U.S. nuclear doctrine.

While Kahn argued that thinking about survivability in a variety of post-nuclear war scenarios could strengthen deterrence, the broader field feared that acknowledging the think-ability of nuclear war would lower the barrier to use and erode deterrence (Kahn, 1958). More broadly, this idea of prevention is not only an approach to risk reduction, but it is also a professional identity established and calcified into the field’s epistemological culture over time. Grappling with the aftermath beyond nuclear winter feels almost like a psychological admission of failure and defeat. The nuclear winter and climate effects sub-field— which emerged in the mid-1980s with the TTAPS model— is the closest the nuclear field comes to thinking about the aftermath. Despite visualizing the risk and making nuclear winter feel tangible, most models are used to reinforce the field’s reliance on prevention-based risk reduction frameworks. Nuclear winter modeling also made the normative commitment to prevent nuclear war feel scientifically justified and legitimated.

The first nuclear winter models, including the TTAPS model (1983) and the following “Climate and Smoke” (1990) models, allowed nuclear risk to be quantified beyond arbitrary stockpile numbers for the first time, visualized in a way that made the risk of nuclear winter feel tangible and real as opposed to abstract. These models primarily depicted climate and atmosphere effects caused by soot injected into the stratosphere, but as a direct extension, models also communicated the far-reaching implications on the economic, political, and societal domains.

Over the years, this modeling produced a peculiar epistemic culture that doesn’t always consider the validity of resilience research in the nuclear winter and climate modeling domains. In Xia et al. (2022), a study modeling agricultural effects and global famine from nuclear winter, the modeled effects of detonations are communicated as so severe that prevention remains the only option: “We estimate more than 2 billion could die from a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, and more than 5 billion could die from a war between the United States and Russia—underlining the importance of global cooperation in preventing nuclear war,” (Xia et al., 2022). While the model acknowledged it’s limitations, it also chose to omit certain interventions, including: farm-management adaptations, cold-tolerating crops, or alternative food sources such as mushrooms, seaweed, and methane single cell protein (Xia et al., 2022).

Xia et al., acknowledges that resilient strategies, or “adaptations,” could reduce the negative impact from a simulated nuclear war, but that it would be “challenging to make all the shifts in time to affect food availability in year two post-nuclear winter,” (Xia, et al., 2022) This conclusion recurs across the canonical models, from Robock and Toon's regional-war study to the field's updated 2007 estimates (Robock et al., 2007; Robock & Toon, 2010). These models use estimates of injected soot to both justify and reinforce the field's attention on prevention. It is both an indictment of deterrence in favor of nuclear abolition, and a further reliance upon the foundations of deterrence to avoid nuclear war. Experts often use findings to shut down the conversation on resilience, rather than expand its scope.

In a way, the field is calibrated to a world that no longer exists. Our conceptualization of an “all-out nuclear war” is based on global nuclear stockpile estimates at the height of the Cold War, with ~70,300 total warheads in 1986. Today, through gradual stockpile reductions and arms control, there are an estimated 12,241 nuclear warheads in the global stockpile (Kristensen et al., 2025). Although progress has been made on reductions, the field’s risk institutions are still grounded in Cold War era assessments that predicted an “all-out” nuclear exchange would lead to extinction.

The field’s epistemic culture hasn’t fully updated its center of gravity to match the shift in the risk landscape. The experts who study nuclear winter modeling are not “bad scientists” (in fact, the opposite), rather their conclusions are often symptoms of a cultural logic that prioritizes a specific aesthetic of homogenous destruction, over the messy reality of survival and resilience (my post on complexity and hot dogs). Beyond culture, preference for simplistic apocalypses shapes epistemology. Studying nuclear winter and the effects of nuclear war are central to how nuclear risk is conceptualized and communicated, but little funding is allocated to the domain, and it faces low institutional interest. While 12,000 nuclear warheads— with a majority still held by Russia and the United States— still constitute a massive global catastrophe, the math of survivability changes from over 70,000.

Effective Altruism-aligned (EA) scholars that think within longtermism, like Toby Ord and Johannes Kattan, consider that with everything we know about nuclear war today, it is unlikely that an exchange would directly lead to the extinction of all of humanity (Ord, 2020; Kattan, 2022). In “The Precipice Revisited,” Toby Ord hesitates to rank nuclear war as humanity’s fundamental undoing; by his reading, our current arsenals lack a known scientific pathway for an all-out nuclear war to lead to human extinction, nor a solid story about how it could permanently end civilization (Ord, 2024).

Other EA researchers argue that models from the Robock et al. model group are likely overestimating the risk of extinction (Ladish, 2020). There are a number of assumptions and uncertainties that still saturate stages of the nuclear winter mechanism chain, where firestorms are treated an inevitable rather than reliant on a number of existing factors— soot injection is dependent upon firestorms with strong enough pyro-convective force to punch a deep plume that reaches the stratosphere. The amount of combustible material in urban environments—which produces the soot— is also uncertain, as most models assume a homogenous fuel load based on construction norms from the mid-twentieth century. The consequences of a nuclear winter with today’s weapons stockpiles, although devastating, would not cause extinction; it would be really bad, yet largely survivable in the long-term.

This conversation frames nuclear winter models as evidence for extinction risk, yet the discipline often blurs the line between human extinction, and the scales of civilizational collapse. One may view this conceptual blurring as a strategic response to institutional abandonment; a deliberate attempt to manufacture political urgency and public engagement in an era dominated by apathy. If the objective scientific conclusions suggest some level of collapse, something survivable but not extinction-level catastrophic, then refusing to engage with or research resilience and post-detonation interventions is both a moral and strategic failure within the discipline. Insularity and epistemic foundations within the nuclear risk research domain produce a culture where assumptions aren’t always re-interrogated, often confusing the ‘politically irrelevant’ with the ‘scientifically resolved.’

In nuclear risk research, and more broadly international security studies, the majority of writings do not go to great length to discuss their analytical, normative, and epistemological assumptions (Buzan & Hansen, 2009). The language we use does epistemic work and holds weight for how we communicate risk within the discipline and outwards. It can also cause different kinds of internal censorship that erode credibility and relevance. This produces a rhetorically induced form of censorship that causes scholars to stay away from “radical re-orderings” of the world that pull the system away from deterrence and nonproliferation.

Modes of censorship contribute to the insular nature of the field, where this distinction makes post-detonation research not only feel unnecessary, but also perhaps transgressive, because it violates the nuclear taboo and challenges the foundations of deterrence. If the effects of a nuclear exchange are widely established and perceived as less severe collapse than the threat of extinction originally thought, this may lower the barrier to use.

In many ways, EA investment is driven by the distinction between collapse and extinction right, which is likely part of why aligned philanthropies fund resilience research. Founders Pledge, an EA-aligned philanthropic funding organization, cited right-of-boom interventions as one of the most severely neglected areas of research in the nuclear field (Ruhl, 2023). In keeping the difference between collapse and extinction central, EA-aligned funders are pushing for resilience research. I find that the nuclear field tends to read this as more resources taken away from prevention, and further evidence that resilience research is strange; too fringe to be relevant. This dismissal itself is merely a symptom of the discipline’s culture that is becoming more obvious as EA-aligned organizations constitute a larger share of overall funding.

There is also a question of whether post-detonation interventions and resilience research is actually neglected, or if it simply wasn’t technologically feasible on the scale necessary when nuclear winter models first quantified the risk. A number of models believe that these interventions simply aren’t possible on the scale that would be needed, and that resources would be further constrained post-nuclear war (Xia et al., 2022). Models often fail to acknowledge that if we invest in these interventions pre detonation, the relative feasibility and deployment changes. Perhaps because this research didn’t seem feasible in the late Cold War, it became “neglected” as a result.

Its entirely possible that the relationship between neglect and feasibility is the mechanism that keeps the loop closed: the longer resilience research is treated as transgressive and morally suspect, the more underdeveloped it becomes, and the more reliably it can be dismissed as unserious. When a sub-field is neglected for long enough, it almost becomes less feasible, struggling with less trained talent, less infrastructure, and less institutional knowledge. This is more so an institutional and cultural outcome, than a scientific conclusion about feasibility. While many of these interventions may not have been feasible then, they are now.

I see a pervasive sense of presentism in risk and security studies; this struggle to imagine a future that is fundamentally different from today. Like an imaginative form of self-censorship. In other words, predictions about nuclear war are just educated guesses and assumptions based on gambling on human behavior, not objective fact. If we strive to remain open to new ideas and possible futures, they can slowly change the ways in which we approach and think about big risks in an increasingly uncertain and complex world.

We can all agree that no one wants a nuclear war, that is the easy part. Yet it is our job as researchers in the nuclear field to acknowledge that a nuclear war can still happen unintentionally or by accident, despite all our best efforts in trying to prevent one. If the field didn’t understand this, we would be very bad at our jobs. Studying and prioritizing resilience and post detonation interventions is not admitting we failed at preventing nuclear war, rather it is making the choice to adapt to a new risk landscape where the stakes feel higher and more uncertain.

In 2023, I wrote my master’s thesis exploring the differences in how nuclear risk is conceptualized in the effective altruism movement compared with the nuclear policy field. I used to think that civil defense and right of boom research was ridiculous, and more importantly a waste of resources. My advisor and I would sit in his office and go back and forth trading quotes and stories about how ludicrous we thought it was that EA researchers were invested in re-visiting nuclear civil defense. I was confused why EA was choosing to re-examine an intervention that the nuclear field deemed ineffective, strategically ambiguous, and a waste of money. When I look back on how I approached these complexities, I wonder why I didn’t have the perspective I do now. It wasn’t that I was uninformed or oblivious— I was merely trained by senior experts in an insular discipline that prioritizes certain frameworks for risk reduction over others and leaves little room for unconventional or “out-there” ideas. I am a product of this culture. It just took me a while to realize that I didn’t have to think in the exact same ways as they do.

The nuclear field’s cultural and epistemological foundations systematically produce blind spots, both about post-detonation and resilience research, about the assumptions baked into nuclear winter modeling, and about what interventions count as “legitimate.” At the end of the day, that is what makes us successful at our jobs in the nuclear field: to recognize when old ways are no longer working, to re-interrogate our assumptions, and to cultivate an environment where innovative approaches and new perspectives aren’t silenced. It demands more than abiding by the status quo: preventing a nuclear war is necessary, but it’s only one part of the solution.

True responsibility lies in preparing for and thinking about the unthinkable, ensuring that our discomfort with the risk itself does not lead to a catastrophic failure of readiness. If one day we are unsuccessful in preventing a nuclear war, but we haven’t prepared for what happens afterwards, simply because it makes us too uncomfortable, where does that leave us?

*I use the term “nuclear field” rather loosely here, but for context, what I mean is the canonical nuclear weapons field that emerged from the Cold War, with a focus on mitigating nuclear risk. This includes nuclear winter experts and strategists alike, but doesn’t include technical folks that work on nuclear energy, or grassroots nuclear advocacy, for example.

Perhaps I talk about it too much, but I think Herman Kahn is wildly misunderstood.

If I could have dinner with any figure dead or alive, I can confidently say it would be Herman (we’re on a first name basis now, I’ve decided). Although his infamous persona was the presumed basis for Kubrick’s insanely absurdist Nazi nuclear strategist Dr. Strangelove, Kahn’s ideas are both more relevant and (almost) palatable in an increasingly complex catastrophic-risk environment. Or, I suppose, they are merely more utilitarian and rationalist; everything old becomes new again. Herman’s worldview almost perfectly aligns with effective altruism’s focus on longtermism, suffering risk, and rational calculations of expected value, among other things. In his 1958 report on a non-military defense, he was quite literally calculating lives saved per dollar spent on fallout shelters.1 Our assumptions haven’t really updated to account for reconsidering these ideas.

I’ve been revisiting Herman’s Thinking About the Unthinkable (1982), and the way in which he talks about war games, deterrence failure, and nuclear war simulations is far different than our conception of them today as a tool for understanding how nuclear wars unfold— and how to prevent them. War gaming shifted from preparation to prevention, but we don’t really talk about why.

Gedanken experiments (German for “thought”) are analytical tools commonly used to understand problems in philosophy and physics; to think about “what if” x is carried out, even if x is improbable. Thinking through the possible sequence of events and probable outcomes allows us to determine if our assumptions are misapplied, and to evaluate possible failure modes. Gedanken experiments are hypothetical— even if they don’t intend to ever carry out the real thing, it still could conceivably be carried out by someone else.

Herman’s lectures on the subject emphasized the importance of trying to understand the unknown and complex domains of nuclear war: “We have to think about how to use them [nukes] to maximize the chances of survival and minimize the damage (to civilians, military installations, industrial complexes, and so on). And we have to think about how to use them to end the war as soon as possible. Herman [in his lessons] would stress the point that its not immoral to think about these things; on the contrary—planning for nuclear contingencies in the event deterrence fails is the only responsible, prudent, and moral course.”2 In other words, Herman’s gedanken are merely what we know today as war games and simulations of nuclear war.

Herman stresses that because no “thermonuclear war has ever been fought,” means that in a sense, everybody including the so-called “experts” is an amateur.3 The bottom line is that if a nuclear-armed nation facing a nuclear-armed opponent does not have the ability to initiate and survive a nuclear war when it is severely provoked, then it may have to consider some strange alternatives.4 War games stress test this.

In this era Herman’s research and rhetoric was seen as undermining deterrence, and morally suspect (sounds familiar, huh); he was perceived as the kooky and absurd one. Herman’s whole point was that the refusal to think through post-detonation scenarios was in itself the immoral position, because it left the public defenseless against the entirely within the realm of possibility failure modes of deterrence. War games are in a way a responsibility the field feels towards the population; protection through intimately understanding failure modes to prevent surprises, unintended escalation, and miscalculation— they just disagree about what discharging it looks like. Herman prefers to think through survival so people aren’t defenseless, while today’s strategists think through restraint so the situation never arises.

War gaming is still a common, and central methodology of the nuclear apparatus to inform operational planning, just as it was in the heyday of nuclear strategy. The difference is that today, we merely use and apply war games in a way that elicit opposing conclusions.

Reid Pauly (MIT, Brown) studied a slate of Cold War-era war games in “Would U.S. Leaders Push the Button?” (2018) and mined them for evidence of a bias toward nuclear nonuse. War games are merely one path that reality might take, and evidence from archival records of war games from the “golden age” were used to systematically assess the strengths and weaknesses of existing nuclear nonuse theories (or perhaps, prevention) that dominate the literature.5 These behaviors and innate norms are otherwise hard to access and observe. Lincoln Bloomfield and Thomas Schelling’s war gaming apparatus shifted the depth of the games themselves to ensure participants were deeply engaged in decision making, felt intense emotions and took full responsibility for the gravity of their choices within the game. Schelling wanted there to be little to no limits, so the full range of possibilities could be played out.

Pauly concludes that strategic elites were reluctant to resort to nuclear use during war game scenarios. Players were sensitive to the appropriateness of nuclear use and felt a common responsibility to avoid nuclear war: “The purest form of the nuclear taboo might predict that ethically based opposition to the use of nuclear weapons would inhibit use on its own… elite war game players rarely made explicit arguments about the immorality of nuclear weapons; they did, however, express apprehension about global, domestic, allied, or peer reputational costs.”6

In the end, we merely extract different things from the same kind of cultural artifact. The lessons depend on the stated purpose of the war game itself as well as the body that employed the games, and shows an evolution in how we perceive the nonuse of nuclear weapons. Pauly is reading Cold War-era war games that were ostensibly in preparation mode — the same gameplay archive supports both readings of the lessons we learn. However, what changes is the analytical frame brought to bear on it. The shift is subtle, and I think has a lot to do with the epistemological norms of the nuclear risk sphere, perhaps more than anything else. But it also encodes a moral commitment: that post-detonation thinking is illegitimate, that “thinking about the unthinkable” à la Herman Kahn, is somewhere between morbid and dangerous. That commitment may be right, but it’s gone unexamined. The renewed interest in right-of-boom interventions, is in another sense a return of Herman Kahn’s gedanken. If the same data supports both readings, the choice of which reading to privilege is doing the moral work.

Deterrence failure modes remain a valid and important area of inquiry for studying nuclear risk, though the conclusions we draw from simulating nuclear wars are very different. We used to use war games to think through preparation and survival (e.g., “fighting” a nuclear war, or making the unthinkable thinkable), but now we largely use them as a means to identify the mechanisms to prevent nuclear war. I don’t really know what to do about this, though I think it is an interesting thought experiment— particularly when the field still relies on war games and simulations as a way to apply strategic principles and model or understand escalation pathways. This dynamic also illustrates how deep the field’s general bias in favor of prevention goes, and how infrequently we revisit the field’s epistemic foundations.

During one of his gedanken/thought experiment lessons, Herman talked about how although nuclear weapons are difficult to employ rationally, they may act as a strong incentive to think rationally: “Thus, the antipathy to nuclear weapons, the very “unthinkability” of nuclear war, may be a reason to think that the antipathy to nuclear weapons will survive the first burst.”7 A central critique of Herman’s theory (back then, and now), is that playing through these “survival” scenarios, thinking about fallout shelters, and making the post-nuclear war world more “thinkable,” lowers the threshold for nuclear use and erodes the nuclear taboo. Perhaps the taboo is not just about use, but has also become a norm for how we are allowed to think about nuclear weapons.

While today we abide by deterrence by punishment, Herman’s perspective abided by deterrence by denial— if the adversary knows we can survive an attack and strike back, they won’t strike in the first place. In many ways our use of war games is in effect making nuclear war thinkable. So why are we still so vehemently opposed to intervening afterwards?

The inherent morality of war gaming itself is subjective, and is debated at length, though our default is to assume that using them to think about post-detonation preparedness is decidedly immoral. At the end of the day, nuclear nonuse is basically preventing nuclear war, but what Pauly observed in his research looked a lot like human nature. Innately, even while playing what is just a game, we don’t want to resort to nuclear use— but that doesn’t mean it is impossible.

My dreams are almost never narrowly focused, instead having several interwoven narratives at play with each other. I could be experiencing one thing, but there are 10 other people with their own situations being interwoven into one dreamscape that somehow, always feels cohesive in my mind. I try my best to retain all of the complexity when I wake up in the morning.

Last night I dreamt I was in the middle of an empty wasteland in a quaint cabin that appeared unburdened from what I presume was a nuclear war, with my ex-best friend (ah, petty social grievances) and Nick Offerman (he was my uncle). Everything that surrounded the cabin was blackened and burnt to a crisp, but the cabin was bathed in this gauzy tangerine light. I could hear echoes of laughter from just outside, and there were people emerging from a nearby bunker having a party. Everyone had a hot dog, potato salad (I often dream of potato salad), and pan fried dumplings, but there were only enough hot dogs for everyone except me. I went over to my ex-best friend, snatched her hot dog, doused it in yellow mustard, ate it myself, and walked away. All amidst a bleak nuclear wasteland. To me, this kind of complexity is fun, rich, strange, and fascinating to ponder.

Our cultural image of catastrophe, however— particularly of nuclear apocalypse— is far less complex than my dreamscape of hot dogs, potato salad, Nick Offerman, and firestorms.

As the biggest consequence of nuclear war, nuclear winter is most often conveyed as an extinction-level risk. On the scale of ~70,000 weapons at the height of the Cold War, extinction was almost certainly on the table. Nuclear winter is presented as the end of humanity, and the end of nearly every Earth system we know. Nothing remains but a bleak, grayscale, and empty nuclear wasteland. It is an ending communicated with a kind of permanence and silence that should make us feel uneasy. The image is vivid, and sometimes this can make us think the event is more probable. Extinction by nuclear winter is really more an aesthetic argument—there is a kind of cultural preference for simplistic or “uniform” disasters that society doesn’t have to deal with… because, we would all be dead.

What manifests as a cultural preference is really just a bias for risks that are dramatic, sudden, and total as opposed to systemic, uneven, and continuous. As a result, these immediate risks garner more attention and investment than those that are complex, or gradual. The sense of immediacy attached to these risks elicits a lot more dread, and they often amplify our perceptions of risk. They also increase our adherence to the belief that the outcome is catastrophic and involuntary— that we lack agency almost entirely. This image, and this idea of extinction and permanence serves as a crucial rhetorical device in communicating risk.

American journalist Jonathan Schell published The Fate of the Earth in 1982 as a response to expanding arsenals, and frequent close calls with nuclear war. Since then, the work has become one of the clearest examples of the moral argument against nuclear war, and for nuclear abolition. In depicting a nuclear holocaust, Schell argues that nuclear war and a reliance on nuclear weapons will lead to extinction and this is reduced to a moral stance in favor of humanity and being alive. Schell also possessed a sort of long-termist view (effective altruism didn’t exist back then), where he felt an innate responsibility for future generations. He requires this totalizing image of extinction in order to make his normative argument legible. If we didn’t feel the bleakness jump from the page, we wouldn’t feel such urgency on the risk.

Everyone’s favorite nuclear strategist (at least, my favorite), Herman Kahn, countered Schell’s position in Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s. Kahn argues that by taking a long-term approach to nuclear weapons control, we can avoid being stampeded into the pursuit of chimerical or dangerous solutions. Kahn writes about Schell’s anti-nuclear alarmism and immediacy: “at any moment our lives may be taken away from us and our world blasted to dust” — he [Schell] urges on his readers both chimerical (the redemption of mankind) and dangerous (a nuclear freeze) means of coping with the threat of nuclear war.”

Kahn continues: “Although one cannot deny that someday, nuclear weapons might be used, the outbreak of nuclear war is not comparable to the unexpected occurrence of a cataclysmic natural disaster (nor is it necessarily an Armageddon).” In other words, we know the risk of nuclear war and nuclear winter is omnipresent, yet in many ways, society sort of pretends it doesn’t exist. We act like it might be a total surprise.

We have the ability to plan for the aftermath, yet we most often choose not to. Kahn resists this idea of totality that Schell relies on, in part because planning for the aftermath requires admitting the messy, complex, and uncertain reality— and how little we truly understand. Kahn was trying to resist unproductive communication, but as a result he was also resisting an aesthetic.

I think that communicating nuclear winter narrowly as extinction is more a result of how humans/societies process and understand risk than it is to the actual science of nuclear winter and the aftermath of a nuclear exchange. We have this implicit preference that nuclear winter is communicated as human extinction merely because the narrative is both legible and legitimate: there is one enemy (the bomb), one mechanism (soot blocking sunlight), and one clean aesthetic (cold, bleak, gray).

The actual likely string of catastrophes post nuclear winter — slow systemic collapse, cascading and heterogenous climate failures, AI-enabled instability, so on and so forth — lack the same pure and homogeneous aesthetic qualities. These cascades are too widely distributed, complex, and uneven to dramatize in the same way; reality is far more messy and complex. So, we keep rehearsing the wrong apocalypse because it’s the only one we can picture. An apocalypse where our cultural imagination always defaults to the cleaner, idealized version of reality.

The techno-aesthetic qualities of total destruction influence more than just how society visualizes nuclear winter— the entanglement between the aesthetics we observe and technology we interact with also shapes our interactions within a particular epistemic culture. The aesthetic we prefer is one of completeness; homogenous destruction that is in a way, unburdened by complexity. In the nuclear field in particular, I see these preferences manifest as almost a rhetorical strategy that forecloses and discourages planning for what happens after a nuclear war.

Much of the extinction-related conclusions from nuclear risk research and nuclear winter modeling often point towards symptoms of a cultural logic that prioritizes this specific techno-aesthetic of total destruction, over the messy, imperfect, uncertain, and uncomfortable reality of survival and resilience. It is difficult to admit what we’ve yet to understand, and it is even more difficult to communicate a risk so complex, uneven, and unpredictable to society while we’re trying to make it proximate. An environment with less complexity and more homogeneity is far easier to communicate and comprehend.

I think a lot of this has to do with living in a world that has only grown more complex, and a future that becomes more uncertain. Most people will always prefer the simple story because the complex narrative is simply harder to hold. Nuclear winter is not a single narrative catastrophe, but we often treat it as such, where straightforward conceptions of apocalypse always seem to win. Single narrative apocalypses fit more seamlessly within existing frameworks and societal structures. In other words, we don’t need to interrogate how we think and process information in order to understand them. How can we resist thinking about single narrative catastrophes?

Consideration of the aftermath significantly changes the equation by exposing us to a level of complexity we wouldn’t have ordinarily associated with nuclear winter. And in the process, this can unravel our assumptions, biases, and preferences for extinction. It can also allow us to create agency in a multi-risk landscape. Recently, researchers in existential risk (x-risk) and effective altruism circles have argued that smaller-scale nuclear exchanges pose a risk of civilizational collapse rather than irreversible extinction. Smaller-scale nuclear exchanges may not end humanity but they could collapse civilization, which is a categorically different problem and one that is inherently complicated. Extinction forecloses planning; collapse demands it. The traditional nuclear policy field has been slow to acknowledge and absorb this shift. In part, I think, because the cultural aesthetic of total destruction is so deeply embedded in the field’s epistemological foundations, that even updated science struggles to shift it.

Although nuclear winter has a sudden onset, it is far from a simplistic apocalypse. The post-nuclear war landscape possesses the same continuous, systemic, and cascading qualities of other catastrophic risks like climate change and ecological collapse. The nature of the effects, and our understanding of them would likely shift and evolve over time. If the techno-aesthetic of total destruction forecloses post-detonation planning, then resisting this image is a precondition for survival, rather than merely an aesthetic preference.

Everything comes back to this idea of how we handle complexity as a society— specifically, an increasingly complex and uncertain multi-risk environment. The real question becomes who is willing to sit with the mess and sort through the complexity.

Sources:

Herman Kahn, “Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s,” (book) 1984.

Jonathan Schell, “The Fate of the Earth,” (book) 1982.

Jeffrey Ladish, “Nuclear war is unlikely to cause human extinction,” EA Forum, November 2020.

Joseph Masco, “Nuclear Techno-aesthetics: Sensory Politics from Trinity to the Virtual Bomb in Los Alamos,” American Ethnologist, August 2004.

John M. McNamara, “Scales of risk and adaptive ‘dread’: an evolutionary theory of risk inflation,” Sept 2025.

Schubert, Stefan, et al., “The Psychology of Existential Risk: Moral Judgments About Human Extinction,” 2019.

Canonical nuclear winter models all rest on assumptions from the early cold war: long before the extensive use of plastics, before modern urban sprawl and skyscrapers, and before the data and open-source satellite imagery revolution. Is the field preparing for the wrong catastrophe? The reality is far more complex.

Nuclear winter is the biggest consequence from a nuclear war that we seek to prevent in the nuclear risk field; we study nuclear winter to prevent civilizational collapse and widespread catastrophe. The winter effect occurs when mass firestorms from nuclear detonations inject soot into the lower stratosphere where it can remain for extended periods of time, blocking sunlight from reaching the Earth’s surface; essentially an “anti-greenhouse effect.” This soot-induced phenomenon would trigger surface temperature drops of 16℉ or more, agricultural system collapse, widespread global famine, and ozone layer destruction capable of causing widespread environmental damage and health concerns. And opposite of conventional understanding, a significant nuclear winter can be triggered from even a regional or limited nuclear exchange, for example, between India and Pakistan.

For a lack of better words, a nuclear winter would be… really really bad.

​As long as nuclear weapons exist, the risk of nuclear winter will remain the ultimate consequence of nuclear war. Despite the omnipresent risk, research on modeling the effects of nuclear winter have waned since the nuclear winter “TTAPS” heyday of the late 1980s and 90s. Part of this may be attributed to the field’s focus on prevention based risk reduction, but more importantly, a severe lack of funding and institutional interest. As a result, much of nuclear winter research and modeling relies on several outdated and static assumptions, or have been altered to elicit a specific political response— thus exaggerating or downplaying the severity of a nuclear winter. These static assumptions assume physical complexities as deterministic and generalizable.

What started as a question about whether fuel load estimates for urban environments were accurate, evolved into a quarter-long research project that systemically examined the assumptions and uncertainties that permeate research throughout the nuclear winter mechanism chain— thermal ignition, firestorm formation, soot injection, atmospheric lofting, and global circulation. Most nuclear winter models treat the key stages of the mechanism chain as “black boxes.” In other words, stages with complex non-generalizable physical processes are replaced by simplified assumptions or empirical relationships derived from limited historical and scientific data. As the broader field evolved amidst an era of waning political urgency on nuclear risk immediately post-Cold War, these simplifications eventually calcified into doctrine.

The report interrogates these “black boxes” at each stage of the mechanism chain, and evaluates how strongly each assumption is actually supported by modern science, atmospheric modeling, and data. Our research also leverages modern datasets, recent disciplinary scholarship, and computational tools to counter assumptions, and improve the accuracy of estimates for the following areas of the mechanism chain: thermal ignition, firestorm formation, the basics that inform soot injection, modern fuel load estimates, the nature of combustible material and land classification, and target list development.

The most pervasive of these assumptions is what we refer to as “The Hiroshima Proxy.” The atomic bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945 remains the singular historical instance of a nuclear detonation triggering a firestorm. This single data point from 1945 — a 15-kiloton airburst over a relatively flat city of two-story wooden buildings — has been scaled linearly to predict how modern weapons of vastly different yields would behave over today’s urban environments.

We don’t even know what Hiroshima’s atmospheric effects actually looked like, since it predated modern atmospheric monitoring and data collection. Yet this relationship has become unquestioned doctrine. The field has been running 21st century atmospheric simulations on what is essentially 1940s urban morphology. The proxy also assumes that the ignition radius— the spherical burn area immediately post-detonation— scales linearly. When analysis and modeling relies on an assumption in the first stage of the nuclear winter mechanism chain, it ripples through the following stages, thus affecting the accuracy and estimations of soot injection.

The problems only multiply from there. Glasstone & Dolan’s The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, published in 1977 is still considered the “gold standard” in the nuclear field. Glasstone & Dolan assume a uniform atmospheric transmittance— in other words, the fraction of radiation, like sunlight, that passes through the atmosphere without being absorbed or scattered by the atmosphere’s gases and aerosols. They also assume a flat and uniform urban surface areas, and a constant fuel density across entire target areas. In reality, atmospheric transmittance is variable, and atmospheric conditions alone can reduce the ignition area by up to 67% depending on visibility changes (e.g., low visibility, haze, fog, or precipitation).

Urban environments also looked very different eighty years ago. Modern urban environments are not as uniform, and often have a lot more sprawl than in the past. Dense downtown city-centers melt gradually into suburbs, parks, highway corridors, and industrial zones, each with dramatically different fuel densities and combustion characteristics. These variations in built density are unique to every city. Depending on the target characteristics, assuming an even distribution of combustible material risks either overestimating or underestimating soot production.

Another evolution has been the widespread use of plastics in modern construction. Plastic materials can produce 2 to 3 times more soot per unit than wood, which means the composition of what burns has fundamentally changed since the Cold War. Interior contents (e.g., furniture, appliances, electronics, consumer goods, etc.) would also burn in the event of a firestorm, which remain poorly quantified in the literature. compared to structural materials. All of these materials burn less uniformly than untreated wood. Our updated framework to address fuel load estimates utilizes modern datasets like the recent Uhl et al., COMBUST study (2025) on gridded combustible mass in the U.S. built environment.

When examined through a closer lens, the sub-field’s over-reliance on assumptions and neglect of core uncertainties presents a fascinating paradox: many of the assumptions this report explores are explicitly mentioned in foundational nuclear winter literature, like Glasstone & Dolan (1977) The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, published in 1977. Yet the field has often chosen to dilute them into static estimations. Our research finds that this reflects a methodological approach shaped by the field’s culture and by practical necessity. This approach is not one of scientific negligence, rather its an approach that favors computational tractability and scenario comparison in an era of limited resources, decreased institutional interest, and urgent political timelines.

At its most basic level, nuclear winter modeling is essentially an attempt to quantify and visualize nuclear risk beyond numbers of weapons. The nuclear winter sub-field emerged during the Cold War under intense political pressure to provide policy-relevant answers about extinction risk scenarios. Simplistic assumptions like the Hiroshima proxy, and uniform fuel load allowed researchers to produce quantitative estimates of global cooling and mortality that could inform policy, norms around nuclear use, the international nonproliferation architecture, as well as arms control negotiations. These assumptions also informed how the broader public conceptualized nuclear risk and nuclear winter.

If nuclear winter models overestimate the climate effect severity, we risk losing credibility when scrutinized, and in an era where we have no upper-limits on long-range nuclear weapons with the expiration of New START this could potentially undermine future arms control efforts. On the other hand, if nuclear winter models underestimate the climate effects— particularly for regional nuclear exchanges and modernized weapons— we may erode the nuclear taboo, and lower the threshold for use because the consequences appear more manageable. In an era of increasing nuclear risk, a tripolar geopolitical environment, and crumbling international norms, the field cannot afford to keep reaffirming Cold War assumptions with greater computational precision. Returning to the field’s foundations allows us to advance our understanding of nuclear winter, ensuring we communicate risk with a clarity that matches the complexities of our time… and hopefully spur more research interest.

In a way, these assumptions became canonical over time not because they were empirically validated but because they provided more tractable answers to some of the world’s biggest existential questions at the time. Humans demand certainty often when there is nothing but complexity— interrogating our assumptions ensures our work to prevent nuclear winter stays grounded in the world as it actually exists.

Read the full pre-print on EarthArXiv.

Here are some things I’ve been thinking about lately:

1. If I could have dinner with anyone living or dead I would probably say Herman Kahn. It’s a strange answer for sure, and I’m certain my answer would change from time to time with whatever has been on my mind (otherwise, I’d likely say Anthony Bourdain). I’ve simply been thinking a lot about Herman Kahn lately— specifically his feelings and motivations with post-detonation interventions, and why the sub-field faded away. I’ve never read a book like Sharon Ghamari-Tabrisi’s The Worlds of Herman Kahn, that gets so deep into someones psyche that I almost feel as if I understand him completely; perhaps I knew him in a past life.

2. I first read Joseph Masco’s The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making, back when I was in graduate school sometime in 2022-23. I loved it back then, of course, but upon revisiting it when my research interests are more directly aligned with his has been sort of rewarding in a way I hadn’t expected. It’s like somehow I knew it would be pertinent to my interests in the future. Anyways, I’ve been revisiting a lot of Masco’s work, in addition to thinking about why there isn’t a larger sub-field dedicated to these anthropological approaches to studying nuclear aftermaths and the psychosocial effects of national security.

3. I (very recently) was told I’m attending the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference at the United Nations in New York next week! The NPT framework, and its gradual erosion has fascinated me for quite some time— more specifically, I think the eroding effectiveness and authority is more of a systemic sociological culture problem to diagnose and understand. As opposed to playing South Africa in a review conference simulation and reading delegate statements, it will certainly be interesting to observe the review process first-hand.

4. In an effort to connect more with my inner child, I bought some shrinky dink paper on amazon— I think anyone who grew up in the 90s or early 2000s would remember making keychains with it. You color and draw on the paper, and bake it so the drawing shrinks and hardens. So I’ve been shrinky dink-ing a lot and recently make a Hwasong-17 keychain for my work bag.

5. The nuclear field’s relationship with post-detonation interventions and resilience research (more on this soon).

6. I’ve been thinking about how most people equate communes with cults and I dislike this association. I’d love to live on an off-grid commune with my friends one day, that’s all, nothing crazy.

And here are the papers, articles, critiques, reports and other things I’ve been consuming lately:

• Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz, “Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?” The New Yorker, April 6 2026.

• Thomas Keating and Anna Storm, “Nuclear memory: Archival, aesthetic, speculative,” Environmental Geography, May 17 2023.

• Claudio Novelli, et al., “The Artificial in “Artificial Intelligence”: How Imagination Shapes AI Regulation,” (paper) March 6, 2026.

• Kyle Chayka, “The Age Old Urge to Destroy Technology,” The New Yorker, April 8 2026.

• Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “How Project Maven put AI into the Kill Chain,” The New Yorker, April 15 2026.

• Naomi Fry (my queen), “Euphoria’s Decent into Hell,” The New Yorker, April 18 2026.

• Johannes Kattan, “Extinction risks and resilience: A perspective on existential risks research with nuclear war as an exemplary threat,” January 2022.

• Joseph Masco, “Nuclear Technoaesthetics: Sensory Politics from Trinity to the Virtual Bomb in Los Alamos,” Cultural Anthropology, 2004.

• Joseph Masco, “Mutant Ecologies: Radioactive Life in Post-Cold War New Mexico,” American Ethnologist, 2004.

• Kjølv Egeland and Benoît Pelopidas, “No such thing as a free donation? Research funding and conflicts of interest in nuclear weapons and policy analysis,” International Relations, 2025.

• Christine Cassel, “An Epistemology of Nuclear Weapons Effects,” Western Journal of Medicine, February 1983.

Superintelligence is communicated as being inevitable, where society is told it has no choice but to ruminate on economic disruption, energy demands, social turmoil, and other far reaching societal effects— because there is likely no future without AGI where humans are alive. The future is in the hands of what is essentially the techno-elite. Although small groups within the AI safety community work to slow the progress towards AGI, the work itself is inherently trying to understand how models act to solve the alignment problem, and help the world prepare for the rapidly approaching superintelligence age…one that doesn’t result in humanity’s extinction.

With nuclear risk, the field sees the existence of nuclear weapons and the risk of nuclear winter not as inevitable, but as a preventable and manageable risk. I attribute this in part to risk normalization and routinization, as well as the relative success of prevention-based risk reduction approaches from the Cold War. Although we see nuclear winter as an avoidable event, the sub-field of nuclear semiotics is dedicated to warning civilization tens of thousands of years into the future of the dangers of buried radioactive/nuclear waste— either from reactors, spent fuel reprocessing, weapons manufacturing, or explosive testing. The presence of nuclear waste is inevitable.

How might we convey the depth and severity of a big risk to future generations? If we perceive an existential outcome as inevitable, we’re forced to consider how to communicate that risk to future generations, if something were to go awry. It’s about long-term risk communication, rather than short-term.

“a way to imagine a future of contending common senses.”

Nuclear semiotics is the interdisciplinary study of how we can design installations today to warn future generations tens of thousands of years into the future, of the dangers of nuclear or radioactive waste…in the case that humans lose knowledge of history, or no longer communicate in the same way as we do today. A warning sign and message to deter human intrusion at nuclear waste repositories, for they are not often designed to last forever, and can still pose dangerous risks even tens of thousands of years into the future. These signs could be massive concrete spikes that protrude from the earth, covering the area where waste is located; or it could be a simple sign that demonstrates the dangers of radioactivity to human health with symbols and simple drawings without words. In other words, the study of semiotics is essentially just the study of symbols and their interpretations.

The central questions of nuclear semiotics surround how to produce alternative modes of expression that are less anthropocentric; modes of communication that exist beyond what humans today consider to be “common sense.” Alternative messaging would attempt to move beyond Western modes of thought and human-centered ideas to imagine what life would look like after humans. The field also considers if semiotic warnings would be understood, or if they would make the danger appear more valuable, or attractive— we can really only wonder and make educated guesses.

Superintelligence, like nuclear semiotics, also grapples with this tedious obstacle of long-term communication and containment. Both grapple with the possibility of a sudden shift. For nuclear waste, the shift is human curiosity, or a massive geological event that breaches a tomb of radioactive waste 10,000 years from now. For AI, the shift seems like the moment a model’s intelligence surpasses our ability to define and understand its boundaries, as well as manage them effectively.

“A semiotic-oriented philosophy of digital communication aims at reading the technologies of meaning in the long period of the history of human semiotic systems, to reveal the implicit ideologies that underlie the creation of new devices, processes, and artifacts of meaning. Artificial intelligence is no exception, as its development is usually underpinned by specific preconceptions about what intelligence is, how it should work, and what kinds of results it is supposed to generate in the world.”

As society quickly (or more slowly, depending on who you ask, I suppose) approaches the age of superintelligence, we are no longer grappling merely with data, but also with the intricate nuances of human language, culture, and context. After reading Dario Amodei’s “Machines of Loving Grace,” I parsed through Claude’s constitution— Anthropic’s lengthy set of guidelines developed primarily by philosopher Amanda Askell that communicate how the ideal “Claude” acts and functions, and what values it is aligned with. Models speak a different language, but in order to be perceived as helpful, safe, harmless, and human-like, they have to be trained to communicate like humans; beyond patterns and rules, and focused on thought, judgement, and feeling. All to make us anthropomorphize AI in a way; to make it appear more human and connected to us than it really is. Perhaps, then, alignment is not only a technical hurdle but also an inherently sociological communication problem.

It is perversely fascinating to think about something like Claude’s constitution in the context of nuclear semiotics, or for that matter, anything that depicts moral or value alignment; these artifacts are merely human interventions for human inventions that create risks on an existential scale. I would argue that despite humans actively creating all of these technological risks and acknowledging the uncertainties, we lack a deep understanding of and harmony with technology simply because it is contradictory to human nature; it’s beyond the bounds of common sense. We want to solve complex problems and make new discoveries, but often create something that becomes a stranger and a mystery to us in the process. Unlike nuclear weapons, the inevitability of AI and superintelligence is slowly changing how we perceive and visualize the future, and how we communicate big risks.

Anthropic wrote a constitution for an intangible intelligent entity that may eventually view our language in the same way we view a 10,000 year old field of spikes resting over a pile of nuclear waste: as a curious, perhaps misunderstood artifact of a dead culture.

Sources:

Thomas P. Keating and Anna Storm, “Nuclear Memory: Archival, Aesthetic, and Speculative,” Progress in Environmental Geography, 2023.

Askell, Amanda, et al. “Claude’s Constitution: Our Vision for Claude’s Character.” Anthropic. Jan 21, 2026.

Claudio Novelli, Luciano Floridi, et al.,“The Artificial in “Artificial Intelligence”: How Imagination Shapes AI Regulation,” Center for Digital Ethics, 2026.

Francesco Mazzucchelli and Nanta Novello Paglianti, “How to remember a place to forget? The semiotic design of deep geological nuclear repositories, from long-term communication to memory transmission,” Linguistic Frontiers, 2022.

Massimo Leone, “The main tasks of a semiotics of artificial intelligence,” Language and Semiotic Studies, 2023.

I recently had lunch with an older friend, and she told me as a teenager that she, in a strange way, loved the bomb. During duck and cover drills, she would be crouched under her desk in the dark, with the boy she had a crush on crouched under the desk just next to her; if she was lucky, their legs might brush together, and it would feel electric. True today as it was back then, our minds always drift to the ordinary things that come most naturally to us (or the most proximate), even in the piecemeal moments that could be our last.

Civil defense was an amalgamation of different preparedness measures, evacuation protocols, and educational initiatives, meant to prepare society and coordinate between all levels of in the event of a nuclear war, including: the Eisenhower interstate system, Bert the turtle’s “duck and cover” drills, public fallout shelter systems, evacuation protocols, and periodic tests of the nationwide emergency broadcast system. Coordination largely failed in practice, and relied far too much on volunteerism, such that towards the end of the Cold War the federal government had little to no authority on civil defense. Civil defense brought nuclear risk to the forefront of public consciousness by creating an illusion of safety, but at observable levels, civil defense was also strategic and could signal preparation for nuclear war.

At its most basic, civil defense was an inherently strategic question, though over time it morphed into a bizarrely perverse cultural phenomenon that created the mere illusion that survival after an all-out nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia was possible. Today, you can buy a Bert the turtle stuffed animal from the Minuteman Missile National Historical Park gift shop, in South Dakota; a kitschy reminder of a bygone era. Herman Kahn, RAND strategist and author of On Thermonuclear War, was the primary driving force behind implementing a robust American civil defense from the 1950s onwards and was one of the first to think about its place in nuclear strategy.

In considering civil defense against nuclear weapons, we enter a field, which is, in a critical sense, new: there is no adequate experience; no one has fought and survived more than a comparatively small and one-sided nuclear war. If, therefore, we wish to understand what the existence of these weapons of unprecedented destructiveness may mean for us, we have no choice but to rely on theoretical analysis and extrapolation, while trying to relate our theories as closely as possible to the known facts and lessons of the real past. So self-evident is this statement that it would hardly be worth making, except for the fact that a great many people regard nuclear war as “unthinkable” and refuse to think about it at all.2

Often portrayed as absurdist and surprisingly light-hearted for a nuclear war strategist, Kahn’s obsession with civil defense stemmed from his belief that a nuclear war, while devastating, wasn’t necessarily an instant un-winnable apocalypse, but really a survivable conflict if properly prepared for it. Kahn felt that nuclear strategists had a responsibility to think about what happens after: “But because war is not impossible, we also have an obligation to allocate at least a modest proportion of our intellectual and material resources to the objective of alleviating the potential results of a nuclear conflict, in the event that one should occur.”3 If overall military posture is evaluated by its ability to protect people and property in the event of a nuclear war, Kahn believed that civil defense, as a result, deserved more emphasis and inquiry relative to other priorities at the time.

At face value, Kahn’s motivations in understanding the post-nuclear war landscape appear humanistic and full of optimism, though in reality they are far more rationalist and reductionist to a fault. Kahn saw survival as a technical adjustment: he calculated metrics for “acceptable” loss of human life, as well as the caloric requirements for post-nuclear war survival, essentially viewing human beings as units to be preserved to reboot the political and economic system. Nuclear winter modeling emerged as a counter to Kahn’s optimism, discussing how secondary effects may make survival more complex. In reality, most experts eventually conceded that in a full-scale nuclear exchange, civil defense efforts—as they were conceptualized during the Cold War— would be entirely futile. Kahn’s conception was more deeply rooted in cost effectiveness, signaling, and strategic weight in nuclear doctrine, than it was in true civilizational resilience. In the current nuclear risk environment, should we be thinking about bringing civil defense back?

The field’s current conceptualization of civil defense makes up a small part of “right-of-boom interventions,” or interventions that affect parts of the post-nuclear war environment—the term is inclusive to understanding (and mitigating) the effects of nuclear winter, nuclear war termination, escalation control to prevent a “limited” nuclear war from becoming “all out,” preserving communication hotlines, planning for a post-war political environment, and of course, traditional civil defense. We don’t hear of much of these interventions today, rather we hear about arms control negotiations, diplomacy (or attempts at diplomacy), norms and values building, deterrence, nonproliferation, and disarmament. In the post-war period, the primary threat was disseminated, and the perceived value of investing in civil defense plummeted with the closing of the office of civil defense in 1994. This reflects the nuclear field’s reliance (perhaps over reliance) on prevention-based approaches to risk reduction. Specifically with regards to approaches that functions in the Cold War environment but haven’t found the same success in our increasingly tripolar geopolitical climate today. In mitigating nuclear risk, the field prevents a nuclear war from occurring. What happens if prevention fails?

While leading the global catastrophic risks fund at Founder’s Pledge, Christian Ruhl published “Philanthropy to the right of boom,” and was likely the first to discuss the post-detonation research gap in philanthropy, the possibility of a nuclear war equivalent of mosquito nets for malaria and consider the utility of post-detonation research today. Ruhl also understood nuclear risk as a spectrum, where focusing on post-detonation interventions in addition to prevention-based approaches would create a more layered and robust defense.4 Right of boom interventions are analogous to car safety features: arms control and diplomacy are safe driving, while right of boom measures are the air bags and seat belts. The concept largely aligns with effective altruist philosophy— measuring return on investment, weighing cost-effectiveness, and rationally considering uncertainty and complexity in risk.

Considering the value of post-detonation interventions more generally aligns with how the EA community conceptualizes nuclear risk, from largely a consequential, rational, and utilitarian point of view. The nuclear field doesn’t really interrogate post-detonation research as much as they should. The majority of the EA community works on AI and AI safety; they see superintelligence as an inevitable outcome, thus much of their research considers what to do in a post-superintelligence world to preserve human flourishing. Thus, this logic is often mapped onto other risk areas, including nuclear—hence their interest in re-visiting the utility of civil defense that the nuclear community has left in the past. Although Ruhl identified a considerable research gap in the field between the public and government sectors, he neglected to lay out something actionable, nor a more granular research agenda; Ruhl’s contribution is more of a strategic compass, rather than a technical research guide, as it’s meant to inform donors and philanthropists.

Traditional civil defense involves preparing for the event of a nuclear war, and solidifying plans on what to do in the short timeframe before detonation. It doesn’t actually contribute to our understanding of the post-nuclear war world and how it may function. Planning for mass evacuations of urban areas is far too chaotic and signals too loudly with satellite imagery access; building mass shelters capable of keeping multitudes of citizens safe for significant periods of time are extremely expensive, and don’t solve the problem of what happens when they re-emerge; and educational initiatives like “duck and cover” feel utterly futile in light of so many other uncertain and confounding risks. Although these interventions prepare for a post-nuclear world, they’re all inherently preventative— they happen pre-detonation. In other words, traditional ‘civil defense’ is actually left of the boom.

We need to rethink what we consider civil defense in a time where we arguably face higher levels of future uncertainty from a higher number of big risks than in the past. A new framework for civil defense, defined by “early” versus “late” post detonation would grapple primarily with understanding the post-nuclear war “environment” that society is forced to operate in. This would include research into agricultural resilience, alternative proteins and food sources, supply and food stockpiling (and plans for dissemination), topsoil contamination research, as well as government and communications redundancy. For example, developing a resilient method for removing radioactive fallout from topsoil to increase agricultural capabilities could drastically improve our knowledge of what crops, and how much we could grow in a nuclear winter. How much radiation is safe for humans to consume in crops? We should also be considering which crop varieties could survive in reduced sunlight conditions or developing distributed food stockpiling storage systems that could function without centralized supply chains. When looking at alternative proteins, we should also be considering new methods like precision fermentation, and nutritional gaps as a result of eating only seaweed. What would developing an easily deployable geo-engineering solution to stratospheric light absorption as a result of soot lofting and nuclear winter look like?

Today, the United States has little to no civil defense infrastructure. After the dissolution of the USSR, the primary threat was gone, and this shift to an all-hazards and nonproliferation approach began to take shape. The broader nuclear risk field seldom revisits civil defense beyond its legacy as a cultural phenomenon that defined the Cold War era; consequently, its strategic and conceptual foundations remain largely unexamined. Perhaps this is why civil defense and post-detonation research isn’t attractive to big nuclear funders: it’s associated with being a pointless cultural relic, and when the field fails to interrogate many of its epistemological foundations, why should it revisit civil defense of all things?

Investing in a new kind of civil defense, in an era where prevention-based approaches fall short, could be even more valuable, and more cost-effective in the long run. It could also be applicable to similar large-scale catastrophic risks. In a more hostile security environment where normal measures fall short, the field must consider what happens if prevention fails. Refusing to understand and prepare for possible failure modes increases the probability and severity of a failure event itself.

After all, neglecting to consider what lies to the right of the boom is also a risk multiplier.

Last week I became fixated (more than usual) on right-of-boom interventions— that is, any risk reduction approach, intervention, or initiative to prepare for and mitigate far-reaching effects after a nuclear weapon is used— specifically, on true post-detonation interventions (unlike civil defense education). This includes alternative proteins research, agricultural resilience, food and supply stockpiling, and topsoil decontamination from radiation. Hence this weeks more nuclear focus. I also spent some time on substack, and found some folks with similar interests who I wasn’t familiar with prior! There are some other random things thrown in here, but more to come on right of boom interventions… Enjoy!

ART: “The New Museum Returns, but Humans Are Left Behind.”

When I saw that the New Museum in the Bowery reopened after a massive expansion, I remembered the first, and last time I visited— on a first date in November 2020 just before Thanksgiving. The sprawling new exhibit focuses on how technology has altered human nature throughout different eras of history; what it means to be human, has certainly changed. I’m planning to visit in May when I’m in New York for my sister’s graduation.

FAVORITE QUOTE: “It warped our sense of place in the universe. I can imagine a version of “New Humans” that would have tried to repair things, rather than cataloguing the various ways we’ve become shrinking adjuncts to our machines. But maybe the future no longer belongs to art. What is the subhead of the show—“Memories of the Future”—if not an elegy?”

NUCLEAR WINTER: “Nuclear Winter, Nuclear War, and the Food System.”

Relative to its importance, nuclear winter is drastically understudied. There are so many research gaps beyond just climate modeling, that all stem from the effects of a nuclear winter. I see it as an endless cycle rooted in the preventative epistemological foundations of the nuclear field: the field constantly says we don’t know enough about the effects of nuclear weapons, yet the United Nations (!!!) of all places cannot secure the funding for a comprehensive study.

FAVORITE QUOTE: “What also becomes clear from the literature is that many of the negative consequences of a nuclear war have not been examined yet… The study found that the projected increases in frost depth would likely disrupt drinking water supply across large parts of the Northern Hemisphere. While drinking water problems have been explored before in nuclear war research, this specific pathway has not. There are likely many research questions that have not been asked yet.”

ALTERNATIVE PROTEINS: “Seaweed as a Resilient Food Solution After a Nuclear War.”

This one was a re-visit, but I included it nonetheless. I think alternative proteins are vastly under addressed related to nuclear winter, and Allfed does the work well but leaves a number of gaps including alternatives like precision fermentation, and looking at how some alternative proteins may create negative nutritional gaps.

FAVORITE QUOTE: “In many seaweed farm designs, seaweed is either inserted into twisted rope by hand or seaweed spores are allowed to grow on seedling lines in so-called hatcheries. The latter is more efficient, but needs some infrastructure set up in preparation. The infrastructure to allow this could be deployed in regions that could have high seaweed growth rates after nuclear war.”

AGRICULTURAL RESILIENCE: “Adapting Agriculture to Climate Catastrophes: The Nuclear Winter Case.”

This paper presented models simulating different severity levels of nuclear exchanges, translated to the amount of soot injected in Teragram’s (Tg, a unit of mass used to measure emissions and aerosols). It also showed how the varying severity of climate affects impacts different crops and their growing conditions/seasons.

One thing I found super interesting is that the climate effect itself, is fundamentally different based on how much soot is injected. This is true, but most assume that more soot = the same effect, but more severe. This paper counters that, and says that the “shielding” effect in the stratosphere dominates in a 5 Tg scenario, and doesn’t deplete O3 while heating the stratosphere. Another assumptions, it seems…

FAVORITE QUOTE: “Critically, hybrids or cultivars within species were not regionally tailored to the transient climate regime of a nuclear winter. These approaches overlook dynamic human efforts to adapt to challenging conditions and the role of the rainy season onset in determining planting dates.”

DEFENSE: “A Few Observations on AI Companies and Their Military Usage Policies.”

I briefly met Sarah when she gave a talk on AI, nuclear risk and geopolitics at CNS while I was in graduate school, and more recently found her substack. Amidst all of the drama between Anthropic, Open AI, and the Department of Defense, it is arguably more important to talk about the meaning (or lack thereof) of frontier AI company ‘policies’ on military themselves, and the public’s understanding of them…rather than just the ensuing deals. Sarah points out that its strange that the Pentagon is spending all of this energy fighting Anthropic, when in reality, they mostly agree on policy. An pertinent read.

FAVORITE QUOTE: “On Friday, Axios reported that the Pentagon agreed to OpenAI’s red lines. Or is it that OpenAI agreed to the Pentagon’s red lines? As I explain more below, there’s significant confusion about what military uses the companies allow or disallow, in part because companies’ public descriptions of allowed uses are vague by design.”

AI: “After The AI Revolution.”

More officials in the current administration should be asking: What is our goal with technology? What constitutes a flourishing human life? Like a prism, this piece argues that upon the arrival of AGI, the differences between Chinese and American civilizational goals with AI will be made clear by how the two grapple with it. Chinese society is already more automated than life in the U.S., and they also have a much deeper sense of camaraderie and community— American’s cultural habit is to organize events in an effort to master them, while in China, AGI is building a new world where human intelligence is neither alone, nor superior. I’m sort of ambivalent about this; unsure if I buy into it, but it will be bad and it will be transformative. Much to consider.

FAVORITE QUOTE: “Acting like a prism, it will refract these converging beams of light and send them in two separate directions. American genius seeks to trace the frontiers of knowledge; Chinese genius often finds itself in the service of a larger social goal.”

FOOD: Doma Cafe, River North, Chicago.

Doma was one of the first places I ventured to in my first weeks living in Chicago, and its since become a favorite. It’s a great place to read, write, or get coffee with friends; the atmosphere and the Croatian-esque menu are part of the appeal! I love a cae sal but have only tried a handful in Chicago. I finally tried Doma’s caesar salad wrap and it was probably the best I’ve had… and it was served with the most tangy citrusy light caesar dressing on the side for dipping, and perfect crouton crunch. I also have been getting back into my iced matcha phase, and this time I got it with a splash of cashew date milk! Delicious and divine!! And the wrap was so huge it was basically 2 meals.

Taste is a broad concept, encompassing tangible experiences like food, wine, style, and prose, as well as more abstract sensibilities, like research taste. A recent New Yorker essay from Kyle Chayka, on Why Tech Bros are Now Obsessed with Taste, discussed how “taste” has derived a new conceptualization from the bay area techno elite spheres, and one that could have dangerous implications: “In the AI age, taste will become even more important.”1 “Taste washing,” in other words, is like strategic marketing for high-consequence technology possessing “good taste,” which of course is a traditionally subjective human and aesthetic quality. The overall goal, aligned with how a lot of the community talks about the nature of AI, seems to be anthropomorphizing AI and machine systems; making them feel more refined, personal, palatable, and human-like, particularly when popular perception is that they aren’t. This even flows into the aesthetic choices of AI companies— simplistic and modern, with clean lines and soft colors; something that feels familiar.

If taste is a subjective aesthetic quality that slowly evolves over time, one could argue that techno-elite/ AI corporation taste is instrumental, profitable, optimized, and heuristics driven. By heuristics driven, I mean snap judgements and mental shortcuts to complexity based on presently available information— like Kahneman and Tversky’s anchoring, availability, adjustment, representativeness, prospect theory, etc. Though “Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” was published in 1974, it feels like it could’ve been written last year; the heuristics Kahneman and Tversky describe, and how they operate in our daily lives and decisions still feel completely accurate. Heuristics are like the quicker version of taste, whereas true taste is slow. If heuristics are shortcuts for cultivating taste, then taste has been rebranded as the ultimate shortcut for trust— today, we’re all primarily driven by heuristics.

These heuristics are influenced by what we perceive. Anthropic is a perfect example: their advertisements are designed to inspire and incite curiosity, and they openly critique OpenAI’s motivations in introducing ads to ChatGPT.2 Anthropic also purposefully uses human actors in the advertisements, rather than showing users interacting with a model through a screen. Anthropic also has a fairly robust and comprehensive set of values that govern ethical and safe AI use, although one could question how seriously this is taken, given the current fights between the U.S. Department of Defense, and Anthropic. Claude was also reported to have been continually used in the war against Iran, despite the DoD designating Anthropic as a “supply chain risk.”3

Over time, Anthropic has increasingly positioned itself as the more responsible and “good” AI company, essentially through careful myth making: anthropomorphizing Claude, emphasizing values in safety, and intentional ideological distancing from OpenAI. This reconceptualization and confidence merely serves AI myth making and the organization’s perceived legitimacy, as they pursue transformative technology that would affect all of society; it is itself, part of the AI myth that makes AGI feel inevitable.

The techno-elite exude an easy sense of confidence, while at the same time it is clear that even those in charge can’t fully predict the ramifications of their technology. When the techno-elite and their models communicate confidence and safety, in turn we often perceive the same. A recent Atlantic piece (in my most recent weekly appetite!) from Nick Dothée dove into the under-addressed psychological realm of AI-human interaction, and how this affects confidence. Confidence is also a decision-making heuristic in many ways; it is a shortcut for assessing credibility, particularly when accuracy is too complex to make a quick and informed judgement. Dothée says that the effect can persist, even when people know a system or a person can be wrong.4

“The confidence heuristic explains why certainty persuades us. AI is amplified by a second force: We’re not just hearing certainty; we’re hearing it from a machine, and that triggers a different kind of trust. The Penn State researcher S. Shyam Sundar calls this the “machine heuristic”: a shortcut in which we automatically attribute objectivity and expertise to machine-generated answers, especially when they’re given fluently and without hesitation. Sundar named the effect more than a decade before AI made that bias a daily experience.”5

The AI community also uses “research taste,” as an effective heuristic to make judgements on what constitutes impactful research. It is something that should be intuitive; an internal guide for researchers to find productive and novel paths for inquiry. It is both innate, and curated at once. This is partly because technical safety and alignment are long-term problems that lack simple solution pathways, where researchers aren’t always able to verify if a technique works immediately. Research taste becomes a shortcut. AI “research taste” is not dissimilar to genuine aesthetic or intellectual taste in academia, for example, though it is more difficult to cultivate a genuine and informed taste in the AI world because the technology/risk is so new and uncharted. Unlike nuclear risk, there aren’t decades of scholarship, strategy, theory, intelligence, and international frameworks behind current motivations on AGI.

This leads me back (once again) to thinking about how risks are selected; one could argue humans select risks based on their own taste. In this case, taste is what feels the most tractable, what fits the frameworks already omnipresent in society. Taste is also what feels new, novel, exciting, and curious. In many ways, taste can be likened to cognitive ease, which is part of why AI safety and AGI risk garners constant attention, while nuclear risk languishes as a result— it’s newer, appears more tractable, and fits in our current tech industry, political structures, and power frameworks. Sometimes, our taste really isn’t just ours, but our taste shapes which risks are priorities.

The slow cultivation of taste; the kind that comes from learning, trying, failing, thinking, reading, and experiencing increasingly feels like a lost art. It matters for more than just aesthetics. We’ve largely traded the slow cultivation of taste for algorithmic heuristics and optimization. Our minds are driven by heuristics and mental shortcuts, in anything from something so trivial like style, to big risks like AGI. We select which catastrophic risks deserve attention the same way we select which AI company to trust: based on taste, on what feels tractable, on what fits the frameworks we already have. Making decisions under complexity often warrants mental shortcuts; it’s natural, and it’s not the problem.

While one could argue that heuristics are innate to human nature, we’ve largely stopped asking whether the heuristics we use are indeed the right ones for the world we live in— especially when our resources to allocate attention to big things are finite. Are we willing to reconstruct them? The myth that silicon valley techno-elite invented taste is only a reflection of their sense of self-importance that makes them believe they did. They merely re-conceptualized taste into an algorithmic model to make AI more palatable, and perhaps are eroding something human in the process… something that we’d ought to preserve.

Happy sort-of spring! Very on brand for Chicago that Saturday (the first day of spring) was 70 and sunny all day, and Sunday went down to 30 by the late afternoon. I tried to make the most of it. Though this week has been largely uneventful, it’s been quite nice and slow, and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the height of sumo citrus season.

I’ve realized that despite my vested interest and focus on nuclear risk, much of what I’ve been consuming lately is on AI. I think recently this is because there has been a sharp uptick in these cultural studies that look at the goings-on inside the silicon valley and AI spheres, which I just find generally fascinating. Part of this is also because I want to become more fluent on current risks and research in AI goverance and technical safety by the summer.

FORECASTING: “Maybe Turning War into a Casino was a Bad Idea.”

Polymarket as a concept is just so fucking absurd in more ways than one. I was talking to a coworker about it recently, specifically how it evolved from an outlet for effective altruist-esque rationalism to encourage deeper thinking about forecasting, into quite literally gambling on war and destruction in such a disturbing way, which this article talks about in depth. I have a moral opposition to it in some ways, but in others it fascinates me. I want to dig into this further at some point…

FAVORITE QUOTE: “I’d be honest and say I disagree with the notion of gambling on anything and everything. But if you are to keep these markets, they have to have admins who can decide on outcomes of bets or issue some kind of ruling. I think there just needs to be a lot more oversight and somebody actually vetting who these big bettors are to avoid insider trading but also to make sure this harassment doesn’t happen.”

AI: “The Hypocrisy at the Heart of the AI Industry.”

The concept of some industries being more or less “prepared” for AGI of course makes sense, but it is crazy to me that those less prepared become targets. The AI sphere’s stance on copyright and fair use is troubling nonetheless— Its as if because the mission of AGI and AI safety is so imperative, those doing the research and model training are above the law, but everyone else still must abide by it.

FAVORITE QUOTE: “Given the double standard, it’s difficult to tell whether Silicon Valley’s arguments about fair use are genuine or just legally expedient. On one hand, generative AI is a new technology that raises new questions about the use of copyrighted work. On the other hand, the AI industry’s aggressive approach is business as usual for Silicon Valley: moving fast and breaking things. And betting that the lawyers can “clean the mess up.””

POLITICS: “At Palantir’s Developer Conference, AI Is Built to Win Wars.”

Someone should study Alex Karp and Peter Thiel. Maybe I’ll do it. I just think these companies are so evil to their core, and perversely so many of them are named for Tolkien/ Lord of the Rings references as if “fantasy” is this higher order of language for the kinds of people working at these big defense tech firms. This article illustrates a reality where those who are contracted by the DoD don’t actually question the validity, or ethics of any decisions on going to war, and instead blindly follow…which is both problematic and a little scary.

FAVORITE QUOTE: “Karp claims that the Palantir culture is broad enough to allow disparate political views—with a key exception. “The one thing I tell Palantirians is you can be on any side of an issue, but if you’re expecting us not to support warfighters when they’re in battle, you’ve got the wrong company.” Now that the US is at war, he says, “We’re not interested in debating. We are very proud to have our role in having American men and women come home safe.”

PSYCH: “The First AI Crisis Is Psychological.”

I’ve been having a lot of conversations lately about AGI timelines, as well as how the majority of people vastly underestimate how much society/life is going to change with AGI. I’m also at fault of this sometimes. I think because much of the focus right now is preventing an existential catastrophe from AGI (and rightfully so!) the psychological dimensions have largely been ignored in research. More or less, its important to interrogate your own relationship and interactions with current models.

FAVORITE QUOTE: “On both fronts—self-worth and epistemic uncertainty—the accelerant is the same: the way AI can sound final whether it’s right or wrong. The trouble with AI confidence is that it starts to corrode our own.”

ANTHROPOLOGY: “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.”

This has been one of my all time favorite nuclear anthropology papers since I read it for the first time in 2020. In cleaning out and organizing my office full of annotated papers, I revisited it. There are a lot of parallels between how defense intellectuals at that time discussed risk and created a culture around it, and how AI communities do the same today.

FAVORITE QUOTE: “In this early stage, I was gripped by the extraordinary language used to discuss nuclear war. What hit me first was the elaborate use of abstraction and euphemism, of words so bland that they never forced the speaker or enabled the listener to touch the realities of nuclear holocaust that lay behind the words.”

FOOD: Txa Txa Club in Logan Square

I had this really foolish realization this weekend, which is that I often say I dislike Chicago but there is still so much of it I haven’t seen. So, I put all of my saved places into a maps guide, and tried to make the most of Saturday’s weather!

Txa Txa Club opened a few weeks ago and it's one of those “all day cafe” concepts (I hate that I used the word concept to describe a cafe) where you can go and work and stay all day. In light of the 350+ applications for our summer research fellowship that I need to review, I decided a change of scenery would be lovely. And the food here did not disappoint!! The boquerones (Spanish white anchovies bathed in olive oil, vinegar, garlic and parsley) and saltines is so simple but such a refreshing citrusy summery bite, and the beet panzanella with labneh was spicy, savory, earthy, and felt healthy but super yummy. And my iced americano had CORN MILK. After I was done working, I had what was definitely the best glass of orange wine… and maybe best glass of wine generally ever.

AI: “Why Tech Bros are Obsessed with Taste.”

How language can change over time and adopt new meaning is soooo fascinating to me. Especially this notion of “tasteful decision-making” in these tech spheres. Taste means so many things; tangible like style/chicness, or as in food or wine, or even research taste. Like a lot of these decisions they make are under complexity and uncertainty, yet taste is a central factor. AI companies and their fixation on taste is because the palatability of the technology, and the bay-area “cool” factor doesn’t translate to anyone outside of that sphere; it plays into techno elite and AI myth making. “Taste washing” as they say…

FAVORITE QUOTE: “For tech bros, the word seems to have a pragmatic function. By their definition, taste is inherently profitable; it is the ability to discern what will make the most money, whether by choosing your next big software concept or by convincing users that your product is necessary.”

AI: “The Human Skill That Eludes AI.”

I think prose is something so special and individual and what makes it so fun and special is that its developed slowly over time, from reading, consuming media, communicating ideas, and learning. Its no wonder that AI still can’t replicate something so human like that; their prose is bland, sophomoric, and too analytical, even when attempting to do creative artful writing. If LLMs can’t write really well, like Joan Didion, John Steinbeck, Susan Sontag, Eve Babitz soul-altering life-changing writing, are they generally intelligent at all?

FAVORITE QUOTE: “One theory is that this is simply a matter of prioritization. In some ways, creativity is directly at odds with AI companies’ other objectives. Generally, chatbots are trained to avoid misinformation, political bias, child-sexual-abuse material, copyright violations, and more… And if most users are using ChatGPT to draft corporate emails, bold text and brief bullet points may be exactly what they want. “The more you control for these” traits, Nathan Lambert, a post-training lead at the Allen Institute for AI, told me, “the more you suppress creativity.””

PHILANTHROPY: “Philanthropy to the Right of Boom.”

I revisited this piece last week for another research group I’m leading on civil defense, and it is still just as fascinating. I read it when it first came out for my master’s thesis research in 2023, and while my personal opinion on it has vastly shifted in a positive direction, I don’t see many experts in the field talking about it or engaging with the questions. It focuses on the neglect of post-detonation interventions in the nuclear field funding landscape, and in simpler less word-y words: if you focus on prevention and completely ignore post-detonation preparation, that is a risk multiplier in and of itself.

FAVORITE QUOTE: “The problem, fortunately, is that the world has very limited experience with nuclear war, and thus there is little opportunity for falsification of theories and limited reference classes and base rates for understanding nuclear war, the likelihood of escalation, and the consequences of different kinds of nuclear war. This allows for a wide range of plausible viewpoints and possible interventions for philanthropists (illustrating this, Herman Kahn apparently liked to quip, “How many thermonuclear wars have you fought recently?” and Alain Enthoven reportedly replied to an official who criticized his lack of military experience, “General, I have fought just as many nuclear wars as you have”).”

RESEARCH: “The Fight For Slow And Boring Research.”

I saw much of this unfold in real time working at UChicago with so many scientists working on research that was defunded (and some of it for the dumbest fucking reasons). This was interesting to read from my position leading a research program in particular, where one of the gripes I have with certain funding organizations and the way the space is trending, is that funder interests, often as non-experts, sometimes dictate the majority of field research … because well, researchers need money, and money will allow them to also spend their time doing what they think is important. I like the idea of deep, slow, and obscure work. Even as seasoned researchers, in todays world it’s hard not to fall for instant gratification and AI making research “quicker.” I think allowing things to unfold slowly is sort of nice; we don’t need every single answer tomorrow.

FAVORITE QUOTE: “Scientists will still apply for federal grants, but the money will feel contingent instead of given. And so, in the coming years, they will start to look sideways — toward private philanthropies, private investors, and other sources of support. To do so, they’ll have to adapt to a landscape in which the ability to explain their work clearly is as important as the work itself.”

POLITICS: “Justice Department Says Anthropic Can’t Be Trusted With Warfighting Systems.”

I don’t regularly read WIRED, but I saw this New York Times article on the publication’s new editor, Katie Drummond, who has made some tech bros a little upset over recent articles. Alas, the never ending Anthropic/Department of Defense drama is bonkers to me, and is just so unique to the world today. The “unfit to be entrusted with war fighting systems” is one thing (personally I wouldn’t trust any current AI CEOs with anything remotely close to national security), but arguing the supply chain designation violates the company’s first amendment right is something I wouldn’t have thought of. And now I’ll read WIRED more!

FAVORITE QUOTE: “The Department of Defense and Anthropic have been fighting over potential restrictions on the company’s Claude AI models. Anthropic believes its models shouldn't be used to facilitate broad surveillance of Americans and are not currently reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons.”

In graduate school I wrote my master’s thesis on how effective altruism conceptualizes risk differently than, say, nuclear experts in the field that shaped me as a researcher. Effective altruism is a philanthropic movement dedicated to mitigating existential risks, particularly from AI/AGI. Traveling to EA conferences and doing field research was the most fun, but writing the actual thesis was… not so fun. I was plagued with what felt like never-ending writer’s block (I was being a perfectionist), and I think I was trying to finish my first draft during the most grey and rainy 2 weeks in January that Monterey had seen in ages.

When I was trying to figure out how to frame the argument, I had just returned from San Francisco for one of the EA global conferences, and was riding on a high from all the conversations I had. I was catching my coworkers up on my weekend, and I told them about this one panel session on uncertainties in risk prioritization.1 The panel tried to examine the cost-effectiveness of investment in certain global catastrophic risks, and used “shrimp welfare” as an example. In this calculus at the time, it felt like global catastrophic risks were not measured in terms of human suffering but reduced to abstract equations and metrics of “possibly sentient individuals,” evaluated by their susceptibility to permanent extinction.

I was thinking like, respectfully, why the fuck are we talking about shrimp sentience during a conference on existential risk; it was absurdist in a way I both could appreciate (laugh at), and found sort of troubling. At the time I felt like it highlighted differing moral frameworks between intellectual communities (e.g., consequentialism and utilitarianism vs. deontological in the nuclear field) and I still stand by this at some level, although I do think it’s more complex, and has a lot to do with uncertainty, broadening humanity’s moral circle, and how we make decisions under complexity.

The shrimp welfare project, a UK charity organization founded in 2021, received 300k in 2022 and $2 million in 2023 from Coefficient Giving (formerly, Open Philanthropy), which remains one of the largest EA-aligned funding organizations.2 Around 440 billion shrimps are farmed each year (apparently, more than 5x the total number of all farmed land animals combined), and the organization wants to improve shrimp welfare and make more ethical farming practices the standard.3 In 2024, the project’s revenue was around $2.4 million.4 I thought all of this was sort of bonkers, like I’m all for animal welfare, but $2.4 million for shrimp feels absurd when big risks from AI, climate change, and nuclear weapons exist without actionable solutions.

There is a wide breadth of literature on studying shrimp and crustacean sentience; it’s a looooong conversation, but generally, sentience is defined as being able to feel not only pleasure or pain, but also feelings like frustration, boredom, fatigue, warmth, and joy.5 The sentience of crustaceans, including shrimp, was formally recognized in 2021 by a group of researchers at the London School of Economics in a paper that drew from over 300 different studies.6 The evidence for shrimp and crustacean sentience is largely convincing, and far reaching, but EA-aligned organizations like the Shrimp Welfare Project, don’t think complete certainty is necessary to determine whether an animal is sentient, and rather they think in terms of likelihoods; one can arbitrarily determine a species morally relevant, and take actions to prevent suffering. In other words this is largely referring to the precautionary principle, where we shouldn’t use a lack of certainty as reasoning to postpone cost-effective measures to prevent adverse outcomes.7

For decapod shrimp and prawns, the extent of welfare related scientific evidence to guide housing and management practices is comparatively less than what has been produced to date for domesticated terrestrial species, thus there is this gap with what is likely a perceived high return on investment.8 It’s a fascinating example of how effective altruism’s moral circle operates and expands in practice. On the surface, it demonstrates a deeply rooted commitment to minimizing suffering, even in the tiniest and most overlooked corners of sentient life. Although mostly agreed upon that shrimp are sentient, some species actually eat themselves from the inside out which complicates the moral calculus in a strange way. They cannibalize other shrimp and do so particularly under high stress conditions, high population densities, with the presence of particular parasites, or when food is scarce.

I learned all of this from asking why. And in my current job, I would consider myself even more aligned with effective altruism (though still not completely). If I re-wrote the thesis today, which maybe one day I will, I would certainly do it differently. I only arrived at this point through time and space and a lot of thinking and most importantly: asking why, and being inquisitive and curious about everything.

My coworkers found the shrimp anecdote hilarious. And thus, the title “sentient shrimp and nuclear winter” was born. In later drafts after my graduate program for various conferences and such, I omitted this comparison as my opinions and thought framework evolved with more experience. Though the core of it remains central to how I move through the world.

There was this one gorgeous afternoon during graduate school where my thesis was submitted, I had a job secured, and I had not a care in the world and I could finally bask in the fact that I get to live in California. My advisor took me out for a drink and appetizers at this restaurant I had always wanted to try before I left Monterey. It was kind of a normal grey day, but as we drove into Carmel to Mission Ranch, the clouds cleared. We sat on the corner of the patio that overlooked a big field with sheep trotting about, and in the distance sat the cliffs of point lobos in the distance. I could just make out the waves breaking on Carmel river beach.

The light was all gauzy and warm, and painted everything the most perfect shade of orange at sunset; we heard children laughing in the distance at a local park. We ordered the shrimp cocktail, and as I sat eating my shrimp, I thought about that one peculiar panel and of the whirlwind adventures I had studying effective altruism during my final year of graduate school. I felt like ruminating on whether shrimp are sentient was largely pointless when humanity was facing possible extinction by so many big risks we don’t fully understand. I learned how to ask why and to understand how a flawed, passionate, and deeply human group of people construct the risk of nuclear weapons.

The absurdity of discussing shrimp welfare in a conversation about humanity’s survival should be a reminder that what we prioritize, and the ethical lens through which we do so, profoundly affects how we define, understand, and approach global catastrophic risks in all their complexity. I think of these moments every time I eat shrimp. It’s a privilege to feel such nostalgia. Always ask why! Humans are so interesting!!

I hear shrimp farming is a pretty booming and accessible industry though. With the way things are going, perhaps I’ll get into breeding shrimp in my parent’s backyard if I lose my job to AGI in the next few years. Maybe if I was actively taking care of shrimp I’d buy into caring about the sentience argument more… Anyways happy shrimping!

As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control.

Kaczynski’s manifesto paints the picture of a future destabilized by technology, where technological development erodes human agency, degrades the environment, and inflicts widespread psychological suffering. He felt that the industrial revolution was disastrous for humanity, and only hastened technological development and its power over society. Reminiscent of techno-elite and effective altruist rhetoric, Kaczynski posited that survival of the technological system could produce low levels of pain and suffering, thus expediting human flourishing, but “only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine.” Technology creates dependency.

Do critiques of technological systems only garner attention when they come from violent extremists?

These ideas themselves don’t elicit extremism, rather they simply ask society to re-evaluate its relationship to technology, and think critically about what technological development means when it erodes human agency over time. I’m not interested in his violent methodologies, but I am interested in the specific parallels between Kaczynski’s diagnosis of technological power and what the techno-elite is telling society about AI today. And what it means that a notoriously mercurial terrorist writing from a Montant cabin in 1995, and the CEO of Anthropic in 2024 are largely describing the same paradox, just with different emotional valences. Kaczynski’s intellectual critiques of industrial society were largely respected in academic circles, and were not created in a vacuum; Kaczynski’s ideas can be separated from what he did because of them.

While Kaczynski was so horrified by this future dominated by technology that it, in part, drove him to violence, Sam Altman on the other hand seems completely fine with it; Altman even goes so far as saying he can’t imagine raising a child without Chat GPT.

This idea of transformative technology and the loss of human agency in how technological development evolves is nothing new or revolutionary, but it is only now getting attention as society sees it play out with AI and the race to superintelligence— it’s no longer merely an intellectual theory, but it is rapidly merging with reality. Critiques of technological power and societal progress are worthy of attention and inquiry, even when they don’t come from a violent extremist with paranoid schizophrenia.

Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization (1934) was one of the earliest intellectual critiques to elucidate the profound implications of technology on society, culture, and politics throughout history. Three decades later in 1964, French sociologist Jacques Ellul published The Technological Society, which established the concept of Technique; this idea that technology touches all aspects of existence and everyday life. La Technique is not just the machines themselves that alter human modes of thought, but also this distinct totality of rationalized and standardized methods that have the goal of absolute efficiency in every aspect of society. Ellul’s philosophies dictate that La Technique is a means to an end which is also an intentional goal, where the end possesses little that is still purely human.

Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky published Risk and Culture in 1982, in which they argue that the selection of technological risks is a socially and culturally constructed process rather than an objective one based on purely scientific assessment. While Mumford and Ellul would likely reject this idea that society picks and chooses technological risks ignoring the totalitarian nature of technology, Risk and Culture represented a prominent evolution in how society perceives and responds to large-scale risks.

In 1985, feminist scholar Donna Haraway published, A Cyborg Manifesto where she uses the idea of a cyborg as a metaphor to argue that technology and humanity are inseparable and have become too interwoven to separate, thus rigid binaries become obsolete. While at its core A Cyborg Manifesto centers on postmodern, posthumanist, and feminist thought, Haraway’s reflections on the relationship between technology and society echo many of the scholars that have come before her, including Ellul and Mumford.

Neil Postman’s Technopoly, published in 1992, popularized many of these philosophies on technology in a more approachable way and took them mainstream. Postman describes the surrender of culture to technology, where technology becomes a dominant self-justifying force in society, thus reshaping the foundations of human understanding.

Three years after Postman’s Technopoly, Kaczynski published Industrial Society and Its Future, which later became known more popularly as The Unabomber Manifesto. Kaczynski’s extremism and mental instability naturally became what he was known for; violence always garners more attention. His work was rooted in the rich literature that came prior— an intellectual history that emerged from the industrial revolution. Stripped of its violent conclusions, Kaczynski articulated a critique of technological determinism that reads almost prophetically in the age of AI.

The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it may eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy.

While all of these works were well respected and taken seriously in their respective fields and intellectual circles, and despite dire warnings about technology, each of them failed to penetrate policy, influence agendas and conventional thought, or alter the trajectory of technological development. Critiques of technology have existed for ages, and although written in a very different world, in different ways they all echo many of the same concerns that AI and superintelligence elicit today; for all we know, these studies could have been published in the last 5-10 years. Our relationship to technology seems to have evolved in almost the exact ways that these scholars and philosophers predicted; developing to the tune of its own logic.

As we watch this same dynamic play out with AI, we see smart people raising serious concerns, sophisticated critiques being publicized, development of superintelligence continuing irregardless of frightening AI uses in war, and tech higher-ups leaving the “AI giants,” citing this fear of what they’ve created and how they want to live off-grid and knit or whatever. We all saw it coming, but the question is why seeing it coming has never been enough to change anything.

This notion is really just a critique of technological determinism, where we weren’t ignorant, but the knowledge of the problem hasn’t been historically sufficient enough for us to address it. We’re in a reality where the violent extremist and the tech CEO describe the same world; two structural realities deeply reminiscent of one another. In this framework, technology develops autonomously, concentrating power in technical elites, eroding human agency, and becoming irreversible and inevitable. Kaczynski saw it as a potential catastrophe for humanity requiring violent resistance. The techno-elites see it as an exciting business opportunity with some safety considerations that don’t evolve at the same speed as the technological systems themselves.

Kaczynski’s proposed solution to the plight of technology is the collapse of the entire technological civilizational structure. This is extreme to say the least, but moreover ridiculous in that it’s always been near impossible to undo technological progress in a way that doesn’t involve something existential like a nuclear winter plunging society back hundreds of years to a more primal state.

We attribute the social and psychological problems of modern society to the fact that that society requires people to live under conditions radically different from those under which the human race evolved and to behave in ways that conflict with the patterns of behavior that the human race developed while living under the earlier conditions. It is clear from what we have already written that we consider lack of opportunity to properly experience the power process as the most important of the abnormal conditions to which modern society subjects people. But it is not the only one.

His diagnosis of why reform was impossible is what uncomfortably tracks well in our current moment. Much of the dialogue around AI today is what Kaczynski predicted: progress continues at increasing speeds, despite warnings from AI safety researchers and AI company higher ups about the dangers, and where Sam Altman admits he is scared of his own creation, but keeps on building. Technological progress will always prevail despite all of our opinions and reservations about living in this new world where there are AI commercials during the super bowl, and AI being shoved down our throats every which way we turn. The system continues, and our agency has eroded so much that none of us have the power to stop it.

The conversation reminds me of the 1980s nuclear freeze movement, where society mobilized to stand up for their survival, and halt the testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons between the U.S. and the USSR. Survival, even back then, was in the hands of few men in power, and grassroots mobilization elicited policy change on nuclear posture and in a way, marked the beginning of arms control and stockpile reductions.

I often wondered about this level of mobilization being possible again today with nuclear risk, or even with AI; that public mobilization on risk could attain a similar outcome. But power, authority, and greed are so deeply interwoven, that the current administration would likely never listen to a mass movement asking to halt AI progress, as it would disappoint the tech oligarchs they bow down to. None of us have the power to stop superintelligence, but we can listen to what scholars have said and change how we operate in our daily lives— we can choose to not use AI, say no to companies that choose to use it, and invest in human creativity. While violence and extremism always capture our attention, so should threats to our agency and humanity, despite being muddled in messaging about the benefits of technology and AI.

Today people live more by virtue of what the system does for them or to them than by virtue of what they do for themselves. And what they do for themselves is done more and more along channels laid down by the system.

Like Douglas and Wildavsky, I used to think that risks were either selected or ignored; that it was a cultural and social process, and that in some ways it was black and white. I’ve come to realize that Kaczynski, Ellul and Mumford are right, and the only reason we ignore risks is because we feel that we have no agency in doing anything about them; we can actively ignore them and still fundamentally believe they are serious risks.

It’s a story about which communities took the risk seriously, and why those communities had no power to affect the trajectory of development. We dismissed so many of these scholars’ claims from the past, but were forced to reckon with Kaczynski because he incited and used violence. And even so, Kaczynski’s manifesto isn’t even known by its actual title. How do we select which critiques of technology we take seriously?

German philosopher Ernst Jünger once wrote that technology is the real metaphysics of the twentieth century; I argue the same holds true in 2026. The irreversible collectivist tendencies of technology, whether it calls itself democratic or authoritarian, were already apparent to Jünger at the end of World War I. While scrolling on Twitter (no, I won’t call it X), I saw a tweet back in July talking about Jünger’s musings: “Jünger saw the code before it was written. We’re all just nodes in the network now.”

Big sigh.

Much of my appetite the past two weeks has been less risk focused, and more society, creativity, and life centered, but nonetheless interesting. Enjoy!

TECH: “Silicon Valley’s Favorite Doomsaying Philosopher.”

This immersive study centers on Nick Land and the “doomers” of silicon valley: AI may kill us all, but what if we work to bring on the AI takeover as soon as possible? In other words this is basically accelerationism— this theory that the only way to overcome the capitalist systems that govern society is to accelerate its processes (e.g., late stage capitalism leading to some sort of revolution); instead of slowly planning for some inevitability, accelerating it could induce radical forms of transformation. It sounds a little kooky because it is, and its certainly problematic in many ways. Though I think it is always valuable to see how different political ideologies operate within society, and within the big risks they seek to bring about.

FAVORITE QUOTE: “Land’s reply took a predictable form. The true engine of history, he explained, is the feedback loop between commerce and technology, money and power. Human desire is just a vessel, worked from the outside toward ends we cannot control. History has a destination, but it is not for humans. “My prediction is that A.I. will persuade you that technology eating the universe is more beautiful,” he said.”

HUMAN NATURE: “The Slow Death of Wonder.”

Grappling with adulthood is complex; I often find myself wishing I could be a kid again. In a quiet way, adulthood teaches us efficiency over curiosity, though there is a price to this brand of pragmatism. The moments when everything feels possible and I am filled with wonder, are most often when I feel small compared to the big wide plant we are merely a speck on. A reminder to seek out those moments that take our breath away and always be curious. Bring back whimsy!!

FAVORITE QUOTE: “That night, the sky looked impossibly close, the stars were so dense it felt like you could pluck them with your hands. It made me realize how far we’ve drifted from awe, from stillness. Those moments come rarely now, but when they do, they make me feel alive again.”

THINKING: “Bring Back Using Your Brain.”

This reminded me a lot of Jenny Odell’s How to do Nothing (highly recommend), where when we are so absorbed in the attention economy, you perceive other people’s opinions and often implicitly take them as your own instead of spending time thinking and forming your own positions on things.

The same goes for using AI much of the time; its regurgitation. I’ve been dealing with the aftermath of a student using chat gpt on all of his working group research I was leading, so this feels especially fresh in my mind. Why apply to do research if you have no interest in doing research? With technology, everything feels less nuanced, and I feel like that’s kind of sad isn’t it? I had to attempt to solve a physics problem on my own. Am I a physicist? No, I only work in a building teeming with them. But I love to think, and we often underestimate how far curiosity and focus can take us.

FAVORITE QUOTE: “The internet killed nuance because hot takes perform better. It’s easier to say “cut them off” than to admit maybe you just need a boundary, you don’t need to make a huge scene. Or that sometimes it’s not toxic… you’re just projecting. There’s no space for context anymore, and context is where maturity lives.”

PAPER: “Myths of Nature: Culture and the Social Construction of Risk.”

Karl Dake is a foundational thinker in this space, and this was ironically the first piece of his I’ve read. Each time I read work from this STS/risk era, I’m always dumbfounded at how the theories could have been published yesterday; like these scholars foreshadowed today’s conversations on technological risk.

This paper focuses on a central debate I’ve also been having with myself: Are risks selected? The construction of risk is an inherently social process, which is true, although today I think there is a difference in agency. Humans today feel like they have less agency over big risks, and feel like nothing can be done. Culture still plays a role in how risks are perceived, but technological developments inherently decrease agency over time. I’ll think more on this.

FAVORITE QUOTE: “From this perspective, arguments about technological hazards are not just a matter of choosing one technology or one risk standard over another one, but they represent a more fundamental debate about the social and political meanings of technologies and their implications for alternative ways of life.

POLITICS: “A Dire Warning From the Tech World.”

The whole Anthropic moral debacle with the DoD is fascinating, particularly because it is anthropic and not another company like OpenAI. Anthropic boasts all of these safety and ethical guidelines, but they often have a lot of trouble abiding by and generalizing them. The Pentagon labeled them as a supply chain risk, and said this means Anthropic will be unable to work with any company that contracts with the administration. This supply chain risk designation is often only use for foreign adversaries. The whole thing is bonkers.

Although the Pentagon willingly admitted to using Claude in initial strikes on Iran, they are simultaneously allowing an independent power structure to develop. Perhaps it is a sign of a bigger decline that is to come.

FAVORITE QUOTE: “The Pentagon’s ultimatum, in his reckoning, is “a kind of death rattle of the old republic, the outward expression of a body that has thrown in the towel.” The action, he wrote, is a repudiation of private property and freedom of speech, two of the most fundamental principles of the United States. In today’s America, Ball argued, the executive branch has become so unstoppable—and passing laws has become so challenging—that the president and his officials can do whatever they want.”

FOOD: While in Seattle, we had breakfast at The Wayland Mill— this adorable Yoshoku Americana fusion cafe in North Lake Union. I had an iced americano with BANANA MILK and it was glorious! I think the best bites out of everything we ordered (almost half the menu) was the biscuit with miso and chasu gravy. I don’t even like normal biscuits and gravy, but it was so umami and salty and the texture was perfect yum yum. The japanese potato salad was a close second for sure.

It’s not to say that AI safety/governance is unimportant, in fact it is just the opposite— I’m merely saying that I am allowed to be interested and invested in some aspects, while not believing in others in this faction’s almost precocious fixation on AI. The fixation is warranted, of course, but I find it sort of perverse. I’m sure I could have said all of this more eloquently. Here’s to reading more about AI, since it seems as if we will never again escape its influence.

Alas much of this week’s appetite centers on what it means to operate within a system, as well as the relationships between AI, technology, and society. Enjoy!

AI: “Machines of Loving Grace.”

I’ve been wanting to read this for some time now, and honestly the only things stopping me were (a) how long it is, and (b) I knew it would piss me off. Even the title to me feels so perverse; as if we’re trying to elicit respect for these intangible ‘beings’ made of disembodied clusters of chips and server racks— just in case they know what we’re saying. Amodei asserts that these things, these aspects of human and societal flourishing will only happen if everything else goes well— we don’t know that it will, and neither does he.

None of the things he writes about are plans for how to control dissemination; they are merely musings on technology, meaning, and society. In light of that crazy resignation letter, and all of the chaos in the Bay Area, I’m not so sure we should merely rely on or trust these people to do it for us, but we don’t really have a choice at the end of the day lol so its confusing why he is writing this whole thing trying to convince people of something in a system where they have no agency. This sounds rather rant-y, though I think this ambivalence about technology and AI is at least warranted, if not extremely necessary.

FAVORITE QUOTE: “Throughout writing this essay I noticed an interesting tension. In one sense the vision laid out here is extremely radical: it is not what almost anyone expects to happen in the next decade, and will likely strike many as an absurd fantasy. Some may not even consider it desirable; it embodies values and political choices that not everyone will agree with. But at the same time there is something blindingly obvious—something overdetermined—about it, as if many different attempts to envision a good world inevitably lead roughly here.”

TECHNOLOGY: “I, Claudius: What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn’t Know, Either.”

Why are we trying to ‘solve’ intelligence? In a way, this is basically a far-reaching anthropological study of AI companies, particularly Anthropic— it’s perplexing, bizarre, and so absurd. There are a million threads but they are all interwoven.

A lot of show don’t tell about Anthropic’s more general paranoia. They position themselves as morally superior to OpenAI, and perhaps on the surface they are (they, at the least, ‘value’ screen their ML engineers), but underneath they are simply the same. In my opinion, nothing that is happening today with AI feels meaningfully connected to this ultimate goal of securing human flourishing.

My takeaway is that models are essentially abstract concepts on top of a million other abstract concepts we don’t fully understand; these models don’t really understand the nature of what it means to think, and be able to think. I don’t think they ever truly will.

FAVORITE QUOTE: “The fanboys’ deflationary counterparts are the “curmudgeons,” who claim that there’s no there there, and that only a blockhead would mistake a parlor trick for the soul of the new machine.”

ESSAY: “What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing.”

Writing is not easy, though it is a beautiful and patient form; Anthony Bourdain once said that anybody who complains about writer’s block, should be forced to clean squid all day. Models can produce competent, yet predictable writing at best, but it lacks that optimization for deeper more eloquent prose; a talent that only comes from sitting with writing, consuming media, and communicating how you see the world. Is predictable bad?

Recently my coworker was showing me some AI-researcher’s blog post, and plastered at the top was: “Co-authored with ChatGPT.” Writing is a privilege, and I can almost guarantee that the best literary works of the next few decades will not come from AI. I hope not, at least.

FAVORITE QUOTE: “Perhaps the best writing also innovates in form and content; or perhaps it evokes an emotional response in its readers; or maybe it employs virtuosic syntax and sophisticated diction. Perhaps good writing just has an ineffable spark, an aliveness, a know-it-when-you-see-it quality. Or maybe good writing projects a strong sense of voice. But then, what makes a strong voice, and why does ChatGPT’s voice so often fall flat?”

MORE TECHNOLOGY: “What Counts As A Mind?”

Consciousness is among other forms like sentience that are subject to ongoing perpetual debate. AI systems are trained on human data; they stimulate human thinking, but this is intentional. They train on human data to be more like us, or rather to show us that they are like us, only is disembodied forms.

The debate over AI consciousness is interesting if not sort of ridiculous; I wasn’t aware some view consciousness as a form of computation. If AI did reach consciousness, there is the possibility we could program it with the right mechanisms. But who is programming those mechanisms is an important question; I certainly wouldn't want it to be Sam Altman.

The mere fact that there is a subreddit r/MyBoyfriendIsAI makes me think the world is too far gone… how strange life has become that we’re talking about AI consciousness.

FAVORITE QUOTE: “Plants move by growing. If they grow in the wrong direction, they can’t take it back very quickly, so they had best get it right the first time. By developing frameworks that can usefully approach such alien systems, Calvo hopes to break open the assumptions that have constrained the mainstream cognitive sciences. He wants to develop fresh scientific paradigms that can include minds of many kinds — perhaps even synthetic.”

HISTORY: “How Hans Bethe and Richard Garwin served the missile defense system they publicly criticized.”

This piece is part of a larger book, Strange Stability, but it tells a story of physicists Hans Bethe and Richard Garwin, by all public means, opposed missile defense and in this they challenged both the Sentinel ABM system, and the military industrial complex. In the end, instead of trying to solve and control the booming arms race, Bethe and Garwin ended up bowing down to and serving the military industrial complex, becoming deeply embedded in a number of initiatives.

I don’t think it should be percieved as “Bethe and Garwin are terrible scientists with no morals,” but rather they were two figures being forced to operate within a complex system that was largely out of their control. Systems like that of the ultra-rational and abstract defense intellectuals (as laid out by Carol Cohn, in Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals), are near-impossible to rise above; even if your beliefs are perceived to be in opposition, there are psychological and behavioral dimensions of groupthink and culture that are hard to understand. Without generalizing too much, my conclusion is mostly that everyone is power hungry and nothing feels genuine or ethically motivated anymore— and if it does, its probably just a facade.

FAVORITE QUOTE: “Ultimately, no insider expert—no matter how brilliant, prestigious, and well-intentioned—can rise above the system they operate in. The commitments and interests of that system and its insiders deserve scrutiny and political engagement. The system itself should be up for debate.”

FOOD: Café Babette’s crab rangoon croissant

I went to Indianapolis over the weekend for novelty and to check off another state (I’ve now been to 31/50) and it was clear that everyone raves about Café Babette in Garfield Park. They change their menu weekly with some of the most funky flavor combinations I’ve seen in pastries, and you either have to preorder the week before, or stand in line on Saturday and hope you’re able to secure some goods before they sell out. I waited in line for over an hour on Valentine’s day and was lucky enough to secure three— a brownie with yuzu caramel and sea salt, a strawberry olive oil cake with balsamic icing, and… a crab rangoon croissant. It was this crispy focaccia-y croissant with cream cheese crab rangoon filling spread in the center that spilled over the edges, with green onions and crispy wontons with duck sauce on top. It was one of the best bites I’ve had in recent memory. Well worth the wait.