Don't Build Fallout Shelters

The type of people who build fallout and other fortified shelters intuitively assign a rather high prior to at least one of the scenarios in which such a shelter is very useful unfolding in the near time frame, such as a few decades.

Right. I argue that even if you do anticipate this, more utility is likely captured by attempting to decrease the odds of such scenarios occurring than by attempting to protect yourself (and perhaps a few friends/family) from their effects.

As for the "life will not be worth living" argument, having a shelter may make a difference between propagating your genes or perishing, and I suspect that the perceived importance of survival of one's bloodline correlates with other survivalist traits.

That seems plausible, though I'll point out that many common antinatalist arguments seem much stronger in a postapocalyptic setting.

er, it's not anything about the "perceived importance of survival of one's bloodline" - it's about rebuilding civilization and trying again at the Singularity, and hopefully preserving as many people, cryonics patients, or whatever we best can, through the rough times. In a very worst-case scenario, reproduction could be a useful way to help carry on that mission beyond your own personal capabilities (which it already is in some ways).

Fixed, thanks.

Maybe the crazy survivalists like the idea, too. Hypothesis: Some reasonable portion of the people who build shelters aren't buying nuclear-war insurance; they're buying the fantasy of being the romantic postapocalyptic survivor. Like buying the fantasy of being rich via lottery tickets, or the fantasy of being fit and pretty via exercise machines.

What's your estimate of how much more likely a crazy survivalist is to survive something bad than a non-(crazy survivalist)? Or, put slightly differently: supposing that something bad happens and only N humans survive, what's your estimate of how many of N are crazy survivalists?

For all I know, the "crazy survivalists" might make things worse.

(Yeah, yeah, fictional evidence and all that.)

You're confusing two messages. One is that building a fallout shelter is not a good way to optimize personal safety. The other is that optimizing society safety is, for some unspecified reason, more-virtuous than optimizing personal safety.

I consider both those arguments relevant to this post. What I'm saying is that building fallout shelters is unlikely to be optimal for personal safety because there is generally much lower-hanging fruit. Further, in the event that building fallout shelters is optimal for personal safety, your efforts would be likely better spent elsewhere because pursuing personal-level solutions for society-level hazards is highly inefficient.

I omitted the obvious third argument against fallout shelters (that they increase the odds of nuclear war, albeit only slightly) because I evaluated it as likely to make people think that this post was actually about fallout shelters.

The first point is historically wrong. In the time when people in the US built fallout shelters, most people who built them thought it was more likely than not that there would be a nuclear war soon. They made the correct calculation given this assumption.

I'm not sure that that's reasonable to say. As I pointed out, personal safety is personal, and thus your decision to build a fallout shelter is subject to a wide range of confounding factors. I believe that it is likely that most people who built fallout shelters could have purchased expected years of survival for cheaper, even on a personal level. Typically fallout shelters seem extremely unlikely to actually be the lowest-hanging fruit in someone's life.

The second point is simply a referral back to a set of presumptions about ethics (selfishness is bad) that should themselves be argued over, rather than the examples here.

I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that that was a given on this site, given previous discussions here. There's probably an argument to be made that all such actions are merely purchasing fuzzies and that protecting yourself is purchasing utilons, but I'd like to think that we're better than that.

The argument that you shouldn't build a fallout shelter because the life you'd live after civilization was destroyed wouldn't really be worth living is contrary to what we know about happiness. It is a highly-suspect argument for other reasons as well.

I'm aware of the studies and arguments used to claim that happiness will reset regardless of what happens to you, but I think that a full-scale nuclear war falls outside the outside view's domain.

You're confusing two messages. One is that building a fallout shelter is not a good way to optimize personal safety. The other is that optimizing society safety is, for some unspecified reason, more-virtuous than optimizing personal safety.

[...]

The second point is simply a referral back to a set of presumptions about ethics (selfishness is bad) that should themselves be argued over, rather than the examples here.

Downvoted for this. If you think that "screw humanity, I want to live!" is moral, then I would love to see you defend that claim.

EDIT:

The first point is historically wrong. In the time when people in the US built fallout shelters, most people who built them thought it was more likely than not that there would be a nuclear war soon. They made the correct calculation given this assumption.

... is also left undefended.

When taking personal precautionary measures, worrying about such catastrophes is generally silly, especially given the risks we all take on a regular basis-- risks that, in most cases, are much easier to avoid than nuclear wars. Societal disasters are generally extremely expensive for the individual to protect against, and carry a large amount of disutility even if protections succeed.

To make matters worse, if there's a nuclear war tomorrow and your house is hit directly, you'll be just as dead as if you fall off your bike and break your neck. Dying in a more dramatic fashion does not, generally speaking, produce more disutility than dying in a mundane fashion does. In other words, when optimizing for personal safety, focus on accidents, not nuclear wars; buy a bike helmet, not a fallout shelter.

And in such worlds I also stand to have more numerous descendants, if not higher quality of life.

Are you serious? Most worlds I can imagine in which huge numbers of people are killed but those in fallout shelters survive would have hellish quality of life for the survivors.

Agreed on both counts.

Iceland?

That might be possible in this age of telecommuting, though still difficult. The trouble with safe places is that part of the reason they're safe is that there's nothing there worth nuking...or living near.

I'm not sure if that generalizes to natural disasters. Are they more common in desirable areas, perhaps because geographical features that invite disaster (e.g. faultlines) correlate to features humans tend to live and build near (e.g. rivers, coastlines)?

If you're doing anything serious, privacy is a very difficult issue and it helps to have as much physical security as possible (including e.g. bomb shelters).

Can you be more specific, both with regards to "anything serious" and "physical security?"

Also this kind of thing makes sense from a general insurance perspective. I already pay for health insurance, cryonics (life insurance), etc. Security is another natural way to spend money when it comes to general insurance, and some kind of shelter or safe room could be a good option depending on the situation.

It's important to keep in mind that safe rooms aren't what I'm talking about here-- they may be practical solutions to personal threats such as armed home invasions, though I think if you anticipate such risks with high enough probability to justify a safe room, moving to a better neighborhood might be more practical.

This post primarily discusses fallout shelters in the context of attempting to build personal defenses for societal-level threats.

Please note that often a rephrasing and reformulation of existing knowledge can be a very good thing, almost as good as original research. If someone writes a post explaining some points in clear language, people can read it and gain a deeper understanding of those points. For that reason, posts like this one are most certainly a Good Thing, and definitely praiseworthy.

Anyone care to enlighten me as to what I'm missing?

A very "clever" utility calculation, where by "clever" I mean wrong.

How is that different from saying, the less likely I am to survive a lethal infection, the less likely it is that I will find myself in universes where I was infected, so I won't get vaccinated?

I don't know a thing about fire insurance in absolute terms, but one big difference seems to be that constructing a fallout shelter represents a large fixed cost, while insurance pricing is (ideally; roughly) proportional to downside risk. There is of course some margin in there, but if that margin's not too high (which it may very well be; again, not an expert) then given the nonlinearity of utility in money there should exist situations where the expected loss from fire outweighs the expected loss from purchasing insurance against it.

With a given probability of nuclear war, we don't care about the utility difference between war and not war; we care about the difference between preparations succeed and preparations fail, which is the probability we are trying to control when buying a fallout shelter.

I'm not sure I agree. When optimizing for utility across one's lifespan, it's important to note that years of post-nuke life are both more expensive and carry less utility than years of non-nuke life. So when you evaluate the utility/dollar of building a fallout shelter and compare it to the utility/dollar of other potential investments, you need to put a discount factor on the years of life you expect your shelter to gain for you in the event of a war.

For instance, if I expected with 50% confidence a nuclear war that will certainly kill me if it occurs while I am unprotected and were presented with the following options:

• Option A: Purchase a bomb shelter that will grant ten years of post-nuke life in the event of a nuclear war but will grant no benefit in the event of no nuclear war

• Option B: Purchase an experimental health intervention that will grant on average five years of additional healthy life in the event of no nuclear war, but have no effect in the event of a nuclear war (as I'll die before getting to benefit)

I would probably consider option B to be superior to option A, because my intuitions suggest that the utility of post-nuclear life would be massively discounted.

Then what is it about?

One can surely argue the inability of hostile forces to build and deploy a nuke is significant: seems some relationship exists between the intellect needed to make these things and the intellect needed to refuse to make or deploy these.

Could you state the relationship more explicitly? Your implication is not clear to me.

Well, but there's also the issue with sums being at all times partial. The low probability high impact scenarios are inherently problematic because very huge number of such scenarios can be constructed (that's where their low probability comes from), and ultimately, your action will be dependent not on utility but on which types of scenarios you are more likely to construct or encounter.

There's also the issue with predictability of the actions. E.g. you can, with a carefully placed flap of butterfly wings, save or kill enormous number of people, but it all balances out - if you are equally able to construct arguments in favour, or against the flap. It's easy for butterfly but it is not so easy for other actions such as donating. Whereas there are clearly possible scenarios (accidental nuclear nuclear exchange) that you can save yourself from with your fallout shelter, and it does not balance out.

Ultimately, it is all up to ability to predict what happens. You can't really predict what happens out of giving money for someone to prevent robot apocalypse. Maybe they'll produce useful insights. Maybe the reason they are so concerned is that their thinking about artificial intelligence is inside a box full of particularly dangerous AIs, and that's where they do all their research, and this actually increases risk or creates even worse scenarios (AIs that torture everyone). Maybe they are promoting notion of the risk. Maybe Frankenstein and Terminator already saturated that. Maybe they look bad or act annoying (non credentiated people intruding into highly technical fields tend to have such effect, especially on cultures that hold scholarship and testing in high regard - e.g. Asians, former Soviet Union, Europe even) and discredit the concerns, making important research harder to publish. You can't evaluate all of that, nor can you produce representative and sufficiently large sample of the concerns, so the expected utility is exactly zero (minus the predictable consequences of you having less money to spend on any future deals). The fallout shelter on the other hand is not exactly zero, it may not be the best idea but you have a clear world model of it not cancelling out.