| Ok. I think the question that we want to ask from the model is more like: “What is (one minus (What is the chance we have had 0 nuclear wars by year “now plus 70”?)” So if there is a nuclear war in year n+3 (for example) it’s effect on year n+4 is irrelevant as the answer to the question is already “0% chance of no nuclear wars by year 70”. So the angle you’re initially coming from is not quite relevant. We can then turn that a bit though and continue your point — we can rephrase your claim to be like this, for example: “if we have had 0 nuclear wars in the next 69 years, then surely that would lower the probability of a war in year 70.” And to that I’m saying — actually no. Or rather: not necessarily. Or more accurately: not much! The info of “we’ve had no nuclear wars in 69 years” is not what the model would care about. More likely it would care about, running the model a bunch of times, in the cases where there no wars in the first 69 years, how many times is there a war in the 70th year? And “brink of war” or “HPI” scenarios would be a much better indicator than the simple absense of nuclear war in those first 69 years. Maybe better to said “there is a lot more information in the question of ‘how many times have we been on the brink of war’ than there is in the answer ‘did we have a nuclear war yet? No’. It’s more about that “how much info is there here?” |