Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Michael Wulfsohn's avatar

From your mass suicide link, most of the historic examples occurred when a community lost a battle and chose suicide over capture. Mass suicide that only kills the losing side won't result in extinction.

However, it's conceivable that a losing side might try to kill not only themselves, but everyone. E.g. the Guadeloupe example; if the former slaves could have taken all the French troops with them, they conceivably would have.

However, we already have that danger on the world stage, with the US and Russian nuclear capabilities. Maybe we should try to minimise the number of actors with that capability, which could be done with a world government?

Expand full comment
Ivo Wever's avatar

> increasingly short periods over which moods and sanity changes

Governments include measures to protect against this. E.g. mood and sanity may change, but it needs to stay changed for 4 years to get a majority supporting the new mood and sanity into Congress.

Also these changes don't randomly flip to extremes.: they are more like random walks in the presence of various force gradients. So the odds for a well designed government to become able to commit suicide is much smaller than your presentation suggests.

Expand full comment
27 more comments...

No posts