COU 2: Partially Modeling Overwhelming Uncertainty
Part 1
The COVID pandemic was disastrous in many respects. But relative to past epidemics, such as the Black Death of 14th century, or the multiple pandemics that decimated native populations in the Americas via the Columbian Exchange, it was relatively mild. In particular, although COVID’s transmission rate was quite high, its mortality rate – i.e. the proportion of infected persons killed by their infections – was modest relative to the worst known epidemics. This has left many of us waiting for the other shoe to drop – i.e. wondering what it will be like if or when a virus with both a high rate of transmission and a high rate of mortality (again, relative to the worst known pandemics in history) becomes a global pandemic.
The question “what will happen in a global pandemic with both a high rate of transmission and a high rate of mortality?” is similar to the question “what will happen if the PRC invades Taiwan?” The possible effects of either event would be so catastrophic, widespread, enduring and multifaceted, that they are impossible to imagine or describe precisely. So our uncertainty about the answer to either question cannot be depicted using a probabilistic model.
However, we can use probabilistic models to depict aspects of our uncertainty about the possibility of a global pandemic much worse than COVID. As we did in the discussion of the PRC’s potential invasion of Taiwan in the lesson, we can pose questions about that possibility that are worded so as to admit only a definite list of precise, mutually exclusive possible answers. For instance, we don’t know the answer to the question “will the PRC invade Taiwan at some point between now and August 1 of 2027?” But we do know that that question has exactly two possible answers: “yes” or “no”. So we can model our uncertainty about the answer to that (narrow) question with a probabilistic model.
So, as we did in the lesson regarding the PRC’s potential invasion of Taiwan, model uncertainty about some aspect of the potential for a global pandemic with transmission and death rates much higher than those of COVID. Do so by responding to the following prompts:
Prompt 1A: Pose two questions about the possibility of a global pandemic with a transmission and death rate much higher than COVID’s that are worded so that they have a definite list of possible but unknown answers.
Prompt 1B: List the possible answers to the combination of those two questions. The list should be expressed as a single exhaustive list of mutually exclusive possibilities.
Prompt 1C: Write a probability distribution over the answers you wrote in response to Prompt 1B.
Part 2
In a televised speech on September 20, 2022, Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin announced a partial military mobilization as part of the Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. The speech included the following statement:
Washington, London and Brussels are openly encouraging Kiev to move the hostilities to our territory. They openly say that Russia must be defeated on the battlefield by any means, and subsequently deprived of political, economic, cultural, and any other sovereignty and ransacked. They have even resorted to the nuclear blackmail. I am referring not only to the Western-encouraged shelling of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, which poses a threat of a nuclear disaster, but also to the statements made by some high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO countries on the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction – nuclear weapons – against Russia. I would like to remind those who make such statements regarding Russia that our country has different types of weapons as well, and some of them are more modern than the weapons NATO countries have. In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. This is not a bluff.
Many politicians and pundits in the U.S. and Europe labeled Putin’s statement “nuclear blackmail”, and in response U.S. and European defense analysts began to publicly discuss the possibility that the Russian Federation might use a nuclear weapon at some point during the Russia-Ukraine war.
Nuclear weapons have only been used in combat twice – both in 1945, when the U.S. armed forces dropped an atomic bomb on each of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since then, the context has changed substantially. Scores of the world’s militaries are now armed with nuclear weapons, and states’ nuclear arsenals include a wide variety of delivery systems and bomb sizes. In short, we have no direct experience to inform any guesses we may have about when present-day leaders might use nuclear weapons, how they might use them, and the consequences of their use. Under what circumstances would the Russian Federation use a nuclear weapon as part of the current war? What would the consequences be if they did so? Are there specific kinds of nuclear weapons that Russia could use in specific ways that would not provoke nuclear retaliation by other states? Would a Russian nuclear attack on Ukraine make other leaders more willing to use nuclear weapons in other conflicts?
We can’t build a probabilistic model of all this open-ended uncertainty. But we can model aspects of our uncertainty about the possibilities and possible consequences of the use of nuclear weapons as part of the Russia-Ukraine war. As you did above regarding a much-worse-than-COVID-pandemic, and as you saw done in the lesson regarding a potential invasion of Taiwan, model some aspects of this uncertainty by responding to the following prompts:
Prompt 2A: Pose two questions about the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons as part of the Russia-Ukraine war that are worded so that they have a definite list of possible (but unknown) answers.
Prompt 2B: List the possible answers to the combination of those two questions. The list should be expressed as a single exhaustive list of mutually exclusive possibilities.
Prompt 2C: Write a probability distribution over the answers you wrote in response to Prompt 2B.
Rubric
You can earn up to three points on each of the two parts of this COU, 1 point for each prompt.
- For Prompt 1A/2A, you get one point if you pose (a) two questions that are (b) about the possibility of a global pandemic much worse than COVID (Part 1) or the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons as part of the Russia-Ukraine war (Part 2) AND that (c) each have a definite list of possible answers. You get zero points otherwise.
- For Prompt 1B/2B, you get one point if you give a single list of the possible answers to the questions in Prompt 1 that amounts to an exhaustive list of mutually exclusive possibilities. You get zero points otherwise.
- For Prompt 1C/2C, you get one point if you write a valid probability distribution over the list of answers you gave in response to Prompt 2. You get zero points otherwise.