Comment by theptip

I get your point and would be much more inclined to agree if we were talking about trying to hit a 3x risk increase. But we are talking about huge risk margins here, many OOMs.

My problem with your argument is that as framed it’s a fully generic argument against doing anything; there is always a risk of bad outcomes for any action. What we must do in practice is look at risk/reward and try our best to estimate each.

Data breaches are a bad analogy because you are presenting this as “I get to make a bit more money by lowering security”. A better analogy would be something like colonoscopy; some people will die from cancer if you advise nobody has this procedure. Some people will die from complications if people do get this procedure. How do we as a society choose how many people should die and from what? This is a trolley problem, there is no choice where people don’t die as a result of the decision. The answer is that we must do our best to estimate the risks and minimize them.

This is not what we are doing with nuclear right now. We are simply trying to reduce the risk of nuclear, without making any attempt to model the harms that are being introduced.