Scott Sagan

That became like a big deal in the 80s and early 90s.

And there's a great book by Scott Sagan, the political scientist Scott Sagan, called The Limits of Safety.

And this is a book that examines how comfortable we should feel about the lack of any unintentional nuclear use up to the early 90s when this book was written.

And the conclusion of this book, and there's been a lot of work since this book that looks at kind of the safety of our nuclear enterprise, it basically concludes that it's mostly luck.

You put one of those padded mats in the gymnasium and the kids are willing to take double flips off the bar because they know they have the padded mat there to back them up if they fall.

That's a good safety feature, but it also encourages risk taking.

Scott Sagan also has a great article titled The Problem of Redundancy Problem, one of the best titles in political science, that really lays out this risk.

And I think there are some clear parallels between these ways of thinking about nuclear safety or organizational cultures and design cultures for safety and what we have going on now in the AI world where we have these complex systems.

I'm an Indian American immigrant.

I thought I was going to medical school, and I think one of my biggest regrets in life may turn out to be I turned down going to work for Google in 2000, but I was really intrigued after taking a class by Scott Sagan International Security and the Changing Worlds, Chip Blacker and Scott Sagan.

And my TA was Taylor Fravel, who's now my colleague, longtime friend.

And I just got the security bug and sort of ended up writing an honors thesis through CSAC, which is Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford.

It's like there was this institutional drive to be ready to, uh, you know, hit the Soviets hard.

There's a book by Scott Sagan, really fascinating book about safety problems, and he describes with pretty good evidence that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, right when the Minuteman nuclear tipped missiles were first being stuck into silos, that a crew at Malmstrom Air Force Base, where the silo was located, took extra measures to make sure they'd be ready to fire back at the, uh, Soviets, even though-

Mm

... that was not allowed.