John von Neumann famously advocated for a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union.

Von Neumann was, at the time, a strong supporter of "preventive war." Confident even during World War II that the Russian spy network had obtained many of the details of the atom bomb design, Von Neumann knew that it was only a matter of time before the Soviet Union became a nuclear power. He predicted that were Russia allowed to build a nuclear arsenal, a war against the U.S. would be inevitable. He therefore recommended that the U.S. launch a nuclear strike at Moscow, destroying its enemy and becoming a dominant world power, so as to avoid a more destructive nuclear war later on. "With the Russians it is not a question of whether but of when," he would say. An oft-quoted remark of his is, "If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?"

It seems likely to me that a world in which the U.S. government took von Neumann's advice would likely be a much darker, bleaker, more violent one. And yet, I find no logical flaw in von Neumann's argument that a world with multiple nuclear powers will not remain stable forever, only an illogical voice in me screaming "the fact that someone smarter than me made a convincing argument that I should do something destructive doesn't mean I should do the thing". Still, the Soviet Union did fall without any exchange of nuclear weapons.

But were we right not to follow von Neumann's advice? Selfishly I think we were, but again I cannot back this up with logic.

Anyway, I was reading Raemon's excellent post Nice-ish, smooth takeoff (with imperfect safeguards) probably kills most "classic humans" in a few decades., and got to this passage

With the background argument: to stop this sort of thing from happening, something needs to have a pretty extreme level of control over what all beings in the universe can do. Something very powerful needs to keep being able to police every uncontrolled replicator outbursts that try to dominate the universe and kill all competitors and fill it with hollow worthless things.

It needs to be powerful, and it needs to stay powerful (relative to any potential uncontrolled grabby hollow replicators.

Hanson correctly observes, that's a kind of absurd amount of power. And, many ways of attempting to build such an entity would result in some kind of stagnation that prevents a lot of possible interesting, diverse value in the universe.

To which I say, yep, that is why the problem is hard.

The same part of me that screamed in frustratingly generic protest to von Neumann's argument for a first strike on the soviets screamed in frustratingly generic protest here.

I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, just flagging it as something that stands out as extremely salient and I don't know what to do with.