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> if your passion involves actively degrading your country's competitive advantage by leaking every info you can to the wide world, I don't like that mindset.

> if your passion involves actively degrading your country's competitive advantage by leaking every info you can to the wide world, I don't like that mindset. The US Gov steals trillions of dollars a year from the public to fund all sorts of stuff. These black projects alone represent hundreds of billions of R&D dollars, that tech should *belong to the public*. We pay for it, they work for us (don't they?), we should collectively benefit from it. Instead valuable advancements are locked away in secret hangars. Entire industries are left un-disrupted, all so we can have some edge for a hypothetical war we shouldn't even be fighting anyways.

AYBABTME 4y ago
I understand your position but I respectfully think it's unreasonable given that the world isn't aligned on your views, and as such there is competitive struggle between countries. In prior wars, these secretive and competitive advantages were decisive in determining the outcome. As a US tax payer, would I rather the US use my tax money to keep a competitive edge against would-be competitors? I sure do. Particularly in a world where competitors are authoritarian dictators. If all the other world powers were pacifists and merely had gentlemen's disagreements over minor stuff, perhaps I'd share your views.
- RetpolineDrama 4y ago
  >I respectfully think it's unreasonable given that the world isn't aligned on your views, and as such there is competitive struggle between countries. The argument here is essentially security through obscurity. If our countries defense is ultimately reliant on some info/tech never leaking then our military has failed us. Our systems should be so strong, so robust that even if an enemy had the damn bluprints and operational knowledge it would still be foolish to attack us. Here's an example, the navy has some really cool tech involving highly precise measurements of gravity vs known gravitational maps of the earth so that subs can navigate underwater without GPS. I don't expect the government to publish exactly how it works on some fancy nuclear submarine, but all the research and knowledge gained during R7D should be publicly available.
  - AYBABTME 4y ago
    But obscurity _is_ a form of security, even though mostly not sufficient on its own.

AYBABTME 4y ago

I understand your position but I respectfully think it's unreasonable given that the world isn't aligned on your views, and as such there is competitive struggle between countries. In prior wars, these secretive and competitive advantages were decisive in determining the outcome. As a US tax payer, would I rather the US use my tax money to keep a competitive edge against would-be competitors? I sure do. Particularly in a world where competitors are authoritarian dictators. If all the other world powers were pacifists and merely had gentlemen's disagreements over minor stuff, perhaps I'd share your views.

RetpolineDrama 4y ago
>I respectfully think it's unreasonable given that the world isn't aligned on your views, and as such there is competitive struggle between countries. The argument here is essentially security through obscurity. If our countries defense is ultimately reliant on some info/tech never leaking then our military has failed us. Our systems should be so strong, so robust that even if an enemy had the damn bluprints and operational knowledge it would still be foolish to attack us. Here's an example, the navy has some really cool tech involving highly precise measurements of gravity vs known gravitational maps of the earth so that subs can navigate underwater without GPS. I don't expect the government to publish exactly how it works on some fancy nuclear submarine, but all the research and knowledge gained during R7D should be publicly available.
- AYBABTME 4y ago
  But obscurity _is_ a form of security, even though mostly not sufficient on its own.