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> it was an ordinary thing when some of my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war. Those refusals were on
by ryandrake 8mo ago
> it was an ordinary thing when some of my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war. Those refusals were on moral grounds.
(spoiler alert)
Wasn't this one of the plot points of the Val Kilmer movie Real Genius? They had to trick the students into creating a weapon by siloing them off from each other and having them build individual but related components? How far we've fallen! Nobody has to take ethics during undergrad anymore I guess...
- jiggawatts 8mo agoReminds me of the story of someone's woman working for a research lab to improve the computer-controlled automatic emergency landings of planes with total power failure. ... or so she was told. She was unknowingly designing glide-bomb avionics.
- moron4hire 8mo agoI feel like these stories are apocryphal. I mean, I can't say for certain that no US DoD research program used subterfuge to trick the performers into working on The Most Racist Bomb. But I can say that in 20 years I've never seen a dearth of people ready, willing, able, and actively participating with full knowledge that they are creating The Fastest Bomb and The Sneakiest Bom and The Biggest Bomb Without Actually Going Nuclear. IDK, maybe it's different outside the National Capitol Region. But here, you could probably shout "For The Empire" as a toast in the right bars and people wouldn't think you were joking.
- reaperducer 8mo agoI feel like these stories are apocryphal. They're not. But if it makes you feel better to believe that, everyone has their own coping mechanism.
- moron4hire 8mo agoWhat? I'm not questioning whether the weapons research actually happened. I'm questioning the sincerity of people claiming they didn't know what they were doing. I've seen plenty of weapons programs. They aren't a secret to the people working on them. My point is, the government doesn't need to lie to researchers or even pay them very well to get them to develop weapons because there are plenty of intelligent-enough people willing to do it almost for free.
- reaperducer 8mo agoIf "This doesn't fit into my mental model, so everyone else must be lying" is how you deal with things you didn't personally experience, do what you have to.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- XorNot 8mo agoThe inability to accurately cite any story about this, and the "friend of a friend" structure is what implies it's garbage. Not to mention it itself requires a conspiracy theory: "no one would do this work voluntarily" (or "all the smart people have to be tricked because they're so smart they obviously agree with me"). As though people don't just go and work at Boeing or Lockheed Martin.
- jiggawatts 8mo ago> "no one would do this work voluntarily" The much more common reason is compartmentalisation. Employees are told as much as they need to know, no more. If someone can design a glide bomb without knowing that it has an explosive payload, then they're not told. The fear is not so much the employees themselves (they might be quite patriotic!) but that the information will leak out to the enemy, giving them a chance to counter the weapon or copy it.
- XorNot 8mo ago
- dmd 8mo ago“someone’s woman”?
- K0balt 8mo agolol I am guessing that was an autocorrect error.
- dotancohen 8mo agoI once saw the word nickel autocorrected incorrectly into something far worse. It was funny given the context (metals, not coins) but I wondered why someone would even have that word in their autocorrect dictionary.
- ahsillyme 8mo agoWhat's in the autocorrect dictionary usually has nothing to do with what you typically write. No reason to wonder (i.e. if the insinuation being that that's a word they'd typically use).
- Nevermark 8mo agoWe could joke about the auto correct knowing your subconscious mind. Except if Facebook has auto correct, you can be sure it’s driven by a personal dossier on each of us, correlated by AI with every other person on the planet. They know you were thinking that word! The neverending benefits of personalization.
- K0balt 8mo agoI see you have not met my (ex) sister in law. Alternatively, you have, and you are a much better (stronger? More stoic? More charitable? I don’t even know what it would take) man than I am. Hats off to you, and Godspeed!
- K0balt 8mo agoMy worst autocorrect story is a message to my mother in law referring to my sister in law. I told my mother in law that I’d give my wife’s sister “a*al’ when I got there. It was supposed to be ”a call” I’m still traumatized decades later.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- kerabatsos 8mo agoGod bless you for referencing that film.
- bobbiechen 8mo ago>I’m going to tell you about how I took a job building software to kill people. >But don’t get distracted by that; I didn’t know at the time. Caleb Hearth: "Don't Get Distracted" https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted
- lukan 8mo agoBut he did know he was going to work for the military. "I’d be joining a contracting company for the Department of Defense." (But interesting article otherwise)
- endofreach 8mo agoTo be fair, the name of that Department used to be very confusing...
- WorldMaker 8mo agoThe name of that Department was chosen to be aspirational, to encourage it to try to keep within its Constitutional guardrails, to keep it focused on the right mission. Sure, it often didn't live up to its aspirations and a lot of the fence posts of those Constitutional guardrails got moved, but wearing those aspirations on its sleeve left some room for people to challenge it and openly criticize it by reminding the Department of its guardrails and its mission. The name change is disrespectful to the Constitution, if not terrifying for other reasons.
- benterix 8mo agoYeah but this itself doesn't necessarily have to mean anything, e.g. DARPA sponsored half of the nice things we're using every day.
- lukan 8mo ago"DARPA sponsored half of the nice things we're using every day" That's a very bold claim. (And I am aware of the history of the Internet)
- pazimzadeh 8mo agoalso relevant to Ender's Game, which came out 8 months before Real Genius
- randallsquared 8mo agoEnder's Game the novel, but I would say that it's not actually super relevant. First, the original short story was 1977, and then Card expanded it into a novel which was published mid-1980s. The point in the story is that kids are sensitive, and supergenius kids more so, and that they don't want to interrupt performance with concerns about guilt. But Real Genius wasn't about that! It was about an anti-war stance born of the Vietnam War and creative-class hatred for Ronald Reagan's presidency.
- pazimzadeh 8mo agoGotcha, I haven't actually seen the movie I just meant the concept of tricking and silo'ing genius kids to make them think they are playing a game when they're actually doing war/genocide is similar to the Ender's Game book. I don't know if this was just an idea floating around in the air or if it was inspired by Ender's Game, just interesting
- BryantD 8mo agoAlso in Good Will Hunting, when Will (Matt Damon) delivers a scathing job rejection to the NSA. 1997. The War on Terror has a lot to answer for. https://youtu.be/tH0bTpwQL7U https://youtu.be/tH0bTpwQL7U
- hax0ron3 8mo agoThe late 90s were full of media that questioned reality and authority - like X-Files, The Matrix, Dark City, all sorts of websites about conspiracy theories and UFOs, etc. The zeitgeist was full of speculation about hidden truths. The cultural mood was defiant and sardonic. There was rap, rap-rock, Beavis and Butthead, Fight Club, Office Space... One of the most popular pro wrestlers in the world played a character who beat up his boss and gave him the middle finger. Then after 9/11 it kinda seemed like suddenly the TV shows were all about cops and soldiers. Admittedly, my memories might be somewhat deceiving me. But I do feel that the mood suddenly shifted, much more than the actual damage done to America by the attack should have justified.
- komali2 8mo agoNo, you're right, and I distinctly remember the conspiracy theorists and counter culture thinkers immediately circling around "this is going to be used to restrict our freedom." And of course they were absolutely right. I also remember it was the worse possible cultural faux paux to indicate you thought invading foreign nations wasn't a good response to 9/11. I mean go look at the votes for invasion of Iraq, damn near 2/3 of both the house and Senate in favor. Every radio blaring patriotic songs, every school doing patriotic projects, every brown kid living in hell. It sucked, bad.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- the_af 8mo agoYou're right. And the military in movies used to be depicted as inflexible, stubborn, paranoid, incompetent, and usually either "the bad guys" or authorities that impeded the progress of the main characters. (With exceptions; I'm not forgetting about Top Gun). Then there was a sudden switch, with the military shown with cool gadgets, airplanes, tech, heroics, and generally being glorified. The transition must have happened before the first Transformers, but it was in full swing by then. Were one of a conspiratorial mind, one would guess massive amounts of money were spent in changing this image.
- gcanyon 8mo ago"Why do you wear that toy on your head?" "Because if I wear it anywhere else it chafes" "A laser is a beam of coherent light." "Does that mean it talks?" "Your stutter has improved." "I've been giving myself shock treatment." "Up the voltage." "In the immortal words of Socrates, who said, 'I drank what?'" "Is there anything I can do for you? Or...more to the point... to you?" "Can you drive a six-inch spike through a board with your penis?" "...not right now." "A girl's got to have her standards." "What are you looking at? You're laborers, you're supposed to be laboring! That's what you get for not having an education!" -- I'm sure I could remember more if I thought about it for a bit. That movie made quite an impression on young me.
- fadesibert 8mo agoIf you are waiting until undergraduate level to take ethics, it's far too late to matter anyways. Doubly so for "business ethics" classes which became à la mode in the post-Enron era. They attempt to teach fundamental ethics, when at most it should be a very thin layer on top of a well founded internal moral framework and well-accepted ethical standards inculcated from day 1 of kindergarten. Morals are taught 0-9 [0], Ethics perhaps slightly later as it requires more complex thought processes. [0] https://familiesforlife.sg/pages/fflparticle/Young-Children-Developing-Core-Values https://familiesforlife.sg/pages/fflparticle/Young-Children-...
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- jadar 8mo ago[flagged]
- mckn1ght 8mo agoYou don’t need religion for ethics or worldview. How about: we all appear here on this rock, none of us know why, we’re all in it together, we all struggle, none of us know if we’re alone in this universe or what the universe really is. This unifies us all and puts us on an even playing field. We should be compassionate to one another as we all come from the same circumstance. We can create a concept of god to explain it, or accept that we don’t know for sure and maybe never will. God is a choice, but not the only one.
- pbh101 8mo agoThis exhibits the borrowing GP mentions: your ‘should’ does not necessarily follow from the stated priors. Why is compassion morally mandated by the priors and not competition, for example?
- mckn1ght 8mo agoIt’s at least an option for consideration. I shouldn’t have spoken normatively. Is your position that compassion is only possible via religion?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- godelski 8mo agoSame with Ender's Game. They are playing war games but they're actually real. He sacrifices his units and commits genocide (xenocide) at the same time. Something he probably wouldn't have done had he known. > Nobody has to take ethics during undergrad anymore I guess... My undergrad wasn't in CS but my grad was. I was incredibly surprised to find that ethics isn't a requirement in most CS programs. That's a sharp contrast to traditional engineering and the hard sciences. CS people seem to love philosophy, yet I'm surprised not so much about this subset. We'll spend all day talking about if we live in a simulation (without learning physics) and what intelligence is (without studying neuroscience or psychology) but when it comes to what's acceptable to do at work the answer is always "if I don't do it somebody else will, at least I'll have a job". A phrase that surely everyone hears in an ethics 101 class... Edit: Oops, missed pazimzadeh's comment. I'll leave mine because I say more
- 7952 8mo agoAnd the world seen through media is heavily abstracted. And I think that makes people psychologically treat war like a game rather than something actually happening. We trick ourselves into believing it isn't real.
- duskdozer 8mo agoI wonder how much this changes based on country. The closest thing to a war happening within US borders was the attack on Pearl Harbor (I think). The US hasn't had conscription for 50 years. So there isn't much of a clearly visible and direct cost to war for many many Americans. I'm not arguing there isn't a cost, by the way, just that most can basically just not watch the news and have no idea war is happening.
- 7952 8mo agoYes. I don't think any of us can really understand what it is like to be in a war zone. Proximity to that must completely change people's outlook.
- keiferski 8mo agoMany prominent tech and science leaders have been disparaging philosophy for decades now. Not surprising that in the absence of any serious ethical thought, “make money = good” is the default position.
- WalterBright 8mo ago[flagged]
- keiferski 8mo agoSometimes I really don’t know how to reply to comments like these. Because they either seem to completely misunderstand the basic premise of my comment, or they deliberately focus on some tangential thing in order to make some trollish point. But I’ll reply here, and just assume my comment was somehow unclear. Do you genuinely think that putting money above any other value is an ethical way to operate in the world? I certainly don’t, virtually no ethical theory does, and the vast majority of people don’t either. This is not saying that making money is inherently a bad thing, but that placing it above every other value without question is definitely a bad thing, or at least a careless and thoughtless one. To use your example: all sorts of things are in demand but unquestionably make the world worse. Does the fact that people are willing to pay for propaganda or chemical weapons or X other negative thing somehow mean that facilitating their sale is ethical? I really don’t understand the position. I suppose there are some people out there who seriously have studied ethics and think making money is the ultimate good. It doesn’t seem like a serious position to me. But I don’t think that’s become the default position because of serious analysis, but rather the total lack of it. Which is what my comment was about: when you refuse to engage in serious philosophical thought about something, you’re just going to revert to base values like the acquisition of money and power, or some variant of that which your local system is optimizing for.
- WalterBright 8mo ago[flagged]
- kortilla 8mo agoYou still take ethics. The only difference is political views. It’s very easy to be consistent from an ethical perspective if you are convinced of a government’s particular powers. The government has a monopoly on violence. Whether you want to enhance it or not all comes down to your political alignment, not ethics.
- bloodyplonker22 8mo agoThe most unethical people I know have taken ethics classes and signal that they did it.
- WalterBright 8mo agoMost of the pranks in Real Genius were actual pranks done at Caltech in the 1970s. The McDonald's prank, for example. I don't recall Caltech having any ethics classes. Caltech did have an honor system, however, which was surprisingly effective.
- asdff 8mo agoTo be fair, it wasn't like lockheed and raytheon and all the rest of the modern human killing machine companies have ever been hurting for engineering talent. Likewise for oil and gas.
- motbus3 8mo agoIf you are tricked into doing that it is not your fault. But the moment you realise you need to to a choice.
- BLKNSLVR 8mo ago> Nobody has to take ethics during undergrad anymore I guess... Especially not when certain people in positions of great power say things like "stupid rules of engagement" when referring to acts of war.
- zelphirkalt 8mo agoFallen far, or maybe we are just more aware now, but anyway, I don't think that a lecture in ethics at university will fix things. That's: (A) way too late, and (B) without a strong character to begin with, this lecture will simply become a "necessary chore" for students, and basically go in one ear, and out the other ear. (Does that saying/phrase translate to English?) By the time people start their undergrad, if they are not already at least trying to act ethically, that ship has sailed for most. Their upbringing and education did not manage to drill that into them before. I see it as more of an early childhood and parenting topic. If the parents are not leading by example and teaching their children ethics, then the children are often just going with the flow, not swimming against the current to uphold ideals. Why would they, if the other way is easier. I think it is rare, that people adopt ethics that they have not grown up with / raised according to. So I would advocate ethics as a mandatory subject at school, if not primary school already.