3 ms·
sabotaging science must be the most morally corrupt thing you can do as a civilisation
by slim 5mo ago
sabotaging science must be the most morally corrupt thing you can do as a civilisation
- Cthulhu_ 5mo agoNah; it's to prevent a country from developing a superweapon and possibly triggering WW3 / worldwide nuclear annihilation. This comment is very exaggerated, I can think of a few more "morally corrupt" things to do.
- jabedude 5mo agoSpying on and sabotaging weapons development of foreign adversaries is a completely normal government function
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- stankondrat 5mo agoI hope one day, it will no longer be normal - it will be wild.
- _joel 5mo agoI wonder how many results got nerfed via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug before it was known about.
- codezero 5mo agoI’d be surprised if it were a lot. At that time (open to corrections) not a lot of scientific research was done on consumer intel platforms. Obviously it was found by a mathematician, but I still suspect it wasn’t obvious in published research or that it ended up not causing significant enough deviations to cause research to revisit the calculations. My team ran into some interesting but very small deviations when we moved our iterative solar wind model from 32 bit to 64 bit, but the changes weren’t significant enough to revisit or re-do prior research wholesale. Like my team in the 2000s I suspect anyone who had data crunched by this bug also revisited it and either concluded it wasn’t significant enough or redid the work and it didn’t change the conclusions. I am curious now if this bug was cited in any papers at the time to give a rough idea how aware or affected academics were.
- kjs3 5mo agoAt that time (open to corrections) not a lot of scientific research was done on consumer intel platforms. We had researchers doing what I suppose might be called HPC on Sequent Symmetrys, which were i386s in the mid-80s and Pentiums by the mid-90s. There were other high-performance x86 SMP boxes that were roughly equivalent (e.g. NCR 3550). That plus some pretty good x86 FORTRAN compilers (e.g. Lehey (sp?)) made this reasonable. I also know a lot of folks who had desktop/side SMP PPros + FORTRAN to save grant money on the big iron and got useful work out of them. Basically, x86 was way cheap and had useful amounts of FP. There's a reason x86 displaced risc; this is one. I'm sure they would have rather used something like an X/MP-48, but one plays the hand one is delt.
- lmm 5mo agoWhat you should worry about is how many scientific "results" are still wrong due to random bugs in numerical code. If anyone's actually verifying the results, they'll catch things like the FDIV bug just as easily as a mistake in the calculations.
- codezero 5mo agoNone of the science being sabotaged was being published in peer reviewed journals was it? (besides the Portuguese hydrodynamic modeling stuff, but it could have been accidental or had other uses) And yes, to be clear, I don’t consider it contributing to “science” if it’s not published, reviewed, and reproducible.
- throwaway25151 5mo agoHow about killing scientists and engineers? [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassinations_of_Iranian_nuclear_scientists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassinations_of_Iranian_nucl...
- flyinglizard 5mo agoScientists and engineers also invented Zyklon-B gas and built the crematoriums in the concentration camps. Don’t underestimate what scientists and engineers can do to Jews.
- anthk 5mo agoNot just Iranians, something odd it's happening with the JPL people. Shitty and brainwashed people in Middle East comes in both ways. Can't wait to the Chinese secularizing all the Abrahamic bullshit by brute force -not by war, but my mere productivity and good reasoning- throwning all the Abrahamic legacy to the dust bin. So, y'all think you are the center of the world, Mediterranean fools? The Chinese got everything you brag from Math in the same way (basic algebra, proto-integration). And, if any case... the Egyptians were before any Abrahamic nonsense. Heck, the Exodus was just a primitive form Nationalist brainwashing, a la North Korea. So, the days for the Mediterranian Jingoism -and oil, of course are numbered the day the Chinese set a working fusion reactor.
- Schlagbohrer 5mo agoThese middle eastern "civilizations" which torture and mutilate their own children... it's hard to see such barbarity winning out in the very long run against intelligence and human rights.
- thin_carapace 5mo agoviolence is the undisputed rule of life. rationalize the power of intelligence to whatever degree you may .... the bigger guy is still gonna wipe the floor with the smaller one. and if an entire homogenous block of the world agrees on a core set of violent tenets, they are bestowed a greater capacity to violence.
- qingcharles 5mo agoThe first thing I thought of was The 3-Body Problem series. If you've read the books (or watched the shows you'll know what I mean).
- guillem_lefait 5mo agoEven funnier as one of the co-author (Juan) and one of contributor (Costin) are both in the "3-buddy problem" podcast. Obviously IOCs are presented.
- Tepix 5mo agoDeveloping weapons is pretty high on my list of shitty things to do as humanity. We will probably keep doing it until we encounter an alien intelligence and snap out of it.
- Iolaum 5mo agoAs a scientist and a father I can say that the most morally corrupt thing is doing bad things to children, not scientists.
- red-iron-pine 5mo agoat some point this science exists to do that, e.g. directly (via things like zyklon b gas), or indirectly (such as how social media screws up kids, and is doing so, wholesale, across civilization)
- aa-jv 5mo agoKilling children and justifying this form of murder by calling them terrorists takes a higher toll, imho.