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> Porn is the canonical example It's the same with weapons design and scientists, or battlefield medicine and doctors. At some point the challenge overcomes th
by scrumper 14y ago
> Porn is the canonical example
It's the same with weapons design and scientists, or battlefield medicine and doctors. At some point the challenge overcomes the ethical qualms. Or, in some cases, the need to eat becomes pretty overwhelming. Morally dirty but technically difficult jobs often pay really rather well, partly because many talented people are turned off by the field.
Real example: a good friend of mine was in my physics class at university. He was a pretty peace-loving, anti-establishment, idealist type like all of us at that age, yet he's now a government employee spending his days inventing ways to make ICBM warheads invulnerable to anti-missile systems. It's cutting-edge materials science stuff, and he loves it. (As a cold war kid myself I'm slightly ashamed to say that I found the whole thing deeply cool and I'm quite jealous of his job.)
- eshvk 14y agoExactly. I went to school and did research hoping to have a career in robotics/Unmanned air vehicles and I had resigned myself to having to work in defense because unless you are in Europe, the number of companies that work on robotics that is not defense related is very small (Single digits, I would say). While, I would have serious problems with the whole idea of actively participating in war, the fact of the matter is that the kind of problems that I would get to hack on while working on there would have been tremendous fun.
- dlitwak 14y agoTrue, I remember a friend chose an internship at Altria (parent company to Phillip Morris, the cigarette company) over another because they paid so much better. Re your friend though: I'd chalk it up to a maturation and the pragmatism that comes with it.