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I simply imply that people are responsible for their actions. People were given the knowledge to make nuclear weapons by those smarter than them. The fact that

I simply imply that people are responsible for their actions. People were given the knowledge to make nuclear weapons by those smarter than them. The fact that others may very well have eventually given them the same is neither here nor there, and your weird obsession with requiring it be angels and aliens does nothing to alter that. If you assume many groups of aliens, each species of which might have given out nukes, then you're in the exact same position as our theoretical physicists - 'of course humans weren't entrusted with nuclear weapons, after all, aliens aren't all part of a great alien conspiracy....' The two scenarios are functionally analogous but for the fact that ALIENS is posted into the second. You're just dancing with semantics.

aaronem 13y ago
And you aren't? The point of involving angels and aliens is to make clear the absurdity of assuming some superhuman agency which handed down the knowledge from on high. Scientists are human beings, too, with all the fallibility and lack of prescience that is our common heritage, and the fact that "others may very well have eventually given them the same" is the very crux of the matter at hand. From our perspective, with the benefit of hindsight, it is trivially obvious that the Third Reich made no significant process toward the attainment of nuclear weapons, and that such weapons were not necessary to guarantee the Allies a victory in Europe. Do you think that was trivially obvious in 1942? It was nothing of the sort, and for all those who worked on the Manhattan Project could know, their efforts were absolutely vital to their nation's successful prosecution of the war. In such circumstances, what you would no doubt consider a principled refusal to participate in the project would, in fact, constitute moral cowardice of the highest order, on the part of anyone who found Allied victory in any sense preferable to Axis. They could not have known, after all, that the Third Reich had no realistic hope of developing an atom bomb, given the time and resources available to them, and judging them on the basis of what we know now, seventy years after the Third Reich's abject defeat and dissolution, is purely foolish. All of this goes to demonstrate your basic error, which is to consider "scientists" a single, unified category which can, or can be expected to, act as a whole in whatever it believes, again as a whole, to be the best interests of mankind. This produces a sort of "us and them" mentality, which implicitly elevates your "scientists" category to the level of the superhuman actors whose existence my "angels or aliens" formulation makes explicit. It is this mentality which permits you to expect knowledge and behavior of scientists which you do not expect of humans, and it is precisely this mistake the original author makes.
- 6d0debc071 13y ago
  Humans are fallible, but some humans are massively more fallible than others. Humans lack foresight, but some humans lack a lot more foresight than others. Viewing humanity as a whole, without respect to local variations in morality and other qualities, over-simplifies things. You have a group of individuals who come across a power that the majority lack, they also happen to be a lot better educated than the average, and their choice is whether to give away the secret of that power. Perhaps they're not well equipped to make that choice, but that's neither here nor there in framing the basic question - and the answer to that question can then be used to form other questions. If they turn out to be ill-equipped to make the choice, then that's at least something that can be worked on. How do you improve the qualities you'd want of a decision maker in this regard? That's a lot more useful, realistic line of thinking to go down than just shrugging and going 'All humans, we should expect the same knowledge and behaviour.' The behaviour you expect of a randomly chosen human should be different to behaviour you expect of a semi-randomly chosen human from a specific subset. Heck, even the arguments you can have - you can't talk about probability with most people, they're not going to understand what you mean when you say 'standard deviation' or anything like that. Most people do not do much thinking. You don't need scientists to be super human. You just need them to be a group you can start asking questions about. Get an angle of attack on the problem through. If they turn out to be average or substandard or whatever in some particular area, then there are ways that can be addressed.
  - aaronem 13y ago
    Given the way you keep ignoring my argument, I don't see this going anywhere useful, so I'm going to curtail my further participation. I'd like to say it's been a pleasure, but...
    - 6d0debc071 13y ago
      From my point of view I'm not ignoring your argument. It's a shame we can't understand one another, but thank you for your time anyway.

aaronem 13y ago

And you aren't? The point of involving angels and aliens is to make clear the absurdity of assuming some superhuman agency which handed down the knowledge from on high. Scientists are human beings, too, with all the fallibility and lack of prescience that is our common heritage, and the fact that "others may very well have eventually given them the same" is the very crux of the matter at hand. From our perspective, with the benefit of hindsight, it is trivially obvious that the Third Reich made no significant process toward the attainment of nuclear weapons, and that such weapons were not necessary to guarantee the Allies a victory in Europe. Do you think that was trivially obvious in 1942? It was nothing of the sort, and for all those who worked on the Manhattan Project could know, their efforts were absolutely vital to their nation's successful prosecution of the war. In such circumstances, what you would no doubt consider a principled refusal to participate in the project would, in fact, constitute moral cowardice of the highest order, on the part of anyone who found Allied victory in any sense preferable to Axis. They could not have known, after all, that the Third Reich had no realistic hope of developing an atom bomb, given the time and resources available to them, and judging them on the basis of what we know now, seventy years after the Third Reich's abject defeat and dissolution, is purely foolish. All of this goes to demonstrate your basic error, which is to consider "scientists" a single, unified category which can, or can be expected to, act as a whole in whatever it believes, again as a whole, to be the best interests of mankind. This produces a sort of "us and them" mentality, which implicitly elevates your "scientists" category to the level of the superhuman actors whose existence my "angels or aliens" formulation makes explicit. It is this mentality which permits you to expect knowledge and behavior of scientists which you do not expect of humans, and it is precisely this mistake the original author makes.

6d0debc071 13y ago
Humans are fallible, but some humans are massively more fallible than others. Humans lack foresight, but some humans lack a lot more foresight than others. Viewing humanity as a whole, without respect to local variations in morality and other qualities, over-simplifies things. You have a group of individuals who come across a power that the majority lack, they also happen to be a lot better educated than the average, and their choice is whether to give away the secret of that power. Perhaps they're not well equipped to make that choice, but that's neither here nor there in framing the basic question - and the answer to that question can then be used to form other questions. If they turn out to be ill-equipped to make the choice, then that's at least something that can be worked on. How do you improve the qualities you'd want of a decision maker in this regard? That's a lot more useful, realistic line of thinking to go down than just shrugging and going 'All humans, we should expect the same knowledge and behaviour.' The behaviour you expect of a randomly chosen human should be different to behaviour you expect of a semi-randomly chosen human from a specific subset. Heck, even the arguments you can have - you can't talk about probability with most people, they're not going to understand what you mean when you say 'standard deviation' or anything like that. Most people do not do much thinking. You don't need scientists to be super human. You just need them to be a group you can start asking questions about. Get an angle of attack on the problem through. If they turn out to be average or substandard or whatever in some particular area, then there are ways that can be addressed.
- aaronem 13y ago
  Given the way you keep ignoring my argument, I don't see this going anywhere useful, so I'm going to curtail my further participation. I'd like to say it's been a pleasure, but...
  - 6d0debc071 13y ago
    From my point of view I'm not ignoring your argument. It's a shame we can't understand one another, but thank you for your time anyway.