Hacker News Reader

Comment by dschuetz | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that his involvements in WW I are justified by his achievements in chemistry in favor of world population problems. Someone else would have found a way to bind nitrogen without him and so feed billions of people in the end. Much later perhaps, but eventually still. Yet, most of today's populus have barely enough to eat. So, ultimataly the problem remains unsolved, or it shifted even.

Haber was not a solution. He was as tragic and as fanatic as everybody else in Europe at that time. Nazi Germany also have invented A LOT of world changing things. They solved a lot of problems. Yet, they managed to do such unspeakable things that all the good stuff instantly fades.

In my humble opinion, it's not difficult to judge a person who commits unspeakable crimes by his good or bad deeds. Good deeds are optional, always. Bad deeds are never an option, regardless of eventual outcomes or consequences.

View on HN

"Someone else would have found a way to bind nitrogen without him and so feed billions of people in the end."

The same logic that wipes out his achievement could also absolve him of his sin. Certainly someone else would have also invented chlorine gas.

Based on the little I've read of him I agree that he doesn't sound like a great guy (though I certainly don't know enough to really have an informed opinion). But, more generally, I oppose the notion that summarizing someone is as simple as a toggle switch between good and bad; I think that's too reductionist. Humans are (and the world is) more complicated than that.

While I agree with you that humans cannot simply be labeled as good or bad (there‘s also a nice Solschenizyn-quote at the end of the article) your argument has one flaw: He not only invented chlorine gas he actively pushed for its use against the opinion of German generals.

The question stands how many people would‘ve not only disocered this deadly weapon but also were so enthusiastic about its use (see also: some quotes of him in the article)

People were already shooting each other, blowing each other up, stabbing each other, wounding each other in the dirt to die of gangrene or other infections, setting each other on fire. On what basis do we condemn chemical weapons while ignoring all these other methods of death and pain?

Well, I guess you have to consult the Hague convention on warfare for an answer to that question. As mentioned in the article this was also the basis on which the generals opposed Haber‘s plans.

This is a good philosophical question, but the answer the governments of major powers came up with is that to limit the atrocity there must be rules even in war. So people came up with mutually agreed conventions. It was agreed that violating these would be worse then killing "by the book". Germany was a party to the rule prohibiting chemical warfare: https://verdragenbank.overheid.nl/en/Verdrag/Details/002422

I agree on the reductionist part, it's never that simple. But, in his case it was his conscious decision to use the gas as a chemical weapon, the case of which was unprecedented. Sure anyone else would have come up with the idea sooner or later, but he has set the precedent so that anyone after him now can use it, as the Allies actually did, in all this "but they also did it, now we want too!" sentiment. His bad judgement caused not only good things, but disregarding the possible consequences also cause much much worse things. It's actually simple, imho.

> Yet, most of today's populus have barely enough to eat. So, ultimataly the problem remains unsolved, or it shifted even.

That is a distribution problem, though. Up to 50% of the food produced around the world never reaches a human stomach.

See: https://www.imeche.org/docs/default-source/default-document-...

Yes I agree. The problem shifted, but it wasn't exactly solved. So, now it's not about how to feed 8 billions of people, but rather who gets how much. So '... and fed the world' in this article is a stretch for an argument.

> such unspeakable things that all the good stuff instantly fades

Well, in 50-100 years noone would really care about atrocities of ww2, just like almost noone cares about ww1 now, and literary noone about the atrocities of the wars before ww1.

But "the world-changing things" will stay, and the people who created these things will be remembered

I don't agree. The Mongol Empire as an example is still remembered to this day. Nobody cares what exactly they did, but it's common sense that it was pretty bad. British colonial era? Same thing, but half the world still remembers what atrocities they have commited, and it was longer ago as WW I.

It's the bad things generations of people remember, the good things not so much. You know, hate sows war, war sows hate. The vicious circle as old as time.

> The Mongol Empire as an example is still remembered to this day. Nobody cares what exactly they did, but it's common sense that it was pretty bad.

Is it really? I think most people only remember them as successful conquerors.

> British colonial era? Same thing, but half the world still remembers what atrocities they have commited, and it was longer ago as WW I.

Depends! The British Empire lasted until the 1960s -- arguably 1997. That's much fresher than WW1 or WW2.

Besides, who remembers the British concentration camps?

Lots of people remember the Irish and Indian famines.

Good point! That's true -- just didn't come to mind when I was posting my earlier comment.

South Africans remember the British concentration camps.

> Besides, who remembers the British concentration camps?

Everyone, because it's the answer to the question "who invented the concentration camp".

Unfortunately it's the incorrect answer, because nobody remembers the American, Spanish, French and Paraguayan (the possibly correct answer) concentration camps that came earlier.

It's quite strange/interesting that atrocities in the "wars before WWI" got turned into atrocities in the "British colonial era" though; maybe people remember what they want to remember.

> Yet, most of today's populus have barely enough to eat.

That's simply not true.

Global levels of hunger are at their lowest point in human history.

Yes, that's right, hence 'barely enough'. They do not hunger, yet they don't live as lavishly as the richest 10% of the world either. It's just/barely enough to satisfy hunger, but does it solve the problem? No.

As of 2016 ~10% of the world's population is undernourished.

https://www.worldhunger.org/2015-world-hunger-and-poverty-fa...

If you believe that "most of today's populus have barely enough to eat" there is a good chance you have a much more dismal view of the world than actually exists.

I'd recommend checking out http://forms.gapminder.org/s3/test-2018

Yes, I do believe that in raw numbers most people have just enough food and water available so that they don't hunger. So the lowest 10% go even below that and face starvation now and then. I doubt that they enjoy the quality of the food they have as much as you enjoy yours.

Thanks for the link to worldhunger.org though. It's nice to see that per definition we solved the hunger and poverty problem! I had no idea! Yet I wonder what people think of the accessibility and variety of food. They pretty much don't give a flying fart about raw numbers and definitions we set up for arguments.

The problem how to generate enough for everybody shifted to how to provide that overwhelming amount of food to those who have the least? Clearly, discussing about how many actually starve and how many barely not hunger misses the whole point. Haber didn't solve the problem, he generated a ton of different other problems.

To quote world hunger:

"The world produces enough food to feed everyone. [...] A principal problem is that many people in the world still do not have sufficient income to purchase (or land to grow) enough food or access to nutritious food."

It's amazing that we produce enough food to feed everyone. The question is how to ensure that everyone has enough access to income to feed themselves. There are two major factors here, the price of food and the income of the person. Both of these can be adjusted to ensure that everyone can eat.

Advances like nitrogen fixing, rust resistant wheat and proper irrigation can push the price of food down. Some of these have the amazing property of being able to be solved essentially once and have the whole world benefit, the green revolution had absolutely amazing ROI, the work of just a handful of people produced wheat that can be raise yields dramatically almost everywhere. It'd be great to see the same thing done with cassava, rice and other staples.

Raising incomes is fairly tricky and even more contentious, but thankfully that is happening as well.

Those soldiers he killed were only there to kill Germans. Of course they were going to fight back. What difference does it make what weapon they use?

I think from his perspective he was just trying his best to help his country win the war. As did many of the US scientists involved in the Manhattan project. For both cases one can argue that their deeds brought great suffering to people. And in both cases you can make the point that a faster way to end a war might have saved thousands of others from the same fate.

I think you underestimate your capacity to commit a bad deed if you're in a situation to do so.

But you got it figured out to share with everyone?

> Yet, most of today's populus have barely enough to eat

That is simply untrue. Not even close to to true. The world has grown from ~1 billion to ~7.5 billion, and we have reduced - in raw numbers - those in extreme poverty. A large part of that is down to Haber.

It’s by no way given that they would during WWI and maybe the war would have been a few years shorter without his explosives and gas.

And maybe a shorter war would havve led to less humiliation of Germany afterwards so that WWII wouldn’t have happened.

> Yet, most of today's populus have barely enough to eat.

But today, this is a political problem, not a scientific one. After all, the world produces more than enough food for everyone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com