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Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

Exactly.

And I doubt it's a mass exodus either.

If you read "Surely you're joking Mr Feynman", the author clearly states that when making the bomb, they had a lot of fun. Lots of budgets. Only smart people. Working on the coolest projects. He even plays with the censorship and security practices.

They never really thought too hard about the ethic part of it: they need to end the war, and that's it. They really said "oh we fucked up" once the bomb exploded.

And we are talking about brilliant minds with very positive personalities.

While skilled, I doubt than more than a small fraction of FB work force is close to Feynman's IQ. And they have a very arrogant culture. Somehow I doubt FB is going to bleed talent anytime soon.

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Feynman's own country, though, was at war; when he was recruited into the team that would eventually work on the Manhattan project, the Pearl Harbour attack had already taken place and irrevocably wounded and scarred the American public consciousness. Many other members of the Manhattan project were from countries or communities that had suffered tremendously at the hands of the Axis' power. War in Europe had been raging for more than two years. Fun or no fun, you can find motivation for working on weapons in a lot of things: the next Pearl Harbour attack could be against your home town, the next ones to be sent to labour camps back at home could be your only surviving relatives, the next casualties of war could be your high school friends.

Barring a couple of teams that work on interesting projects, Facebook has little other than money and reputation to throw at people. The former isn't that hard to find in our field, though, and the latter is kindda fickly. Facebook may well keep its talent pool constant, but largely by having people for whom the latter (or, more generally, what they work on and what impact it has) is important replaced by people for whom it is not.

Fortunately (for most of us, at least), the kind of talent that money, disregard for ethics and public doublespeak attracts is pretty self-destructive in the long run.

You can replace facebook with google, apple, ms or amazon and you have the same picture though.

And they got the best projects and the most money.

Yet when I said to my relatives, 5 years ago, that I refused an interview from google and facebook, they questioned my sanity.

I don't pretend to have the moral high ground here, as i made enought bad things in my life, but this kind of pondering work opportunities doesn't happen enough imo.

> And they got the best projects and the most money.

I think what they don't have is their CEO testifying in front of the Congress after building a platform whose hunger for money made it an exceptional weapon against society. Smart, young people start avoiding companies only after public perception turns against them. Facebook is closer to that than Amazon or even Google.

I don't remember when I felt that, oh man I wish I had a shot at working at google, to where I am now. There was a bit of "meh" in between.

> I refused an interview from google and facebook, they questioned my sanity.

You were prematurely anti-facist.

(It's an old phrase: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/premature_antifascist )

That's not exactly my recollection from the book. I believe they thought closely about how the bomb was needed to end the war in Europe as quickly as possible.

What they failed to do was reevaluate the project after the Allies won the war in Europe. It was after Hiroshima they said, "oh, we fucked up." (to parapahrase)

Exactly. There is no war/enemy here. Only ideals, whose ethics are now openly questioned.

I think the public discussion probably hits FB most in hiring - I mean, if I were doing an interview there I'd at least ask the question and see how they responded (maybe negotiation point on what I'd be working on or increased comp).

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

—- J. Robert Oppenheimer, after watching the first test

"Sometimes someone confesses a sin in order to take credit for it."

-- J. von Neumann, about Oppenheimer

Doubleplusgood, speaking as a bit of a quotation hound who hadn't come across that one. There's a whiff of La Rochefoucauld to it, too.

Contrast Feynman's attitude to that of Wolfgang Pauli, who refused to work on the Manhattan Project, saying "it's not the business of science to engineer mass destruction."

There have been plenty of other highly intelligent people who acted ethically, often at great danger to themselves, rejecting many financial and social incentives to act unethically.

This. We rarely realize that we idolize the wrong historical actors which contributes to our inaccurate evaluation of their deeds. In this case, pointing out Feynman or any other "brilliant minds" behind horrific events and technologies fails to acknowledge that they had detractors in during their time who pointed out these things to them. And they ignored them.

I usually try to keep that in mind now. In the back of my mind I'm saying "they knew, someone told them" and lo and behold, if I go looking for said detractors I can usually find them in spades.

I'm not defending or excusing anyone. Just pointing out that its unlikely these employees were unaware.

But it just doesn't seem likely.

The bomb was initially built against the Nazis, and with the understanding that they would be building something similar.

Japan came later.

Also the group was sequestered to a remote lab (Los Alamos?) and working under strong secrecy. You either try to keep a good atmosphere or you go crazy.

If you are capable of building the most powerful weapon on earth, you are capable of guessing it will be used on something else than your current designated target, later.

But they didn't think about that. They don't mention that they thought that they were working on something that could literally end humanity.

And the thing is, we didn't even use the bomb to win against the Nazi.

That the bomb was a good decision or not is a hard debate that I still think about sometime.

But there was not that much debate reported from the people building it.

Smart people can be really dumb.

Oppenheimer recalling the Trinity test:

It brought to mind words from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

I'm sure those scientists thought about it and discussed it among themselves, but they were in a super top secret lab in the middle of nowhere. Not much opportunity to leave an historical record of what they thought (letters highly censored, etc).

The Feynman biography cover in length the what happened, but it doesn't mention much debate about this.

> If you are capable of building the most powerful weapon on earth, you are capable of guessing it will be used on something else than your current designated target, later.

Yes, however the point is moot if your adversary hits you with it before you are finished.

Pacifists get shot first.

You are creating a false dichotomy, between pacifism and the use of a doomsday weapon. There are other options. And we actually won against the nazi without using the bomb.

Now given the cold war event, I can't say for sure if the bomb was a good or a bad thing.

But's saying "we had no choice" is a really dangerous way of putting things.

Yep -- Los Alamos. You should read "Surely You're Joking," by the way. It's worth it just for the story about finding a hole in the fence, then walking in the guard gate and out the hole again and again until someone noticed.

It's one of those rare books where you laught while reading it. The whole reason he ends up in Brazil is just so relatable to me, pricesily because it's absurd and so realistic at the same time.

I have the book, but I don't think I got to the Los Alamos part ;)

Thank you for wasting my time ;-). That story was in "Los Alamos from Below," which may not have been part of "Surely You're Joking." Feynman was a fascinating guy and an excellent writer, even if he was a bit too young to be a serious player in the Manhattan Project. By the way, if you're interested in physics, these are about as good as it gets: http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/

>While skilled, I doubt than more than a small fraction of FB work force is close to Feynman's IQ.

Feynman is semi-famous for testing at a much lower IQ than most people assume. (He scored 125 on his test at school).

See: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-the-next-ein...

Unless I'm mistaken, I tested out at 140 a long time ago.

There is no friggin way I'm remotely as intelligent as Feynman was so there goes any faith in IQ tests being meaningful. Most of the people who have worked for me are demonstrably smarter than me and none of them are close to Feynman. Smart people but not at his level IMO.

RIP IQ tests :)

Tests can be sometimes inaccurate but still useful. There are false positive and negative rates for everything.

Doesn't it depend a lot on what age you take the test though? Like I was very smart for my age as a child and I tested very high. Later in life I'm probably not much higher than my peers.

I think the whole point of IQ test is being stable independent of age.

Originally though IQ was calculated by dividing by age, now it's calculated by comparing with those in the same age group. So any random child outscoring a famous scientist doesn't seem to be that significant.

It seems like a goal of IQ is to assign a single, unchanging score to someone's cognitive ability, but it is a severely flawed concept. The test should not be called "intelligence quotient" but something like "cognitive battery" instead.

You don't have an IQ. It's a test that you take that can provide some useful information, but it isn't a fixed score, and "intelligence" (a word that is too ambiguous to use without careful definition) can't be reduced to a single number.

There's a difference as it were between, roughly speaking, stored knowledge and being able to figure things out on the fly, but multi-factor analysis says there's only one factor for being good at IQ tests, oddly enough. And every test of doing mental tasks we know how to create correlates strongly with any other test. There's a good explanation about how the tests work here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nfg0hfrQMFM

I'm not saying that the tests are useless, just that they should be renamed, and culture should look at them a little differently.

I would agree with you if you're saying that they're not at all a measure of human worth. I don't get the 'rename' comment, though.

If we don't call one's skill at mental tasks 'intelligence', just how should we label it?

"Intelligence" is poorly defined in most conversations. The nature of the word and concepts around it lead to problems, even for people who can score high on IQ tests.

It will take me a long time to write out my thoughts completely, but I plan to do it at some point.

Mostly it seems to be quick and adaptable thinking, if I understand the test results right. The colloquial usage is all over the place, as usual, but the tests strongly correlate with things like being able to attain advanced education and ability to be successful. Some of it appears to be inherent, whether it's clock speed/RAM equivalent for our brains or what, because it survives twins raised in completely different homes (including large economic differences). That said, there are certainly environmental effects, too, especially in the negative direction (e.g. lead exposure).

I think I tested around 30 (apparently still insecure enough back then to care, these days I care what my dogs think more than I care what people think :)

Feynman had a higher IQ than 125

Tests are not perfect, he could have had a bad day

Maybe he didn’t care

Maybe he misremembers taking an actual IQ test etc

IQ tests only measure your ability to write IQ tests.

> And we are talking about brilliant minds with very positive personalities.

Do you think "very positive personalities" were a plus in this case? Obviously you don't want homicidal sociopaths on the team, but someone whose first thought was "What's the worst possible thing that could happen here?" might have come in handy.

The worst possible thing that could happen here was the Germans create the bomb first.

But we didn't use the bomb to win against the nazi.

And saying having the bomb is the only way to counter the enemy building one is excluding the search of any other possible solution.

> While skilled, I doubt than more than a small fraction of FB work force is close to Feynman's IQ.

In fact Feynman's IQ was merely "above average" according to Feynman himself, who got a look at his score after taking the test in school.

But if you're using "IQ" as a proxy for actual, you know, intelligence then yeah, I agree :-)

Just a figure of speach of course. Feyman doesn't use "fucked up" either :)

Don't forget that a lot of them were refugees in need of a good job to sustain their family.

Well people might be valuing stock price risks and not making decision based on ethical concerns.

> They never really thought too hard about the ethic part of it

Feynman was only speaking for himself there. It's been 25 years since I read that book but I thought he described some of the efforts by Einstein, et al. to prevent the bomb from being used.

So maybe the Cambridge Analytica hullabaloo is the equivalent of the bomb going off?

No electing trump was the bomb going off.

Cambridge Analytica was more of a "oh, WE made that bomb?"

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