Comment by grepsign | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grepsign | Hacker News Reader

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What's so hard to understand?

I'm an aerospace engineer and I specialize in rockets. I understand that the nature of my work will almost always 100% benefit the weapons industry because there's just no avoiding it. When I started my career ~10 years ago I worked on a defense project as I was a fresh graduate and had no choice, but nowadays I make it very clear to prospective companies that while I have no issues with my colleagues working on weapons, I myself will absolutely, under no circumstances, work on defense funded projects in any capacity. Most companies from my experience are willing to work with you on this especially because a lot of them are already set up for segregated access.

The fault in your thinking is that you seem to think it needs to be an "all or nothing" choice. It's not, and it doesn't need to be. I try to be green and recycle everything I can, but I don't lose sleep over throwing plastic away in the garbage because I do what I can. I'm 99% vegetarian because of my views on animal ethics and I honestly can't remember the last time I've bought meat for my personal consumption, but I have no qualms about going to a friend's backyard BBQ and eating the same grilled burgers that everyone else is enjoying because I do what I can. For this reason, I choose to not work directly on weapons, despite the fact that basically all rocket related technologies can be applied to weapons, because that is something that I can not change, so I do what I can, which in this case is refusing to work on defense funded projects.

This argument assumes that working for US military is worse ethically than what Google does. Short term it is, but longer term I am not so sure.

> I'm an aerospace engineer and I specialize in rockets. I understand that the nature of my work will almost always 100% benefit the weapons industry because there's just no avoiding it.

Those people are software engineers. Unlike you, they could have easily found equivalent jobs elsewhere (almost anywhere) that did not contribute to building a worldwide surveillance network in the name of serving better ads.

I agree with GP that it takes a wacky moral compass to willingly engage in mass surveillance but feel strongly enough about weapons to quit over them. It's either very naive, hypocritical, or both.

> I agree with GP that it takes a wacky moral compass to willingly engage in mass surveillance but feel strongly enough about weapons to quit over them. It's either very naive, hypocritical, or both.

I don't see why it's inconsistent. They don't want to be complicit in physical violence and death, but surveillance leads to neither.

Surveillance does lead to that if it's how we identify where someone is located or leads to actionable intelligence which can then be used as justification for dropping a missile from the sky.

Name a single industry or product that can't be a starting point of a chain that ends in a missible dropping from the sky.

1. Being curt with someone can lead to them going home and beating their spouse to vent their frustrations. Should we then never be curt because it might lead to domestic abuse? How improbable does the outcome need to be before this kind of argument is considered invalid?

2. Dragnet surveillance alone cannot lead to actionable intelligence, it can only be used to confirm other sources of intelligence. The false positive rate is simply too high. Would they still drop that bomb without that surveillance? In most cases, probably.

3. Weapons have only one purpose: to physically harm. Surveillance can have many legitimate purposes. They simply aren't directly comparable.

This is not entirely true. I mean, sure, they could not work for _Google_, but almost the entire field of eCommerce involves either contributing to surveillance, or benefitting from it as much as you can. You basically get a choice over the brand of the bad.

Of course, there are other jobs, but much of it either comes with its own significant ethical hurdles - like fintech, for example, or any form of marketing and much of banking - or is much less accessible (good luck switching fields from eCommerce to embedded programming for power plant equipment or something).

Pretty much only solution I can come up with is seizing the means of production, but that might be an unpopular proposition on this particular website.

This is the key. Your actions matter. You should do the best you can. And the best you can probably includes never working on weapons. That should apply to all of us, but each person must decide. What is the best you can do?

But you're clearly not doing what you can. You're just doing what's convenient.

You still eat meat in one of the most important times not to eat meat (in front of others) if you are truly driven by ethics for animals. You refuse to work on defense-funded projects because companies in your field have a pretend isolation mechanism (here's a hint: unless they are actually separate companies, they aren't isolated) that allows you to think you aren't supporting the military despite working for the company supporting the military.

This type of behavior shocks idealists. Even though it's better than nothing, just doing little bits here and there where convenient actually makes it harder to change the status quo for idealists (because you think you're helping when you're not).

Clearly he is rejecting the idealist viewpoint, so what does it matter if what he is saying “shocks idealists”?

He asked "what's so hard to understand?" so I explained.

Maybe the issue is with idealists, having a white or black view of the world, then?

Then, as an idealist, what do you expect from other people to reach your goal ? If 50% of the people do 80% of what is needed you're at 40% of your goal. If 10% of the people do 100% you're only at 10% plus you've turned your goal in to an "us vs them" instead of "everybody for the greater good". Voting with your wallet 80% of the time is a valid means to support what you think is right. An idealistic minority doesn't change the world. The majority does.

Exactly.

I think a more CS way to think about it is shipping out a MVP vs. shipping out a 100% perfect, 100% feature complete, 100% bug free, 100% documented, product.

I think everybody would be happy to start a project and ship out that 100% finished product, but you'll spend your entire life working on this and die without succeeding because it doesn't exist. So the choices are to 1) not bother, 2) do what you can (MVP), or 3) work until you die as a failure. OP would want me to choose 1 or 3, it seems.

Well done. Great logic. The majority can also prop up a Kim Kardashian and Trump who met in the Whitehouse today and took a nice selfie. Those two idealists are taking your majority for great ride pal.

Do the things that have a real impact.

Choosing to work for a defense contractor with restrictions on projects gives them nearly as much benefit as without the restrictions. The fruits of your labor are still easily funneled into military projects and at a minimum they are keeping the company alive longer while serving the military.

This isn't someone doing 80% of what's required. It's them doing active harm to a cause while continuing to take credit for pretending to help.

You're not wrong on the first statement. I am doing what's convenient. But I am also doing what I can with what's laid out in front of me. Basically every single company in my field has ties and contracts with military, so what, am I suppose to just change careers? I enjoy what I do, and I think military projects are neat in the technical sense, but that doesn't mean I want a part in it.

I'm not an idealist. The world isn't black and white.

>Am I supposed to just change
You should absolutely change jobs if your current one is immoral, and careers if it comes to that. This much is obvious.
The problem is in the hurdles making that difficult or unrealistic. In America, this process could leave you and your family homeless, maybe bankrupt if anything goes wrong. This fear leaves (maybe most) people in jobs they know to be immoral, and society is that much worse off because of it.

I think you should be doing whatever you can do* to create a society in which people are not forced to act immorally, such as you have been.

>so what, am I suppose to just change careers?

Of course. If you like to make ice cream and the only organization employing people to make ice cream is the mafia, you stop making ice cream professionally.

That kind of black and white thinking implies that the only moral way to live is as a monk, if you're ever spending money on say, a vacation or a new TV or eating out, well why don't you give that money to charity you monster??

You can believe that people have a moral obligation to do good, without believing that people have a moral obligation to maximize good in every aspect of their lives.

Idealism isn't about living as a monk, it's about not compromising on the things that are often seen as "trivial" or "inconsequential". Most people don't jump from acting ethically to accepting work on that is obviously problematic. What actually happens is a long series of small, trivial compromises and other deviations that eventually become normalized[1].

Humans make mistakes; it isn't possible to live the "ideal monk" life. The real question is how small problems are handled? Compromising when the problem isn't a "big enough" ethical problem inevitably[2] pushes that boundary back in a cycle of normalized small, easily avoided deviances. Instead, if a hard line is taken against small problems when they are still small, a lot of larger problems can be avoided.

[1] https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professionalism/Diane_Vaughan_...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGLYEDpNu60

> Idealism isn't about living as a monk, it's about not compromising on the things that are often seen as "trivial" or "inconsequential".

Not seeing the distinction here. If you're an idealist the way hueving indicated and don't live as a monk, you're necessarily compromising on your values every day. And not on trivial or inconsequential things either, since you could easily donate to a variety of non-trivial causes.

What you're suggesting just sounds like reflexive goalpost-moving: the compromises I make are okay, the compromises others make are not.

Morals never serve individually. They serve to facilitate a social environment that favors a group to effectively work as a team. The reality of this is sure to be rife with contradictions, especially at individual scale, but somehow they effort is not contradictory if we consider the madness of a society erased of it’s morals. The challenge of this contradiction can be overcome through conviction and forgiveness alone. It’s essentially the scientific argument for religion. I would like to think nobody would say this is easy, but many people do say it’s easy. It’s not. It’s nearly impossible, but humans have done it time and time again.

What kicked off this whole chain was a discussion on whether a particular individual's decision was moral or not.

"This ideology is impractical/contradictory but still effective in a group" is a potential valid point to make in another context, but irrelevant to what we were specifically discussing here.

No, it's not about living as a monk, it's about not compromising when things really matter.

Refusing to work for a defense contractor has a real long-term impact because you are depriving them of your labor. Working for a defense contractor but not on specific projects is meaningless because they still profit from you and support the military.

> No, it's not about living as a monk, it's about not compromising when things really matter.

If you cut back on living expenses, you could give thousands every year to hungry kids or the environment or [insert good cause here]. Those are all things that really matter. Especially over the course of many years, you could make a real difference. You don't get to handwave away this point just because it's inconvenient to your argument.

You're trying to find a loophole in your own logic to excuse your own behavior that violates your self-proclaimed values. I get that nobody likes cognitive dissonance, but it's quite obvious you're not being internally consistent here.

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