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Comment by aratno | Hacker News Reader

Many of the reasons he stated can also be applied to VC funding:

> One thing that makes the slope so slippery is that you have accumulated responsibility for a lab full of graduate students, and the consequences of a major drop in funding will be even more painful for them than it is for you.

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Or any funding of any sort from any source, public or private, for that matter. It's a total garbage argument; anyone can require something you disagree with as a condition for continuation of funding, the military is not special in this regard.

It's basically akin to saying "don't get a job because if you do then your boss might eventually ask you to do something (that's legal) that you disagree with."

Ridiculous.

I don’t think it’s ridiculous. I think it simply says that people with stringent ethics cannot serve others and cede control. They may bootstrap their own businesses, become their own bosses, or find another way to operate independently.

For some, control is relinquished to VCs. For others, it is the funders of their research, or their bosses.

Most people are not as picky about their ethics as they are about their diets.

By his logic you shouldn't do that either just replace "your boss" with "your customers."

"don't start a business because if you do then your customers might eventually ask you to do something (that's legal) that you disagree with."

Except his argument is even sillier, because he's actually arguing that "might eventually" is actually "inevitably." That it's just inevitable that DARPA funded cancer research naturally turns into building cruise missiles.

You can refuse customer. You can not breach already written contract.

If nobody's buying what you're selling, then you have no business.

That still allows you to refuse fair amount of customers. Because here, the condition is "most or all potential customers want exclusively things you don't want to do" which may happen, but is significantly less likely.

But then you're trading money for morality directly. For most businesses, customers are to some extent fungible, so you can afford to be a little picky if you're careful about the health of your company.

But he knows the military funds research to efficiently kill people, which he doesn't want any part of. So it's more like saying, "don't get a job at a company if you know they might require you to do morally uncomfortable things."

That sounds reasonable.

But he would probably be able to support more grad students, that may not otherwise be able to be in grad school, if he took the military funding.

But do you think that the total number of grad students is a measure of good? If so, it makes sense to get funding for them by any means necessary.

But if not, there is an amount of unethical, unacceptable funding which trumps the good of the grad students it provides for.

Couldn’t some other professor take the available funding, and support those additional students?

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