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Comment by Atlantium | Hacker News Reader

Many humans are quite aggressive. Pacifists are easily defeated by force. How can you have progress without security?

That's a straw man. The problem is tons of research and development won't happen without the state, but the main avenue the state funds development (as opposed to research) is the military.

There are many possible futures, and the world is highly non-ergodic, so there is a real cost here to biasing the development of technology in this matter. "Opportunity cost" doesn't do the concept justice.

We don't have to stop military research, but we should bring up the Arpa-E and other such things to bring balance to the situation.

> That's a straw man. The problem is tons of research and development won't happen without the state, but the main avenue the state funds development (as opposed to research) is the military.

The reason the op's comment is not actually a straw man (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man) is because the first governments were developed out of a necessity to ensure a unity of peoples, the functioning of essential systems, and the protection of said peoples and systems. It's also why (for instance) the very first sentence of the US constitution has multiple touch points with national security:

> We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, *establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty* to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

To summarize: defense is how so much of our monetarily non-viable societal advances take place because defense is primarily why governments exist at all. Even arpa-e (thanks for your edit—it's a good topic to bring up) exists to minimize our reliance on foreign energy, which is directly motivated by national security.

Come on, nobody knows how the first governments were developed. No written records exist.

Yeah, and as far as we can tell those first states massively sucked for almost everyone, too.

We know what government is per se, regardless of the motives of the earliest state governments.

But here we miss an important point which is that government is natural to human societies. The mistake is to think that government is some artificial construct at odds with human nature. Tribes are governed. Families, the smallest society, are governed. What we call "government" is just a modification of the most basic form of government of the family (kings, for example, were analogically fathers of the kingdom). The authority of the state is derived from the authority of parents through the principle of subsidiary.

I agree with the spirit, but I prefer to reject the natural/artificial distinction. Societal and biological evolution can be a very "arbitrary" processes. Sometimes something just happens, and is good enough, and sticks around. It's ultimately pretty subjective which things are "over-determined" and what wasn't (photosynthesis? agriculture? Something like eukaryotes from endo-symbiosis?), without being able to run a bunch of difficult experiments.

Government and money are two institutions who's origins are much debated, but I would be find replacing them with something else, "self-perpetuation" replaces "natural" for me.

I also so think this is dovetails with the best argument for reproducible bootstraps (as the follow up to reproducible builds). Without that, and like with our socials institutions, we have a a "historical bootstrap" we are constrained by. But by making an artificial bootstrap, we gain some freedom to tinker rather than being completely constrained by historical happenstance.

With software it is clear what this looks like. With something like governance and money it is less clear. Certainly it's hard to imagine the John Locke style arguments bootstrapping from "primitive man" working out, as children must be raised in a culture before they get the privileges of democracy, and are thus biased. But perhaps there are other more feasible ways.

America is preventing Russia from antagonizing Europe, all the while we foot the bill for maintaining a capable military.

China is a looming threat. If you don't see that, I don't know what I can say.

Take away America's military and see what happens.

Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Spratleys, 9-dash, water rights, Belt+Road indebtedness, Crimea, Ukraine...

The US has to be strong out of necessity, and we get treated like shit for it. America is far from perfect, but it's Democratic and celebrates individualism and free speech. And I'm not persecuted for being LGBT. I'd hate to be in Russia or China where I'm told I can't think my own thoughts or have my own preferences.

If we didn't have to pay so much for our military capabilities, maybe we'd all get to enjoy the same free health care and social programs that Europe, Canada, and other nations enjoy.

Europe needs to carry some of this weight.

> America is preventing Russia from antagonizing Europe?

Er, Ukraine is in Europe. Out of 10, how would you rate the USA's efforts at stopping Russia there so far?

"Europe" is probably the wrong term here. The USA's efforts to stop Russia from antagonizing NATO members probably rates 8/10.

Part of Russia is also in Europe.

No, no.

Ukraine paid the 'entry price' that was asked of them to be protected by USA, (and France, UK, Russia, China) by surrendering their nuclear weapons.

This was a level of vulnerability and trust in third parties the good citizens of USA (and the others above) would never for a second countenance.

The USA (and the others) willingly signed up to the deal [1]. And then failed to do any deterring when it was time to walk the talk.

[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit...

That was a non-binding memo. If Ukraine wanted protection then they should have insisted on a mutual defense and non-aggression treaty.

> That was a non-binding memo.

That's not the problem of Ukraine. The whole world sees what agreements like that are worth. Alternatively, if that would be the binding memo, and USA broke the "legally binding" promise, nobody would prosecute. The reaction of the world would be about the same.

Bottom line: non-bindingness doesn't matter here.

>Part of Russia is also in Europe.

Care to explain?

Edit: sorry, my brain read Europe as EU.

The cat is out of the bag, Ukraine gave up 3d largest Nuclear arsenal on the promise that other nuclear powers mainly US would provide security. Everyone saw how that played out so a country would need to be suicidal not to start a nuclear program.

Just ask Gadhafi, Saddam and Kim Jung Un. Oh, right, only one can answer!

Ukraine did not have as much of a choice as one would think. All the nukes were set up to be controlled by Moscow and it would have taken enough time to bypass the controls that the Russian army could feasibly have invaded or destroyed them.

They were not a major portion of Nuclear Weapons R&D and manufacturing were done in Ukraine including design and manufacture of majority of electronics including guidance systems, comms etc. as well as most top tear weapons were designed by Yuzhnoye Design Office (Dnepr Ukraine) and manufactured by Yuzhny Machine-Building Plant (Dnepr Ukraine)

Ukraine indeed had a lot of manufacturing and design of nuclear weapons. Even then the control, launch and timings were all centralized in Moscow. They would have had to reverse engineer and hack a lot of it amidst attacks from Russia and perhaps even the US.

I think you are still confused the control systems were designed and manufactured in Ukraine there was nothing to reverse eng. The only step not done in Ukraine was uranium enrichment.

Ukraine never really possessed nuclear arsenal. There were nuclear weapons on their territory but they lacked full operational capability to employ them, and didn't have the technical infrastructure to maintain them without Russian support. Those capabilities could have been built out in time but it would have required significant resources.

Right casuse Yuzhny Machine-Building Plant and Yuzhnoye Design Office are not in Dnepr Ukraine.

> Ukraine gave up 3d largest Nuclear arsenal on the promise that other nuclear powers mainly US would provide security

> mainly US

You missing historical order here. Ukraine gave up their arsenal long before they decided to drop Russia as an ally and play with Europe/USA (latter happens after "Maidan"). So at given time point (when Ukraine signs memorandum) they done it with _only_ Russia' protection in mind (as there was single country in past and they're both slavic)

Please enlighten me on the order :) being a Ukrainian born in 70th

Citing nti.org:

> By 1996, Ukraine transferred all Soviet-era strategic warheads to Russia.

> Ukraine received extensive assistance to dismantle ICBMs, ICBM silos, heavy bombers, and cruise missiles from the __U.S.__ funded Cooperative Threat Reduction Program

Citing wiki: > Euromaidan was a wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Ukraine, which began on the night of __21 November 2013__ with public protests in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kyiv

Easy, uh?

well even by your convoluted logic you would have to go back to Orange revolution in 2004. But none of what you site has anything to do with Russia being considered a mil ally. by Ukrainan gov. Russia was considered the biggest threat to Ukraine independence starting with Ukraine's first president.

> convoluted logic

The only convoluted thing here is your own history as you see it.

> Russia was considered the biggest threat to Ukraine independence starting with Kyivan Rus'

Until Yushchenko there was no such president. Relations never were stable, though.

Look at A.I. Kuzmuk paper "Ukraine military doctrine evolution" if curious. VDU-1993 and VDU-2004 never considered Russia as a threat. VDU-2004 states there is no direct military threat against Ukraine, just possibility of being involved into bigger conflict. Kuchma even cancelled statement about NATO integration in VDU-2004, by making it more smooth.

I highly doubt Kuzmuk ever read that book to begin with :) He certainly never wrote it :). To argue an empire is not a threat to the country that gained independence from it in very recent time is very toll order and Kravchuk always aknowleged Russia as a threat to Ukrainian independence as did Kuchma.

Well could you point to the downside of this? From teflon to internet and countless other things you use every day that came out of DARPA and other def. research, what would have changed if it was funded via different model?

History shows that conflict has actually been rather useful for our development

That's circular — it's important precisely because nothing else created the political will for that much state-run development.

We should at least try to do non-military development, even if military dev will continue to have an edge.

The problem is privileging technologies that have defence capabilities. There are likely countless ideas that could have similar success to DARPA projects if they had similar access to capital and state support.

However, unless it can show off some military capability its funding can't be justified using the current model, leaving a gigantic subsections of technologies that could have similar innovative impact underserved by this level of support.

Without defense, the others cannot exist. Without defense, you cannot have a space within which you can securely do other work. So it cannot be a matter of competition but prioritization.

Of course, we can criticize the massive amount of funding that goes to military contractors and the like (Eisenhower did). That's where the devil is: the military-industrial complex.

"Defense" is the worst euphemism for the military. I wish it was still called the Department of War, which is honest.

No one is saying abolish the military. In in fact we are saying some forms of state–military complexes might be good.

It's the idea the state-driven industry must be tied to defense and not anything else that's the problem.

I think the complaint is not that the government funds research for defense, it's that it could be funding energy, medical, etc research.

I honestly don't know if I fully agree with his complaint, because I'm fairly sure the government does fund a lot of other research that isn't defense focused (see a lot of universities).

It funds many sorts of research but much less development. Research ideas do not develop themselves and so the story of modern academia is zillions of abandoned ideas.

DARPA does lots of good things — I have in fact worked on a DARPA project and enjoyed it. It's well run.

But each of those things has to be contorted to have a military purpose, even if the main benefit we get in the end is not military-related.

We should be able to research those things just because they are good, without laundering their best purpose. And we should open the door to other things that seem just as promising, but are harder to so launder.

The fact I can't tell you the counterfactual is kind of the point — most of us have no idea about the world-changing effects of the development not persued might be, just as the average person on the 1970s did not envision today's internet. The world of possible futures is simply too open ended.

One prominent one is that we use fear to control other countries instead of love.

We spend so much human talent on defense, and sure we got a bunch of great technologies, but who's to say that we wouldn't have got them through some other avenue, later? Or perhaps even better technologies. I only speculate about the former, but I am quite certain a lot of the violence in the world has been caused by American Neo-colonialism and the terrorism we imposed upon the world. I am a betting man, and I bet that if we didn't fuck the Russians over so hard in WW2, that we wouldn't have had the cold war.

How did the US fuck over Russia in WWII? And are you aware of the billions of foreign aid many countries get from the US which is tied to issues like human rights, freedom, and democracy?

The US let the Russians break themselves fighting the Eastern front while they invaded north Africa. The North African front was basically secure while Stalingrad was happening, and if the US applied more pressure to Germany in this period, as the Russian requested, the Germans probably would not have done so much population damage to Russia.

Bitterness of this fueled a lot of ideological tensions. I was also taught that a large motivation of dropping the Bomb was to scare the Russians.

Source: My Highschool education. Obviously, commentary on WWII is not objective, but I stand by my thesis, considering the actual action that the United States engages in in present times. Its in our history to be both ideologically driven and meta gamers.

That line of argument doesn't make any sense to me. The Americans were actually in FAVOR of a cross-channel invasion in 1942-43 (see operation sledgehammer and operation roundup), but were shouted down by the British. Which, to their credit, was fair: the Allies lacked the ability to launch a large amphibious assault in 1942 into France. They lacked a sufficient fleet of landing craft, along with the proper doctrine, the same degree of air superiority they would have in 1944.

"The North African front was basically secure while Stalingrad was happening"

That doesn't make any sense. Operation Torch (the Allied invasion of Morocco and Algeria) didn't even start until Nov 8th, and Montgomery's position in Libya was hardly "secure" before November. But the Soviets were already launching counter-offensives and encircling the German army by the end of November. If you're counting from the beginning of the main Stalingrad offensives, August 1942, yeah maybe you could call the North African theater "stable", if by stable you mean that the Allies just one a defensive victory and managed to stall out an offensive into Egypt. But it's not like they could cancel their planned invasion of Algeria and Morocco and re-plan for an invasion of France in a couple months.

Plus the US would be invading mainland Europe Sept 3rd of 1943, and I really don't think they could have performed a successful invasion anytime sooner.

It’s hard to imagine the scale of the U.S. air operations against Germany and say the U.S. let the Russians break themselves without doing anything to help. Or look at the disaster that was Market Garden and think the U.S. could have invaded earlier. The U.S. was under no ethical obligation to throw away lives uselessly in a German blender as a distraction.

Without Lend Lease keeping the Russians supplied with food/logistics they would have starved and collapsed.

Straw Man noun 1. an intentionally misrepresented proposition that is set up because it is easier to defeat than an opponent's real argument.

My comment speaks directly to to above post as follows: "It really sucks that there's a 'D' for 'Defense' at the front of the acronym. Their website says they're "creating breakthrough technologies and capabilities for national security". Horrible that national security is the reason for this, when it should be human progress."

As for the world being difficult to predict, or to use your phrasing "non-ergodic", it is in fact easy to predict that security will be necessary. It is difficult to predict exactly what the threat to security will be. This uncertainty alone justifies development. Also, DARPA tech is well known for spreading outside of it originally intended remit. Ie the research itself can be of use in other areas.

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