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Comment by petra | Hacker News Reader

I served in the Israeli military, like every 18 year old male.

In ours, there are many places where people don't care.

A lot depends on the role one plays. some are very meaningful. In some you carry a direct and deep responsibility(for your team mates lives, for the people you protect). In some places, you'll get punished severely if you make a mistake, So you really try not to. So you try to do a good job.

In others ? Not so much. So you do the bare minimum and skate by. Many people are like that. It's a general "recommendation" for the new soldier.

Now compare that to civilian life - in most jobs you're just a cog, you get paid the minimum your employer can manage, and most of the benefit of doing a better job is making the boss richer. So why give a fuck ?

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You are always a cog in the wheel, in a miltary the boss in addition making money can also kill you for a useless goal, the $2 trillion and thousands killed and injured over 20 years in afganistan is a recent example .

Being motivated about a job whether miltary /civilian should be about what you can do not if its corrupt /inefficient /incompetent almost any large institutuion usually is

> useless goal

Is bringing peace, civil rights, and good governance to a corrupt, poor, and violent country useless? (Obviously, we ended up failing in large part.)

Agree that "useless" was a bit harsh. Perhaps "unachievable"?

It's a bit like dieting. You take someone who has been chubby their entire life, put them through a bootcamp, and then look at their weight 5 years later. The stats are not looking good in those cases, and I think they largely reflect our efforts in up-leveling the political landscape in historically corrupt countries.

I am not saying that we shouldn't keep trying. But I think we should internalize that the chances of success are slim, and then make that a part of our upfront decisioning process on budget, casualties, political cost, etc.

Well, considering America's recent military endeavors have done the opposite, you have to wonder how many times you can hear that until you conclude it was always a bald-faced lie to mask our economic interests.

Dropping bombs on a country rarely makes it less prone to conflict unless you intend to occupy it, it just gives more recruiting material to the "violent" radicals.

> to mask our economic interests

If "our" means the US and it's people as a collective, then it really seems clear that it wasn't in our collective economic interests either. If our means military contractors, then yes they made out very well.

It was in interests of the oil companies as well, and by extension the interests of the leaders of the country who are effectively on their payroll.

But yes, "our" in this case was perhaps a poor choice of words to refer to the interests of, for lack of a better term, the ruling class, whose interests do not align with the vast majority of the country.

the ghani administration was nothing more than an american imperialist puppet government, forcing american "ideals" (see: consumerism and globalism) on a people who want nothing to do with it.

“God has promised us victory, and Bush has promised us defeat. We’ll see which promise is more truthful,”

- Mullah Omar.

Mostly: the concept of a nation.

Afghanistan isn't a nation. And you can't externally force people to believe they're part of a nation.

Either they do, in which case they're willing to accept sacrifices for the greater good of their fellow citizens, or they aren't.

Yeah violating self-determination of a country without also permanently occupying it can be seen as useless.

// Being motivated about a job whether miltary /civilian should be about what you can do

Usually why people care about that is in-job competition and status hierarchies and ego.

But the role of those psychological/biological mechanisms(for ex. the serotonin system), in apes, for example, is to drive you to compete on mates and food. To get access to real, valuable resources.

Modern organizations are using those mechanisms to motivate you, without giving you any access to real resources. Another form of exploitation.

Some chose not to play that game.

I totally don’t see it this way — the machine that we’re all cogs in does in fact give you access to recourses. Being the best burger flipper gives you job security.

Today we have access to insane resources that our early humans couldn’t have even dreamt about, even for the relatively poor people today.

The machine provides a massive supply chain of a variety of food and medicine that was unheard of for ~all of human history. Flipping burgers for an hour makes you ~$10, with which you can buy food for two people for a whole day (or more). That’s less work for more reward than ever before in history.

So the reward system does work — you’re still competing, and the rewards are massive, relative to apes and early humans.

I don't care about the machine. It will work just the same without my participation(in most roles).

// Being the best burger flipper gives you job security.

Burger flippers earn close to the minimum wage. They always have decent job security, it's easy to find a similar job(not necessarily as a burger flipper).

"That’s less work for more reward than ever before in history"

This is absolutely, myopic, demonstrably wrong at so many levels, from the fact that minimum wage has been stagnant for decades to eising cost of living

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/02/24/this-char...

It seems to me that your comment is the myopic one. GP was talking about long time scales. The reason the industrial revolution was so amazing was the level of efficiency it brought with it. There is no arguing that we get more for less work than any time previous to that. Whether that's worth the cost of everyone being a cog in the industrial machine is however a valid question.

Being the best burger flipper gives you zero job security because your boss will believe they can’t afford you if you suddenly realize how much you are worth. They may preemptively let you go, if they’re a good boss that wants to see you grow.

There’s no such thing as job security without a form of a contract.

Also, you should look up the minimum wage in the 60’s and 70’s and adjust it for inflation. They were getting paid $40USD+ per hour in today’s dollars. So, no $10 is not a lot.

People actually get promoted in the military, though

This is a fantastic comment. Yes, in many tech companies it seems like career growth is dead unless you know someone.

It is just as true in the military as well, most well defined organizations are pyramid in their hierarchy, career growth almost by definition is going to stagnate higher you go up the ladder and depend on factors that may or may not be in your control.

Federal employees move up the pay scale at regular intervals. No other career promises that.

Interesting. Based on your experience, would you say it's a consequence of filling the ranks with draftees?

Despite the rose-colored (gold-colored) glasses in some comments, I'm sure every military, and every other large organization, has the same things. We are dealing with millions of human beings. I've never worked with even 10 that were all so highly motivated.

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