Realizing scientists are the real superheroes
deepmind.com
deepmind.com
My dad was a scientist. He was not a superhero. The people he worked with were not superheroes. In fact, they were all thin-skinned, selfish pricks that wanted to keep everything for themselves with no sense of helping others, etc. It was a zero-sum game in his laboratory so the competition was toxic.
Most scientists are desperate for their next round of funding. They will do anything to get it, and it incentivizes them to not do anything against the grain. The real scientific community isn't so magnanimous or selfless at all, it's almost the opposite.
Some people worked themselves ragged to keep the basic machinery of our society working and at the start with no guarantee of any remunerative reward above ordinary pay (some never received hazard pay). Is that not admirable?
Scientist discovered what makes water "clean" but it was activists and politicians that gave it to all. Many of whom you probably would not want to idolize today. The inadequacy of science to save us is evidenced by the fact that to this day there are places where, despite the availability of the technology, people suffer with undrinkable water.
"The Rise and Fall of American Growth" has this really interesting observation that makes this more pointed to me. It is that most of the gains in human life expectancy are attributable to public health initiatives.
I can't remember exactly how the numbers break down but it's something like 70-80% of life expectancy increase happened between 1890 and 1940. During these years public health projects expanded across the country whilst medicine was still quite a crap shoot.
It's so compatible with American culture that we make achievements like this about individual geniuses inventing life giving technology. When in reality the life giving came from popular mass movements and the individuals involved mostly counted as people who could understand and apply that popular will to institutions that often ignored the populus.
Dietary science improves! -> Companies puts stuff in food to make people eat more and get fatter than ever before!
Psychology science improves! -> Companies get better at designing ads and manipulating groups of people into self destructive behavior than ever before!
Or yeah, I guess that makes sense. Science can be used for bad or good, we need to regulate away the bad cases and then science is mostly good.
I really hated during the pandemic how people moralized the science. I don't mean to say the science was ambiguous. It largely was not. But the, "I believe science" memes were a deceptive appeal to find morality somewhere we shouldn't. The moral position for wearing masks was not dependent on the certainty that they work. It depended on a willingness to subdue one's own will for the good of all.
I'm not saying that across the board the collective is the higher moral obligation. Collective vs. individual is a moral area that must be carefully weighed. For me, the clarifying question when suborning one's will to the collective is, "what if they are wrong vs what if I am wrong".
In the case of mask wearing, if they were wrong, there's relatively little harm. 24 months of off and on, minor discomfort. That is something for which, when weighed against the advice of experts is worth submitting over.
Leo Szilard created a petition to try and convince Japan to surrender instead of using nuclear weapons on them [0]. This was signed by 70 scientists but never made it up the chain of command, presumably for political reasons.
Before then, there was the Franck report, signed by 7 scientists, that tried to similarly avert the use of nuclear weapons [1].
Einstein was Jewish and fled Germany because of the Nazis rise to power. Einstein was acutely aware of the dangers a nuclear weapon would impose and was the reason why he wrote a letter to then Franklin Roosevelt recommending the development of a nuclear weapon [2]. Though Einstein didn't work on the Manhattan project directly, I would be surprised if many other scientists in a similar situation didn't feel the same.
Many scientists either fled Europe because of the war or were Jewish.
My model of most scientists working on the Manhattan project was one of need and duty, if not to the US then to quell the threat of a world ruled by fascists, tempered by the understanding that the project they were working on could have negative world consequences.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szil%C3%A1rd_petition
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franck_Report
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szilard_lette...
I believe there were many attempts to convince Japan to surrender before using nuclear weapons on them. For example, the LeMay leaflets dropped before the bombing of Hiroshima:
Read this carefully as it may save your life or the life of a relative or friend. In the next few days, some or all of the cities named on the reverse side will be destroyed by American bombs. These cities contain military installations and workshops or factories which produce military goods. We are determined to destroy all of the tools of the military clique which they are using to prolong this useless war. But, unfortunately, bombs have no eyes. So, in accordance with America's humanitarian policies, the American Air Force, which does not wish to injure innocent people, now gives you warning to evacuate the cities named and save your lives. America is not fighting the Japanese people but is fighting the military clique which has enslaved the Japanese people. The peace which America will bring will free the people from the oppression of the military clique and mean the emergence of a new and better Japan. You can restore peace by demanding new and good leaders who will end the war. We cannot promise that only these cities will be among those attacked but some or all of them will be, so heed this warning and evacuate these cities immediately.
Then the second set of leaflets dropped before the bombing of Nagasaki:
TO THE JAPANESE PEOPLE:
America asks that you take immediate heed of what we say on this leaflet.
We are in possession of the most destructive explosive ever devised by man. A single one of our newly developed atomic bombs is actually the equivalent in explosive power to what 2000 of our giant B-29s can carry on a single mission. This awful fact is one for you to ponder and we solemnly assure you it is grimly accurate.
We have just begun to use this weapon against your homeland. If you still have any doubt, make inquiry as to what happened to Hiroshima when just one atomic bomb fell on that city.
Before using this bomb to destroy every resource of the military by which they are prolonging this useless war, we ask that you now petition the Emperor to end the war. Our president has outlined for you the thirteen consequences of an honorable surrender. We urge that you accept these consequences and begin the work of building a new, better and peace-loving Japan.
You should take steps now to cease military resistance. Otherwise, we shall resolutely employ this bomb and all our other superior weapons to promptly and forcefully end the war.
"Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
This is a different problem from whatever "trust the experts" crap it is currently fashionable for the "what about the lab leak theory" Internet sleuths to agonize over. This is a problem of AI research being badly overhyped, from the admittedly quite amazing things actually being accomplished to this eschatological fatalism where AI is either going to lead to human extinction or the end of all scarcity and suffering, and nothing in-between, and probably before the end of this century.
There's both a lot of good and bad that scientists have done for the world. In fact, single men have killed millions and saved billions. The world is too complex to put people into bins of "good" and "evil." Even with a singular person it is almost impossible to do this. It is also easier to put people into the evil bin rather than the saint bin. But there are no saints nor devils. People are people, and often a product of their times. Look at those that worked on the Manhattan Project. Many thought they were doing the right thing (it is still even arguable if dropping the bombs saved more or killed more). The majority of them regret their work and feel a lot of guilt for their actions. Even though those actions were influenced from extremely limited knowledge, fear monger, and propaganda. Things we all as normal people face. We can only really do the best that we can. Should one be judged for what someone else does with their invention? There's no easy answer.
I don't think calling scientists "superheros" is really trying to say that they are saints. Rather I read it as saying that by doing science you can have large impacts on the world and society. Obviously that can be wielded for good or evil, and often it is used for both. Those that wield the power that science brings also often isn't the scientists themselves. You often see scientists advocating for how to use their work properly (we see this frequently in the ML/AI community today while we also see rampant abuse). But calling them superheros is with the intent to inspire the newer generations to pursue science. It is to give hope. But the good vs evil is orthogonal to this because that can either be individual or out of the hands of the creator.
It is just too easy to bin people and paint with a wide brush. But at the root of this is dehumanization. You aren't seeing individuals. You are representing a non-homogeneous group with biased samples (the extreme cases). Obviously this problem is rampant in more than how we classify scientists. This absolute pessimism is not criticism and does not allow us to grow and redeem ourselves. This is no way to move forward as a society and will only lead us down a darker path. It will only lead to self-fulfilling prophesies.
It's pretty interesting to read the personal story of a researcher who made it to one of the top AI labs in the world.
Personally speaking, if there's one profession that deserves a lot more credit for the positive things that exist in the world, it's the engineers who actually build stuff. An engineer can't bullshit you to the level that a bad scientist can: there's no faking or ambiguity about a bridge that can't stand upright or a building that collapses.
Hero complexes work when an individual can make broad effective change. They don't work in situations requiring heavy cooperation and coordination.
Science is a cooperative field. As is law enforcement and medicine. (Teaching may be a bit different - a lone good teacher can make a difference but you need enough cooperation still).
A perfect example is when coronavirus started, people were told by the scientific beaurocrats and the corporate media that they could not go to work or school, that they could not go to visit family, that everything would shut down. And they were told that this was the only way to prevent catastrophe.
Fast forward to the Black Lives Matter, Inc. "protests", which began a couple of months later, and those same scientific beaurocrats and the corporate media were literally saying that "social justice" was more important than social distancing. That thousands of people marching shoulder to shoulder should in no way be seen as a "super spreader". Because we all know that "the science" shows that the virus doesn't affect you if it knows you're fighting for "social justice".
So don't confuse the beaurocrats in lab coats with actual scientists. No actual scientist talks about science in terms of 'trust' and 'believe'. Science is about questioning, testing hypothesis and trying to verify as best as you can. Trust and belief is the realm of religion. They might as well start telling people to "have faith in the science".
People should be able to have confidence in the methods and motives of the science and health professionals. But that will only happen if we get to hear from the actual scientists whose only agenda is actual science.