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Comment by bonestamp2 | Hacker News Reader

Due to the private nature of these projects, some parts of the projects have to be developed and tested in a secure area. They need the best talent for these programs. To attract the best talent, they can't require a whole family to live in a secure facility. So, they have to bring in the talent from a non-secure area. The most sensible way to do that is by air.

The carbon footprint is not something that is ever going to factor into this arrangement, at least not until there is a very green plane available. I'm all for reducing carbon footprint, but there are about 100,000 flights/day so these two flights (there/back) make up 0.002% of daily air traffic -- it's a drop in the bucket from a carbon footprint standpoint.

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I agree 100%. It's the same as public outcries about world leaders flying government planes to climate summits. It's not controversial at all to me, but it seems to be to a vast number of people out there for some reason.

Jennifer Government has a hilarious example of what can happen if someone were to try to “fix” this problem.

I think it’s different because there are other options for world leader climate summits (eg, make them virtual) where as there is not a replacement for physically needing to be in a secure test location in the middle of the desert.

I’ve read more about celebrity attendance and private jets and the replacement for those photo ops seems similarly not relatable to this example.

The overarching point is that it doesn't matter in the scheme of things. It's outrageous as an example but it misses the point that industrial regulation and society wide incentives are needed to tackle climate change, not individual behavior changes of an extremely small group of people.

Even the world leaders need to meet in person. When you have people with that level of impact on policy - virtual meetings just do not have the same effect. They need to meet in person, talk, have side-bars, read body-language, get a drink together, do human things while solving human problems.

To attract the best talent, they can't require a whole family to live in a secure facility.

Los Alamos started out as exactly that. A secure lab, with a secure town built around it, housing all the engineers and scientists working on the bomb.

And that technique doesn't scale to something the size of Area 51.

> they have to bring in the talent from a non-secure area. The most sensible way to do that is by air.

Not disagreeing, but adding a few steps:

The most sensible way to bring in talent from a non-secure location is to construct the secure facility right next door to a fantastic place to live for that talent. The second most sensible way is to locate it within a commute-able distance of such a place.

When neither of those are options, then the sensible thing is to facilitate the commute.

> Due to the private nature of these projects, some parts of the projects have to be developed and tested in a secure area. They need the best talent for these programs. To attract the best talent, they can't require a whole family to live in a secure facility. So, they have to bring in the talent from a non-secure area.

"Have to", according to the opinions of the people working on this project, who were not elected, and whose initiatives have not been signed off by the citizens of this "democracy".

> The most sensible way to do that is by air.

According to some people's opinion. It is surely more convenient though for the subset of people who benefit from such programs.

> The carbon footprint is not something that is ever going to factor into this arrangement, at least not until there is a very green plane available.

If the country was more democratic, what "factorsd into" various things may change dramatically. But as luck would have it, the truth of what going on here is a secret, and most citizens are not just ok with it, but seem to consider it a very good thing.

> I'm all for reducing carbon footprint, but there are about 100,000 flights/day so these two flights (there/back) make up 0.002% of daily air traffic -- it's a drop in the bucket from a carbon footprint standpoint.

What other flights and harms happen as a consequence of this research is causally related, but the unknown tends to appear as nonexistent (and thus "is" "nonexistent").

> area. "Have to", according to the opinions of the people working on this project, who were not elected, and whose initiatives have not been signed off by the citizens of this "democracy".

Precisely. And that’s as good as it gets. There won’t be another group able to make the decision.

The initiatives were signed off in that citizens elect representatives, representatives vote on and allocate funds to programs, programs make decisions. There is legislative oversight. It’s also top secret though.

There’s no way for a citizens panel to evaluate these kinds of details due to their secrecy.

One way to improve it would be something like directing the entire portfolio to reduce carbon by 10% or something. But that would probably result in planting lots of trees or something.

> Precisely. And that’s as good as it gets. There won’t be another group able to make the decision.

As long as those running the show in this "democracy" continue to have their way...which I suspect is the case as long as people run on a cognitive model where they are unable/unwilling to distinguish between predictions about reality (for example: the future) and reality itself.

> The initiatives were signed off in that citizens elect representatives....

The election of representatives is not an agreement with all the subsequent decisions made by those representatives, but if the minds of the public can be conditioned appropriately, it can cause it to appear that way to them (and: they will typically defend this clearly false belief passionately, if the conditioning is adequately powerful).

> There’s no way for a citizens panel to evaluate these kinds of details due to their secrecy.

I agree that there is no current way, but that was true for many current human capabilities prior to humans figuring out how to achieve them. But if you never even try to figure something out, there's a decent chance it will never be figured out.

> One way to improve it would be something like directing the entire portfolio to reduce carbon by 10% or something. But that would probably result in planting lots of trees or something.

Agreed. And I suspect there are many, many more opportunities for improvement. A plausibly decent way to come up with a shortlist of ways of more: utilize the human mind's capacity to think, ideally: free from all constraints (conditioning, censorship, etc). Easier said than done perhaps, but the true difficulty can only be discovered if one tries. If we continue to refuse to try (or even think about trying), then we may be stuck at this local maxima forever.

Are you, in the same post, arguing that "the citizens have not signed off on it", that "they seem to consider the work being done a very good thing", and that "things aren't Democratic"?

Lol. Talk about cognitive dissonance. Count me in as someone who approves of military research. Seems like an incredible amount of humanities achievements come through military research and I quite like some of them. So, keep doing it please.

On a more realistic note, I'd much prefer democracies have the most advanced weapons in the world . And I think that the USAF protects most democracies in the world. So I'm pro a strong USAF.

> Are you, in the same post, arguing that "the citizens have not signed off on it", that "they seem to consider the work being done a very good thing", and that "things aren't Democratic"?

Yes.

Human beings are extremely illogical, prone to bias, etc - if the topic of this thread was directly about that abstract(!) idea (like in a thread about human psychology) this would not be controversial or difficult to realize/perceive, but since the topic of discussion is a specific object level matter, minds tend to not have access to that knowledge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-dependent_memory

https://www.victoriaadvocate.com/blogs/reader/politics_plus/...

> Lol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism_(psychology...

https://ehyde.wordpress.com/2013/12/14/freud-on-humor-and-so...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness

> Talk about cognitive dissonance.

In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information, and the mental toll of it. Relevant items of information include a person's actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one or more of those things. According to this theory, when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, people do all in their power to change them until they become consistent. The discomfort is triggered by the person's belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein the individual tries to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.

I would enjoy to actually talk about cognitive dissonance, if you are willing, and able (and the conversation is not censored for being inconsistent with site guidelines, both explicitly stated and non-explicit/de facto enforced caps like: be curious, but not too curious).

Do you perceive yourself to be both willing, and able? I guess, there may be only one way to find out, considering cultural norms.

> Count me in as someone who approves of military research. Seems like an incredible amount of humanities achievements come through military research and I quite like some of them. So, keep doing it please.

During your contemplation of the matter, did you consider this (as well as the links above):

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-counterfactual/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_thinking

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

If not: why not? (I ask this question both rhetorically, and literally.)

Might it be possible that you lack substantial desire to hold beliefs that are necessarily true (or in other words: to have a default (or even occasional) cognitive state other than that which is outlined in my "naive realism" link above)?

> On a more realistic note, I'd much prefer democracies have the most advanced weapons in the world . And I think that the USAF protects most democracies in the world. So I'm pro a strong USAF.

"Each to his own" as the saying goes. Personally, I would much rather people have goals that are more balanced between the dominance of the country they live in with the well-being of all of humanity, regardless of one's culture or geographical location. Do you think that would be a bad idea, or that it is unrealistic, or that such thinking is (in fact*) an example of "cognitive dissonance"?

Note: this comment contains many juicy "baits" that might attract the mind's attention and invoke pre-conditioned behavior (rhetoric, ad hominem, etc)....it will be interesting to see if that is how you will respond, especially now that I have explicitly made reference to that common human cognitive behavior. Sometimes I will "inb4" specific common sub-perceptual intuitive behaviors (leveraging the phenomenon whereby humans tend to have an aversion to behaving in a way that was explicitly predicted before they do it), but in this case I think I will leave those not mentioned.

I'm cracking up, this is great, thanks.

See: "Note: this comment contains many juicy "baits" that might attract the mind's attention and invoke pre-conditioned behavior (rhetoric, ad hominem, etc)"

I wonder: is this (laughing, and only laughing, in response to ideas that challenge your own) the extent of your capabilities, intelligent human?

There is what claims (explicit or implied) one makes about their capabilities, there is one's ability to demonstrate claimed abilities, and then there is "laughing it off", or downvoting &/or silence.

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