A Boy Genius Who Killed 14M Poor People | Hacker News Reader

A Boy Genius Who Killed 14M Poor People

thebulwark.com

19 pointsjslezak14 comments

What is the moral weight of responsibility for the men who carried out DOGE’s work?

What is scary to me is that at his age, given the opportunity, I would have done the same thing. I was active in the Purdue Libertarians, a student group.

The moral calculus is very simple: taxation is theft, the ends do not justify the means, so it doesn't matter how many people would die. The theft must stop.

Cf. with abortion: Abortion is murder, so it must stop. The ends do not justify the means, so it doesn't matter how much suffering the banning of abortion would cause, abortion must stop.

What these have in common is a phenomenon which Orwell talked about in his "Principles of Newspeak" essay. If you make words like "theft" and "taxation" to be synonymous, or "abortion and murder" to be synonymous, you blur over the endless richness of meaning that English has. You destroy meaning which are useful in tracking features of reality--and you destroy meanings which could refute your position.

At the age of 23, I had completely bought into it. I would have cheerfully consigned those 14 million people to die. At 23, I knew exactly which lever to pull in trolley scenarios.

What is even more scary is this: would I ever even have been able to let myself realize I was wrong? Or would I have spent the rest of my life rationalizing? How, exactly, do you admit to yourself that you consigned more people to death than Goebbels? Would it even be possible to express any kind of empathy without feeling the weight of so much guilt that it would cause you to be so traumatized that you would never recover?

Your testament is well known back to antiquity,

The hazards of improper binding of meaning in language and experience are well known.

It so happens there was a Polish philosopher at the beginning of the 20th century who wrote an enormous tome on the subject of society and science, and the general hazards inherent to the structure of language and meaning:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski

His work has an extensive legacy, yet is not well known.

The subject of semantic hazards needs to be taught. Children can pick up on the hazards very readily with instruction, but are not likely to comprehend the matter on their own. Moreover they will tend to prefer to wield their personal discoveries like magic which is another hazard.

Electronic mass media have greatly amplified semantic hazards and has greatly disturbed us. We are engulfed by media that leverage semantic hazards for ill gains, and many of our leaders are blend of ignorance of the hazards or maliciously exploiting them.

As anyone who is paying attention to the AI can see, the social media industry is greedily at work on systems intending to further disturb and exploit the public mind for fun and profit, no matter the cost.

Always been particularly baffled by the concept of _anti-abortion libertarians_. I mean, they do seem to exist, but it feels like it takes a particularly messy series of mental gymnastics to get there.

It's a bit of a stretch to say he 'killed 14 million people' with absolutely no proof besides hit pieces on the now defunded NPR.

Many of these people that claim to have been affected by the cuts live in war-torn countries. Shouldn't this fall on the shoulders of their government? Why are they poor and destitute with no medical care to begin with?

“No proof” is an interesting way to say “lots of proof I am unwilling to engage with intellectually”. I note that you were unable to find any fault with the NPR pieces and instead tried to distract by talking about political attacks on their funding, apparently hoping that readers weren’t going to know that NPR was simply reporting on a serious article in a top journal:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

As for other governments, yes, the failed ones deserve criticism but the Trump administration broke legal commitments in their rush to prevent aid from reaching people. If your neighbor leaves their home due to an abusive spouse, you don’t get to shift blame to the original abuser when you kick them out in the middle of the night – it just means the victims have been failed again.

We can sit in front of our computers at home and criticize this guy for his actions which he deserves but that does nothing for the future. The big idea we can learn from this is that he was following his hero so whatever his hero said was right also it's very easy to push a few buttons and ruin many lives when all you are doing is looking at a screen specially with our current state of technology. You don't hear and feel the pain you are causing. Yet, we will eventually see it. We need to understand that we can't follow our leaders blindly and, definitely, all our actions have consequences.

Same like with AI, intelligence and compassion are different and separated things. One does not guarantee the other.

Why are Americans required to feed millions of people in other countries???

Nobody said we were, but when you promise to do something you will rightly be blamed for breaking your promise, especially if you do so suddenly with no time for a graceful transition.

It’s also a mistake to think of this as a cost. The United States quite willing spent money to influence other countries because anyone who thinks further ahead than the next quarterly report recognizes that even from a strictly utilitarian perspective it’s better to have international negotiating power instead of wars. Cutting USAID saved far less money than DOGE has already cost taxpayers, and cutting it mostly means that China is picking up the global power status we’re shedding.

Nailed it. And after our relationship with China sours, we are going to need cheap manufacturing. Paraphrasing an article I read the day the funding got cut, "Until today, America was a blessing on the lips of every person in Africa".

It is unfortunate, because sure, we sent a lot of money to Africa without much to show other than influence. Tomorrow, we would industrialize Africa to bolster our economy. Win-Win for all involved.

ETA: pretty good read with an outside perspective:

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/8/3/the-real-reason-...

We chose to do it in part because soft power works better and is cheaper than hard power.

Who's "We"? I don't recall seeing this on a ballot ever.

We are everyone who isn't ham-fistedly destroying American soft power. Up until recently, there was a non-partisan consensus about diplomacy and soft power. But hey, nothing matters anymore, so have at it. Enjoy watching it all burn.

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