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Comment by bigyabai | Hacker News Reader

> by having the smartest people inside these companies coming up with the best tech while also shaping the conversation from the inside.

The smartest people don't get that choice. Oppenheimer, Teller and Ulam were all ignored in matters of policy, the Manhattan Project was not designed to integrate their political feedback. Conversely, the scientists at Peenemünde never got to question the effectiveness of V-1 bombs with a CEP measured in miles. Their participation in policy was deliberately severed, ultimately to the detriment of the Wehrmacht.

When you start seeing technologies that affront humanity - warrantless surveillance, civilian terror weapons, chemical/biological agents - that's when normal people step out. No amount of sanewashing will fix the underlying administrative issue, it only exacerbates the underlying moral dilemma.

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Fair point. I don’t think that simply working at a defense-tech would or should give someone sway over political decisions.

Which might be also good: von Neumann advocated for a U.S. nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union.

In the context of this thread my claim is simply that smarter people will yield smarter solutions that balance the tradeoffs mentioned earlier. The choice to use those weapons still lies with our elected leaders.

I guess that's what I'm confused by, then. Americans don't have a duty to prevent their government from descending into crony capitalism. As long as the Fed undervalues intelligent labor, the smartest Americans are incentivized to go the private ownership route and extort the defense industry themselves. Protecting DARPA and preserving valuable Pentagon assets is the federal government's job - nobody else is paid to care about it, nobody else can fix it.

> smarter people will yield smarter solutions that balance the tradeoffs mentioned earlier.

That's conjecture, as far as I'm aware. Again, the earliest researchers of spacecraft were being forced to design a pitiful terrorist weapon. Those same scientists wouldn't meaningfully progress peaceful space exploration until decades later. There is no balance inherent to having good ideas or executing them well, the procurement process can (and frequently does) excise intelligent thought when tensions run high.

FWIW, I bear little ill-will towards the defense industry or US service members. I just think that "shaping the conversation" is a fool's errand when "the conversation" is warrantless surveillance, and "shaping" simply means finding the best way to do it. An intelligent humanitarian would be fired long before they instill an ounce of ethical change.

> that's when normal people step out.

So Oppenheimer Teller and Ulam were not normal/sane people. In other words, they had the choice, and made a decision. Everything is political.

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