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Comment by trimethylpurine | Hacker News Reader

You can't prove that walking through walls is impossible but you are an idiot if you keep trying. It hurts. That's called inductive reasoning.

We've never seen a case where some government in some country doesn't work as hard as possible to ensure that they have the biggest possible weapon. So you should believe someone is doing that. (Point in fact, we know of several governments currently trying to achieve nuclear, aerial, and AI superiority today.)

You can check out why scientists use this same philosophy in modern discovery and belief systems by catching up on the subject of "the philosophy of science." You'll find some 5,000 years of scientific debate and conclusions that roughly culminate in the above system of belief.

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I’m well aware of why people do it, that doesn’t change my feelings about it or my opinion of it.

Developing the more heinous weapons before the other guy is the pragmatic thing to do, but it doesn’t give you the moral high ground.

> (Point in fact, we know of several governments currently trying to achieve nuclear, aerial, and AI superiority today.)

And why are they doing that? To get it first since others will do it anyway.

So, honest question, that being the case, is the best solution to let them gain superiority, exercise revolution at the cost of millions of lives, and then hope they don't kill you and your countrymen?

I think making seemingly moral short term decisions that result in maximum casualties is not actually moral. It's stupid, and wrong.

Creating an arms race by letting someone who isn't the current leader gain an advantage ensures that a power struggle will ensue. It implies revolution in all known cases in history.

The moral high ground you're referring to should result in the best outcome. It doesn't arise from a guy standing at the top of a hill by himself shouting that he's the most moral guy while getting us all killed in the course of violent revolution. That's just megalomania.

They're very similar. One relies on rational thinking about actual expected outcomes, the other relies on one's own opinion about right and wrong.

You have to be careful because it's deceivingly easy to be the latter and end up an accidental megalomaniac that kills us all.

See history for countless examples.

You mentioned your feelings. I'm glad you did. Your feelings are nearly always a guide to bad outcomes. I'd trust you more as a leader if you instead relied on your rational faculties to guide us to good and moral decisions and outcomes.

And I'm confident that you'd find that your self doubt is diminished when you can self reflect on your decisions and find in all cases that they were made using the best information at the time, instead of how you felt about them at the time.

In the case of weapons development, it's not about whether someone will do it or not. It's about whether that is a good reason/excuse to then do it yourself

So, if someone else is going to develop something very harmful, is the best solution to develop something equally or more harmful? Or are there maybe other better solutions to this problem?

There might be, but we've never seen one. The culture with the lesser weapons is subjected to inferior quality of life when compared to the oppressing culture in all cases in history.

So, it might be worth entertaining whether you can convince everyone in your culture to be subservient?

Here again, historically that's never happened, so it's not worth believing. And that's just to check if there's a better solution. You might arrive at an even worse outcome.

Revolutions require even bigger weapons, despite sometimes having better long term outcomes. How many people have to die to test our theory?

Genghis Khan created centuries of peace horrifically with bigger guns. The Ottoman Turks similarly did. The US, now. And many more cases that we know of. All of these examples coincidentally allowed multiculturalism, and even more, they enforced it as a matter of law. Just as an interesting side point.

Life is terrible in all cases in history where it's not clear who has the biggest guns. That's always been the demarcation of the beginning of a new regime at the cost of millions of lives.

Revolutions are horrible. That's what we know for sure.

I want to clarify my side point. I brought up multiculturalism because I think these societies find that to be a requirement for peace once they've established military superiority.

I want to clarify that because I could see someone taking that statement to mean that multiculturalism is inherently wrong, which is the opposite of what I'm saying.

Huh? There have been lots of extremely nasty things which there has been implicit or explicit international agreement not to develop and/or deploy, and this has largely held. Weaponised nerve agents, most biological weapons, salted nuclear weapons (the doomsday machine from Doctor Strangelove, essentially), extremely large nuclear weapons...

Agreement? Never happened.

Sadam Hussein? IRGC? United States?

When?

It's never happened. The US itself doesn't abide by Geneva convention. Let alone other UN members.

You're living in pretense, I'm sorry to point out.

The world is run by terrorists. The only question is which terror group you want to retain power.

Personally, I like the multiculturalism that the US champions, and the Turks used to, and the Khan dynasty used to, and Persia used to. And only because it's the most likely recipe for the longest track record for peace.

Like it or not, history doesn't agree with your optimism as much as you and I wish it did.

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