"Half" is obviously an exaggeration but apart from time-sharing operating systems, the Internet, what is now CSAIL and (partially) GPS, they sponsored a ton of open source projects. They used to maintain a catalog[0]. The Web Archive version[1] contains a partial list (e.g. OpenBSD was sponsored only for a few years and is not included there).

[0] https://www.darpa.mil/opencatalog

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140301185004/https://www.darpa...

Ethics are easy when you can afford food.

Post 2000s there has been a pretty fundamental change in the US economy. Things like rent and food were far cheaper. There was also a lot of potential income to be made by individuals by connecting buyers and sellers. Typically if you wanted to sell something like a car, you either went to a dealer that screwed you, or you put and ad in the local paper. If you watched around you could quickly buy cheap cars and turn them quickly for more than enough profit to make it worth while.

The internet quickly flattened this. First by pulling all the buyers and sellers on one advertising site it quickly turned into the fastest with the most capital won. Then the sites themselves figured out they should be the middle man keeping buying up the stock and selling it.

There has also been a huge consolidation to just a few players in many markets. This consolidation and many times algorithmic collusion has lead to the general ratcheting of prices higher. When you start adding things in like 'too big to fail' the market becomes horrifically unbalanced to large protected capital with unlimited funds from the money printing machine.

It's no wonder we quickly dropped ethics, most of us would starve to death in the system we've created.

And yet Gen X is the demographic that fell hardest for Trump.

CSI and Law and Order as well contributed to the perception that the majority of police officers spend their time diligently and righteously investigating real crimes (usually resulting in finding the culprit) instead of spending their days watching traffic in pursuit of pretextual traffic stops, and solving less than 50% of violent crime cases.

Please lets also not forget computer games. Call of Duty, Battlefield, Medal of Honor, oh what a glorious thing to be an american soldier...

So, no conspiracy theory necessary.

> No conspiracy necessary. The CIA bought the rights to the 1954 film Animal Farm, modified the ending to fit propagandist ends,

yea, I remember reading the book and then watching the movie and it had differences iirc, its available on youtube for free and I remember some comments talking about the different ending.

IIRC, in the movie, the animals finally kick the pigs out and everything. It was a good ending.

but in the book, there was not a good ending, the humans and the pigs were celebrating together and then ended up fighting in between each other

> Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

This is the last paragraph I found from the book (had to download it via archive.org to find the last para)

So am I correct or is there more to the story?

Such a great and underappreciated movie.

  > It means you can bring your priors into the classroom but I can’t.

  > Ethics is and always has been applied theology

You seem to be under the belief that without god there are no moral convictions. Well I'll quote a very famous conman, as I feel the same as him.

  The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what's to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn't have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine. I don't want to do that. Right now, without any god, I don't want to jump across this table and strangle you. I have no desire to strangle you. I have no desire to flip you over and rape you.
  - Penn Jillette

Hey look, we did Secular Ethics, and discussed religion! I disagreed with you, but you'll notice I never made claims about if I believe in god or not. You'll notice I make no judgement on you for believing in god. You'll notice, my entire argument is based on the origin of morals and really we've discussed is what is in a man's heart matters. This is no different than "Is an act of kindness good if one films themselves doing it?" There's a lot of gray in that question, obviously.

No ethics class is going to exclude you for being religious, as that would be unethical.

I have to strongly disagree.

I've met people who have never been in touch with organized religion. They generally have excellent ethical frameworks. I've also read the bible, it does not have a consistent moral or ethical framework.

How can it be that areligious people have ethics if they need god for ethics?

Ethics is all about being human, it does not require a god, and it does not require anyone to understand even what a human is, or what process led to us living life together. The subjective experience of life and the subjective experience of life in a society is all you need to develop ethics.

sorry, perhaps I misunderstand, but dont you /wouldn’t you take the best from others as well? Is that outside of consideration for some reason?

It’s at least an option for consideration. I shouldn’t have spoken normatively.

Is your position that compassion is only possible via religion?

Both can be true that Leaders can use god to justify their terrible actions and Scientists can use theories/philosophies to justify their terrible actions too.

Justification of any evil action to consider oneself as a good guy might be a human quality.

That being said, Majority of wars/conflicts in the past have sadly been because of religions and that number doesn't seem to be stopping and is still continuing to this day sadly.

I understand the argument, but the number of reprehensible Christians (or other flavor of religion) out in the world doesn’t seem to back up the claim that viewing God outside oneself leads to better moral results.

Option C: God doesn't exist as far as is currently known

> who says?

Only people can say things. And following people that start by lying that they have unique and superior insight into what things ought to be is not a good strategy. Secular is just saying, we are all in this together as equals, let's figure things out, here's what we got thus far.

My requirements for someone's ethical opinions to be "valid" are that they don't criticize the field of ethics as useless. I guess that is a "requirement" I have, but it's a pretty nitpicking, useless distinction to make.

If someone criticizes the French language, but doesn't speak a word of French, sorry, but I don't have much respect for their opinion on French.

And no, I don't "assume they aren't well thought out," because many of these people have explicitly said philosophy is a waste of time.

One of my best friends is a philosophy grad, and another is a very intelligent financier. What we've come to realize is that speaking and writing and making arguments is fruitless. You either have had the embodied experiences to recognize a statement is directionally correct -- to various magnitudes -- or you don't.

No amount of words will change that.

It is my experience -- after seeing the quality of thinking from those philosophically trained (I am not) -- that learning philosophy is learning how to think, and by extension figuring out for oneself what is capital g Good.

Morals and ethics are different and you conflate them. That is the crux of your confusion. Someone can understand morality inherently without ever thinking about it; but ethics requires actual intentional thought over years and years of reflecting on lived experience. What is good for you and your small circle can be grasped intuitively, but to grasp what is good "at scale" must be reasoned about. Without having seriously grappled with this, one is liable to have simplistic views, and in many cases hold views that have already been trodden through and whose "holes" have been exposed and new routes taken in unveiling ethics.

Without seriously having interfaced with it, it's like talking to someone about the exercise science when all they know is do steroids, lift weight, and eat. Sure, that works, but it lacks nuance and almost no thought has gone into it.

Anyway, this is tiring. Philosophical discussions are not something to do with strangers. It requires intimacy and is a deeply personal conversation one should have with those close to them and explore together.

Then I don’t understand the point of your initial comment or what you’re trying to say.

What's in the autocorrect dictionary usually has nothing to do with what you typically write. No reason to wonder (i.e. if the insinuation being that that's a word they'd typically use).

My worst autocorrect story is a message to my mother in law referring to my sister in law. I told my mother in law that I’d give my wife’s sister “a*al’ when I got there. It was supposed to be ”a call” I’m still traumatized decades later.

I've worked as a contractor for a safety system that turned out to be for a foreign military. I was given a signal, and told to write software to fit it. The signal could plausibly be collected for a wide variety of civilian purposes.

What I realized later was that none of the civilian markets could possibly justify the cost of the project.

The particular type of signal fitting I was doing was only achievable by a few thousand expensive domain experts in the world, so, I think that addresses your other point.

Lots of people working on the Manhattan project did not know what they were working on. The core group of physicists did, but not many others.

Because working on things that go boom is like working on fireworks. The fact the end up on people is incidental.

If "This doesn't fit into my mental model, so everyone else must be lying" is how you deal with things you didn't personally experience, do what you have to.

maybe they should make the person with the codes black. I think several cold-war presidents probably wouldn't have a problem with that

This is a false dichotomy. In the words of the post-war US strategic bombing survey:

"Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."

While this is all speculation, that was at the very least a defensible point of view held by a bunch of Americans shortly after the war.

Regarding firebombing: Hiroshima alone killed probably more civilians than the entire Tokyo firebombing campaign. A firestorm is a terrible thing, but you can still run from a fire even if your whole city burns down; you can't run from a nuke.

So if you measure collateral damage primarily in civilian deaths, firebombing still looks much better (a hypothetical firebombing campaign would have probably killed <40k civilians in Hiroshima instead of 100k, guesstimating from Tokyo numbers).

Edit: I don't think dropping the nuclear bombs was especially ethically questionable compared to the rest of the war, but I feel it is very important to not whitewash that event as valiant effort to save young American conscripts. Regarding it as a slightly selfish weapon demonstration feels much more accurate to me.

> Do you think a continuation of the firebombing campaign and an invasion of the Japanese home islands would have resulted in fewer deaths of civilians (particularly of the 'volunteer fighting corps')?

I don't know, but there's a lot of evidence this wasn't a factor in the decision to drop the bombs on Japan. The planners for the invasion and the planners for the bombing weren't exactly talking to each other and coordinating the strategy.

They had the bomb and they were going to use it. Everything else was an a posteriori justification.

Now think what will happen with easily deployed AI-powered weapons.

Basically all types of weapons have been used in all sorts of conflicts; the British used aircraft in their mandates, and the Italians used chemical weapons in Ethiopia. That said, I am not aware of any weapon which was developed specifically for use against a less technologically advanced adversary, most novel weapons are developed for use against peer-adversaries.

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

[flagged]

Did you mean Venezuela or Iran?

Because there are actual technical impediments why neither China nor the Russians could have blown a US carrier in the Caribbean.

Yes, agreed. Mainland China is not under any threat from Taiwan, for instance.

However, the Iranians chant Death To America regularly and openly. They have both an active nuclear program and a means to deliver a nuclear weapon. They are also heavy funders of anti-American militias and groups. It is incumbent upon the Americans to ensure that the Iranians do not achieve their nuclear ambitions.

Yes, agreed 100%. Some groups see it as their mission to dominate Eastern Europe, or the entire Middle East, or the entire southern Asian continent. The smaller states in the areas are under constant threat.

However in the case of Iran, who openly calls for the destruction of America and is blatantly developing technology that seriously threaten America and other Middle Eastern states, decisive military action to prevent the threat is important. Don't watch the bully themself and wait for him to confront you, when he is telling you the whole time his intention to destroy you.

Your post reads as if you would rather those aggressors who threaten America to not be disposed of. How is the world a better place with the aggressors than without?

In general I agree. 100% agree.

But the AI cat-for-war has left the box for both Iran and the US. Opposing US development of AI for warfare will not suppress US's adversaries from developing the technology.

You're arguing semantics. The west refuses to recognize Taiwan as the legitimate government of China and refuses to recognize it as an independent country.

Whatever they claim, the west (and most of the world) due to Chinese leverage/power refuses to recognize.

Taiwan meets all the criteria for being a state. It controls land, population, it has a military, it has a government, currency, passports etc. etc. It's a de-facto country/state.

You literally described independence.

You're confusing land with governance.

Taiwan buys military equipment and operates it's own military very much like it is independent of China and views Chinese troops in it's territory as a threat.

  > No one is afraid.

  > Taiwan themselves still claim to be the Republic of China and not separate from the rest of China.

Mainland China's current government is called the "People's Republic of China" (PRC)[1]

Taiwan calls itself the "Republic of China" (RoC)[2]

The difference of one word is very important. It's easy to miss, which is why Taiwan even changed its passport[3]... over a decade ago.

But also... they issue different passports. They have different governments. Really, this is not hard to understand that Taiwan considers themselves independent and the PRC considers the RoC a bunch of rebels. And... what do rebels typically do?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_recognition_of_T...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_of_the_People%27s...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan

[3] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1758230.stm

"China" is analogous to "France," not "Europe."

There was a civil war inside China, with the rulers of both competing sides claiming the entire country as their own for decades after the shooting ended. Inside Taiwanese politics, there has been a shift relatively recently (in the last 20 years), but it would be a major shift if that were actually implemented as official policy.

> Many States may try to make claims for the title to support their legitimacy and heavenly mandate to rule, but that doesn't make it true.

We live in a post-WWII world of national sovereignty and inviolable borders (or at least we did until very recently). That's what China rests on for its claims, legally speaking.

That’s reasonable. In the context of the larger discussion here a post up thread’s implication that a graduate in 2007 would be anti-war because of Vietnam is kind of dubious. Public opinion of the war shifted quite a lot in the four years after “Mission Accomplished” and Freedom Fries.

No

Me, an Iraq combat veteran had a different experience of that period than an investment baker of similar age

That was not true for WWII and to a lesser extent Vietnam due to the draft

The distinction is draft vs “all volunteer” wars