Am I the only one to think that no, creating military robots isn’t a “good career path” towards friendly AI, because creating military robots is inherently unfriendly to humanity? Especially if you live in the US and know that your robots will be used in aggressive wars against poorer countries. It’s some kind of crazy ethical blindness that most Americans seem to have for some reason, where “our guys” are human beings, but arbitrarily chosen foreigners deserve whatever they get… Just like this incident I saw on HN when one guy asked about career prospects working for the occupation force in Iraq, and another answered that it’ll be an “amazing and unique experience”. You’ll note my reply there was much more concise.
It’s some kind of crazy ethical blindness that most Homo sapiens seem to have for some reason, where “our guys” are human beings, but arbitrarily chosen foreigners deserve whatever they get
Fixed it for you.
And the reason is evolved psychological instincts with pretty obvious selection benefits.
I don’t think that’s an accurate correction. Because America is the current hegemonic power Americans can get away with feeling that other nations aren’t “real” in the sense the USA are. For example when considering some hypothetical situation that would concern the whole planet an American might only consider how the USA would react, while anyone else in the same situation would in addition to the reaction of their own nation at the very leasts also have to consider how the USA reacts, and might even consider other nations since their situation is more obviously symmetrical to their own.
Because America is the current hegemonic power Americans can get away with feeling that other nations aren’t “real” in the sense the USA are.
I’m afraid I don’t know what this means.
For example when considering some hypothetical situation that would concern the whole planet an American might only consider how the USA would react, while anyone else in the same situation would in addition to the reaction of their own nation at the very leasts also have to consider how the USA reacts, and might even consider other nations since their situation is more obviously symmetrical to their own.
There might be pragmatic realities that force non-Americans to consider the reactions of foreigners more than Americans must. Americans have two oceans and the world’s strongest military to keep a lot foreign troubles far away, other people do not. But this isn’t evidence that Americans care less about foreigners than those from other countries do. It sounds like you’re talking about a political blindness instead of an ethical blindness. Besides, there is equally good reason to think America’s hegemonic status makes Americans more worried about foreign goings-on since American lives and American business concerns are more often at stake.
Not “real” is the best description I have. You could say having the same sort of attitude towards other nations you might have towards Oz, Middle Earth or the Empire from Star Wars even though you intellectually know that they really exist, but that only comes close to what I mean. I must stress that not all Americans have this attitude, but some seem to do, and thats enough to influence the discourse.
But this isn’t evidence that Americans care less about foreigners than those from other countries do. It sounds like you’re talking about a political blindness instead of an ethical blindness.
I was thinking more of e. g. first contact situations in SF stories and things like that, not necessarily normal international politics, but I think it extends to all fields: Domestic politics (the amount and the kind of consideration the fact that a policy seems to work well somewhere else gets), pop culture, sports, science, language learning, wherever one might consider other nations Americans have more leeway not to do so. This doesn’t by necessity have to extend to ethical considerations, but when cousin_it observes that it appears to it seems inappropriate to me to “correct” that out.
I must stress that not all Americans have this attitude, but some seem to do, and thats enough to influence the discourse.
Exactly zero evidence has been presented that Americans have this ill-defined attitude at a higher rate that non-Americans.
wherever one might consider other nations Americans have more leeway not to do so.
No reason given to think this is the case on balance.
This doesn’t by necessity have to extend to ethical considerations, but when cousin_it observes that it appears to it seems inappropriate to me to “correct” that out.
The obvious and straight forward interpretation of cousin it’s comment was that he was referring to American nationalism. A real and quite common phenomenon in which Americans don’t give a lick about people who don’t live their country (in civilized places this is referred to as racism). I’ve met plenty of people with this view. It is a disgusting and immoral attitude. That said, it is a near ubiquitous attitude. Humans have been killing humans from other groups and not giving a shit for as long as there have been humans. We’re good at it. Really good. We do it like it’s our job. In no way is this unique to residents or citizens of the United States of America. If cousin_it meant something else he can clarify. He’s been commenting elsewhere throughout this conversation anyway.
It is a disgusting and immoral attitude. That said, it is a near ubiquitous attitude. Humans have been killing humans from other groups and not giving a shit for as long as there have been humans. We’re good at it. Really good. We do it like it’s our job. In no way is this unique to residents or citizens of the United States of America. If cousin_it meant something else he can clarify. He’s been commenting elsewhere throughout this conversation anyway.
Yes! Thank you! Finally, a human user says what I’ve been trying to say all along! (See for example here.)
On my first visit to Earth (or perhaps the first visit of one of my copies before a reconciliation), my reaction was (translated from the language of my logs):
“The Alpha species [i.e. humans] inflicts disutility on its members based on relative skin redness. I’m silver. Exit!”
The obvious and straight forward interpretation of cousin it’s comment was that he was referring to American nationalism. A real and quiet common phenomenon in which Americans don’t give a lick about people who don’t live their country (in civilized places this is referred to as racism). I’ve met plenty of people with this view. It is a disgusting and immoral attitude. That said, it is a near ubiquitous attitude. Humans have been killing humans from other groups and not giving a shit for as long as there have been humans. We’re good at it. Really good. We do it like it’s our job. In no way is this unique to residents or citizens of the United States of America. If cousin_it meant something else he can clarify. He’s been commenting elsewhere throughout this conversation anyway.
While all what you say about nationalism is true It’s not obvious to me that it explains what cousin_it was talking about, at least not to its full extent. Degradation of other people through nationalism usually evokes hate (“those damned X!”), while the linked comment seemed too cheerful for that, it’s not like it encouraged to “help show it to those stinkin’ Arabs” or anything like that. As if the fact that someone might be hurt simply didn’t occur to them. There has been plenty of that in other historical cases of nationalism, but I think usually only in similarly asymmetrical situations. Nationalism in symmetrical situations seems to be of the plain hate kind.
Degradation of other people through nationalism usually evokes hate (“those damned X!”), while the linked comment seemed to cheerful for that, it’s not like it encouraged to “help show it to those stinkin’ Arabs” or anything like that, like the fact that someone might be hurt simply didn’t occur to them.
Nationalism almost always displays as willful ignorance or apathy about the condition of those outside the nation. It’s nation-centrism, in other words. Hatred is an extreme case (thus the moniker “ultra-nationalism”).
Nationalism in symmetrical situations seems to be of the plain hate kind.
This just isn’t true. At all. I’m not even sure where you would get it. There are nationalists all around the world who do not express hate toward other nations, even in cases of power symmetries.
More importantly: Why are we arguing about this? Cousin_it isn’t some old philosopher or public intellectual who we can’t reach for clarification. If he wants to correct my understanding of his comment let him do it.
Sorry for taking so much time to reply. FAWS is right, I’m not saying Americans hate foreigners. It’s more like a blindness or deafness. See my link above to the “amazing and unique experience” guy. The ethical angle of the situation simply doesn’t occur to him, it’s as if Iraqis were videogame characters. America’s fighting an aggressive war and killed umpteen thousand people?… uh, okay man, I got a career to advance and I wanna go someplace exotic, like expand my horizons and shit. I’ve never heard anything like that from Russians or anyone else except Americans, though I’d be the first to agree that we Russians are quite nationalistic.
Nationalism almost always displays as willful ignorance or apathy about the condition of those outside the nation.
The original disagreement wasn’t about the term nationalism (and I never claimed that nationalism didn’t explain it, only that what you said about nationalism up to that point didn’t), so you seem to be arguing my point here: For the reasons I described it’s easier for Americans to be “ignorant about the condition of those outside the nation”.
This just isn’t true. At all. I’m not even sure where you would get it. There are nationalists all around the world who do not express hate toward other nations, even in cases of power symmetries.
You can’t keep hurting someone and not even notice you do in a symmetrical conflict because they will hurt you back, and then you will want revenge in turn.
More importantly: Why are we arguing about this?
You seem to be of the opinion that you can’t even coherently/rationally (?) think a certain thing and I disagree. That disagreement is independent of the question whether anyone had actually been thinking that.
EDIT: Nation-centrism is close to what I meant with not feeling that other nations are “real”.
For the reasons I described it’s easier for Americans to be “ignorant about the condition of those outside the nation”.
“willful” ignorance… Do we really need to spend time distinguishing nationalism from the fact that the US gets the NBA?
You can’t keep hurting someone and not even notice you do in a symmetrical conflict because they will hurt you back, and then you will want revenge in turn.
So what you want to claim is that asymmetrical conflict is more likely than symetrical conflict to lead to people in one country being ignorant of the animosity against them in the other country. This is plausible though several counterexamples come to mind and I’m not sure it applies since a large portion of American nationalists appear to conceive of the conflict as a symmetrical one (this has been a minor issue in American politics, of course). I’m not sure I see how this issue relates to nationalism exactly and what it’s relevance is. But as you can see below I’m not sure I understand what you’re claiming at this point.
You seem to be of the opinion that you can’t even coherently/rationally (?) think a certain thing and I disagree. That disagreement is independent of the question whether anyone had actually been thinking that.
WHAA? This is incredibly vague and confusing. I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about.
“willful” ignorance… Do we really need to spend time distinguishing nationalism from the fact that the US gets the NBA?
And the fact that you neither need to make any significant sacrifices nor engage in double-think doesn’t make willful ignorance easier?
So what you want to claim is that asymmetrical conflict is more likely than symetrical conflict to lead to people in one country being ignorant of the animosity against them in the other country.
Not really. The term nationalism is unhelpful. There seem to be at least two kinds, the we’re-great-don’t-care-about-anyone-else nation-centric one, and unite-against-the-enemy-us-or-them kind. My point is that being a hegemonic power facilitates the nation-centric kind. The sub-point that a hot symmetric conflict turns nationalism into the second kind pretty much by necessity even if it started out as the first kind. An asymmetric conflict of course allows either kind in the stronger party, presumably that’s what your counter-examples show.
WHAA? This is incredibly vague and confusing. I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about.
Presumably you detected a feature that made the post knowably correctable. If that feature wasn’t an incoherent or irrational (in light of further evidence you have available) opinion, what was it?
A real and quiet common phenomenon in which Americans don’t give a lick about people who don’t live their country (in civilized places this is referred to as racism).
That sounds like nationalism rather than racism to me. The country you live in has only a loose correlation with the colour of your skin. If people favoured countries which had a strong majority of people of a particular ethnicity that might be evidence for racism.
I was speaking loosely in the parenthetical. Nationalism has a strong tendency to manifest as racism and racism has a similar tendency to manifest as nationalism. They’re highly correlated but yes, conceptually distinct.
No reason given to think this is the case on balance.
Because I thought it would be obvious enough.
Americans are less likely to learn foreign languages, most Americans don’t even have a passport, it’s easier to write a science paper without referencing any non-American research (not that I think this done at a significant rate, but the equivalent would be unthinkable elsewhere), foreign movies are generally either ignored or remade (and set in the USA if possible), foreign trade is a smaller percentage of GDP than just about any other developed nation, it’s possible to “buy American” for a greater range of products than the equivalent anywhere else, America has the top leagues for the sports it cares about (it’s not just that America cares for different sports than the rest of the world, for almost all countries the top level of the sport that country cares most about is at least in part played elsewhere so a soccer fan in e. g. Romania has to pay attention to the English Premier League, the Spanish Premiera Divison etc. [and even the English and Spanish fans have incentive to pay attention to each others league because they are at roughly equal level and the top teams regularly play each other]. If America cared about soccer the top league would be there so Americans still wouldn’t have any reason to pay attention to foreign sports).
I think most of those things could be expected regardless of whether America has any such putative hegemonic status. Most Americans don’t have passports because they can’t afford to travel to another continent, and the number is rising now that passports are required to visit other countries in North America. Getting a passport in the US is a fairly annoying, expensive process, so I’m not surprised most people haven’t bothered. Ditto with the foreign languages—most Americans don’t meet or talk to people who don’t speak American.
I haven’t been able to find a source online—do most Chinese people speak foreign languages and have passports? Are they required?
Most Americans don’t have passports because they can’t afford to travel to another continent, and the number is rising now that passports are required to visit other countries in North America. Getting a passport in the US is a fairly annoying, expensive process, so I’m not surprised most people haven’t bothered.
Getting a passport is a bother everywhere, the point is that Americans don’t really need a passport because their country is huge, rich and powerful and they can take a vacation in whatever climate they like without ever leaving their borders. People in other developed nations would have to make much greater sacrifices to never travel abroad.
Ditto with the foreign languages—most Americans don’t meet or talk to people who don’t speak American.
That’s exactly my point! They can do that without missing all that much, unlike most of the planet.
do most Chinese people speak foreign languages
IIRC compulsory foreign language instruction (mostly in English) starts in third grade, and many educated Chinese learn a third/fourth language later. For many Chinese Mandarin is effectively a L2 language so they know their native dialect, Mandarin and some English. The state of English learning is mostly horrible and only a minority can communicate effectively, but I’d think that Chinese on average speak better English than non-native-speaker Americans speak Spanish and the difficulty is much greater.
I’m not all that clear about the passport situation/foreign travel and China is a bad example anyway because it is itself an enormous country and very “nation-centric”, but a huge number of Chinese study abroad, while there is no comparable reason for Americans to do so because they already have many of the most prestigious universities.
Why was this voted down? Was there anything in this post that isn’t either objectively true (Americans have more leeway to ignore other nations) or clearly marked as speculation (“seem to”)? Is it inherently irrational to consider the hypothesis that cousin_it’s observation was meant exactly as stated, and then to speculate about what might be behind this observation?
“War is bad, the military industrial complex is evil,” sounds good, and it hits all the right emotional buttons (care for humanity, etc.), but it is not necessarily true when all of the costs and benefits are taken into account. A defensive military allows intellectual, cultural, economic, and artistic endeavors to flourish without fear of attack. Destruction of infrastructure can open the way for rebuilding into a far better environment, and massive war spending can push the boundaries of technology. Reshaping political landscapes can cause huge culture shifts through decades which may result in much more open, and better, societies.
Suffering is terrible; death is abhorrent; and the benefits are uncertain enough, they should not be used as arguments to start an otherwise preventable war. But I do not see how we can appropriately judge the complex results of “war in general” on the timeline of decades or centuries.
What I can certainly agree with is that contributing to the military is bad on the margins, since it’s already getting more than its share of resources thanks to others of a more bloodthirsty bent.
A defensive military allows intellectual, cultural, economic, and artistic endeavors to flourish without fear of attack.
At this point I laughed with a kind of sad laugh. Everyone who thinks America will use military robots for self-defense, raise your hands! On the other hand, you’ve made a wonderful argument that a strong offensive US military stifles cultural/economic/artistic endeavours worldwide due to fear of attack, though I’m sure you didn’t mean to.
Everyone who thinks America will use military robots for self-defense, raise your hands!
They will use them for defense as well as for offense. I’ve seen several articles already of American cities ready to purchase military drones for law enforcement purposes, and I would be very surprised if they were not also added to strategic military bases within America to defend against potential attackers. At the very least, when countries are making strategy decisions that may involve the military, the mere existence of drones will serve as a deterrence.
On the other hand, you’ve made a wonderful argument that a strong offensive US military stifles cultural/economic/artistic endeavours worldwide due to fear of attack, though I’m sure you didn’t mean to.
My point was to state the necessity of defense. If there are strong, warlike countries with military drones, such as the United States, then other countries had better start developing countermeasures to protect themselves. That, or ally themselves with the strong country in the hopes of falling under their protection rather than their ire. As such, staying ahead of the other countries is a valid strategy.
And I would certainly agree that US aggressiveness is stifling those very things in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, etc. The word ‘fear’ was poorly chosen. I was thinking more of what happened to Tibet and all those pacifists when they failed to muster an appropriate military defense: actual invasion and displacement or destruction.
I’ve seen several articles already of American cities ready to purchase military drones for law enforcement purposes
Oddly I don’t seem to have a reference handy, but several US cities already use robots in law enforcement. iRobot and Foster-Miller really took off after the success of their robot volunteers at the WTC.
However, I was being honest with my questions. I’d like to know what sort of utilon adjustments people assign to these different situations, even if it’s just a general weighting like ‘high’ or ‘low’.
As I see it, it’s less about how much harm those specific things do, and more about how viable the alternatives are. I expect that all governments makes tax avoidance/evasion difficult, and I suspect that paying taxes to any government will support a military. The lifestyle changes involved in actually living sustainably (as opposed to being ‘slightly better than the US average’ or applying greenwash) seem pretty significant and possibly unattainable for most of us, as well. (I could be wrong on the latter in a general sense; I haven’t looked into it, since I’m already relatively sure that it’s beyond what I, personally, could manage.) Given that Warrigal was asking about the career move, though, I expect that he does have other viable options that could be pursued without completely turning his life upside down, and that’s a significant difference between this decision and the other two.
As I see it, it’s less about how much harm those specific things do, and more about how viable the alternatives are.
How viable, given that you want to live in relative comfort and ease. But if a true valuation is made, then perhaps that should not be taken as given, considering the costs.
There are various arguments that building military robots is bad, but I don’t think you’ve touched on any good ones. When you look at how unreliable human soldiers are on the field, creating military robots just seems like an obvious way to make things better for everyone involved. Fewer American casualties because we’re using robots, and fewer civilian casualties because the robots are better at not shooting at civilians.
Also, FWIW, most military robots currently aren’t the sort that shoot people—they do things like look around corners, draw fire, perform aerial surveillance, and detect/defuse bombs.
It’s some kind of crazy ethical blindness that most Americans seem to have for some reason, where “our guys” are human beings, but arbitrarily chosen foreigners deserve whatever they get...
Then you wrote:
...an obvious way to make things better for everyone involved. Fewer American casualties because we’re using robots, and fewer civilian casualties because the robots are better at not shooting at civilians.
This happens to pixel-perfectly demonstrate my point about ethical blindness. Reread my quote again, then your quote, then mine, then yours again. Notice anything wrong? Anything missing?
You see, you omitted one pretty important group: everyone America calls “enemy combatants”. If you think all of them are bad people and deserve to die, then you obviously don’t get it. Repeat after me: America Starts Aggressive Wars. Then say it again because it’s true and truth won’t suffer from repetition. Say it as many times as you need to make it sink in, then come back and we will resume this discussion.
America will be killing those people with or without robots. We already have ways of wiping all of the enemy combatants off the map if we want to (for example nukes). Military technology is primarily about finding ways to 1) kill fewer of our own soldiers and 2) kill fewer people who aren’t enemy combatants.
America will be killing those people with or without robots
Not necessarily. All else equal, the less it costs to wage a war (in money, American lives, and good will), the more more likely leaders are to actually start one.
Ignoring the question whether that’s desirable or not (politics is the mindkiller) reducing the cost of killing those people will lead to more of those people killed in marginal situations where such considerations matter.
Yes, that’s one of the good arguments against robot soliders I mentioned above. We’re more likely to not care about the fate of our robot soliders, and so would be less hesitant to send them into battle. Though it’s still an open question whether that effect would trump any increased monetary cost per soldier (if any) and whether the other benefits outweigh such concerns.
Human soldiers perform horribly in terms of following the rules of war, and above that do absolutely horrible things sometimes.
You don’t even have to go as far as “America Starts Aggressive Wars”—“Under the right conditions, America is capable of starting aggressive wars, and is more likely to do so if the cost of doing so is lowered.”
Look, I get the “Politics is the Mind Killer” mantra, and I agree that it would be fruitless to start a debate about something like abortion here—it comes down to definitions and conventions about what is moral.
But when something is actually, demonstrably, true, refusing to look at and examine the truth because it is painful to do so is not compelling. It doesn’t even trigger most of the reasons in “politics is the mindkiller”—both major U.S. Political parties are just fine with most of the examples. The only two teams that can credibly be put in opposition here are “U.S.A.” and “Everyone else”.
You don’t even have to go as far as “America Starts Aggressive Wars”—“Under the right conditions, America is capable of starting aggressive wars, and is more likely to do so if the cost of doing so is lowered.”
It is worth noting that to complete the argument someone needs to show that America starting aggressive wars is bad. The people starting such wars, it turns out, have their reasons.
ETA: to tell the truth, until I dug up that last Wikipedia page just now for purposes of argument, I still had no clear idea how much this happened. And give these people autonomous killer robots? In the name of developing Friendly Intelligence?
That’s why. Folks will disagree that’s something that the US does, and pointing to things the US might have done decades ago won’t convince them. There’s no way to even debate this point without going down a potentially mind-killing rabbit hole, and I find it hard to believe you weren’t aware of this when you posted it.
In case you weren’t aware of it: I live in the US, and I’ve talked to a number of ordinary folks and a number of scholarly folks about it, and I don’t tend to encounter people who would grant that the US starts aggressive wars. You should be able to see why someone who thinks that would be angry and vocal about the accusation.
Am I the only one to think that no, creating military robots isn’t a “good career path” towards friendly AI, because creating military robots is inherently unfriendly to humanity? Especially if you live in the US and know that your robots will be used in aggressive wars against poorer countries. It’s some kind of crazy ethical blindness that most Americans seem to have for some reason, where “our guys” are human beings, but arbitrarily chosen foreigners deserve whatever they get… Just like this incident I saw on HN when one guy asked about career prospects working for the occupation force in Iraq, and another answered that it’ll be an “amazing and unique experience”. You’ll note my reply there was much more concise.
Fixed it for you.
And the reason is evolved psychological instincts with pretty obvious selection benefits.
I don’t think that’s an accurate correction. Because America is the current hegemonic power Americans can get away with feeling that other nations aren’t “real” in the sense the USA are. For example when considering some hypothetical situation that would concern the whole planet an American might only consider how the USA would react, while anyone else in the same situation would in addition to the reaction of their own nation at the very leasts also have to consider how the USA reacts, and might even consider other nations since their situation is more obviously symmetrical to their own.
I’m afraid I don’t know what this means.
There might be pragmatic realities that force non-Americans to consider the reactions of foreigners more than Americans must. Americans have two oceans and the world’s strongest military to keep a lot foreign troubles far away, other people do not. But this isn’t evidence that Americans care less about foreigners than those from other countries do. It sounds like you’re talking about a political blindness instead of an ethical blindness. Besides, there is equally good reason to think America’s hegemonic status makes Americans more worried about foreign goings-on since American lives and American business concerns are more often at stake.
Not “real” is the best description I have. You could say having the same sort of attitude towards other nations you might have towards Oz, Middle Earth or the Empire from Star Wars even though you intellectually know that they really exist, but that only comes close to what I mean. I must stress that not all Americans have this attitude, but some seem to do, and thats enough to influence the discourse.
I was thinking more of e. g. first contact situations in SF stories and things like that, not necessarily normal international politics, but I think it extends to all fields: Domestic politics (the amount and the kind of consideration the fact that a policy seems to work well somewhere else gets), pop culture, sports, science, language learning, wherever one might consider other nations Americans have more leeway not to do so. This doesn’t by necessity have to extend to ethical considerations, but when cousin_it observes that it appears to it seems inappropriate to me to “correct” that out.
Exactly zero evidence has been presented that Americans have this ill-defined attitude at a higher rate that non-Americans.
No reason given to think this is the case on balance.
The obvious and straight forward interpretation of cousin it’s comment was that he was referring to American nationalism. A real and quite common phenomenon in which Americans don’t give a lick about people who don’t live their country (in civilized places this is referred to as racism). I’ve met plenty of people with this view. It is a disgusting and immoral attitude. That said, it is a near ubiquitous attitude. Humans have been killing humans from other groups and not giving a shit for as long as there have been humans. We’re good at it. Really good. We do it like it’s our job. In no way is this unique to residents or citizens of the United States of America. If cousin_it meant something else he can clarify. He’s been commenting elsewhere throughout this conversation anyway.
(Not my downvote, btw)
Yes! Thank you! Finally, a human user says what I’ve been trying to say all along! (See for example here.)
On my first visit to Earth (or perhaps the first visit of one of my copies before a reconciliation), my reaction was (translated from the language of my logs):
“The Alpha species [i.e. humans] inflicts disutility on its members based on relative skin redness. I’m silver. Exit!”
While all what you say about nationalism is true It’s not obvious to me that it explains what cousin_it was talking about, at least not to its full extent. Degradation of other people through nationalism usually evokes hate (“those damned X!”), while the linked comment seemed too cheerful for that, it’s not like it encouraged to “help show it to those stinkin’ Arabs” or anything like that. As if the fact that someone might be hurt simply didn’t occur to them. There has been plenty of that in other historical cases of nationalism, but I think usually only in similarly asymmetrical situations. Nationalism in symmetrical situations seems to be of the plain hate kind.
Nationalism almost always displays as willful ignorance or apathy about the condition of those outside the nation. It’s nation-centrism, in other words. Hatred is an extreme case (thus the moniker “ultra-nationalism”).
This just isn’t true. At all. I’m not even sure where you would get it. There are nationalists all around the world who do not express hate toward other nations, even in cases of power symmetries.
More importantly: Why are we arguing about this? Cousin_it isn’t some old philosopher or public intellectual who we can’t reach for clarification. If he wants to correct my understanding of his comment let him do it.
Sorry for taking so much time to reply. FAWS is right, I’m not saying Americans hate foreigners. It’s more like a blindness or deafness. See my link above to the “amazing and unique experience” guy. The ethical angle of the situation simply doesn’t occur to him, it’s as if Iraqis were videogame characters. America’s fighting an aggressive war and killed umpteen thousand people?… uh, okay man, I got a career to advance and I wanna go someplace exotic, like expand my horizons and shit. I’ve never heard anything like that from Russians or anyone else except Americans, though I’d be the first to agree that we Russians are quite nationalistic.
The original disagreement wasn’t about the term nationalism (and I never claimed that nationalism didn’t explain it, only that what you said about nationalism up to that point didn’t), so you seem to be arguing my point here: For the reasons I described it’s easier for Americans to be “ignorant about the condition of those outside the nation”.
You can’t keep hurting someone and not even notice you do in a symmetrical conflict because they will hurt you back, and then you will want revenge in turn.
You seem to be of the opinion that you can’t even coherently/rationally (?) think a certain thing and I disagree. That disagreement is independent of the question whether anyone had actually been thinking that.
EDIT: Nation-centrism is close to what I meant with not feeling that other nations are “real”.
“willful” ignorance… Do we really need to spend time distinguishing nationalism from the fact that the US gets the NBA?
So what you want to claim is that asymmetrical conflict is more likely than symetrical conflict to lead to people in one country being ignorant of the animosity against them in the other country. This is plausible though several counterexamples come to mind and I’m not sure it applies since a large portion of American nationalists appear to conceive of the conflict as a symmetrical one (this has been a minor issue in American politics, of course). I’m not sure I see how this issue relates to nationalism exactly and what it’s relevance is. But as you can see below I’m not sure I understand what you’re claiming at this point.
WHAA? This is incredibly vague and confusing. I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about.
And the fact that you neither need to make any significant sacrifices nor engage in double-think doesn’t make willful ignorance easier?
Not really. The term nationalism is unhelpful. There seem to be at least two kinds, the we’re-great-don’t-care-about-anyone-else nation-centric one, and unite-against-the-enemy-us-or-them kind. My point is that being a hegemonic power facilitates the nation-centric kind. The sub-point that a hot symmetric conflict turns nationalism into the second kind pretty much by necessity even if it started out as the first kind. An asymmetric conflict of course allows either kind in the stronger party, presumably that’s what your counter-examples show.
Presumably you detected a feature that made the post knowably correctable. If that feature wasn’t an incoherent or irrational (in light of further evidence you have available) opinion, what was it?
That sounds like nationalism rather than racism to me. The country you live in has only a loose correlation with the colour of your skin. If people favoured countries which had a strong majority of people of a particular ethnicity that might be evidence for racism.
I was speaking loosely in the parenthetical. Nationalism has a strong tendency to manifest as racism and racism has a similar tendency to manifest as nationalism. They’re highly correlated but yes, conceptually distinct.
Because I thought it would be obvious enough. Americans are less likely to learn foreign languages, most Americans don’t even have a passport, it’s easier to write a science paper without referencing any non-American research (not that I think this done at a significant rate, but the equivalent would be unthinkable elsewhere), foreign movies are generally either ignored or remade (and set in the USA if possible), foreign trade is a smaller percentage of GDP than just about any other developed nation, it’s possible to “buy American” for a greater range of products than the equivalent anywhere else, America has the top leagues for the sports it cares about (it’s not just that America cares for different sports than the rest of the world, for almost all countries the top level of the sport that country cares most about is at least in part played elsewhere so a soccer fan in e. g. Romania has to pay attention to the English Premier League, the Spanish Premiera Divison etc. [and even the English and Spanish fans have incentive to pay attention to each others league because they are at roughly equal level and the top teams regularly play each other]. If America cared about soccer the top league would be there so Americans still wouldn’t have any reason to pay attention to foreign sports).
I think most of those things could be expected regardless of whether America has any such putative hegemonic status. Most Americans don’t have passports because they can’t afford to travel to another continent, and the number is rising now that passports are required to visit other countries in North America. Getting a passport in the US is a fairly annoying, expensive process, so I’m not surprised most people haven’t bothered. Ditto with the foreign languages—most Americans don’t meet or talk to people who don’t speak American.
I haven’t been able to find a source online—do most Chinese people speak foreign languages and have passports? Are they required?
Getting a passport is a bother everywhere, the point is that Americans don’t really need a passport because their country is huge, rich and powerful and they can take a vacation in whatever climate they like without ever leaving their borders. People in other developed nations would have to make much greater sacrifices to never travel abroad.
That’s exactly my point! They can do that without missing all that much, unlike most of the planet.
IIRC compulsory foreign language instruction (mostly in English) starts in third grade, and many educated Chinese learn a third/fourth language later. For many Chinese Mandarin is effectively a L2 language so they know their native dialect, Mandarin and some English. The state of English learning is mostly horrible and only a minority can communicate effectively, but I’d think that Chinese on average speak better English than non-native-speaker Americans speak Spanish and the difficulty is much greater.
I’m not all that clear about the passport situation/foreign travel and China is a bad example anyway because it is itself an enormous country and very “nation-centric”, but a huge number of Chinese study abroad, while there is no comparable reason for Americans to do so because they already have many of the most prestigious universities.
Again, why the down-vote? Is there any factual error or is giving evidence when asked not welcome here?
Why was this voted down? Was there anything in this post that isn’t either objectively true (Americans have more leeway to ignore other nations) or clearly marked as speculation (“seem to”)? Is it inherently irrational to consider the hypothesis that cousin_it’s observation was meant exactly as stated, and then to speculate about what might be behind this observation?
“War is bad, the military industrial complex is evil,” sounds good, and it hits all the right emotional buttons (care for humanity, etc.), but it is not necessarily true when all of the costs and benefits are taken into account. A defensive military allows intellectual, cultural, economic, and artistic endeavors to flourish without fear of attack. Destruction of infrastructure can open the way for rebuilding into a far better environment, and massive war spending can push the boundaries of technology. Reshaping political landscapes can cause huge culture shifts through decades which may result in much more open, and better, societies.
Suffering is terrible; death is abhorrent; and the benefits are uncertain enough, they should not be used as arguments to start an otherwise preventable war. But I do not see how we can appropriately judge the complex results of “war in general” on the timeline of decades or centuries.
What I can certainly agree with is that contributing to the military is bad on the margins, since it’s already getting more than its share of resources thanks to others of a more bloodthirsty bent.
At this point I laughed with a kind of sad laugh. Everyone who thinks America will use military robots for self-defense, raise your hands! On the other hand, you’ve made a wonderful argument that a strong offensive US military stifles cultural/economic/artistic endeavours worldwide due to fear of attack, though I’m sure you didn’t mean to.
They will use them for defense as well as for offense. I’ve seen several articles already of American cities ready to purchase military drones for law enforcement purposes, and I would be very surprised if they were not also added to strategic military bases within America to defend against potential attackers. At the very least, when countries are making strategy decisions that may involve the military, the mere existence of drones will serve as a deterrence.
My point was to state the necessity of defense. If there are strong, warlike countries with military drones, such as the United States, then other countries had better start developing countermeasures to protect themselves. That, or ally themselves with the strong country in the hopes of falling under their protection rather than their ire. As such, staying ahead of the other countries is a valid strategy.
And I would certainly agree that US aggressiveness is stifling those very things in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, etc. The word ‘fear’ was poorly chosen. I was thinking more of what happened to Tibet and all those pacifists when they failed to muster an appropriate military defense: actual invasion and displacement or destruction.
-- Jack Handey’s Deep Thoughts
Oddly I don’t seem to have a reference handy, but several US cities already use robots in law enforcement. iRobot and Foster-Miller really took off after the success of their robot volunteers at the WTC.
How much harm do you contribute by working to enable military robots?
How much harm do you contribute by paying taxes to the US government, part of which are used to fund military robots?
How much harm do you contribute by existing, living in the US, and absorbing a huge amount of electricity and other natural resources?
Well, that was voted down pretty rapidly :)
However, I was being honest with my questions. I’d like to know what sort of utilon adjustments people assign to these different situations, even if it’s just a general weighting like ‘high’ or ‘low’.
My decision to not work for the military industrial complex is all about fuzzies, not utilons.
It can be useful to separate ‘fuzzies’ from ‘practical benefit’ but they can both be considered sources of utilons.
As I see it, it’s less about how much harm those specific things do, and more about how viable the alternatives are. I expect that all governments makes tax avoidance/evasion difficult, and I suspect that paying taxes to any government will support a military. The lifestyle changes involved in actually living sustainably (as opposed to being ‘slightly better than the US average’ or applying greenwash) seem pretty significant and possibly unattainable for most of us, as well. (I could be wrong on the latter in a general sense; I haven’t looked into it, since I’m already relatively sure that it’s beyond what I, personally, could manage.) Given that Warrigal was asking about the career move, though, I expect that he does have other viable options that could be pursued without completely turning his life upside down, and that’s a significant difference between this decision and the other two.
Costa Rica’s constitution forbids a military, and they seem to mean it, though one can quibble about whether their police count.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_of_Costa_Rica
How viable, given that you want to live in relative comfort and ease. But if a true valuation is made, then perhaps that should not be taken as given, considering the costs.
I have not assigned numbers—it is not a simple question.
I live in Russia and have refused numerous invitations to migrate to the US.
There are various arguments that building military robots is bad, but I don’t think you’ve touched on any good ones. When you look at how unreliable human soldiers are on the field, creating military robots just seems like an obvious way to make things better for everyone involved. Fewer American casualties because we’re using robots, and fewer civilian casualties because the robots are better at not shooting at civilians.
Also, FWIW, most military robots currently aren’t the sort that shoot people—they do things like look around corners, draw fire, perform aerial surveillance, and detect/defuse bombs.
This is ironic. I wrote:
Then you wrote:
This happens to pixel-perfectly demonstrate my point about ethical blindness. Reread my quote again, then your quote, then mine, then yours again. Notice anything wrong? Anything missing?
You see, you omitted one pretty important group: everyone America calls “enemy combatants”. If you think all of them are bad people and deserve to die, then you obviously don’t get it. Repeat after me: America Starts Aggressive Wars. Then say it again because it’s true and truth won’t suffer from repetition. Say it as many times as you need to make it sink in, then come back and we will resume this discussion.
America will be killing those people with or without robots. We already have ways of wiping all of the enemy combatants off the map if we want to (for example nukes). Military technology is primarily about finding ways to 1) kill fewer of our own soldiers and 2) kill fewer people who aren’t enemy combatants.
Not necessarily. All else equal, the less it costs to wage a war (in money, American lives, and good will), the more more likely leaders are to actually start one.
Ignoring the question whether that’s desirable or not (politics is the mindkiller) reducing the cost of killing those people will lead to more of those people killed in marginal situations where such considerations matter.
Yes, that’s one of the good arguments against robot soliders I mentioned above. We’re more likely to not care about the fate of our robot soliders, and so would be less hesitant to send them into battle. Though it’s still an open question whether that effect would trump any increased monetary cost per soldier (if any) and whether the other benefits outweigh such concerns.
Human soldiers perform horribly in terms of following the rules of war, and above that do absolutely horrible things sometimes.
Also, this is definitely not the place to debate this, and you have to know a lot of people won’t agree with you, so stop with the flamebait.
You don’t even have to go as far as “America Starts Aggressive Wars”—“Under the right conditions, America is capable of starting aggressive wars, and is more likely to do so if the cost of doing so is lowered.”
Look, I get the “Politics is the Mind Killer” mantra, and I agree that it would be fruitless to start a debate about something like abortion here—it comes down to definitions and conventions about what is moral.
But when something is actually, demonstrably, true, refusing to look at and examine the truth because it is painful to do so is not compelling. It doesn’t even trigger most of the reasons in “politics is the mindkiller”—both major U.S. Political parties are just fine with most of the examples. The only two teams that can credibly be put in opposition here are “U.S.A.” and “Everyone else”.
It is worth noting that to complete the argument someone needs to show that America starting aggressive wars is bad. The people starting such wars, it turns out, have their reasons.
[half-ironic] Yep. Some countries are just in desperate need a good ol’ fashioned ass-kicking. [/half-ironic]
Why flamebait? I stated a very well-known fact.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Pigs_Invasion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Power_Pack
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Urgent_Fury
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Just_Cause
More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_sponsored_regime_change
ETA: to tell the truth, until I dug up that last Wikipedia page just now for purposes of argument, I still had no clear idea how much this happened. And give these people autonomous killer robots? In the name of developing Friendly Intelligence?
1) Politics is the mind killer, 2) Agree denotationally but not connotationally
Bay of Pigs? Really? How about nailing us on the Philippines while you’re at it. :-)
It isn’t like there aren’t recent examples to choose from.
That’s why. Folks will disagree that’s something that the US does, and pointing to things the US might have done decades ago won’t convince them. There’s no way to even debate this point without going down a potentially mind-killing rabbit hole, and I find it hard to believe you weren’t aware of this when you posted it.
In case you weren’t aware of it: I live in the US, and I’ve talked to a number of ordinary folks and a number of scholarly folks about it, and I don’t tend to encounter people who would grant that the US starts aggressive wars. You should be able to see why someone who thinks that would be angry and vocal about the accusation.
Ooh… I thought we were having a factual disagreement. I apologize. Maybe this won’t work as flamebait here :-)
Creating military robots can be friendly, if:
Lbh fryy gur ebobgf gb nyy fvqrf, ercynpvat uhzna nezvrf, naq unir gurz evttrq gb abg npghnyyl svtug rnpu bgure, ohg vafgrnq gnxr njnl gur rssrpgvir cbjre bs gur tbireazragf gung jnagrq nyy gur jnef.
(Rot13)
Unfortunately, this isn’t a realistic option if you’re an employee at a big military contractor, which is the most likely scenario...
Well, yeah, there is no way someone at standard human level would pull off what happened in that story.