You're reading the public-facing archive of the Category Theory Zulip server.
To join the server you need an invite. Anybody can get an invite by contacting Matteo Capucci at name dot surname at gmail dot com.
For all things related to this archive refer to the same person.
Jade Master (Feb 25 2021 at 19:52):I would like to share this article:
Grothendieck posits that scientists have a responsibility to humanity as a whole,
The scientist, as the principal architect of technological progress, must assume a major part of the responsibility for the unprecedented dangers that modern technology has posed for mankind. Better informed than the majority of the human population, the scientist has no excuse for closing his eyes to the imminence and the dimensions ofthe perils he has helped to create. Because most countries (whether communist or capitalist) are anxious to preserve their precious "gray matter", the scientist is generally treated like a spoiled child in today's world, enjoying privileges which are denied to vast numbers of people: good working conditions, comfortable surroundings, financial security, more extended means of information, repeated contacts with colleagues from other countries, more leisure time, greater freedom to learn and to reflect . .. * The scientist enjoys an undeniable prestige among the general public (reflecting the prestige attached to technological prowess) and an enviable material security. No one could be less justified in claiming "helplessness" or "personal insecurity" as an excuse for doing nothing to combat the dangers already cited –if only to the extent of refusing to collaborate with the military and warning the public of the real gravity of the situation.
and argues that even passive collaboration with the military is an abdication of this responsibility
While only a small number of scientists work directly for the military. virtually all scientists collaborate "passively" by accepting army contracts, or by organizing seminars or colloquia financed partially or totally by military funds, without even giving it a second thought. In doing so, scientists have willingly cooperated in establishing the powerful grip that the military now has on "pure" scientific research, to some extent throughout the western world, but particularly in the USA. The domination of pure scientific research by military money has finally alarmed even the civil authorities, who have judged it necessary to limit the practice –much to the disappointment of the scientists, who would prefer to see the "military manna" continue unabated. Practically all the scientists of the western world have accepted, or would accept if the opportunity presented itself, military subventions whether for private research, or for the organization of specific scientific activities, or in the form of salary from an institution regularly furnished with military funds. The massive collaboration of the scientific community with the army (often at the same time that the most savage wars are being prosecuted by that same army) is the greatest. It is also the most obvious sign of their abdication of responsibility toward human society.
These words reflect my personal values. I would like to discuss this with the category theory community in a non-judgemental way, so we can get a better idea of where everyone stands on this issue.
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 21:02):You will occasionally hear the argument "I'm glad they're giving me their money because what I research is completely useless." No. And no.
John Baez (Feb 25 2021 at 21:02):To make the conversation interesting it would be good to get someone like @Bob Coecke or @David Spivak involved, since they take money from the military and have thought about these issues. Bob in particular is quite unapologetic about it and will argue in favor of it.
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 21:08):Can people please stop lionising "abstract nonsense"?
Jade Master (Feb 25 2021 at 21:10):Conor McBride said:
You will occasionally hear the argument "I'm glad they're giving me their money because what I research is completely useless." No. And no.
Yeah...at least as a computer scientist if you say your work is useless then you run the danger of people believing you.
Jade Master (Feb 25 2021 at 21:11):John Baez said:
To make the conversation interesting it would be good to get someone like Bob Coecke or David Spivak involved, since they take money from the military and have thought about these issues. Bob in particular is quite unapologetic about it and will argue in factor of it.
That would be nice, but in this article Grothendieck is also arguing against more passive collaboration with the military than what Bob and David do...e.g. collaborating with people who work with military. I am interested in perspectives from people who do that as well.
John Baez (Feb 25 2021 at 21:12):In our last big conversation about this, I pointed out the long-term military funding of category theory and more recently homotopy type theory:
For example:
- Saunders Mac Lane, Group Extensions by Primary Abelian Groups, United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research, 1959.
Or in the introduction to Mac Lane's 1963 book Homology:
For many years the Air Force Office of Scientific Research supported my research projects on various subjects now summarized here; it is a pleasure to acknowledge their lively understanding of basic science.
Or in the introduction to the 1971 edition of his Categories for the Working Mathematician:
I have profited much from a succession of visitors to Chicago (made possible by effective support from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Office of Naval Research, and the National Science Foundation): M. André, J. Bénabou, E. Dubuc, F. W. Lawvere, and F. E. J. Linton.
Or in 2014, on the Homotopy Type Theory blog:
We are pleased to announce that a research team based at Carnegie Mellon University has received a $7.5 million, five-year grant from the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research, as part of the highly competitive, DoD Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program. The MURI program supports teams of researchers that intersect more than one traditional technical discipline, and our effort will focus on mathematical and computational aspects of HoTT. The team consists of Jeremy Avigad, Steve Awodey (PI), and Robert Harper at CMU, Dan Licata at Wesleyan University, Michael Shulman at the University of San Diego, and Vladimir Voevodsky at the Institute for Advanced Study. External collaborators are Andrej Bauer (University of Ljubljana), Thierry Coquand (University of Gothenburg), Nicola Gambino (University of Leeds), and David Spivak (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
In order to encourage collaboration and development, the funds will be used to provide support for students, postdoctoral researchers, visiting junior and senior researchers, meetings, and conferences. We are delighted about the opportunities that the grant provides to build infrastructure and lay the foundations for this exciting research program.
The technical portion of the grant proposal can be found here: MURI proposal (public).
In 2017, an Army Research Office Broad Agency Announcement for Fundamental Research wrote:
Modeling frameworks are desired that are able to eschew the usual computational simplification assumptions and realistically capture … complexities of real world environments and phenomena, while still maintaining some degree of computational tractability. Of specific interest are causal and predictive modeling frameworks, hybrid model frameworks that capture both causal and predictive features, statistical modeling frameworks, and abstract categorical models (cf. Homotopy Type Theory).
and later:
Homotopy Type Theory and its applications are such an area that is of significant interest in military applications.
The examples could be multiplied.
Jade Master (Feb 25 2021 at 21:12):Conor McBride said:
Can people please stop lionising "abstract nonsense"?
Big agree.
Jade Master (Feb 25 2021 at 21:18):John Baez said:
In our last big conversation about this, I pointed out the long-term military funding of category theory and more recently homotopy type theory:
For example:
- Saunders Mac Lane, Group Extensions by Primary Abelian Groups, United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research, 1959.
Or in the introduction to Mac Lane's 1963 book Homology:
For many years the Air Force Office of Scientific Research supported my research projects on various subjects now summarized here; it is a pleasure to acknowledge their lively understanding of basic science.
Or in the introduction to the 1971 edition of his Categories for the Working Mathematician:
I have profited much from a succession of visitors to Chicago (made possible by effective support from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Office of Naval Research, and the National Science Foundation): M. André, J. Bénabou, E. Dubuc, F. W. Lawvere, and F. E. J. Linton.
Or in 2014, on the Homotopy Type Theory blog:
We are pleased to announce that a research team based at Carnegie Mellon University has received a $7.5 million, five-year grant from the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research, as part of the highly competitive, DoD Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program. The MURI program supports teams of researchers that intersect more than one traditional technical discipline, and our effort will focus on mathematical and computational aspects of HoTT. The team consists of Jeremy Avigad, Steve Awodey (PI), and Robert Harper at CMU, Dan Licata at Wesleyan University, Michael Shulman at the University of San Diego, and Vladimir Voevodsky at the Institute for Advanced Study. External collaborators are Andrej Bauer (University of Ljubljana), Thierry Coquand (University of Gothenburg), Nicola Gambino (University of Leeds), and David Spivak (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
In order to encourage collaboration and development, the funds will be used to provide support for students, postdoctoral researchers, visiting junior and senior researchers, meetings, and conferences. We are delighted about the opportunities that the grant provides to build infrastructure and lay the foundations for this exciting research program.
The technical portion of the grant proposal can be found here: MURI proposal (public).
In 2017, an Army Research Office Broad Agency Announcement for Fundamental Research wrote:
Modeling frameworks are desired that are able to eschew the usual computational simplification assumptions and realistically capture … complexities of real world environments and phenomena, while still maintaining some degree of computational tractability. Of specific interest are causal and predictive modeling frameworks, hybrid model frameworks that capture both causal and predictive features, statistical modeling frameworks, and abstract categorical models (cf. Homotopy Type Theory).
and later:
Homotopy Type Theory and its applications are such an area that is of significant interest in military applications.
The examples could be multiplied.
Is your point that category theory has benefited a lot from military money in the past, so it can't be that bad of a thing?
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 21:20):So from my perspective as a European, this mostly seems to be the question of "should you accept funding from the american army", because I haven't heard of any other army funding research (do the russian or chinese militaries offer research money?). So I think it should be more of a question of convincing the american public that they need to give less money to the military and more to the universities. Telling researchers to not accept available funding while competition is killing seems to me to put the burden of morality in the wrong place
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 21:21):If I had to choose between stopping my career as a researcher due to a lack of funding, or accepting funding from the US military (assuming they are letting me work on research of my own choosing) I will accept the military funding
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 21:22):John van de Wetering said:
If I had to choose between stopping my career as a researcher due to a lack of funding, or accepting funding from the US military (assuming they are letting me work on research of my own choosing) I will accept the military funding
Actually, there are other ways of getting funding, that are rather novel
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 21:22):For instance, part of my funding comes from the cryptospace, which is a decentralized community
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 21:23):Clearly these are still very experimental ways of doing things, I admit. But the model is just so much better than the usual university/grant one that I reckon it will be increasingly common in the future
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 21:23):Do you have a link to more information about this cryptospace funding?
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 21:24):And hopefully this will rule out military funding for good, or it will at least give people the possibility to opt out without having to give up on their career
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 21:24):It's a constellation of institutions. but for instance the ethereum foundation puts out grants every now and then. Me, @Jules Hedges and @Philipp Zahn are on one of these grants for instance
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 21:25):The REALLY good thing about this sort of funding usually is that you need to really contribute and participate to the community to get it. It's really different from the grant stuff, where you write to an institution you do not ever interact with, ask for money, and that's it
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 21:25):Also, to do some meta-arguing about accepting military funding. Given the premise that we will not convince all researchers to not accept military funding, if people with a strong moral compass do not accept the funding that means the funding will go to people with less moral scruples, which seems like a bad idea
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 21:25):this stuff really puts the scientist into a context. It's not like you say "oh, hello, I'm cool give me money"and they do.
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 21:26):That old saw.
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 21:26):John van de Wetering said:
Also, to do some meta-arguing about accepting military funding. Given the premise that we will not convince all researchers to not accept military funding, if people with a strong moral compass do not accept the funding that means the funding will go to people with less moral scruples, which seems like a bad idea
Indeed, the idea would be to actively campaign to reduce military funding, or, like the crypto space is trying to do, reinvent the economy as much as possible so that money just starts flowing through different channels.
Jade Master (Feb 25 2021 at 21:27):John van de Wetering said:
So from my perspective as a European, this mostly seems to be the question of "should you accept funding from the american army", because I haven't heard of any other army funding research (do the russian or chinese militaries offer research money?). So I think it should be more of a question of convincing the american public that they need to give less money to the military and more to the universities. Telling researchers to not accept available funding while competition is killing seems to me to put the burden of morality in the wrong place
Even within the US military it's hard to put blame on particular people, it is a massive bureaucracy and there are some people whose work is a genuine positive in the world. The thing with massive bureaucracies is everyone shares a small amount of the blame, so it is our personality responsibility to do what can to make things better.
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 21:27):"If they didn't spend it on me, they'd only spend it on someone really evil."
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 21:28):I think what scientists can really do is to protest. The very same arguments have been used to defend elsevier for ages, until people started saying "well, enough is enough, I just won't publish there and I don't care how big their impact factor is".
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 21:28):In this respect, Perelman publishing the proof of the Poincaré conjecture on arXiv has been huge.
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 21:29):I grew up with daleks on the streets.
If you're enabling better daleks, I'm not liking you.
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 21:29)::heart:
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 21:30):Conor McBride said:
"If they didn't spend it on me, they'd only spend it on someone really evil."
While this might not be true when the movement to reject military funding is small, I think this might come into play once a significant number of people won't accept funding from the military. Assuming again that military funding is a significant portion of the money available (which is probably not true actually) this would result in moral people being without funding
John Baez (Feb 25 2021 at 21:31):Jade wrote:
[...] in this article Grothendieck is also arguing against more passive collaboration with the military than what Bob and David do...e.g. collaborating with people who work with military. I am interested in perspectives from people who do that as well.
As for me, I'm trying to use category theory (and lots of other math) to help understand some things about chemistry, biology, ecology and economics. You could say I'm trying to understand open systems, how they process information, how they evolve, how they thrive or fail to thrive... but also that I constantly get side-tracked by the beautiful math that seems to be the prerequisite for understanding these things.
In the process I became a subcontractor for the DARPA program called CASCADE, for Complex Adaptive System Composition and Design Environment. I had some misgivings about this... decided to give it a try... came up with some cool stuff, helped fund @Blake Pollard and @Joe Moeller, who both went on to get jobs at NIST based in part on this work... and eventually got frustrated and quit, mainly because the program was not set up to give us time to explore the ideas I thought were interesting, but also because the intended military applications became more clear, and I didn't want to pursue those goals.
More recently I've been talking to James Fairbanks and Evan Patterson about biochemistry: using math to infer Petri nets with rates from data. This is actually a big topic in biochemistry, though of course not many people are trying to use category theory. James has gotten grant money from the Defense Department for this project, but I'm not letting that deter me, because the benefits of what we're doing outweigh any harm it might do.
Jade Master (Feb 25 2021 at 21:32):John van de Wetering said:
If I had to choose between stopping my career as a researcher due to a lack of funding, or accepting funding from the US military (assuming they are letting me work on research of my own choosing) I will accept the military funding
I don't want to belittle the hard choices that people have to make here. On the other hand I think that mathematicians usually have some compromise available (like what Fab mentioned) which will allow them to avoid this funding.
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 21:32):John van de Wetering said:
Conor McBride said:
"If they didn't spend it on me, they'd only spend it on someone really evil."
While this might not be true when the movement to reject military funding is small, I think this might come into play once a significant number of people won't accept funding from the military. Assuming again that military funding is a significant portion of the money available (which is probably not true actually) this would result in moral people being without funding
Well, if immoral people start getting military funding and everyone else isn't, you just stop inviting them to conferences. If it's a war there are really many ways to kill people careers that aren't funding.
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 21:32):John van de Wetering said:
Conor McBride said:
"If they didn't spend it on me, they'd only spend it on someone really evil."
While this might not be true when the movement to reject military funding is small, I think this might come into play once a significant number of people won't accept funding from the military. Assuming again that military funding is a significant portion of the money available (which is probably not true actually) this would result in moral people being without funding
That's an artificially first-order reaction. The question is who has friends.
John Baez (Feb 25 2021 at 21:32):@Jade Master wrote:
Is your point that category theory has benefited a lot from military money in the past, so it can't be that bad of a thing?
No, if that were my point I would have said so.
John Baez (Feb 25 2021 at 21:33):I just want people to be aware of the history of this subject.
For example, there could be people who didn't know Mac Lane's work on category theory was heavily funded by the Defense Department.
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 21:33):Jade Master said:
John van de Wetering said:
If I had to choose between stopping my career as a researcher due to a lack of funding, or accepting funding from the US military (assuming they are letting me work on research of my own choosing) I will accept the military funding
I don't want to belittle the hard choices that people have to make here. On the other hand I think that mathematicians usually have some compromise available (like what Fab mentioned) which will allow them to avoid this funding.
Yeah I'm willing to admit it is a bit of a false dilemma. But if we would decide from this day forward an mass that nobody would accept military funding, then in the short term this would mean some researchers would be without jobs
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 21:34):John Baez said:
I just want people to be aware of the history of this subject.
I used to pretend to be funded by the "Strong Normalisation for Nuclear Missiles" project, as funded by Polaris House, Swindon. But that joke is probably long gone.
Jade Master (Feb 25 2021 at 21:34):John Baez said:
Jade wrote:
[...] in this article Grothendieck is also arguing against more passive collaboration with the military than what Bob and David do...e.g. collaborating with people who work with military. I am interested in perspectives from people who do that as well.
As for me, I'm trying to use category theory (and lots of other math) to help understand some things about chemistry, biology, ecology and economics. You could say I'm trying to understand open systems, how they process information, how they evolve, how they thrive or fail to thrive... but also that I constantly get side-tracked by the beautiful math that seems to be the prerequisite for understanding these things.
In the process I became a subcontractor for the DARPA program called CASCADE, for Complex Adaptive System Composition and Design Environment. I had some misgivings about this... decided to give it a try... came up with some cool stuff, helped fund Blake Pollard and Joe Moeller, who both went on to get jobs at NIST based in part on this work... and eventually got frustrated and quit, mainly because the program was not set up to give us time to explore the ideas I thought were interesting, but also because the intended military applications became more clear, and I didn't want to pursue those goals.
More recently I've been talking to James Fairbanks and Evan Patterson about biochemistry: using math to infer Petri nets with rates from data. This is actually a big topic in biochemistry, though of course not many people are trying to use category theory. James has gotten grant money from the Defense Department for this project, but I'm not letting that deter me, because the benefits of what we're doing outweigh any harm it might do.
Not to interrogate you in particular, but why are you so sure the benefits outweigh the harm. Can you know for certain what sort of collaborations your work will lead to in the future?
Jade Master (Feb 25 2021 at 21:36):Conor McBride said:
John Baez said:
I just want people to be aware of the history of this subject.
I used to pretend to be funded by the "Strong Normalisation for Nuclear Missiles" project, as funded by Polaris House, Swindon. But that joke is probably long gone.
Is the joke just about the absurdity of normalizing nukes? edit: sorry lol I get it now.
Cole Comfort (Feb 25 2021 at 21:36):John van de Wetering said:
So from my perspective as a European, this mostly seems to be the question of "should you accept funding from the american army", because I haven't heard of any other army funding research (do the russian or chinese militaries offer research money?). So I think it should be more of a question of convincing the american public that they need to give less money to the military and more to the universities. Telling researchers to not accept available funding while competition is killing seems to me to put the burden of morality in the wrong place
I'm not making a comment on whether or not one should take money from the US millitary, but I really dislike the fact that people very often automatically assume that decisions made in America's supposed best interest are in my nation's own best interest. People would perhaps act less sanctimoniously if non-western militaries were offering money.
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 21:37):So I understand on a intuitive level that accepting military funding is icky, but I'm having a hard time accepting the argument of "you never know what they are going to use the research for". The cases I'm aware of, Bob Coecke working on CQM and natural language stuff, he had complete freedom in choosing his research. So the research would have been the same whether funded by regular grants, or by the military. So if the argument is that the military might use it for bad things, then why isn't this a problem if it is not funded by the military? Or is the argument more that you are normalising the presence of military things in academia?
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 21:38):For me it's clearly the latter.
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 21:39):There's a little more to it. On the one hand, it's putting a hand up to the fact that the whole of the origins of computing come from war effort. On the other hand, it's a desirable property of nukes that their navigation strategy is independent of their target.
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 21:39):It's funny. For instance, we Italians are trying to tell Northern Europeans that a lot of businesses popping out in Germany and whatnot are actually owned by people with ties in the mafia. Their reply is "well, but they are doing nothing illegal here for now." Clearly they aren't until they do, and at that point it will be to late to get rid of them. This is exactly how it happened here. :smile:
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 21:40):So yes, normalizing is WAY more dangerous than you think. They give you research freedom until they don't, and if at that point your research is tied to military funding you are screwed.
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 21:40):Okay, I can see that problem in principle, but do they also actually do that?
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 21:41):And I mean, people are getting screwed by a lack of funding anyway :P
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 21:41):The move to the silicon chip was entirely funded by the people who wanted the logic to be done by a machine that fitted inside the missile.
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 21:41):Also, even if research is open source, I really do not want the military to take any intellectual acknowledgement from it
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 21:42):I don't care that it is open anyway. I'd prefer soldiers not flexing with my work if possible.
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 21:43):We have to stop being blackmailed by the death industry.
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 21:46):Cat got your tongue?
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 21:48):Mine? I do agree with everything you say :smile:
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 21:48):Conor McBride said:
Cat got your tongue?
Apologies for not instantly having anything to say
Jules Hedges (Feb 25 2021 at 21:49):I'm late to the party on this thread
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 21:50):It just all went quiet. I'm new here, so I'm introducing myself properly by mild trolling.
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 21:52):Let me turn around the question: I haven't really heard any super convincing argument to not accept the funding other than "military bad" and a vague notion of not wanting to normalise military in research. Now, while I agree with these things and they would be enough reason to stop me doing something less important, like say, skip going to some store, this is about my livelihood. So I would hope there were some more concrete arguments. Like, if someone could point me towards some researcher accepting funding and then later being screwed over by the military, or his research being used in a bad way. Or a branch of research where military funding is very normalised and this leading to bad outcomes for the research or society
Jules Hedges (Feb 25 2021 at 21:52):My first thought is, the world of 2021 is (as far as I know) a much more complicated place to live than the world of 1970. Back then it was pretty straightforward: the world consisted of 2 superpowers vying for dominance, and there would either be a nuclear apocalypse or there wouldn't, no middle option was likely. Life in 2021 is much more subtle than that. There are still the big-E Evils, like the US military, BAE systems and whatever, the people who go out and shoot civilians. We also have to worry about the compound effect of a bunch of way more subtle evils
John Baez (Feb 25 2021 at 21:53):Jade wrote:
Not to interrogate you in particular, but why are you so sure the benefits outweigh the harm. Can you know for certain what sort of collaborations your work will lead to in the future?
I'm not "so sure". I just follow my instincts. If I were trying to be certain about things I would never have worked on n-category theory, and I never would have gotten interested in applied category theory; a lot of people thought these ideas were crazy. I can try to explain my instincts, but being "sure" or "certain" has nothing to do with it.
Jules Hedges (Feb 25 2021 at 21:53):Not accepting money from the US military is a no-brainer. Accepting money from Google or Facebook is a way more subtle question.
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 21:53):John van de Wetering said:
Let me turn around the question: I haven't really heard any super convincing argument to not accept the funding other than "military bad" and a vague notion of not wanting to normalise military in research. Now, while I agree with these things and they would be enough reason to stop me doing something less important, like say, skip going to some store, this is about my livelihood. So I would hope there were some more concrete arguments. Like, if someone could point me towards some researcher accepting funding and then later being screwed over by the military, or his research being used in a bad way. Or a branch of research where military funding is very normalised and this leading to bad outcomes for the research or society
Well, if "military bad" is not enough reason for you, and you need rationality-based arguments because the moral ones do not seem to work, then I cannot help you, sorry :frown:
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 21:53):This is the right question. What have we enabled?
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 21:54):Jules Hedges said:
Not accepting money from the US military is a no-brainer. Accepting money from Google or Facebook is a way more subtle question.
Why subtle? They are equally bad, if not worse
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 21:55):I mean you are talking about a company that sets dopamine targets in designing their user experience. It's literally creating a product designed to be the digital equivalent of cocaine
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 21:55):Fabrizio Genovese said:
John van de Wetering said:
Let me turn around the question: I haven't really heard any super convincing argument to not accept the funding other than "military bad" and a vague notion of not wanting to normalise military in research. Now, while I agree with these things and they would be enough reason to stop me doing something less important, like say, skip going to some store, this is about my livelihood. So I would hope there were some more concrete arguments. Like, if someone could point me towards some researcher accepting funding and then later being screwed over by the military, or his research being used in a bad way. Or a branch of research where military funding is very normalised and this leading to bad outcomes for the research or society
Well, if "military bad" is not enough reason for you, and you need rationality-based arguments because the moral ones do not seem to work, then I cannot help you, sorry :(
Did you have many fights with Bob about this? :P
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 21:55):It doesn't get more desplicable than that
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Feb 25 2021 at 21:55):It'd be interesting to see how strong is the correlation between research being funded by the military and technology being developed for the military. Unless they figured out a wonderful pipeline for turning science into technology, it seems unlikely they are extracting more technology than they would if they didn't fund researchers directly (and I think that's why they rain money on everyone: the only thing they can exploit is volume).
This disqualifies the moral responsibility of scientists for military technology, imo, at least for those who work far enough from the actual development (of course von Braun is quite responsible for V2 missiles, but Newton?).
So to me the big problem is to have the military controlling research-space, which is quite awful. Also I guess everybody would be enrolled in the next Manhattan project as soon as something bad happens.
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 21:55):John van de Wetering said:
Fabrizio Genovese said:
John van de Wetering said:
Let me turn around the question: I haven't really heard any super convincing argument to not accept the funding other than "military bad" and a vague notion of not wanting to normalise military in research. Now, while I agree with these things and they would be enough reason to stop me doing something less important, like say, skip going to some store, this is about my livelihood. So I would hope there were some more concrete arguments. Like, if someone could point me towards some researcher accepting funding and then later being screwed over by the military, or his research being used in a bad way. Or a branch of research where military funding is very normalised and this leading to bad outcomes for the research or society
Well, if "military bad" is not enough reason for you, and you need rationality-based arguments because the moral ones do not seem to work, then I cannot help you, sorry :frown:
Did you have many fights with Bob about this? :stuck_out_tongue:
Yep, just look at the history of this zulip group. xD
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 21:57):I have to say that when in Oxford, the argument of "we are stealing their money" seemed more convincing to me. Then I got to see other realities, and I think an alternative to military funding is almost always possible if one searches long enough.
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 21:57):Let me clarify a bit more about "military bad" not being intrinsically being enough. The US government is putting children in cages on the border, and depriving people of healthcare, which are grade A evil in my book. Does that mean accepting funding trough the US government is also a no-no?
Jules Hedges (Feb 25 2021 at 21:57):Fabrizio Genovese said:
For instance, part of my funding comes from the cryptospace, which is a decentralized community
Incidentally I don't implicitly trust cryptocurrency money for a second. I deal with it on a case by case basis
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 21:58):We are not talking about trusting cryptocurrency (not trusting it is plain stupid imho, but you do you). We are talking about the community behind it
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 21:58):Fabrizio Genovese said:
I have to say that when in Oxford, the argument of "we are stealing their money" seemed more convincing to me. Then I got to see other realities, and I think an alternative to military funding is almost always possible if one searches long enough.
That's what I'm talking about. That's how they get you. But you can stop.
Evan Patterson (Feb 25 2021 at 21:58):I am not going to contribute to the substance of this discussion right now. I will just say that the causticness currently being directed toward @John van de Wetering for mildly questioning—not even disagreeing with!—what seems to be the prevailing opinion (at least in this thread) makes it very unlikely that anything productive will come of this.
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 21:59):And that depends on the community. Bitcoin is basically ruled by a bunch of alt-righters that read Nick Land, but Ethereans are waaaay better, they are really looking at ways to improve society and such
Jules Hedges (Feb 25 2021 at 21:59):Yep, and I also don't want to be forced to switch to moderator-hat on this thread
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 21:59):John van de Wetering said:
Let me clarify a bit more about "military bad" not being intrinsically being enough. The US government is putting children in cages on the border, and depriving people of healthcare, which are grade A evil in my book. Does that mean accepting funding trough the US government is also a no-no?
Not in the slightest.
Jules Hedges (Feb 25 2021 at 22:00):My experience as a mod is that this channel usually needs more attention than the others, in the rare times when it's active
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 22:00):Fabrizio Genovese said:
And that depends on the community. Bitcoin is basically ruled by a bunch of alt-righters that read Nick Land, but Ethereans are waaaay better, they are really looking at ways to improve society and such
There is actually a very nice talk given at DEVCON V of how eth foundation funds project. Basically the idea is that "the more we give, the more we grow". Let me see if I can find it
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Feb 25 2021 at 22:00):I understand what John says... We don't want to slippery slope our way into not accepting funds from anyone. Fab, I'd say even crypto might be criticized as being highly unethical in some respects: it enables a lot of criminal activity, and BTC is now an additional nation our already overexploited planet has to support.
I guess John is rightly asking how to we discriminate between 'bad' and 'good', because it's easy to find the bad in a lot of stuff.
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 22:01):I think these things are both already debunked. The criminal-related transactions on BTC are negligible, and much of the mining energy comes from renewables
Martti Karvonen (Feb 25 2021 at 22:01):Fabrizio Genovese said:
Well, if "military bad" is not enough reason for you, and you need rationality-based arguments because the moral ones do not seem to work, then I cannot help you, sorry :(
I for one would like the argument below debunked with more than "no and no". I'm up for being convinced, but I don't yet understand the argument.
Conor McBride said:
You will occasionally hear the argument "I'm glad they're giving me their money because what I research is completely useless." No. And no.
Personally I'd prefer a military having a smaller budget and more research funded directly, but assuming we can't choose the size of the budget (I'm not a voter in US), it seems obvious to me that it's better spent on no-strings-attached grants on category theory than on whatever their alternative is (but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise). Kinda like I think it's good that CIA spent all that money on modern art back in the day than did more of whatever they were otherwise up to.
Tim Hosgood (Feb 25 2021 at 22:01):my only "novel" input (as in, yet to be mentioned here) is that the (US, in particular) military is not just a murder machine, but specifically a _capitalist_ murder machine, running wars to make rich people richer. science is an inherently socialist, and can only progress as such. even if you don't care/don't believe in/don't agree with the moral arguments, i think that this is a good rationalist argument against accepting military funding: it's simply growing the capitalist stranglehold on research
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 22:01):Also, in doing the energy trick you should compare the energy spent for mining to the pollution that traditional finance causes. Do you factor in all the trillions tradfi invests in oil, for instance?
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Feb 25 2021 at 22:02):@Fabrizio Genovese Well... It's still a massive waste of energy which could be used otherwise. And there's nothing renewable in ASICs boards, afaik.
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 22:02):Tim Hosgood said:
my only "novel" input (as in, yet to be mentioned here) is that the (US, in particular) military is not just a murder machine, but specifically a _capitalist_ murder machine, running wars to make rich people richer. science is an inherently socialist, and can only progress as such. even if you don't care/don't believe in/don't agree with the moral arguments, i think that this is a good rationalist argument against accepting military funding: it's simply growing the capitalist stranglehold on research
I don't know if science is socialist but for sure military is capitalistic. :smile:
Martti Karvonen (Feb 25 2021 at 22:02):Well BTC is far from scaling up to whatever NYSE does on a daily basis, and would require massive amounts of energy for that.
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 22:03):There are other chains that scale better, but that's not the point. The point is the huge community building experiment that is taking place
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Feb 25 2021 at 22:03):Yeah BTC is not comparable to the entire finance sector... Not even to banking. But let's not have this conversation here, it's ot.
Tim Hosgood (Feb 25 2021 at 22:03):Fabrizio Genovese said:
I don't know if science is socialist but for sure military is capitalistic. :)
I think that Alexandra Elbakyan has a lot to say about this ;)
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 22:03):E.g. I'd suggest to look into how communities like YFI self-govern
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Feb 25 2021 at 22:03):Eth it's much better afaik, because of PoS
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 22:04):Eth is not pos
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Feb 25 2021 at 22:04):No?
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 22:04):I mean, it's like since 2014 that they are saying "we'll switch to PoS"
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Feb 25 2021 at 22:04):Oh
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 22:04):Tim Hosgood said:
my only "novel" input (as in, yet to be mentioned here) is that the (US, in particular) military is not just a murder machine, but specifically a _capitalist_ murder machine, running wars to make rich people richer. science is an inherently socialist, and can only progress as such. even if you don't care/don't believe in/don't agree with the moral arguments, i think that this is a good rationalist argument against accepting military funding: it's simply growing the capitalist stranglehold on research
Yes, but so does accepting private-public partnerships. I really dislike those as I believe science should be fully public, but public-private stuff seems to be what many governments want, so what are we to do?
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 22:04):And then they don't. Now they launched the beacon chain but no, for now it's still largely PoW, and fees especially now are beyond expensive
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Feb 25 2021 at 22:04):Then bad boy to them too
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 22:06):Conor McBride said:
John van de Wetering said:
Let me clarify a bit more about "military bad" not being intrinsically being enough. The US government is putting children in cages on the border, and depriving people of healthcare, which are grade A evil in my book. Does that mean accepting funding trough the US government is also a no-no?
Not in the slightest.
If you are interested in elaborating, I'd like to hear a good argument for this
Jules Hedges (Feb 25 2021 at 22:06):And yes, once you start questioning things, it's hard to find any unambiguously clean source of funding. So it becomes a question of where each individual will draw an arbitrary line in the middle of a spectrum of greys
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 22:06):Martti Karvonen said:
Fabrizio Genovese said:
Well, if "military bad" is not enough reason for you, and you need rationality-based arguments because the moral ones do not seem to work, then I cannot help you, sorry :(
I for one would like the argument below debunked with more than "no and no". I'm up for being convinced, but I don't yet understand the argument.
Conor McBride said:You will occasionally hear the argument "I'm glad they're giving me their money because what I research is completely useless." No. And no.
Personally I'd prefer a military having a smaller budget and more research funded directly, but assuming we can't choose the size of the budget (I'm not a voter in US), it seems obvious to me that it's better spent on no-strings-attached grants on category theory than on whatever their alternative is (but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise). Kinda like I think it's good that CIA spent all that money on modern art back in the day than did more of whatever they were otherwise up to.
The first no is to the idea that that it's harmless to be funded for doing something useless. Apart from anything else, it makes the funder look benevolent, which they may not be.
The second no is to the assertion that the research is useless.
Martti Karvonen (Feb 25 2021 at 22:07):Say the military decides to cut its research budget, and spends sall the extra on bombing people. Is this supposed to be a win?
Joe Moeller (Feb 25 2021 at 22:07):John van de Wetering said:
So from my perspective as a European, this mostly seems to be the question of "should you accept funding from the american army", because I haven't heard of any other army funding research (do the russian or chinese militaries offer research money?). So I think it should be more of a question of convincing the american public that they need to give less money to the military and more to the universities. Telling researchers to not accept available funding while competition is killing seems to me to put the burden of morality in the wrong place
The US public has incredibly little power over this.
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 25 2021 at 22:08):Fabrizio Genovese said:
Fabrizio Genovese said:
And that depends on the community. Bitcoin is basically ruled by a bunch of alt-righters that read Nick Land, but Ethereans are waaaay better, they are really looking at ways to improve society and such
There is actually a very nice talk given at DEVCON V of how eth foundation funds project. Basically the idea is that "the more we give, the more we grow". Let me see if I can find it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Czf2aAqGIY <- this is the talk
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 22:08):Martti Karvonen said:
Say the military decides to cut its research budget, and spends sall the extra on bombing people. Is this supposed to be a win?
That's such a mathematician's hypothetical.
Martti Karvonen (Feb 25 2021 at 22:10):Well, if all the mathematicians stop taking money from US army, presumably the army does not return it to taxpayers but does something else.
Jules Hedges (Feb 25 2021 at 22:10):All the mathematicians do nothing of the sort, because this is always an individual choice
Martti Karvonen (Feb 25 2021 at 22:11):If they halved that something else and spent it all on research, that would seem like a win to me. Extrapolating linearly, army research spending>other army spending.
Martti Karvonen (Feb 25 2021 at 22:12):If one advocates mathematicians to not take army money but doesn't want all mathematicians to do so, what's actually the goal?
Jules Hedges (Feb 25 2021 at 22:12):Jade kicked off the thread by saying she agrees with Grothendieck, and probably a majority on the thread agree too. Not everyone does. There's not a whole lot that can be done after that point, aside from talking across each other...
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 22:12):If they halved that something else and spent it all on research, that would seem like a win to me. Extrapolating linearly, army research spending>other army spending.
The argument against that would be that if the army can show that they have succesfully performed research, then next year they will get a larger budget for bombing people
Cole Comfort (Feb 25 2021 at 22:12):I mean this presupposes that the US government budgets based on tax revenue, and not just by printing money :sweat_smile:
Martti Karvonen (Feb 25 2021 at 22:12):Of course, ideally the reseach money wouldn't come via the army in the first place, but I think that's something everyone agrees with anyway
Martti Karvonen (Feb 25 2021 at 22:13):John van de Wetering said:
If they halved that something else and spent it all on research, that would seem like a win to me. Extrapolating linearly, army research spending>other army spending.
The argument against that would be that if the army can show that they have succesfully performed research, then next year they will get a larger budget for bombing people
Thanks, this is the kind of argument I was hoping to see instead of something like "if it's not obvious you're immoral"
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 22:15):I'm not arguing against taking army money. I'm arguing for being honest about why.
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 22:15):You mean, why you would accept funding? I mean, that answer is obvious right: funding is funding
Martti Karvonen (Feb 25 2021 at 22:15):Conor McBride said:
I'm not arguing against taking army money. I'm arguing for being honest about why.
Oh then I misunderstood your position (though I'm sure some others are arguing against taking military money)
Jules Hedges (Feb 25 2021 at 22:16):John Baez said:
To make the conversation interesting it would be good to get someone like Bob Coecke or David Spivak involved, since they take money from the military and have thought about these issues. Bob in particular is quite unapologetic about it and will argue in factor of it.
And here's the most underrated post in the whole thread. Many people have been funded indirectly by the USAF via Bob especially, probably a bunch right here in the thread
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 22:18):I'm an old man, from a violent place, who is used to being misunderstood.
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 22:18):Also, for people who are convinced themselves by moral arguments to not accept military funding: it might still be useful to think about more "practical" reasons for not accepting the funding, because that will help you convince other people in not accepting funding, which will further your goals
Jules Hedges (Feb 25 2021 at 22:21):The majority of those indirectly funded by the USAF via Bob were PhD students. Almost nobody starting out with a PhD is in a position to question where their funding is coming from. They don't yet know anything about how science functions
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 22:22):Also, in order to get some scope about the numbers in this thread:
The annual research funding by AFOSR is about 400 million USD. link
The EU Marie Curie Individual Fellowship program in 2019 had a budget of 236 million EUR. link
Jules Hedges (Feb 25 2021 at 22:23):Well, the Marie Curie fellowships are super prestigious. They don't hand them out like sweets
Martti Karvonen (Feb 25 2021 at 22:23):It's not apples-to-apples, but gives some sense of the numbers involved anyway
Jade Master (Feb 25 2021 at 22:24):Darpa spent over 220 million dollars in math and computer science research last year.
Jules Hedges (Feb 25 2021 at 22:24):Also, 400 million USD really isn't that much for all of science. A single big grant in formal science with only staff costs can be a few million over several years. An experimental science lab is significantly more expensive than that
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 22:25):The "Excellent Science" portion of Horizon 2020 is about 4 billion EUR per year link
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 22:27):Jules Hedges said:
Also, 400 million USD really isn't that much for all of science. A single big grant in formal science with only staff costs can be a few million over several years. An experimental science lab is significantly more expensive than that
Yeah it might be nice to find some numbers about how this funding is distributed. I can imagine that most of it is spent on a few big projects that have a clear military purpose
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 22:28):Jade Master said:
Darpa spent over 220 million dollars in math and computer science research last year.
Although this might point in the other direction, unless the budget of DARPA is a lot larger then that of AFOSR
Jules Hedges (Feb 25 2021 at 22:28):Right, for example I'd expect a rocketry or nuclear physics lab to have annual running costs that are a significant chunk of 400 million
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 22:28):I'm anxious to stop one particular argument for working for the military, namely "we're useless". And I hope you now see both reasons. We're bloody well not useless. And we bloody well make the military look benevolent.
Jules Hedges (Feb 25 2021 at 22:29):It's probably possible to be useless, but it's surprisingly hard and definitely not something to aspire to
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 22:29):Sure, our research is not useless. But if you were gonna do the same research regardless of it being funded by the military, I don't see how that makes it more of a problem
Martti Karvonen (Feb 25 2021 at 22:30):I guess the argument is the one you just made to me when I asked - it makes the army look better
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 22:30):When you make the "we're useless" argument for working for the military, you undermine every other funding outreach. So don't.
Jules Hedges (Feb 25 2021 at 22:30):John van de Wetering said:
Sure, our research is not useless. But if you were gonna do the same research regardless of it being funded by the military, I don't see how that makes it more of a problem
Jade wrote a blog post that kind of focussed on this point specifically, let me dig it out..
Jules Hedges (Feb 25 2021 at 22:31):Here it is: https://jadeedenstarmaster.wordpress.com/2020/12/11/the-lie-of-its-just-math/
Jules Hedges (Feb 25 2021 at 22:32):tl;dr: "The DoD’s real goal is not just the math you produce, they want to gain access to your mathematical community." and "The DoD wants to normalize themselves in your non-mathematical communities."
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 22:34):There's a couple of things in that post that I would like to understand better
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 22:35):"Maybe you would never work on missile guidance systems. That’s okay, the people you work with at the DoD will gain expertise in your mathematical specialty."
How does this process work of them gaining more expertise in your speciality by funding you?
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 22:36):"The DoD wants to build themselves into these mathematical communities from the very beginning so that when it does eventually become practical they will be poised to take advantage."
What kind of advantage is meant here? That when the research becomes practical that they will withdraw funding unless you cooperate on more nefarious research?
Martti Karvonen (Feb 25 2021 at 22:38):Jules Hedges said:
tl;dr: "The DoD’s real goal is not just the math you produce, they want to gain access to your mathematical community." and "The DoD wants to normalize themselves in your non-mathematical communities."
That + they seem more benevolent when they do research as well + they might be able to direct research in directions they like. Given all this, I agree that it's preferrable if science was funded directly rather than via the military, but I'm not sure that's the choice we're making. On the margin, the military either gives the money for some particular research or it does something else. In the case of Mac Lane (or other projects mentioned in the comments), it's not obvious to me that this "something else" is a better use of that same money.
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 22:39):"The DoD wants to normalize themselves in your non-mathematical communities."
So, I still don't buy this argument. To me it feels that the only thing we're normalising is the accepting of funding from the military. I mean, some of us here have directly benefited from military funding and yet we are still all in agreement that the military is evil and should be defunded.
As a side-note: if you are funded by military and have to include a "This research was funded by..." blurb in the Acknowledgements of your paper, could you then also add another line saying "I think the military is evil, I'm only accepting this money because I need funding", or would that be dissallowed by your grant?
James Wood (Feb 25 2021 at 22:39):Conor McBride said:
And we bloody well make the military look benevolent.
To who?
Martti Karvonen (Feb 25 2021 at 22:40):I guess to other academics who are then happy to cooperate even more?
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 22:42):James Wood said:
Conor McBride said:
And we bloody well make the military look benevolent.
To who?
If you think they don't puff themselves for spending money in this way, you have another think coming.
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 22:43):Puff themselves to whom?
Jade Master (Feb 25 2021 at 22:44):John van de Wetering said:
"Maybe you would never work on missile guidance systems. That’s okay, the people you work with at the DoD will gain expertise in your mathematical specialty."
How does this process work of them gaining more expertise in your speciality by funding you?
Not saying it always works this way...but often a funding opportunity will involve collaborating specifically with a mathematician who works for the department of defense or a military contractor. In this situation, this mathematician learns about your research and the math you do through this collaboration and will take this knowledge to their other projects.
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 22:45):Ultimately, the electorate.
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 22:45):Not saying it always works this way...but often a funding opportunity will involve collaborating specifically with a mathematician who works for the department of defense or a military contractor. In this situation, this mathematician learns about your research and the math you do through this collaboration and will take this knowledge to their other projects.
That makes sense, but seems to be more of an argument for not collaborating with researchers directly employed by the military (which I would agree with), than an argument for not accepting their funding
Jade Master (Feb 25 2021 at 22:46):John van de Wetering said:
"The DoD wants to build themselves into these mathematical communities from the very beginning so that when it does eventually become practical they will be poised to take advantage."
What kind of advantage is meant here? That when the research becomes practical that they will withdraw funding unless you cooperate on more nefarious research?
They won't need to do anything like withdrawing funding. When the research becomes practical they will already have employees who are capable enough, just by collaborating for so long.
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 22:48):Okay, I think we might have different ideas about what it entails to accept funding from the military. I'm coming from the viewpoint of Bob, where as far as I understand, he basically got money to do what he wants, without any further interaction with any researchers or employees of the military. If there were such interactions I think there is a much stronger case that this is a bad^{tm} thing to do.
Joe Moeller (Feb 25 2021 at 22:51):Right, there are different forms funding can take. Jade had a close second-hand view of John and I working on this DARPA project where they had a project, and we joined in on it, via the company Metron. This is very different than just getting handed a bunch of money to do what you like.
Jade Master (Feb 25 2021 at 22:51):Martti Karvonen said:
Jules Hedges said:
tl;dr: "The DoD’s real goal is not just the math you produce, they want to gain access to your mathematical community." and "The DoD wants to normalize themselves in your non-mathematical communities."
That + they seem more benevolent when they do research as well + they might be able to direct research in directions they like. Given all this, I agree that it's preferrable if science was funded directly rather than via the military, but I'm not sure that's the choice we're making. On the margin, the military either gives the money for some particular research or it does something else. In the case of Mac Lane (or other projects mentioned in the comments), it's not obvious to me that this "something else" is a better use of that same money.
Grothendieck had a great response to this;
However, by accepting their funds through military channels, scientists help to augment the importance of themilitary in the life of the nation –to the extent that the army finances research, the part of the national revenue devoted to the military will be increased accordingly. Thus even if scientists accept massive amounts from the military, it will not diminish –even by one –the number of weapons the army has at its disposal, nor the number of victims massacred by this same army when it is engaged in a war, as is actually the case in the USA
[...]The support of pure scientific research lends a degree of respectability and even an aura of innocence to the army. How can one hope that the man-in-the-street or the politician will wake up to these ignoble escapades that might prove fatal to all of us, when he sees the entire scientific community collaborating with the very apparatus that poses these threats?
[...]Certainly research is an agreeable activity for those who engage in it, sometimes even exalting. That doesn't establish its utility, or that its positive consequences, outweigh the negative ones. Too often it has served the vilification of man, from the beginning of the industrial revolution until today, when it may well prove to be the tool of its own final destruction. In fact the men whose activities have been the most dangerous and deadly for humanity over the past thirty years are not heads of state, nor generals, but scientists –for without them, the military would have remained relatively inoffensive. From this global perspective, I am convinced that no scientific discovery, however useful it may appear to be, can compensate for or justify the collaboration of a scientist with the military.
Jade Master (Feb 25 2021 at 22:55):John van de Wetering said:
Not saying it always works this way...but often a funding opportunity will involve collaborating specifically with a mathematician who works for the department of defense or a military contractor. In this situation, this mathematician learns about your research and the math you do through this collaboration and will take this knowledge to their other projects.
That makes sense, but seems to be more of an argument for not collaborating with researchers directly employed by the military (which I would agree with), than an argument for not accepting their funding
I have less experience with the type of funding where they don't interfere much, but I have a hard time believing that they would give you millions of dollars if there wasn't something they got out of it. This could be the actual technology or math you're developing or the normalization and goodwill they generate by giving you the money.
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 22:56):When we take money, we endorse the people from whom we take money.
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 22:56):@Aleks Kissinger @Bob Coecke Do you want to weigh in on this? How much interference or say in your research would you say the military has?
Jules Hedges (Feb 25 2021 at 22:56):I actually will read this paper when I have time (if paper's the right word). I think I'd misunderstood Grothendieck's position, I thought his problem was with the French military, and in particular France's nuclear weapons
Jules Hedges (Feb 25 2021 at 22:59):In the end if you take a very strong position like Grothendieck you'll be limiting your chances as a researcher as Grothendieck did, and look where it got him. He never produced any work of note, and now he's entirely forgotten
Jade Master (Feb 25 2021 at 23:01):Jules Hedges said:
I actually will read this paper when I have time (if paper's the right word). I think I'd misunderstood Grothendieck's position, I thought his problem was with the French military, and in particular France's nuclear weapons
Yes, Grothendieck was very concerned about militarization of all countries. He was worried it would lead to the end of humanity...in particular he is saying the world powers, the countries who play war games in other peoples countries are the worst offenders.
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 23:02):That's a very reasonable position to have in the Cold War :)
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 23:04):Jade Master said:
Jules Hedges said:
I actually will read this paper when I have time (if paper's the right word). I think I'd misunderstood Grothendieck's position, I thought his problem was with the French military, and in particular France's nuclear weapons
Yes, Grothendieck was very concerned about militarization of all countries. He was worried it would lead to the end of humanity...in particular he is saying the world powers, the countries who play war games in other peoples countries are the worst offenders.
Welcome to Glasgow! The UK's nuclear arsenal is a short walk away.
Jade Master (Feb 25 2021 at 23:04):Yeah definitely, things are a bit different nowadays...
Martti Karvonen (Feb 25 2021 at 23:05):Conor McBride said:
Ultimately, the electorate.
I'm pretty sure the electorate/house/senate never cared or heard whether say Mac Lane was funded or not. That said, I guess if there was a coordinated "boycott DoD"-campaign (kinda like the ones against Elsevier), it wouldn't look too good on them and there just might be a chance that this would effect something in the long run
Jade Master (Feb 25 2021 at 23:05):I'm not gonna be in Glasgow for a while but that's good to know :grimacing: :grimacing: Is there a military base there as well?
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 23:06):Jade Master said:
I'm not gonna be in Glasgow for a while but that's good to know :grimacing: :grimacing: Is there a military base there as well?
The UK's only deep water submarine port is pretty much just down the street. It's a bit of an issue.
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 23:08):Martti Karvonen said:
Conor McBride said:
Ultimately, the electorate.
I'm pretty sure the electorate/house/senate never cared or heard whether say Mac Lane was funded or not. That said, I guess if there was a coordinated "boycott DoD"-campaign (kinda like the ones against Elsevier), it wouldn't look too good on them and there just might be a chance that this would effect something in the long run
Don't be obtuse. The electorate are constantly required to make decisions about which they are not remotely informed.
Jules Hedges (Feb 25 2021 at 23:08):A not completely trivial question in the Scottish independence debate is who gets the nukes? I think the general consensus is Scotland doesn't want them, but the rest of the UK has nowhere suitable to put them
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 23:10):Jules Hedges said:
A not completely trivial question in the Scottish independence debate is who gets the nukes? I think the general consensus is Scotland doesn't want them, but the rest of the UK has nowhere suitable to put them
The traditional answer is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaufort%27s_Dyke
Martti Karvonen (Feb 25 2021 at 23:15):Conor McBride said:
Don't be obtuse. The electorate are constantly required to make decisions about which they are not remotely informed.
I'm not being obtuse on purpose - I'm just trying to learn. But I guess the point is that army will point to funding research in general and to particular technological breaktroughs made with the money when puffing themselves, not to Mac Lanes and stuff that are harder to sell to whoever is the puffee.
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 23:17):Yes, flinging cash is a good look. Taking the cash makes that good look work.
Martti Karvonen (Feb 25 2021 at 23:19):Grothendieck said:
Thus even if scientists accept massive amounts from the military, it will not diminish –even by one –the number of weapons the army has at its disposal, nor the number of victims massacred by this same army when it is engaged in a war, as is actually the case in the USA
This one I don't find obvious - I now think it's nontrivial to estimate whether funding taken by scientists decreases the remaining army budget, doesn't change it all or increases it (due to them looking better).
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 23:19):Conor McBride said:
Yes, flinging cash is a good look. Taking the cash makes that good look work.
But the military will always spend money on military research, so they can always say they support research regardless of whether mathematicians get funded. Besides, military propaganda depends much more on other more visible things like Hollywood movies
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 23:20):"I have conned these awful people into giving me loads of money." is positively endorsing the awful.
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 23:22):John van de Wetering said:
Conor McBride said:
Yes, flinging cash is a good look. Taking the cash makes that good look work.
But the military will always spend money on military research, so they can always say they support research regardless of whether mathematicians get funded. Besides, military propaganda depends much more on other more visible things like Hollywood movies
It's about putting a face on it. Is it yours?
Ben Sprott (Feb 25 2021 at 23:23):Are we really not just talking about an entrenched belief that American power needs to be curtailed? I think we are seeing more and more that this is either misguided or a contraption of foreign influence.
Martti Karvonen (Feb 25 2021 at 23:23):Similarly, I think this part from Grothendieck could go both ways:
Certainly research is an agreeable activity for those who engage in it, sometimes even exalting. That doesn't establish its utility, or that its positive consequences, outweigh the negative ones.
Like one could also say: certainly army money is disagreeable to those who see it taken, sometimes even disgusting. That doesn't establish its disutility, or that its negative consequences, outweight the negative ones.
Martti Karvonen (Feb 25 2021 at 23:23):Conor McBride said:
John van de Wetering said:
Conor McBride said:
Yes, flinging cash is a good look. Taking the cash makes that good look work.
But the military will always spend money on military research, so they can always say they support research regardless of whether mathematicians get funded. Besides, military propaganda depends much more on other more visible things like Hollywood movies
It's about putting a face on it. Is it yours?
Surely something more than personal purity is at stake?
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 23:26):Martti Karvonen said:
Conor McBride said:
John van de Wetering said:
Conor McBride said:
Yes, flinging cash is a good look. Taking the cash makes that good look work.
But the military will always spend money on military research, so they can always say they support research regardless of whether mathematicians get funded. Besides, military propaganda depends much more on other more visible things like Hollywood movies
It's about putting a face on it. Is it yours?
Surely something more than personal purity is at stake?
I'm totally pragmatic on this one, but I try to be clear about what's going on. If you ask that question, then you have a problem, not me.
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 23:26):Martti Karvonen said:
Similarly, I think this part from Grothendieck could go both ways:
Certainly research is an agreeable activity for those who engage in it, sometimes even exalting. That doesn't establish its utility, or that its positive consequences, outweigh the negative ones.
Like one could also say: certainly army money is disagreeable to those who see it taken, sometimes even disgusting. That doesn't establish its disutility, or that its negative consequences, outweight the negative ones.
Couldn't you also put this the other way: the military is more likely to want to fund research that will have some impact on society, while most math research does not have any impact. As random research that has an affect on society is more likely to be positive than negative (debatable), it is positive utility to accept military funding as it forces you to think about research that has some impact on society.
Jules Hedges (Feb 25 2021 at 23:27):Ben Sprott said:
Are we really not just talking about an entrenched belief that American power needs to be curtailed? I think we are seeing more and more that this is either misguided or a contraption of foreign influence.
The fact that this thread keeps coming back to the US military is itself yet another face of the American exceptionalism, which is nearly impossible to escape on the internet. Only a small minority of people are even legally capable of being funded by the US military
John van de Wetering (Feb 25 2021 at 23:27):Conor McBride said:
Martti Karvonen said:
Conor McBride said:
John van de Wetering said:
Conor McBride said:
Yes, flinging cash is a good look. Taking the cash makes that good look work.
But the military will always spend money on military research, so they can always say they support research regardless of whether mathematicians get funded. Besides, military propaganda depends much more on other more visible things like Hollywood movies
It's about putting a face on it. Is it yours?
Surely something more than personal purity is at stake?
I'm totally pragmatic on this one, but I try to be clear about what's going on. If you ask that question, then you have a problem, not me.
I'm really not understanding what you are saying here. It looks like you are saying "my concience is clear, is yours?" Which is not a very good argument
Martti Karvonen (Feb 25 2021 at 23:27):Conor McBride said:
I'm totally pragmatic on this one, but I try to be clear about what's going on. If you ask that question, then you have a problem, not me.
I'm not sure I follow - could you rephrase this one?
Martti Karvonen (Feb 25 2021 at 23:30):The following thread got mentioned here earlier I think, but I'm not sure anyone linked it - the discussion there was interesting: https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2020/12/the_lie_of_its_just_math.html
Martti Karvonen (Feb 25 2021 at 23:30):There was an even wider range of opinions than here, including people thinking that US army is by and large a force of good.
Jules Hedges (Feb 25 2021 at 23:33):Heh, I remember that. There's a genuine debate to be had about this stuff, but "the US army is by and large a force of good" crosses the line into :clown:
Martti Karvonen (Feb 25 2021 at 23:34):Yeah to be clear I'm not pushing for that, just pointing out that there was an even wider range of opinions than here
Jade Master (Feb 25 2021 at 23:39):Funding for weapons won't decrease if you take funding for math because taking funding for math will make them more popular and allow them to get more funding in total.
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 23:39):There is a pile of history here. It has had a huge structural impact at an institutional level. LFCS Edinburgh exists at all because of objections to funding from spooks. Meanwhile, Bletchley Park folks totally started Edinburgh AI. I'm not trying to kick anyone.
Martti Karvonen (Feb 25 2021 at 23:42):Jade Master said:
Funding for weapons won't decrease if you take funding for math because taking funding for math will make them more popular and allow them to get more funding in total.
I agree that this _can_ happen, but it's not obvious to me that that's always the case. If it were always true, wouldn't army e.g. double its research budget given that it would still have at least as much left for everything else?
Jules Hedges (Feb 25 2021 at 23:42):There's also several entire subjects where RAND played a major role in them existing at all: game theory, operations research, optimisation theory. Stuff I'm thinking about all the time. (I have a mini conspiracy theory that these subjects are a really early example of the military industrial complex: they're all really useful in business, and also all really useful to the military)
Martti Karvonen (Feb 25 2021 at 23:43):Like I can really see it going either way - for some level of funding, giving more to science gives you even more back from the taxpayer, and at some point it'll give less. It's not at all clear to me where we are on that curve.
Bob Coecke (Feb 25 2021 at 23:48):Oh dear, this conversation on this forum, including the very existence of this forum would not have happened if it wasn't for accepting money that was without constraints, the easiest money whatever, whether it came from military or religious fanatics. Many people writing here wouldn't have been in academia at all. Not gonna start naming people but from what I know that's surely 50+ and probably 100+ at least, several in this conversation. You want them all to vanish like in the Avengers? Just klick your fingers then, I'll provide you with their names. The fact that there is now this flourishing ACT community, as well as QPL, quantum foundations etc. wouldn't have happened without that. If you are not mainstream, you have to seek alternative resources. The reality is that with the exception of some CS places in Europe, CT was dying 20 years ago, big centres were evaporating. I was unemployed, since the CT community driven by utopian sofa ideology had not taken care at all of its offspring, being just busy with person cults. The end of the species was looming. I spend a major chunk of the past 20 years, and continuing to do so now, to generate jobs for enabling people to do interesting things. We build a group through which some 300 people came trough, now having their own groups elsewhere. You want them all to vanish? I can give the names. Tell them. "When we take money, we endorse the people from whom we take money", yeah right, and the military is going to get more money because of some category theoretician respecting them, right. What I have seen instead is that people who helped us are doing so because they believe in good science and have a hell of a job trying to justify that to their admirals. I have seen some of those loose their jobs cause they gave money to people like me; I have a lot more respect for them than for sofa ideologists who don't bother to help with the procreation of their community. (yes, I am an animal) Cheers!
Jules Hedges (Feb 25 2021 at 23:55):One realistic possibility is every treats Bob as the morality version of a money launderer. Bad money comes in, good money comes out, Bob collects all the moral consequences for himself, everyone's happy
Conor McBride (Feb 25 2021 at 23:55):The more Bob edits his message, the more I approve. So far.
Jade Master (Feb 26 2021 at 00:01):This forum was created by Christian Williams iirc, nothing to do with military lol
Jules Hedges (Feb 26 2021 at 00:02):Only in the most literal sense
Jade Master (Feb 26 2021 at 00:02):What other sense is there?
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 00:03):The existence of the community behind it.
Jules Hedges (Feb 26 2021 at 00:04):It's made of people!
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 00:06):John van de Wetering said:
As a side-note: if you are funded by military and have to include a "This research was funded by..." blurb in the Acknowledgements of your paper, could you then also add another line saying "I think the military is evil, I'm only accepting this money because I need funding", or would that be disallowed by your grant?
I don't think it's disallowed by the grant. It would reduce your chance of getting another grant.
Conor McBride (Feb 26 2021 at 00:08):John Baez said:
John van de Wetering said:
As a side-note: if you are funded by military and have to include a "This research was funded by..." blurb in the Acknowledgements of your paper, could you then also add another line saying "I think the military is evil, I'm only accepting this money because I need funding", or would that be disallowed by your grant?
I don't think it's disallowed by the grant. It would reduce your chance of getting another grant.
And that's the blackmail you signed up for.
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 00:08):After the death of the Category Theory in Computer Science conference in 2002 or so, MFPS was the main forum for applied category theory, always funded by the Office of Naval Research until now. They gave funding for Jamie Vicary cause "he was argumentative".
Jules Hedges (Feb 26 2021 at 00:10):(and what are wars if not the logical extension of having an argument?)
John van de Wetering (Feb 26 2021 at 00:12):Bob Coecke said:
The existence of the community behind it.
I mean, or even more basic: the internet was funded by a lot of military funding
Jade Master (Feb 26 2021 at 00:13):You're not wrong, applications of category theory have been a DoD project since the beginning. The fact is that the military is seeing the benefits of this today.
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 00:13):John Baez said:
John van de Wetering said:
As a side-note: if you are funded by military and have to include a "This research was funded by..." blurb in the Acknowledgements of your paper, could you then also add another line saying "I think the military is evil, I'm only accepting this money because I need funding", or would that be disallowed by your grant?
I don't think it's disallowed by the grant. It would reduce your chance of getting another grant.
Wrong: At the time I had a webpage saying I accept money from war-mongers and religious fanatics, with in the case of the war-mongers a video of Black Sabbath "War Pigs" and for religious fanatics "Psalm 69" by Ministry. ONR liked that a lot.
John van de Wetering (Feb 26 2021 at 00:13):Maybe a good way to get more people to not accept military funding is for some funding agencies to only accept projects from people that have vowed publically to not accept military funding. Fight money with money!
Jade Master (Feb 26 2021 at 00:14):Now we have category theory going towards coordinating drones and making sure they can't be hacked.
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 00:14):Jade Master said:
You're not wrong, applications of category theory have been a DoD project since the beginning. The fact is that the military is seeing the benefits of this today.
Sorry Jade, clumsy at this medium. Was replying to John. :)
Jules Hedges (Feb 26 2021 at 00:15):The US military love heavy metal right? They even used it as part of the sleep deprivation torture in Guantanamo
Jade Master (Feb 26 2021 at 00:16):Bob Coecke said:
Jade Master said:
You're not wrong, applications of category theory have been a DoD project since the beginning. The fact is that the military is seeing the benefits of this today.
Sorry Jade, clumsy at this medium. Was replying to John. :)
That's alright. I was mostly responding to your original post here.
Martti Karvonen (Feb 26 2021 at 00:19):Jade Master said:
You're not wrong, applications of category theory have been a DoD project since the beginning. The fact is that the military is seeing the benefits of this today.
And I guess so is the world, making it trickier, no?
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 00:20):Planck, Schrodinger, Einstein, Dirac, ...and then.
Conor McBride (Feb 26 2021 at 00:22):Let me be clear. I object to the false-modest claim to non-utility as the justification of supping with the devil. I do not object to the devil.
Jade Master (Feb 26 2021 at 00:24):Einstein's willingness to collaborate with the US military led to the development and use of nuclear weapons. I hope we can learn from his mistakes.
Jules Hedges (Feb 26 2021 at 00:26):I believe the story with Einstein is much more nuanced than that
John van de Wetering (Feb 26 2021 at 00:26):It also lead to the development of nuclear reactors, preventing the building of thousands of coal-fired plants, which probably saved millions of lives. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the premise that what Einstein did was wrong, but that these utility calculations are difficult
Jade Master (Feb 26 2021 at 00:26):Martti Karvonen said:
Jade Master said:
You're not wrong, applications of category theory have been a DoD project since the beginning. The fact is that the military is seeing the benefits of this today.
And I guess so is the world, making it trickier, no?
Yeah maybe the world is benefitting from category theory, but who is getting the technology which comes from it...the military and software engineers mostly in my opinion.
John van de Wetering (Feb 26 2021 at 00:27):If you believe category theory is having a negative impact on the world, then why are you doing category theory? (this is not meant too sound aggressive, but it might have come out this way)
Jade Master (Feb 26 2021 at 00:28):John van de Wetering said:
If you believe category theory is having a negative impact on the world, then why are you doing category theory?
Mostly selfish reasons to be honest!
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 00:28):John van de Wetering said:
If you believe category theory is having a negative impact on the world, then why are you doing category theory?
Well said, grandson.
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 00:29):It started pretty bad. With Eilenberg and Maclane working on the atom bomb.
John van de Wetering (Feb 26 2021 at 00:29):They did?
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 00:30):John van de Wetering said:
They did?
They wrote their 1st paper while working on the Manhattan project.
Jade Master (Feb 26 2021 at 00:30):For reasons of self-interest I don't want to quit, but this is why it's important to me to try to change the applications of category theory so that it goes to something better...at least in whatever capacity I have for this.
John van de Wetering (Feb 26 2021 at 00:31):What would you say is an application of category theory that has negative utility?
Martti Karvonen (Feb 26 2021 at 00:32):I've heard that von Neumann advocated for a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 00:32):Joe Moeller said:
Right, there are different forms funding can take. Jade had a close second-hand view of John and I working on this DARPA project where they had a project, and we joined in on it, via the company Metron. This is very different than just getting handed a bunch of money to do what you like.
By the way, you never get handed money to do whatever you like. You have to write grant applications and at least claim you're going to work on some "hot topic". People who repeatedly get grants tend to be ones that succeed in doing approximately what they claimed they'd do. So the whole grantsmanship game - which dominates the sciences these days - really pushes people toward "hot topics".
But you're right about this: what you and I had was not a grant, it was a subcontract - so we were being bossed around more.
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 00:32):@Conor McBride wrote: "Don't be obtuse."
Please don't say things like that here. People here can disagree a lot, but they shouldn't start insulting each other.
John van de Wetering (Feb 26 2021 at 00:34):Martti Karvonen said:
I've heard that von Neumann advocated for a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union
von Neumann was a complicated man. If I remember correctly from the biography I read he escaped Hungary when it come under soviet control, and he felt Stalin was the most dangerous man in the world, and really unpredictable. But I don't think he advocated a preemptive strike, just that the united states should be scary enough that Stalin wouldn't try anything
Jade Master (Feb 26 2021 at 00:34):John van de Wetering said:
What would you say is an application of category theory that has negative utility?
Military applications, machine learning and data processing for large data companies, probably some more things...
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 00:35):Jade Master said:
For reasons of self-interest I don't want to quit, but this is why it's important to me to try to change the applications of category theory so that it goes to something better...at least in whatever capacity I have for this.
Exactly, and the way you do this in this world is by getting to some position of power, respect, not by not accepting funding. The reason I went into industry, is that the way quantum technology will be decided, is by the businesses. My last line of my job announcement states this explicitly: "More broadly, I foresee a major role for quantum AI, and am looking very much forward to the challenge of building an organisation that will harness the power of quantum technology in a responsible manner."
John van de Wetering (Feb 26 2021 at 00:35):Military applications, machine learning and data processing for large data companies, probably some more things...
But what are military applications? I think it was brought up a bit back that the DoD is interested in verified code to make their drone strikes better. However, verified code is useful in many fields (and so is machine learning and data processing for that matter)
Jules Hedges (Feb 26 2021 at 00:38):And I'll get back to you after maybe 5 or 10 years with a retrospective on open games.........
Jade Master (Feb 26 2021 at 00:41):Bob Coecke said:
Jade Master said:
For reasons of self-interest I don't want to quit, but this is why it's important to me to try to change the applications of category theory so that it goes to something better...at least in whatever capacity I have for this.
Exactly, and the way you do this in this world is by getting to some position of power, respect, not by not accepting funding. The reason I went into industry, is that the way quantum technology will be decided, is by the businesses. My last line of my job announcement states this explicitly: "More broadly, I foresee a major role for quantum AI, and am looking very much forward to the challenge of building an organisation that will harness the power of quantum technology in a responsible manner."
Best of luck to you in this. In general I'm not the most optimistic about this sort of strategy. Mostly because I've seen people with good intentions get a lot of power in silicon valley type companies...and then because there is nothing holding the leaders accountable they eventually devolve to acting in self interest. Making themselves and their friends very rich but participating in the exploitation of lots of people in the process.
Jade Master (Feb 26 2021 at 00:43):Valeria de Paiva said:
Conor McBride said:
"If they didn't spend it on me, they'd only spend it on someone really evil."
or something really evil, like torture methods in children
What do you mean Valeria?
Jade Master (Feb 26 2021 at 00:44):John van de Wetering said:
Military applications, machine learning and data processing for large data companies, probably some more things...
But what are military applications? I think it was brought up a bit back that the DoD is interested in verified code to make their drone strikes better. However, verified code is useful in many fields (and so is machine learning and data processing for that matter)
Yes it's used in lots of places, unfortunately I believe that capitalism incentivises the use of these technologies for things which exploit and kill...so that's what it gets used for more than the things that do good.
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 00:49):Jade Master said:
Bob Coecke said:
Jade Master said:
For reasons of self-interest I don't want to quit, but this is why it's important to me to try to change the applications of category theory so that it goes to something better...at least in whatever capacity I have for this.
Exactly, and the way you do this in this world is by getting to some position of power, respect, not by not accepting funding. The reason I went into industry, is that the way quantum technology will be decided, is by the businesses. My last line of my job announcement states this explicitly: "More broadly, I foresee a major role for quantum AI, and am looking very much forward to the challenge of building an organisation that will harness the power of quantum technology in a responsible manner."
Best of luck to you in this. In general I'm not the most optimistic about this sort of strategy. Mostly because I've seen people with good intentions get a lot of power in silicon valley type companies...and then because there is nothing holding the leaders accountable they eventually devolve to acting in self interest. Making themselves and their friends very rich but participating in the exploitation of lots of people in the process.
I saw earlier in a conversation that I am not very typical, and neither is our CEO, who is funding the Topos institute and is the reason for their stance against a bunch of modern bad stuff by big companies, so maybe we have a chance. :) I always have been pretty extreme left-wing, so is he, so is Ross Duncan, the 2nd highest scientist in the company, so maybe we have a chance; if there is going to be a problem it's the Trotsky vs Bakounin vs Lenin thing. (Bakounin (aka me) survived the longest btw).
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 00:53):Bob Coecke said:
John van de Wetering said:
They did?
They wrote their 1st paper while working on the Manhattan project.
I don't think Mac Lane and Eilenberg worked on the Manhattan Project. If anyone has evidence for that, I'd love to see it.
As I demonstrated in a previous post here, Mac Lane got a lot of funding from the Air Force after WWII.
I bet Mac Lane worked for the military during WWII, and maybe Eilenberg too... but I don't think it was the Manhattan Project. I've read a lot about the Manhattan Project and have never heard of that!
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 00:55):Martti Karvonen said:
I've heard that von Neumann advocated for a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union.
Yes, that's true:
In 1950 Life magazine quoted the great Hungarian-American physicist John Von Neumann, co-father of both the atom bomb and the digital computer, advocating immediate pre-emptive nuclear war against Russia: “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?” He was hardly alone. Generals and members of Congress were making the same arguments.
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 01:00):John Baez said:
Joe Moeller said:
Right, there are different forms funding can take. Jade had a close second-hand view of John and I working on this DARPA project where they had a project, and we joined in on it, via the company Metron. This is very different than just getting handed a bunch of money to do what you like.
By the way, you never get handed money to do whatever you like. You have to write grant applications and at least claim you're going to work on some "hot topic". People who repeatedly get grants tend to be ones that succeed in doing approximately what they claimed they'd do. So the whole grantsmanship game - which dominates the sciences these days - really pushes people toward "hot topics".
But you're right about this: what you and I had was not a grant, it was a subcontract - so we were being bossed around more.
That's very true @John Baez the last AFOSR grant I got was a phone call: "Bob, can you use 1M? If so get us a grant proposal by tomorrow". We wrote that we wanted to do logic in DisCoCat @Jade Master @Joe Moeller Mehrnoush Sadrzadeh (Iranian) wrote it since she had time and we split the money. Dan Marsden, Martha Lewis are now part of the community because of that. The 20 people I hired in the past 6 months at CQC are also the result of the work I did with Will Zeng on that grant. Was that bad?
Georgios Bakirtzis (Feb 26 2021 at 01:02):Jade Master said:
Now we have category theory going towards coordinating drones and making sure they can't be hacked.
Or something else, I wrote about it here: https://increment.com/reliability/safety-critical-software-development/ (this seems directly applicable to my two main CT papers that compose my thesis and that's why I respond)
Conor McBride (Feb 26 2021 at 01:04):Bob Coecke said:
John Baez said:
Joe Moeller said:
Right, there are different forms funding can take. Jade had a close second-hand view of John and I working on this DARPA project where they had a project, and we joined in on it, via the company Metron. This is very different than just getting handed a bunch of money to do what you like.
By the way, you never get handed money to do whatever you like. You have to write grant applications and at least claim you're going to work on some "hot topic". People who repeatedly get grants tend to be ones that succeed in doing approximately what they claimed they'd do. So the whole grantsmanship game - which dominates the sciences these days - really pushes people toward "hot topics".
But you're right about this: what you and I had was not a grant, it was a subcontract - so we were being bossed around more.
That's very true John Baez the last AFOSR grant I got was a phone call: "Bob, can you use 1M? If so get us a grant proposal by tomorrow". We wrote that we wanted to do logic in DisCoCat Jade Master Joe Moeller Mehrnoush Sadrzadeh (Iranian) wrote it since she had time and we split the money. Dan Marsden, Martha Lewis are now part of the community because of that. The 20 people I hired in the past 6 months at CQC are also the result of the work I did with Will Zeng on that grant. Was that bad?
Whether or not it was bad depends on who else got such a phone call.
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 01:04):@Bob Coecke wrote:
the last AFOSR grant I got was a phone call: "Bob, can you use 1M? If so get us a grant proposal by tomorrow". We wrote that we wanted to do logic in DisCoCat @Jade Master @Joe Moeller Mehrnoush Sadrzadeh (Iranian) wrote it since she had time and we split the money. Dan Marsden, Martha Lewis are now part of the community because of that. The 20 people I hired in the past 6 months at CQC are also the result of the work I did with Will Zeng on that grant. Was that bad?
I'll let the experts on ethics decide if that was bad. Here's my question: what did you have to do to get into the position where someone from the Air Force Office of Strategic Research called you up and said "Bob, can you use 1M?" They don't do that to just anyone. (Or at least not me.)
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 01:14):John Baez said:
Bob Coecke said:
John van de Wetering said:
They did?
They wrote their 1st paper while working on the Manhattan project.
I don't think Mac Lane and Eilenberg worked on the Manhattan Project. If anyone has evidence for that, I'd love to see it.
As I demonstrated in a previous post here, Mac Lane got a lot of funding from the Air Force after WWII.
I bet Mac Lane worked for the military during WWII, and maybe Eilenberg too... but I don't think it was the Manhattan Project. I've read a lot about the Manhattan Project and have never heard of that!
I got this, "big disjunction" from Borceux, or Benabou, or...from other old people. The Manhatten project was not just an isolated nucleus I remember from their stories, but involved many other branches of US Science, and that's how the two of them got involved; they worked on he obligatory stuff during the day, and other stuff at night. I am pretty sure of this story. I'll check for details with people...
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 01:16):John Baez said:
Bob Coecke wrote:
the last AFOSR grant I got was a phone call: "Bob, can you use 1M? If so get us a grant proposal by tomorrow". We wrote that we wanted to do logic in DisCoCat @Jade Master @Joe Moeller Mehrnoush Sadrzadeh (Iranian) wrote it since she had time and we split the money. Dan Marsden, Martha Lewis are now part of the community because of that. The 20 people I hired in the past 6 months at CQC are also the result of the work I did with Will Zeng on that grant. Was that bad?
I'll let the experts on ethics decide if that was bad. Here's my question: what did you have to do to get into the position where someone from the Air Force Office of Strategic Research called you up and said "Bob, can you use 1M?" They don't do that to just anyone. (Or at least not me.)
Front cover of New Scientist. That's what they referred to.
Jade Master (Feb 26 2021 at 01:17):Bob Coecke said:
Jade Master said:
Bob Coecke said:
Jade Master said:
For reasons of self-interest I don't want to quit, but this is why it's important to me to try to change the applications of category theory so that it goes to something better...at least in whatever capacity I have for this.
Exactly, and the way you do this in this world is by getting to some position of power, respect, not by not accepting funding. The reason I went into industry, is that the way quantum technology will be decided, is by the businesses. My last line of my job announcement states this explicitly: "More broadly, I foresee a major role for quantum AI, and am looking very much forward to the challenge of building an organisation that will harness the power of quantum technology in a responsible manner."
Best of luck to you in this. In general I'm not the most optimistic about this sort of strategy. Mostly because I've seen people with good intentions get a lot of power in silicon valley type companies...and then because there is nothing holding the leaders accountable they eventually devolve to acting in self interest. Making themselves and their friends very rich but participating in the exploitation of lots of people in the process.
I saw earlier in a conversation that I am not very typical, and neither is our CEO, who is funding the Topos institute and is the reason for their stance against a bunch of modern bad stuff by big companies, so maybe we have a chance. :) I always have been pretty extreme left-wing, so is he, so is Ross Duncan, the 2nd highest scientist in the company, so maybe we have a chance; if there is going to be a problem it's the Trotsky vs Bakounin vs Lenin thing. (Bakounin (aka me) survived the longest btw).
Do any of you have any specific political or social goals relating to the use of quantum computing or quantum natural language processing?
Jade Master (Feb 26 2021 at 01:19):What I've seen so far indicates that the goal is to improve technology...but what do y'all want to use the improved technology for?
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 01:24):Jade Master said:
Bob Coecke said:
Jade Master said:
Bob Coecke said:
Jade Master said:
For reasons of self-interest I don't want to quit, but this is why it's important to me to try to change the applications of category theory so that it goes to something better...at least in whatever capacity I have for this.
Exactly, and the way you do this in this world is by getting to some position of power, respect, not by not accepting funding. The reason I went into industry, is that the way quantum technology will be decided, is by the businesses. My last line of my job announcement states this explicitly: "More broadly, I foresee a major role for quantum AI, and am looking very much forward to the challenge of building an organisation that will harness the power of quantum technology in a responsible manner."
Best of luck to you in this. In general I'm not the most optimistic about this sort of strategy. Mostly because I've seen people with good intentions get a lot of power in silicon valley type companies...and then because there is nothing holding the leaders accountable they eventually devolve to acting in self interest. Making themselves and their friends very rich but participating in the exploitation of lots of people in the process.
I saw earlier in a conversation that I am not very typical, and neither is our CEO, who is funding the Topos institute and is the reason for their stance against a bunch of modern bad stuff by big companies, so maybe we have a chance. :) I always have been pretty extreme left-wing, so is he, so is Ross Duncan, the 2nd highest scientist in the company, so maybe we have a chance; if there is going to be a problem it's the Trotsky vs Bakounin vs Lenin thing. (Bakounin (aka me) survived the longest btw).
Do any of you have any specific political or social goals relating to the use of quantum computing or quantum natural language processing?
I think it will hopefully get us closer to understanding why we fuck up so much. The world is too cartesian, as advocated by many of the fathers of category theory. Cartesian means borders between nations, genders, ethnicities, etc. (and punks vs normal people in my days) I see the quantum paradigm as a way to blur those borders, and understand the fluidity and potential of richness vs compartments.
Valeria de Paiva (Feb 26 2021 at 01:31):Jade Master said:
Valeria de Paiva said:
Conor McBride said:
"If they didn't spend it on me, they'd only spend it on someone really evil."
or something really evil, like torture methods in children
What do you mean Valeria?
I removed the message, as it was only a bad joke that didn't need to be made. I think one of the differences that people are not paying attention to is that in Europe there are, besides individual countries' NSF-like funders such as EPSRC, the EU, and their frameworks. While in the USA there's this pretense of commercial innovation, but actually the infrastructure work has always been paid by the military: the silicon chips, the internet, even the GPU revolution (that we tend to say came about because of the porn -- and the games) was originally supported by the military. I understand that when we accept their money, we give them some credibility that I wish I didn't have to give. But I also think that the money they spent on CT is a dent in the money they spent on killing robots and other technologies much more clearly lethal. I am with Bob that if the money has no strings attached, I will take it.
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 01:34):Anyway, @Conor McBride was referring to the devil earlier, drunk way to many Duvel's just now (my Belgian hometown beer meaning devil), have to take my 6 year old for a 2 hour walk tomorrow morning because of school closures. This was a great discussion. Will try to be here more often again....
David Michael Roberts (Feb 26 2021 at 01:35):FWIW I appreciate much more the detailed and honest anecdotes of actual funding examples (eg Bob, John), than people saying "No, and no" (for example) and then taking O(100) posts of discussion to then clarify they are not actually against funding, but against people telling themselves little stories to justify taking funding so they can sleep comfortably at night (and I mean that in both senses).
People bring up Grothendieck dropping out as a paragon.
I personally am willing, and have, taken a manual job when funding ran out, being paid ~$1.20 per package delivered, pre-tax. I now have a bigger family and also no second, part-time income coming in, so it will probably make things quite difficult if I have to resort to that again. There is no hypothetical for me about having to resort to leaving academica for lack of funding, since I will be gone by the end of the year, and I as yet have no plan, and I have commitments to my extended family here and so moving elsewhere for a university job is not an option. The only other major employer of mathematicians in my city is ... guess who. So I appreciate being told constructive stories by people who struggled through managing to build a career.
Steve Huntsman (Feb 26 2021 at 02:14):Jade Master said:
I would like to share this article:
- The Responsibility of the Scientist Today, Alexandre Grothendieck, 1970
Grothendieck posits that scientists have a responsibility to humanity as a whole,
The scientist, as the principal architect of technological progress, must assume a major part of the responsibility for the unprecedented dangers that modern technology has posed for mankind. Better informed than the majority of the human population, the scientist has no excuse for closing his eyes to the imminence and the dimensions ofthe perils he has helped to create. Because most countries (whether communist or capitalist) are anxious to preserve their precious "gray matter", the scientist is generally treated like a spoiled child in today's world, enjoying privileges which are denied to vast numbers of people: good working conditions, comfortable surroundings, financial security, more extended means of information, repeated contacts with colleagues from other countries, more leisure time, greater freedom to learn and to reflect . .. * The scientist enjoys an undeniable prestige among the general public (reflecting the prestige attached to technological prowess) and an enviable material security. No one could be less justified in claiming "helplessness" or "personal insecurity" as an excuse for doing nothing to combat the dangers already cited –if only to the extent of refusing to collaborate with the military and warning the public of the real gravity of the situation.
and argues that even passive collaboration with the military is an abdication of this responsibility
While only a small number of scientists work directly for the military. virtually all scientists collaborate "passively" by accepting army contracts, or by organizing seminars or colloquia financed partially or totally by military funds, without even giving it a second thought. In doing so, scientists have willingly cooperated in establishing the powerful grip that the military now has on "pure" scientific research, to some extent throughout the western world, but particularly in the USA. The domination of pure scientific research by military money has finally alarmed even the civil authorities, who have judged it necessary to limit the practice –much to the disappointment of the scientists, who would prefer to see the "military manna" continue unabated. Practically all the scientists of the western world have accepted, or would accept if the opportunity presented itself, military subventions whether for private research, or for the organization of specific scientific activities, or in the form of salary from an institution regularly furnished with military funds. The massive collaboration of the scientific community with the army (often at the same time that the most savage wars are being prosecuted by that same army) is the greatest. It is also the most obvious sign of their abdication of responsibility toward human society.
These words reflect my personal values. I would like to discuss this with the category theory community in a non-judgemental way, so we can get a better idea of where everyone stands on this issue.
I respect this POV but strongly disagree with the idea that military R&D is a bad thing in its own right, to say nothing of my belief that it is by far the greatest catalyst for technological development
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 02:16):Jade Master said:
Einstein's willingness to collaborate with the US military led to the development and use of nuclear weapons. I hope we can learn from his mistakes.
I would like to make sure everyone what actually happened here. As usual, I'm not secretly trying to make some point: when I want to make a point I try to make it directly. I just think it's good to know the history. "Willingness to collaborate with the military" is a somewhat odd way to describe what Einstein did.
Briefly: during WWII the physicist Leo Szilard spent a lot of time sitting in his bathtub pondering nuclear fission, which had been discovered by the German chemist Hahn and the German Jewish physicist Lise Meitner in 1938.
He realized that it could be used to make a bomb - which may sound obvious, but is not really: it's not trivial to build a nuclear weapon. He realized that the Nazis would try to do this - which turned out to be true: the Nazi bomb project was led by Heisenberg. And he decided that the US had to build its own bomb, or at least look into whether it was really possible.
So he decided to write a letter to president Roosevelt advocating this. But he knew Roosevelt wouldn't listen to him, so he decide to enlist the help of the most famous physicist in the world, the only one whose letter Roosevelt might read: Einstein.
And so they wrote a letter to Roosevelt, and after a while Roosevelt started the Manhattan Project.
Einstein wasn't involved in the Manhattan Project at all... except for starting it, which of course is huge: I'm not trying to minimize that!
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 02:17):Here's the letter:
August 2nd, 1939
F.D. Roosevelt,
President of the United States,
White House
Washington, D.C.Sir:
Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration. I believe therefore that it is my duty to bring to your attention the following facts and recommendations:
In the course of the last four months it has been made probable—through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America—that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.
This phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air.
The United States has only very poor ores of uranium in moderate quantities. There is some good ore in Canada and the former Czechoslovakia, while the most important source of uranium is Belgian Congo.
In view of this situation you may think it desirable to have some permanent contact maintained between the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America. One possible way of achieving this might be for you to entrust with this task a person who has your confidence and who could perhaps serve in an inofficial capacity. His task might comprise the following:
a) to approach Government Departments, keep them informed of the further development, and put forward recommendations for Government action, giving particular attention to the problem of securing a supply of uranium ore for the United States.
b) to speed up the experimental work, which is at present being carried on within the limits of the budgets of University laboratories, by providing funds, if such funds be required, through his contacts with private persons who are willing to make contributions for this cause, and perhaps also by obtaining the co-operation of industrial laboratories which have the necessary equipment.
I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over. That she should have taken such early action might perhaps be understood on the ground that the son of the German Under-Secretary of State, von Weizsäcker, is attached to the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut in Berlin where some of the American work on uranium is now being repeated.
Yours very truly,
Albert Einstein
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 02:21):Einstein never worked on the Manhattan Project; indeed he was denied a security clearance in 1940 because of his pacifist beliefs. He later had misgivings about his role in creating the Manhattan Project, saying, “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in developing an atomic bomb, I would have done nothing for the bomb.”
Steve Huntsman (Feb 26 2021 at 02:22):I respect this POV but am on record as strongly disagreeing with the premise that military R&D is a bad thing. I think it’s a huge boon to society on balance. You can have vicious conflicts without any particular technological sophistication but you can’t have mRNA vaccines or the internet or self-driving cars or interplanetary exploration without military R&D.
Steve Huntsman (Feb 26 2021 at 02:44):Lol I felt very sketchy entertaining recruiters from Facebook before finally telling them to stop contacting me but never had any qualms whatsoever (and in fact have great enthusiasm for) about military work
Joe Moeller (Feb 26 2021 at 02:59):John Baez said:
Joe Moeller said:
Right, there are different forms funding can take. Jade had a close second-hand view of John and I working on this DARPA project where they had a project, and we joined in on it, via the company Metron. This is very different than just getting handed a bunch of money to do what you like.
By the way, you never get handed money to do whatever you like. You have to write grant applications and at least claim you're going to work on some "hot topic". People who repeatedly get grants tend to be ones that succeed in doing approximately what they claimed they'd do. So the whole grantsmanship game - which dominates the sciences these days - really pushes people toward "hot topics".
But you're right about this: what you and I had was not a grant, it was a subcontract - so we were being bossed around more.
No I know. I was just drawing a contrast.
Steve Huntsman (Feb 26 2021 at 03:02):Y’all should stop publishing if you want folks like me to not get any more ideas
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Feb 26 2021 at 12:06):Conor McBride said:
Welcome to Glasgow! The UK's nuclear arsenal is a short walk away.
:surprise: shit...
Jules Hedges (Feb 26 2021 at 13:24):Steve Huntsman said:
Y’all should stop publishing if you want folks like me to not get any more ideas
Yup, that's a tension I'm aware of and something I think about sometimes. Two different ideals that I take strong positions on - open science + non-collaboration - are in conflict with each other
Jules Hedges (Feb 26 2021 at 13:26):Matteo Capucci (he/him) said:
Conor McBride said:
Welcome to Glasgow! The UK's nuclear arsenal is a short walk away.
:surprise: shit...
The UK did a very smart bit of cold war strategy, which is that all of its launch-ready nukes are on submarines. (That system's called Trident, which is a really good name). That very strongly discourages being the target of a preemptive strike. The place that's up the road from Glasgow is where the nuclear-armed submarines come into dock
Jade Master (Feb 26 2021 at 14:43):Steve Huntsman said:
I respect this POV but am on record as strongly disagreeing with the premise that military R&D is a bad thing. I think it’s a huge boon to society on balance. You can have vicious conflicts without any particular technological sophistication but you can’t have mRNA vaccines or the internet or self-driving cars or interplanetary exploration without military R&D.
I am curious, from your perspective why would the air force give people like Bob millions of dollars with no strings attached? When justifying these decisions to their superiors they probably make some case for funding this research. What do you think they might say?
Jade Master (Feb 26 2021 at 14:44):@John Baez in addition to what you said I think it's important that Einstein's physics made the atomic bomb possible in the first place.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Feb 26 2021 at 14:48):The very fact that military personnel are responsible for funding decisions, and that they have to justify these as strategic decisions to their superiors, possibly putting their jobs on the line as Bob mentioned earlier, is absurd.
Bob Coecke said:
What I have seen instead is that people who helped us are doing so because they believe in good science and have a hell of a job trying to justify that to their admirals. I have seen some of those loose their jobs cause they gave money to people like me; I have a lot more respect for them than for sofa ideologists who don't bother to help with the procreation of their community.
I know that us discussing this here on Zulip isn't going to have a big impact on how government funding reaches researchers in the short term, but if boycotting military funding whenever possible represents an eventual positive move towards taking military structures out of the equation, that seems like a positive reason to do so.
John van de Wetering (Feb 26 2021 at 14:51):That sounds fine in the abstract, but in the short term that will mean some people will lose their jobs, as Bob was pointing out
Jade Master (Feb 26 2021 at 14:54):I'm not advocating that people all quit their DoD funded jobs all at once...I'm advocating for people to make decisions in the future which shift themselves away from such funding sources whenever they can.
Joshua Meyers (Feb 26 2021 at 15:01):John van de Wetering said:
Let me turn around the question: I haven't really heard any super convincing argument to not accept the funding other than "military bad" and a vague notion of not wanting to normalise military in research.
I want to highlight this again. Suppose I think the military is bad. Suppose I even think it is bad that they are funding ACT. How do I get from those statements to "I shouldn't accept their funding"? It might seem obvious, but I'm sure everyone is familiar from math with the dubiousness of making an argument by saying "well it's just obvious". It is not obvious to me how to get from A to B, when A is a judgment that X is bad and B is a particular tactic for how to stop X. I don't believe in a rule that says "if X is bad, and B is a tactic for stopping X, then I should do B". This rule doesn't make any mention of the efficacy or side-effects of B, it has no analysis of B from a strategic persepctive.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Feb 26 2021 at 15:01):If someone could put together a well-written letter pointing out why research decisions coming down a military pipeline is absurd, a movement towards contacting representatives might have some impact.
Jade Master (Feb 26 2021 at 15:04):Bob, not going to tag you but no offense what you said about quantum computing breaking down borders makes very little sense to me. I see no political or social content in it. That's fine...but it seems strange to call yourself Bakounin without much to back it up.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Feb 26 2021 at 15:05):Steve Huntsman said:
I respect this POV but am on record as strongly disagreeing with the premise that military R&D is a bad thing. I think it’s a huge boon to society on balance.
Why would military R&D over just government-funded R&D be better? If the source is the taxpayer, why would one have a preference for that funding getting funnelled through more layers of people presumably underqualified to appreciate the value of research for its own sake?
Jade Master (Feb 26 2021 at 15:06):Joshua Meyers said:
John van de Wetering said:
Let me turn around the question: I haven't really heard any super convincing argument to not accept the funding other than "military bad" and a vague notion of not wanting to normalise military in research.
I want to highlight this again. Suppose I think the military is bad. Suppose I even think it is bad that they are funding ACT. How do I get from those statements to "I shouldn't accept their funding"? It might seem obvious, but I'm sure everyone is familiar from math with the dubiousness of making an argument by saying "well it's just obvious". It is not obvious to me how to get from A to B, when A is a judgment that X is bad and B is a particular tactic for how to stop X. I don't believe in a rule that says "if X is bad, and B is a tactic for stopping X, then I should do B". This rule doesn't make any mention of the efficacy or side-effects of B, it has no analysis of B from a strategic persepctive.
If you are against them funding ACT then you will do what you can personally to not contribute to this thing you think is bad...by not being funding by them to do ACT.
Joshua Meyers (Feb 26 2021 at 15:07):Jade Master said:
Joshua Meyers said:
John van de Wetering said:
Let me turn around the question: I haven't really heard any super convincing argument to not accept the funding other than "military bad" and a vague notion of not wanting to normalise military in research.
I want to highlight this again. Suppose I think the military is bad. Suppose I even think it is bad that they are funding ACT. How do I get from those statements to "I shouldn't accept their funding"? It might seem obvious, but I'm sure everyone is familiar from math with the dubiousness of making an argument by saying "well it's just obvious". It is not obvious to me how to get from A to B, when A is a judgment that X is bad and B is a particular tactic for how to stop X. I don't believe in a rule that says "if X is bad, and B is a tactic for stopping X, then I should do B". This rule doesn't make any mention of the efficacy or side-effects of B, it has no analysis of B from a strategic persepctive.
If you are against them funding ACT then you will do what you can personally to not contribute to this thing you think is bad...by not being funding by them to do ACT.
You're just reiterating an inference by the rule I said I don't believe in
Jade Master (Feb 26 2021 at 15:09):I'm not sure I understand. You don't believe in stopping your contribution to something that you think is bad?
Joshua Meyers (Feb 26 2021 at 15:09):I don't believe in the validity of the rule "if X is bad, and B is a tactic for stopping X, then I should do B".
Jade Master (Feb 26 2021 at 15:11):Okay let's say your house is on fire, putting water on fire is a tactic for putting it out. Therefore you should put water on the fire.
Joshua Meyers (Feb 26 2021 at 15:12):OK let's say your house is on fire. One tactic for putting it out is waving your arms to generate air currents that may put it out. Therefore you should wave your arms to generate air currents that may put it out.
Joshua Meyers (Feb 26 2021 at 15:13):One tactic is to set the adjacent house on fire to draw away oxygen from your house. Therefore you should do that.
Jade Master (Feb 26 2021 at 15:13):Okay you're saying that you don't believe that rejecting military funding is an effective way to keep the military out of ACT?
Joshua Meyers (Feb 26 2021 at 15:15):Yeah, with the caveat that "don't believe X" is not equivalent to "believe not X"
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 15:18):Jade Master said:
Steve Huntsman said:
I respect this POV but am on record as strongly disagreeing with the premise that military R&D is a bad thing. I think it’s a huge boon to society on balance. You can have vicious conflicts without any particular technological sophistication but you can’t have mRNA vaccines or the internet or self-driving cars or interplanetary exploration without military R&D.
I am curious, from your perspective why would the air force give people like Bob millions of dollars with no strings attached? When justifying these decisions to their superiors they probably make some case for funding this research. What do you think they might say?
So one thing I have been told by them, is that they want certain things out in the open rather than in secret in some Russian secret lab. With our DisCoCat funding that must have been the case. AFOSR recently also tweeted a big picture of me playing guitar stating that they were proud about once funding me and that this work has contributed to a thing in industry now. Here's the tweet:
https://twitter.com/AFOSR/status/1364360835292925958
How should one interpret that? The work we did was all the work with Mehrnoosh, Martha Lewis, Dan Marsden and Dimitri Kartsaklis on DisCoCat, very well known to you, and the 1st QNLP paper with Will Zeng, leading to my CQC team. Thanks to the money this is now a big area in ACT as well.
Former AFOSR PI Bob Coecke appointed Chief Scientist @cambridgecqc: https://cambridgequantum.com/cambridge-quantum-computing-appoints-oxford-university-professor-bob-coecke-as-chief-scientist/ AFOSR supported his research "Algorithmic and Logical Aspects when Composing Meanings" while @UniofOxford: https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/bob.coecke/. Congrats Bob Coecke! #QuantumComputing #AFOSR_Spotlight https://twitter.com/AFOSR/status/1364360835292925958/photo/1
- AFOSR (@AFOSR)
There is also the simple fact that some program managers are decent people, with their own passion for science. I remember one ONR round I had an informal role in assigning the awards, and this was for high-level methods in quantum computing. We just awarded it to the best scientists. The project review was about helping the program manager tell the admirals why he funded us.
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 15:20):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
The very fact that military personnel are responsible for funding decisions, and that they have to justify these as strategic decisions to their superiors, possibly putting their jobs on the line as Bob mentioned earlier, is absurd.
Bob Coecke said:What I have seen instead is that people who helped us are doing so because they believe in good science and have a hell of a job trying to justify that to their admirals. I have seen some of those loose their jobs cause they gave money to people like me; I have a lot more respect for them than for sofa ideologists who don't bother to help with the procreation of their community.
I know that us discussing this here on Zulip isn't going to have a big impact on how government funding reaches researchers in the short term, but if boycotting military funding whenever possible represents an eventual positive move towards taking military structures out of the equation, that seems like a positive reason to do so.
The program managers I met are mostly civilians, not military.
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 15:24):Jade Master said:
Bob, not going to tag you but no offense what you said about quantum computing breaking down borders makes very little sense to me. I see no political or social content in it. That's fine...but it seems strange to call yourself Bakounin without much to back it up.
It's the simple cartesian vs non-cartesian point of view. Lawvere developed much of his category theory from a Leninist point of view. But that was a very Cartesian point of view. Embracing the world to be truly monoidal, gives a different view on humanity, at least for me. So what I was referring to was more the acceptance of nature being non-cartesian. Technology can contribute to major changes in worldview.
Joshua Meyers (Feb 26 2021 at 15:25):Joshua Meyers said:
Yeah, with the caveat that "don't believe X" is not equivalent to "believe not X"
Basically I haven't yet been convinced that it's an effective tactic. In fact, I've seen little to no discussion of its effectiveness as a tactic.
Jade Master (Feb 26 2021 at 15:25):Bob Coecke said:
Jade Master said:
Steve Huntsman said:
I respect this POV but am on record as strongly disagreeing with the premise that military R&D is a bad thing. I think it’s a huge boon to society on balance. You can have vicious conflicts without any particular technological sophistication but you can’t have mRNA vaccines or the internet or self-driving cars or interplanetary exploration without military R&D.
I am curious, from your perspective why would the air force give people like Bob millions of dollars with no strings attached? When justifying these decisions to their superiors they probably make some case for funding this research. What do you think they might say?
So one thing I have been told by them, is that they want certain things out in the open rather than in secret in some Russian secret lab. With our DisCoCat funding that must have been the case. AFOSR recently also tweeted a big picture of me playing guitar stating that they were proud about once funding me and that this work has contributed to a thing in industry now. Here's the tweet:
https://twitter.com/AFOSR/status/1364360835292925958
How should one interpret that? The work we did was all the work with Mehrnoosh, Martha Lewis, Dan Marsden and Dimitri Kartsaklis on DisCoCat, very well known to you, and the 1st QNLP paper with Will Zeng, leading to my CQC team. Thanks to the money this is now a big area in ACT as well.There is also the simple fact that some program managers are decent people, with their own passion for science. I remember one ONR round I had an informal role in assigning the awards, and this was for high-level methods in quantum computing. We just awarded it to the best scientists. The project review was about helping the program manager tell the admirals why he funded us.
To me this tweet indicates that they are using you to generate goodwill and show off all the good work they do. Maybe it is good work. I believe they are doing it for the same reason that billionaires do philanthropy. They need good PR.
Jade Master (Feb 26 2021 at 15:30):This sort of philanthropy can be very effective in encouraging cooperation with their goals.
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 15:30):Jade Master said:
Bob Coecke said:
Jade Master said:
Steve Huntsman said:
I respect this POV but am on record as strongly disagreeing with the premise that military R&D is a bad thing. I think it’s a huge boon to society on balance. You can have vicious conflicts without any particular technological sophistication but you can’t have mRNA vaccines or the internet or self-driving cars or interplanetary exploration without military R&D.
I am curious, from your perspective why would the air force give people like Bob millions of dollars with no strings attached? When justifying these decisions to their superiors they probably make some case for funding this research. What do you think they might say?
So one thing I have been told by them, is that they want certain things out in the open rather than in secret in some Russian secret lab. With our DisCoCat funding that must have been the case. AFOSR recently also tweeted a big picture of me playing guitar stating that they were proud about once funding me and that this work has contributed to a thing in industry now. Here's the tweet:
https://twitter.com/AFOSR/status/1364360835292925958
How should one interpret that? The work we did was all the work with Mehrnoosh, Martha Lewis, Dan Marsden and Dimitri Kartsaklis on DisCoCat, very well known to you, and the 1st QNLP paper with Will Zeng, leading to my CQC team. Thanks to the money this is now a big area in ACT as well.There is also the simple fact that some program managers are decent people, with their own passion for science. I remember one ONR round I had an informal role in assigning the awards, and this was for high-level methods in quantum computing. We just awarded it to the best scientists. The project review was about helping the program manager tell the admirals why he funded us.
To me this tweet indicates that they are using you to generate goodwill and show off all the good work they do. Maybe it is good work. I believe they are doing it for the same reason that billionaires do philanthropy. They need good PR.
Not all rich people are like that. I know some were it is the other way around: being rich enables one to do good things. We talk all the time how ultimately CQC can contribute to a better world, where the big tech companies now messed-up big time.
I have never heard them talk about "their goals" when talking to academia. They have their own research labs for that. I don't think that I am a complete moron without any ability to gage intent of the people I am talking to. And really, I never experienced bad intent.
Jade Master (Feb 26 2021 at 15:30):Anyway I've got work to do, I'll check back on this later today.
Joshua Meyers (Feb 26 2021 at 15:46):Same
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 16:02):Jade Master said:
John Baez in addition to what you said I think it's important that Einstein's physics made the atomic bomb possible in the first place.
I wouldn't blame Einstein for that. Yes, in an atom bomb mass is converted to energy via , but that's also true when you burn a log: the mass of the byproducts is less than the mass of what you started with. The question is whether knowing this fact, was crucial for developing atomic bombs. And I don't think so! What was really crucial was research on radioactivity and later nuclear physics, and Einstein didn't do any of this, as far as I know.
If you want to blame someone, blame:
Pierre Becquerel for discovering radioactivity: "By May 1896, after other experiments involving non-phosphorescent uranium salts, he arrived at the correct explanation, namely that the penetrating radiation came from the uranium itself, without any need for excitation by an external energy source".
Marie and Pierre Curie for discovering and studying new radioactive elements like radium and polonium ; they shared the 1903 Nobel with Becquerel for work on radioactivity. Marie died of cancer from doing experiments with these materials.
Ernest Rutherford for inventing the concept of half-life, and discovering that in radioactive decay one element would turn into another by emitting alpha and beta particles. In 1917 Rutherford carried out the first "nuclear reaction": bombarding nitrogen with alpha particles and turning it into oxygen.
Otto Hahn for discovering nuclear fission in 1938 and Lise Meitner for figuring out what was going on: a nucleus of uranium bombarded with neutrons could split into two smaller nuclei, releasing a lot of energy and also more neutrons.
Frédéric Joliot-Curie, the husband of Marie and Pierre's daughter, for letting the world know that this could create a chain reaction. Leo Szilard actually came up with the idea in 1933, and in 1934 he patented the idea of a nuclear reactor. But he was smart enough to keep quiet about it. When Enrico Fermi (in New York) and Frédéric Joliot-Curie (in Paris) started doing experiments on nuclear fission, he tried to persuade them to not publish anything about the idea of a chain reaction, lest the Nazis become aware of it. Fermi agreed to self-censor. Joliot-Curie did not: he published an article in Nature saying that when a uranium atom split, it released more neutrons that it took to split that uranium atom! The idea of a nuclear bomb was then apparent to any intelligent physicist. Leo Szilard became so scared of the Nazis developing a bomb that in 1938 he decided to contact Roosevelt.
Werner Heisenberg for agreeing to lead the Nazi atomic bomb project. He later argued that he deliberately slowed down this project, and there's even some evidence for this, but people will argue endlessly about it, and Bohr broke off his friendship with Heisenberg over this issue.
Fermi, Bohr and all the other physicists who joined the Manhattan Project - this is a very long list.
Einstein was a bit player in all this except that he went along with Szilard and wrote the letter to Roosevelt.
The myth that was the key to the atomic bomb came later. It certainly helped people figure out things about fission, but the things I just listed helped much more. Einstein was off thinking about other things while these people were paving the way for nuclear weapons.
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Feb 26 2021 at 16:38):I'd extend this to say that neither Becquerel, Marie and Pierre Curie, Hahn, Szilard, Fermi should be held responsible for the bomb, since none of them explictly pushed for their science to be developed into a weapon. Even people closer to the Manhattan project could be excused: as John reported, many of them were very scared the Nazis could get there first (a very reasonable doubt) and at that point game theoretic incentives start to play a role, so that for the Allies developing the bomb was the only option. Using it, maybe not that much, that's another problem.
But yeah, I think these are extremely complex problems and putting blame on people is wrong, since it oversimplifies.
The good thing to do was non-proliferation treaties. But it takes a lot of work to arrive to a point where that's an option on the table. I don't think the 1930s were ready, and the bomb became inevitable.
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Feb 26 2021 at 16:41):We should all keep in mid these are very complex issues, so case-by-case analysis is what most of us can afford. I side with @Jade Master's remark about 'not side with evil when you can choose', but maybe Grothendieck wouldn't have been so light.
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Feb 26 2021 at 16:43):To change what we can't directly act on, political action is the only possibility in a democracy. Grothendieck did that too, by being very vocal about his opinions. He ultimately gave up, I guess.
Ben Sprott (Feb 26 2021 at 17:11):@Jade Master Hi, thanks for the vigorous discussion. I am curious about one thing. Do you feel that American global power should be curtailed? I think many people here get funding from the US military. They are really, in effect, just supporting US global power.
Steve Huntsman (Feb 26 2021 at 17:28):So that people like me will pick it up and use it once it’s ready for that
Steve Huntsman (Feb 26 2021 at 17:35):A forcing function. https://books.google.com/books/about/Is_War_Necessary_for_Economic_Growth.html?id=Eopn-pYI1tsC
Jules Hedges (Feb 26 2021 at 17:35):I'll take the turn to place the obtuse part here. The US as a nation and especially the US military is left playing with its toys and pretending that it's important. There's still a real risk that it could throw a tantrum and hurt someone with its toys, but "US global power" isn't really a thing in this millennium. Pretending that it's still important is not helpful to anyone
Steve Huntsman (Feb 26 2021 at 17:36):I can tell you that it is not
Jules Hedges (Feb 26 2021 at 17:40):(Speaking as someone from a place that went through exactly the same process 75 years ago, and surrounded by people who still didn't get that memo yet)
Steve Huntsman (Feb 26 2021 at 17:40):Tell it to the Baltics
Jules Hedges (Feb 26 2021 at 17:43):Yup, to me it's obviously the EU's responsibility to have troops on the ground in Latvia and Lithuania along the Russian borders. For deep political reasons that likely will never happen. (This is, by now, very far off topic from where this thread ought to get back to)
Ben Sprott (Feb 26 2021 at 17:51):@Jules Hedges
I'll take the turn to place the obtuse part here. The US as a nation and especially the US military is left playing with its toys and pretending that it's important. There's still a real risk that it could throw a tantrum and hurt someone with its toys, but "US global power" isn't really a thing in this millennium. Pretending that it's still important is not helpful to anyone
Consensus is becoming an increasingly difficult state to achieve with the changes to media. There are many, powerful forces that are trying to achieve this disintegration of consensus. American consensus is particularly under assault.
I know for sure, that there are many countries out there that would love for the broader global population to come to the consensus that there is no future in American global power. I see this event as truly disastrous to a world that can be taken seriously or enjoyed thoroughly.
Perhaps you are talking about Trump or the pandemic. He is gone and we are heading straight to immunity through vaccines.
Just Google "countries ranked by gdp". What you are saying is very strange.
Steve Huntsman (Feb 26 2021 at 17:53):Jade Master said:
Okay you're saying that you don't believe that rejecting military funding is an effective way to keep the military out of ACT?
It is not effective. I can read papers and sometimes even understand them. And there are folks doing DoD stuff who also know a lot more CT than me.
Georgios Bakirtzis (Feb 26 2021 at 17:53):The question is if researchers should take military funding or not. This is not only in the US and it does not only concern the USDOD. Europeans/Japanese/Chinese ALSO take military funding either directly or indirectly. (Don't know for other but I am sure they do too)
Georgios Bakirtzis (Feb 26 2021 at 17:54):This conversation always ends up chastising researchers located in the US because people are extremely transparent on where their funding comes from
Georgios Bakirtzis (Feb 26 2021 at 17:57):Maybe people are concerned with the huge amount of money the USDOD spends but that is not really associated with the normative claim that researchers shouldn't accept military funding
Joshua Meyers (Feb 26 2021 at 17:57):Also, the really bad thing that I would like to stop is abuse of military power, not the military funding ACT. So the correct question is not "how can ACT people help keep the military out of ACT?" It's "how can ACT people help stop abuse of military power?" If you think that the latter question reduces to the former, that is something that can be argued, but it is not true a priori. If you advocate rejecting military funding as a tactic, then I think the right question is "how effective is this tactic for stopping the abuse of military power?"
Ben Sprott (Feb 26 2021 at 17:57):The question is if researchers should take military funding or not. This is not only in the US and it does not only concern the USDOD. Europeans/Japanese/Chinese ALSO take military funding either directly or indirectly. (Don't know for other but I am sure they do too)
China vs US
US military
You are missing the big, fundamentally important pieces to this discussion
Georgios Bakirtzis (Feb 26 2021 at 17:58):Really, we as researchers in ACT should examine the power dynamics between world powers?
Georgios Bakirtzis (Feb 26 2021 at 17:58):And actually become experts to have some sort of informed opinion about it that is not hogwash?
Georgios Bakirtzis (Feb 26 2021 at 17:58):Please
Jules Hedges (Feb 26 2021 at 18:02):As far as I'm aware, military funding in Europe just isn't a thing. The UK is I think one of the more militaristic societies in Europe, and I've never heard of military research grants here. (What we do have here is huge industrial players like BAE and Lockheed, and they do fund research sometimes)
Georgios Bakirtzis (Feb 26 2021 at 18:05):https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/peaceful-eu-starts-to-fund-military-research1/
Jules Hedges (Feb 26 2021 at 18:07)::face_palm:
Jules Hedges (Feb 26 2021 at 18:08):Bah, calling the EU "peaceful" was a bit of a stretch already
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 18:10):There must have been some military funding of research for France to develop nuclear weapons.
Jules Hedges (Feb 26 2021 at 18:11):The EU is orthogonal to each individual member state. France deals with its own nuclear programme
Georgios Bakirtzis (Feb 26 2021 at 18:11):There has always been military funding in European countries, I don't know were the myth that they don't come from
Jules Hedges (Feb 26 2021 at 18:16):Well, at least I spent nearly a 10 year career here and I never heard of anyone funded by local military money. I know of Bob's group funded by the US air force, and I knew someone at Queen Mary funded by BAE
Ben Sprott (Feb 26 2021 at 18:17):Really, we as researchers in ACT should examine the power dynamics between world powers?
Jade is literally advocating for the removal of scientific input to the foundation of American global power. We are way past the point to having the luxury of not caring.
The idea that the concern is couched in terms of a universal removal of this support from all militaries is not a reasonable expectation. That goes back to John's post about how Einstein sent the letter saying the Germans will get to the bomb first. The other idea, that fundamental science goes straight and quick to the applications, is also untenable.
Georgios Bakirtzis (Feb 26 2021 at 18:19):I understand American foreign policy and war/defense (whichever side you are on this argument) efforts is easy to criticize but that wasn't the point of the initial message. Would you say a European or Chinese researchers is okay to take military funding because that way they contrast the American global effort? This doesn't make sense morally
Joshua Meyers (Feb 26 2021 at 18:20):Joshua Meyers said:
I don't believe in the validity of the rule "if X is bad, and B is a tactic for stopping X, then I should do B".
Yes my other problem with this rule is that it doesn't consider the possible side-effects of B. It's not just about the effectiveness
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 18:21):Giorgos Bakirtzis said:
Really, we as researchers in ACT should examine the power dynamics between world powers?
We should do that just as citizens. People who struggling for survival, making a living cleaning hotel rooms, usually don't have time to think hard about politics. We do. But this is not special to ACT. This applies to anyone in a position to reflect on their lives and think about what's best to do.
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 18:29):Giorgos Bakirtzis said:
Would you say a European or Chinese researchers is okay to take military funding because that way they contrast the American global effort? This doesn't make sense morally.
Okay, so you are thinking about these things! Good!
I agree with you: European and especially Chinese researchers should think just as carefully about their involvement in the military as American ones. I say "especially Chinese" because the possibility of a war between China and the US in the next few decades is a real one, whereas it seems less likely the EU will initiate a big war like that. But it's probaby better for everyone to think about the consequences of taking military funding, not just cross their fingers and hope their country's military doesn't go to war.
Georgios Bakirtzis (Feb 26 2021 at 18:35):In Engineering military funding is not going away – it's a lost cause there. But maybe math and CS are different. (Also my personal examinations of such things does not mean that I think it should be a prerequisite for being a researcher in any field, some people just don't care about politics AT ALL)
Steve Huntsman (Feb 26 2021 at 18:42):Jules Hedges said:
Well, at least I spent nearly a 10 year career here and I never heard of anyone funded by local military money. I know of Bob's group funded by the US air force, and I knew someone at Queen Mary funded by BAE
BAE is a UK company
Jules Hedges (Feb 26 2021 at 18:54):I'm very aware of that
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 18:57):Matteo Capucci (he/him) said:
I'd extend this to say that neither Becquerel, Marie and Pierre Curie, Hahn, Szilard, Fermi should be held responsible for the bomb, since none of them explicitly pushed for their science to be developed into a weapon.
I agree about Becquerel and the Curies. But Szilard was the one who came up with the idea of telling Roosevelt to start investigating the possibility of creating an atomic bomb: that was the start of the Manhattan Project. And Fermi was one of the principal leaders of the Manhattan Project!
So I think Szilard and Fermi very much have some responsibility for creating the atomic bomb.
This is not the same question as whether they did something evil. That's a harder question.
To my mind the real evil in this vicinity was the US and British policy of winning the war by demolishing whole cities, killing vast numbers of innocent civilians.
An early example was the bombing of Hamburg in July 1943 by US and British forces, which killed 37,000 civilians and wounded 180,000:
A thermal column of wind generated heat in excess of 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, melting trolley windows and the asphalt in streets, the wind uprooting trees. When people crossed a street, their feet stuck in the melted asphalt; they tried to extricate themselves with their hands, only to find them stuck as well. They remained on all fours screaming. Small children lay like "fried eels" on the pavement. The firestorm sucked all the oxygen out of the city. - Martin Middlebrook
Later came the firebombing of Dresden in February 1945, where they - or should I say "we"? - dropped 3,900 tons of bombs and incendiary devices on the city, leading to a firestorm that killed about 25,000 people.
We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from. — Lothar Metzger, survivor
And then came the bombing of Tokyo in March 1945. 279 planes flew over the city and dropped 1,665 tons of bombs. Most were 500-pound cluster bombs, each one releasing 38 incendiary bomblets at an altitude of about 2000 feet. These bomblets punched through the roofs of people's houses or landed on the ground and ignited 3.5 seconds later, throwing out jets of flaming, sticky napalm. Tokyo was a densely packed city, largely made of paper.
The planes also dropped 100-pound jelled-gasoline and white phosphorus bombs that ignited upon impact. The city's fire departments were overwhelmed, and the individual fires started by the bombs joined to create a huge conflagration that destroyed 16 square miles of the city. Over 100,000 people died — nobody knows how many, and both the Japanese and Americans had reasons to underestimate the casualties.
the charred corpse of a woman in Tokyo who was carrying a child on her back
When the Germans admitted defeat, the Manhattan Project lost its original rationale, but the scientists continued work on building a bomb — and after they built on, the US dropped two on Japanese cities, over the protests of some (but certainly not all) the scientists. Somewhere between 120,000 and 226,000 died. Horrible! But just the culmination of a horrible way of winning a war by treating civilians as worthless rats to be burnt.
Steve Huntsman (Feb 26 2021 at 19:16):https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reich_Plenipotentiary_for_Total_War gives some opposing context on why the Allies fought the way they did. You might also recall the Blitz. Jus in bello has the central principle of proportionality since Grotius, and that is where you might consider trying to identify the “evil that started it”
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 19:16):I had just deleted my statement about what "started it".
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 19:17):I'm not going to try to discuss the question of what "started it".
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 19:19):I don't think anything the Nazis did justified burning whole cities of Germans, though it certainly helps us understand why the British and Americans came up with that strategy.
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 19:20):I am not going to spend time saying how bad the Nazis were, since I assume that's generally accepted here.
Jules Hedges (Feb 26 2021 at 19:20):All I say is, nobody in the 21st century is in a position to pass judgement about those things either way, without first learning a lot about the historical context
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 19:25):The main reason I said all that stuff is that I've found a lot more people know about Hiroshima and Nagasaki than the bombings of Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo. So, I just wanted everyone to know that the strategy of completely destroying whole cities did not emerge out of nowhere when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Nuclear weapons were not required for this strategy. They just made it a lot easier.
And I don't think Einstein's discovery of is to blame at all. This is just a fact that people were bound to discover, like the Pythagorean theorem - in fact both of these facts are immediate consequences of the same formula describing the geometry of spacetime:
Jules Hedges (Feb 26 2021 at 19:30):Luckily, I can make choices about what I will do in 2021, independently of deciding what I think some bloke in the 40s ought to have done
Ben Sprott (Feb 26 2021 at 19:59):John has brought up the atrocities of the second world war with a bit of an emphasis on what terrible things the US and Britain did. Americans are the first to point out how American aggression and intervention is unjust. That very fact is why I believe that the ongoing soft and military powers of the US are welcome. Life has been very good for a lot of people for a long time, and where life is not good, the US and EU have been quick to condemn those countries. There is no justification for scientists to pull out of the maintenance of this state of affairs.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Feb 26 2021 at 20:13):@Ben Sprott (and others) why should any military have a controlling interest in people getting funding in the field of ACT? As far as I can tell, a majority of those here either don't want their work to be used for potentially violent military applications or don't believe that there work is relevant to those applications; so why is it that in some parts of the world the only option is military funding? Why should Bob and co. have had to resort to reliance on military funding for so many years that they now vehemently defend it?
I'm not going to try to convince people for whom such funding is their only option that they shouldn't take it, but I would like to flip this discussion towards what business the military has in being a dominant channel for scientific funding. Is there anything any of us can do to change this state of affairs, beyond my previous suggestion of coherently putting a case to our respective political representatives?
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 20:15):Ben Sprott wrote:
John has brought up the atrocities of the second world war with a bit of an emphasis on what terrible things the US and Britain did.
Just to be clear, I was not bringing up those atrocities mainly to say that the US and Britain are especially evil... I stay away from such broad judgements. I was bringing up those atrocities to point out that the "atom bomb" was not a unique stand-alone sort of thing: it was part of a general strategy of bombing cities in such a way as to start massive fires. So, if one is going to blame Einstein for discovering , one had better also look at the people involved in this strategy.
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 20:17):I've also just spent a lot of time reading about the history of 20th-century physics and the world wars, and how they interacted. I consider myself mainly a mathematical physicist, so I've always been interested in this time period, where physicists made a big difference in world affairs, and Jewish scientists chased out of Germany helped build the bomb and jump-started physics in the US. The glorious discoveries of quantum mechanics and relativity are mixed in quite inextricably with very dark, horrific events.
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 20:22):So, all that stuff is a bit of a digression, but it's full of instructive stories of how scientists made decisions to either help the military or not, and the consequences thereof.
Ben Sprott (Feb 26 2021 at 20:38):@Morgan Rogers (he/him)
@Ben Sprott (and others) why should any military have a controlling interest in people getting funding in the field of ACT? As far as I can tell, a majority of those here either don't want their work to be used for potentially violent military applications or don't believe that there work is relevant to those applications; so why is it that in some parts of the world the only option is military funding? Why should Bob and co. have had to resort to reliance on military funding for so many years that they now vehemently defend it?
I'm not going to try to convince people for whom such funding is their only option that they shouldn't take it, but I would like to flip this discussion towards what business the military has in being a dominant channel for scientific funding. Is there anything any of us can do to change this state of affairs, beyond my previous suggestion of coherently putting a case to our respective political representatives?
I believe that all the funding, all this activity and progress in ACT and everything else for that matter...is due to the US and the way it handles it's funding into science which is through its military. Without the US, there would be every little in the way of funding for anything . Another big spender is China. Let that sink in. Things are happening because of the US and China. We are supporting either US global power or Chinese.
Americans are constantly lobbying their government to reduce or increase military funding.
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 20:38):@Morgan Rogers (he/him) wrote:
I would like to flip this discussion towards what business the military has in being a dominant channel for scientific funding. Is there anything any of us can do to change this state of affairs, beyond my previous suggestion of coherently putting a case to our respective political representatives?
As for why the US military is a dominant channel for scientific funding, it's mainly because the US has a strategy of maintaining military dominance via technological superiority. There are lots of documents about this; it's completely deliberate and explicit. The US spends more on the military than the next 10 countries combined, and
Annual spending on defense science and technology has “grown substantially” over the past four decades from $2.3 billion in FY1978 to $13.4 billion in FY2018 or by nearly 90% in constant dollars, according to a new report from the Congressional Research Service.
(from here). For comparison, it looks like the National Science Foundation got $7.767 billion in 2018.
Georgios Bakirtzis (Feb 26 2021 at 20:40):Ben Sprott said:
Morgan Rogers (he/him)
@Ben Sprott (and others) why should any military have a controlling interest in people getting funding in the field of ACT? As far as I can tell, a majority of those here either don't want their work to be used for potentially violent military applications or don't believe that there work is relevant to those applications; so why is it that in some parts of the world the only option is military funding? Why should Bob and co. have had to resort to reliance on military funding for so many years that they now vehemently defend it?
I'm not going to try to convince people for whom such funding is their only option that they shouldn't take it, but I would like to flip this discussion towards what business the military has in being a dominant channel for scientific funding. Is there anything any of us can do to change this state of affairs, beyond my previous suggestion of coherently putting a case to our respective political representatives?
I believe that all the funding, all this activity and progress in ACT and everything else for that matter...is due to the US and the way it handles it's funding into science which is through its military. Without the US, there would be every little in the way of funding for anything . Another big spender is China. Let that sink in. Things are happening because of the US and China. We are supporting either US global power or Chinese.
Americans are constantly lobbying their government to reduce our increase military funding.
I honestly don't see a lot of ACT happening in the US, for the moment it's mostly an EU/Canada sport so I am not sure what you are talking about.
Georgios Bakirtzis (Feb 26 2021 at 20:42):We have said this before, who is doing ACT in the US? John Baez and his graduate student (and he is not taking any more graduate students), David Spivak, David Jaz Myers on the side, me, and 5 people at NIST?
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 20:42):His middle name is not Jazz, by the way. :saxophone: :piano:
Georgios Bakirtzis (Feb 26 2021 at 20:42):My bad; I'm bad with names :(
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 20:47):By the way, while the Topos Insitute should improve the visibility of applied category theory in the US, David Spivak leaving MIT and me retiring from UCR will leave rather few opportunities for students to get PhDs in applied category theory in this country.
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 20:47):Not that there were very many to begin with!
Georgios Bakirtzis (Feb 26 2021 at 20:47):well there is @James Fairbanks
Georgios Bakirtzis (Feb 26 2021 at 20:48):(which I forgot to list above with Evan Patterson)
Georgios Bakirtzis (Feb 26 2021 at 20:48):(I am also not sure if I count as an ACT researcher but oh well)
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 20:50):Yes, there are various young people - I'd also include @Tai-Danae Bradley and others. And there's Bob Ghrist at U. Penn doing applied stuff with sheaves... though I'm not sure he'd call himself an applied category theorist.
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 20:51):But there are definitely not, say, half a dozen tenured professors in the US who claim to be doing applied category theory. If that ever happens, the landscape will be very different.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Feb 26 2021 at 21:01):John Baez said:
Morgan Rogers (he/him) wrote:
I would like to flip this discussion towards what business the military has in being a dominant channel for scientific funding. Is there anything any of us can do to change this state of affairs, beyond my previous suggestion of coherently putting a case to our respective political representatives?
As for why the US military is a dominant channel for scientific funding, it's mainly because the US has a strategy of maintaining military dominance via technological superiority.
This is something I can point at and oppose. I personally have no interest in my research "maintaining military dominance," and as an agenda which is transparently militaristic, it seems antidemocratic for anyone to have to have no choice about depending on it in the pursuit of their research.
Ben Sprott said:
I believe that all the funding, all this activity and progress in ACT and everything else for that matter...is due to the US and the way it handles it's funding into science which is through its military.
Do you think it's right that the way the US handles its funding into science is through its military?
Ben Sprott (Feb 26 2021 at 21:35):@Morgan Rogers (he/him)
@_John Baez|275920 said:
Morgan Rogers (he/him) wrote:
I would like to flip this discussion towards what business the military has in being a dominant channel for scientific funding. Is there anything any of us can do to change this state of affairs, beyond my previous suggestion of coherently putting a case to our respective political representatives?
As for why the US military is a dominant channel for scientific funding, it's mainly because the US has a strategy of maintaining military dominance via technological superiority.
This is something I can point at and oppose. I personally have no interest in my research "maintaining military dominance," and as an agenda which is transparently militaristic, it seems antidemocratic for anyone to have to have no choice about depending on it in the pursuit of their research.
Ben Sprott said:
I believe that all the funding, all this activity and progress in ACT and everything else for that matter...is due to the US and the way it handles it's funding into science which is through its military.
Do you think it's right that the way the US handles its funding into science is through its military?
Whatever you feel, there are whole armies of American lobbyists and activists that agree with you and have channels for you to express your thoughts.
Again, unless you buy into a fantasy that magically all scientists will refuse to do this anymore, it comes down to what group/system you want to support. I have given a few reasons and can give many more reasons why supporting American global power, is the right choice( even if that it is mainly through military).
If you are still left with misgivings, perhaps you need to consider your feelings simply towards the idea of success.
John van de Wetering (Feb 26 2021 at 21:43):Something I'd like to see a bit more discussion on is the question about the difference between accepting funding from the US military and the US government. They have the same commander in chief, pretty much all the terrible things the US military does is because the government told them to do it, and as far as I understand it, the people in charge of giving funding can hop between doing this for the military and doing this for the government. Why then would it be morally acceptable to accept a government grant, but not a military grant?
I could see a difference when you would be actively cooperating with military personel, as then your knowledge is directly contributing to the military, but if the situation is like Bob's where it is basically a cash-only transfer, why would the difference matter?
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Feb 26 2021 at 21:55):Ben Sprott said:
Again, unless you buy into a fantasy that magically all scientists will refuse to do this anymore, it comes down to what group/system you want to support. I have given a few reasons and can give many more reasons why supporting American global power, is the right choice( even if that it is mainly through military).
The irony is that lobbying to divorce ostensibly non-military research from the military would improve the situation for both military and non-military research interests. At the risk of really kicking the heat in this discussion up a notch, I would compare this to the concept of defunding the police. The military is not a body fit for the responsibility of determining the entire scope of scientific research, and if it were relieved of that responsibility it could focus on funding the research that directly benefits the services it provides.
If you are still left with misgivings, perhaps you need to consider your feelings simply towards the idea of success.
I don't know whether to read this as a joke or not?
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 22:03):John Baez said:
By the way, while the Topos Insitute should improve the visibility of applied category theory in the US, David Spivak leaving MIT and me retiring from UCR will leave rather few opportunities for students to get PhDs in applied category theory in this country.
Just to to put this in perspective of the other discussion here, with help of evil funding, there now are Jamie Vicary's group, Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh's, Miriam Backens', Martha Lewis', Chris Heunen's, Aleks Kissinger's, Vladimir Zamdziev's, etc. now that I retired from academia, and Samson will be retiring too. That funding has been essential to the success of the Oxford community as a whole, and people like Ross and I getting embedded in industry doing ACT. Is this really such a bad thing?
Conor McBride (Feb 26 2021 at 22:06):It's not as bad a thing as Oxford PPE graduates becoming politicians and journalists in the UK.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Feb 26 2021 at 22:10):Bob Coecke said:
That funding has been essential to the success of the Oxford community as a whole, and people like Ross and I getting embedded in industry doing ACT. Is this really such a bad thing?
It's good that you got funding and built a community on top of it. It's surely objectively bad that you had no choice but to rely on funding that a significant proportion of that community have a moral objection to.
Conor McBride (Feb 26 2021 at 22:15):There is, of course, also the issue of getting involved not with the army, but with spooks. Hello, Richard!
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 22:26):Personally, these days I find university administrations the most evil of all, especially in UK. They have completely lost their sense of humanity. This is resulting in mental issues for staff: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2019/05/23/the-university-has-become-an-anxiety-machine/ The reason for that are the governmental funding schemes and how they set academics up against each other, and universities bullying them into doing so. With universities you would have expected some kind of role model for society. I left academia in part because of that.
Conor McBride (Feb 26 2021 at 22:29):Bob Coecke said:
Personally, these days I find university administrations the most evil of all, especially in UK. They have completely lost their sense of humanity. This is resulting in mental issues for staff: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2019/05/23/the-university-has-become-an-anxiety-machine/ The reason for that are the governmental funding schemes and how they set academics up against each other, and universities bullying them in doing so. With universities you would have expected some kind of role model for society. I left academia in part because of that.
Yer no wrang.
Senior colleagues need to look out for junior colleagues.
Jules Hedges (Feb 26 2021 at 22:33):As Conor's junior colleague, I feel looked out for
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 26 2021 at 22:34):Sorry, I'm late to the conversation. A few considerations:
Jules Hedges (Feb 26 2021 at 22:36):Youse missed an interesting point 2 hours ago when talking about the relative lack of category theory in the US, namely that the biggest applied category theory group in the world, despite not being in the US, was largely funded by the USAF
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 26 2021 at 22:41):Also, there are very rich people that want to do good, it's true. But I still think that the social cost of a billionaire defeats the possible benefits multiple times. Even people like Bill Gates, that donated a lot of their fortune to philantropic causes, have probably destroyed lives, careers, enterprises for a sum that was orders of magnitude higher than the one they donated. This is intrinsic to capitalism: To get that rich you have to engage in ruthless business practices, and more importantly actively fuel a system that is literally eating the planet away. And this is when you are a "good" billionaire. When you are a bad one you are just like Peter Thiel that has Moldbug and Land as his favourite ideologues, which says it all.
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 26 2021 at 22:42):Simply put, I see no possible real value in giving someone that much power.
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 22:43):Jules Hedges said:
Youse missed an interesting point 2 hours ago when talking about the relative lack of category theory in the US, namely that the biggest applied category theory group in the world, despite not being in the US, was largely funded by the USAF
Don't forget the religious fanatics. The most grant money overall we got from Templeton. 2nd most probably ONR+AFOSR. Although personal fellowships may even way more than the previous two.
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 22:43):Jules Hedges said:
Youse missed an interesting point 2 hours ago when talking about the relative lack of category theory in the US, namely that the biggest applied category theory group in the world, despite not being in the US, was largely funded by the USAF
The US military projects global ACT dominance through its overseas bases. :smirk:
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 26 2021 at 22:44):Finally, as for the military, I don't like it, but I understand that the issue is difficult. For what is worth, I'm trying (and I think I succeded, personally) to have my research paid/funded by institutions that aren't the military or some evil tech giant. I said it once, I say it again: There are other opportunities out there. If you start actively searching, you may be surprised. :smile:
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 26 2021 at 22:45):(And not the Holy See either, which is the most evil of them all)
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 22:45):Fabrizio Genovese said:
Finally, as for the military, I don't like it, but I understand that the issue is difficult. For what is worth, I'm trying (and I think I succeded, personally) to have my research paid/funded by institutions that aren't the military or some evil tech giant. I said it once, I say it again: There are other opportunities out there. If you start actively searching, you may be surprised. :)
I paid you with the money from the religious fanatics, in fact, you ran that show!
Conor McBride (Feb 26 2021 at 22:46):Jules Hedges said:
As Conor's junior colleague, I feel looked out for
I will get you into so much trouble. But I'll also get you out of it. I'm a terrible person.
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 26 2021 at 22:46):I know, and indeed I didn't have a choice back then. But then I started looking elsewhere and I found something soldier free, google free and Vatican free. And that makes me happy. :grinning:
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 22:54):By leaving academia, I am soldier-free, Google-free and Vatican-free too now. On the other hand, my former department is more and more becoming a Google bastion.
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 26 2021 at 22:54):T_T
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 26 2021 at 22:55):The funniest thing is that Google motto is "don't be evil" xD
Jules Hedges (Feb 26 2021 at 22:56):One thing about being in a small business is you're always one investor away from having a new overlord imposed on you. (I don't know if that applies to CQC or not, since I have no idea how rich your boss is)
Conor McBride (Feb 26 2021 at 22:58):Bob Coecke said:
By leaving academia, I am soldier-free, Google-free and Vatican-free too now. On the other hand, my former department is more and more becoming a Google bastion.
If you're actually moving to sunny C, then I'm looking forward to seeing you down the Dev.
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 22:58):I of course retain lost of connections with the university, we are offering PhD funding to physics, and will jointly supervise, and I am still teaching and doing MSc supervision in maths, and Emeritus Fellow at Wolfson College where I run a Research Cluster. For those who didn't know, I was in Computer Science.
Georgios Bakirtzis (Feb 26 2021 at 22:59):Fabrizio Genovese said:
The funniest thing is that Google motto is "don't be evil" xD
_was_ they took it out
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 23:02):Conor McBride said:
Bob Coecke said:
By leaving academia, I am soldier-free, Google-free and Vatican-free too now. On the other hand, my former department is more and more becoming a Google bastion.
If you're actually moving to sunny C, then I'm looking forward to seeing you down the Dev.
The Dev as in Devonshire arms in Camden, or Sunny C as in Cambridge? I am staying in Oxford, our own new building, with pub / music place in-house. @Jules Hedges knows what I mean by a 2nd Black Pub, now downtown.
Conor McBride (Feb 26 2021 at 23:05):By "Sunny C" I mean Cambridge. It's funny that you mean a different "Devonshire Arms" than I mean. It's a great pub near the train station.
Jules Hedges (Feb 26 2021 at 23:05):Oxford's still one of the places to be I guess, just now spread between more different places in the city instead of just one corridor of one department plus Bob's back garden
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 23:08):Jules Hedges said:
One thing about being in a small business is you're always one investor away from having a new overlord imposed on you. (I don't know if that applies to CQC or not, since I have no idea how rich your boss is)
So that's something our CEO, also the Chair of Directors at Topos Institute and funder of Compositionality, is really good at. No VC at all and only investment in the form of collaboration, so that full ownership is retained with a safe margin.
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 23:09):Jules Hedges said:
Oxford's still one of the places to be I guess, just now spread between more different places in the city instead of just one corridor of one department plus Bob's back garden
And one floor in our new building is the UK satellite of the Topos Institute, where there will be 3 postdocs when we can move in again.
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 23:12):Conor McBride said:
By "Sunny C" I mean Cambridge. It's funny that you mean a different "Devonshire Arms" than I mean. It's a great pub near the train station.
I do end up in Cambridge regularly of course, now that I am technically Ross' boss. :) I think we were there last time.
Conor McBride (Feb 26 2021 at 23:13):Bob Coecke said:
Jules Hedges said:
Oxford's still one of the places to be I guess, just now spread between more different places in the city instead of just one corridor of one department plus Bob's back garden
And one floor in our new building is the UK satellite of the Topos Institute, where there will be 3 postdocs when we can move in again.
Although wildly off-topic, it's always fun to enumerate your collection of cities in which you function as slightly more than a tourist. I basically know how to live in Oxford, Paris, Gothenburg, Tallinn, lord knows where else.
Bob Coecke (Feb 26 2021 at 23:16):Conor McBride said:
Bob Coecke said:
Jules Hedges said:
Oxford's still one of the places to be I guess, just now spread between more different places in the city instead of just one corridor of one department plus Bob's back garden
And one floor in our new building is the UK satellite of the Topos Institute, where there will be 3 postdocs when we can move in again.
Although wildly off-topic, it's always fun to enumerate your collection of cities in which you function as slightly more than a tourist. I basically know how to live in Oxford, Paris, Gothenburg, Tallinn, lord knows where else.
My measure for that is walk into your local pub in that place and they start pouring your beer before you order. But that's cause I am a pretty constant function at what I drink.
Conor McBride (Feb 26 2021 at 23:21):It's lovely to be known.
Joshua Meyers (Feb 26 2021 at 23:26):Fabrizio Genovese said:
- I don't like rationalistic arguments like the ones Joshua Meyers was doing. I can understand that rationalism is very appealing for mathematicians, but it leads very easily to discard moral arguments, which in some cases are fundamental. The result of applying a rationalist way of thinking in fields that should benefit also from a moral judgement can be seen in projects like effective altruism, which seem rationally sound but end up being just a discriminatory bollocks shitshow. With this I'm not saying that one shouldn't better motivate things, I'm just saying that analyzing moral-related issues like they were theorems can be dangerous.
Sorry I don't really know what to do with this criticism. Of course I agree that a purely rationalist way of thinking can be dangerous, but you haven't really shown me that that is happening here. Can you give a criticism that is more specific to the particular arguments I actually gave? Also, btw, I don't know whether you think I am arguing for taking military funding, but if you do then that is a sign that you don't understand what I'm saying.
John Baez (Feb 26 2021 at 23:28):Fabrizio Genovese said:
The funniest thing is that Google motto is "don't be evil" xD
That is no longer their motto! They officially gave it up!
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 26 2021 at 23:30):I don't think you are advocating for military funding, but you asked explanations about why/how "I don't like the military -> I don't take military funding" can be a good strategy. What I mean is that I do not think that analyzing moral issues in strategic terms is the best course of action
Joshua Meyers (Feb 26 2021 at 23:31):Why don't you think that that analyzing moral issues in strategic terms is the best course of action?
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 26 2021 at 23:32):I can give you a reason why this is so: The idea of thinking about solving issues in rational/game theoretic terms has been traditionally championed, for instance, by the realist school of international politics. Their idea was "The best way to decide how to act internationally is by interpreting the world like a sort of competitive game". This kind of school started with Bismarck, up until Kissinger, and there are still many people that think that way
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 26 2021 at 23:32):In general those are also the one that end up committing the most nefarious acts, and kill the most people
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 26 2021 at 23:33):The reason is that being "realist" gives you a very convenient argument for suspending moral judgement in service of some "greater good". The (obviously extreme) example of this may be the usual "If we kill all of our enemies, and show absolutely no mercy to anyone, then we will have peace."
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 26 2021 at 23:34):It clearly works, because it reduces the problem you are facing to a non-problem. If you factor moral judgement in, then the non-trivial solutions like the one above don't really work anymore
Joshua Meyers (Feb 26 2021 at 23:34):So because the realist school of international politics thinks of morality with strategy, and realist policies have included nefarious acts, it is not good to ever think of morality with strategy? Is that what you are saying?
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 26 2021 at 23:36):What I am saying is that we have pretty good example of how thinking in strategic terms can become a way of disregarding moral judgement as lacking a solid basis, which can turn into a prelude for nefarious things
Joshua Meyers (Feb 26 2021 at 23:38):Agreed, that is certainly an example of how it CAN do that.
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 26 2021 at 23:39):Let me stress another important thing: No one, aside some truly mentally deranged people, does bad stuff while knowing that the stuff they are doing is bad. What I mean is that, more often than not, even the people doing the worst things one can imagine will think they were acting in good faith.
For instance, and this is quite well documented, in a case of aggression between people you will see how both parties will say that they were acting defensively. "I stabbed him because he was punching me", "I punched him because he insulted me", "I insulted him because he was looking at me in a bad way", and so on. If you unpack any kind of violent behavior, you'll find out how most of the time both parties involved are convinced that they were acting in good faith, and were somehow justified
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 26 2021 at 23:40):This is precisely why I do believe that moral reasoning must be central in discussing these issues. It really is something one has to constantly keep in check. "Am I acting morally here?" is the first question one should always ask himself, way before "Am I acting rationally?" Cos the former is much more difficult to fix than the latter. :smile:
Joshua Meyers (Feb 26 2021 at 23:41):I'm not disagreeing with you, I just don't see how any of this is relevant to my arguments.
Joshua Meyers (Feb 26 2021 at 23:41):Yes my arguments mention strategy in the context of morality, which has dangerous consequences sometimes. Does it have dangerous consequences this time?
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 26 2021 at 23:42):I was saying how, because of all these things that are basically my belief system, I do not think that going through the path of "what is strategically rational?" is necessarily the best way to analyze the issue at hand. :smile:
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 26 2021 at 23:43):Joshua Meyers said:
Yes my arguments mention strategy in the context of morality, which has dangerous consequences sometimes. Does it have dangerous consequences this time?
It doesn't have to, but I'm not sure It's worth the risk. At least for me
Joshua Meyers (Feb 26 2021 at 23:44):Well for this particular issue unfortunately, my disagreement is entirely in the realm of strategy. I completely agree about the harm that the US military does, and I want it to stop. I just am unsure about the best strategy to make it stop.
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 26 2021 at 23:45):For me, looking for alternative sources of funding whenever possible is a good start. I agree that it's not easy for everyone
Joshua Meyers (Feb 26 2021 at 23:45):That's one strategy
Joshua Meyers (Feb 26 2021 at 23:45):Another one is some sort of political organizing
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 26 2021 at 23:46):Aside of that, I do believe that scientists should be more vocal about their ethical stance. Stuff like the Hippocratic oath for computer scientists is also important
Joshua Meyers (Feb 26 2021 at 23:47):Fabrizio Genovese said:
Joshua Meyers said:
Yes my arguments mention strategy in the context of morality, which has dangerous consequences sometimes. Does it have dangerous consequences this time?
It doesn't have to, but I'm not sure It's worth the risk. At least for me
What's not worth the risk? Thinking any thought that involves both strategy and morality? Uttering such a thought aloud? Saying such a thought publicly? Acting on such a thought?
Fabrizio Genovese (Feb 26 2021 at 23:47): Joshua Meyers (Feb 26 2021 at 23:49):Like it or not, if you want to be effective at doing anything you need to think about your strategy for doing it. A fortiori if you want to be effective about doing something good. I'm not claiming that this is sufficient, merely necessary. You also have to think about what is good to do in the first place, as well as whether your strategy has harmful effects which outweigh the good of what it is a strategy for.
Jade Master (Feb 27 2021 at 01:13):I am becoming very exhausted by this conversation and shabbat is tonight so i probably won't return to it for at least a few days. Thank you for all your contributions and people are welcome to private message me about things if they like.
Ben Sprott (Feb 27 2021 at 01:36):@Fabrizio Genovese
- The US global power should really be curtailed (if only T_T). No offense but since 2001 US foreign policy didn't bring anything but problems, at least here in the EU. I have been provocative about this many times, but I'll say it again: From an EU perspective, Trump was a blessing. Having the US without any real foreign policy for 4 years has been simply awesome for us. And I'm pretty sure that now that you have someone with a brain in power again, our relationships with Russia (that is our neighbour, btw) will just get much worse.
I tried looking up this idea that Eu-russia relations improved during Trump. I only found an Economist article that suggested a thaw around 2019 but it was paywalled.
I don't believed the receding of US foreign policy improved EU-russia relations. The reason is that I believe, instead, that they focused their attention on the personal manipulation they could achieve through social media. This eventually led to the UK leaving the European Union. That is an incredible win for Russia. They dismantled the EU.
If American power were to recede, don't you feel that this would inevitably lead to the rise in China's power. My country has just labeled them as effecting a genocide right now. I am not sure you understand what that means to most people.
Ben Sprott (Feb 27 2021 at 02:02):I have been trying to consider this idea that all scientists, globally, could just somehow agree to act highly ethically, say, for the next hundred years. It is impossible.....but, let's just approach it from an idealized point of view. How could it be achieved? What would it mean on a personal level for Scientists? How would they incorporate it into their work? I mean, in just the simplest sense, there is already a whole branch of science which deals with ethical questions. Take life science. Is it really just a matter of not taking grants from the military? That doesn't make sense, since once their work is published, technologists working for the military would find applications. So that puts the burden on the scientist to mentally strangle themselves.
John Baez (Feb 27 2021 at 02:12):Personally, I think if scientists want to be "highly ethical for the next hundred years", they need to focus a lot of attention on the Anthropocene. Global warming is the most obvious part of this, but it's really a much bigger thing, and only with a lot of help from scientists will we get through this without a seriously damaged biosphere. Of course politicians, and people in industry, and everyone has a crucial part to play, but at present only scientists can actually understand the many ways in which we are pushing up against planetary boundaries and tipping points, and only scientists have a chance of understanding the advantages and disadvantages of proposed solutions like geoengineering, carbon sequestration, fission and fusion power, solar and wind power, etc.
By the way, I'm not saying scientists should make the decisions: they should learn about the situation, evaluate solutions, and explain all this to everyone else!
John Baez (Feb 27 2021 at 02:13):All this takes a lot of time, and we really don't have much time at all. We are in a little rowboat drifting to the edge of a big waterfall, and we're not doing much yet.
John Baez (Feb 27 2021 at 02:20):It's much easier for scientists and mathematicians than ordinary folks to understand all the issues I just listed: we can read graphs (believe it or not, most people can't), we can read journal articles (most people don't even have access to them, much less know how to read them), we can sense what counts as crackpot science (well, many of us can), and so on. So we all really have a duty to learn about these issues and educate our friends, neighbors, students and everyone about them.
Steve Huntsman (Feb 27 2021 at 02:38): Steve Huntsman (Feb 27 2021 at 02:39):“ the Department can also be a platform for positive change, spurring the development of climate-friendly technologies at scale.”
John Baez (Feb 27 2021 at 02:40):Yes, one thing I like about the US military is that they are in general part of the "reality-based community": they don't think you can solve problems by pretending they don't exist. So, even during administrations where the President denies the importance of climate change, they have been taking it seriously.
John Baez (Feb 27 2021 at 02:42):But I would like the Defense Department to be explicitly tasked with defending the planet. Yes, that sounds too idealistic. But maybe when the climate crisis gets bad enough, it'll happen.
Steve Huntsman (Feb 27 2021 at 03:05):Sounds much less implausible than most of the stuff in this thread. Climate cooperation is the likeliest linchpin of a new rules-based order that will get enough buy-in to work. Money likes rules and predictability.
Jules Hedges (Feb 27 2021 at 10:29):Thanks John, this is a much more productive direction this thread could take too. Instead of passing judgement on funding sources we think are Bad, instead focus on good things we can do
Jules Hedges (Feb 27 2021 at 10:30):A couple of months ago John helped amplify me when I was looking for collaborators in climate science to see if open games could do any good. It was a long shot and nothing came from it
Jules Hedges (Feb 27 2021 at 10:31):It's not like there's no funding in "green science" either. Pretty sure the EU pumps a lot of money into it through Horizon for example
Jules Hedges (Feb 27 2021 at 11:03):It's another example of how the world has changed between when Grothendieck was writing and now. The "elephant in the room" problem has switched from nuclear weapons to the climate
Bob Coecke (Feb 27 2021 at 13:57):It now takes 12M $ to train GPT-3 in electricity alone (!) so AI is heading for an ecological disaster. We hope that our brand of AI which needs exponentially less resources can do something about that. People in quantum computing are also working on carbon capture.
Chad Nester (Mar 03 2021 at 22:15):You all write very fast. I admire your conviction.
The world is a messy place.
We all have a responsibility to reflect, earnestly and frequently, on our lives.
I think it is fair to expect this. I don’t see how we could expect more.
Chad Nester (Mar 03 2021 at 22:28):I don’t think scientists have different moral obligations to non-scientists.
We are not priests, with special access to some divine truth.
Chad Nester (Mar 03 2021 at 22:29):(I say “we”, but I don’t know if I am a scientist...)
John Baez (Mar 03 2021 at 22:45):Scientists have special moral obligations because we have special tools and skills. It's like how firefighters have more responsibility for putting out fires than other people - not because they have special access to some divine truth, but because they have special access to fire trucks and hoses.
Fabrizio Genovese (Mar 04 2021 at 00:16):I do agree with John. And fields like data science and AI are really sensitive at the moment. For instance, a friend of mine working in AI told me in some AI-related fields it is becoming customary to make datasets and code available only to the reviewers, in fear that new advancements may be used by rogue actors (states or whatnot) to automate discrimination, persecution of political opponents and so on. So I'd definitely say that scientists have some very peculiar responsibilities, especially the ones working in some ethically sensitive fields.
Georgios Bakirtzis (Mar 04 2021 at 00:35):What is your opinion: Is category theory one of those fields?
Fabrizio Genovese (Mar 04 2021 at 02:22):No, not at this stage. But one day it may well be. We are still building the ACT fundamentals, but it's not unreasonable to think that one day the categorical approach will result in breakthroughs in various fields. This is already the case for quantum protocols, for instance. In such cases, some of the things we do may become problematic. It's good that we talk about these issues now that the community is still reasonably small, there aren't huge ethical implications in what we do (yet) and things are more or less under control. Hopefully, we will be able to understand and sort ethical issues now, so that when they will come we will be prepared (in truth I think you can never be prepared for this stuff, but giving it some thought helps anyway).
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Mar 04 2021 at 08:21):Also we could build strong moral foundations in the community from the beginning. The same applies to inclusivity, I believe. Let's normalize good things, and good things will be the norm.
Fabrizio Genovese (Mar 04 2021 at 09:52):That was my point, yes
Jules Hedges (Mar 04 2021 at 10:40):Fabrizio Genovese said:
For instance, a friend of mine working in AI told me in some AI-related fields it is becoming customary to make datasets and code available only to the reviewers, in fear that new advancements may be used by rogue actors (states or whatnot) to automate discrimination, persecution of political opponents and so on.
This looks like a really special feature of machine learning that it's possible to do this. It's quite a lot like showing someone your car but not giving them the key so they can't take it for a joyride (and technically they also can't know for certain that it's not broken down). Our field is way more conceptual, I can't imagine having an equivalent of "not giving them the key"
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Mar 04 2021 at 11:03):Let's keep using very obscure language and 'just'ify everything, that'll do it :stuck_out_tongue_wink:
Steve Huntsman (Aug 02 2022 at 23:22):Jules Hedges said:
I'll take the turn to place the obtuse part here. The US as a nation and especially the US military is left playing with its toys and pretending that it's important. There's still a real risk that it could throw a tantrum and hurt someone with its toys, but "US global power" isn't really a thing in this millennium. Pretending that it's still important is not helpful to anyone
Bumping this in light of events since
John Baez (Aug 02 2022 at 23:28):Agreeing or - as I suspect - disagreeing?
Steve Huntsman (Aug 02 2022 at 23:46):John Baez said:
Agreeing or - as I suspect - disagreeing?
https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker/ gives a quantitative answer
Steve Huntsman (Aug 03 2022 at 00:33):And adding this: https://twitter.com/AVindman/status/1554593687283408897
Too many talk about US decline. Way too many want an isolationist disengaged America. But look at the last ~24 hours. The US provided Ukraine $500 million in critical military aid, killed the #1 terrorist off in Afghanistan & girded democracy in Taiwan. No one else could do that.
- Alexander S. Vindman (@AVindman) Keith Elliott Peterson (Aug 03 2022 at 09:18):This has been touched on a bit in the thread, but perhaps someone should be explicit: whether you accept funding or not, and how you feel about that, is irrelevant. If the militaries of the world wish to use your ideas, they'll simply use them, regardless if they throw money at you and tell you to buy something pretty.
If you're worried some of your ideas could be used to kill, maim, or displace people, either directly or indirectly, let me soothe your worries for you: Yes, they absolutely can be.
But then again, I don't see that much different than being a taxpayer, where your tax money goes to military spending.
As pointed out, if one doesn't like the way militaries do things, then the solution is to try to change the minds of voters, politically organize, and try to change the political situation. That being said, that could also come with its own unintended consequences.
:shrug:
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 03 2022 at 09:47):Keith Peterson said:
This has been touched on a bit in the thread, but perhaps someone should be explicit: whether you accept funding or not, and how you feel about that, is irrelevant. If the militaries of the world wish to use your ideas, they'll simply use them, regardless if they throw money at you and tell you to buy something pretty.
It's pretty hard for one's condemnation of military applications of one's research to have any impact if one is being directly paid by the military. Just like in any other mode of employment, if you are knowingly being paid to contribute to a problematic thing, you are directly complicit in the problematic thing. If your attitude is that the problematic thing will happen anyway so you might as well be complicit, that's a choice you can't possibly expect everyone to be on board with.
I tend to agree that only systematic changes will reduce the militaristic abuses of research, but that's no excuse for wilful participation in that abuse on an individual level (I guess this remark also applies to the other recent topic in this stream).
Steve Huntsman (Aug 03 2022 at 11:12):Keith Peterson said:
This has been touched on a bit in the thread, but perhaps someone should be explicit: whether you accept funding or not, and how you feel about that, is irrelevant. If the militaries of the world wish to use your ideas, they'll simply use them, regardless if they throw money at you and tell you to buy something pretty.
I’m on record as saying that if y’all feel bad about what someone (or I specifically) might do with your research, then y’all should demonstrate the courage of conviction and do something else. I’ll mention that at my last job I was pointing out potential applications of open games to mosaic warfare to colleagues…
Steve Huntsman (Aug 03 2022 at 11:14):…who knows what they’re doing now?
Jules Hedges (Aug 03 2022 at 11:16):Steve Huntsman said:
potential applications of open games to mosaic warfare
I should go live on a mountaintop and become a geometric topologist.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 03 2022 at 11:16):Careful I don’t apply the h-cobordism theorem
Jules Hedges (Aug 03 2022 at 11:17):It takes enough of my attention worrying about what finance people do with my work, without having to think about Dr Strangelove too
Steve Huntsman (Aug 03 2022 at 11:21):As it happens about 20 years ago I gave an internal lecture series called “How I learned to stop worrying and love molecular biology” when I was leaving the Institute for Defense Analyses. :smiling_devil:
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 03 2022 at 11:54):Steve Huntsman said:
I’m on record as saying that if y’all feel bad about what someone (or I specifically) might do with your research, then y’all should demonstrate the courage of conviction and do something else. I’ll mention that at my last job I was pointing out potential applications of open games to mosaic warfare to colleagues…
I take the position that doing research is not an endorsement of violent applications of said research unless one is personally profiting from those applications. It seems to me that it would be awfully convenient for you if people that disagree with your values (or lack thereof) decided to go and do something else rather than publicly objecting to your choices.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 03 2022 at 12:14):I think the Ukrainians and Taiwanese are profiting from the sort of stuff I do
Si vis pacem, para bellum
Steve Huntsman (Aug 03 2022 at 12:19):https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/04/us/politics/uss-kearsarge-stockholm.html
Steve Huntsman (Aug 03 2022 at 12:21):You can object all you want… but my kind are providing the aegis for you to do it
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 03 2022 at 13:15):I'm so glad you have a way to feel self-righteous about "the sort of stuff you do".
Steve Huntsman (Aug 03 2022 at 13:19):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
I'm so glad you have a way to feel self-righteous about "the sort of stuff you do".
Me too, and sincerely! And I encourage everyone here who feels bad about it to be aware of their own role in it and either come to terms with their own hypocrisy, or change careers.
John Baez (Aug 03 2022 at 14:08):Keith Peterson wrote:
If the militaries of the world wish to use your ideas, they'll simply use them, regardless if they throw money at you and tell you to buy something pretty.
That's true. But this is not:
John Baez (Aug 03 2022 at 14:15):whether you accept funding or not, and how you feel about that, is irrelevant.
The military pays a lot of people to do research that leads directly to new weapons and new software to organize the business of war. And there are a fair number of applied category theorists doing just this. I know them - and I was one myself, for a while. (I was naive because they said the project would be about organizing search and rescue missions, which seemed harmless, but then the focus of the project shifted, and in retrospect I should have known from the start that this was a convenient cover story.)
John Baez (Aug 03 2022 at 14:18):In general, the military is not mainly paying people to do pure math that's useless to the military. There are exceptions. But they aren't a charity.
By the way, nothing in what I'm saying here presumes an answer to the question "should I be helping the military?" People can make up their own minds about that. And my point also applies to working for companies. My point is that if someone is paying you to work for them, your work is probably helping them accomplish their goals, and you should think about that.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 03 2022 at 14:22):John Baez said:
this was a convenient cover story
I have no direct knowledge of this particular instance but I am pretty sure that DARPA doesn't do "cover stories" for "6.1" (i.e., basic) research. They aren't liars. It was almost surely a bona fide application that was mindful of the sensitivities of those likely to contribute, but also very likely not the only one that DARPA had/have in mind.
John Baez (Aug 03 2022 at 14:26):Yeah, I didn't mean they "lied". Maybe "cover story" has some very precise technical meaning that I didn't intend. What I mean is that their original project, the one that I agreed to work on, which modeled saving sailors in a yacht competition in the Caribbean, segued smoothly into a second project that involved combat search and rescue. This second project was sprung on me midstream. And I quit.
John Baez (Aug 03 2022 at 14:29):And the whole $1 million DARPA project was followed by a $10 million DARPA project to further develop the use of operads in assembling military missions.
John Baez (Aug 03 2022 at 14:30):I don't think it's a coincidence that the original small project seemed much more benign (as in: "who could possibly object?") than the followups.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 03 2022 at 14:36):John Baez said:
And the whole $1 million DARPA project was followed by a $10 million DARPA project to further develop the use of operads in assembling military missions.
Warfare is gonna be a thing as long as we're barely more than chimps. Mosaic warfare is gonna be a thing, and a thing that exploits compositionality one way or another, whether the engineers (or mathematicians) use category theory per se, knowingly, etc or not. It is also gonna be a thing that makes war less harmful to noncombatants--platforms and weapons will be smaller and individually less lethal, but more precise. Compare that with Grozny/Aleppo/Mariupol (or Tigray or Yemen etc.). Anyone who works in applying category theory (and Grothendieck's ghost) should come to terms with this stuff.
John Baez (Aug 03 2022 at 14:46):Right. I agree with all this. I've just decided I'd rather develop systems for modeling epidemic disease, working with public health experts. My ideas may be borrowed and reused by the military or corporations for their own purposes, but at least I've done something I actually want to do.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 03 2022 at 14:57):John Baez said:
Right. I agree with all this. I've just decided I'd rather develop systems for modeling epidemic disease, working with public health experts. My ideas may be borrowed and reused by the military or corporations for their own purposes, but at least I've done something I actually want to do.
I admire your efforts to make your actions and ethics global sections. I also try to be mindful of this "sheaf cohomology" though our sections differ
John Baez (Aug 03 2022 at 15:09):Thanks. And btw, I'm not reflexively anti-military. The whole issue of the proper role of the military in a democracy is a really complicated question that I'm trying to not get into here. I just wanted to argue against Keith's apparent claim that it doesn't matter what you work on.
(He phrased it differently, as "whether you accept funding or not, and how you feel about that, is irrelevant". But really, when you accept funding from X to do Y, you have to think about why X is willing to pay you to do Y. Usually they have a reason.)
Keith Elliott Peterson (Aug 03 2022 at 21:08):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
It's pretty hard for one's condemnation of military applications of one's research to have any impact if one is being directly paid by the military. Just like in any other mode of employment, if you are knowingly being paid to contribute to a problematic thing, you are directly complicit in the problematic thing. If your attitude is that the problematic thing will happen anyway so you might as well be complicit, that's a choice you can't possibly expect everyone to be on board with.
You can condemn all you want, but in the end, such condemnations are just performative in nature. That is to say, talk is cheap. :neutral:
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 04 2022 at 08:45):Steve Huntsman said:
Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
I'm so glad you have a way to feel self-righteous about "the sort of stuff you do".
Me too, and sincerely! And I encourage everyone here who feels bad about it to be aware of their own role in it and either come to terms with their own hypocrisy, or change careers.
The idea that I'm a hypocrite for doing academic research is preposterous. I live in Europe. The funding for my work is not predicated on its potential usefulness to any military organisation, and I can be pretty confident that my career will not depend on the possibility eventual military applications. If my work is exploited as a resource by the military, I am not responsible for that, any more than the native people of countries invaded by the American military are responsible for the eventual exploitation of the resources in those countries which they discovered.
Keith Peterson said:
You can condemn all you want, but in the end, such condemnations are just performative in nature. That is to say, talk is cheap. :neutral:
Communication is a necessary first step in any collective action, although I share your doubts that such will be the result of this discussion. On the other hand, you've already said that military applications are not worth worrying about, which I take to indicate that you wouldn't take an opportunity to obstruct such applications if you had it. If talk is cheap, a promise of inaction must be free.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 04 2022 at 13:05):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
The idea that I'm a hypocrite for doing academic research is preposterous.
You've concluded that you have no role in enabling me and my kind: fine. Perhaps you actually will be lucky enough to have your work never be used in any way by any of us. But some other folks here have confidently played that game and lost badly.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 04 2022 at 13:21):It's not a game. I'm not somehow gambling on the non-existence of bad actors, I'm refuting the idea that I am responsible for their bad actions.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 04 2022 at 13:23):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
If my work is exploited as a resource by the military, I am not responsible for that, any more than the native people of countries invaded by the American military are responsible for the eventual exploitation of the resources in those countries which they discovered.
People invade (or defend) places because there is something they think is worth doing it for. If a place is invaded (or defended) because the discovery of something was once announced there, then the discoverers (and those who assist them) bear some responsibility.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 04 2022 at 13:24):Why? How does the existence of something justify its exploitation?
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 04 2022 at 13:26):If I announce the amount of money in my wallet, does that make me responsible for its theft?
Steve Huntsman (Aug 04 2022 at 13:28):If you had $1M in your wallet would you announce it, or consider that it might be foolish to do so?
Steve Huntsman (Aug 04 2022 at 13:30):Or would you only announce it if you had provided for your self-defense?
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 04 2022 at 13:35):Understanding how others might weigh up the consequences of that theft against the value stolen well enough to recognize that theft would be a likely outcome doesn't make me responsible for the theft. A prerequisite for any premeditated crime is the criminal's knowledge of the crime's possibility and a positive evaluation of the crime's value. I stand by standard legal practice in believing that it is the criminal that holds full responsibility for the crime, and not the victim.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 04 2022 at 13:39):If you are foolish then you are responsible for being foolish. If a crime is perpetrated against you then that is another matter. Do not think or imply that I would blame the victim of a crime for that crime.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 04 2022 at 13:40):If something is valuable and you announce its existence, then you should prepare the means for its use and defense, or you are foolish.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 04 2022 at 13:43):Those statements neatly summarise the crux of this discussion, I appreciate that. I fundamentally disagree, partly with their relevance.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 04 2022 at 13:47):I think I'll drop this discussion for now. Thanks Steve. It will be interesting to see if anyone else responds to that claim.
John van de Wetering (Aug 04 2022 at 17:13):This discussion is reminding me a bit of a thought I had recently, which is that we put way too high a value on being a hypocrite or not. If someone says "you are being a hypocrite!", then that is something you must immediately defend against, because that sure is a serious accusation. It almost feels like we would much rather have someone be a serial killer who is pure evil, rather than someone who is trying to do good, but sometimes doesn't, because that last person is a hypocrite.
See for instance all those claims being made against Greta Thunberg, where if she does the merest thing that might be outputting CO2, people immediately try to discredit her using that. Or people trying to talk down vegans, because don't you know that soy is being farmed under unfair labour practices?
John van de Wetering (Aug 04 2022 at 17:14):I guess what I'm trying to say is, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. So everyone who doesn't go to live as a hermit in the woods is a hypocrite. So being a hypocrite is fine, as long as you try to live up to your principles.
John Baez (Aug 04 2022 at 20:27):You might enjoy this short article of mine, John:
Steve Huntsman (Aug 04 2022 at 21:18):John Baez said:
You might enjoy this short article of mine, John:
Quoting two levels: "People dislike hypocrites because they unfairly use condemnation to gain reputational benefits and appear virtuous at the expense of those who they are condemning–when these reputational benefits are in fact undeserved"
John Baez (Aug 04 2022 at 21:39):Heh. By the way, that quote is from an article by the Association for Psychological Science, with no evident author.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 05 2022 at 10:36):The same applies to being "foolish", I think. Steve said earlier that "If you are foolish you are responsible for being foolish", but that strikes me as too simplistic.
Behaviour judged to be foolish can be a result of a (perceived) failure of knowledge (ignorance) or a failure of reasoning. In either case, the accusation of foolishness contains the implication that the person should have known or reasoned better, and that obligation is the basis for assigning them responsibility for the consequences of their actions. But it's rarely possible to make such a judgement objectively, and it certainly isn't true that a person is always responsible for their own ignorance or inability to reason correctly. A bad teacher might hold their student responsible for failing to answer a question in class, but ultimately it is that teacher's responsibility to ensure that their student is equipped to answer those questions.
I maintain that being "foolish" doesn't make you responsible for the actions of others; at worst, it makes you vulnerable to them. If doing academic research while denouncing those who would apply my work to violent ends makes me a hypocrite or a fool to your eyes, so be it.
Jade Master (Aug 07 2022 at 21:31):I've made the decision not to accept military funding because I believe it is morally wrong. Use my work if you want, you'll just be doing me a favor. You may realize that it would've have been better to choose the research of someone who is willing to work with you anyway...
Jean-Baptiste Vienney (Aug 07 2022 at 22:59):Sorry guys but I want to make a comment. Most of you seem to agree that :
(*) being funded by the military is bad. Because military are mean and want to kill people and they can use your research to develop themselves and kill more people.
Okay.
1) We don't know if the world would be less or more stable without the military, especially the military from the US. I agree with the fact that it's bad that people are killed by organized group of people with weapon, like national armies or terrorist organizations. I want to minimize the number of people who are killed by these organized group of people with weapon. I'm not convinced of what is the most efficient strategy for this but I'm ready to hear rigorous explanations.
2) It is much more scientifically established that the world will be less stable with a few more degrees in the average temperatures. By less stable, I mean in particular a world where there is more people who die by "unnatural causes" or suffer of various issues. It thus comes more easily to my mind to prioritize this point. I will not give you your best way of acting as it has been previously discussed in another thread.
3) I think that Grothendieck explained rightly how the world of math scholars suffer of some issues like people being more concerned by social recognition than acting rightly, in Récoltes et Semailles. I think that here, people are happy to agree on the proposition (*) because it is more or less widely accepted by their friends and it is always nice to feel part of a community who agree on similar things. It is not about social recognition but also more a social behavior than really something about morality even if I'm sure that you all want to act morally at the end. Grothendieck didn't agree with this because he was strongly against funding by military but he got the point of (social aspects) > (real morality) for mathematicians I think.
In my opinion, these three propositions are more or less true. I admit that I have not carefully read every message and that I'm not extremely subtle, but I can't not saying what I think. I'm ready to hear every constructive criticism but I don't think that we are going to make more progress than in the thread about conferences. Thus, I'm not sure that I really want to discuss more this.
Jean-Baptiste Vienney (Aug 08 2022 at 00:10):Do you know that Grothendieck also created the ecologist journal "Survivre et Vivre"? Survivre et Vivre, 1970 - 1972
Steve Huntsman (Aug 08 2022 at 02:27):https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurements_of_Earth_Data_for_Environmental_Analysis
Steve Huntsman (Aug 08 2022 at 02:40):Jade Master said:
You may realize that it would've have been better to choose the research of someone who is willing to work with you anyway...
That’s not how it works. “We” try to solve actual problems and use whatever we think can help best/most. Those of us who are lucky (I count myself here) are often accorded the leeway to look for things that are elegant, generalizable, etc. Sometimes that even means a functor gets involved here or there.
But in order for something to have enough promise to be worth our time it usually needs to be clear enough for numbskulls like me to grok it without any assistance and even to explain it (with prototype code) to engineers.
Security through obscurity works a little in the sense that we might take longer, might kludge stuff, or reinvent it to get the job done. But we usually don’t need any help—it’s just a cherry on top to chat with folks who’ve thought about stuff we use before it got on our radar.
Jade Master (Aug 08 2022 at 03:36):Steve Huntsman said:
Jade Master said:
You may realize that it would've have been better to choose the research of someone who is willing to work with you anyway...
That’s not how it works. “We” try to solve actual problems and use whatever we think can help best/most. Those of us who are lucky (I count myself here) are often accorded the leeway to look for things that are elegant, generalizable, etc. Sometimes that even means a functor gets involved here or there.
But in order for something to have enough promise to be worth our time it usually needs to be clear enough for numbskulls like me to grok it without any assistance and even to explain it (with prototype code) to engineers.
Security through obscurity works a little in the sense that we might take longer, might kludge stuff, or reinvent it to get the job done. But we usually don’t need any help—it’s just a cherry on top to chat with folks who’ve thought about stuff we use before it got on our radar.
Is it also common practice to disregard copyright on software? I wouldn't be surprised if it was.
Jade Master (Aug 08 2022 at 03:36):In your profession I mean.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 08 2022 at 10:41):Jade Master said:
In your profession I mean.
It would be a scandal.
You would probably be shocked how many lawyers (and not of the John Woo sort) are in DoD and the intelligence community, and I suspect you would be very surprised how fundamentally decent most of the warriors and civilians are in comparison to the larger population.
If you think for example that a large majority of military officers and noncommissioned officers in the US (and especially senior ones)are not animated by a deep and abiding sense of honor then you should get to know some of them.
John van de Wetering (Aug 08 2022 at 13:27):Jean-Baptiste Vienney said:
Sorry guys but I want to make a comment. Most of you seem to agree that :
(*) being funded by the military is bad. Because military are mean and want to kill people and they can use your research to develop themselves and kill more people.
Okay.
1) We don't know if the world would be less or more stable without the military, especially the military from the US. I agree with the fact that it's bad that people are killed by organized group of people with weapon, like national armies or terrorist organizations. I want to minimize the number of people who are killed by these organized group of people with weapon. I'm not convinced of what is the most efficient strategy for this but I'm ready to hear rigorous explanations.
2) It is much more scientifically established that the world will be less stable with a few more degrees in the average temperatures. By less stable, I mean in particular a world where there is more people who die by "unnatural causes" or suffer of various issues. It thus comes more easily to my mind to prioritize this point. I will not give you your best way of acting as it has been previously discussed in another thread.
3) I think that Grothendieck explained rightly how the world of math scholars suffer of some issues like people being more concerned by social recognition than acting rightly, in Récoltes et Semailles. I think that here, people are happy to agree on the proposition (*) because it is more or less widely accepted by their friends and it is always nice to feel part of a community who agree on similar things. It is not about social recognition but also more a social behavior than really something about morality even if I'm sure that you all want to act morally at the end. Grothendieck didn't agree with this because he was strongly against funding by military but he got the point of (social aspects) > (real morality) for mathematicians I think.
In my opinion, these three propositions are more or less true. I admit that I have not carefully read every message and that I'm not extremely subtle, but I can't not saying what I think. I'm ready to hear every constructive criticism but I don't think that we are going to make more progress than in the thread about conferences. Thus, I'm not sure that I really want to discuss more this.
So I think to me, and to many other people, it doesn't matter if the military is good, actually. You still don't want to work with them. Let me try to explain with an analogy: a doctor might be able to save 10 people, by killing one and harvesting their organs. In a utlitarian sense this might be a good thing to do. But I think it is very reasonable if the doctor doesn't want to do this. Someone could ask, but why, don't you want to save all those other people? And I don't think the doctor has to give any other explanation than "I don't want to, it feels icky".
That to me is how working for the military would feel.
Now, maybe it is good that there are other people that don't have this feeling of ickyness, and they can explain why it is perfectly fine. But to me that still probably wouldn't convince me.
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Aug 08 2022 at 14:56):Steve Huntsman said:
Security through obscurity works a little in the sense that we might take longer, might kludge stuff, or reinvent it to get the job done. But we usually don’t need any help—it’s just a cherry on top to chat with folks who’ve thought about stuff we use before it got on our radar.
so we agree, military doesn't need category theorists
Jules Hedges (Aug 08 2022 at 15:05):This thread keeps almost making me laugh like a black comedy sketch, where an openly evil organisation is talking about how great they are
Zanzi (Aug 08 2022 at 15:19):Steve Huntsman said:
Keith Peterson said:
This has been touched on a bit in the thread, but perhaps someone should be explicit: whether you accept funding or not, and how you feel about that, is irrelevant. If the militaries of the world wish to use your ideas, they'll simply use them, regardless if they throw money at you and tell you to buy something pretty.
I’m on record as saying that if y’all feel bad about what someone (or I specifically) might do with your research, then y’all should demonstrate the courage of conviction and do something else. I’ll mention that at my last job I was pointing out potential applications of open games to mosaic warfare to colleagues…
You're boasting about profiteering off of someone else's research, and your only defence for yourself is that if they don't like it then they need the conviction to quit the field they love and do something else?
Maybe what they really need is the conviction to show people like you the door, over and over, until you get the point.
Jean-Baptiste Vienney (Aug 08 2022 at 15:25):Jules Hedges said:
This thread keeps almost making me laugh like a black comedy sketch, where an openly evil organisation is talking about how great they are
It’s more a sketch about antimilitarist mathematicians to me. « an open evil organizations » : such words are really ridiculous to me.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 08 2022 at 15:28):Jean-Baptiste Vienney said:
(*) being funded by the military is bad. Because military are mean and want to kill people and they can use your research to develop themselves and kill more people.
A bit reductive, but I'll accept it.
1) We don't know if the world would be less or more stable without the military [...] I want to minimize the number of people who are killed by these organized group of people with weapon. I'm not convinced of what is the most efficient strategy for this but I'm ready to hear rigorous explanations.
No one in this discussion has advocated for the dissolution of the military, at least not openly, so I don't think this line of reasoning is relevant. On the other hand, if it comes to a simple choice between working with the military or not, it's pretty clear that 'not' would have a lower expected contribution to military output.
2) The world will be less stable with a few more degrees in the average temperatures. [...] It thus comes more easily to my mind to prioritize this point. [...] it has been previously discussed in another thread.
It was discussed in another thread because it is again not relevant to the present discussion. There are many ethical issues that one must confront in the world, but arguing against the discussion of one because there are other issues to discuss is rarely constructive, unless the discussion itself is causing a significant reduction in action on other issues.
3) I think that Grothendieck explained rightly how the world of math scholars suffer [...] people being more concerned by social recognition than acting rightly. I think that here, people are happy to agree on the proposition (*) because it is more or less widely accepted by their friends and it is always nice to feel part of a community who agree on similar things. It is [...] more a social behavior than really something about morality even if I'm sure that you all want to act morally at the end.
Is your point that having this discussion is just our way of social signalling, that it's unlikely to actually impact anyone's behaviour, and that as a result the discussion is a waste of time? Or is it something else?
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 08 2022 at 15:45):Steve Huntsman said:
I suspect you would be very surprised how fundamentally decent most of the warriors and civilians are in comparison to the larger population. If you think for example that a large majority of military officers and noncommissioned officers in the US (and especially senior ones) are not animated by a deep and abiding sense of honor then you should get to know some of them.
Hmmm... I'm not sure that this argument promoting individuals carries the weight you think it does. The military and the individuals comprising it do great things on a regular basis. John mentioned participating in a project aimed at search and rescue missions, for instance. The problem lies in the fact that the military doesn't share a moral baseline with me. Violence in its various forms is an acceptable means to an end for the military, whereas it is not for myself and several other participants in this discussion. For me, being a decent person in my day-to-day life wouldn't excuse voluntary participation in military violence.
Jean-Baptiste Vienney (Aug 08 2022 at 15:46):My point is that this discussion is very one-sided. It woud be more interesting if there were military explaining more what their job consist in. I see this is as people who discuss but already agree together on an assumption which is maybe false: military have a bad effect on the world. I know you discuss precisely the point of accepting or not to be funded by military but it is pretty much equivalent to the question of what is really the effect of military on the world. Because you just want to defend or not an organization if it is a bad one or a good one basically. And I think, it is not so simple. Military are simply not that bad I think. At least it would be interesting to try to understand this question better.
Jean-Baptiste Vienney (Aug 08 2022 at 15:57):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
Steve Huntsman said:
I suspect you would be very surprised how fundamentally decent most of the warriors and civilians are in comparison to the larger population. If you think for example that a large majority of military officers and noncommissioned officers in the US (and especially senior ones) are not animated by a deep and abiding sense of honor then you should get to know some of them.
Hmmm... I'm not sure that this argument promoting individuals carries the weight you think it does. The military and the individuals comprising it do great things on a regular basis. John mentioned participating in a project aimed at search and rescue missions, for instance. The problem lies in the fact that the military doesn't share a moral baseline with me. Violence in its various forms is an acceptable means to an end for the military, whereas it is not for myself and several other participants in this discussion. For me, being a decent person in my day-to-day life wouldn't excuse voluntary participation in military violence.
But military are way more reasonable about violence that what you think. It is only the ultimate solution. If there is a terrorist organization who has no problem about being extremely violent, you can't respond with just words. It is necessary to be able to act on the physical level and simply kill people if it's the only solution to defend yourself. But this is just the last option, when all the other failed, and military think like this in fact.
Jean-Baptiste Vienney (Aug 08 2022 at 16:00):-- At least french military from what I know.
Jean-Baptiste Vienney (Aug 08 2022 at 16:04):Military know how to kill people but it is included in an amount of thinking about strategy and how to act in a world where there is various forces in opposition.
Zanzi (Aug 08 2022 at 16:07):Jean-Baptiste Vienney said:
I know you discuss precisely the point of accepting or not to be funded by military but it is pretty much equivalent to the question of what is really the effect of military on the world.
The first question is a practical one, the second is a philosophical one. There's nothing wrong with a one-sided practical conversation, it just means that people are broadly in agreement about what course of action to take and are hashing out the details. Of course that would make for a very un-interesting philosophical debate, if that's what your after.
Maybe the crux of your disagreement with a few people here boils down to the fact that you're trying to play a devil's advocate in a philosophical discussion, while they're engaged in a practical one?
Jean-Baptiste Vienney (Aug 08 2022 at 16:25):Yes, you're right. I find the philisophical question more interesting that the practical one. For me, it's the most important one. It's not very interesting to discuss if we must accept or not being funded by military before knowing if we want to be with or against them.
Jean-Baptiste Vienney (Aug 08 2022 at 16:27):But at the end, I just think about practical issues like less people killed, suffering...
Jean-Baptiste Vienney (Aug 08 2022 at 16:35):When you have a crazy Poutine in Russia, do you really want that the US army doesn't have really efficient defense systems in order to avoid a nuclear bomb killing thousand of people in a moment of madness of Poutine? It's not necessarily the best solution to be simply against all military as a solution against violence.
Jean-Baptiste Vienney (Aug 08 2022 at 16:39):And if they could use some category theory in order to be more efficient and not kill civilians when they want to eliminate some terrorist building, it would not be that bad.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 08 2022 at 16:39):Zanzi said:
You're boasting about profiteering off of someone else's research, and your only defence for yourself is that if they don't like it then they need the conviction to quit the field they love and do something else?
Maybe what they really need is the conviction to show people like you the door, over and over, until you get the point.
I don't think profiting and profiteering are the same thing. But I guess we might disagree on issues of political economy.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 08 2022 at 16:58):Jean-Baptiste Vienney said:
I know you discuss precisely the point of accepting or not to be funded by military but it is pretty much equivalent to the question of what is really the effect of military on the world.
Where do folks draw the line between getting (US) funding from DoD and NSF? Do y'all think they don't cross-pollinate with money and jobs? I personally was acquainted with a NSA mathematician who went on to NSF, and in government funding discussions where DoD vs NSF buckets of money were a prominent topic. From my experience drawing any line would be a pretty arbitrary exercise.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 08 2022 at 17:44):Zanzi said:
Maybe what they really need is the conviction to show people like you the door, over and over, until you get the point.
BTW do you think people like me don't get your point, or that your door-showing activities could ever make us walk through? The Russian and Chinese militaries (to name but two) are a little more forceful in their demonstrations than a bunch of theorists virtue-signaling to each other how sinister I am.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 09 2022 at 00:30):Jules Hedges said:
This thread keeps almost making me laugh like a black comedy sketch, where an openly evil organisation is talking about how great they are
You must mean Amnesty International
Steve Huntsman (Aug 09 2022 at 01:52):Matteo Capucci (he/him) said:
so we agree, military doesn't need category theorists
The US military (somehow folks seem to be conflating “a” military and “the US” military) already has category theorists. I am a bumbling dilettante compared to most of them
Steve Huntsman (Aug 09 2022 at 02:00):But many are in NSA not the rest of DoD
Simonas Tutlys (Aug 09 2022 at 03:16):Read the back end of this discussion and in my opinion this discussion boils down to the moral of a situation where someone shows the peace sign or tries to appeal to emotions to someone with a gun pointing at him.My interpretation - If the person with the gun has empathy (or empathy greater than their want of their set goals) you might win,if s/he doesn't you won't.
We all want to live in peaceful times where quality of life is distributed along a distribution with the maximum possible variance so violence seems to reduce that variance (just a metaphor,not doing the math of the impact of a changing number of people if that occurs),but not wanting to defend yourself or be defended out of platonic morals (which I sincerely hope will be concrete some day) is bad according to camp @Steve Huntsman and good according to everyone else.
Don't think I added anything to the discussion but that's how I see it.
Jules Hedges (Aug 09 2022 at 10:33):Jean-Baptiste Vienney said:
Jules Hedges said:
This thread keeps almost making me laugh like a black comedy sketch, where an openly evil organisation is talking about how great they are
It’s more a sketch about antimilitarist mathematicians to me. « an open evil organizations » : such words are really ridiculous to me.
If it helps we could stick to hard facts, such as the US military's extensive list of documented war crimes over the last 20 years
Steve Huntsman (Aug 09 2022 at 10:50):Jules Hedges said:
Jean-Baptiste Vienney said:
Jules Hedges said:
This thread keeps almost making me laugh like a black comedy sketch, where an openly evil organisation is talking about how great they are
It’s more a sketch about antimilitarist mathematicians to me. « an open evil organizations » : such words are really ridiculous to me.
If it helps we could stick to hard facts, such as the US military's extensive list of documented war crimes over the last 20 years
Again I’m seeing “US military” vs just “military” being the actual thing folks are objecting to.
I also wonder if you’d like to stack up prosecutions of US war criminals against the 64th Motor Rifle Brigade”s recent treatment and still claim that the US military is the thing that makes your heart bleed.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 09 2022 at 10:55):I am proud that the US holds its soldiers accountable.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 10 2022 at 08:29):Jean-Baptiste Vienney said:
When you have a crazy Poutine in Russia, do you really want that the US army doesn't have really efficient defense systems in order to avoid a nuclear bomb killing thousand of people in a moment of madness of Poutine? It's not necessarily the best solution to be simply against all military as a solution against violence.
Again, the argument here has seldom been for the complete dissolution of any given military organisation (although there may well be people who would argue for that). My personal view is that funding for fundamental research should not come through military organisations; the value or viability of my research should not be determined by its potential violent applications.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 10 2022 at 08:57):Steve Huntsman said:
Jean-Baptiste Vienney said:
I know you discuss precisely the point of accepting or not to be funded by military but it is pretty much equivalent to the question of what is really the effect of military on the world.
Where do folks draw the line between getting (US) funding from DoD and NSF? Do y'all think they don't cross-pollinate with money and jobs? I personally was acquainted with a NSA mathematician who went on to NSF, and in government funding discussions where DoD vs NSF buckets of money were a prominent topic. From my experience drawing any line would be a pretty arbitrary exercise.
This question turned out to be a lot more interesting than I expected. I'm quoting from here. When the NSF was founded in 1950, its directives were as follows:
§1862. Functions
(a) Initiation and support of studies and programs; scholarships; current register of scientific and engineering personnel
The Foundation is authorized and directed—
(1) to initiate and support basic scientific research and programs to strengthen scientific research potential and science education programs at all levels in the mathematical, physical, medical, biological, social, and other sciences, and to initiate and support research fundamental to the engineering process and programs to strengthen engineering research potential and engineering education programs at all levels in the various fields of engineering, by making contracts or other arrangements (including grants, loans, and other forms of assistance) to support such scientific, engineering, and educational activities and to appraise the impact of research upon industrial development and upon the general welfare;
(2) to award, as provided in section 1869 of this title, scholarships and graduate fellowships for study and research in the sciences or in engineering;
(3) to foster the interchange of scientific and engineering information among scientists and engineers in the United States and foreign countries;
(4) to foster and support the development and use of computer and other scientific and engineering methods and technologies, primarily for research and education in the sciences and engineering;
(5) to evaluate the status and needs of the various sciences and fields of engineering as evidenced by programs, projects, and studies undertaken by agencies of the Federal Government, by individuals, and by public and private research groups, employing by grant or contract such consulting services as it may deem necessary for the purpose of such evaluations; and to take into consideration the results of such evaluations in correlating the research and educational programs undertaken or supported by the Foundation with programs, projects, and studies undertaken by agencies of the Federal Government, by individuals, and by public and private research groups;
(6) to provide a central clearinghouse for the collection, interpretation, and analysis of data on scientific and engineering resources and to provide a source of information for policy formulation by other agencies of the Federal Government;
(7) to initiate and maintain a program for the determination of the total amount of money for scientific and engineering research, including money allocated for the construction of the facilities wherein such research is conducted, received by each educational institution and appropriate nonprofit organization in the United States, by grant, contract, or other arrangement from agencies of the Federal Government, and to report annually thereon to the President and the Congress; and
(8) to take a leading role in fostering and supporting research and education activities to improve the security of networked information systems.
In other words, while interacting with other organisations, this was designed to be a foundation for direct support of science research, without particular prejudice regarding its applications.
However, in the National Science Foundation Authorization Act of 2010, quoted on the NSF website, a "broader impacts review criterion" has been added to projects supported by the foundation which evaluates the following points:
§1862p–14. Broader Impacts Review Criterion
(a) Goals
The Foundation shall apply a broader impacts review criterion to identify and demonstrate project support of the following goals:
(1) Increasing the economic competitiveness of the United States.
(2) Advancing of the health and welfare of the American public.
(3) Supporting the national defense of the United States.
(4) Enhancing partnerships between academia and industry in the United States.
(5) Developing an American STEM workforce that is globally competitive through improved pre-kindergarten through grade 12 STEM education and teacher development, and improved undergraduate STEM education and instruction.
(6) Improving public scientific literacy and engagement with science and technology in the United States.
(7) Expanding participation of women and individuals from underrepresented groups in STEM.
In particular, point (3) makes it somewhat easier (hard for me to judge how much) for projects related to national defense to get funding.
Ultimately, any national funding has a budget and some of its priorities determined by the government and lawmakers of that country. If I were in the US and faced with the choice between DoD funding and NSF funding, it's still pretty clear to me that the latter would be preferable, since I can aim to get my research funded in support of points (2), (6) and (7) of the criteria above (for example), while avoiding reliance on my work's value with respect to the other criteria.
The fact that people pass between these sources of funding is irrelevant. The line exists to the extent that funding decisions are taken independently by the two organisations.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 10 2022 at 13:19):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
I can aim to get my research funded in support of points (2), (6) and (7) of the criteria above (for example), while avoiding reliance on my work's value with respect to the other criteria.
The fact that people pass between these sources of funding is irrelevant. The line exists to the extent that funding decisions are taken independently by the two organisations.
You and your grant application are not the sole or even primary determinant of your work's value with respect to the other criteria. But again I understand (correct me if I'm mistaken) that you disclaim any responsibility for how your work is used by others.
Re: funding, the personal experience I keep coming back to was one where DoD effectively exercised a right of first refusal on 6.1/basic research--the folks they'd been funding were top-notch (among that small set was a future Nobelist and a future MacArthur winner) and were going to continue to get funded be someone either way. So DoD said "let NSF start planting seeds from their bucket instead of us" with the intent of seeing what worked and what didn't. That NSF money was still advancing DoD's goals in accordance with DoD's plans.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 10 2022 at 16:12):Steve Huntsman said:
Jules Hedges said:
This thread keeps almost making me laugh like a black comedy sketch, where an openly evil organisation is talking about how great they are
You must mean Amnesty International
Since I saw question marks, I'll elaborate: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/flawed-amnesty-report-risks-enabling-more-russian-war-crimes-in-ukraine/
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 10 2022 at 16:26):That's a pretty misleading headline. A flawed report doesn't "enable" Russian war crimes, it just contributes to Russian propaganda. It's still the personnel of military organizations actually committing the war crimes here.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 10 2022 at 17:21):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
That's a pretty misleading headline. A flawed report doesn't "enable" Russian war crimes, it just contributes to Russian propaganda. It's still the personnel of military organizations actually committing the war crimes here.
I can't think of a more polite way to phrase it: this statement of yours is ignorant and betrays your moral bankruptcy. The report enables Russian war crimes by, inter alia, discouraging the provision of weapons by the West, which in turn costs innocent lives at the hands of criminals masquerading as an army that deliberately target civilians at the highest levels.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 10 2022 at 18:46):Sounds like you didn't think very hard :thinking:
This is a concerning double standard you seem to have. One instance of Amnesty International releasing a report which Russia was able to spin as supportive of their war crimes is apparently sufficient for you to label them an "openly evil organisation", but when confronted with mention of war crimes committed by the US military you find a way to express your pride in the organisation? The irony of you calling me morally bankrupt is quite amusing.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 10 2022 at 18:48):On second thought...
I should be discouraging those accusations rather than returning them in kind. I must admit it's been rather interesting to get a glimpse through your lens on the world, Steve.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 10 2022 at 18:48):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
Sounds like you didn't think very hard :thinking:
This is a concerning double standard you seem to have. One instance of Amnesty International releasing a report which Russia was able to spin as supportive of their war crimes is apparently sufficient for you to label them an "openly evil organisation", but when confronted with mention of war crimes committed by the US military you find a way to express your pride in the organisation? The irony of you calling me morally bankrupt is quite amusing.
The war crimes you talk about are committed by individuals in the US military, which has prosecuted all of them. I am proud of the prosecutions. The war crimes I talk about are committed by the Russian military as an institution, which has rewarded them. You are whitewashing these.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 10 2022 at 18:56):If you think that the PRC PLA vis-a-vis Taiwan or the DPRK PLA vis-a-vis South Korea or (etc etc) are going to behave themselves any better than the Russian military if they get the chance, then you are fooling yourself and misunderstanding the singular nature of Western post-WWII militaries as professionals versus bandits marshalled by generals that is the sad historical and geographical norm. So yes I am proud not only to do mathematics and science but also to deploy that in service of an institution that has made the world a much better place and continues to do so daily.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 10 2022 at 19:07):Tell me again where the double standard is. The US military mostly owns up to its institutional mistakes (and eventually all of them once they come to light) and always owns up to the crimes of its soldiers: I dare you to name one instance where it hasn't, or one organization that does better in this regard. Amnesty dodges its responsibility and pretends to be virtuous while blaming victims that it professes to help.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 10 2022 at 19:09):I place a high value on not being absolutely full of it (making my actions and ethics a "global section"). So educate me.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 10 2022 at 19:21):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
This is a concerning double standard you seem to have. One instance of Amnesty International releasing a report which Russia was able to spin as supportive of their war crimes is apparently sufficient for you to label them an "openly evil organisation"
BTW I think the context makes absolutely clear that I am trying to educate y'all about the actual world in reference to "black comedy," and the label wasn't chosen by me. And I am not gonna make a "one instance" excuse for the institutions I support and work for.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 10 2022 at 19:29):What Amnesty did is evil. They have good people working for them, and some bad actors. One of Amnesty's bad actors is its chief, who should resign in shame. The US military has participated in evil at the misguided and/or malicious behest of its political leadership and surely will again. They have good people working for them, and some bad actors, who should be forced out in shame, or if necessary court-martialed. Members of the US military have done evil: they should be prosecuted. If you think I will claim that Amnesty is a historically evil organization you are tone deaf. I have donated to them in the past. But I never would again until its leadership changes and the organization atones for its misdeeds.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 10 2022 at 19:31):And of course this is probably gonna become a whole thing on how organizations with good people can do evil, which prospect I find terrifically boring.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 10 2022 at 22:39):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
I should be discouraging those accusations rather than returning them in kind.
As a reminder: I didn't start the volley of negativity and arguments for deplatforming/cancellation/what have you directed towards me and my employer that you actively participated in a couple years back, and I actually had to sit back because of the situation it put me in vis-a-vis my employer, who as it happened was just trying to respond positively to a request for help.
I just responded to this stuff as best I could at the time and returned to it now when events conclusively demonstrated (IMO) the absurdity of a position that overtly says "making weapons is bad" with a distinct subtext of "the US military in particular is pointless at best and bad at worst."
I will double down on my statement: this position is morally bankrupt because it is simply false, and everyone participating in this discussion has the critical faculties and access to information to understand world events, the nature of large groups of humans, and the actual necessity for defense. I will not assail a position like "the military makes me uncomfortable and I'd rather not work on things that they could easily use" or "I won't take military funding per se but I understand that it's shades of gray" but I will try to move the Overton window here so that ALL sane, coherent, and defensible positions (and I think mine is more coherent than most and no less sane or defensible) are considered acceptable for those of us here to espouse in good faith.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 10 2022 at 22:44):Oh yeah, and also another factor I brought this up again was that I didn't have to worry anymore about the ACT 2022 folks finding a reason besides the content of my submission to reject it, and let's not kid ourselves here: there was clearly ample reason for me to be cautious until after the fact given the sentiments expressed here about me and my work in the past.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 11 2022 at 01:42):An example from today of the US Army holding itself and its soldiers accountable for misbehavior (not war crimes): https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2022/08/10/scandals-in-us-adviser-brigade-alarm-leaders-behind-closed-doors/
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Aug 11 2022 at 07:24):I do think that some of the sweeping criticism made here of the “US military” looks more like generic criticism of the “US foreign policy complex” which is a strict superset of the military. My outsider impression is that the DoD component of this tends to be both more cautious and more accountable than most (probably because of “skin in the game”). If there is an organisation that should be called “evil” and has been overall pernicious on a global level, that should rather be the CIA, which is autonomous.
(I got the impression that there are hints of a similar pattern on the Russian side too, where the military was privately concerned about the invasion, but Putin surrounded himself with boasting and sycophantic intelligence officers instead).
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Aug 11 2022 at 07:26):On the other hand I am not that sympathetic to the arguments of “realism” and “inevitability” and the accusation that denying this is either naivety or virtue-signalling, and I think it should be expected that other mathematicians in the community would not receive these well.
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Aug 11 2022 at 07:29):First of all because many of us get into mathematics precisely because we value creativity and the exploration of the full space of possibilities, and find it ludicrous to suggest that a certain global state of affairs that has developed in the last few decades is somehow the “only realistic one” and some kind of inevitable consequence of “human nature”.
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Aug 11 2022 at 07:32):Many of us idolise Grothendieck in particular who was a “naive idealist” if there ever was one. His “naive” approach to mathematics certainly got impressive results. Of course success in politics and society follows different routes but it's not like “naive” questions about the social order -- e.g. “do we really need to have a hierarchy of kings, queens, and aristocrats?” -- have not ever led to global movements.
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Aug 11 2022 at 07:35):And also, (I'm paraphrasing something I read from David Graeber about “moral envy”), accusations of virtue signalling or naivety from those who have made the (arguably) “compromising” choice cannot be taken seriously, because they have too many personal stakes in them.
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Aug 11 2022 at 07:36):I do think that people who go into the military or civil service are usually “do-gooders” who genuinely want to serve, but at some point they have made the calculation that the only “realistic” path to do good is to join an institution and become effectively enforcers of the status-quo.
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Aug 11 2022 at 07:38):So the prospect that “uncompromising” ones may be right or succeed is extremely scary, because it means that they did not need to sacrifice their freedom and autonomy (or that doing so may have even be “bad” on net).
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Aug 11 2022 at 07:39):So the “uncompromising ones” have to be either naive (hence doomed to fail) or dishonest (hence “not actually better than me”).
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Aug 11 2022 at 07:42):Tl;dr I think that Steve's arguments are honest and that his choice is certainly not obviously evil, but at the same time I don't think that those who criticise it are dishonest virtue-signallers either, they are simply rejecting the premise that this choice is “the only grown-up choice”.
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Aug 11 2022 at 07:53):Amar Hadzihasanovic said:
And also, (I'm paraphrasing something I read from David Graeber about “moral envy”), accusations of virtue signalling or naivety from those who have made the (arguably) “compromising” choice cannot be taken seriously, because they have too many personal stakes in them.
I should specify that the original argument was rather about those on the left who become “centrist”/establishment politicians, and then rage at the “radical” left.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 11 2022 at 10:12):Amar Hadzihasanovic said:
Many of us idolise Grothendieck in particular
I’ve previously called this argument “Grothendieck vs von Neumann”
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Aug 11 2022 at 10:48):That's interesting because I would consider von Neumann much more of the same sort as Grothendieck, even though their approaches put them on opposite sides of the spectrum: he was also a very proactive idealist advocating for “creative” solutions, just one who considered the Soviet Union a unique threat to world freedom that warranted “dirty” methods.
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Aug 11 2022 at 10:50):If you wanted to find somebody exemplifying the “realist” option, I would suggest Kolmogorov. Scott Aaronson wrote about him.
Kolmogorov knew better than to pick fights he couldn’t win. He judged that he could best serve the cause of truth by building up an enclosed little bubble of truth, and protecting that bubble from interference by the Soviet system, and even making the bubble useful to the system wherever he could—rather than futilely struggling to reform the system, and simply making martyrs of himself and all his students for his trouble.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 11 2022 at 13:15):Amar Hadzihasanovic said:
If you wanted to find somebody exemplifying the “realist” option, I would suggest Kolmogorov. Scott Aaronson wrote about him.
Kolmogorov knew better than to pick fights he couldn’t win. He judged that he could best serve the cause of truth by building up an enclosed little bubble of truth, and protecting that bubble from interference by the Soviet system, and even making the bubble useful to the system wherever he could—rather than futilely struggling to reform the system, and simply making martyrs of himself and all his students for his trouble.
Well I named my oldest kid after Kolmogorov but not sure I view his sort of Taoist approach there as relevant here, or that characterization of von Neumann above as fully representative. I view (and I think von Neumann also viewed, but correct me please) the US as a uniquely benevolent (yes there are counterexamples, but consider any possible comparisons) great power in the context of history, and the best hope for ushering in a just and peaceful global society. Sort of an "arc of history bends toward justice" thing.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 11 2022 at 13:26):I'll quote Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann#Mutual_assured_destruction
Von Neumann entered government service primarily because he felt that, if freedom and civilization were to survive, it would have to be because the United States would triumph over totalitarianism from Nazism, Fascism and Soviet Communism. During a Senate committee hearing he described his political ideology as "violently anti-communist, and much more militaristic than the norm".
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Aug 11 2022 at 14:03):Yes, but my point is that there is no “Grothendieck vs von Neumann argument”, in the sense that I don't think that anybody in the history of people has been torn between “going Grothendieck” or “going von Neumann”. They are both idealists who believed in radical freedom but fundamentally disagreed about the best route to that freedom.
Relatedly, while you may feel ideologically closer to von Neumann, I don't think you are trying to convince people here who are more “Grothendieckian” to switch to a “von Neumannian” worldview. Instead, you are talking to people who probably view the US military (or rather US foreign policy) negatively overall, and you are trying to argue that they should nevertheless work with it (and be tolerant towards those who are), because that's better than the alternatives (ranging from “helping worse actors” to “having no impact whatsoever”) and because you can work with good people and make a positive difference within the system. That looks to me like proposing a “Kolmogorovian” bargain.
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Aug 11 2022 at 14:04):In short, I think there is a true “Grothendieck vs. Kolmogorov” debate that many of us actually face in our life choices but not a true “Grothendieck vs. von Neumann” debate.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 11 2022 at 14:05):Amar Hadzihasanovic said:
That looks to me like proposing a “Kolmogorovian” bargain.
Yeah fair enough
dusko (Aug 11 2022 at 21:11):this thread is by now way to long to be carefully read, so i apologize that i only skimmed it yet rush to comment. but i have been thinking about this all of my life.
we are looking for a general principle of responsibility of a scientist. we are scientists and we tacitly assume that the world is driven by general principles. while most physicists agree that the same laws are valid in all corners of the universe, fewer people believe that the same moral laws are valid in all corners of life. such people used to be called puritans.
when we blindly follow our cognitive drift to seek the causes of things, and reality does not comply, we end up with superstitions and obsessions. grothendieck stated a general principle, and followed it into silence. von neumann saw nazis in action early on, stated a general principle, and followed it into his honest devotion to war and to the arms race. he was so honest that he insisted on being among the soldiers close to the triton test. the most general general principle left to him in the end was pascal's wager on his deathbed.
the very concept of responsibility is based on the general principle that we can predict the consequences of our actions. jainism suggests that we are responsible for the deaths that we cause. to avoid stepping on any insects, jainists used to have their servants walk in front of them and clear the path with large brooms. how much death has been caused by having too many servants?
i grew up when the future was bright and lit by science. i hated doing math, but ended up doing it because my head sought general principles, and every single human relationship that i had collapsed because of that. which taught me to keep things apart. "we should be silent of what we cannot speak."
every organization is a group of people. there are bad people at your department, and there are good people at your department. there are good people at a religious university, and there are bad people. there are good people at NSA and there are bad people.
the greatest responsibility of a scientist, and the only one that we stand a chance to implement, is to keep an open mind and try to avoid prejudices.
John Baez (Aug 12 2022 at 00:40):I can't think of a more polite way to phrase it: this statement of yours is ignorant and betrays your moral bankruptcy.
I can think of a more polite way to phrase this. Chill out, folks!!!
John Baez (Aug 12 2022 at 00:46):This also applies to the guy who said
This thread keeps almost making me laugh like a black comedy sketch, where an openly evil organisation is talking about how great they are.
John Baez (Aug 12 2022 at 00:48):No matter how "morally bankrupt", "ignorant" and "evil" the other participants in the conversation are, you are required here to show your moral superiority by being polite and demonstrating your powers of reasoning.
It helps a lot to focus on the issues rather than the failings of the people you're talking to.
John Baez (Aug 12 2022 at 00:56):I also don't think it helps, in a serious debate, to comment on people's remarks by adding scornful emoticons.
John Baez (Aug 12 2022 at 00:59):We actually have a chance to figure some things out here - and it's good that we have representatives of people from different well-established communities that strongly disagree with each other.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 00:56):[T]here are no men more ignoble or more foolish, no men whose actions are fraught with greater possibility of mischief to their country and to mankind, than those who exalt unrighteous peace as better than righteous war...
All this is so obvious that it ought not to be necessary to repeat it. Yet every man in active affairs, who also reads about the past, grows by bitter experience to realize that there are plenty of men, not only among those who mean ill, but among those who mean well, who are ready enough to praise what was done in the past, and yet are incapable of profiting by it when faced by the needs of the present. During our generation this seems to have been peculiarly the case among the men who have become obsessed with the idea of obtaining universal peace by some cheap patent panacea...
There are big and powerful nations which habitually commit, either upon other nations or upon sections of their own people, wrongs so outrageous as to justify even the most peaceful persons in going to war...Be it remembered that the peoples who suffered by these hideous massacres, who saw their women violated and their children tortured, were actually enjoying all the benefits of "disarmament." ...
Yet amiable but fatuous persons, with all these facts before their eyes, pass resolutions demanding universal arbitration for everything, and the disarmament of the free civilized powers and their abandonment of their armed forces; or else they write well-meaning, solemn little books, or pamphlets or editorials, and articles in magazines or newspapers...It is almost useless to attempt to argue with these well-intentioned persons, because they are suffering under an obsession and are not open to reason. They go wrong at the outset, for they lay all the emphasis on peace and none at all on righteousness. They are not all of them physically timid men; but they are usually men of soft life; and they rarely possess a high sense of honor...if the principles they now uphold are right, it means that it would have been better that Americans should never have achieved their independence, and better that, in 1861, they should have peacefully submitted to seeing their country split into half a dozen jangling confederacies and slavery made perpetual...
The chief trouble comes from the entire inability of these worthy people to understand that they are demanding things that are mutually incompatible when they demand peace at any price, and also justice and righteousness...
These persons would do no harm if they affected only themselves. Many of them are, in the ordinary relations of life, good citizens. They are exactly like the other good citizens who believe that enforced universal vegetarianism or anti-vaccination is the panacea for all ills. But in their particular case they are able to do harm because they affect our relations with foreign powers, so that other men pay the debt which they themselves have really incurred. It is the foolish, peace-at-any-price persons who try to persuade our people to make unwise and improper treaties, or to stop building up the navy. But if trouble comes and the treaties are repudiated, or there is a demand for armed intervention, it is not these people who will pay anything; they will stay at home in safety, and leave brave men to pay in blood, and honest men to pay in shame, for their folly.
[From the autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt]
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Aug 13 2022 at 12:14):Perhaps there are hard-line pacifists here but I'm not sure the main line of debate is that one. I could agree with the core message of this except but reject that righteousness is about the “righteous nations” prevailing over the “unrighteous nations”, and indeed an “orthogonal” view of what is a righteous war is a basic left-wing tenet: embrace peace between the oppressed of all nations and war against the oppressors of all nations.
To keep it more concrete, I don't think that the “righteous” way to stick it to Putin is to make sure that as many 18-year-olds from Siberian villages as possible are blown to pieces, any more than I think that Steve deserves to die on the way to punishing George W. Bush for his war crimes.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 12:19):If someone thinks that contributing to weapons development is canonically bad then I don’t know what to call them besides a hard-line pacifist. And that crowd might also consider https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/derrick-jensen-pacifism-as-pathology-introduction
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 13 2022 at 12:24):Indeed @Amar Hadzihasanovic. Once again, I'll point out that as far as I remember, no one has advocated for the dissolution of any given military organisation. As long as they exist, they apparently justify one another's existence. I can also recognize that military organisations require researchers. But what @Steve Huntsman has not managed to convince me of is that any given scientist, especially a theoretically inclined mathematician such as myself, should voluntarily become one of them, or worse be coerced into it because they have no other option for career progression.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 13 2022 at 12:26):Re being proud of the US military prosecuting war crimes: if I never hold a gun, I will never be guilty of shooting someone. I don't want to be in a position where I could be complicit in war crimes, no matter how sure I am that the law would punish someone who perpetrates them.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 12:27):If you’ve never held a gun then you should try sometime. Read the beginning of Churchills book above for an interesting anecdote about doing so.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 12:28):I don’t mean the introduction per se
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 13 2022 at 12:28):Which book?
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 12:30):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
Which book?
Pacifism as pathology, linked to above. You can easily read the first part of the main text online
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 13 2022 at 12:30):Ah I was confused because the author of the linked introduction is "Derrick Jensen"
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Aug 13 2022 at 12:34):Steve Huntsman said:
If someone thinks that contributing to weapons development is canonically bad then I don’t know what to call them besides a hard-line pacifist.
Perhaps I am projecting my own views on other people. For me the issue of developing weapons for a particular state actor, which will keep the results to itself, in order to improve their standing over other state actors is fundamental, more than the one of “helping develop weapons” in general (which is somewhat outside one's control).
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Aug 13 2022 at 12:35):I am personally fine with the US (or any other) military using the results of my research, as long as those results are “open access” and equally available to anyone else in the world.
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Aug 13 2022 at 12:36):If someone argues that “it is bad to contribute to the development of weapons in any way whatsoever” then yeah, that seems pretty unsustainable.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 13 2022 at 12:50):I found the passage in question in Churchill's book. It did nothing to convince me that I would benefit in any way from handling a gun, so perhaps you could explain why you think I should try?
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 13 2022 at 13:03):Steve Huntsman said:
Tell me again where the double standard is. The US military mostly owns up to its institutional mistakes (and eventually all of them once they come to light) and always owns up to the crimes of its soldiers: I dare you to name one instance where it hasn't, or one organization that does better in this regard. Amnesty dodges its responsibility and pretends to be virtuous while blaming victims that it professes to help.
Since you explicitly asked for me to respond to this: owning up to a "mistake" is a far cry from avoiding them happening or adequately compensating the victims. If an opposing military force were being equally 'honorable' in holding their members accountable for their "mistakes", would they then merit your support?
Each military organisation uses the perceived transgressions of the others to justify its actions to its people. Even if you happen to be right that the US military is the least bad, it doesn't convince me that I should be a participant in a military organisation.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 13:46):Well if someone is gonna inveigh against something then I think they should have at least a little direct knowledge before they claim a position of superiority.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 13 2022 at 13:48):How do you feel about murder @Steve Huntsman?
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 13:49):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
Steve Huntsman said:
Tell me again where the double standard is. The US military mostly owns up to its institutional mistakes (and eventually all of them once they come to light) and always owns up to the crimes of its soldiers: I dare you to name one instance where it hasn't, or one organization that does better in this regard. Amnesty dodges its responsibility and pretends to be virtuous while blaming victims that it professes to help.
Since you explicitly asked for me to respond to this: owning up to a "mistake" is a far cry from avoiding them happening or adequately compensating the victims. If an opposing military force were being equally 'honorable' in holding their members accountable for their "mistakes", would they then merit your support?
Each military organisation uses the perceived transgressions of the others to justify its actions to its people. Even if you happen to be right that the US military is the least bad, it doesn't convince me that I should be a participant in a military organisation.
Support, no: respect: yes.
You don’t have to participate. But you don’t have anything like adequate justification to rake me or anyone else over the coals for doing so.
Jon Sterling (Aug 13 2022 at 16:09):Why are we talking about guns lol??
Jon Sterling (Aug 13 2022 at 16:10):I love shooting guns. I used to own one. I also think the United States is the most vicious enemy of the world's people. Where's the contradiction?
Jon Sterling (Aug 13 2022 at 16:12):By the way, up until recently my research was funded by the US Air Force. The Air Force also recently paid for one of my air flights... I'm not trying to take a hard line on these issues, which are somewhat complex --- all research in capitalist countries plays a role in what many of us would consider "evil", and sometimes it is little less than clear where the lines are drawn. But I find the full-throated defense of US Imperialism on display here to be pretty mind-blowing, and really something that I don't think we, as a community, have any duty to tolerate or pay respect to.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 16:13):I think someone needs to know the circumstances of a death before they can call it murder
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 16:19):Jon Sterling said:
By the way, up until recently my research was funded by the US Air Force. The Air Force also recently paid for one of my air flights... I'm not trying to take a hard line on these issues, which are somewhat complex --- all research in capitalist countries plays a role in what many of us would consider "evil", and sometimes it is little less than clear where the lines are drawn. But I find the full-throated defense of US Imperialism on display here to be pretty mind-blowing, and really something that I don't think we, as a community, have any duty to tolerate or pay respect to.
I think the community does have a duty to accept that you and I have an equal right to participate. I find your views on the US abhorrent and outright false, but it’s fine that you have them and advocate for them here.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 16:23):Jon Sterling said:
I also think the United States is the most vicious enemy of the world's people.
Tell it to the Ukrainians
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 16:23):Or the Taiwanese
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 16:23):or the South Koreans
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 16:24):or the Afghans
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 16:25):or probably even the Iraqis
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 16:25):or the Estonians or Poles
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 16:28):I’m sure there isn’t tons of good feeling towards the US in Iraq
Not sure you could get a majority to say the US is their biggest enemy or even an enemy at all
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 16:28):But happy to see any polling data
Jon Sterling (Aug 13 2022 at 16:36):This thread is mindblowing... Afghans and Iraqis !! Anyway, I am quite confident I don't ever want to talk with you again. Be careful that you don't approach me in real life either.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 16:36):Lol you’re threatening me and saying I’m the vicious one
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 16:37):forgot the Japanese
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 16:38):the 120k afghans that the US extracted didn’t feel like the US was the problem
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 16:38):or I bet most of women still there
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 17:02):the sense of abandonment of some in the region does not shrink the majority of those who still see the US as an ally — in some cases precisely because it is a key player in the policies to confront and contain Iran, which is seen as an enemy by 64% of respondents
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 17:03):Sounds like this poll says folks wish the US would imperialize more but educate me please.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 17:05):Can’t find anything recent about Iraq specifically but again would love to be educated
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 19:56):PRIME MINISTER AL-KADHIMI: (As interpreted.) Thank you, Mr. President. We consider our ties with the United States as one of friendship, a strategic relationship.
…
I’m thankful for the United States, for all of the support that it provided to the — to Iraq throughout this war. And we seek even better relations.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 20:38):https://www.voanews.com/a/poll-nearly-all-afghans-say-they-are-suffering/6423851.html
Many Afghans, 53% of those interviewed by Gallup, have said they want to leave their country permanently. Many want to move to the U.S., Canada, or another Western country.
The U.S. and its allies have evacuated more than 120,000 Afghans since the fall of the Afghan government last year.
The desire to move to the U.S. comes amid soaring disapproval of the U.S. – a record high of 84% - among Afghans, particularly since the U.S. withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.
Guessing based on this that most folks there feel betrayed but don’t view the US as an enemy. But again would like to see some evidence either way
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 20:39):And I think the US let em down since 2001 FWIW
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 23:24):Perhaps worth noting that polities in countries I list above versus others that have more luxury of being lotus eaters clearly favor the US more
Steve Huntsman (Aug 13 2022 at 23:29):And comparing to the EU core leadership:
Seems like the US is trusted more by folks who have more skin in the game
dusko (Aug 14 2022 at 00:52):this thread seems long enough that any of us could by now really go to gpt3.website/ and train it to continue their argument. or the opponent's. together with the links and the factcheckers.
if we start sounding like twitter or these other places, elon musk will think we are bots and will never buy the zulipchat.
on the other hand, this is a category theory stream, and if cartegory theory is as good as they say, it should help with all math, including war, strategy, social dynamics, utility. some random samples across the gamut:
https://peterturchin.com/historical-dynamics/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0960077995000119
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/disposing-dictators-demystifying-voting-paradoxes/66FE851EEFDB422F6BDA4437507BF079
https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-War-History-Theory-Combat/dp/0963869272
https://www.routledge.com/Risk-Ambiguity-and-Decision/Ellsberg/p/book/9781138985476
if anyone provides a categorification of any of the above models, i think most of us will recognize them as being totally in the right.
(uh, gpt3.website/ became https://gpt3demo.com/product/gpt-3 . and they removed some projects. thank u MS )
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 14 2022 at 10:04):Jon Sterling said:
Why are we talking about guns lol??
It's because I made the following analogy between gun use and military involvement:
if I never hold a gun, I will never be guilty of shooting someone
Steve Huntsman said:
I think someone needs to know the circumstances of a death before they can call it murder
But do you think that someone has to have "direct knowledge" of murder, analogously to physically experiencing/handling guns that you were proposing, in order to decide it's something you would rather not be involved with, given the choice?
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 14 2022 at 10:26):Steve Huntsman said:
Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
Since you explicitly asked for me to respond to this: owning up to a "mistake" is a far cry from avoiding them happening or adequately compensating the victims. If an opposing military force were being equally 'honorable' in holding their members accountable for their "mistakes", would they then merit your support?
Each military organisation uses the perceived transgressions of the others to justify its actions to its people. Even if you happen to be right that the US military is the least bad, it doesn't convince me that I should be a participant in a military organisation.
Support, no: respect: yes.
You don’t have to participate. But you don’t have anything like adequate justification to rake me or anyone else over the coals for doing so.
I just looked back at my contributions to this conversation, and I was surprised at how consistent my position has been. If I have or were to "rake you over coals", it would be for continually failing to explain why anyone here who doesn't share your pride in a military organisation should voluntarily contribute to one? You've adequately argued that the military is a 'necessary evil' (just coining a phrase, please don't read too much into it) and that any research we produce that is deemed potentially useful by the military will be exploited. Fine. But you haven't justified why a mathematician who is not interested in (or may even be resentful of) military applications should have to get their funding through a military funnel.
It's my position that fundamental/basic research should be funded independently of military decision-making and interests. As an early career mathematician, the only agency I have over that situation, besides making somewhat public statements such as this, is to refuse or avoid military funding wherever possible, and I think the same goes for anyone else in my position. That's why I believe this is The Responsibility of the Scientist Today, not because I'm actively opposing the military, but because military interests are not the same as the interests of science.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 14 2022 at 11:43):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
you haven't justified why a mathematician who is not interested in (or may even be resentful of) military applications should have to get their funding through a military funnel.
It's my position that fundamental/basic research should be funded independently of military decision-making and interests. As an early career mathematician, the only agency I have over that situation, besides making somewhat public statements such as this, is to refuse or avoid military funding wherever possible, and I think the same goes for anyone else in my position. That's why I believe this is The Responsibility of the Scientist Today, not because I'm actively opposing the military, but because military interests are not the same as the interests of science.
Ok, I’ll take this one head on and without reference to the surrounding context. The answer is utility. There are reasons why DARPA makes breakthroughs that NSF doesn’t—often breakthroughs that help the whole world. They take risks that NSF never will. They focus on real problems that NSF never will. They deploy money more coherently in focused period than NSF ever will. Their measure of success is utility, not publications. If you want your research to mean anything in the greater scheme, you should take military money. If you want to just be an artist and avoid work that would suggest a measure of responsibility, then remember that almost nobody on the planet will appreciate or understand what you do, and your life’s work will probably be trivial.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 14 2022 at 11:49):But then again you could get lucky and have a great career. I’m not a good enough mathematician to have my work matter much if I don’t apply it. I don’t want to make crummy art that almost nobody can understand. I want my work to matter. I want to make things that are useful and sometimes even actually used for things that I feel good about.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 14 2022 at 11:52):And I take the work of better mathematicians than me and make it matter too. If they think it’s a disgrace, then I think they’ve made a terrible bargain.
Jade Master (Aug 14 2022 at 20:01):We have destroyed these countries and you say they should thank us?
Steve Huntsman (Aug 14 2022 at 21:40):Jade Master said:
We have destroyed these countries and you say they should thank us?
I am not saying anything of the sort. The Iraqi prime minister is thanking the United States. Perhaps he and h the folks who voted for him have a different perspective than yours. I am inclined to give it more weight.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 14 2022 at 21:43):And last I checked the Taliban had had their way in Afghanistan for some time before the US get involved there. I am not sure if that place is worse off than before. I know there have been many tragedies and many good outcomes during 2001-2021 but not sure how to add them up. Educate me please.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 14 2022 at 21:44):or are you arguing that the US has destroyed, eg, Estonia or Japan or Ukraine?
Steve Huntsman (Aug 14 2022 at 21:45):there is certainly a clear case for Japan but not sure it continues to be a driver of peoples feelings and actions much of anywhere
Steve Huntsman (Aug 14 2022 at 21:54):Maybe this is all Stockholm syndrome. But I see no evidence of it.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 14 2022 at 22:30):I have the impression that y’all take it as axiomatic that Afghanistan and Iraq were unmitigated calamities instead of calamities with silver linings, even big silver linings. I do not take it as axiomatic. I am not that well informed about them because I’ve spent my whole career being more preoccupied with China and Russia and the spheres they are trying to dominate. I will argue about those with considerably more confidence, eg as here: https://www.amazon.com/Minimum-Means-Reprisal-Security-American/dp/0262622025#aw-udpv3-customer-reviews_feature_div
But in any case I can be convinced by evidence.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 00:20):By the time the Taliban fell in November 2001, 23 years of war had taken an extraordinary toll on Afghanistan’s population and institutions. Then-Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who opened the U.S. embassy in early 2002, told SIGAR he arrived to find “absolute devastation. . . . There was almost literally nothing there.” He remembered that interim president Hamid Karzai “had no real authority and nothing to work with, no military, no police, no civil service, no functioning society.”
https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/lessonslearned/SIGAR-21-46-LL.pdf
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Aug 15 2022 at 09:35):I live in Estonia, I have lived in Japan and I've travelled a bit, e.g. to Iran. I think the common factor is that... people have complex thoughts? They certainly don't see the US or any other actor as a monolith.
In any case I don't think that Estonia/Ukraine or Japan are very representative examples, considering they are neighbours in a tense relation with US rivals, so of course they'll accept the patronage of whoever can help. Most Estonians hailed the Nazi as liberators from Russians when they occupied the country in World War II. I presume you would have also said “Ask the Estonians if they think the Nazis are so evil”?
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 10:09):My point is that the US is helping places that have tense relations with their neighbors. There are a lot of such places. US help is needed.
Not sure most folks here actually believe this is the case though. Certainly a vocal group disagrees.
I think this mostly suggests the Soviets were really bad occupiers. As are the Russians. And I expect the PRC would not be much nicer for example.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 10:17):Don’t South Korea and Israel and Taiwan also have tense relations with neighbors? At a certain point the hundreds of millions of people in countries in precarious situations that the US sticks it’s neck out for become “representative” I think
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 10:19):And I think it is good and kind and just (and yes in enlightened self interest) to enforce a status quo of freedom and democracy
Probably most folks here will sneer at this sentiment
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 10:26):Trying really hard to avoid Godwin’s law here
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Aug 15 2022 at 10:43):I should add that the sentiment that I've mostly heard expressed in private from Estonians is strongly positive towards the "concept" of NATO mutual defense, and at the same time strongly distrusting of the US's commitment (essentially people are convinced that if it comes to that, Americans will never actually want to sacrifice their own soldiers to protect the Baltics). Which is why a lot of Estonia's diplomatic moves are about pushing the US to make stronger and more concrete commitments so that they hopefully can't walk back without losing face.
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Aug 15 2022 at 10:44):I believe this is a sentiment matured from hundreds of years of being used as a pawn by "big powers" of all sides. In the end Estonians will only trust themselves.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 10:48):What do you think the locals would make of the crowd here?
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 10:48):Helpful sentiments?
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Aug 15 2022 at 10:55):I think the prevailing sentiment is definitely on the militaristic side, so they would share that with you; at the same time I think your optimistic remarks about the US's commitment & overall purpose would be met with some sarcasm
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Aug 15 2022 at 10:56):So something like “Yes we should all be building weapons; no I don't think the Americans are here to help us selflessly; and in any case we can only count on ourselves”
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Aug 15 2022 at 10:56):Of course I cannot claim to speak for any individual person. This is my own reading of the zeitgeist.
Amar Hadzihasanovic (Aug 15 2022 at 11:10):Steve Huntsman said:
Trying really hard to avoid Godwin’s law here
Yeah I realise I verged on it earlier, that was not intentional.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 11:31):Amar Hadzihasanovic said:
So something like “Yes we should all be building weapons; no I don't think the Americans are here to help us selflessly; and in any case we can only count on ourselves”
I don’t think the US is acting selflessly—it’s enlightened self interest
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 15 2022 at 11:32):Steve Huntsman said:
Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
you haven't justified why a mathematician who is not interested in (or may even be resentful of) military applications should have to get their funding through a military funnel.
It's my position that fundamental/basic research should be funded independently of military decision-making and interests. As an early career mathematician, the only agency I have over that situation, besides making somewhat public statements such as this, is to refuse or avoid military funding wherever possible, and I think the same goes for anyone else in my position. That's why I believe this is The Responsibility of the Scientist Today, not because I'm actively opposing the military, but because military interests are not the same as the interests of science.Ok, I’ll take this one head on and without reference to the surrounding context. The answer is utility. There are reasons why DARPA makes breakthroughs that NSF doesn’t—often breakthroughs that help the whole world. They take risks that NSF never will. They focus on real problems that NSF never will. They deploy money more coherently in focused period than NSF ever will. Their measure of success is utility, not publications. If you want your research to mean anything in the greater scheme, you should take military money. If you want to just be an artist and avoid work that would suggest a measure of responsibility, then remember that almost nobody on the planet will appreciate or understand what you do, and your life’s work will probably be trivial.
I personally judge the value of science on how much it advances understanding, be it at the cutting edge of research or in a classroom (it's "knowledge utility", if you like), rather than in its exploitability. I don't know how you could justify the risk-taking claims; surely funding fundamental research which lacks a direct pathway to practical payoff is a bigger financial "risk" than entrepreneurial funding of technological development.
But if I were to value practical utility/impact more highly, it still wouldn't justify taking military money. There are a vast number of applications of maths, and most of them have no obvious dependency on the military. Most notably for public benefit, one could seek applications to medicine, energy, transportation and logistics, communications... So I ask you again, why should I take money from the military? If your answer is that the US military funds projects in those domains too, then my question will instead be: why should that be the case?
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 11:37):the author is pessimistic about the capacity of the U.S. political system to provide the necessary public support, absent serious war or the threat of war, for revolutionary technologies that have large payoffs only after a decade or two and for which it is difficult for private investors to appropriate many of the gains.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 11:43):Do you think the NSF make topological data analysis a thing, or was it DARPA?
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 11:44):Or the internet? Or mRNA vaccines? Or GPS? Or digital assistants? Or in fact modern computing at all?
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 11:46):Or for that matter space exploration?
The Hubble was a spy satellite pointed backwards
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 11:46):Neural nets started with an intelligence community research effort in the sixties
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 15 2022 at 13:21):Would you like to answer my last question, then? All your examples bring me to the conclusion that we could have had all of these things sooner if the same resources had been invested towards scientific goals rather than military ones.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 13:44):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
Would you like to answer my last question, then? All your examples bring me to the conclusion that we could have had all of these things sooner if the same resources had been invested towards scientific goals rather than military ones.
I disagree totally in the real world. The military goals provided focus and will. NSF doesn't take big risks. And there are reasons why everyone keeps trying to duplicate DARPA (e.g., ARIA in the UK most recently) without the same level of success: e.g., lack of focus and will.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 13:48):I think your view of what polities and unfocused funding can do is utopian and totally unrealistic. Aspire all you want: me and mine will be busy actually doing things that have an impact (and I think a good one on balance).
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 13:49):Why doesn't the EU make these breakthroughs while they're free riding on the US security architecture and acting like they're nobler?
Jon Sterling (Aug 15 2022 at 13:50):If DARPA is so great, why do basically all the professors I know avoid it like the plague? The story is that it is a high-overhead (e.g. lots of dog-and-pony show) source of money, and the funding is so unselective that it doesn't really count for your tenure case.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 13:54):This sounds laughable. If you get enough money you get tenure. And you have no idea what you're talking about. Try showing up at a "broad agency announcement" day for a basic research effort with 100 academics in the room, 10 of whom will get funded after teaming up, and claiming that it's easy to win that money.
Jon Sterling (Aug 15 2022 at 13:54):Regarding the relationship between scientific goals and military goals, I too find it to be a bit idealistic/utopian to speak of the former as if they can be independent of the latter in imperialist society. (Of course, I agree that it is good to 'want' what you advocating!)
Ultimately everything boils down to the class struggle; if you are getting paid a lot of money to do something fun within an imperialist country (e.g. US, UK, EU, Russia, China, etc.), chances are that you won't like the ultimate reasons you are being paid to do this... Sometimes it is to literally make a weapon, but other times it is about developing and projecting 'soft power' that is not directly applied to weapons, but more has to do with the continued cutting-edge mathematical supremacy of (e.g.) the United States, etc.
Johan Commelin (Aug 15 2022 at 13:54):Steve Huntsman said:
Why doesn't the EU make these breakthroughs while they're free riding on the US security architecture and acting like they're nobler?
Mini-comment: I think a lot of "practical breakthroughs" happen in industry. The US is big boss here. But this is more related to the economical structure (start-up culture, entrepreneurial incentives, etc) then with military funding.
In terms of "impractical breakthroughs" why exactly is the EU lagging behind? I think France showed the world how to have a great culture for "impractical mathematical breakthroughs"!
Jon Sterling (Aug 15 2022 at 13:55):Steve Huntsman said:
This sounds laughable. If you get enough money you get tenure. And you have no idea what you're talking about. Try showing up at a "broad agency announcement" day for a basic research effort with 100 academics in the room, 10 of whom will get funded after teaming up, and claiming that it's easy to win that money.
That's actually not true at most American universities; it is quite common for Deans to quietly warn starting professors that certain sources of funding will be taken more seriously than others.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 14:01):Johan Commelin said:
Steve Huntsman said:
Why doesn't the EU make these breakthroughs while they're free riding on the US security architecture and acting like they're nobler?
Mini-comment: I think a lot of "practical breakthroughs" happen in industry. The US is big boss here. But this is more related to the economical structure (start-up culture, entrepreneurial incentives, etc) then with military funding.
In terms of "impractical breakthroughs" why exactly is the EU lagging behind? I think France showed the world how to have a great culture for "impractical mathematical breakthroughs"!
Silicon Valley grew out of DoD work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#Early_military_origins and of course the Internet
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 14:05):Jon Sterling said:
Steve Huntsman said:
This sounds laughable. If you get enough money you get tenure. And you have no idea what you're talking about. Try showing up at a "broad agency announcement" day for a basic research effort with 100 academics in the room, 10 of whom will get funded after teaming up, and claiming that it's easy to win that money.
That's actually not true at most American universities; it is quite common for Deans to quietly warn starting professors that certain sources of funding will be taken more seriously than others.
Well I guess the tenured folks at e.g., Columbia and MIT that have been on basic research carveouts in winning proposals I've personally led aren't very representative of your elite crowd then.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 14:07):Perhaps it's the case that folks who get hired to do pure math are expected to do pure math, and their funding should reflect that. But your telling sounds not very credible to me and not in line with my personal experience or the things I've heard from academics.
Jon Sterling (Aug 15 2022 at 14:08):Welp, I can only give you the collected experiences of a lot of CS professors that I have spoken with about the matter. I'm sure there are plenty of cases where it works out the other way.
Jon Sterling (Aug 15 2022 at 14:09):I think it is also likely, as you allude to, that there would be some difference in the reception of different kinds of funding depending on where you lie on the applied--theoretical spectrum, and it will also depend on the department.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 14:15):I think its almost surely about expectations. If you show up as a fresh assistant prof to work on one thing and end up doing another the department will not view it favorably and the money had better not come with controversy or reputational risk unless it pays for a building. If you show up and work on what they hired you for and bring in money the world's your oyster.
Johan Commelin (Aug 15 2022 at 14:18):Steve Huntsman said:
Silicon Valley grew out of DoD work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#Early_military_origins and of course the Internet
Sure, can you still chalk up everything that happened in silicon valley in the last 25 years to its military origins?
Can the EU chalk up everything that happened at Universiteit Leiden (random example that I'm familiar with) to "military origins" because of
a reward to the city of Leiden for its defence against Spanish attacks during the Eighty Years' War.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leiden_University)
Also, you didn't reply to my comment on "impractical" breakthroughs in e.g. France (38 Fields medalists in Paris!)
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 14:50):Johan Commelin said:
Steve Huntsman said:
Silicon Valley grew out of DoD work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#Early_military_origins and of course the Internet
Sure, can you still chalk up everything that happened in silicon valley in the last 25 years to its military origins?
Can the EU chalk up everything that happened at Universiteit Leiden (random example that I'm familiar with) to "military origins" because of
a reward to the city of Leiden for its defence against Spanish attacks during the Eighty Years' War.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leiden_University)
Also, you didn't reply to my comment on "impractical" breakthroughs in e.g. France (38 Fields medalists in Paris!)
I don't feel great about what's happened in SV in the last 15 years for sure. The third time Facebook tried to recruit me, I told them to never contact me again--they weren't looking for me to do purely basic research, and I didn't want to undermine democracy by doing anything else there for that creep Zuck. So no I won't claim that FAANG or MMAAA or whatever it is now are mostly driven by DoD priorities--clearly it's advertising and retail stuff along with a lot of cloud/services. But I also think the idea that they are making transformative technologies to the same degree as 25 years ago is a bit strained unless there's DoD money driving it. The iPhone is 15 years old (and Siri was literally a spinoff from a DARPA program). VR research on the other hand is still pushed by DoD (esp. the USAF) as much as anyone--like the $22B dumpster fire with Hololens. Self driving cars are a DARPA thing.
Impractical breakthroughs are easy. The Soviets had them in spades in places like Novosibirsk. But they never did much with any of the math they made.
Johan Commelin (Aug 15 2022 at 15:01):Like they weren't the first to launch a human into space, etc...
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 15:01):Old math!
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 15:02):They had zillions of cyberneticists and a parlous state of computing tech compared to the US.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 15:13):And I'll also mention that event is precisely what got DARPA started.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 15:19):Jon Sterling said:
Ultimately everything boils down to the class struggle
I think this distills the divergence of our worldviews quite succinctly.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 15:33):I know Russian troops were really infuriated when they saw how much better Ukrainians were living
Steve Huntsman (Aug 15 2022 at 15:36):Don’t forget Taiwanese GDP per capita is about 2x that of the PRC—expect similar class struggle if it comes to a fight
Naso (Aug 16 2022 at 01:06):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
I personally judge the value of science on how much it advances understanding,
Have you heard of the idea of the 'urn of inventions' from Nick Bostrom? He makes the point that the agenda of science, to blindly extract balls from this urn as rapidly as possible, is actually kind of insane.
There doesn't seem to be any good reason to assume there are not 'black balls' in this urn that e.g. greatly empower individuals to cause massive ammounts of harm, and once extracted they cannot be put back.
(An interview with Nick and Sam Harris, they get on this topic around 20min https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/151-will-destroy-future )
John Baez (Aug 16 2022 at 15:52):Jon Sterling said:
This thread is mindblowing... Afghans and Iraqis !! Anyway, I am quite confident I don't ever want to talk with you again. Be careful that you don't approach me in real life either.
I've been talking to the other moderators on this group, and we agree that this sort of threat - "Be careful that you don't approach me in real life either" - is completely unacceptable in this forum. We have a list of policies, but I scarcely need to review them to make it clear that this violates them.
I am very glad that Sterling and Huntsman are now conversing quite reasonably.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 16 2022 at 20:12):Steve Huntsman said:
Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
Would you like to answer my last question, then? All your examples bring me to the conclusion that we could have had all of these things sooner if the same resources had been invested towards scientific goals rather than military ones.
I disagree totally in the real world. The military goals provided focus and will. NSF doesn't take big risks. And there are reasons why everyone keeps trying to duplicate DARPA (e.g., ARIA in the UK most recently) without the same level of success: e.g., lack of focus and will.
Many moons ago in this topic, @Bob Coecke alluded to (amongst other things) people losing their jobs for diverting money towards category theorists, and to having to dedicate a lot of his own career to building the funding sources to support his research. The researchers provide focus and will. We're the ones who do the work because we believe in it; it's what gets me up in the morning. All that the military is providing in your examples is money and resources, and taking the credit in exchange. If science was instead funded in good faith for its own sake, we wouldn't have to waste our time or others' jobs convincing bureaucrats of its worth.
Earlier, you mentioned that the DoD exercises a "right of first refusal" for project funding. It's hard for me to imagine how choosing project proposals which appear to promise the most marketable payoffs is "providing focus and will".
And regarding risk: the only risk when funding a scientific project is that it won't produce any surprising results. The work done in confirming existing knowledge still counts as valuable science; that results can be confirmed is integral to the scientific method. If you're talking about risk from the point of view of someone investing in science with an expectation of financial gain in return, then I think that sort of risk should be irrelevant. It doesn't surprise me that the UK is trying to ape a for-profit model of science, but this is not in science or scientists' best interests.
John Baez (Aug 16 2022 at 20:23):The overly conservative nature of science funders is being discussed by Michael Nielsen.
(A brief afternoon rant.) https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/1559318292120027137/photo/1
- Michael is finishing a metascience essay (@michael_nielsen) John Baez (Aug 16 2022 at 20:25):You have to work a bit to read that thing above, but it's about how funders claim they want to fund high-risk proposals and blame scientists for being too conservative, but in fact they tend to fund low-risk proposals.
John Baez (Aug 16 2022 at 20:27):I've been wanting to write letter to the editor somewhere saying how the reluctance of the NSF to fund applied category theory is pushing applied category theorists into the arms of the military: DARPA, the Office of Naval Research, etc.
John Baez (Aug 16 2022 at 20:27):I'm not sure such a letter would do any good, but it's an interesting issue.
John Baez (Aug 16 2022 at 20:36):I could put it as a more general issue, not just about applied category theory... if I did some more research and that turned out to be true.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 16 2022 at 20:37):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
Steve Huntsman said:
Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
Would you like to answer my last question, then? All your examples bring me to the conclusion that we could have had all of these things sooner if the same resources had been invested towards scientific goals rather than military ones.
I disagree totally in the real world. The military goals provided focus and will. NSF doesn't take big risks. And there are reasons why everyone keeps trying to duplicate DARPA (e.g., ARIA in the UK most recently) without the same level of success: e.g., lack of focus and will.
Many moons ago in this topic, Bob Coecke alluded to (amongst other things) people losing their jobs for diverting money towards category theorists, and to having to dedicate a lot of his own career to building the funding sources to support his research. The researchers provide focus and will. We're the ones who do the work because we believe in it; it's what gets me up in the morning. All that the military is providing in your examples is money and resources, and taking the credit in exchange. If science was instead funded in good faith for its own sake, we wouldn't have to waste our time or others' jobs convincing bureaucrats of its worth.
Earlier, you mentioned that the DoD exercises a "right of first refusal" for project funding. It's hard for me to imagine how choosing project proposals which appear to promise the most marketable payoffs is "providing focus and will".
And regarding risk: the only risk when funding a scientific project is that it won't produce any surprising results. The work done in confirming existing knowledge still counts as valuable science; that results can be confirmed is integral to the scientific method. If you're talking about risk from the point of view of someone investing in science with an expectation of financial gain in return, then I think that sort of risk should be irrelevant. It doesn't surprise me that the UK is trying to ape a for-profit model of science, but this is not in science or scientists' best interests.
Let me elaborate. A bunch of people doing their own research individually without a common goal and competition among various teams to best achieve it leads to bad overall results even if there are islands of excellence. That is, the researchers are individually focused but collectively unfocused. They are not organized. They lack the will to subordinate themselves to a specific, measurable goal without (their lab supervisor's) money on the line.
Examples par excellence here are the various grand challenges that demonstrated autonomous driving (first wilderness, then urban) and hacking/patching; or the AlphaDogfight competition that had AI systems flying fighter jets literally fight to the (simulated) death. These are not basic research, but even in the programs I've PI'd or worked on there have been challenges and competition. Folks learn much more quickly what works and what doesn't because they have skin in the game.
The example I have cited was not DARPA, and it was not competitive--DoD had concluded that research was still too immature to be applied, and even too early to have different approaches compete. This is in fact why it was farmed out to NSF. The Heilmeier catechism is important to bear in mind here.
Your perspective on risk also I think misses the point. Say you want to make fusion work. Do you do inertial confinement, a tokamak, or something "crazy"? DARPA will try the crazy things if they appear to pass muster. Sometimes this results in bad science because a small group can made bad calls: e.g., a project to get energy from hafnium isomers that some of my mentors at the Institute for Defense Analyses were bashing incessantly when I was there. Mostly it results in things that kind of work but don't get "transitioned." But DARPA measures the risk as: are we missing out on the ability to make something that isn't incremental? They specifically require that any research has the plausible prospect of revolutionary advances to the state of the art (whether or not that sparks a revolution beyond the art). NSF very much embraces the incremental.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 16 2022 at 20:42):John Baez said:
I've been wanting to write letter to the editor somewhere saying how the reluctance of the NSF to fund applied category theory is pushing applied category theorists into the arms of the military: DARPA, the Office of Naval Research, etc.
If I became a DARPA PM (not outlandish, two folks I mentored are there currently and one of my best friends is former, besides probably a dozen others I am acquainted with) I would for instance explore "doing SysML with category theory," basically to accelerate and amplify the sort of stuff NIST has been poking around. So yeah this or something similar could actually happen, and even if I personally didn't become a PM. It is a small community and I have at times ranted to folks (including Paschkewitz) about various things. Many people have similar ideas and there is no monopoly on them.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 16 2022 at 20:47):So you can read this thread as a sort of advertisement, probably failing and socially unacceptable here, to consider the possibility of working on something like that in the future.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 16 2022 at 20:54):I'll also mention that the PMs I've worked with have often provided invaluable technical guidance as well as sanity checks, exposure to applications and interested parties, and cross-pollination among teams. The model really does work better than anything else folks have discovered where innovation is concerned. Like capitalism, it's terrible except for the alternatives.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 16 2022 at 20:57):The "dog and pony" element that Jon Sterling referred to is necessary for the PM to provide that sort of value versus the much more passive ONR/AFOSR or still more passive NSF model. Academics probably hate it unless they are trying to spin off a company from their work, which I tried and which I've seen other folks I've worked with do more successfully. Those folks love it because they get use cases and actual results that they can show potential clients/investors/etc.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 16 2022 at 20:59):(Or for "6.4" projects, the demonstrations necessary to convince folks to move an effort from DARPA to one of the armed services where it will turn into a fielded and sustained technology.)
John Baez (Aug 16 2022 at 21:00):A bunch of people doing their own research individually without a common goal and competition among various teams to best achieve it leads to bad overall results even if there are islands of excellence. That is, the researchers are individually focused but collectively unfocused.
I think it depends a lot on the subject. In math this individualistic approach seems to work quite well. One could argue that math research would work better if it were more organized - but for a lot of topics, where brilliant weird new ideas are what we need most, I think the resulting increase in conformity would be bad.
In any event, most mathematicians are used to working in teams of at most about 5: coauthorships.
For subjects that need big teams, like serious engineering projects, it's bound to be different.
Computerized theorem-proving like Lean is an interesting case. HoTT also has some "big team" aspects. The AlgebraicJulia project, which I'm somewhat involved with, also involves a lot more teamwork than anything I've done.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 16 2022 at 21:04):Steve Huntsman said:
DARPA measures the risk as: are we missing out on the ability to make something that isn't incremental?
I should add that they also are explicitly tasked with "preventing strategic surprise" in technology--again, a la Sputnik.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 16 2022 at 21:05):John Baez said:
A bunch of people doing their own research individually without a common goal and competition among various teams to best achieve it leads to bad overall results even if there are islands of excellence. That is, the researchers are individually focused but collectively unfocused.
I think it depends a lot on the subject. In math this individualistic approach seems to work quite well.
Absolutely. My own work is far less collaborative than any of my colleagues' is. But once you want to turn math into code things can get intricate quickly, as you remark in re: AlgebraicJulia. TDA had much the same feature.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 16 2022 at 21:10):Also I'll mention that formal methods of various sorts (theorem proving, model checking, SMT solving) have long been a DARPA I2O (information innovation office) mainstay and will continue to be. Lean and HoTT are both adjacent to this. This is in part why I'm surprised and even incredulous about Jon's remarks re: the attractiveness of DARPA funding. I've seen more than a few academics with very strong Coq (or occasionally something like ACL2) chops on proposals, including my own, and some but not all winning.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 16 2022 at 21:13):And many others on programs, albeit usually at low levels of effort. And heck Kathleen Fisher is the I2O director now.
John Baez (Aug 16 2022 at 21:28):Steve Huntsman said:
So you can read this thread as a sort of advertisement, probably failing and socially unacceptable here, to consider the possibility of working on something like that in the future.
It might not be failing - but you can be damn sure anyone interested in it won't dare speak up in this conversation. :upside_down:
I sometimes wonder what people hope to achieve by "demonizing" military-funded work. Personally I'm less interested in demonizing it than avoiding it, and developing new sources of funding. For example, I'm hoping that work on compositional epidemiology helps get some applied category theory funded by the medical establishment. I don't want this funding myself, but I want it to exist, and I wish the Topos Institute could get some. I also want to get serious about applications connected to climate change.
It's possible the people who "demonize" military-funded work aren't really thinking strategically. If you think something is terrible you just yell about it. So far this isn't stopping the HoTT project, or David Spivak, or Bob Coecke, from getting lots of military funding - much of which gets disbursed to postdocs. But the demonization certainly means that they won't talk about it here!
So in a way, it tends to create a bubble, where people inside the bubble all agree military funding is evil, and are shocked to hear from anyone who disagrees... yet outside the bubble, military funding continues apace.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 16 2022 at 22:14):Steve Huntsman said:
Let me elaborate. A bunch of people doing their own research individually without a common goal and competition among various teams to best achieve it leads to bad overall results even if there are islands of excellence. That is, the researchers are individually focused but collectively unfocused. They are not organized. They lack the will to subordinate themselves to a specific, measurable goal without (their lab supervisor's) money on the line.
Your argument here is that bigger projects require greater organising structure? Fine. Nothing in the model you're talking about requires anything to do with the military, it just happens that this is a model that the US military is employing. You've taken every opportunity to advertise your employer's successes in funding research, but this doesn't address the issue of why the military should be involved. If the model is so successful, what's keeping it tied to the military?
DARPA will try the crazy things if they appear to pass muster. DARPA measures the risk as: are we missing out on the ability to make something that isn't incremental? They specifically require that any research has the plausible prospect of revolutionary advances to the state of the art (whether or not that sparks a revolution beyond the art). NSF very much embraces the incremental.
Some progress is made incrementally, some is made through creative leaps. All this shows is what the NSF should be doing with its funding. It does not demonstrate that military ties are essential in any way to scientific funding.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 16 2022 at 22:16):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
If the model is so successful, what's keeping it tied to the military?
Excellent question. Many have tried, none have succeeded so dramatically even on a per-dollar basis. ARPA-E, BARDA, HSARPA; in the UK: ARIA (before that, DERA), etc. are pale shadows.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 16 2022 at 22:22):My impression is that it's a combination of military necessity that the polity mostly buys into and the American talent for applied research/entrepreneurship. In large part the latter is due to the former. Just a guess.
If this stuff was easy, Alphabet's non-Google stuff would be raking in cash. DeepMind is crushing it but the ROI seems indirect to me (or channeled back into Google per se quietly). Bell Labs and Xerox PARC famously failed to exploit their innovations (the latter leaving the field to Apple on many occasions, where SRI has also notably intersected). But this stuff is harder than being a VC because you have to start sooner in the technology readiness level and still get a "product" to be successful.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 16 2022 at 22:26):TL;DR- DARPA caught lightning in a bottle and is trying hard to keep it charged.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 16 2022 at 22:29):I guess another critical factor is that the problems to be solved aren't purely dictated by nature. There is an extra degree of freedom--folks want to do something versus merely solve some purely scientific/technical challenge directly.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 16 2022 at 22:38):You know, I'm reminded of an episode where I had an idea for a pure science ("6.1") DARPA BAA and had someone at a very fancy university interested before they claimed it wasn't possible for an administrative reason. I read between the lines and I am 95% sure a PhD student/postdoc objected to doing that sort of thing, whereupon the professor offered a polite excuse. So this can be a lesson to the youngsters: talk with prospective advisors about your red lines early--they and you will be better off for it.
dusko (Aug 17 2022 at 08:54):oh man, the amount of words that can be produced in a thread like this.
i thought people devote serious time to math mostly after they realize that talking can prove anything.
do we have any reason to believe that there are arguments that could NOT be won if you just talk long enough? and in a chat list like this, buzz lightyear could obviously type to infinity and beyond...
Jon Sterling (Aug 17 2022 at 09:38):John Baez said:
Jon Sterling said:
This thread is mindblowing... Afghans and Iraqis !! Anyway, I am quite confident I don't ever want to talk with you again. Be careful that you don't approach me in real life either.
I've been talking to the other moderators on this group, and we agree that this sort of threat - "Be careful that you don't approach me in real life either" - is completely unacceptable in this forum. We have a list of policies, but I scarcely need to review them to make it clear that this violates them.
I am very glad that Sterling and Huntsman are now conversing quite reasonably.
To @John Baez and the other "moderators": Consider whether there is not also a mortal threat in Huntman's blithe advocation for US interventions in other countries... This is a threat to millions of people, but I suppose it matters much less to you and the other moderators because these millions of people are not citizens of wealthy western countries like we are. To be honest, I stand by what I said 100%, and I will be departing this Zulip entirely as you have shown it to be an inhospitable place for anyone who sides against imperialist mass-murder and the machine that makes it go. This Zulip is a great shame on the category theory community, an embarrassment to everyone involved.
I invite anyone to wishes to discuss these matters further with me to email me, jon@jonmsterling.com.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 17 2022 at 09:44):@Jon Sterling there's a big difference between "siding against" someone and publicly threatening them.
Jon Sterling (Aug 17 2022 at 09:45):One day there will be a settling of accounts on a global basis, and it will be important for different communities to be able to show that they have stood up to defend those who have been exploited, murdered, and exterminated by the ruling class and their button-men. I hope that the rest of the category theory community can grapple with this question with more finesse than this corner did.
John Baez (Aug 17 2022 at 15:10):dusko said:
oh man, the amount of words that can be produced in a thread like this.
It's easy to mute threads if you get bored with them. You can do it by clicking on the little grayed-out bell next to the title of the thread, in this case "The Responsibility of the Scientist Today". It has a slash through it because you haven't muted it yet.
Oscar Cunningham (Aug 17 2022 at 15:44):(It always has a slash through it, but it's a darker gray if you've muted the thread.)
John Baez (Aug 17 2022 at 18:21):Oh, right. That makes sense: bell with a slash through it = muted.
dusko (Aug 19 2022 at 18:36):John Baez said:
dusko said:
oh man, the amount of words that can be produced in a thread like this.
It's easy to mute threads if you get bored with them. You can do it by clicking on the little grayed-out bell next to the title of the thread, in this case "The Responsibility of the Scientist Today". It has a slash through it because you haven't muted it yet.
of course. even if it could not be muted, noone is forcing me to read anything. a newspaper cannot be muted, but no one is forcing anyone to read it sequantially, and they don't.
the thread is not boring to me. on the contrary.
but the problem with a discussion that generates a flood of words is not personal, but social. one side is objecting against one kind of harmful reasoning, the other side against another kind of harmful reasoning. there is no reason why of two people who disagree either one has to be wrong, and either one has to be right. the reasoning are often in different subspaces, often perpendicular. there may be two parallel universes, where one side's view is pursued, and where the other side's view is pursued, and in both universes everyone is dead. or in both everyone is having fun. there is no reason why either side has to be right. in most wars, both adversaries commit some terrible things. (it is easier to see that on older wars than on newer.)
there are many families and friendships with deep disagreements. bob thinks in pictures and alice thinks in words, and alice is obviously blind to many things that bob sees, and bob is deaf to many things that alice says. but empirically, most families do not spend time arguing such issues. we don't push our children to our standpoints, or to re-educate our parents, because we know that some conversations are impossible. words don't work for everything.
but when it comes to discussing really BIG complicated things, then we feel the need to convert the other side, because they are so deeply wrong. and we will do it by producing lots of words. we didn't try convince our parents that bacon is disgusting, or that parking close to the garage door will not cause fire, but we feel a need to convince a network community that funding by Google causes less harm than funding by AFRL, or vv.
a history of trying and failing to communicate made people produce many different languages. body language expresses some things words don't. math expresses some things words don't. no one could play a basketball match if they had to make plans in words. they coordinate in body language. here there are lots of people who are good at things expressed in math. it is useful to think a bit about what kind of messages stand a chance of being transferred in which narratives.
((it's ironic how many words i used to say this, repeating almost everything a couple of times :))
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 19 2022 at 19:12):@dusko are you claiming that we've written a lot without making progress? If so, I dispute that. I understand Steve and his point of view a lot better now than I did before, and it's enabled me to refine my arguments and understand my own position better. It's taken work and patience from both sides. Just as in my research, I value that advancement in understanding.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 19 2022 at 19:15):I am way more interested in shifting the Overton window in this community than trying to convert any interlocutors. The former is a realistic goal, the latter is a fool's errand.
dusko (Aug 19 2022 at 19:29):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
dusko are you claiming that we've written a lot without making progress? If so, I dispute that. I understand Steve and his point of view a lot better now than I did before, and it's enabled me to refine my arguments and understand my own position better. It's taken work and patience from both sides. Just as in my research, I value that advancement in understanding.
i am claiming more than that: i am claiming that a precise notion of progress in conversations doesn't exist. you may prove a lemma, and that is progress. or you may conjecture it, and that is smaller progress.
but here i say that you didn't make progress, and you dispute that. and this very dispute is an example of what we are talking about. how do we make progress in this dispute? "You say yes, I say no, You say stop, and I say go, go, go. Hallo halo, hello, hello, I don't know why you say goodbye, I say hello..." (that was of course in the 60s :upside_down: )
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Aug 19 2022 at 19:30):Then why are you writing this?
dusko (Aug 19 2022 at 19:34):the reflection principle helps in programming. undecidable tasks are often coded that way. talking about talking can be useful and even helps in talking.
but there is also no correct answer to "why am i writing this". the previous sentence might have been justifiable, but this one may have lost that justification. and i think it actually has :)
Jade Master (Sep 05 2022 at 08:25):Just one more point I want to make: DARPA research created agent orange and predator drones as well as lots of the technology that makes up our society.
Jade Master (Sep 05 2022 at 08:26):We should be able to contribute to the latter without contributing to the former is what I believe
Jade Master (Sep 05 2022 at 08:33):If you don't know about agent orange I suggest you read up on it (i.e. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange) and ask yourself: "Do I really want to work for an organization that makes technology like this?"
Steve Huntsman (Sep 06 2022 at 13:48):Jade Master said:
Just one more point I want to make: DARPA research created agent orange and predator drones as well as lots of the technology that makes up our society.
Following your advice I did read up on it. DARPA tested and evaluated Agent Orange. But, contrary to your claim, DARPA research did not create it: the agent was used by the British in Malaya in the fifties for the same purpose (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_AGILE#Subproject_VI).
DARPA's T&E work was conducted in the early-to-mid sixties, during a time when the component (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,4,5-Trichlorophenoxyacetic_acid) that was contaminated with dioxin was allowed for use even in American agriculture until 1970. This suggests to me an instance of Hanlon's razor, viz. "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." I can only speak for myself here: had I been involved in this test/eval work and known of the dangers (and I assume I would not be so incompetent not to have been, as the dioxin contamination issue was apparently known before the sixties), I would have urged that the chemical not be used. I suggest that having competent people involved in DARPA research is important precisely because of its gravity, and that discouraging folks from participating is perhaps counterproductive to your stated goals in an instance such as this.
As far as Predator drones are concerned, we are all aware of tragic mistakes in targeting, and we all deplore them (I view them as necessary evils; you and others merely as evils).
But I submit to you that a recent example of drones in this regard is a model of how technological development keeps people safer. Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed by a drone strike using a Hellfire R9X missile, which has no warhead: instead, it "just" deploys blades and cuts through a single target. (https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/08/03/ayman-al-zawahiri-s-death-what-is-the-hellfire-r9x-missile-that-the-americans-purportedly-used_5992310_4.html) Though al-Zawahiri's family was in the same house as him, there appear to have been no collateral victims. As technology improves C4ISR and other warfighting elements, the harm to noncombatants decreases. This is a trend throughout history, and is something to be welcomed: if wars must be fought (and we will disagree on this), then civilian harm should be minimized (DoD is making admirable efforts in this regard).
If you will argue that the US targeting the leader of al-Qaeda in a drone strike that killed him alone is in any way wrong, then I have nothing further to say to you on the topic.
Steve Huntsman (Sep 06 2022 at 19:00):Reading a bit more, it turns out that the US Department of Agriculture was tasked to perform secondary evaluations of herbicide candidates after the US Army chem/bio folks performed initial evaluations: see p. 144 of https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/AD0338491. ARPA's principal role appears to have been to be "on the loop" here while focusing on developing spraying systems (see p. 143). So perhaps you should take issue with the USDA, not least since DARPA's direct involvement with bioscience only began in 2001 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Technologies_Office_(DARPA)) and helped with mRNA vaccines, prostheses, and trauma care among other things.
Steve Huntsman (Sep 06 2022 at 19:03):But I am guessing that railing against working for the USDA (or CDC, or FEMA, or other US government agencies whose spectacular failures have also come at terrible human cost) may not fit with your agenda.
Jade Master (Sep 09 2022 at 07:56):Lol. It's all I can say
Steve Huntsman (Oct 18 2022 at 17:00):Is anybody from the anti-weapons development or anti-fossil fuel crowds gonna protest re: any of the speakers' affiliations at next month's NIST confab, or has this become passé? Just noticing relative silence compared to what was directed my way back in 2020, and feeling the urge (ever since) to stir up trouble.
Steve Huntsman (Oct 18 2022 at 17:04):Or anti-intelligence community crowds? I feel like ARLIS does good work that helps people, but others might disagree.
Christian Williams (Oct 18 2022 at 17:10):Sorry, this is not a place to "stir up trouble". You're welcome to try on another platform.
Steve Huntsman (Oct 18 2022 at 17:32):Christian Williams said:
Sorry, this is not a place to "stir up trouble". You're welcome to try on another platform.
I disagree! Precisely this sort of trouble was stirred up here two years ago and directed my way.
Steve Huntsman (Oct 18 2022 at 17:32):Or has there been some policy change in the meantime?
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Oct 18 2022 at 17:59):Steve Huntsman said:
Is anybody from the anti-weapons development or anti-fossil fuel crowds gonna protest re: any of the speakers' affiliations at next month's NIST confab, or has this become passé? Just noticing relative silence compared to what was directed my way back in 2020, and feeling the urge (ever since) to stir up trouble.
I'll bite. What are you alluding to?
Steve Huntsman (Oct 18 2022 at 18:02):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
Steve Huntsman said:
Is anybody from the anti-weapons development or anti-fossil fuel crowds gonna protest re: any of the speakers' affiliations at next month's NIST confab, or has this become passé? Just noticing relative silence compared to what was directed my way back in 2020, and feeling the urge (ever since) to stir up trouble.
I'll bite. What are you alluding to?
In which I was the person in question
John Baez (Oct 18 2022 at 18:09):Yes, this was quite the firestorm. Maybe what Morgan Rogers doesn't remember about is that you were the person at the heart of this controversy. (I think most of the comments didn't mention your name.)
John Baez (Oct 18 2022 at 18:13):One difference between then and now is that most applied category theorists here attend or at least know about the ACT conferences, while the NIST meeting seems heavily aimed at people working for big companies, and it was not even announced here as far as I can tell. (I just did it.)
Steve Huntsman (Oct 18 2022 at 18:17):John Baez said:
One difference between then and now is that most applied category theorists here attend or at least know about the ACT conferences, while the NIST meeting seems heavily aimed at people working for big companies, and it was not even announced here as far as I can tell. (I just did it.)
I am quite certain that @Jules Hedges (among other folks) knows about the NIST meeting.
John Baez (Oct 18 2022 at 18:20):Yes, since he's speaking there. But I had not heard of it until you mentioned it just now, and I like to think I know what's going on.
Christian Williams (Oct 18 2022 at 18:23):Steve Huntsman said:
Christian Williams said:
Sorry, this is not a place to "stir up trouble". You're welcome to try on another platform.
I disagree! Precisely this sort of trouble was stirred up here two years ago and directed my way.
Any kind of discussion can be had here if it comes from a place of genuine intent toward mutual understanding. Your first few messages here now did not seem to be coming from such a place.
Steve Huntsman (Oct 18 2022 at 18:27):Christian Williams said:
Steve Huntsman said:
Christian Williams said:
Sorry, this is not a place to "stir up trouble". You're welcome to try on another platform.
I disagree! Precisely this sort of trouble was stirred up here two years ago and directed my way.
Any kind of discussion can be had here if it comes from a place of genuine intent toward mutual understanding. Your first few messages here now did not seem to be coming from such a place.
Well I genuinely want to understand what speakers at that event who've inveighed against any association with my kind of work in the past have to say regarding their involvement here.
Dylan Braithwaite (Oct 18 2022 at 18:27):I think there's a big difference in who these events should be considered to represent. From an outsider's perspective the ACT conference was set up by the ACT research community, so is probably a good indicator of the values of a majority of people in that community.
On the other hand I would expect a workshop run by a US govt organisation to be representative merely of the US government's values.
John Baez (Oct 18 2022 at 18:31):Yes. In particular, Spencer Breiner and Eswaran Subrahmian at NIST are trying to set up a consortium of companies that support research in applied category theory, including Chevron and others, and this meeting at NIST is part of that effort.
John Baez (Oct 18 2022 at 18:42):So, this is an entirely more corporate/governmental affair than ACT2020 was, and I doubt most of the people complaining about BAE Systems at ACT2020 will be attending this (with one exception already mentioned).
Dylan Braithwaite (Oct 18 2022 at 18:48):I kind of danced around my point above. But what I meant was that as someone doing research in ACT I would feel much more responsibility for the image of the ACT conference, than for a NIST workshop, because it directly reflects on a community which I choose to be part of.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Oct 18 2022 at 20:40):Steve Huntsman said:
Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
Steve Huntsman said:
Is anybody from the anti-weapons development or anti-fossil fuel crowds gonna protest re: any of the speakers' affiliations at next month's NIST confab, or has this become passé? Just noticing relative silence compared to what was directed my way back in 2020, and feeling the urge (ever since) to stir up trouble.
I'll bite. What are you alluding to?
In which I was the person in question
No, I remember that very well. I was asking what affiliations you were referring to that you were surprised folks aren't protesting.
Steve Huntsman (Oct 18 2022 at 21:05):Lockheed? Maybe even Chevron?
Steve Huntsman (Oct 18 2022 at 21:06): Steve Huntsman (Oct 18 2022 at 21:13):Or ARLIS (mentioned above)?
Steve Huntsman (Oct 19 2022 at 12:19):Dylan Braithwaite said:
I think there's a big difference in who these events should be considered to represent. From an outsider's perspective the ACT conference was set up by the ACT research community, so is probably a good indicator of the values of a majority of people in that community.
On the other hand I would expect a workshop run by a US govt organisation to be representative merely of the US government's values.
So let me get this straight: the US government values mathematics over adherence to a political fringe position, while the ACT research community values adherence to a political fringe position over mathematics? Or am I being uncharitable?
Steve Huntsman (Oct 19 2022 at 17:38):In case anyone views my use of the word "fringe" in my preceding post as dubious, I refer them to recent surveys of Europeans regarding their desire for US involvement in European defense (may have to scroll a bit to get to #16); of folks around the world about their regard for the US military; and of Americans regarding their desire to reduce the size of the US military (with weighting coefficients here).
Steve Huntsman (Oct 19 2022 at 17:43):Perhaps it's worth rubbing some salt in here: per a poll above, folks around the world seem to have a better view of the US military than of US universities. But maybe they are just uneducated.
John Baez (Oct 19 2022 at 17:43):The US government is clearly very different in its values from academia or the ACT community; there's no need to agree on which one is right to agree on that, and I don't think Dylan ever said who is right - just that there's this difference.
John Baez (Oct 19 2022 at 17:43):So if you want to argue with someone, Steve, I'm not sure he's the one.
Steve Huntsman (Oct 19 2022 at 17:44):I agree that Dylan did not say this. My lived experience (and I think the evidence) says it.
John Baez (Oct 19 2022 at 17:45):Okay, so you're just arguing in general - to the crowd, as it were.
Steve Huntsman (Oct 19 2022 at 17:45):That's how I roll. Trying to shift the Overton window to sanity.
Ryan Wisnesky (Oct 20 2022 at 13:47):my own take as more of an engineer than a scientist is that this thread is misnamed ;-) Screen-Shot-2022-10-20-at-6.45.49-AM.png
Steve Huntsman (Oct 20 2022 at 14:13):It's been more than 15 years since my office at the Naval Postgraduate School was on the same floor as a railgun and I was doing temp work for a free electron laser group in between taking some courses on conventional explosives and nuclear weapons. Now I mostly just want to do things with bits. :innocent:
Jade Master (Oct 21 2022 at 08:50):Steve Huntsman said:
In case anyone views my use of the word "fringe" in my preceding post as dubious, I refer them to recent surveys of Europeans regarding their desire for US involvement in European defense (may have to scroll a bit to get to #16); of folks around the world about their regard for the US military; and of Americans regarding their desire to reduce the size of the US military (with weighting coefficients here).
Lol Steve, other than the first link the other two aren't what you said at all? The first link is not surprising to me...Europe is a continent that the US military tends not to bomb or destabilize the governments of. I think in the rest of the world the actions of the US military speak for themselves...we're seen as a policeman of the world more like this: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/08/how-rest-world-views-american-military/ but maybe that's a good thing in your worldview
Jade Master (Oct 21 2022 at 09:00):Do you think most Guatemalans have a positive view of the US military? Remember when the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government planning to make many important and popular reforms only to instead plunge the country into four decades of civil war and genocide wikipedia
Jade Master (Oct 21 2022 at 09:02):We have done this to many many countries. Cool that you're proud of it I guess
Jade Master (Oct 21 2022 at 09:07):But anyway thank you for pressing the issue and bringing up the all the shady funding and influence of the NIST workshop. I totally agree :) I personally refuse to participate in it and I hope my friends and colleagues who did participate in it find a way to work for someone else.
Steve Huntsman (Oct 21 2022 at 12:31):Jade Master said:
Steve Huntsman said:
In case anyone views my use of the word "fringe" in my preceding post as dubious, I refer them to recent surveys of Europeans regarding their desire for US involvement in European defense (may have to scroll a bit to get to #16); of folks around the world about their regard for the US military; and of Americans regarding their desire to reduce the size of the US military (with weighting coefficients here).
Lol Steve, other than the first link the other two aren't what you said at all? The first link is not surprising to me...Europe is a continent that the US military tends not to bomb or destabilize the governments of. I think in the rest of the world the actions of the US military speak for themselves...we're seen as a policeman of the world more like this: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/08/how-rest-world-views-american-military/ but maybe that's a good thing in your worldview
Wow a lot to address...I'll go in order. Please provide some data to support your assertions instead of an opinion piece. I get that you loathe the Pax Americana, and that it is easy to find sympathizers in your milieu and among media that you consume. But I prefer quantitative data and facts to ideology. If you can provide either of the former (I have challenge you on this point before, you may recall) I'll accept them seriously and with intellectual honesty/humility.
The US bombed Europe quite a bit not that much longer ago than 1954, which is the most salient date in your recent comments (I'll get to that). The US also bombed the former Yugoslavia quite a bit in the nineties--but I get that Serbia doesn't like the US. Anyway having spent three weeks in Montenegro about a decade ago I can personally attest that their neighbors like the US quite a bit, and I think even you would have a hard time arguing with a straight face against that whole episode.
Steve Huntsman (Oct 21 2022 at 12:32):Jade Master said:
Lol Steve, other than the first link the other two aren't what you said at all?
Now regarding this part specifically, I'm gonna post screenshots of what I said and what the links show, so you can tell me precisely how I'm misrepresenting any of them (honestly I am baffled by your assertion here).
Steve Huntsman (Oct 21 2022 at 12:34):image.png -- I said: [a survey of] "folks around the world about their regard for the US military"
Steve Huntsman (Oct 21 2022 at 12:35):image.png -- I said: [a survey of] "of Americans regarding their desire to reduce the size of the US military"
Steve Huntsman (Oct 21 2022 at 12:36):image.png -- I said: "with weighting coefficients [for the previous survey] here."
Steve Huntsman (Oct 21 2022 at 12:36):How is this in any way not an accurate representation?
Steve Huntsman (Oct 21 2022 at 12:44):Now I actually do subscribe to the Team America speech [warning: not in good taste, and not for the faint of heart]. To the extent the Pax Americana supports the free movement of ideas, people, and goods, I think it is a good thing. To the extent that it does not, it is dubious at best and misguided. The example of Guatemala in 1954 that you cite (or others wherein the US made Latin America safe for the United Fruit Company and its ilk, or Iran safe for oil interests) placed goods above people, which is and was a mistake. I also won't act like the Monroe Doctrine is something that should apply in the 20th or 21st centuries. So score that one for you, I guess, if you think that my position is blind support of whatever the US does. But this is not my position and trying to characterize it that way is easily refuted by statements that I've previously made here.
Steve Huntsman (Oct 21 2022 at 12:47):Jade Master said:
Do you think most Guatemalans have a positive view of the US military? Remember when the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government planning to make many important and popular reforms only to instead plunge the country into four decades of civil war and genocide wikipedia
Regarding this point: I don't know about the first question. I do know that the most recent data I could find indicated that a clear majority of Guatemalans have a positive view of the US (I don't know about the military). SInce I think you mischaracterized what I've done regarding links while claiming the opposite, I'll post a screenshot as well: image.png https://www.statista.com/statistics/807285/guatemala-perception-united-states/#statisticContainer
Steve Huntsman (Oct 21 2022 at 12:51):But yes I understand that Guatemala has had a rough go of it. I don't know much about it either. But (since you seem fond of opinions, assertions, and anecdotes in lieu of broader facts) the only person of Guatemalan descent that I've ever known reasonably well is a first-generation American who--wait for it--I recruited to work on a DARPA effort in 2008 (as she was spending a year in Guatemala) and continues in the defense R&D arena to this day. She seems to think the US military is pretty good.
Steve Huntsman (Oct 21 2022 at 12:51):And I mean "good" in whichever way you care to interpret it.
Steve Huntsman (Oct 21 2022 at 12:59):Jade Master said:
We have done this to many many countries. Cool that you're proud of it I guess
I am not proud of many of the US's actions. I protest against my government fairly regularly in fact, and quite a bit during calendar years 2017-2020. But I am proud of defending democracy, free trade, freedom of navigation, etc., and of my country supporting these (when it actually does follow its better angels).
Steve Huntsman (Oct 21 2022 at 13:14):By the way I am really curious to know what @Jules Hedges thinks about the NIST workshop and intends to do about it, not least since I saw a green dot next to his name here since starting this particular discussion. (I am pretty sure what @Fabrizio Genovese thinks, and I expect his beliefs and actions to be pretty self-consistent as usual, but he isn't subscribed to this stream)
Joe Moeller (Oct 21 2022 at 13:31):Jade Master said:
But anyway thank you for pressing the issue and bringing up the all the shady funding and influence of the NIST workshop. I totally agree :) I personally refuse to participate in it and I hope my friends and colleagues who did participate in it find a way to work for someone else.
Just to be clear, the only funding for the event is from NIST, which is not DoD. I know this is only a minor correction to the overall point.
Steve Huntsman (Oct 21 2022 at 17:04):Screen-Shot-2022-10-21-at-10.25.38-AM.png Seeing the same green dot now as when I took this screencap a few hours ago and also noticed back on Wednesday...really wondering what there is to be so silent about now vs 2020 image.png
Jules Hedges (Oct 21 2022 at 17:20):I don't feed trolls. I'll happily talk about this some other place
Jules Hedges (Oct 21 2022 at 17:27):Let me point out to the mods that this guy is posting screenshots showing times when I'm online, that sounds probably not ok to me
Steve Huntsman (Oct 21 2022 at 17:32):Happy to get kicked off here or admonished even for breaches of courtesy/decorum if folks want to do that. I think folks who go out of their way to preach about their values (like me or you) ought to have the courage to act accordingly and take any hits that follow with a smile.
Jules Hedges (Oct 21 2022 at 17:39):I have actual reasons for going to this workshop in spite of my past comments, and I'll happily talk to you if you can go a few days without writing like a not-even-skillful troll
Steve Huntsman (Oct 21 2022 at 17:46):Really I think the term provocateur is more appropriate here. But fair enough! I'm sure we're all looking forward to it.
John Baez (Oct 21 2022 at 17:55):Nobody is obliged to talk to anyone here, and posting screenshots of when someone else is online, in an attempt to bully them into talking to you... that's just not acceptable. Don't do it, Steve.
Everyone: please try to talk politely about issues, not getting into childish fights. Steve is not the only one responsible for the mudfight here.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Oct 22 2022 at 10:46):Yep, I'll second that. It's fine for you to request that someone respond to something that they might have missed (that's what tags are for, after all), but demanding a response and singling them out if they choose not to respond is unacceptable.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Oct 22 2022 at 11:18):I should take some responsibility for humouring Steve too. Sorry @Jules Hedges.
Maybe Steve should consider that acting in this way, as a self-appointed representative of military interests in this space, may have the opposite of the intended effect of making such interests palatable to people here.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (Oct 22 2022 at 11:26):My personal response to the surveys you're throwing around is that these represent the effectiveness of the US' propaganda, which does not constitute an argument for how someone thinking critically should feel about the US military.
Steve Huntsman (Oct 24 2022 at 17:59):Jules Hedges said:
I have actual reasons for going to this workshop in spite of my past comments, and I'll happily talk to you if you can go a few days without writing like a not-even-skillful troll
It's been 72 hours.
Steve Huntsman (Oct 24 2022 at 18:19):John Baez said:
Nobody is obliged to talk to anyone here, and posting screenshots of when someone else is online, in an attempt to bully them into talking to you... that's just not acceptable. Don't do it, Steve.
The word "bully" is just wrong here: "publicly browbeating" would be correct though. Bullying implies a power dynamic that plainly isn't in evidence. If anything, I've been at a power disadvantage relative to Jules on at least two occasions: first, in 2020, when I was unable to directly respond because I could not speak on behalf of my employer, and this was inextricably bound up with the discussion; and second, as I submitted something to ACT 2022. (In fact I submitted there versus a venue I've had three papers at largely because I had reason to think my paper would get rejected for reasons other than the merits, and I must say I was impressed that it wasn't. So kudos to the PC, FWIW.) I have no power over Jules and very little (less than most if not all of my interlocutors) in the part of this community that doesn't work with the US military.
That said, I admit that I could have simply showed the existence of a green dot or merely asserted its appearance, and what I did was less graceful than that. So I apologize for this minor variation in form--but not for any substance.
Steve Huntsman (Oct 24 2022 at 18:23):John Baez said:
Everyone: please try to talk politely about issues, not getting into childish fights. Steve is not the only one responsible for the mudfight here.
This isn't childish at all. It is about violence and our role in it. There could hardly be anything more adult. Unseemly, sure. But as far as politeness has gone I place my actions far higher up the Emily Post scale than trying to cancel someone for an implicit mainstream political opinion. Let's not confuse the difference in scale here.
Steve Huntsman (Oct 24 2022 at 18:24):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
Yep, I'll second that. It's fine for you to request that someone respond to something that they might have missed (that's what tags are for, after all), but demanding a response and singling them out if they choose not to respond is unacceptable.
Nobody has to respond. Why is this unacceptable? I get that it bothers folks.
Steve Huntsman (Oct 24 2022 at 18:26):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
I should take some responsibility for humouring Steve too. Sorry Jules Hedges.
Maybe Steve should consider that acting in this way, as a self-appointed representative of military interests in this space, may have the opposite of the intended effect of making such interests palatable to people here.
I have zero interest in trying to make these interests palatable to anyone on the fence. Those folks won't do any meaningful work. My interest is in exposing the inconsistency of most people engaged in this discussion, so that folks who aren't on the fence can feel reassured that not everybody here is unlike them.
Steve Huntsman (Oct 24 2022 at 18:27):Morgan Rogers (he/him) said:
My personal response to the surveys you're throwing around is that these represent the effectiveness of the US' propaganda, which does not constitute an argument for how someone thinking critically should feel about the US military.
As far as this goes, this statement is IMO just ducking facts with unjustified assertions. @Jade Master has been doing the same thing here. Mathematicians should try to do better, and they should recoil from this sort of "thinking."
John Baez (Oct 24 2022 at 18:29):I'm not going to discuss this more. Two moderators have told you that trying to pressure Jules into talking to you as you did is unacceptable. That was not an invitation to discuss the matter.
Steve Huntsman (Oct 27 2022 at 14:28): Matteo Capucci (he/him) (Oct 27 2022 at 14:35):Well this seems exactly what happened, so great
Steve Huntsman (Oct 27 2022 at 15:00):Matteo Capucci (he/him) said:
Well this seems exactly what happened, so great
Not noticing any asymmetry?
Daniel Geisler (Nov 05 2022 at 01:04):My day job as a retiree is preparing for a post-capitalistic world and connects with having spent years as a yogic monk. Many people know me as Prashanta which means dynamic peace - a deep part of my identity is to protect people and the Earth as a whole. I have worked with violent developmentally disabled people where I constantly had to intercede to protect people including using my body as a shield for others. The most important part of the job was being able to turn the other cheek and not retaliate when hit. And I have also had very close ties to the military and government.
As someone who had been a yogic monk for years, I entered the US Air Force in 1978. A major part of this message is the importance of diverse people connecting up. In basic training I meditated at the end of the day. At the end of basic there where half a dozen of up meditating at night.
I ended up with AFTAC which monitors the nuclear test ban treaty - it also has deep ties to DARPA. At least in the eighties AFTAC was a world class scientific institution. Our geophysical division was decades ahead of the rest of the scientific establishment. As a young man it transformed my life working with so many elite people and projects. Not just intellectually, many people had great honor and civic commitment. I have many good memories of AFTAC.
As a computer developer I have worked for the State Department on multiple projects. Very politically and intellectually sophisticated people. Some institutes are together, some are a mess. All inside beltway reality.
I don't accept Grothendieck's answer to the existence of the military. Even out bodies had immune systems. Things get better when people come together. I've become good friends with surprising people - as should be. The Air Force and the government accepted me for who I was and even gave me a Top Secret clearance. Just like the rest of reality, there are exceptional parts and those which are not. Just be resolute in your beliefs and you will change your surroundings for the better wherever you are.
Steve Huntsman (Dec 06 2022 at 18:01):Steve Huntsman said:
Jules Hedges said:
I'll take the turn to place the obtuse part here. The US as a nation and especially the US military is left playing with its toys and pretending that it's important. There's still a real risk that it could throw a tantrum and hurt someone with its toys, but "US global power" isn't really a thing in this millennium. Pretending that it's still important is not helpful to anyone
Bumping this in light of events since
We should make sure that we are stronger. And now I must be very honest, brutally honest with you. Europe isn't strong enough right now. We would be in trouble without the United States involving in the war in Ukraine. The United States have given a lot of weapons, a lot of financial aid, a lot of humanitarian aid to Ukraine, and Europe isn't strong enough yet. And we have to make sure that we are also building those capabilities when it comes to European defense, European defense industry, and making sure that we could cope in different kind of situations. -Finland PM Sanna Marin, 3 Dec 2022
"We would be in trouble without the United States." Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin says Russia's war in Ukraine shows that the European Union isn't strong enough. https://twitter.com/dwnews/status/1599003729801396231/video/1
- DW News (@dwnews) Keith Elliott Peterson (Mar 26 2023 at 01:27):Bob Coecke said:
Jade Master said:
Bob, not going to tag you but no offense what you said about quantum computing breaking down borders makes very little sense to me. I see no political or social content in it. That's fine...but it seems strange to call yourself Bakounin without much to back it up.
It's the simple cartesian vs non-cartesian point of view. Lawvere developed much of his category theory from a Leninist point of view. But that was a very Cartesian point of view. Embracing the world to be truly monoidal, gives a different view on humanity, at least for me. So what I was referring to was more the acceptance of nature being non-cartesian. Technology can contribute to major changes in worldview.
@Bob Coecke , what exactly do you mean by a "Cartesian vs Non-Cartesian" point-of-view?
Jean-Baptiste Vienney (Mar 26 2023 at 18:30):Maybe he is talking about cartesian categories vs monoidal categories. Cartesian categories are classical physics, related to calculus (eg. differential lambda calculus), a notion of truth (intuitionnist logic) and infinity (because you can copy indefinitely data from one object). Monoidal categories are quantum mechanics, they are more about processes and discreetness. The two can be reconciled by the exponential modality of linear logic which gives a Cartesian (closed) category as the coKleisli category of a comonad on a Monoidal (closed) category. As such one can even view linear logic as an adjunction between a linear (the second one) and a non-linear (the first one) category. But the most important one is really the linear one ie. the monoidal category. Cartesian categories and intuitionnistic logic have a more “theological” flavour than Monoidal categories and the linear part of linear logic because it comes from ideas about eternal truth and infinity which can cause damage into our finite world eg. think to global warming.
Jean-Baptiste Vienney (Mar 26 2023 at 18:36):We must understand that natural resources are not available freely as an object in a Cartesian category that can be copied indefinitely. In linear logic, or (linear and not cartesian) monoidal categories, the notion of ressource is important. is two units of which is different from a single unit . I guess Bob Coecke was doing a political interpretation of this idea.
John Baez (Mar 27 2023 at 23:40):Yes, I think this is a very nice explanation about the dangers of "cartesian thinking", meaning "thinking the universe is like a cartesian category". I like to say that a cartesian category is like an office where all you deal with is documents and you have a perfect copying machine and a perfect waste basket, so you can duplicate and throw out documents to your heart's content and never run out of money, or ink, or space in your waste basket.
John Baez (Mar 27 2023 at 23:42):We can try to imagine the real world is a category where morphisms are physical processes, but if we do it's very non-cartesian: we cannot freely copy and delete things, and this is why things are precious.
Keith Elliott Peterson (Mar 28 2023 at 01:01):Sure, but are no-cloning and no-deletions theorems what @Bob Coecke is getting at?
John Baez (Mar 28 2023 at 01:12):I thought Jean-Baptiste and I explained it, but let me make it more explicit. A cartesian attitude (in this technical sense) can lead to a highly idealized unphysical attitude to the world, where nothing is precious - everything is just data that can be copied.
John Baez (Mar 28 2023 at 01:14):The internet with cloud computing is our current best attempt to implement this cartesian heaven here on earth, and as long as we're all jacked in to cyberspace we may not notice that we're destroying the real world to live in this fake heaven.
John Baez (Mar 28 2023 at 01:19):Probably @Bob Coecke has a somewhat different take on what's bad about cartesianness. But to put really crudely: it's fake.
More precisely, it's not about our world, it's about an idealized world that is nice in various ways. And whenever we get take idealizations too seriously, bad things happen.
Keith Elliott Peterson (Mar 28 2023 at 02:55):Sure, we now live in a world where people freely pollute and create trash, and governments freely create money to keep an "ideal" amount of inflation, to encourage consumer spending. In a sense, the rejection of linearity (in the sense of linear logic) by the powers and forces that be in a modern society?
What does this have to do with a "Leninist perspective" of Lawvere? Is Leninism inherently Cartesian?
Also, I suspect Lawvere might have countered that the human mind and the thoughts that inhabit it are a part of nature just as much as flowers, rocks, and stars. Just that we have to keep in mind (heh) the separation between concrete and abstract categories.
John Baez (Mar 28 2023 at 05:49):Is Leninism inherently Cartesian?
I'll have to let Bob Coecke, or Lawvere's writings, or someone, answer that. I've never understood anything about "Leninism".
Bob Coecke (Mar 28 2023 at 09:17):John Baez said:
Probably Bob Coecke has a somewhat different take on what's bad about cartesianness. But to put really crudely: it's fake.
More precisely, it's not about our world, it's about an idealized world that is nice in various ways. And whenever we get take idealizations too seriously, bad things happen.
It's not even fake, just bloody boring. :) And indeed, most stuff in the world is simply not Cartesian, from a process-theoretic point of view. The reason the old generation went full-on Cartesian was because of the universal property obsession. But for me, compact closure is actually also like a property. The maths isn't entirely in place yet for this, but here are the intuitions: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.00708
Steve Huntsman (Jul 31 2023 at 21:08):Jon Sterling said:
To John Baez and the other "moderators": Consider whether there is not also a mortal threat in Huntman's blithe advocation for US interventions in other countries... This is a threat to millions of people, but I suppose it matters much less to you and the other moderators because these millions of people are not citizens of wealthy western countries like we are. To be honest, I stand by what I said 100%, and I will be departing this Zulip entirely as you have shown it to be an inhospitable place for anyone who sides against imperialist mass-murder and the machine that makes it go. This Zulip is a great shame on the category theory community, an embarrassment to everyone involved.
I invite anyone to wishes to discuss these matters further with me to email me, jon@jonmsterling.com.
OK so anyway "anyone who sides against imperialist mass-murder and the machine that makes it go" and is in the DC area for ACT 2023 is welcome to join me and others after the conference ends on Friday night across the street from the russian embassy: https://www.facebook.com/events/3758675377781576/
Additional background is here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/03/us/politics/russia-embassy-ukraine-war.html
Hypatia du Bois-Marie (Aug 07 2023 at 15:58):A truly noble cause, dearest 手足 (Cantonese for "fellow advocates", originated in Hong Kong's movements against the communist party)!
Jade Master (Aug 07 2023 at 18:45):Hey did anyone see Oppenheimer? No particular reason why I am mentioning it in this thread :P
John Baez (Aug 07 2023 at 19:10):I haven't seen it yet, but I will.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 07 2023 at 19:34):Jade Master said:
Hey did anyone see Oppenheimer? No particular reason why I am mentioning it in this thread :P
No good seats yesterday. But you may find my Amazon purchase history of interest and I'll also mention that I once took a course on nuclear weapons at the Naval Postgraduate School, so I would wager I've thought more about this topic than most.
image.png
image.png
image.png
John Baez (Aug 07 2023 at 19:38):I didn't take a class classified course on nuclear weapons, but I slept in a Holiday Inn.
(Joke based on an old ad.)
No, actually I've read Rhodes' book on the making of the atomic bomb, a biography of Oppenheimer, and a bunch of other stuff - I'm fascinated by the Manhattan project.
Steve Huntsman (Aug 07 2023 at 19:43):John Baez said:
I didn't take a class classified course on nuclear weapons, but I slept in a Holiday Inn.
(Joke based on an old ad.)
No, actually I've read Rhodes' book on the making of the atomic bomb, a biography of Oppenheimer, and a bunch of other stuff - I'm fascinated by the Manhattan project.
Some of the most interesting stuff about nuclear sociology is by Hugh Gusterson and Alex Wellerstein (the latter of whom I've had lunch with, and who also made the sobering NUKEMAP that informed my choice of a location for buying a house in the DC area)
Naso (Aug 10 2023 at 02:11):Jade Master said:
Hey did anyone see Oppenheimer? No particular reason why I am mentioning it in this thread :P
[SPOILER?]
I saw it and without exaggerating it is one of the worst and most boring movies I've ever seen. And I do actually like some other films from Nolan (Inception, Interstellar). I am totally confused why it is getting good reviews. Beyond being boring as shit, the most egregious point is it barely acknowledges the horrific violence against Japanese civilians- the main moral dilemma is about Oppenheimer having his security clearance revoked or something? 0/5 :star:
Todd Trimble (Aug 10 2023 at 05:05):I haven't seen Oppenheimer yet, but I did see Adventures of a Mathematician (based on Stan Ulam's book) not long ago, and wow, talk about unbelievably boring. Ulam of course was a prominent figure at Los Alamos.
The "security clearance revoked or something" was actually a pretty huge event of the time.
Hypatia du Bois-Marie (Aug 10 2023 at 09:50):Todd Trimble said:
I haven't seen Oppenheimer yet, but I did see Adventures of a Mathematician (based on Stan Ulam's book) not long ago, and wow, talk about unbelievably boring. Ulam of course was a prominent figure at Los Alamos.
The "security clearance revoked or something" was actually a pretty huge event of the time.
So cool! (although I'd personally like a film about Gödel more
Hypatia du Bois-Marie (Aug 10 2023 at 09:55):Naso said:
it barely acknowledges the horrific violence against Japanese civilians
yeah... that would be something particularly more resonating to a lot of researchers then and today (if you've heard the stories of Yau and Tian, or more relevantly about the notorious political scientist Wang Huning