That was part of the mission profile, no? If it hadn’t been you’d have a point, but as I understand it that was a reasonable milestone to hit and to determine if an animal can even survive for a time in orbit before they risked a human life.
Animals often die in experimentation and that’s usually the whole point of the experiment.
3-days is a pretty short time for such a major shift in politics for starters. Would a 3rd or 4th have been justified in the 6 day gap before their August 15th surrender announcement if the US had had them available?
Also the justification for the second bomb, that it was required to demonstrate it wasn't a one off doesn't require the that bomb be dropped on a second city either. The main thrust isn't that the bombs weren't effective it's that the extreme nature of the act requires extreme justification bordering on it being the only option but for a bloody home island invasion. See my other long posts about the anti-moral-bomb argument in this thread, I don't want to duplicate them here to avoid spamming the thread.
If the premise is that nuclear bombing was excessive compared to the firebombing and if the United States had waited a few more days between nuclear bombings they would have still continued with firebombing which was just as destructive as nuclear bombing and more people would have died.
The US wanted to end the war as quickly as possible and prevent the Soviets from invading and holding even a small piece of Japan for an indefinite period of time.
In doing so they probably prevented more deaths of Japanese civilians from continued firebombing and a Soviet occupation that would have been incredibly brutal.
And you can look at how the Soviets treated the people in the states that it occupied for decades after and compare it to how the US treated occupied Japan in the post war period.
The effects of both occupations still linger to this day, it's startling to look at economic differences in West Germany vs East Germany. It's doubtful that the USSR would have been able to prevent massive famines in Japan in a post war scenario where they occupied Japan or a portion of it.
A scenario where the US lacked nuclear weapons would have resulted in tremendous firebombing campaigns by both the Americans and the Soviets, as well as famine induced by a naval blockade and the war would have dragged on for much longer, drawing resources away from rebuilding both Europe and Asia, and the result would have been more civilian casualties from war and later famine that would have followed.
I don't think the blame for these civilian deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki falls on the shoulders of the Americans just like the deaths of civilians in the battle of Berlin were the responsibility of the European allies -- The blame lies squarely on the shoulders of the madmen who lead their countries to their doom for ultra nationalist reasons and a deranged sense of pride.
And that sense of pride thing there probably played into why the nuclear bombings were necessary -- The ultra-nationalist Japanese leadership needed to save face and it was easy to do so by surrendering to an enemy who had an unfathomably powerful new weapon.
Communications between Hiroshima and Tokyo had totally broken down. When input was received on what actually happened, it would have been so fantastic that it would have been hard to process. And this was at a time where the Bolsheviks-hard to understate the Imperial Japanese government's loathing and horror of Communism despite the pragmatic and often deeply mutually cynical relationship they had during the war-were about to go to war with them.
This comment[0] on HN from a while back marks the parallels between the two situations very clearly.
It's very frustrating talking about this subject with Americans online[1]. In general they seem to have blinders on regarding the magnitude of the consequences of their democratic choice in leadership.
I get a sense that a feeling of learned helplessness has beset the American people and that they're not able to imagine a world of agency and action against authoritarianism.
I don't know what can shake them out of their torpor, but I do know that the longer they take to wake up the higher the price of action will be.
> It's very frustrating talking about this subject with Americans online[1]. In general they seem to have blinders on regarding the magnitude of the consequences of their democratic choice in leadership.
If polls are to be believed, the majority of Americans do not, in fact, fit that description.
They won’t have that sort of moment of self reflection until someone does something like use Flock infrastructure to stalk and assassinate the CEO of another YC company and then it will only be brief and fleeting before they double down on supporting this kind of egregious behaviour.
Let's just use Flock cameras to track all top-level YC people, publish everything we possibly can. Absolutely and utterly eliminate their privacy until they learn to respect ours.
The last paragraph of this article mentions some work by UofT researchers to investigate how Canadian digital infrastructure is dependent on American infrastructure for the purposes of surveillance.
I believe the link below is from those researchers:
The implication of what you're saying is that pathological liars and perpetual grifter snake oil salesmen types aren't intelligent.
> All it can do is get exposed to specific examples, and learn that we don't like that.
I've heard it said that prison rehabilitation programs for prisoners diagnosed with psychopathy that are based around exposing them empathy for the victim are counter-productive. Apparently programs that teach these people to think about the consequences of their actions and how they're detrimental to their own personal well-being lower recidivism rates in this particular kind of group.
> The implication of what you're saying is that pathological liars and perpetual grifter snake oil salesmen types aren't intelligent.
No, I don't think that is the implication. I think you're making the "if all x's are y's, all y's are x's" mistake. I am saying LLMs cannot be moral because they don't have a mind, actual intelligence, or the ability to experience consequences. That doesn't mean that anything immoral is unintelligent.
If your buddy leaves his car parked at the top of a hill without the parking brake on and it rolls down the hill and side-swipes a bunch of vehicles and narrowly misses an elderly person walking by with a cane someone could easily say:
"Dude wtf is wrong with you, you left your car parked on the top of a hill with no brake and let it roll into traffic"
The phrasing doesn't absolve the offender of their negligent behaviour and the consequences of it.
The only thing thing does is the lack of action from regulators and society writ large.
Our lack of action is what allows people like Sam Altman and Dario and the irresponsible people who choose to work for them to be continue to be negligent.
> Hacker News is owned by Y Combinator, an American venture capital firm heavily invested in surveillance tech. Their moderators have time to remove our posts for copy-pasting small amounts of text but not to remove years of libel and harassment. Perhaps it's time for legal action.
Animals often die in experimentation and that’s usually the whole point of the experiment.
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