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Comment by csours | Hacker News Reader

Several comments here about what is the missing X factor - why did these guys get along. The quoted story takes place during World War II, and they were developing nuclear technology, specifically The Bomb. It's very easy to look back and criticize the outcome, but AT THE TIME, these people thought that they had to do this to preserve their way of life and defeat evil.

I think this is a critical component of any moonshot - you have to have competition or some motivation that feels like an external compulsion.

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What I hear is that these people are really listening and paying attention.

In so many normal conversations people are repeating over and over again because they assume it goes in one ear and out the other and they are right.

I think most conversations are each person waiting for the other person’s mouth to stop moving so they can make their own point. I.e. no listening, just talking. Worse in larger groups.

I find part of the issue is how fleeting opportunities for intimate conversation are. It's been a long time since I've sat down with a drink, a friend and a few hours to kill. I have friends and do a lot of things, but they're all activity based. I do love that, but it can make conversation pretty shallow.

Another part of the issue is the internet, for many reasons, but specifically related to this is that it's killed people's curiosity and their ability to discuss a topic for fun. The internet gives people their opinions, and answers any ambiguity in an instant. Want to know what the best tire for your bike is? No need to discuss it, the internet told them what's correct, case closed.

Covid has had an effect. I like to do things like ski, backpack and such with my friends. We'd usually drive up together in a car, or couple of cars, which gave time for all sorts of yakking. With Covid you're supposed to take individual cars.

"I find part of the issue is how fleeting opportunities for intimate conversation are. It's been a long time since I've sat down with a drink, a friend and a few hours to kill. I have friends and do a lot of things, but they're all activity based. I do love that, but it can make conversation pretty shallow."

It's rather curious to me to see how others live their lives in ways that they're limited on details that I take for granted as normal and regular. I see many people here describing activities that I haven't done in years or ever too, and then run into something like your comment above, where sitting down with a friend for a drink and a few hours of conversation is a rare thing, though in my case I usually find the time to do it at least once a week to refresh and relax, and have done it without interruptions for years now. Just an observation on these differences between lives in general.

If the context wasn't WWII then the meeting might have gone very differently. A high level of crisis can tend to focus things a bit. It will, by necessity, bias things towards action when some action is definitively required. At that point the hope is that you stumble upon a moderately effective (or better) course of action and not just one that says, "we have to do something. $X is something, therefore we have to do $X"

In my workplace during the pandemic I have seen this bias towards action play out. New (barely MVP) systems and integrations build in a week that would have been a year to get to the same point normally. A yes, there were a few nonsense "$action must be done" as well, but we managed the crisis too.

You're missing the point of the story. It wasn't "bias toward action". It was "the point was made once sat the beginning of a long meeting, never brought up again, and ended up being considered the right outcome at the end." That is, what made the meeting exciting was that everyone presented an opinion, did it one time, and retained what everyone else said.

Yes, and I'm saying that if it weren't a war crisis that meeting may have played out very differently. And I'm saying that meetings today, now & throughout the COVID crisis, have played out very differently than before, resembling that of the linked article more closely.

There has certainly been more discussion & review of options than in the linked article, more debating of relative merits. But, then again, the circumstances I've been working through in my organization are not as clear cut as the optimal method of extracting a substance where there are discrete known facts. And the people involved have been experts in varying domains, not all physicists or related backgrounds where the merits of an opinion can be understood by the others without more discussion. Also this was one meeting: I doubt that every meeting among the people in the article all went so smoothly, with never debate or need for someone to rearticulate or expand their explanation of a point of view.

Please note that I am not saying these men weren't great, and that the group dynamic Feynman describes isn't at least partly indicative of their level of intelligence. What I am saying is that the group dynamic described is not unique to people of towering genius. Having weathered many crisis (to be sure none on the scale of WW II) my observation is that this group dynamic cannot be disentangled from the crisis context and only-- somewhat simplistically-- attributed to "these were great men". Greatness of mind is not a universal panacea for indecision and uncertainly. Crisis on the other hand forces people to push through those things.

There was a really good TED talk at some point about effective communication - and probably books as well - where points in your comment and other sibling ones were addressed; repeating oneself was one of them, it assumes the other party wasn't listening. Not listening was another one, either through distraction or because of waiting for their turn to speak.

I've seen it a lot in meetings, part of it is excitement, people really eager to bring their Knowledge to the table, or that they need to get things out of their system before the conversation goes somewhere else.

I think there should be a lot more formalized meetings, in the sense that people are coached to finish one sentence / idea before moving on to the next, to ensure that all voices are heard, etc.

I think about how to get better at it a lot.

I worked at a mediation center with a woman (a founder) who could listen to two people talk about a dispute for 90 minutes, not take any notes, listen carefully and make a detailed verbal summary of what the people said. It amazed me.

I was in a call just now where there was a knock-down drag-out discussion going on that we've had before. It was tempting to disengage, daydream. I was waiting to write this comment the whole time but was able to stop it because it was worth listening to the group which is the only way out of the impasse. I find myself asking, "What is it going take for this person to feel heard?" (I wish I could just ask them that!)

David Snyder is a hypnotist who makes videos on Youtube and he says that if you want people to feel mirrored it's powerful to remember and be able to repeat what the person said using the same words in the same order. Even if there is a place for paraphrasing, the more exact you can be the more certain you can be heard.

We were having a stoned discussion at my house and my son was feeling that people were talking over him so I cleared off the whiteboard and summarized what he said. I was not going to "lose" and let him walk away saying that I hadn't listened to him. Sometimes he got really upset when I made him pause so I could take a picture of the board and clear it but I didn't stop until he didn't have anything more to say and he acknowledged that he'd been heard.

I have an ideal of working towards of being able to offer people an unreasonable level of mirroring because of the power it has for drawing people in. I know I can't be perfect at it and can't expect perfect mirroring for others but I try to imagine there's no limit to how good I can do it.

I was at a party the other day and a woman tried to flatter me based on a superficial thing about my intelligence and my first reaction was "Yuck! I've always felt my intelligence was something that separated me from other people. I'd appreciate it if somebody said I was funny or brave and probably not be able to think straight if somebody said I was handsome, but..." I had to step back and try to appreciate the sentiment but I thought about it and thought some more and decided I'd rather not make that mistake when I'm trying to seduce someone.

I see a lot of people at the gym who have their bodies on display but are really defended and I don't feel I could talk to anybody about their superficial characteristics. I am only going to talk to somebody if I can show I really saw something about them that was personal, unique and touches me.

There's one lady who really whoops it up when the Baltimore Ravens are playing on Sunday and that's one of the very few people I can talk to because boy I know she is crazy about football!

An alternative theory is that they all got along because they were mostly Ashkenazi Jews from central Europe, especially Hungary.

Also, these were the only guys who were trying seriously, they were on a mission,and in a military environment

Not sure who, besides the Japanese at the time, have really criticised the outcome. Even now the Japanese seem to at least understand why it had to happen. It was the difference between Nazi fascism winning global hegemony or not. I don’t think there’s a serious argument that it shouldn’t have happened.

I'm not well read on the topic, and I do tend to agree with you, but I can imagine an argument like:

- nuclear threat is a serious cost to productivity and well-being - the bomb merely brought forward a conclusion that was already looking inevitable

There's an obvious counter that some nation likely would have developed nuclear weapons independently - America was merely the first.

Nonetheless, I think it's not a given that the bomb was a positive.

There are very convincing historical arguments on why the bomb was both unnecessary and also why it didn't in fact play any role in Japan's surrender (it sound unlikely, but conventional bombing raids were annihilating Japanese cities at such a clip that Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn't even register as anything different with the decision-making group; they decided to capitulate when the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and all hopes of avoiding unconditional surrender were dashed). Google brings up plenty of reading material.

Listen to at least the end of the “Supernova in the East” episodes of Hardcore History.

Those arguments decontextualize the war and are self-defeating in that the Allies were willing to give Dresden and other cities a treatment not much different from Hiroshima in the end. At the scale of 2 bombs, the a-bomb was wasn’t a revolution in war, that wasn’t going to happen until solidly in the mid 1950s where there was a large supply of devices that were practical use.

Another factor was that the U.S. thought it was very possible we’d be going to war with Russia and was slow to demobilize so there was definitely the intent to intimidate the Soviet Union even that early.

Adding this link: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-08-05/hiroshima-a...

Plenty do criticize the outcome and with reasonable justification. Your reasoning doesn't take into account that when the nukes were dropped Nazi Germany had already unconditionally surrendered. Sure, it was too costly to invade Japan.. but in retrospect, blockading and sanctioning might have achieved the same goals without indiscriminately obliterating 200,000 innocents.

Germany did not unconditionally surrender until Hitler was dead and Berlin was overrun. Japan would have done the same. More than 200k innocents would have died.

Hence blockade and sanction. No need to invade.

More than 200k still would have died under that scheme as well.

Would they?

Yes

And how do you know that?

You're welcome to find the original sources. There are several excellent books on the topic. I suggest using Google to find one that piques your interest. You definitely seem like the type to "do your own research" Mr Just-Asking-Questions guy.

I fail to see how that would have led to a more humane outcome for the civilian population. The military controlled the government, they get first dibs on resources, not the civilian population.

Why did they need to unconditionally surrender?

Mostly to free Korea, Burma, and China.

Why would that be needed for that? "Conditional surrender" doesn't mean there are no conditions the other way.

Japan rejected losing the occupied territories.

And nothing other than murdering thousands of civilians with an atomic bomb could change that?

A blockade and air raids also causes deaths. The literal name for the blockading operations with mines around Japan was Operation Starvation.

Sometimes there are only bad options available. The bomb was the best choice

Thanks for the interesting reading! I took a dive and it turns out Operation Starvation was remarkably effective and arguably should have been used earlier [0]. Also it didn't actually lead to any deaths from starvation [1]. Here are some excerpts.

"After the war, the commander of Japan's minesweeping operations noted that he thought this mining campaign could have directly led to the defeat of Japan on its own had it begun earlier. Similar conclusions were reached by American analysts who reported in July 1946 in the United States Strategic Bombing Survey that it would have been more efficient to combine the United States' effective anti-shipping submarine effort with land- and carrier-based air power to strike harder against merchant shipping and begin a more extensive aerial mining campaign earlier in the war. This would have starved Japan, forcing an earlier end to the war." [0]&[2]

"While some of the main actors (the UK, the US, Germany, and Japan) escaped famine..." [1]

"In Britain, Germany, and Japan, rationing was effective; even though food availability was sharply reduced almost everywhere, few literally died of hunger. Britain and Germany managed to maintain food consumption per capita at about 3,000 calories throughout the war. In Japan consumption fell from a norm of 2,000 calories per capita before Pearl Harbor to 1,900 calories in 1944, plummeting to 1,680 calories by the war’s end." [1]

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Starvation

1: https://voxeu.org/article/famines-wwii

2: https://www.anesi.com/ussbs01.htm

Depends what you mean by "the outcome" here.

If you mean developing the bomb, then fine.

If you mean dropping the bomb, then that seems pretty controversial.

I thought it was pretty well established that the USA knew Japan was willing to surrender, but dropped the bomb anyway?

> the USA knew Japan was willing to surrender, but dropped the bomb anyway?

This is the opposite of what I usually hear? I've heard things about how Japan was getting ready to fight to the last man, starting to arm civilians.

I have heard that the emperor was maybe willing to surrender, but that the country was essentially being run by the military leadership, who would ~never see surrender as an option.

Well, that's what Truman said.

I'm pretty sure the US thought that every man between 16 and 65 was going to be given a weapon and fight for every inch of Japanese soil. That at the time it was considered likely that we would have to fight a long war of attrition across the island losing hundreds of thousands of Americans and being forced to kill uncountable Japanese conscripts.

We never had to do that. We could have simply not invaded the main islands. Furthermore, we could have offered a peace agreement that ends the war without occupation of Japan.

I don't know if we could have just offered peace. The Japanese forces on various islands were refusing to surrender, even when vastly outnumbered. Japan may not have recognized a peace treaty without an occupation. Further, if the US didn't occupy Japan, the USSR could and the Japanese people could have been absorbed as another soviet state.

We know the Japanese forces outside of Japan would have surrendered if there was a peace treaty, because that's what happened. That would be the purpose of a peace treaty (and exchange of prisoners, etc.).

If the USSR decided to invade Japan on its own, who cares? We could let them fight. Or we could ally with Japan.

>If you mean dropping the bomb, then that seems pretty controversial

I honestly see this as a purely gut-level reaction to the astonishing power of the nuclear bomb more than anything about the victims. The casualties of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are but a rounding error next to all those who died by fire bombing, carpet bombing, siege and starvations, and all the other infernos of WW2.

It's not that this makes it okay, it just makes it strange that the bombings get all this attention in popular culture over other much more horrific atrocities and massacres. This was probably an effect of the 1960s/1970s/1980s terror of nuclear projected back on the events of 1945.

Pure gut level reactions do make a difference though. The exact mechanism of threat can make a substantive difference to fear and how an enemy react. The brutal nature of nuclear weapons could be a feature.

If you want to have a comprehensive view of what happened and why things happened, I cannot recommend Dan Carlin's Hardcore History series enough on this topic [0].

The A bomb is extensively discussed late in the series, with shift in the strategy from strategic bombing to mass firebombing as US were preparing the invasion of mainland japan.

TL;DR: > I thought it was pretty well established that the USA knew Japan was willing to surrender, but dropped the bomb anyway?

Simply not true, however answering if Abomb was good move or not, is such a complex and nuanced question you cannot just have a simple statement for or against.

The USA feared the invasion of mainland japan because of the unimaginable looses they would incur. Japan's population was prepared to fight USA with sharpened bamboo stick, and I mean population as in civilians, as in EVERY single person is possibly out to get you. Just imagine what kind of mental damage you would put of your soldiers to have to mow down scores of suicidal civilians. Note that this behaviour was already showing up as US were nearing closer to actual japan.

Also you had USSR freed from fighting nazis having a massive score to settle with japan. Do you want uncle stalin also be involved? (given what happened to west/east germany was it better japan avoided est/west japan split?)

Have a listen to [1] on the accounts of firebombing of Tokyo. It horrendous fate in comparison to A-bomb. On top the horror of slowly burning alive trapped in fire cage there were far more death from firebombings/carpetbombings than Abombs.

[0]https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-62-supern...

[1]https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-67-supern...

I thought it was pretty well established that the USA knew Japan was willing to surrender, but dropped the bomb anyway?

There are a few different theories about this, and still some controversy about it all to this very day as I understand it.

One idea holds that Japan would have surrendered earlier had the Allies not insisted on the abolition of the role of the Emperor (who as I understand it, is something akin to God in Japanese culture). This was apparently a step too far for the Japanese at the time.

Another idea holds that even if the Allies had invaded, the Japanese would have quickly capitulated IF the Russians were part of the invasion. Supposedly Japan was uniquely afraid of Russia at that moment in history, for some reason. I don't recall now the details behind this suggestion.

I can't say much about the veracity of either position, but those are two themes I've heard repeatedly about the situation.

The speculation I’ve read is that dropping the bomb was as much about deterring the Russians than preventing a ground invasion of Japan.

I have studied this and as yet I am unable to find any evidence that Truman thought Japans surrender was imminent. All evidence I have found seems to point to Truman actually believing that dropping the bomb would save lives- both American and Japanese.

If you have any evidence otherwise, I would be interested in reviewing it.

That is wrong. The difference was how quickly Japan would lose the war after Germany was already a non-factor. The cost was how bloody the defeat would be and the calculation was that the bombs would result in fewer lives lost overall. Japan wasn’t going to win one way or the other.

> It was the difference between Nazi fascism winning global hegemony or not. I don’t think there’s a serious argument that it shouldn’t have happened.

By the time nukes were dropped on Japan [0] in August 1945 nazi Germany was defeated, the war in Europe ended, Soviets attacked Japanese army in Manchuria [1] on August 9-th -- the day of Nagasaki bombing.

Dropping bombs on Japan had one main purpose - to show the Soviets who is the boss and prevent them from invading and occupying Japan before the USA can do it.

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

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet–Japanese_War

That's a pretty bizarre reading of history. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan because Stalin had promised Roosevelt and Churchill at the 1943 Tehran conference, so this was not some sort of surprising or unwelcome development.

The surprising development was just how quickly the Manchurian front collapsed against the Soviet Union. The Kwantung Army, and Japan's ability to continue the war, even in a defensive capability completely fell apart in 7 days. Japan was utterly reliant on supplies and raw materials from its Chinese and Korean puppet states.

Between that, and the amphibious attacks against Korea, the Kurils, and Sakhalin, the US was on a pretty short clock to end the war before communism had a chance to move in, and settle down.

Stalin respected the pre-agreed partition of Europe, but neither Postdam, nor Tehran said very much about who would be in control of what part of the Japanese empire after the war... And in practice, this meant that when the war ended, possession, in the form of 'whose army is parked where' was nine tenths of the law.

The United States was not at all interested in seeing an East/West Japan partition. North/South Korea was bad enough.

It was not surprising for sure, but Truman who succeeded Roosevelt was not keen seeing Russians meddling in Japan when it was already on a brink of defeat and surrender. Nukes can cool off Stalin's appetite quite effectively.

The atom bomb project was initiated out of a fear that Germany would get it first.

Which has nothing to do with the question of why the bombs where dropped years later.

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