Comment by alexb_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexb_ | Hacker News Reader

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So what exactly should we be doing? Not developing any technology at all with the military? Making the military look as unappealing and awful as possible so that we completely lose any and all advantage we have over other countries in military might?

War is awful. It's horrific and has killed millions and traumatized or impacted millions and millions more. But someone has to be good at it. Because if we as a nation decide to not be the best at it, someone else will. And I would much rather have the United States and it's moral systems be running things than our enemies.

>I understand it comes with the territory in the US south

Please, please, please stop talking about the south as a monolith. Or as if you are somehow so above the dumb hicks in the south, who are not enlightened with your amazing views such as "why don't we just stop killing eachother?".

>When we promote content, we do so in a wider context: we are also promoting the creator of that content, and their views on society, and our attention and linking is materially enriching them to further those views

This is such a horrible and terrible way to think about things on the internet. This type of thinking is how you get extremists and complete and utter polarization. Because when you not just unconsciously surround yourself with media that only you agree with, but WILLFULLY do it, you hurt yourself and make extremism even more likely. And that's only for things that are relevant - you are going a step further, and taking this to a level that makes no sense. If you were in charge of hiring people, would you never hire anyone who was pro-military? You putting money in their pocket is enriching them to help further their views which are oh-so-terrible. This type of thinking gets really bad, really fast, and it's not something we want to promote. It's exclusionary thinking that can only result in missing out on very talented people because of something that isn't actually relevant.

"A permanent peace cannot be prepared by threats but only by the honest attempt to create a mutual trust. However strong national armaments may be, they do not create military security for any nation nor do they guarantee the maintenance of peace."

"I believe serious progress (in the abolition of war) can be achieved only when men become organized on an international scale and refuse, as a body, to enter military or war service."

- Albert Einstein (both quotes)

When was this said? In what context?

Why is Einstein being quoted as if he knows anything about war, or politics, or the human nature to fight for what one believes is right?

Separate reply for a separate topic.

> If you were in charge of hiring people, would you never hire anyone who was pro-military? You putting money in their pocket is enriching them to help further their views which are oh-so-terrible. This type of thinking gets really bad, really fast, and it's not something we want to promote.

With the exception of those who are military veterans, who are a protected class in the United States for purposes of hiring (it's actually illegal to discriminate against them on that basis), yes, I can and do actively avoid hiring anyone pro-military who is not presently (and has not been) actually in the military (which is the maximum extent permitted by law).

There's no injustice in discrimination for purposes of association when such discrimination is based on the informed, adult choices of a person (as opposed to someone's inbuilt traits, which they have no control over). We rightfully discriminate during hiring based on whether or not someone chose to attend university, whether or not someone chooses to espouse racist views, whether or not someone chooses to use or avoid certain technologies, whether or not someone has chosen to develop (or not) their social skills, whether or not someone chooses to move to the location of the proposed job offer. These are great and useful.

Freedom of association is one of our most powerful tools for improving society (both in the macro, as well as in the micro, such as in a company or organization). We don't owe anyone our time or attention or association (or YouTube views) if we don't agree with the kind of world they're trying to build.

It also makes for a nicer workplace when you opt to avoid hiring people who are racist, or pro-violence, or anti-human-rights, or anti-equal-application-of-the-law, or any manner of a big list of optional adult choices that tell you a lot about a person's thinking (or lack thereof) about the world around them.

(Before the straw man argument: this is not an argument for hiring people who are "just like me", or only who share my views, or an embracing of the status quo, or any of the other obvious traps that are endemic in hiring. This is an argument for exercising judgement on specific constrained topics which should be universal in a civilized culture and unfortunately are nowhere near universal in our current culture.)

If I am advocating for anything, it is to discriminate more using your own criteria to build a better world, however you see best to do that. It's fine if you have different opinions from me (maybe you want to prefer hiring military promoters or something?), the point is that we should be making these choices more consciously to steer society in the right directions.

These are mine. Yours will be different. Choose to be a moral person, and do what is right. We'll all get there together eventually, because there are vastly more of us who don't want violence (or violent ideologies) in our societies.

>We rightfully discriminate during hiring based on whether or not someone chose to attend university, whether or not someone chooses to espouse racist views, whether or not someone chooses to use or avoid certain technologies, whether or not someone has chosen to develop (or not) their social skills, whether or not someone chooses to move to the location of the proposed job offer. These are great and useful.

We discriminate on those things during hiring because all of them are directly relevant to the job. If you have a social job, you need good social skills. If you work with other people, then someone who makes the people around them or certain groups of people they work with/could potentially work with feel unsafe shouldn't be there. If you have to use a certain technology to do your job, and there is no reasonable workaround for that, then they aren't suitable for the job.

Discriminating on literally ANYTHING else, on ANYTHING that is not relevant to the job being done, is blatantly awful and should not be promoted on any level of any organization. This shouldn't even be a controversial issue.

>this is not an argument for hiring people who are "just like me", or an embracing of the status quo. This is an argument for exercising judgement on specific topics which should be universal in a civilized culture.

What those specific topics are, or what you think should be "universal in a civilized culture", is completely up to each person. That's pretty much what political opinions are. And this type of thinking is the basis of a lot of discrimination that we should not be promoting in absolutely any way. If someone had a religion that promoted war , would you not hire them? What about if someone is from the south, and you haven't heard them be racist but you know how those southerners are. Is the law literally the only thing that's preventing you from saying no to these questions? If the answer to any of these are yes, then you are contributing to discrimination that has absolutely no place in the world.

> Discriminating on literally ANYTHING else, on ANYTHING that is not relevant to the job being done, is blatantly awful and should not be promoted on any level of any organization.

Why? Organizations are always subsets of the world in which they operate, and I don't see how being picky about the types of people with whom one associates is any sort of inherent injustice (other than the fact that, if applied improperly, it may hinder or otherwise impede/impair the organization, or (again, if applied improperly) deny opportunity to the disadvantaged on the wrong/unjust basis).

If I theoretically wanted to never hire people who are, say, sports fanatics, what's bad about that (outside of the fact that it may or may not make my team perform better or worse)?

Or, for a more concrete example: I do actually refuse to hire people who are both a) presently addicted to nicotine and b) consume tobacco combustion smoke to service that addiction. My personal thesis is that not quitting smoking in 2022 (and further not switching to a vaporizer now that such is widely available) is correlated with a specific lack of important personality and cognitive traits that make someone maximally effective in life (and at work). Am I being awful, and why?

You seem to approach it as something inherently bad, and I'm curious as to why, because I don't see any (external) harm whatsoever in it, and I should be free to make bad(?) hiring decisions that potentially kneecap (or benefit) my own team/company if I choose.

In fact, given that people working within the team/company are entirely opt-in, I see the ability to shape a team on other important social axes using these sorts of methods as a very important competitive differentiator (for better or worse; one would hope it results in competitive advantage) with regards to attracting and retaining talent (from relatively insignificant "your coworkers won't be ashtray stinky" all the way up to things like "your coworkers won't be TERFs").

What's the social/moral downside? Is there one?

I'm not going to explain to you why discriminating on things not relevant to job performance is bad. The fact that we have horseshoe'd our selves back to this conversation is honestly appalling.

Appalling viewpoints. We should all strive to do better and stop judging others for their decisions.

I don’t smoke but I’ll hire a smoker!

> Or, for a more concrete example: I do actually refuse to hire people who are both a) presently addicted to nicotine and b) consume tobacco combustion smoke to service that addiction. My personal thesis is that not quitting smoking in 2022 (and further not switching to a vaporizer now that such is widely available) is correlated with a specific lack of important personality and cognitive traits that make someone maximally effective in life (and at work). Am I being awful, and why?

Aren't you precisely making the point that you would be discriminating on something relevant to the job being done?

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