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Comment by jajko | Hacker News Reader

> But at some point, one needs to launch the thing

Do they? Even if risks are not mitigated and say risk for catastrophe can't be pushed below ie 15%? This ain't some app startup world where failure will lose a bit of money and time, and everybody moves on.

I get the political forces behind, nobody at NASA was/is probably happy with those, and most politicians are basically clueless clowns (or worse) chasing popularity polls and often wielding massive decisive powers over matters they barely understand at surface level.

But you can't cheat reality and facts, not more than say in casino.

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Maybe it's a bad analogy given the complexity of a rocket launch, but I always think about European exploration of the North Atlantic. Huge risk and loss of life, but the winners built empires on those achievements.

So yes, I agree that at some point you need to launch the thing.

This sounds like you are saying colonialism was a success story?

For the ones doing the colonizing? Overwhelmingly yes. A good potion of the issues with colonizing is about how the colonizing nations end up extracting massive amounts of resources for their own benefit.

In context, it sounds like you think that the genocide of indigenous peoples was totally worth it for European nations and that callous lack of concern for human life and suffering is an example to be followed by modern space programs.

I'd like to cut you the benefit of the doubt and assume that's not what you meant; if that's the case, please clarify.

You are not reading the context correctly. The original point was that establishing colonies was very risky, to which whyever implied that colonialism was not a success story. But in fact it was extremely successful from a risk analysis point of view. Some nations chose to risk lives and it paid off quite well for them. The nuance of how the natives were treated is frankly irrelevant to this analysis, because we're asking "did the risk pay off", not "did they do anything wrong".

I am not participating in amoral risk/reward analysis, and you should not be either.

If the cost was genocide or predictable and avoidable astronaut deaths, the risk didn't pay off; there's no risk analysis. This isn't "nuance" and there is no ambiguity here, it's literally killing people for personal gain.

> In context, it sounds like you think that the genocide of indigenous peoples was totally worth it for European nations and that callous lack of concern for human life and suffering is an example to be followed by modern space programs.

Can you provide a quote of where I said this is an example to be followed"? (This is a rhetorical question: I know you can't because I said nothing remotely akin to that.)

> I'd like to cut you the benefit of the doubt and assume that's not what you meant; if that's the case, please clarify.

Sure, to clarify: I meant precisely what I said. I did not mean any of the completely different nonsense you decided to suggest I was actually saying.

If you see "colonization benefited the people doing the colonizing" and interpret it as "colonization is an example to be followed", that's entirely something wrong with your reading comprehension.

You're not "cutting me some slack" by putting words in my mouth and then saying "but maaybe didn't mean that", and it's incredibly dishonesty and shitty of you to pretend you are.

> Can you provide a quote of where I said this is an example to be followed"?

People can read the context of what you said, there's no need to quote it.

In fact, I would advise you to read the context of what you said; if you don't understand why I interpreted your comment the way I did, maybe you should read the posts chain you responded to and that will help you understand.

> Sure, to clarify: I meant precisely what I said. I did not mean any of the completely different nonsense you decided to suggest I was actually saying.

Well, what you said, you said in a context. If you weren't following the conversation, you didn't have to respond, and you can't blame other people for trying to understand your comments as part of the conversation instead of in isolation.

Even if you said what you said oblivious to context, then I have to say, if you meant exactly what you said, then my response is that a risk/reward analysis which only considers economic factors and ignores human factors is reprehensible.

There is not a situation which exists in reality where we should be talking about economic success when human lives are at stake, without considering those human lives. If you want to claim "I wasn't talking about human life", then my response is simply, you should have been talking about human life because the actions you're discussing killed people and that the most important factor in understanding those events. You don't get to say "They took a risk and it paid off!" when the "risk" was wiping out entire populations--that's not a footnote or a minor detail, that's the headline.

The story of the Challenger disaster isn't "they took a risk ignoring engineers and lost reputation with the NASA client"--it's "they risked astronaut's lives to win reputation with the NASA client and ended up killing people". The story of colonizing North America isn't "they took a risk on exploring unknown territories and found massive new sources of resources" it's "they sacrificed the lives of sailors and soldiers to explore unknown territories, and then wiped out the inhabitants and took their resources".

Isn't it fairly obvious from history that you and the Renaissance-era colonizers calculate morality differently? You speak of things that should not be, but nonetheless were. The success of colonialism to the colonizers is obvious. Natives of the New World were regarded as primitives, non-believers, less than human. We see the actions of the European powers as abhorrent now, but 500 years ago they simply did not see things the way we do, and they acted accordingly.

What exactly is your point in the context of this conversation?

I'm a modern person, I have modern morality? Guilty as charged, I guess.

We're supposed to cut them some slack because they were just behaving as people of their time? Nah, I don't think so: there are plenty of examples of people at that time who were highly critical of colonialism and the treatment of indigenous people. If they can follow their moral compass so could Columbus and Cortez. "Everyone else was doing it" is not an excuse adults get to use: people are responsible for their own actions. As for their beliefs: they were wrong.

There are other points you could be making but I really hope you aren't making any of the other ones I can think of.

Obviously I don't know what points you fear I may be making.

What examples were there of anti-colonialism in those times? What influence would they have had over the monarchies and the church of their day? What influence did they exert?

I would contend that the moral compass of Columbus and Cortez was fundamentally different than yours or mine. They were products of a world vastly different than ours. You and I have modern morality; they did not. Since we cannot change the actions of the past, we can only hold them up as examples of how people were, and how they differ from (or are similar to) what we are now.

My complaint is that, to my eyes, you are criticizing them as if we moderns have some power over their actions. How can we expect them to have behaved as we would? We cannot change them or what they did. I'm not sure means "cutting them some slack." They did what they did; we can only observe the consequences and hope to do better.

I agree, their beliefs were wrong. Nonetheless, they believed what their culture taught them to believe. Yes, people of any era are responsible for their own actions, and if they act wrongly according to their culture, they should be punished for it. But if their culture sees no harm in what they are doing, they'll be rewarded. We certainly can't punish or reward them from 500 years in the future. We can only hope that what we believe, and how we act, is better.

> My complaint is that, to my eyes, you are criticizing them as if we moderns have some power over their actions.

We moderns have power over our own actions, and those actions are informed by the past.

In this thread we're talking about risk/reward analyses and for some reason, you and other people here seem oddly insistent that we not discuss the ethical implications of the actions on question.

And all-too-often, that's what happens today: companies look at the risk/reward in financial terms and ignore any ethical concerns. I would characterize the corporate approach to ethics as "complete disregard". The business ethics classes I took in college were, frankly, reprehensible; most of the material was geared toward rebranding various corporate misdeeds as miscalculated risk/reward tradeoffs, similar to what is being done in this thread. This is a huge problem, and it's pervasive in this thread, in HN as a whole, and in corporate culture.

Your complaint is rather hypocritical: given we have no power over their actions, why defend them? Your complaint applies as much to your own position as it does to mine. What problem are you addressing?

> you and other people here seem oddly insistent that we not discuss the ethical implications of the actions on question.

Hmm, I don't think that's my actual intent; only that we discuss them as they apply to modern morality, not as if we can influence them to be different than what they are.

If I defend them (which I don't think I do), I do so to help explain their attitudes and actions, not to excuse them. We need to understand where they are coming from to see the differences between them and us.

Distancing ourselves from historical people is one of the worst possible mistakes we can make when studying history. We aren't different. The entire 10,000 years we've had anything resembling civilization is an evolutionary blip.

The reasons that Columbus tortured, killed, and enslaved indigenous people are the same reasons for Abu Ghraib: racism, lack of oversight, and greed. The exact details have changed, but the underlying causes are alive and thriving.

Thankfully, I think humans as a whole understand these things better and I think things are improving, but if we fail to keep that understanding alive and build upon it, regress is possible. Certainly the startup culture being fostered here (HN) which looks only at profit and de-emphasizes ethics enables this sort of forgetfulness. It's not that anyone intends to cause harm, it's that they can rationalize causing harm if it's profitable. And since money makes the same people powerful, this attitude is an extremely damaging force in society. That's why I am so insistent that we not treat ethics as a side-conversation.

I would somewhat agree with first launch, first moon mission and so on, but N-th in a row ain't building no new empires. Its business as usual.

Great point and I agree. Balancing the need to launch the thing is the need to improve over time, else the human cost begins to outweigh the benefit.

I think ultimately the problem is of accountability

If the risks are high and there are a lot of warning signs, there needs to be strong punishment for pushing ahead anyways and ignoring the risk

It is much too often that people in powerful positions are very cavalier with the lives or livelihoods of many people they are supposed to be responsible for, and we let them get away with being reckless far too often

> Maybe it's a bad analogy given the complexity of a rocket launch, but I always think about European exploration of the North Atlantic. Huge risk and loss of life, but the winners built empires on those achievements.

> So yes, I agree that at some point you need to launch the thing.

This comment sounds an awful lot like you think the genocide of indigenous peoples is justified by the fact that the winners built empires, but I'd like to assume you intended to say something better. If you did intend to say something better, please clarify.

This is dishonest. I am not engaging with your red herrings.

If the fact that entire nations were murdered is a "red herring" to you, you have no business talking about colonialism. That's not a distraction, it's the headline.

You are debating your own delusions, not me.

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