Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How We Learned to Kill

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 154 posts

Re: How We Learned to Kill

#41

Post by TeMPOraL »

sebastianconcpt wrote: post #34
BariumBlue wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem If you were in the situation above, what choice would you make? I'm legitimately curious, as I do not know many people that seem to think in moral absolutes.

You don't fall into the false dichotomy of even entering into playing that game. Your question presents a false dichotomy that (dangerously) is pushing things into trying to institutionalise a justification of killing a fellow human being. Worst, is trying to do that a priori. Is exactly what dictatorships, genocides and Eugenicists would use. In Nature, and even in urban life, the chances of experiencing the Trolley…

Nope, you don't understand the trolley problem. It's a very precise tool designed to explore the workings of human conscience. It's a toy problem, not meant to be used with real-world situations. What it shows is that humans indeed have the intuition that, ceteris paribus, the value of lives adds up - saving two lives is more right than saving just one.

Re: How We Learned to Kill

#42

Post by [deleted] »

vinceguidry wrote: post #35
mrottenkolber wrote: post #25

He ordered the killing of humans because of an assumption? What the shit. Just walk over there and ask the bloke what he's doing, or investigate after they left, or throw in a flash grenade and disable, shoot the legs not the heads. Anything but kill. What are they thinking? That their chances of survival are higher if they kill the enemy combatants before they can kill them? Is this really what it boils down to? Thi…

> This sort of behavior is not acceptable for a human being, heck its not acceptable for an animal being or a plant. Animals are ruthless killers. Cats kill for fun . Plants aren't much better. In India, a captive elephant is allowed to kill two of its handlers before they will put it down. They suspect the elephants know this and pick their targets carefully. Only man has the ability to be moral, to decide whether t…

[deleted]

Re: How We Learned to Kill

#43

Post by [deleted] »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #39
mrottenkolber wrote: post #25

He ordered the killing of humans because of an assumption? What the shit. Just walk over there and ask the bloke what he's doing, or investigate after they left, or throw in a flash grenade and disable, shoot the legs not the heads. Anything but kill. What are they thinking? That their chances of survival are higher if they kill the enemy combatants before they can kill them? Is this really what it boils down to? Thi…

This is war. A place of snap decisions, unfortunately. Sure, I personally would like US soldiers, or for that matter my own country's soldiers, to wage war like United Federation of Planets - diplomacy, diplomacy, and if that fails, set phasers to stun. But we don't have phasers. Nowdays, if you run at your enemy with a taser, you'll get shot to death before you're halfway there. I'm not defending the atrocities many…

[deleted]

Re: How We Learned to Kill

#44

Post by gnoway »

[deleted] wrote: post #42
vinceguidry wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This sort of behavior is not acceptable for a human being, heck its not acceptable for an animal being or a plant. Animals are ruthless killers. Cats kill for fun . Plants aren't much better. In India, a captive elephant is allowed to kill two of its handlers before they will put it down. They suspect the elephants know this and pick their targets carefully. Only man has the ability to be moral, to decide whether t…

[deleted]

No, cats kill for fun, or at least they do so for reasons beyond securing their next meal. If you've had a cat, especially an 'outside cat,' you will know this to be true.

Re: How We Learned to Kill

#45

Post by [deleted] »

mter wrote: post #36
mrottenkolber wrote: post #25

He ordered the killing of humans because of an assumption? What the shit. Just walk over there and ask the bloke what he's doing, or investigate after they left, or throw in a flash grenade and disable, shoot the legs not the heads. Anything but kill. What are they thinking? That their chances of survival are higher if they kill the enemy combatants before they can kill them? Is this really what it boils down to? Thi…

> investigate after they left We tried this terrible idea once. It results in our guys dying because surprise, they detonate the ied when you walk up to it. > shoot the legs not the heads Have you ever watched programmers on tv doing things like 3 people typing on the same keyboard? That's the equivalent of this statement. > Don't shoot unless shot upon They fight by planting ieds. In your world, we'd be dying by the…

[deleted]

Re: How We Learned to Kill

#46

Post by TeMPOraL »

xvedejas wrote: post #20
transfire wrote: post #13

Imagine if we took the commandment "Thou shall not kill" to heart. Imagine if instead of killing those men on the roadside, it was the job to the soldiers to incapacitate them but take them alive. Is it possible? Of course it is possible. Perhaps harder, but possible. Here's the funny thing about killing. Somehow we continually find excuses for doing it. And the easiest excuse of all is that the other guy did it firs…

Well, when it comes to firearms, incapacitation doesn't work quite like the movies show. You can't just hit someone in the arm/leg every time (aiming is harder than that), and even if you do it will fairly likely kill them anyway. If you really want to priorize incapacitating enemy soldiers, you're going to have to use different weapons than firearms, weapons that are probably shorter range and slower. That isn't a p…

We could use some serious development in non-lethal weapons, but I'm afraid it might not solve anything - non-lethal weaponry is by definition more complicated by lethal, and thus any technology designed to stun could be repurposed to kill with more effectiveness than the bloodless variant. We'd probably need to reach the level when there would be no practical difference of effectiveness between the two types.

Re: How We Learned to Kill

#47

Post by TeMPOraL »

[deleted] wrote: post #43
TeMPOraL wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is war. A place of snap decisions, unfortunately. Sure, I personally would like US soldiers, or for that matter my own country's soldiers, to wage war like United Federation of Planets - diplomacy, diplomacy, and if that fails, set phasers to stun. But we don't have phasers. Nowdays, if you run at your enemy with a taser, you'll get shot to death before you're halfway there. I'm not defending the atrocities many…

[deleted]

If only that was so easy. What really happens is that some of the people who don't want to go get jailed or executed, and the rest quickly change their minds. And if you somehow managed to breed a whole nation of people refusing to kill others, then your country would quickly get invaded by another one. "Why don’t we live in the utopia dreamed of by sixties pacifists and their many predecessors? Because if we did, the first renegade to pick up a rock would become a Genghis Khan."[0]

You'd have to enact a global and immediate mentality change to beat the coordination problem inherent in this situation.

[0] - http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=418

Re: How We Learned to Kill

#48

Post by dragonwriter »

[deleted] wrote: post #42
vinceguidry wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This sort of behavior is not acceptable for a human being, heck its not acceptable for an animal being or a plant. Animals are ruthless killers. Cats kill for fun . Plants aren't much better. In India, a captive elephant is allowed to kill two of its handlers before they will put it down. They suspect the elephants know this and pick their targets carefully. Only man has the ability to be moral, to decide whether t…

[deleted]

> By fun you mean exercise I assume. Cats aren't that smart I am pretty sure they don't have a concept of fun.

Being not smart might mean they have no concept of exercise, but the pleasure responses that can be fairly labelled "fun" are pretty fundamental.

(Now, the reason those propensity for those particular pleasure response or selected for in cats may well be the activity that they encourage provides exercise that useful in developing reflexes for survival skills, but that doesn't mean they do it "for exercise" in any motivational sense.)

Re: How We Learned to Kill

#49

Post by methodover »

xvedejas wrote: post #20
transfire wrote: post #13

Imagine if we took the commandment "Thou shall not kill" to heart. Imagine if instead of killing those men on the roadside, it was the job to the soldiers to incapacitate them but take them alive. Is it possible? Of course it is possible. Perhaps harder, but possible. Here's the funny thing about killing. Somehow we continually find excuses for doing it. And the easiest excuse of all is that the other guy did it firs…

Well, when it comes to firearms, incapacitation doesn't work quite like the movies show. You can't just hit someone in the arm/leg every time (aiming is harder than that), and even if you do it will fairly likely kill them anyway. If you really want to priorize incapacitating enemy soldiers, you're going to have to use different weapons than firearms, weapons that are probably shorter range and slower. That isn't a p…

What if we did have incapacitating weapons that could be used in a wartime situation?

Re: How We Learned to Kill

#50

Post by [deleted] »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #40
[deleted] wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

> It's a bullshit problem created to justify stupid decisions. No. It's a toy problem designed to check for particular moral reactions in controlled conditions, for exploring the way human conscience works. It's not meant to be used as something you reduce real-world problems to. > I don't think in moral absolutes, hell I don't even consider myself an especially moral person. I justify my actions based on their merit…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN