alt Hacker News>Your first comment is effectively "the ends justified the means".
Yes? Welcome to the real world. The Nazis developed technologies that Western Europe, USA and the Soviet Union all wanted. In your view what should the US have done? Let the Soviets poach them all up and get better at tech and maybe take over Europe even more?
>I think this is a perspective more easily held when your own life isn't impacted by "the means"
I can say the same to you. I have seen the rapid decline of my country, Sweden, directly due to the 2015 migration crisis and before. So we very much are directly impacted, thank you.
>Life's got plenty of nuance - we don't need to lose our humanity at every opportunity for an incremental technological gain that would eventually come either way.
This is a very naive view that I am surprised to see on HN.
Would Linux have "just happened anyway" without Linus Torvalds? Would Windows have happened without Bill Gates? Facebook without Mark? Clean sewage without Joseph Bazalgette? Mobile X-Rays without Marie Curie? This is in reaction to your Werner Van Braun comment. Do you really think the USA set him to make rockets and engines because he was just a random engineer? No, some people are truly geniuses, and their one impact can matter.
Some societies are just better than others. You sit in (probably) the USA or western world, in probably a nice apartment or house willing to say screw it all all the good things will just materialize and happen by itself... I do too but I am not so naive. We have fought for our society.
> Would Linux have "just happened anyway" without Linus Torvalds? Would Windows have happened without Bill Gates? Facebook without Mark? Clean sewage without Joseph Bazalgette? Mobile X-Rays without Marie Curie? This is in reaction to your Werner Van Braun comment. Do you really think the USA set him to make rockets and engines because he was just a random engineer? No, some people are truly geniuses, and their one impact can matter.
Probably yes to most of these things. We as ICs like to put the greatest of ICs on a pedestal and imagine that those specific individuals are the only ones that could have conceived of those specific ideas and correctly executed them. Nothing is really further from the case. Maybe the exact iterations would change and the timing by which they would come to be - but none of us are so special that the world would cease without us. Technology would carry on. Might just look a bit different. We're all innovating every single day. That's the shotgun approach to humanity (and even startup investment). Some will succeed, some will fail. The successes and failures will rarely playout strictly because of the individual. But history will remember the individuals because they did it, and they'll be GOATED for doing it. And rightfully so. But they were not uniquely capable of doing it. We can celebrate successes without all of the other nonsense you're parroting.
The rest of your post is relatively jaded and incompatible with my own views, so I'm happy to call it here. Spend some time traveling the world and finding love.