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From: taylor@hplabsc.UUCP (Dave Taylor)
Newsgroups: mod.comp-soc
Subject: Re: The Ethics of Work
Message-ID: <565@hplabsc.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 20-Aug-86 00:23:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: hplabsc.565
Posted: Wed Aug 20 00:23:11 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 21-Aug-86 00:55:21 EDT
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This article is from pyramid!ut-sally!harvard!bu-cs!bzs (Barry Shein)
 and was received on Tue Aug 19 17:12:26 1986
 

Perhaps a slightly different slant;

Some people I know won't work for defense projects because they are afraid it 
would make things work too well.

I know this is a strange attitude. Consider the moral nightmare Einstein 
claimed to have suffered upon discovering, from documents delivered to him 
(ransacked from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute) that the Nazis were not even 
close to designing a working atomic bomb. It was a fear of the Nazis 
perfecting the bomb that finally motivated Einstein to work with Fermi et 
al and solve some nagging problems that remained (I believe Clark's biography 
of Einstein goes over this.)

That is, he was a great mind, and did not realize that other great minds were 
incapable of what he found simple (he wrote that he feared the Nazis would 
develop the bomb because it was so simple, for him perhaps.)

I realize it takes a great egotist to accept this rationale for him or 
herself, but it's worth a thought. You don't have to be on par with Einstein, 
that is only a dramatic example.

Better the mediocre should work on such projects. I have this fantasy that 
truly great minds on all sides realize this intellectual burden after the 
experiences of the 20th century. Perhaps it's not a fantasy?

		-Barry Shein, Boston University