are generally preferred on Rationality Quotes threads. You can make blockquotes by typing a greater-than symbol (>) followed by a space before each paragraph in your quote (no need for quotation marks).
Also, that specific quote doesn’t make much sense to me without context.
After a joint American-Soviet mission to Mars, the astronauts return home and refuse to tell who was the first to put their feet on the planet. Everybody pesters them, but they say they did it together (though they really couldn’t.) The Soviet one is drinking with a new friend, whom he knows for a few hours, and the friend says it is impossible that Harrison will claim the honour—and so gets dubbed ‘a Martian’ himself. Martianss here is really a name for humans for whom petty things don’t matter, who work for mankind.
This is off on a tangent, but why couldn’t they? If they went through all the effort to make it a joint mission, stepping off of the ship at the same time, at least to the point where neither could tell who landed first, seems comparatively easy.
I think that the quote means “petty things like who stepped out of the spaceship first don’t matter”, not “petty things like the difference between us and those capitalist pigs don’t matter”.
It’s also true that the line between “American” and “Soviet” (or, for that matter, between “American” and “1940s German”) is not drawn in remotely the same way as the line between “burns others in ovens” and “doesn’t”: it is mainly indicative of which part of the world you were born in. I have much greater sympathy for moral equivalency in the first case than in the second.
The line between a random American and a random Soviet person depends mostly on what part of the world they were born in. A person who lands on Mars is not random; they couldn’t get to Mars without enthusiastically participating in the system. The people who praise the astronauts are aware of this too, and will treat the astronauts’ successes as a success of the system, not mainly as the success of an individual astronaut.
They both landed on Mars. Which one touched first is random. If it wasn’t, it would be signalling that one country is better, which is the exact opposite of the point of a joint mission to Mars. It’s to show the two countries respect each other as equals. Getting to Mars is just a bonus.
I find it hard to think of someone who “enthusiastically participates in the system” in order to go to space as being morally culpable for everything that the system has done.
It’s not quite a matter of choosing between participating in the system or being punished by the system. It’s possible to live an inconspicuous life with only mild risk of suffering the consequences of no enthusiastic participation. But this is incompatible with accomplishing something noteworthy.
I can admire someone who has the ambition of going to space, but denies that ambition on moral grounds because it would support a political faction. However, I think a moral framework that demands this is unreasonably strict.
I’m not holding the astronaut responsible for anything. It’s the reverse: because the astronaut had to work within the system to succeed, his success is not his personal success, it’s the system’s success. Saying “it doesn’t matter which astronaut won” is saying “it doesn’t matter which system won”. When one system starved up to 7.5 million people to death and another didn’t, which system won is not a petty issue.
(You could, however, argue that “first man on Mars” and “second man on Mars” are very similar achievements and that one is so marginally close to the other the difference between the two is petty. But I don’t think that’s what most people who express this kind of pettiness sentiment mean.)
I see your point; I think that saying “the system won”, though, is an easy story to tell that doesn’t reflect what actually happens very well. I don’t see how the starving-people-to-death part of the system and the space-race part are sufficiently connected that the space-race part winning helps the starving-people-to-death part.
(If you disagree about this prediction, I will be unhappy to discuss it further but happy to say “okay, this is the underlying fact on which we disagree, let’s stop there”. Is this the underlying fact on which we disagree, or is there more to it?)
Thus, my understanding of the original quote is “The Pursuit of Science lies above political differences, and sabotaging the former because of the latter is petty.”
the space-race part winning helps the starving-people-to-death part
Via propaganda.
Specifically, in the form of “Yes, all y’all are starving and we had to shoot a few of your friends and relatives for not being enthusiastic enough, but look! We are actually achieving GREAT THINGS! Digging ditches in Siberian permafrost is part of the common effort which makes our society SUCCESSFUL and we can prove that it is successful because we just WON THE SPACE RACE!”.
I think that the Soviet Union actually got a lot of propaganda mileage out of Sputnik and Gagarin in real life.
And that is, of course, ignoring the other part—that space rockets with minor modifications function perfectly well as ICBMs...
Also, there’s a more direct connection: They both involve the government deciding to allocate resources. In the case of the space race, the government allocates resources to something; in the case of the starving Ukrainians, the government takes resources away from someone. But they’re flip sides of the same process, which is a top-down dictatorship using ideology to decide who gets to have the resources.
They both involve the government deciding to allocate resources
All governments are in the business of allocating resources, both directly (US government spending is about one third of GDP) and indirectly through laws and regulations.
I see your point; I think that saying “the system won”, though, is an easy story to tell that doesn’t reflect what actually happens very well. I don’t see how the starving-people-to-death part of the system and the space-race part are sufficiently connected that the space-race part winning helps the starving-people-to-death part.
Try replacing “starving people to death” with “putting people in ovens”.
That particular person didn’t care for the system. He was the Editor-in-chief of a (fictional) journal ‘Science and thought’, dedicated to protecting population from fraud and literally wasn’t afraid of the devil. But he did care about space exploration. The quote was meant to express the muchsimpler message about selective pressure’out there’ that makes ordinary oneupmanship as a habit of mind irrelevant.
It’s also true that the line between “American” and “Soviet” (or, for that matter, between “American” and “1940s German”) is not drawn in remotely the same way as the line between “burns others in ovens” and “doesn’t”
Ok, how about the difference between “sends people to the gulags on trumped up charges” and “doesn’t”, or “engineers famines” and “doesn’t”?
Summary: The superheroes of Worm regularly fight against existential threats called Endbringers, and have to work together with villains (some of whom are neo-nazis) to do it. They’ve been able to set up rules to ensure the villains can co-operate (no arrests, no using villains as bait, everyone gets medical attention afterwards), without which the Endbringers would win. However, the linked chapter explains that they’ve failed to extend this to post-fight celebrations, since the public won’t accept any form of moral equivalence. Since the public will protest if villains are honoured for their sacrifices, and the villains riot if heroes are honoured but villains are not, no-one gets honoured.
I think “petty things don’t matter” connotes that the differences are small on an absolute scale and that working together demonstrates this, not that the differences are merely small in relation to the goal on which everyone works together. The latter is honoring Nazis for their sacrifices; the former is saying “the fact that Nazis can sacrifice shows that it’s not important to oppose Naziism”.
If you were writing any story in which the protagonist works with Nazis or neo-Nazis, you’d want them to face a greater threat—perhaps an existential threat, like nuclear war in the time when the USSR existed. Otherwise you’d be writing a ridiculous straw-man.
Interesting note for people who’ve read “Worm”—gur svefg Raqoevatre gb nccrne va gur jbeyq bs gur fgbel jnf enqvbnpgvir, gur frpbaq bprna-eryngrq, naq gur fpnel bar znxrf zr guvax bs NTV.
I think
are generally preferred on Rationality Quotes threads. You can make blockquotes by typing a greater-than symbol (>) followed by a space before each paragraph in your quote (no need for quotation marks).
Also, that specific quote doesn’t make much sense to me without context.
After a joint American-Soviet mission to Mars, the astronauts return home and refuse to tell who was the first to put their feet on the planet. Everybody pesters them, but they say they did it together (though they really couldn’t.) The Soviet one is drinking with a new friend, whom he knows for a few hours, and the friend says it is impossible that Harrison will claim the honour—and so gets dubbed ‘a Martian’ himself. Martianss here is really a name for humans for whom petty things don’t matter, who work for mankind.
This is off on a tangent, but why couldn’t they? If they went through all the effort to make it a joint mission, stepping off of the ship at the same time, at least to the point where neither could tell who landed first, seems comparatively easy.
I wondered myself. Maybe they decided not to risk anything-just in case.
Supporters of the Soviets were keen on moral equivalency.
Imagine if that was done with Nazis. “Petty things like the difference between people who burn others in ovens, and people who don’t, don’t matter”.
I think that the quote means “petty things like who stepped out of the spaceship first don’t matter”, not “petty things like the difference between us and those capitalist pigs don’t matter”.
It’s also true that the line between “American” and “Soviet” (or, for that matter, between “American” and “1940s German”) is not drawn in remotely the same way as the line between “burns others in ovens” and “doesn’t”: it is mainly indicative of which part of the world you were born in. I have much greater sympathy for moral equivalency in the first case than in the second.
The line between a random American and a random Soviet person depends mostly on what part of the world they were born in. A person who lands on Mars is not random; they couldn’t get to Mars without enthusiastically participating in the system. The people who praise the astronauts are aware of this too, and will treat the astronauts’ successes as a success of the system, not mainly as the success of an individual astronaut.
They both landed on Mars. Which one touched first is random. If it wasn’t, it would be signalling that one country is better, which is the exact opposite of the point of a joint mission to Mars. It’s to show the two countries respect each other as equals. Getting to Mars is just a bonus.
I find it hard to think of someone who “enthusiastically participates in the system” in order to go to space as being morally culpable for everything that the system has done.
It’s not quite a matter of choosing between participating in the system or being punished by the system. It’s possible to live an inconspicuous life with only mild risk of suffering the consequences of no enthusiastic participation. But this is incompatible with accomplishing something noteworthy.
I can admire someone who has the ambition of going to space, but denies that ambition on moral grounds because it would support a political faction. However, I think a moral framework that demands this is unreasonably strict.
I’m not holding the astronaut responsible for anything. It’s the reverse: because the astronaut had to work within the system to succeed, his success is not his personal success, it’s the system’s success. Saying “it doesn’t matter which astronaut won” is saying “it doesn’t matter which system won”. When one system starved up to 7.5 million people to death and another didn’t, which system won is not a petty issue.
(You could, however, argue that “first man on Mars” and “second man on Mars” are very similar achievements and that one is so marginally close to the other the difference between the two is petty. But I don’t think that’s what most people who express this kind of pettiness sentiment mean.)
I see your point; I think that saying “the system won”, though, is an easy story to tell that doesn’t reflect what actually happens very well. I don’t see how the starving-people-to-death part of the system and the space-race part are sufficiently connected that the space-race part winning helps the starving-people-to-death part.
(If you disagree about this prediction, I will be unhappy to discuss it further but happy to say “okay, this is the underlying fact on which we disagree, let’s stop there”. Is this the underlying fact on which we disagree, or is there more to it?)
Thus, my understanding of the original quote is “The Pursuit of Science lies above political differences, and sabotaging the former because of the latter is petty.”
Via propaganda.
Specifically, in the form of “Yes, all y’all are starving and we had to shoot a few of your friends and relatives for not being enthusiastic enough, but look! We are actually achieving GREAT THINGS! Digging ditches in Siberian permafrost is part of the common effort which makes our society SUCCESSFUL and we can prove that it is successful because we just WON THE SPACE RACE!”.
I think that the Soviet Union actually got a lot of propaganda mileage out of Sputnik and Gagarin in real life.
And that is, of course, ignoring the other part—that space rockets with minor modifications function perfectly well as ICBMs...
Also, there’s a more direct connection: They both involve the government deciding to allocate resources. In the case of the space race, the government allocates resources to something; in the case of the starving Ukrainians, the government takes resources away from someone. But they’re flip sides of the same process, which is a top-down dictatorship using ideology to decide who gets to have the resources.
All governments are in the business of allocating resources, both directly (US government spending is about one third of GDP) and indirectly through laws and regulations.
Try replacing “starving people to death” with “putting people in ovens”.
That particular person didn’t care for the system. He was the Editor-in-chief of a (fictional) journal ‘Science and thought’, dedicated to protecting population from fraud and literally wasn’t afraid of the devil. But he did care about space exploration. The quote was meant to express the muchsimpler message about selective pressure’out there’ that makes ordinary oneupmanship as a habit of mind irrelevant.
Ok, how about the difference between “sends people to the gulags on trumped up charges” and “doesn’t”, or “engineers famines” and “doesn’t”?
That’s (approximately) the difference between Stalin and not Stalin. I’m pretty sure most Soviet astronauts had never engineered a single famine.
The “participating in the system” argument given by Jiro is more reasonable, so see my cousin comment for my reply to that.
And most members of the Nazi rocket program never put anyone into an oven.
Yes, imagine. (Spoilers for “Worm”.)
Do you have a summary? I don’t want to bother reading that.
Summary: The superheroes of Worm regularly fight against existential threats called Endbringers, and have to work together with villains (some of whom are neo-nazis) to do it. They’ve been able to set up rules to ensure the villains can co-operate (no arrests, no using villains as bait, everyone gets medical attention afterwards), without which the Endbringers would win. However, the linked chapter explains that they’ve failed to extend this to post-fight celebrations, since the public won’t accept any form of moral equivalence. Since the public will protest if villains are honoured for their sacrifices, and the villains riot if heroes are honoured but villains are not, no-one gets honoured.
I think “petty things don’t matter” connotes that the differences are small on an absolute scale and that working together demonstrates this, not that the differences are merely small in relation to the goal on which everyone works together. The latter is honoring Nazis for their sacrifices; the former is saying “the fact that Nazis can sacrifice shows that it’s not important to oppose Naziism”.
If you were writing any story in which the protagonist works with Nazis or neo-Nazis, you’d want them to face a greater threat—perhaps an existential threat, like nuclear war in the time when the USSR existed. Otherwise you’d be writing a ridiculous straw-man.
Interesting note for people who’ve read “Worm”—gur svefg Raqoevatre gb nccrne va gur jbeyq bs gur fgbel jnf enqvbnpgvir, gur frpbaq bprna-eryngrq, naq gur fpnel bar znxrf zr guvax bs NTV.
Offend with substance, don’t offend with style.
Fixing broken windows is useful even if you don’t care about the actual window.
I find myself confused...: (
Formatting quotes properly isn’t hard, there no good reason against it.