Fascinating - I just listened to Rufus Fears' lecture on Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison before opening HN.

Personally, I find Bonhoeffer's premises are easily accepted - 1) stupidity is not an intellectual defect and 2) stupidity as a more dangerous adversary than malice. It follows that liberation, not instruction, is necessary to overcome stupidity. "The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity."

What I don't align with is the consequence that "stupidity surpasses malice in its danger." Malice, and only intentional malice, is the evil that was present in his day and remains so. I think there's an inherent snobbishness of modern philosophy readers who have a surface relation to this axiom, thinking that it means that, "oh, everyone is just stupid and unmotivated towards learning, and that's why I'm better than them."

I love this insanely insightful crystalization for me. I see you got a degree in IR and you used the word axiom so I'd refract back to you: reformulate stupidity as ignorance and assume a continuous conserved action exists between < stupidity-ignorance-malice | danger > so that your observable is a danger measure-metric.

Basically the reason ignorance is so danger is that it aliases between harmless stupidity and extreme evil, but it fails to trigger our collective species evil detection pattern coding which results in an unbelievable cascade evil failure mode.

In a sense, religion is a meta-epistemic solution to the binding problem of our collective subconscious.

I think if you apply the epistemic quantum mechanics to different logic modalities, you get some interesting insights!

> Basically the reason ignorance is so danger is that it aliases between harmless stupidity and extreme evil, but it fails to trigger our collective species evil detection pattern coding which results in an unbelievable cascade evil failure mode.

Great summary. The problem with ignorance is that you are more likely to forgive the perpetrator whereas a malicious actor would have been cutoff once detected. You then stick with the ignorant for way longer and suffer loses beyond what a malicious actor would've likely caused. This is my impression from relationships at work.

I think Bonhoeffer was referring to an acquired or affected stupidity; a position adopted defensively to fit into a social or political situation.

If the truth becomes dangerous or unpopular, a decent defense is adopting stupidity. I think that is subtly different from ignorance, which implies never knowing, as opposed to a rejection of truth.

Like much cognitive dissonance, it can be easiest to live with if you just change your beliefs rather than trying to rail against it.

The danger is, once truth is denied, reality becomes disconnected and atrocity much more abstract.

Maybe there is a better name yet for the phenomenon.

Well said. But 'fear of God' only works until religion itself is hijacked.

Flipping burgers and scrubbing toilets can be done by literally anyone. On the other hand, the demand for people who can code like you remains high.

This is the reason why investment bankers make bank. Granted, many of the "signals" are dubious, but the people who can _actually_ do the work of a MD are extremely low.

Took a quick look at the case. I'm guessing some corp lawyer, maybe even general counsel, didn't have enough "real work" to do and needed to make a name for himself. Then it became a giant d* measuring contest.

Source: Went to law school. Never practiced though.

I have a different take on this: corporate research labs died because we aggressively clamped down on monopolies.

When you don't have a monopoly, the investor mindset is that the company should be laser-focused on "core competencies" (buzzword, but important) and return excess capital to shareholders - who then provide it to other companies that will innovate in the field. Keep in mind, the universe of alternative investments go beyond the stock market/PE/VC.

Capital is tied to shareholder value. When you can't point to something creating value, there isn't a reason for capital to stay. For a company to maintain a research lab, it needs to be perceived as something other than a cost center. In contrast, Bell was able to entertain its own full-fledged R&D labs because shareholders expected them to create new avenues of profit themselves because they were the monopoly.

I half with you - when you have a money printing machine (a monopoly), it's easier to justify spending money on R+D.

But at the same time, we've seen a decline in corporate R+D since the start of the neoliberal era - the article mentions that this started at around Nixon's time. This is the period of time where Milton Friedman's ideas started to gain widespread acceptance:

>“there is one and only one social responsibility of business– to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game,”

Many organisations have taken the idea of "profits over everything", and interpreted it as "quarterly profits over everything". R+D labs don't result in quarterly profits. Much of the research ends up being profitable years down the track. So corporate R+D is killed off.