[gameprogrammer] Re: Innovation and Creativity. Getting OT?

On Mon, May 03, 2004 at 10:07:05AM -0500, Bob Pendleton wrote:

> You say above that war is not a contributor to technology, and then you
> say strife is a contributor... War is just strife on a large scale. You
> can't have it both ways.

War might be strife, but not all strife is war.  I'm sure you can see
the difference. What he wrote wasn't incorrect IMHO.

> No one is saying that war is good. We are saying that it does lead to
> the development of technology.

I don't believe this is accurate.  *Necessity*, not war is the mother of
invention.  That this necessity has way too often been bred by war, is
an entirely separate topic.  It just goes to show that many of us are
too primitive to feel excitement other than that provided by power and
control.  That's why the history of mankind is the history of wars and
violence.  When you realize that most of the time spent by us since the
dawn of mankind was spent by making wars, it doesn't seem too surprising
that much of necessity and strife that motivated invention was spurred
by war.  But it's still easy to fall into the trap of thinking that war
is somehow semi-required for progress.

Fortunately, mankind was also able to produce great minds that could be
motivated by far deeper, profound and admirable desire than the desire
to opress.  And it turns out that much of what we know about nature and
ourselves (and what we often use against each other, sadly) was revealed
to us by those basically peaceful men that never participated in a war
machine of any kind.

G.H.Hardy wrote in his book "A Mathematician's Apology" something along
the lines of that mathematics (a science that provides underpinning for
most of the inventions we talk about here) cannot be used for warfare,
and never was.  While it perhaps might be argued that it could and was,
it's clear that huge majority of successful research in mathematics,
physics and other fields of science was seldom motivated by the desire
to make war making more effective.  Neither Newton nor Einstein were
warmongers even though their work was later (sometimes not much later)
used for warfare - so you don't need to be either, even in the name of
invention.

I know that your intentions are pure, I just thought I might point out
to you that just because war makes someone to take a collection of
existing generic theories or technologies (maybe throw in a couple of
their own) and make the last step or two in turning them into a piece of
weapon of some kind, it doesn't mean that war is somehow necessary for
invention.  Yes, I know that there is quite a strong basic research in
military environment but that doesn't contradict my point, namely that
necessity is what motivates progress and that necessity can have roots
anywhere, war being one of those places.  And that mankind would be
better off *without* this particular motivator of progress since it
takes much more than it gives and people would probably sooner or later
find a way invent the good byproducts of military research anyway.

        latimerius

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