Imagine that our bitter ememies invented a superior logistics tool, known as the wheel. They also invented airplanes and the concept of blitzkrieg. Should we attribute their success to the wheel, and study how it was designed, since they clearly had a mighty army?

I think the idea being debated here is that it’s impossible to know whether the business practices would work without the lack of ethics. It might not be a good case study or a direction you want people going in as it might put them in some of the ethically compromising positions, or even worse require people to put themselves in those positions to work

If we're going this way, the next question - and a real one, this time - is whether we should study and use the medical data they acquired doing very unethical things to prisoners.

I’m not going to pretend to have an answer to that question, it’s above my pay grade.

But I would be comfortable pushing back on the idea that we should structure and operate our medical clinics like theirs because they made scientific breakthroughs.

It's above my paygrade too, but what I remember from occasional discussions of that case is that:

- The obvious take is, the evil deed's already been done, the knowledge it produced can save lives and can't realistically be re-gathered any other way, so why not use it?

- The counter to that is, using it legitimizes and encourages similar acts in the future.

(Personally, I can see the encouragement angle; disagree with legitimization.)

- There's often a side thread going on about how the atrocities and those who committed them were not Up To Scientific Standards, therefore all their data is invalid, so there's no reason to use it anyway.

(Personally, I think this is a lame cop-out, used when one feels the ethical argument is too weak to stand on its own.)

Something to note here is that most (if not all) of the "medical data" acquired by Axis experiments is useless: a lot of it is on the order of "if we make someone really cold they die". The methodology was, unsurprisingly, generally biased, non-reproducible, and often cruel for the sake of it, rather than unethical out of necessity.

IMO there's a nice parallel between useless evidence from bad experiments, and useless business practices from unethical companies. If you want to take the lessons but leave the bad stuff, often you'll find there's nothing left.

> Imagine that our bitter ememies invented a superior logistics tool, known as the wheel. They also invented airplanes and the concept of blitzkrieg. Should we attribute their success to the wheel, and study how it was designed, since they clearly had a mighty army?

If you replace "wheel" with "jerrycan", then that's exactly what happened.

Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerrycan :

> Such was the appreciation of the cans in the war effort that President Franklin Roosevelt noted, "Without these cans it would have been impossible for our armies to cut their way across France at a lightning pace which exceeded the German Blitzkrieg of 1940."

The problem is not the inventor but the invention itself. In your quite inept analogy, the wheel itself is somehow unethical. IE, they didn't invent the wheel they invented the slave.

> Imagine that our bitter enemies invented a superior logistics tool

Imagine instead that narrow, shallow, obsessed people (NSOBs) built a superior Banality Machine for absorbing the time and attention of suckers. The more suckers who watch, the more revenue earned by NSOB Inc.

> Should we even consider adopting it, given its clearly ethically unacceptable origins?

I regret that we have done so. At global scale.

Why would a wheel be ethically unacceptable? The example you’re replying to talks about tobacco companies and cancer. A wheel doesn’t cause cancer.

I made an absurd example exactly to show that there is a limit after which the argument of "tainted source" should not apply.

(Regarding tobacco, see a different thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41552737)

Also notable: the first was accomplished under a fascist government intent on violent world domination, and the latter was completed under a (arguably less fascist, depending on exact time frame) different government, specifically because in the meantime there was a large scale critique of the people running the aforementioned initial government by (roughly) the rest of the world.

So I believe your point leads to the conclusion that critiques at this time of the ruling authorities within this company might lead to a reorganization of control, such as might best position any further advancements to benefit a wider population in more pro social ways.

(von Braun being a clear “A-Player”, not a CEO, given the terminology at hand)

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?

That's not my department, " says Wernher von Braun.