"does not necessarily" -> "can have an opinion [...] depends on one's values"
This was in response to your original statement: "it makes no sense to say that 2015 music is necessarily better than 18th century music".
I am stating that the superiority of one type of music, period or composer over the other is subjective, that is, that the value judgement changes depending on the person. Therefore, it does make sense to say that one is better than another, even if this value judgement varies between persons - you need to frame the argument.
This was a sideline prompted by the idea that technological progress is objective (including in music); that is, one cannot argue rationally against the idea that knowing nuclear engineering is an improvement over not knowing nuclear engineering, regardless of its usage, that ignorance is never desirable. Science is the discovery of facts about nature through reason, even if the process itself is filled with uncertainty and "progress" between dogma (the earth is flat, then round, the centre of the world, then not...). Science can approach objectivity, which the arts cannot (even that judgment is subjective).
We appear to disagree here as you do not separate the knowledge from its intended use ("Is the progress bring made in the name of humanity or in the name of technology?") and therefore create cases of "desirable ignorance". I consider that this brings unwarranted subjectivity to the argument as "humanity" needs to be defined (Imperial Japan would disagree that their defeat and restructuring in 1945 was done in the name of humanity, which much of South East Asia at the time considered a good thing; in the Japanese narrative, a global or much larger Empire of Japan would be a net positive by bringing Japanese civilisation to the barbarians). As far as I am concerned, the misuse of technology is a squarely political and/or philosophical problem separate from science and the blame goes to the users, not the scientists. Further, intention does not guarantee outcome: nuclear weapons have basically averted any new global conflict after WWII via MAD, but they were not designed with this purpose in mind. Apologies if I misunderstand your position.
1. "This was in response to your original statement..."
coldtea != ZenoArrow. No problem though, I'm sure it's just an honest mistake.
2. "Therefore, it does make sense to say that one is better than another"
Let's split what is meant by 'better'. In terms of science and technology, you can have something which is measurably better. With personal preferences, the argument is that something is better if someone likes it better. I'd argue that this latter use of better holds little weight. Words have meaning when they act to convey a message, saying something is better when it's just something you prefer carries a weak message as it doesn't align with the 'measurably better' meaning that's commonly understood. Let's not mix the terminology of the subjective and the objective, the results are often a drag.
3. I disagree with your points about nuclear weapons. For one, yes I believe you can argue that ignorance is sometimes preferable. For example, I am ignorant of what it would truly feel like to kill someone, but am glad that such knowledge has eluded me. What little I know is enough to stop actively seeking to find out.
Rejecting ignorance completely means knowledge is always seen as a good, regardless of how or why it is obtained. I would argue that intention and purpose are very important. The intention to discover new ways to kill people is part of what certain science and engineering fields aid, regardless of whether these groups are deluded enough to believe that knowledge is always assured of its purity, and therefore feel no guilt.
4. Nuclear weapons have not stopped war, the actors involved in these wars either lack the resources to operate on a multinational scale or choose to fight war without declaring it. Consider how many puppet governments the US and its allies have worked on implementing over the last 60 years, are these not acts of war?
Apologies indeed - the great thing about HN is that users take second seat to the content! But sometimes it backfires.
On 2. - let's make it simpler then. The OP's (coldtea) premise is that it is not possible to say that one is better than the other ("it makes no sense to say"). The premise is incorrect because in my case, I can make the value judgment that one is better than the other, and further, it is probably safe to assume that most people also have their own ranking. In aggregate, people do make value judgments and do, therefore, make sense of "better".
I agree that it can get a little lengthy discussing subjective value, and not armed with years of philosophy studies, I'm not very good at it either.
On 4. - whilst several world powers such as the US, the USSR, France and Portugal have indeed fought proxy and covert wars to further the interests of a subset of their citizen, there has been no conflict of the scale and geography of World War II since World War II. Vietnam was localized in Vietnam, although it impacted US culture, precisely because Washington was afraid of starting a nuclear war. The only instances of WWII-level losses of lives were due to genocide, often from civil war.
As an extreme example of the power of MAD fear, the Yom Kippur War was ended by US intervention (or at least the threat thereof) saving the Israelis at the last minute after Golda Meir made the bet that arming the nuclear weapons would be detected by the CIA and result in exactly such intervention.
On 3., scientific knowledge available to the community is a very different thing to personal discovery of such knowledge. You do not need to know electronics, physics or applied mathematics to use a computer, and you do not need to know how to kill someone because there are people who specialize in this and keep the peace. But there is a difference in the type of knowledge that is the discovery and popularization of random forests, and knowing the feeling of taking someone's life.
Getting better at killing CAN have positive effects. The refined Blitzkrieg with modern equipment waged by the US in the first Gulf War, the product of decades of research on killing and invading, resulted in a very short war with almost no casualties on the offensive side (292 - all figures from Wikipedia), and relatively few on the defending side (20-35,000) and civilians (5,000) compared to what a more even war would have cost (for example, the Iran-Iraq war cost around 100,000 lives for each of these groups). I see this as a net positive.
Generally, financing an extreme imbalance of power results in global lasting relative peace, cf Pax Romana, Pax Britannia, Pax Americana.
Isreal - Unknown, but appear to have them in the 1970's
India - 1974
South Africa - 1979 to 1991
Pakistan - 1998
North Korea - 2006
Have any of the countries above avoided conflict since WW2? Perhaps France, China and South Africa, though it could be argued they've been involved in conflicts in other ways. The US, Russia, UK, Isreal, India, Pakistan and North Korea have all been involved with wars against other countries since WW2 ended even after they got nuclear weapons. Why do you suspect this is?
As for the Yom Kippur War, it's not one I'm overly familiar with, but it is relevant so thanks for mentioning it. However, the impression I get from reading this account was that the arming of the missiles was a cry for help in order to get the backing of the US. What would the Isrealis have stood to gain if they'd really set them off?
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/06/opinion/the-last-nuclear-m...
It's not about being involved in regional, relatively minor conflict, but about avoiding annihilation. I did not say we have had no war, I said we have had no global wars of the scale seen fairly frequently until WWII.
For Israel, the idea was to convey the message of a desperate strike before succumbing (since the neighbouring countries were pretty clear about their intentions); if the message was not convincing, it wouldn't have had the effect it had. Meir took a risk that paid off handsomely. MAD is the only message as no nation today would get away with the aggressive use of a nuke, it is the option for desperate people and discourages total war which makes governments desperate. The Yom Kippur war is generally fascinating to read about and I really recommend digging, if you are interested in modern history and the Middle East.
Europe was under threat of the Red Army to such an extent that entire regions were mined with nukes on 3 day fuses (in some famous cases, with live chicken inside to keep the electronics warm) to take out the invading force once it had settled. Russia's foreign policy was of systematic undermining of Western civilisation in any way possible (through both fostering enemies in proxy wars, and Active Measures, which is a fascinating topic in itself on which much has been written by Gen. Kalugin and others - just look up famous KGB defectors).
Israel, Pakistan and North Korea obtained weapons to defend themselves against overwhelming regional threats by increasing the cost of invasion substantially; Pakistan also wanted to follow India's lead (famously "If India builds the bomb, we will eat grass and leaves for a thousand years, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own." - Bhutto in... 1965 - luckily, India's foreign policy did not end up in an invasion of Pakistan, as the mountain of bodies from Partition may have led observers to think would happen).
The UK and France both were involved only in decolonization wars (Algeria, Indochina, Kenya, Malaya, Ireland... and modern French interventions are related to Francafrique) except for the Falklands, a territory too small to warrant exercising the nuclear option or even scale to the mainland, especially when the attacker was not nuclear; and Rhodesia, where British forces were deployed just long enough to allow Mugabe's forces to take the countryside safe from the RLI and Selous Scouts and therefore the election (the blame might also lie with the Scouts' miscalculation about British unwillingness to let Mugabe win, weakening Nkomo strategically).
Talking of Rhodesia, you have to understand the mindset of pre-1991 South Africa - every European colony in Africa was falling, one after the other, and South Africa felt the vice tighten as hostile borders closed in. The great thing about exporting commodities is that no matter the blocade the stuff still gets through, so you can get away with a lot. There were tankers in Iraq and Syria during their respective wars... (from what I hear, it's actually harder to move the money than the oil). The other reason for closeness with the US was the Cuban artillery and fighters in South West Africa and other places where the South Africans were fighting.
French and British nukes were aimed at Russia, with which they never fought. China's wars are and were defensive or internal, with the exception of Korea (and even the intervention in Indochina - the Maquis Chocolat reported beheading some officers from a Chinese division that moved early on - was the result of an internal conflict, pushing a Southern general out of the way to make way for a Northerner to take up the space, although I don't have the details at hand, see e.g. [1] if you can read French or follow Jean Sassi's trail); especially after the split from the Soviet, Mao needed his own capability to really scare off any new friends of the KMT.
The point stands: nuclear weapons appear to have staved off any further truly global conflict with dozens of millions of deaths. Local conflict will always happen when the odds are in favour. Si vis pacem, para bellum - only an overwhelming imbalance of force is dissuasive enough to avoid conflict and enjoy a relatively free and safe global environment.
Look at [2] - between 2004 and 2007 around 50,000 to 200,000 people a year died from armed conflict. Compare this to WWII which killed 48 million, with an estimated further 2 million saved by the two nuclear attacks on Japan causing it to surrender early. Or take the "purge" of the PKI in Indonesia (1965?) where estimates of the civilian death toll number between half and a full million.
TL;DR: We live in a period of unprecedented peace, even if it doesn't look like it looking at TV. Most Western countries even abolished national service... Nuclear weapons and MAD are a very likely contributing factor.
"It's not about being involved in regional, relatively minor conflict, but about avoiding annihilation. I did not say we have had no war, I said we have had no global wars of the scale seen fairly frequently until WWII."
Global wars were fairly frequent? Perhaps in the 20th century, but throughout history most wars have featured only one or two nation states or uncoordinated resistance to the rise of empires. WW1 and WW2 were anomalies, we hadn't seen anything like them before or since. If the only recognisable form of war is now a world war, do we have to discount the smaller, more frequent skirmishes that are found in every known era of our time on this planet?
"TL;DR: We live in a period of unprecedented peace, even if it doesn't look like it looking at TV. Most Western countries even abolished national service... Nuclear weapons and MAD are a very likely contributing factor."
For Westerners, yes, but that's not exactly universal. There are some areas of the world that are a real mess, including parts of Latin America, Africa and the Middle East (plus North Korea in Asia).
My personal opinion is that people barely think about nuclear proliferation any more. Bar a few scare stories about Iran and North Korea, the common view seems to be that it was a Cold War era problem. No country would get away with using them anymore, so they're not seen as much of a threat. Furthermore, conflict frequently happens at a level where such weapons would be complete overkill (that's all the time really, but I doubt we'd ever accept their use on anything less than a global war). Yet, people still die from conflict every day. There are people alive today that will be dead next week because of conflicts stirred up by the actions of the Western world (and I'd include the 'war on drugs' and 'war on terrorism' in that list). What do we do about that?
"does not necessarily" -> "can have an opinion [...] depends on one's values"
This was in response to your original statement: "it makes no sense to say that 2015 music is necessarily better than 18th century music".
I am stating that the superiority of one type of music, period or composer over the other is subjective, that is, that the value judgement changes depending on the person. Therefore, it does make sense to say that one is better than another, even if this value judgement varies between persons - you need to frame the argument.
This was a sideline prompted by the idea that technological progress is objective (including in music); that is, one cannot argue rationally against the idea that knowing nuclear engineering is an improvement over not knowing nuclear engineering, regardless of its usage, that ignorance is never desirable. Science is the discovery of facts about nature through reason, even if the process itself is filled with uncertainty and "progress" between dogma (the earth is flat, then round, the centre of the world, then not...). Science can approach objectivity, which the arts cannot (even that judgment is subjective).
We appear to disagree here as you do not separate the knowledge from its intended use ("Is the progress bring made in the name of humanity or in the name of technology?") and therefore create cases of "desirable ignorance". I consider that this brings unwarranted subjectivity to the argument as "humanity" needs to be defined (Imperial Japan would disagree that their defeat and restructuring in 1945 was done in the name of humanity, which much of South East Asia at the time considered a good thing; in the Japanese narrative, a global or much larger Empire of Japan would be a net positive by bringing Japanese civilisation to the barbarians). As far as I am concerned, the misuse of technology is a squarely political and/or philosophical problem separate from science and the blame goes to the users, not the scientists. Further, intention does not guarantee outcome: nuclear weapons have basically averted any new global conflict after WWII via MAD, but they were not designed with this purpose in mind. Apologies if I misunderstand your position.