111–120 of 209 posts
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What happened after 5 years? Did he get caught? Or just founded his own unicorn ai startup
I think around year 4 a manager made the mistake of believing the research and pushing hard on it. This in turn became a tracked goal with a multi-year timeline. The individual left before things could fall on them too heavily.
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For similar reasons, I left academia. I joined academia for the pursuit of truth, and forth the glory of Knowing. But it turned out that academia doesn’t really do this anymore, it just sells itself as doing these things. Academia is entirely a “reputation” system, as it turns out, from paper publishing to student-evaluations to “public rankings.” As it turns out, the capitalist marketplace must also contend with the…
> But it turned out that academia doesn’t really do this anymore, it just sells itself as doing these things. What do you mean by 'anymore'. Was there some golden age of bygone glory?
You either play the game and survive - often at the cost of your integrity. Or you walk. I walked. No regrets.
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For similar reasons, I left academia. I joined academia for the pursuit of truth, and forth the glory of Knowing. But it turned out that academia doesn’t really do this anymore, it just sells itself as doing these things. Academia is entirely a “reputation” system, as it turns out, from paper publishing to student-evaluations to “public rankings.” As it turns out, the capitalist marketplace must also contend with the…
> But it turned out that academia doesn’t really do this anymore, it just sells itself as doing these things. What do you mean by 'anymore'. Was there some golden age of bygone glory?
Then (late 1800s?) it changed to a profession, and the focus became extracting funding from ignorant patrons.
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I've always wondered if ethics class impart any ethics at all. If you're not an ethical person, why would you become one after taking such a class? If you're already an ethical person, taking a class in it is pointless.
There is a distinction between understanding and practicing ethics. It's like taking a course on leadership vs being a good leader - some people might have a legitimate desire to be a good leader, but not know the best techniques; taking a course allows them to understand how to be a good leader so that they might become one. As another example, an atheist could study theology not to better practice religion but mere…
Is there really any empirical evidence that such people exist and could be helped by an ethics course? I think laymen [to ethics] with a desire to be ethical can generally go about being ethical with little more than the Golden Rule. And if somebody hasn't figured out the Golden Rule yet by the time of their mandatory ethics course in college, there's probably something wrong with them (narcissism? psychopathy? some compulsion that makes them listen to intrusive thoughts?) that will make the ethics lectures basically pointless.
The most effective time to teach ethics is probably Kindergarten, plus or minus a few years. I just don't believe in the existence of adults who want to be ethical but don't know how because a college professor hasn't explained it to them.
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This guy is featured in the So You've Been Publicly Shamed book, and it definitely seemed like he was pilloried pretty hard. It is interesting, though, which journalists get tarred and feathered and which ones are celebrated. Certainly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Novak have massive journalistic ethical errors: the former fabricating news for the US Government a…
Is Miller still a celebrated journalist? I had her down mentally as "noted fraud". Looking at Wikipedia, it looks like she's never done real news again, and has spent her time on what I think of as the "wingnut welfare circuit". And the reactions to her memoir suggest that she's never been welcomed back into the profession: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller#Memoir
The title is clickbait in the sense that it suggests that we should expect this person to be super honest, and instead they were found to be dishonest. On the contrary, I think we should expect them to be dishonest, and they are. They literally have a book named “Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life”, what did you expect? Of course they're dishonest.
Yes, the title is clickbait because you're smarter than everyone else and so are not surprised.
- "That's not how X works."
- "Anyone back in ___ who was paying even the slightest attention could have seen that ___ was going to happen."
- "This subreddit / board / field has gone to sh_t"
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Yes, the title is clickbait because you're smarter than everyone else and so are not surprised.
Being surprised that an expert in dishonesty is dishonest is like being surprised that a lot of pyromaniacs become firemen or that a lot of pedos become teachers and priests - it's something they spend a lot of time doing and thinking about, it makes sense that they'd want to do it for a job if they can. No, I don't think spotting this pattern makes me smarter than everyone else.
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Question from a non-student of philosophy: Why do people use the term "ethical" as though there were a single agreed-upon "right" system of ethics? My understanding is that there are numerous concepts of right and wrong, some of which are very divisive. So i.e. there are people who would be widely detested for being "ethical" in unfashionable frameworks.
Most people have incoherent answers to any question of right and wrong. Philosophers like to overcomplicate things and throw buzzwords too. I think it's a very difficult conversation full of emotional traps and personal biases. Once upon a time, we all shared the same moral foundation (religion) and did not have this problem.
(Of course it wasn't really "all" , either within one community or between communities. People in power were just better about killing the weak people were just better about silencing people who disagreed.)
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I've always wondered if ethics class impart any ethics at all. If you're not an ethical person, why would you become one after taking such a class? If you're already an ethical person, taking a class in it is pointless.
If there are swift and just penalties for unethical behavior, then one does not need to actually learn how to be internally ethical, they just need to learn the social and political framework that's already established. As you might expect, it's among "one of the most popular" courses offered at Harvard.