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Ethics Is the Skill That Matters Most Now

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Re: Ethics Is the Skill That Matters Most Now

#41

Post by bnfcl »

embedding-shape wrote: post #30
bnfcl wrote: post #28

The bottom line of the article: Intelligence is being automated. Judgment is not. This is true. Like with a lot of similar takes on AI, tacit knowledge is not easy to add to the AI’s training set.

> tacit knowledge is not easy to add to the AI’s training set. Is it even possible? Different people do different judgements for the same things, there is no right or wrong really, just the choice you made in that moment, based on whatever you cared about at that point.

Circumstantial tacit knowledge can probably be approximated through examples and feedback. But that is not quite the same as truly acquiring it. Bridging that gap would likely require a fundamental breakthrough. And sure, there is no objective right judgement, but that is the same for a lot of things the models already do.

Re: Ethics Is the Skill That Matters Most Now

#42

Post by SoftTalker »

bflesch wrote: post #15

> So the filter runs, generation after generation, and what comes out the top is disproportionately people who lie well and feel nothing about it. Not because voters want liars, but because the machinery reliably promotes them. The reason is that 99% of states are monarchies, and there is immense propaganda effort to make people believe that they in fact live in a democratic system. Hollywood and the startup world en…

There are still plenty of real "selfmade" people also.

Re: Ethics Is the Skill That Matters Most Now

#43

Post by FlyingBears »

ClarityGuy wrote: post #8
kimjune01 wrote: post #2

[flagged]

You could argue that in a corrupt system, ethics tends to work against the interests of that system... but I'd say at the civilizational level they're indispensable, and going back to Aristotle ethics is rooted at the civilizational level (or some would say at the God-and-man level with necessary implications for civilization). A lot of our relatively new institutions are set up to run like perpetual-motion machines…

This is a conjecture that ethics emanates from the whole of society and somehow keeps the things from falling apart and then explains it to have cyclical nature. I don't think ethics exists anywhere other than impressionate minds and words on paper.

Re: Ethics Is the Skill That Matters Most Now

#45

Post by dsubburam »

Article looks substantially AI written, and I find it difficult to get past that, especially on a topic like ethics[1]. We already have the following guideline for comments:

"Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans."

I for one will value a similar guideline for submissions. Maybe we can have a poll. @dang.

[1]maybe an AI written article is fine if it is e.g. documentation for some new gadget.

Re: Ethics Is the Skill That Matters Most Now

#46

Post by pixl97 »

dsubburam wrote: post #45

Article looks substantially AI written, and I find it difficult to get past that, especially on a topic like ethics[1]. We already have the following guideline for comments: "Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans." I for one will value a similar guideline for submissions. Maybe we can have a poll. @dang. [1]maybe an AI written article is fine if it is e.g. documentation fo…

How is the average person supposed to know if an article is AI generated or not?

I've seen HNers accuse content of being AI... that was written in the 2015-2017 era. So we seem to be rather poor judges of authenticity.

Re: Ethics Is the Skill That Matters Most Now

#47

Post by pixl97 »

danaris wrote: post #36
jsrozner wrote: post #33

This piece fails to understand that, in general, ethics depends on what side you are on. In hindsight, the winner's notion of right and wrong usually dominates. If ethics mattered, the colonists wouldn't have taken America or slaves. If pre-existing laws mattered, America would have lost the revolutionary war (America legally belonged to the king). If ethics mattered, anyone who made money in cigarettes would be in p…

...do....do you think that's a gotcha? Yes , if we had considered ethics in the past, we wouldn't have committed bloody genocide on the Native Americans. We would probably have tried to open up mutually beneficial trade with them. (Sadly, we probably would still have caused the deaths of millions of them simply due to pathogens we didn't know we were carrying when we met them.) Do you think that would have made thing…

No! Not their values, my values because my values are the best.

So ya, it's a hard problem.

Re: Ethics Is the Skill That Matters Most Now

#48

Post by gchamonlive »

cryo32 wrote: post #7
gchamonlive wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof? Or are you treating a hunch as if it's fact?

It's so banal and middle-of-the-road it has to be AI generated.

Can I take another stab at it? I take back what I said in my flagged comment. Could you elaborate on why the ethical points and the erosion of leadership in the article are banal and middle-of-the-road?

Re: Ethics Is the Skill That Matters Most Now

#49

Post by pixl97 »

bnfcl wrote: post #41
embedding-shape wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tacit knowledge is not easy to add to the AI’s training set. Is it even possible? Different people do different judgements for the same things, there is no right or wrong really, just the choice you made in that moment, based on whatever you cared about at that point.

Circumstantial tacit knowledge can probably be approximated through examples and feedback. But that is not quite the same as truly acquiring it. Bridging that gap would likely require a fundamental breakthrough. And sure, there is no objective right judgement, but that is the same for a lot of things the models already do.

This is the entire purpose of alignment, and we're very bad at it.

Re: Ethics Is the Skill That Matters Most Now

#50

Post by abnercoimbre »

UnreachableCode wrote: post #19
abnercoimbre wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this article is largely LLM-generated. Is that ethical?

Doesn't that still ring true with the ideas in the article though? His ethics were in the right place, even if he did use AI to write it?

Someone paid a chef to make a fancy pizza, then told his friend "look what I made!"

The author's message would've landed if he demonstrated human authorship. Like this blog post [0] attaching a notebook page or my own [1] video proof.

[0] https://vinxis.moe/posts/writing-2026-07-15

[1] https://abner.page/post/are-we-harold-bloom/

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