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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

#61

Post by saturn8601 »

bflesch wrote: post #60
saturn8601 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Hollywood and the startup world enables nepo kids to lie to themselves and to the public about their "selfmade" status until they receive their ancestral Lordship from the King of England, and this fake meritocracy keeps everyone in line trying their best because one day you could be a billionaire, too. What about the exceptions? Doesn't that disprove the theory? You mentioned Hollywood. There has been a lot of mala…

The audience still recognizes talent, but talent is far from everything one needs to be successful. For every new star that suddenly "pops up everywhere" I recommend a journey through newspaper [0] and government archives based on their family names. Here [1] you can check if the family has their own island, e.g. Trump island near Seattle/Canada with historic Swastika/KKK-shaped house that accidentally burnt down in…

The first link is too broad and would send me on a goose hunt with no payoff. all the other links pulled up nothing when i searched the last name only.

I mean you are welcome to prove me wrong but in my time during which I was interested in learning more about Inde Navarette, I have discovered a poorly curated Wikipedia article with minor incorrect info (she is not studying behavioral psychology) which seems to indicate minimal 'curation' and her family history is well documented as not coming from an entertainment background or wealth. This is despite going to #1 on the IMDB Star counter and her main social media platform(IG) going from what I suspect was ~200-300K followers to 3.5M in the course of ~two months.

You argument can be made about anyone but it goes into conspiracy theory.

Has there been a reduction in rags to riches stories, I would argue yes but one positive example in 2026 could disprove your original hypothesis.

Re: Ethics Is the Skill That Matters Most Now

#62

Post by bflesch »

saturn8601 wrote: post #61
bflesch wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The audience still recognizes talent, but talent is far from everything one needs to be successful. For every new star that suddenly "pops up everywhere" I recommend a journey through newspaper [0] and government archives based on their family names. Here [1] you can check if the family has their own island, e.g. Trump island near Seattle/Canada with historic Swastika/KKK-shaped house that accidentally burnt down in…

The first link is too broad and would send me on a goose hunt with no payoff. all the other links pulled up nothing when i searched the last name only. I mean you are welcome to prove me wrong but in my time during which I was interested in learning more about Inde Navarette, I have discovered a poorly curated Wikipedia article with minor incorrect info (she is not studying behavioral psychology) which seems to indic…

Navarrete is both a region in Spain and in Domenican Republic [0]. According to Wikipedia, her unnamed father is Mexican and US Marine Corps [1]. IMDB has various actors with her last name or variations of it. Last name of mom is Fox like in Fox news.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navarrete

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inde_Navarrette

Re: Ethics Is the Skill That Matters Most Now

#63

Post by saturn8601 »

bflesch wrote: post #62
saturn8601 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first link is too broad and would send me on a goose hunt with no payoff. all the other links pulled up nothing when i searched the last name only. I mean you are welcome to prove me wrong but in my time during which I was interested in learning more about Inde Navarette, I have discovered a poorly curated Wikipedia article with minor incorrect info (she is not studying behavioral psychology) which seems to indic…

Navarrete is both a region in Spain and in Domenican Republic [0]. According to Wikipedia, her unnamed father is Mexican and US Marine Corps [1]. IMDB has various actors with her last name or variations of it. Last name of mom is Fox like in Fox news. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navarrete [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inde_Navarrette

So..does this data convey anything meaningful about her success?

Re: Ethics Is the Skill That Matters Most Now

#64

Post by pixl97 »

danaris wrote: post #58
pixl97 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No! Not their values, my values because my values are the best. So ya, it's a hard problem.

Nah, moral relativism is bullshit. Sure, I can acknowledge that there may be values out there that are better than my values. That doesn't mean I have to say that people whose values are antithetical to mine—whose values are essentially "I can, should, and will take anything I want, no matter the cost to other people"—are just as good.

And I mean I agree with you, but must acknowledge that they may not agree with you and I and are willing to bury you over it.

So as I said, a hard problem.

Re: Ethics Is the Skill That Matters Most Now

#65

Post by jsrozner »

alpha_squared wrote: post #38
danaris wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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…

I don't think the parent is advocating adhering to their values, but instead just talking about the relativism of ethics and morality. Society broadly cannot function without a shared set of morals (e.g. stealing sows discord which leads to anarchy, so we outlaw stealing). However, it can get quite complex and so there are infinitely many shades of grays. The base principal would still stand and you do your best to a…

Right I'm definitely not advocating that one should adhere to the values of the winners of the last 20-40 years.

I'm saying that if you're winning today (as measured in money/power), then by most objective notions of morality, you're probably a crappy, antisocial, person who is greedy and exploitative.

At some level it's almost definitional: if you share the material wealth you have, you'll never become that wealthy. If you don't consume a bunch of resources for the sake of your own consumption or to produce products that others consume, then you're also not going to make a lot of money.

Re: Ethics Is the Skill That Matters Most Now

#66

Post by jsrozner »

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…

I realize it might have come across like I was advocating something akin to nihilism, or as you put, "might makes right." It's the opposite. I'm saying that so far, caring about ethics--especially over the past couple decades--hasn't mattered or has been even counterproductive to one's economic station. And relatedly, the people who have cared least about ethics have won, which in turns has made caring about ethics even less economically viable.

Deciding "what is worth doing" requires adjudicating values, and this does not have a mathematical solution.

The development of AI is a bit like giving everyone an atomic weapon, and few people have the ethics to use it responsibly (for some technologies, there does not even exist an ethical use).

The author suggests that the people who can tell "what's worth doing" (roughly, what's right) are the ones who will succeed in the coming era. I actually, unfortunately, think it's the opposite. The people who most ruthlessly steal and deploy AI for their own gains are likely to "succeed," where "succeed" is defined by accruing greater power. Those of us who are worried about doing what is right are likely to move more slowly and carefully and to thus "get left behind."

Re: Ethics Is the Skill That Matters Most Now

#67

Post by spwa4 »

jaggederest wrote: post #35
andy99 wrote: post #25

This AI written article seems to be substituting ethics for “taste” and making similar arguments to those from the past. Choosing what to do is more important than doing it is a taste problem, of which ethics is an aspect but one of many.

This kind of god-of-the-gaps thing is kind of amusing to watch, especially since I can clearly see myself doing it over time. Even if the models never get better than they are now, which is unlikely, they're already equipped to usurp taste, ethics, and everything else to a significant degree. Human feedback will always be valuable because we assign value to human feedback, but if you don't think an ethics-bot will ev…

> ... but if you don't think an ethics-bot will ever be a thing, you're not seeing the current state of things.

You mean the people who are supposed to judge ethics are lazy like everyone else and also farm out their judgement to AI like everyone else.

This is like reading EU commission press releases about regulating AI and realizing there's "AI-isms" in the press releases. They're too short, and they were sloppy before AI could be involved, so I mostly suspect this, but ... who is writing AI regulations? ChatGPT is writing those.

Let's hope OpenAI/Anthropic doesn't realize too quickly that writing their political positions into the system prompt just like they're writing their legal positions into the system prompt. The famous example being that, no, Anthropic/OpenAI did nothing wrong illegally downloading and using millions of books.

Re: Ethics Is the Skill That Matters Most Now

#68

Post by AlexeyBelov »

RickJWagner wrote: post #11
kstenerud wrote: post #6

> This is a selection problem, not a character problem. This is a times problem, not a selection problem. The unipolar world order is ending, and everyone responds by turning inward and looking for strong leaders who will protect them against the rest.

Please explain ‘unipolar world order’.

It's a quote from Putin. Bad look...
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