421–430 of 862 posts
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It has one more syllable than ‘warfighter’, which also doesn’t do any of the things you said.
I'm not sure how much more clear warfighter could be. "One who fights wars." Service member is extremely vague. "A member of a service."
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Probably because it hurts its position either in court or during negotiations with the DoW.
I think this is one of the weaknesses of rationalism and effective altruism, is that it tries to make a clean break from the common law legal reasoning that the government, and thus corporations, operate on. While I find rationalism to be a useful lens, the fact is that the common law legal framework is totally dominant, and so these deontological arguments made rationally collapse very quickly when translated to the…
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Literally yes. If you justify harming others out of nowhere by ‘sabotaging your own existence’ then yes. ‘Sabotaging your own existence’ is a magic sentence that can justify everything. Israel can kill children more than any other nation in the world, and justify it by ‘not sabotaging their own existence’ Anyone can do anything with this perspective. This is the exact point gere. Pull yourself back, if you are about…
Sure, any one can say anything. But I am not referring to that. I am talking about a case where it is objectively true. But I think that is a question that anyone would rather not consider. The issue is that if you don't consider that question, and jump into discussion or actions, in general just have an "outrage", then it would be very hard to take you seriously.
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I think the funniest part is the fact that all the western countries are even afraid to recognize Taiwan's independence. It's a much better argument to say Korea or Japan are ruled by the US (and Korea and Japan absolutely hate one another!). Does the US have influence in Taiwan? Certainly! But if that meant Taiwan was the US's puppet then Taiwan would simultaneously be China's puppet. Schrödinger's Vassal
> afraid to recognize Taiwan's independence. Does Taiwan claim independence? I thought that both the government in Beijing and the government in Taipei both claim that all of China is united, and that they are the legitimate government of that united entity.
You're confusing land with governance.
Around 10 years ago, in college, in Calculus class I had a very ambitious classmate, wanted to go to DARPA and work on Robotics. I asked if he was thinking it through solely from technical perspective or considering ethics side as well. Clearly, he didn't understand the question and I directly inquired - what if the code you write or autonomous machine you contribute to used for killing? His response - that's not my…
> what if the code you write or autonomous machine you contribute to used for killing? This line of thinking, that creating machines that kill is unethical, will destroy the West. If the US wasn't so good at producing killing machines in WW2, you wouldn't be here to complain about DARPA ethics. Instead of having engineers develop the most advanced machines for killing (i.e. protecting the West) such people go into pr…
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> The idea of teaching some sort of “secular” ethics has never made sense to me … An intro ethics class won't shy away from religion, it comes up a lot. You'll most likely even discuss differences in different sects of Christianity. You should also have the discussion of if morals are universal (and if so, which ones) or are all made up. Secular just means you discuss more than one viewpoint. The idea of teaching mor…
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I've met people who have never been in touch with organized religion. They generally have excellent ethical frameworks. I've also read the bible, it does not have a consistent moral or ethical framework.
How can it be that areligious people have ethics if they need god for ethics?
Ethics is all about being human, it does not require a god, and it does not require anyone to understand even what a human is, or what process led to us living life together. The subjective experience of life and the subjective experience of life in a society is all you need to develop ethics.
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Department of peace sounds even better than defense.
No it doesn’t, it sounds like newspeak.
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People keep making this strange claim about Taiwan, the only liberal democracy in the East without a single American soldier on its soil. Almost like Taiwan is a sovereign nation uninterested in participating in the PRC and USA's fight for global hegemony.
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See in your case with the military you can directly say, hey my code will be used to bomb other people possibly. But in today's times it isn't (I am sure even then) so cut and dry. I worked in AdTech industry (like 60% of the bay area techies). So the ad tech I write gets shown to millions/billions. What about ads influencing elections and then politicians waging wars? Anti-vax ads which influence people and then kil…
Well you cannot be responsible for adults' discernment or their critical thinking. If those same ads are being shown to children that would be different.
It is incredible how far the overton window has moved on this issue. When I graduated in 2007, it was common for tech companies to refuse to let their systems be used for war, and it was an ordinary thing when some of my graduating classmates refused to work at companies that did let their systems be used for war. Those refusals were on moral grounds. Now Anthropic wants to have two narrow exceptions, on pragmatic an…