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OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

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Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#51

Post by estearum »

shafyy wrote: post #37
estearum wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, homeless people are not everywhere. Homelessness is created by high rents. High rents are created by high local productivity. The people who are productive enough to make it over the rent-bar are housed, and their marginal productivity above the rent-bar serves to raise the rent-bar (talk to any landlord about how they set rent prices: it's the local wages, stupid). This then pushes a greater proportion of people…

> High rents are created by high local productivity. Wrong. High rents have many reasons and also good policies to get them down and have affordable housing for more people, also in otherwise expensive and popular cities.

Nope.

Rents cannot (at meaningful scale) exceed local productivity, or else there will be widespread vacancies and landlords will reduce their rents.

Rents cannot (at meaningful scale) fall below local productivity, or else landlords will simply raise their rents.

Go talk to a landlord about how they site prices.

Step 1. Look up income of your target demographic

Step 2. Eat 30% of their income

Can you show me a place with high local productivity and low rent?

Can you show me a place with high rent and low local productivity (that's not e.g. a vacation destination for people with high productivity elsewhere)?

You can certainly artificially suppress prices with rent control. But that just gets fed back into the system in the form of reduced supply, so it ends up raising rents on the non-controlled housing stock anyway.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#52

Post by pferde »

ksbd-pls-finish wrote: post #44
pferde wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can be the backstop. The word "can" is doing some extremely heavy lifting here, against corporate practices which dilute and spread guilt and responsibility for immoral decisions so thin, nobody in the decision chain even realizes something immoral has been decided.

Is this the same argument as "please point to a moral backstop that would prevent any person from taking immoral acts"? We usually hope that people will be moral, but can't enforce this.

My point was that in big corporations, things are stacked against people wanting to act morally.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#53

Post by tclancy »

lenerdenator wrote: post #10
roschdal wrote: post #4

[flagged]

Well, economics in general doesn't, but yes. There isn't much ethical merit in building a wall around a city with guard towers, attack dogs, and anti-personnel mines to keep the citizens in so that they can contribute to your economic vision, for example.

Eh, I would say it doesn’t have them as axioms the concept is based on, but ethics are modelable in economics and often appear. Remember economics is the study of choices/ preferences given a certain set of inputs, not about how money works. That’s just the easiest second effect signal to use. Game theory regularly models how ethics affect and are affected in situations.

All of that said, no idea what this person was doing. Probably involved a red stapler.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#54

Post by ltbarcly3 »

bulbar wrote: post #45
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's everywhere, there are homeless people everywhere. The difference is Silicon Valley feels so guilty about it's wealth it refuses to do the normal things that societies do to prevent people from living like animals because 'rights' or something, so they let drug addicts live in their common spaces without treatment. This normally isn't tolerated in a functioning society where people are pressured into behaviors…

That's not how it works at all. You can't pressure people into becoming a productive member of society. What you can do when it already happened is kill them or make them die in some ways, jail them or try to support and/or treat them. I hope it goes without saying that letting them just die or killing or jailing them is not an option in a western society. Prevention is much more favorable of course. For example, don…

Until you accept that they didn't 'easily become homeless' the problem will continue. They used drugs and spiraled, usually over the course of many months or years, forced all their friends to turn their backs on them, got kicked out of any living situations they had access to because of drug/alcohol use or theft to support the same and finally ended up on the street.

On the street they have access to almost endless support, at least in Silicon Valley, but much of that support is contingent on things like not openly using heroin or not repeatedly getting so intoxicated that they defecate or vomit on themselves, so they refuse it.

I don't care how liberal you are, no society is functioning when it allows people to get on BART and pee on themselves and defecate on the cloth seats and walk up and down the aisles dripping feces and urine on the floor. That is allowed and nothing is done about it for fear of upsetting homeless 'rights' groups who are funded by the tax dollars meant to help homeless people.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#55

Post by estearum »

vlovich123 wrote: post #47
shafyy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> High rents are created by high local productivity. Wrong. High rents have many reasons and also good policies to get them down and have affordable housing for more people, also in otherwise expensive and popular cities.

OP has the demand part of the equation if supply remains fixed. The reason supply remains fixed is the US as a whole made policy changes in the 1970s that slowed down construction, specifically zoning laws and environmental laws swept the country. The 2008 recession also cancelled what little construction remained ongoing for a long time. When you combine that with spiking wealth in Silicon Valley, you’ve got the per…

The equilibrium for new housing construction will always be "just enough to keep it expensive by local standards [i.e. by local wages]." That's especially true with rising labor, material, and capital costs.

It was actually the post-war housing boom that was abnormal, fueled by aggressive federal funding of suburban buildout. US municipalities are now broadly doomed to bankruptcy trying to maintain sprawling infrastructure that was never cost-effective to create in the first place.

Look at Austin TX. Influx of new building, prices stabilized, and now construction is dropping off a cliff. No one can afford to build into a stable or potentially falling local market. Construction will start again when local productivity grows enough for people to bid the prices back up again.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#56

Post by nixon_why69 »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #50
nixon_why69 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's actually very unusual to have tons of homeless people next to spectacular wealth, California is a global outlier in this phenomenon. There are many, many places in the world that are much poorer and don't have homeless encampments all over the place.

I literally said that.

You said "there are homeless people everywhere", which is technically true but omits quantity, and especially quantity compared to wealth.

I'm not as positive as you are about what makes California (and Seattle) create/attract so many, but it's definitely an outlier compared to "everywhere".

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#58

Post by 2PqboPPmKegvanx »

nixon_why69 wrote: post #39
cyanydeez wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So more of an ethicist-for-pay than for the challenge of it.

Any ethicist for a corporation is clearly a PR move, right? Like, a pure researcher for a corporation might have some genuine overlap and shared interests where breakthroughs in the research benefit both parties, but an ethicist?? For a legal construct that's defined by and bound to sociopathically pursue profit? Come on now.

>Any ethicist for a corporation is clearly a PR move, right?

I think a lot of it depends on the size of the company. Startup? Sure, maybe it's a real thing.

Gigantic company like a member of FAANG or MANGOS? absolutely a PR move.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#59

Post by ltbarcly3 »

nixon_why69 wrote: post #56
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I literally said that.

You said "there are homeless people everywhere", which is technically true but omits quantity, and especially quantity compared to wealth. I'm not as positive as you are about what makes California (and Seattle) create/attract so many, but it's definitely an outlier compared to "everywhere".

Yes, if you didn't understand my point: there are homeless people in every society, but most do not have as many as silicon valley because they pressure them into accepting the help necessary to restore their ability to make rational decisions. Rational people do not choose to live outside on the sidewalk like rats, people who are drug addicted and who have untreated mental illness do.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#60

Post by nixon_why69 »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #59
nixon_why69 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said "there are homeless people everywhere", which is technically true but omits quantity, and especially quantity compared to wealth. I'm not as positive as you are about what makes California (and Seattle) create/attract so many, but it's definitely an outlier compared to "everywhere".

Yes, if you didn't understand my point: there are homeless people in every society, but most do not have as many as silicon valley because they pressure them into accepting the help necessary to restore their ability to make rational decisions. Rational people do not choose to live outside on the sidewalk like rats, people who are drug addicted and who have untreated mental illness do.

I'd just be really skeptical of thinking I have the true understanding and solution to this issue.

Like, do you know many addicts or seriously mentally ill? Have you tried pressuring them into being better? How did it work out?

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