Ethics has always mattered. In 1798 John Adams wrote his famous line "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
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 ever be a thing, you're not seeing the current state of things.
> Every skill humans once bragged about is getting commoditized. Writing, coding, analysis, translation, design, research. A machine does each of them faster, cheaper, and increasingly better.
This is very much up for debate. I also would have liked your article to delve into whether thing’s that bring us humans joy actually need to be faster, and cheaper.
Knowing why you do something crucially depends on knowing the thing being done. It’s very hard to cast an ethic judgement over a process you don’t understand.
If your argument is that we need to be ethic stewards of machines but need to step aside the doing then your premise might lead you straight into tautology.
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 prison. If ethics mattered, Zuckerberg and his cronies would be in prison.
If you had been concerned about ethics in the past, you would have failed to create America and failed to create Facebook, etc. In my moral framework, the worst (i.e. greediest, most selfish, anti-social) people have been winning over the last 20-40 years.
This dude needs to read some actual philosophy and then ponder it and write it himself, rather than using AI.
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 things worse now?
> In my moral framework, the worst (i.e. greediest, most selfish, anti-social) people have been winning over the last 20-40 years.
This sounds an awful lot like a "might makes right" attitude: "Sure, they're awful people, but they're winning, so we should adhere to their values!"
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 adhere to it in order to have a stable society.
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.
> 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.
Ethics as opposed to morality is about codified rules. This seems to be somewhat conflating the two.
Also this sounds like it's talking about both designing those rules and also applying existing rules, without noticing much distinction between those aspects.
For applying existing rules, is there any reason that can't be mechanized aside from "the tools just aren't that capable yet"?
Designing the rules does have a "will this work as intended" component that can probably be machine-enhanced, but is largely about preferences / "should" questions.
I agree with most of what it says there and the overall sentiment.
Two notes:
1. Whoever wrote this, add your name there. Otherwise it is a 0.2x credibility multiplier.
2. I like this topic a lot and would like to discuss it with others that also like it a lot. Reach out (email in my profile), let's make a small discussion group around this :).
Meta thought: Having recently learned of WeChat Groups in China, I'm now repeatedly noticing situations where familiar alternatives are higher friction.
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 with voracious appetites constrained only by positive law -- so much for those institutions. What we really need is to recognize the many ways in which we've lost our bearings plus a cooling-off period that allows us to search for them again.
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.
Machiavellian ethics is also ethics. Ethics has very little to do with how to be good in some public opinion sense. The core question of ethics is what is the appropriate action in a given circumstance. It's an open question that has a lot of different answers.
The opposite of ethics arguably isn't evil, but moral incontinence.
> Ethics has very little to do with how to be good in some public opinion sense
I would say that it probably does, but it's common for that to change with the passage of time. There are a lot of things that were done in the past that are horrific by today's standards but at the time were uncontroversial or accepted.
I appreciate that this is a topic of discussion, whatever defects the author's post contains, both explicit and tacit.
Some commentary:
1. Ethics is the practical science (in the broader classical sense, not the narrow empirical sense) of right action. But what determines right action? I'll make a stronger and more complete claim: it is the study of human nature, its ultimate end, and the principles that guide us there. Ethics is, therefore, about the principles that underpin the good life. Without its grounding in human nature, and without an end inherent to human nature, there is no ethics. An action's goodness can only be measured in relation to human nature and an end. Anything else is arbitrary and meaningless, hence the widespread and childish conviction that morality is just some set of made-up rules, or perhaps some otherworldly feeling of a gnostic variety. Ethics, morality, and virtue are not external things that we can sometimes appeal to and sometimes not. They concern our condition as human beings at all times and every single decision we make.
2. What the author is talking about when he calls ethics a skill is really personal morality and virtue. Am I a virtuous person? Do I do what I ought or do I habitually choose to do what I ought not to? Ethics helps us clarify our understanding of the underlying principles governing morality, but morality and virtue as such involve their concrete application. Prudence is nothing but the ability to discern what the right decision is here and now and in this situation. It is effectively the skill of applying general moral principles to particular circumstances.
3. A good society requires good members. As bad as collectivism is, this is one reason why libertarian hyper-individualism is also bogus. We are social animals. Our good is not sealed off from the good of society. Our personal immoralities don't just affect us; they affect the society we live in. We are our morality, as it were. If you're a crappy person, you drag the condition of society down. You have a moral duty to be good, and since you are a social animal, that also means you are obligated to be just and even charitable as prudence requires.
In short:
- Ethics is the scientific study of the good life and the end of the human person.
- Morality is the rational quality of our concrete, freely chosen actions.
- Virtue concerns the internal habits that give us the power to act rightly.
- Prudence (the first of the so-called "cardinal virtues") is the practical skill (the "art") of applying ethics to daily life.
> 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 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.
It's a charade where your last name decides everything, even before you were born. But this is also the most peaceful and stable economic system humanity has come up with after horrors such as the crusades, the Holocaust and Rhodesia. It rewards achievements of many generations past no matter what modern ethics might think about those achievements, and it allows monarchs to peacefully blend in with the peasants.
With this in mind, the only thing a strive for "ethics" gives you is a spot on the weekly kill list.
> 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.
The US can't force China do what they want and China can now also prevent the US doing whatever it wants to third countries too. Not all of them but definitely some.
It does not seem so to me. There does not seem genuine wish for protection from danger as much as genuine wish to see the leader to be cruel to others or take advantage as others.
Ethics has always mattered. In 1798 John Adams wrote his famous line "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
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 ever be a thing, you're not seeing the current state of things.
> Every skill humans once bragged about is getting commoditized. Writing, coding, analysis, translation, design, research. A machine does each of them faster, cheaper, and increasingly better.
This is very much up for debate. I also would have liked your article to delve into whether thing’s that bring us humans joy actually need to be faster, and cheaper. Knowing why you do something crucially depends on knowing the thing being done. It’s very hard to cast an ethic judgement over a process you don’t understand. If your argument is that we need to be ethic stewards of machines but need to step aside the doing then your premise might lead you straight into tautology.
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 prison. If ethics mattered, Zuckerberg and his cronies would be in prison.
If you had been concerned about ethics in the past, you would have failed to create America and failed to create Facebook, etc. In my moral framework, the worst (i.e. greediest, most selfish, anti-social) people have been winning over the last 20-40 years.
This dude needs to read some actual philosophy and then ponder it and write it himself, rather than using AI.
People like you are the definition of insufferable. I guarantee you that in 1866 you wouldnt be as righteous as you think that you are.
...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 things worse now?
> In my moral framework, the worst (i.e. greediest, most selfish, anti-social) people have been winning over the last 20-40 years.
This sounds an awful lot like a "might makes right" attitude: "Sure, they're awful people, but they're winning, so we should adhere to their values!"
No! Not their values, my values because my values are the best.
So ya, it's a hard problem.
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 adhere to it in order to have a stable society.
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.
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.
The bottom line of the article:
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.
This is the entire purpose of alignment, and we're very bad at it.
Incorrect, "ethics" is a good way to get laid off
Ethics as opposed to morality is about codified rules. This seems to be somewhat conflating the two.
Also this sounds like it's talking about both designing those rules and also applying existing rules, without noticing much distinction between those aspects.
For applying existing rules, is there any reason that can't be mechanized aside from "the tools just aren't that capable yet"?
Designing the rules does have a "will this work as intended" component that can probably be machine-enhanced, but is largely about preferences / "should" questions.
>Ethics as opposed to morality is about codified rules
That's not accurate. See e.g. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-theory/ section 1.2.1 "Morality and Ethics"
I agree with most of what it says there and the overall sentiment.
Two notes:
1. Whoever wrote this, add your name there. Otherwise it is a 0.2x credibility multiplier.
2. I like this topic a lot and would like to discuss it with others that also like it a lot. Reach out (email in my profile), let's make a small discussion group around this :).
> Reach out (email in my profile),
Meta thought: Having recently learned of WeChat Groups in China, I'm now repeatedly noticing situations where familiar alternatives are higher friction.
ethics doesnt pay
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 with voracious appetites constrained only by positive law -- so much for those institutions. What we really need is to recognize the many ways in which we've lost our bearings plus a cooling-off period that allows us to search for them again.
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.
Machiavellian ethics is also ethics. Ethics has very little to do with how to be good in some public opinion sense. The core question of ethics is what is the appropriate action in a given circumstance. It's an open question that has a lot of different answers.
The opposite of ethics arguably isn't evil, but moral incontinence.
> Ethics has very little to do with how to be good in some public opinion sense
I would say that it probably does, but it's common for that to change with the passage of time. There are a lot of things that were done in the past that are horrific by today's standards but at the time were uncontroversial or accepted.
Real morality doesn’t pay, shallow “ethics” for business, tech, etc. has a whole industry that pays very all.
Child labor pays. Sex trafficking pays. Slavery pays. What kind of person do you want to be?
I appreciate that this is a topic of discussion, whatever defects the author's post contains, both explicit and tacit.
Some commentary:
1. Ethics is the practical science (in the broader classical sense, not the narrow empirical sense) of right action. But what determines right action? I'll make a stronger and more complete claim: it is the study of human nature, its ultimate end, and the principles that guide us there. Ethics is, therefore, about the principles that underpin the good life. Without its grounding in human nature, and without an end inherent to human nature, there is no ethics. An action's goodness can only be measured in relation to human nature and an end. Anything else is arbitrary and meaningless, hence the widespread and childish conviction that morality is just some set of made-up rules, or perhaps some otherworldly feeling of a gnostic variety. Ethics, morality, and virtue are not external things that we can sometimes appeal to and sometimes not. They concern our condition as human beings at all times and every single decision we make.
2. What the author is talking about when he calls ethics a skill is really personal morality and virtue. Am I a virtuous person? Do I do what I ought or do I habitually choose to do what I ought not to? Ethics helps us clarify our understanding of the underlying principles governing morality, but morality and virtue as such involve their concrete application. Prudence is nothing but the ability to discern what the right decision is here and now and in this situation. It is effectively the skill of applying general moral principles to particular circumstances.
3. A good society requires good members. As bad as collectivism is, this is one reason why libertarian hyper-individualism is also bogus. We are social animals. Our good is not sealed off from the good of society. Our personal immoralities don't just affect us; they affect the society we live in. We are our morality, as it were. If you're a crappy person, you drag the condition of society down. You have a moral duty to be good, and since you are a social animal, that also means you are obligated to be just and even charitable as prudence requires.
In short:
- Ethics is the scientific study of the good life and the end of the human person.
- Morality is the rational quality of our concrete, freely chosen actions.
- Virtue concerns the internal habits that give us the power to act rightly.
- Prudence (the first of the so-called "cardinal virtues") is the practical skill (the "art") of applying ethics to daily life.
Well I guess the industry is fucked then!
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?
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.
[delayed]
> The bottom line
Is how Claude ends 90% of articles. So yes LLM slop.
Wish you could read yourself. This is exactly like how horoscope works. "Born in October? Oh, you must be really insecure!"
> 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 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.
It's a charade where your last name decides everything, even before you were born. But this is also the most peaceful and stable economic system humanity has come up with after horrors such as the crusades, the Holocaust and Rhodesia. It rewards achievements of many generations past no matter what modern ethics might think about those achievements, and it allows monarchs to peacefully blend in with the peasants.
With this in mind, the only thing a strive for "ethics" gives you is a spot on the weekly kill list.
There are still plenty of real "selfmade" people also.
Excellent post. Interesting that "ethics" is something society expects from normal folks, but the Big Important Leaders never have that concern.
> 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’.
The US can't force China do what they want and China can now also prevent the US doing whatever it wants to third countries too. Not all of them but definitely some.
It does not seem so to me. There does not seem genuine wish for protection from danger as much as genuine wish to see the leader to be cruel to others or take advantage as others.