Student: "My career ambition to be an ethical technologist" Me: "Why do we need more ethics in tech?" "Just cause we can do something, doesn't mean we should" "We already have lots of ethics in tech, why do we need MORE?" <awkward silence>
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Replying to @s_r_constantin
That's a bit too terse for me to understand you.
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Replying to @robinhanson
You’re thinking of ethics as a thing you can trade off against other values, like one of many departments in a company. Indeed if you had an “ethics department”, it would be a compliance department, and I’d worry about overfunding it relative to others.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin
Isn't valid to think of ethics as one of many topics to which one can pay attention? The fact that ethics has its own separate books, journals, conferences, etc. certainly gives that impression. If so, can't one pay too much attention to the topic?
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Replying to @robinhanson
That’s like counting uses of the string “ethics”, not its referent. The only meaning of ethics that makes sense to me is more like “policy/strategy consistent with one’s long term goals”, which should be a mindset informing everything you do.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @robinhanson
unfortunately I think that in practice when people sit down to "do ethics", what they tend to do is more like Robin's useage than yours. See, for example, ethics committees at universities.
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Sure, but I think people should be at least a little sluggish in ceding words to conventional (cynical and debased) usage, or get a little pushback when they do.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @robinhanson
The problem is at some point you have to concede that the new meaning of the word has won. The meaning of "ethics" in the context of "ethics in technology" isn't "people will be good", it's "people will do the IRB thing". see:https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/ …
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