Will be curious to see if business and tech media are willing to admit the role that EA religious extremism plays in the chaos at OpenAI. Starting to seem more and more like the bubble of irrationality surrounding many SV insiders is clashing again with the real world, as when the “VC Qanon” conspiracy thinking has started destroying value at other high-profile companies.
@anildash It sure seems like the general public would be a lot less accepting of tech products if they knew about the batshit ideology underpinning so many of them. Yet I’m not aware of this liability being disclosed anywhere.
@dwineman sounds like you are promoting ad hominem attacks, though, trying to ignore the substance for the sake of attacking the speakers.
It's like, should we give up modern, lifesaving advancements like MRIs and advanced surgical techniques because you have a beef with the individual doctors who developed them?
@fgcallari no straw man at all.
I simply disagree with you, as I don't believe that we should be looking to corporations for morality, or as substitutes for democratic processes.
Should us companies have boycotted IBM? I don't think so. Maybe we could have come together to pass a law against it if we really felt that way, that's how democracy works, but if as a country we didn't see fit to pass such a law then the job of the company is to serve customers.
@volkris @dwineman @anildash
But see, the law moves much slower than individuals freely making business decisions based on information they have. And individuals running good businesses that take a patient forward-looking view do realize that dealing with bad actors is bad for their own business itself.
To make a silly example, Twitter nowadays cannot attract good engineers almost at any price, a death spiral. Being a nazi haven is just not good for growing a business larger than 8chan.
@volkris @anildash @fgcallari @dwineman Maybe it should go without saying and I also fear we often forget that “corporations” and “companies” only even exist as entities because we people have (democratically, perhaps) allowed them to. As we dump more power and control into this “free market” we absolutely should expect, and seek, morality from “businesses”.
@izzaboo @anildash but that's my point: let's not dump power into them.
It kind of gets it backwards to dump power and then expect morality. Instead we should deny them power BECAUSE we can't expect morality.
They are the wrong tools for the job. It's akin to buying more and more expensive screwdrivers when what you need is a wrench. No, let's stop putting more and more faith in corporations to be moral leaders in society and instead recognize that it's not what they are really able to do so they should be disempowered.
@volkris @dwineman @anildash
Nice strawman you set up there, be a pity if it got holes poked into.
Let's try it a little differently. Should US companies have boycotted IBM in the 40's, once the role of its tabulating machines in the holocaust surfaced? Yes. Would doing so have delayed progress in computer adoption, including in lifesaving applications? Yes, maybe by the 3 months it'd have taken for the market to adapt. Worth it? Yes.
Repeat the above exercise for SpaceX