I try to practice independent reasoning/critical thinking, to challenge current solutions to be more considerate/complete. I do not reply to DMs for non-personal (with respect to the user who reached out directly) discussions, and will post here instead with reference to the user and my reply.
When thinking about deontology and consequentialism in application, it is useful to me to rate morality of actions based on intention, execution, and outcome. (Some cells are "na" as they are not really logical in real world scenarios.)
In reality, to me, it seems executed "some" intention matters (though I am not sure how much) the most when doing something bad, and executed to the best ability matters the most when doing something good.
It also seems useful to me, when we try to learn about applications of philosophy from law. (I am not an expert though in neither philosophy nor law, so these may contain errors.)
| Intention to kill the person | Executed "some" intention | Killed the person | "Bad" level | Law |
| Yes | Yes | Yes | 10 | murder |
| Yes | Yes | No | 8-10 | as an example, attempted first-degree murder is punished by life in state prison (US, CA) |
| Yes | No | Yes | na | |
| Yes | No | No | 0-5 | no law on this (I can imagine for reasons on "it's hard to prove") but personally, assuming multiple "episodes", or just more time, this leads to murder and attempted murder later anyways; very rare a person can have this thought without executing it in reality. |
| No | Yes | Yes | na | |
| No | Yes | No | na | |
| No | No | Yes | 0-5 | typically not a crime, unless something like negligence |
| No | No | No | 0 | |
| Intention save a person (limited decision time) | Executed intention to the best of ability | Saved the person | "Good" Level | |
| Yes | Yes | Yes | 10 | |
| Yes | Yes | No | 10 | |
| Yes | No | Yes | na | |
| Yes | No | No | 0-5 | |
| No | Yes | Yes | na | |
| No | Yes | No | na | |
| No | No | Yes | 0-5 | |
| No | No | No | 0 | |
| Intention to do good | Executed intention to the best of personal ability1[1] | Did good | "Good" Level | |
| Yes | Yes | Yes | 10 | |
| Yes | Yes | No | 8-10 | |
| Yes | No | Yes | na | |
| Yes | No | No | 0-5 | |
| No | Yes | Yes | na | |
| No | Yes | No | na | |
| No | No | Yes | 0-5 | |
| No | No | No | 0 |
Possible to collaborate when there is enough time.
If you look into a bit more history on social justice/equality problems, you would see we have actually made many many progress (https://gcdd.org/images/Reports/us-social-movements-web-timeline.pdf), but not enough as the bar was so low. These also have made changes in our law. Before 1879, women cannot be lawyers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_women_lawyers_in_the_United_States). On war, I don't have too much knowledge myself, so I will refrain from commenting for now. It is also my belief that we should not stop at attempt, but attempt is the first step (necessary but not sufficient), and they have pushed to real changes as history shown, but it will have to take piles of piles of work, before a significant change. Just because something is very hard to do, does not mean we should stop, nor there will not be a way (just like ensuring there is humanity in the future.) For example, we should not give up on helping people during war nor try to reduce wars in the first place, and we should not give up on preventing women being raped. In my opinion, this is in a way ensuring there is future, as human may very well be destroyed by other humans, or by mistakes by ourselves. (That's also why in the AI safety case, governance is so important so that we consider the human piece.)
As you mentioned political party - it is interesting to see surveys happening here; a side track - I believe general equality problems such as "women can go to school", is not dependent on political party. And something like "police should not kill a black person randomly" should not be supported just by blacks, but also other races (I am not black).
Thanks for the background otherwise.
On LLMs vs search on internet: agree that LLMs are very helpful in many ways, both personally and professionally, but the worse parts of the misinformation in LLM comparing to wikipedia/internets in my opinion includes: 1) it is relatively more unpredictable when the model will hallucinate, whereas for wikipedia/internet, you would generally expect higher accuracy for simpler/purely factual/mathematical information. 2) it is harder to judge the credibility without knowing the source of the information, whereas on the internet, we could get some signals where the website domain, etc.
You may like this paper, and I like the series generally ( https://physics.allen-zhu.com ):
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.20311
This paper looked at generalization abilities for Math, by making up some datasets in a way that the training data have definitely not seen it.
It is unclear to me why AI ethics would be partisan; could you elaborate? Do you mean the bias part in the context of US politics somehow specifically perhaps? (I think a lot of the topics are politicized in an unnecessary/non-causal way in the US)
I am a bit confused on this being "disappointing" to people, maybe because it is not a list that is enough and it is far from complete/enough? I would also be very concerned if OpenAI does not actually care about these, but only did this for PR values (seems some other companies could do this). Otherwise, these are also concrete risks that are happening, actively harming people and need to be addressed. These practices also set up good examples/precedents for regulations and developing with safety mindset. Linking a few resources:
child safety:
private information/PII:
deep fakes:
bias:
Oxford languages (or really just after googling) says "rational" is "based on or in accordance with reason or logic."
I think there are a lot of other types of definitions (I think lesswrong mentioned it is related to the process of finding truth). For me, first of all it is useful to break this down into two parts: 1) observation and information analysis, and 2) decision making.
For 1): Truth, but also particularly causality finding. (Very close to the first one you bolded, and I somehow feel many other ones are just derived from this one. I added causality because many true observations are not really causality).
For 2): My controversial opinion is everyone are probably/usually "rationalists" - just sometimes the reasonings are conscious, and other times they are sub/un-conscious. These reasonings/preferences are unique to each person. It would be dangerous in my opinion if someone try to practice "rationality" based on external reasonings/preferences, or reasonings/preferences that are only recognized by the person's conscious mind (even if a preference is short term). I think a useful practice is to 1. notice what one intuitively want to do vs. what one think they should do (or multiple options they are considering), 2. ask why there is the discrepancy, 3. at least surface the unconscious reasoning, and 4. weigh things (the potential reasonings that leads to conflicting results, for example short term preference vs long term goals) out.