[59percentmore]

Because the difference between what he's done and, say, the practice of the people who peddled opioids for a paycheck is one of degree, not kind.

[sillyfluke]

Obviously the difference of degree on the spectrum between the two in this case does vary greatly, but your comment reminded me of an interview with a journalist who had compiled a collection of interviews with midtier drug dealers in various cartels and one thing that stood out to him was that almost all of them, when asked why they did what they did, would respond by saying that if they didn't someone else would.

[nixon_why69]

The difference between my sins or your sins and much greater sins is also one of degree, not kind.

You never lied or went along with something dubious? At least this person is being honest and reflective.

[DANmode]

> You never lied or went along with something dubious?

…no?

Certainly not where it impacted more than just me and one other person.

Why would that be normal?

[nixon_why69]

Seriously? No white lies or going along with anything that you didn't fully agree with, in your life, in all contexts? We're talking about kind and not degree here, per the comment I responded to.

Have you been fired from a job for standing on these ironclad principles?

[DANmode]

Left my best job/title for them.

Had my place to sleep as a young person threatened, for doing the right thing in the family business.

I don’t even feel good about Santa…

[nixon_why69]

Ok, well respect to you for whatever happened there, sincerely.

But all of us have compromised at some time or place, I have in some places and faced consequences for not doing so in other places. If you haven't compromised yet, then wait until you have a family to take care of.

I prefer being honest about the times I did compromise and took OPs comment in that vein. A true psycho would see nothing wrong and also not be reflective about it.

[DANmode]

> then wait until you have a family to take care of.

I’ve also kept from having a family until I’m able to have one without directly* harming someone else to do it.

I’m reflecting. Mostly on what others have, materially, that I do not, but also what I have that they cannot.

Environmental externalities of the existence of my entire country/society notwithstanding - before this goes off into the weeds further.

[SecretDreams]

Yeah, but it's multiple orders of magnitude apart.

Are we also going to start putting LLM engineers to the fire because they're accelerating the enshitification of our world? Probably not.

[LadyCailin]

That’s not a good example, since you can argue that LLMs have utility to humanity. Hiding the cancel button has none, except for rent seeking.

[angrysaki]

The bigger difference is that the net utility for LLMs could turn out to be massively negative

[LadyCailin]

Maybe! But that’s certainly debatable. “I thought I was doing the right thing” is anyways a much better defense than “I was just following orders” anyways.

[SecretDreams]

Rockets have value to humanity too, but some people that worked on rockets ended up working for people that did not want to use rockets to improve human life.