there's this kind of thinking trap that programmers sometimes fall into, which we'll explainhonestly? in our youth we fell pretty hard into it and were huge Lisp fans. then later we were huge Haskell fans for similar reasons. it took a while to really ...
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@alwayscurious @Elucidating in particular, we noticed that a lot of that strategy is based on breaking big ethical choices into small ones. instead of "should we surveil people", people are presented with a dozen different ways to ask what kinds of people it's okay to surveil.
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@alwayscurious @Elucidating when ethical choices are excessively taxonomized like that, they lose their connection to the real world, the impact starts to feel less. it's stunningly effective.
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@alwayscurious @Elucidating what we learned is that ethics is a process, not a single decision, it's something that nobody ever gets to stop thinking about
and that, furthermore, it must always be open-ended. rubrics and checklists can be important tools but they must never be the whole thing.
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If I may also offer: The end conclusion is that you can affect moral outcomes, but you must accept that you cannot possibly forsee all of them. To empower people is, on some level, accepting that you're going to empower someone doing a bad thing.
There's lots of directions you can go from there, but *inherently* the act of empowering people is an act with a spectrum of moral and ethical outcomes and it cannot be any other way.
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@Elucidating @alwayscurious absolutely. strongly agreed.
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@Elucidating @alwayscurious you said that very carefully, which we appreciate. it's structurally similar to an argument that gets used a lot to tell people to NOT care about the consequences: "it's just a tool, the tool is morally neutral, it's about how people use it, which is not up to you"
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@Elucidating @alwayscurious we never see any reasoning provided as to WHY that's not up to the workers who make the tool, at least to some extent. it's one of those things people state as if it's unassailable fact because they're trying to MAKE it true.
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@irenes @alwayscurious Yeah. The dual of that is also untenable. "Do you know how many fascists make a living by using your text editor, it's a lot of fascists" is not a very helpful framing for Vim, even though I can point to vim enthusiasts who are also Nazis and have big communities of fash leaning tech.
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@Elucidating @alwayscurious yes, agreed. it's not that moral responsibility ever stops, that's certainly a consideration to weigh, but we see nothing you can or should do about it, other than not adding features requested by that crowd.
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@Elucidating @alwayscurious there's a lot of focus lately on mechanisms, legal or technical, to control who uses a program, perhaps because of the bias towards reactivity that social media promotes. we think such mechanisms do more harm than good because they are a tool of control first and foremost, and the answer to oppressive ideologies cannot be to enact the methods of those ideologies. the purpose of a system is what it does; our intentions in building it do not absolve us.