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Its odd to me how many people in this thread are either for or against this decision, not based on a fixing a problem rationale but on moral grounds that this

Its odd to me how many people in this thread are either for or against this decision, not based on a fixing a problem rationale but on moral grounds that this person deserved or didn't deserve the punishment. Does your computer program deserve to be debugged, fixed, and recompiled when it has thrown an error? What would that even mean? Was it evil or bad because it didn't perform how we wanted it to?

thomasmeeks 9y ago
To my recollection there was a meaningful amount of evidence that this wasn’t a bug. Rather it was optimizing for the test in such a way that it essentially faked the results, and the company was aware it had been done. So, yeah, where I sit this is a good thing. If it were simply a bug that the company was open and honest about, then lets fix it and move on. If they cover it up, then there’s a solid ethical case for severe consequences in my mind.
Zigurd 9y ago
The sentence was severe for a non-violent crime in part because restitution is not practically possible. The damage has been done to the environment. Lives were shortened in amounts that are fairly precisely quantifiable. Competitors were economically disadvantaged. The market for fuels was distorted by a criminal act. This was all done intentionally, to cheat a system that was supposed to improve air quality, throwing such efforts into doubt.
geofft 9y ago
I do not understand how the second paragraph of your reply is related to the first. Computer programs (currently) do not respond to incentives, nor do they react to available resources in any way other than the way in which the resource provider explicitly changes them. So the idea of "deserving" does not apply, but it does apply to entities that respond to incentives or consume and make use of resources in complex/emergent ways. If we had strong AI, then yes, certain strong AIs would be more deserving of resources from the commons than others - that's exactly what MIRI is working on. And if you step back from "program" to "project" (meaning the whole system of code + the autonomous decisions of humans, including groups of humans working as companies, to continue developing the code), then yes, certain projects do deserve to be fixed more than others do. A particularly difficult crash in Python 3.6 is much more worth debugging than one in Python 2.4, which in turn is much more worth debugging than one in GW-BASIC, because the net benefit for humanity in exchange for the opportunity cost varies widely.
- jfaucett 9y ago
  My point has to do with the notion of retributive justice i.e. that punishment should be inflicted because the criminal deserves it - in a quasi-religious sense i.e. he is evil or deserving of hell. This usually carries along notions of moral good and evil that are almost never grounded in measurements to give them real meanings. Conversely, I think people should think about crime in a more reinforcement learning approach i.e. rehabilitative. I view humans as machines essentially. If a machine breaks you fix it, but there is no emotional garbage attached. That's the concept I was trying to get across.
  - s73ver_ 9y ago
    Humans are not machines, so trying to look at them that way is going to be flawed. Furthermore, there is no excuse for what they did. They knew it was wrong. They knew it was against the law. It was not an accident; it was a deliberate act. There's not really any rehabilitation that can take place here.
  - geofft 9y ago
    I agree that punishment as retribution is a poor way to run a civilized society. But punishment as incentive structure fits the framework of "deserving" just fine - full participation in human society is a privilege, not a right, and extending that privilege to people who will hurt society is a poor use of resources. And credibly threatening not to extend that privilege will cause people to try to be the sort of person who "deserves" not to be punished. Viewing humans as machines doesn't work precisely because humans have agency. A machine generally does not decide to break, and a machine generally can be properly fixed (or if it can't, it's obvious). Attempting to convince a machine that it will suffer some negative consequence for misbehavior is unlikely to have any results at all. Meanwhile, especially for humans making decisions about corporate strategy (which means that they're in a culture that's pretty firmly incentivized towards "is this profitable"), credibly convincing them that they will suffer punishment is a great way to change their behavior and prevent them from deciding to do something unwanted. And one way to credibly convince people that they will suffer punishment for an action is to actually punish people who do the same thing. It's very unlikely this executive will make the same mistake again, punishment or no punishment. Rehabilitation isn't the point. But we need to make an example of them, and I say that without the slightest shred of emotion.
s73ver_ 9y ago
I honestly don't know what you're on about. This person willfully engaged in fraud; they instructed their engineers to engage in a project to deliberately mislead regulators, and throw much, much more pollution in the air than they told people they did. This is not a simple mistake.
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  The person you're responding to literally does not see any difference between a person and a program, from any philosophical, moral, or ethical viewpoints. I don't know how you even respond to such an absurdity beyond calling it out for what it is: absurd.
  - s73ver_ 9y ago
    The mods tend to ding me when I do that.

thomasmeeks 9y ago

To my recollection there was a meaningful amount of evidence that this wasn’t a bug. Rather it was optimizing for the test in such a way that it essentially faked the results, and the company was aware it had been done. So, yeah, where I sit this is a good thing. If it were simply a bug that the company was open and honest about, then lets fix it and move on. If they cover it up, then there’s a solid ethical case for severe consequences in my mind.

Zigurd 9y ago

The sentence was severe for a non-violent crime in part because restitution is not practically possible. The damage has been done to the environment. Lives were shortened in amounts that are fairly precisely quantifiable. Competitors were economically disadvantaged. The market for fuels was distorted by a criminal act. This was all done intentionally, to cheat a system that was supposed to improve air quality, throwing such efforts into doubt.

geofft 9y ago

I do not understand how the second paragraph of your reply is related to the first. Computer programs (currently) do not respond to incentives, nor do they react to available resources in any way other than the way in which the resource provider explicitly changes them. So the idea of "deserving" does not apply, but it does apply to entities that respond to incentives or consume and make use of resources in complex/emergent ways. If we had strong AI, then yes, certain strong AIs would be more deserving of resources from the commons than others - that's exactly what MIRI is working on. And if you step back from "program" to "project" (meaning the whole system of code + the autonomous decisions of humans, including groups of humans working as companies, to continue developing the code), then yes, certain projects do deserve to be fixed more than others do. A particularly difficult crash in Python 3.6 is much more worth debugging than one in Python 2.4, which in turn is much more worth debugging than one in GW-BASIC, because the net benefit for humanity in exchange for the opportunity cost varies widely.

jfaucett 9y ago
My point has to do with the notion of retributive justice i.e. that punishment should be inflicted because the criminal deserves it - in a quasi-religious sense i.e. he is evil or deserving of hell. This usually carries along notions of moral good and evil that are almost never grounded in measurements to give them real meanings. Conversely, I think people should think about crime in a more reinforcement learning approach i.e. rehabilitative. I view humans as machines essentially. If a machine breaks you fix it, but there is no emotional garbage attached. That's the concept I was trying to get across.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  Humans are not machines, so trying to look at them that way is going to be flawed. Furthermore, there is no excuse for what they did. They knew it was wrong. They knew it was against the law. It was not an accident; it was a deliberate act. There's not really any rehabilitation that can take place here.
- geofft 9y ago
  I agree that punishment as retribution is a poor way to run a civilized society. But punishment as incentive structure fits the framework of "deserving" just fine - full participation in human society is a privilege, not a right, and extending that privilege to people who will hurt society is a poor use of resources. And credibly threatening not to extend that privilege will cause people to try to be the sort of person who "deserves" not to be punished. Viewing humans as machines doesn't work precisely because humans have agency. A machine generally does not decide to break, and a machine generally can be properly fixed (or if it can't, it's obvious). Attempting to convince a machine that it will suffer some negative consequence for misbehavior is unlikely to have any results at all. Meanwhile, especially for humans making decisions about corporate strategy (which means that they're in a culture that's pretty firmly incentivized towards "is this profitable"), credibly convincing them that they will suffer punishment is a great way to change their behavior and prevent them from deciding to do something unwanted. And one way to credibly convince people that they will suffer punishment for an action is to actually punish people who do the same thing. It's very unlikely this executive will make the same mistake again, punishment or no punishment. Rehabilitation isn't the point. But we need to make an example of them, and I say that without the slightest shred of emotion.

s73ver_ 9y ago

I honestly don't know what you're on about. This person willfully engaged in fraud; they instructed their engineers to engage in a project to deliberately mislead regulators, and throw much, much more pollution in the air than they told people they did. This is not a simple mistake.

CydeWeys 9y ago
The person you're responding to literally does not see any difference between a person and a program, from any philosophical, moral, or ethical viewpoints. I don't know how you even respond to such an absurdity beyond calling it out for what it is: absurd.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  The mods tend to ding me when I do that.