6 ms·
Those skills are unrelated.
by revax 5y ago
Those skills are unrelated.
- saurik 5y agoYeah... and as the person in question who found and exploited this particular bug ;P, I can definitely state that I would not feel comfortable betting the rest of my life on my ability to safely launder a giant pile of crypto back through to fiat (and then, further, keep that secret for the rest of my life, which shouldn't be downplayed). I am much happier being able to get a bunch of clean money and then be able to give talks on the subject at conferences and get a lot of "street cred" in the tech community for my effort than spending the rest of my life wondering if there's someone from a real-world mob out there trying to hunt me down to recover the $100M I "owe them".
- jacquesm 5y agoThe whole assumption that your ethics have a pricetag attached is faulty, it's not as if the choices were 'commit crime / get bounty'.
- sillysaurusx 5y agoEveryone’s ethics have a price tag. It’s better not to pretend otherwise, since it clarifies a lot of human behavior.
- jacquesm 5y agoI strongly disagree with that. You really can't claim to speak for everybody.
- sillysaurusx 5y agoIf you don’t play ball in certain parts of the world, you end up in a river. The price tag is just different. Yours would likely be family or close relatives. I think you’d take money to do something untoward if that was the alternative. Almost everybody would. And there’s nothing wrong with admitting that.
- jacquesm 5y agoMy 'goalposts moved' detector just twitched.
- sillysaurusx 5y agoIf you say so. It’s the same thing, even if it’s more comfortable to believe it’s not. It helps to frame it this way, because once you accept that you’d do that, you’re more likely to accept you would do something unethical for a billion dollars if it had no consequences to you. And from there, it’s a binary search to determine exactly what your price is. Would you be able to say you wouldn’t lie to your wife if it meant you’d walk away with a billion dollars? Certainly this is contrived, but all examples in this territory are contrived.
- jacquesm 5y agoYes, but that's not what we're discussing, because then I can counter with: "Would you sell your mother or your children at any price?" And I hope - admittedly, that's speculation - I know what the answer to that would be. So this is now an absurd discussion, whereas it started off from a rational point of view: there exist such people whose ethics can not be corrupted. The fact that you believe this is not the case says nothing about people in general.
- sillysaurusx 5y agoPeople did in fact sell their children when faced with hard times, by the way. The 1920’s era was rough. https://www.ranker.com/list/story-behind-photo-of-children-for-sale/1499368817867 https://www.ranker.com/list/story-behind-photo-of-children-f... You are asking what I would personally do. But it’s better to think of limit cases that everyone would do — such as lie to their wife for a billion dollars. Since it’s guaranteed you fall into the bucket of “everybody”, that means you can locate your ethical price tag. It’s helpful for people to do this mental exercise. At least, I find it comforting knowing my own price tags in advance.
- aaaaaaaaata 5y agoMany people's ethics have a price tag. Don't bleed all over us!, or let others bleed on us.
- saurik 5y agoYeah: I definitely agree with this, and I think it is an endemic problem to discussion of ethics in technology: we tend to focus on "but I could"--which sometimes ignores the law but even when it doesn't tends to then get bogged down arguing the exact boundaries of the law--without instead trying to judge people on whether they "should" (maybe based on the ramifications it has on other people) or "would". I just think it is also worth noting that, even if we do accept the false dichotomy, I would not be an effective criminal... which seems to continually disappoint some people ;P. (I'm sorry to be such a let down! lol)
- jacquesm 5y agoIndeed, not everything that is permitted is ethical.