7 ms·

Good people refuse to do bad things

126 points by Brajeshwar 14d ago

jmclnx 14d ago
Nice to see people standing up for their beliefs even when it could hurt them. Story time :) I remember when I was first starting out as a programmer. At QE (always occurred on a weekend) a slew of financial reports were created and printed for review the following Monday then I think used for summaries for Wall Street to look at. A high level finance manager came to me and asked if the report could be changed, not knowing what he was asking I said sure. After a long discussion turned out he wanted the numbers on the report changed and re-printed. I said it was possible but the numbers would be all wrong. So he said "do it". I went to my manager and told them what he wanted, then I refused to do it. I said I would quit first because I did not want the SEC to come after me. Luckily they all supported me and the finance manager was told to "FO". FWIW, that company is long gone.
- dofm 14d ago
  Yes. You never threaten to resign. You conditionally promise to resign. I had to make this conditional promise once, back in the nineties, as a junior person in a related industry. Because in the dot-com era developers like me were often simultaneously a babe-in-arms on a professional career level and also the only person who knew how to do the work that was being sold. I decided that if it came to it, I would not be the person having a hard time in court. The client understood better than my bosses and they changed the product. Took them a few minutes at most, but I have reason to believe that my decision made some ripples. Nowadays I don’t let those issues surprise me: I believe in establishing specific ethical standards at the beginning of projects, because if you don’t do that, you don’t have a basis to robustly point to actions that put them at risk.
ArcHound 14d ago
Generally, I agree. Imagine: you start working at the company with a good will towards them. As you learn more and see more decisions, you slowly realize how bad it is. Now you've already contributed. Then you leave. It might be possible to build everything with this goodwill and that's how we'd still end up with a torment nexus even if you immediately drop it. What I'm saying is, at one point you have to break the company fully. I'm not sure what more we need to wait for, if the claim "10% it ends humanity" is not enough.
- sandeepkd 14d ago
  There is a lot more to it, an assumption is being made that somehow its easy to classify a company being god or bad and same for people. In reality, everyones life experiences shape them differently, the moral compass of right and wrong isn't same for everyone. Leaving that aside people are not just managing their feelings alone, more than often they are responsible for other people in the family as well and the impact of decision can have far reaching impact. Making a decision when you are single vs with kids and a mortgage are two different things. Good people can be in tough position where even when they do not agree they may not have much of an option but to keep going.
  - ArcHound 14d ago
    I think we are in agreement. What I wanted to say is that usually people start with good intentions and only later they realize they are contributing to a torment nexus. What you are saying definitely plays a role and it makes doing moral choices difficult.
- godwinson__4-8 14d ago
  Compelling argument. All involved in this AI endeavor should be forced to answer: What other made up figure are you waiting for!?
- seiferteric 14d ago
  If it's "10% it ends humanity" and "20% it solves climate change and saves humanity" then is it still bad?
  - ArcHound 14d ago
    Any indication how it could solve climate change? Because I'm seeing mainly hacker attacks, job insecurity, environmental impacts and vague threats with smiling faces.
  - mofeien 14d ago
    Potentially. If we could put a precise probability on it, we could maybe make an informed decision on whether we want to play that Russian roulette as a species. But the reality is that experts' probabilities for human extinctions vary wildly, with the lab leaders at 20%-30% and these researchers at >10% (he didn't state how much higher...), LeCun at <0.01% and the other two godfathers of AI, Bengio and Hinton at >10%. And this decision to take our shot is not taken in a democratic way by humanity as a whole, but by a few companies racing as fast as possible. So as long as no one can put an upper bound on the extinction risk, development must be globally shut down.
carterschonwald 14d ago
theres a certain amount of financial security needed for folks to do this kinda thing.
- phyzome 14d ago
  Of course. But software developers are, on the whole, pretty damn well compensated. As a group we have a lot of freedom to make these sorts of financial decisions. Yes, some members of the group don't have that freedom. But that doesn't excuse the ones who do.
- calcifer 14d ago
  The article addresses that: > If the answer is the salary, say it louder, and do not force yourself to make excuses.
- throwaway713 14d ago
  You need to have money to do the right thing? Odd take. Plenty of people with much less have sacrificed much more throughout history.
- rglullis 14d ago
  No. This is one of the many excuses that people employ to keep feeding the beast.
- skrtskrt 14d ago
  Even if everyone had enough financial security (or realized they did), you need coordination, people are never going to independently and spontaneously turn down these jobs at evilcorp en masse - you need coordination, a.k.a strong unions which can actually effect the policies of the employer.
- pizzafeelsright 14d ago
  "Now that my RSUs have been exercised, here is the problem with _________"
deleted 14d ago
[deleted]
moondistance 14d ago
The root issue is a lack of honour in the world today.
- vvpan 14d ago
  I think that puts too much onto personal responsibility. Most problems are structural.
  - zaphar 14d ago
    Personal responsibility leads to corporate responsibility which is the solve for structural problems. You can never impose a new structure to fix it unless you embrace some form of corporate responsibility which requires personal responsibility.
    - vvpan 14d ago
      By law the only corporate responsibility is to shareholders (and law). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
  - phyzome 14d ago
    And that structure is made of people, and supported by people's decisions. People are very happy to abdicate what personal responsibility they have if they can blame the system. (And then fail to help change the system.)
    - vvpan 14d ago
      A system where shareholder value is effectively the only metric will align the people accordingly.
- agumonkey 14d ago
  And also cost. Standing out from the pack is always costly, you may not find job right away, you might be outcast .. the more we have safety nets the easier it is to quit bad groups.
cluckindan 14d ago
Good people are easy to mislead into thinking they’re doing a good thing.
- davsti4 14d ago
  Correction - highly intelligent people. Its the same playbook, over and over again.
- rvz 14d ago
  For the "benefit of humanity", "saving the world" and "imaging to do good" via effective altruistic ways. /s
- BalinKing 14d ago
  [Disclaimer: I believe that morality is objective (and that our consciences are generally reliable guides, albeit ones we can suppress or even change), so any strong statements I make below are implicitly coming from this perspective.] I strongly disagree, I think this is instead true for those who have an image of themself as "good". IME, someone whose identity involves their "goodness" (and I certainly include myself here) will be willing to do a whole lot to maintain that perception (whether it's a self-perception or an external one). In particular, I think that someone already motivated to feel good about themselves is going to be easier to mislead by slick arguments. See the unfalsifiable longterm-ism of modern-day EA ("you can do an incalculably large amount of good with comparatively minimal effort"), much of today's political violence/radicalism, or the religious persecution all throughout history, whether against the religious (many of last century's authoritarians) or by the religious: cf. Jesus' warning about this in John 16:2 ("They will put you out of the synagogue; in fact, the time is coming when anyone who kills you will think they are offering a service to God."), or even just the Bible's very many warnings against pride (e.g. Proverbs 26:12 [0]) and self-righteousness (e.g. Romans 10:2-3 [1]). (Of course, sometimes people have no way of knowing a priori that they're being misled. I'm exclusively talking about cases where, deep down, one could/should have known that the situation wasn't actually on the up-and-up... which I'd argue is much more common than we often like to think.) On the other hand, I'd argue that someone who is truly doing what is good is, by definition, unable to be swayed from that (for then they wouldn't be doing good things anymore, no matter what words they want to use to describe themselves or others). Relatedly, I don't agree that someone can be a "good person" in the absence of actually doing good. (Naturally, this is an extraordinarily high bar, and I'd argue an impossible one to perfectly meet.) I'm reminded of C.S. Lewis's famous quote: > Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. [0] "You have seen a man wise in his own opinion— there is more hope for a fool than for him." [1] "For I testify about them that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For not knowing about the righteousness of God and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God." (emphasis mine)
rochansinha 14d ago
It’s an excellent article marred by the last line/ heading. People do things. Good or bad is relative to their own biases/experiences/ beliefs and moral compass. Very few people are truly sociopaths who do evil stuff for personal gain. Most do it because of the curse of the “banality of evil” (re: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem?wprov=sfti1#Banality_of_evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem?wprov=sf...>) Doesn’t make it right, but like everything else in life the reality is much more complex than saying “good people refuse to do bad things”
- Sha1rholder 14d ago
  The last line/heading of this article makes its main point super clear. Don't deceive yourself (and others).
- spencerflem 14d ago
  I’m well aware tech companies are evil and yet work at one. My current read is that ~20-30% of people in America actively delight in hurting others (ICE supporters etc) Another 30% do not seem to care about anything but their own well-being. (I don’t like to think I fall here but as a big tech peon it doesn’t look good). The remaining percent seem to care and are trying their best but looking at how things are going it’s not enough
  - chadgpt8 14d ago
    The former is a recognised personality trait called "social dominance orientation".
dgellow 14d ago
That Coxon guy looks as delusional as the AI leadership. If you watch interviews he gave he doesn’t articulate what he’s concerned about, only sharing vague information about a supposed AI god that will take over the world, but without articulating why now, and how that would even happen. The more I look into his story the more that move looks like what a grifter would do
- api 14d ago
  I'm deeply skeptical of AI doomer stuff, but I've been struggling to exactly articulate why. I can think of it in my brain and can try to explain but so far none of my explanations have seemed fully coherent to me. I studied biology in college. I actually did this because I was interested in AI, and already knew a ton of CS and programming. I was already coding in C and using Linux and writing fairly complex stuff. I figured studying the only actual example of a truly intelligent system (especially at the time, early 2000s) was the best way to understand intelligence. Didn't end up going into AI as my day job, but I've kept up with it all and worked through the math and played with different types (genetic, neural nets, transformers/LLMs, CA / alife, etc.). I think the root of my skepticism is in what I learned studying biology about how life, adaptation, learning, and evolution actually work in the real world. I'll try to TL;DR it: I think the doom crowd (and also some of the AI singularity crowd) has a "mystical" view of intelligence. Intelligence is magic pixie dust, and intelligence beyond human is fully unknown and likely has magic superpowers. The deeper underlying thing seems to be some kind of mathematical mysticism. Real intelligence is ubiquitous in nature. Trees, grass, bugs, and even bacteria are intelligent. It's also domain specific and limited in capability to what its domain, available training data, and available compute allows. It's not context-free limit-free magic. It's not special. It's an adaptation like any other.
  - spencerflem 14d ago
    What gets me is that I haven’t heard a reasonable explanation of exactly what the AI will do besides: nukes and biolabs we already have & ofc AI is making climate change worse, some of the Amazon datacenters are using fossil fuels to generate a country’s worth of power, but that’s never part of their calculations
oconnor663 14d ago
> do not consider yourself a contributor to humankind Good lord. You could apply the same logic to any taxpaying resident of any country whose government is doing something bad. There's some truth to it, it's worth bearing in mind, but it's also the very definition of an Isolated Demand for Rigor.
- petesergeant 14d ago
  > Isolated Demand for Rigor That is a fantastic term for something that seems to come up a lot, and I had not heard before.
  - oconnor663 14d ago
    https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...
    - wonnage 14d ago
      Lmao all roads lead to the same navel gazing bullshit from Scott Alexander The man is the definition of a useful idiot https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/08/30/military-strikes-are-an-extremely-cheap-way-to-help-foreigners/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/08/30/military-strikes-are-a...
- applfanboysbgon 14d ago
  > You could apply the same logic to any taxpaying resident of any country whose government is doing something bad. You can't, because those taxes are coerced from you at literal gunpoint if you refuse (or your property seized at gunpoint to the same effect). It's completely different than choosing to do that of your own free will. When I was in the US, I did actively attempt to diminish my tax contribution as much as legally possible out of disgust at what it was used for, but nobody is morally tainted for being forced to contribute a small slice to something evil. Maybe there's a threshold where you should be actively laying down your life to resist, eg. if being forced to commit actual murder, but I don't think you can reasonably expect that of paying taxes at all. --- Edit: rate-limited, attaching a reply to a below comment. > The problem with avoiding taxes because of expenditures you think are bad is that you also reduce the pool available for things you think are good. Indeed, but I also chose to contribute money to other good causes instead. In that way, the same sum could be used for 100% good instead of, say, 80% good 20% bad. Now that I live in a country of my choosing, I am proud to pay taxes because of how they are used. 0% of my tax money goes to killing innocent people overseas, for instance.
petesergeant 14d ago
These replies will be full of people showing how worldly and clear-eyed they are by dismissing the same threat the guy resigned over as a marketing stunt.
BatchJob 14d ago
but what if dude already did it (destroyed the world but it hasnt happened yet) before he quit? The rule of all games played in capitalism is there's a sucker born every minute. you can work a few years or your whole life before you realize you've been had. and most do....
bravoetch 14d ago
If everyone doing a 'bad thing' stepped off the hamster wheel today, the world economy would collapse before markets closed. The biggest companies have built an attention and surveillance nightmare machine that funnels all the money to a relatively small number of shareholders.
- phoronixrly 14d ago
  Good.
- nativeit 14d ago
  These kinds of discussions very quickly arrive at the “no ethical consumption under capitalism” line of thinking. No matter who you are, no matter what you do, some activity or product you engage with will have been the result of some kind of exploitation.
  - rpdillon 14d ago
    Yes, this is one of the central theses of the TV show "The Good Place". In simpler societies, it's easier to determine what is right and wrong, since actions are often local and can be judged on their immediate effects. But when everything is globalized and there's so many connections, determining right and wrong becomes much more difficult.
  - trumpdong 14d ago
    "no ethical consumption under capitalism" is true, explains why we can't just stop bad things (everything is bad, so you'd starve) and is a jumping off point for a discussion of what we can actually do about it without starving.
- phyzome 14d ago
  Are you suggesting that since "everyone does the right thing now" would have bad consequences, we shouldn't bother with "everyone does the right thing in a normally distributed way"? (Which is the less artificial scenario.)
Aurornis 14d ago
> More than half of tech workers (53%) would steer a newcomer away from their own field, and they stay. It would be nice to see this survey repeated across professions. In my experience, most people have gripes about their profession because it’s what they know. Only half of respondents saying they would steer newcomers away feels a lot better than what my friends in medicine say all the time. Among my college professor and professor-track friends, this number probably reaches 100%.
- bornfreddy 14d ago
  Also, how does this number (53%) compare to pre-LLM numbers?
- autoexec 14d ago
  I think more important than the percentages are the reasons why someone would steer others away from their chosen profession.
nilslindemann 14d ago
He may also have gotten paid for it by players, which dont want AGI, because it would disturb their plans. Imagine AGI works out a plan, which, when applied by everyday people without needing any government help, enforces the end of wars, poverty, pollution, illness, unhappiness, worldwide.
cogman10 14d ago
I disagree with this article and here's why. Life isn't black and white with "good/bad". Further, there's no objective measure of what is good or bad. Everything is a shade of gray. You certainly could argue that some actions are absolutely good or absolutely bad, but those aren't the majority of actions people take on a day to day basis. People aren't often faced with "should I kill this person" or "should I publish the cure for cancer". Instead it's "should I eat a hamburger or a salad" or "Should I finish this jira case or that jira case". For example, you could argue that anyone working in an automotive plant is doing something bad because they are helping to produce vehicles which burn fuel which perpetuates climate change. But those plants also often produce parts for farm equipment or vehicles used to transport necessities like food. People working at AI companies can make similar personal calculations. Like yeah there are bad things happening because of AI, but also they can believe that there are good things that can come as a result such as research and product developments.
- graemep 14d ago
  A few big good/bad decisions are more important than thousands of trivial decisions. Balancing good against bad is not clear, I agree, but that makes it all the more important to think about it when making a big decision such as what job to take. Its hard and people do not even agree about how to balance it - e.g. whether the ends justify the means.
  - cogman10 14d ago
    Well that's my point. Someone working as a geologist for the oil industry can think climate change isn't real or not a problem so they can view their job of finding more oil as being a clear benefit for society. No amount of trying to tell them "But you are doing something bad by helping the oil industry" will make them reconsider if they are good or bad. But I also wouldn't say they are necessarily bad people. You can also simply just be wrong or misinformed when you make your moral calculation. Good people do bad things sometimes. Bad people do good things sometimes. That's why the framing of badness as a taint isn't really helpful IMO. It creates a "us vs them" sort of attitude that ultimately doesn't address whatever issue is at hand.
livvy 14d ago
Coxon is a shithead who thought he could have a better career as an AI scaremonger than an engineer. He's still working in service of the AI companies though (same narrative) and no doubt will land a cushy job at so-callef "AI Safety" labs or make a living on the news/podcast circuit.
- livvy 14d ago
  The downvotes are funny to me because it's true. To quote Coxon on CBS News: > I think it clearly there was some latent demand for this sort of sentiment or people were gradually coming to this sort of conclusion because obviously so many other people have been saying the same thing for a long time. ... > Yeah. Honestly, when I talk to my friends and family about this, I find it easier to or people seem to actually get more of a sense for it if they're further away from technology. Because I honestly think it sounds more like science fiction than real technology. He's quite open about it, saying the quiet part out loud. Tech is strange place to be if you're, well... technical. Being constantly gaslit by people who haven't built anything or have 3 years in the industry like here Coxon.
chilmers 14d ago
Why is it that every one of these anti-AI screeds that gets upvoted on HN has been clearly written by AI? Here is one of his posts from 2022: "Since a long time now I was interested in learning computer graphics and “do stuff” with computer graphics APIs. I began to work on a very simple Game engine in Swift / Metal last year but I began to switch to a Windows machine a few months ago, and Swift / Metal is not compatible with Windows (and will never be I think)." https://carette.xyz/posts/opengl_and_cpp_on_m1_mac/ https://carette.xyz/posts/opengl_and_cpp_on_m1_mac/ This is the same person who is apparently now writing: "It is a transaction where you sell the part of you that was supposed to care. Do that often enough, and it does not come back. That is not burnout, but it is still a disease. Although, like every disease, it spreads: first to your team, then to your product, then to the people using it."
- trumpdong 14d ago
  Everything that gets upvoted on HN has been written by AI. Because AI writing works (if your goal is to attract upvotes).
tptacek 14d ago
The author of this blog is an AI skeptic (see the backlog of posts). That's fine, but it's hard to square with this particular post. To take Coxon's argument seriously, you have to believe frontier models are hypercapable, and not just hype objects. That's what Coxon believes and why he left.
- dsign 14d ago
  > To take Coxon's argument seriously, you have to believe frontier models are hypercapable, and not just hype objects. It's harder and harder to make the point that frontier objects are just hype objects though. And, even if they stay where they are today, that's more than enough to make them incredibly...destabilizing, to say the least. It's not only it, but frontier models act like knowledge mixers and percolators. Some people (not necessarily everybody), are adept at the discipline of learning, building things and executing projects, and that's all you need today with LLMs filling many of the gaps such person can have. Now, most of those people are actually engineers. So I'm going to go with the article and say that we must stop selling our souls for money.
- moolcool 14d ago
  All OP has to believe is that Coxon himself believes the hype.
  - tptacek 14d ago
    I guess if the entire argument is that people should make moral choices in their employment, sure, but that's not a very interesting piece; people generally already believe that. But I don't think that's their argument. I think their argument is that people should make moral choices to avoid employment with AI firms, and if you're using Coxon for that argument, you can't coherently argue that models are hype objects simultaneously. There is no greater claim you can make about AI hypercapability than that it will eradicate humanity. (I don't buy any of those claims, for what it's worth.)
    - moolcool 14d ago
      The heads of the firms themselves believe it too. Maybe it’s reasonable to quit your job if your boss thinks he’s building a doomsday machine (regardless of how ridiculous you or anyone else find that idea)
fi-le 14d ago
It's refreshing to see a well-argued and balanced essay on AI risk being upvoted on Hacker News.
armchairhacker 14d ago
It's impossible to judge long term effects. My only advice is to think long and deep, then do what is true to yourself. Jacob Coxon and Frances Haugen are good people by any reasonable metric, and maybe someone who stays but tries to steer the system from the inside is good too.
skyberrys 14d ago
I understand the concern about your work being used to cause harm, but I also worry about the development of 'forbidden knowledge'. What does it mean to say a branch of science and engineering is too dangerous of a path to go down? Does it mean scientists are persecuted just for asking questions and designing experiments to find answers? Will there be witch hunts against ML researchers? Part of teaching is trusting your students to use the learnings wisely.
- trumpdong 14d ago
  This isn't the first. What did it mean for human embryonic gene editing?
  - bornfreddy 14d ago
    That is a good point, but the problem with ML/AI is that anyone can do it. It will be difficult to stem this tide.
- autoexec 14d ago
  There's a lot of very dangerous scientific work that gets done because we've put safety measures in place to protect workers and the public to the best of our ability. This allows the dangerous work to be done as safely as possible. "AI" is being worked on and funded by sociopaths who care about money over all else and have demonstrated that they are willing to hurt others in exchange for more of it. There are no rules or protections for anybody anywhere. In fact AI companies are pouring bribe money into our corrupt political system in an effort to remove or avoid anything that would stop them from doing whatever they want.
- hollerith 14d ago
  What is your basis for calling them "witch hunts" rather than "criminal prosecutions"? (The prosecutions would start only after the passage of a new law making the questions and experiments illegal.) If you work at a defense contractor on warplanes, radar systems or nuclear weapons and you are too free in how you teach or write about your professional knowledge, you go to prison, and it has been that way in the US continuously since WWII. Criminal prosecutions are relatively rare because security-clearance background investigations filter out most of the job applicants who would go on to violate the laws.
01100011 14d ago
I think a lot of the success of the valley comes from disguising the thing the people are working on. If the end goals of our work were apparent to us we'd have a lot harder time showing up for work everyday. That said, I don't buy this article. I'm AI neutral. It's going to break a lot of things and fix many others. Good for you if you think you know what the net outcome will be but I think it's delusional to believe you do. Also I don't think you can resign and stop it without ceding the world to bad people. Pandora's box has already been opened. We've discovered a new thing math can do and now it's yet another arms race between various factions seeking to exploit it. Help the faction you want to win. It's not the world I want it to be, but it is what it is.
magimas 14d ago
>The accusation >So, why are you still working for them? >If the answer is the salary, say it louder, and do not force yourself to make excuses. >If the answer is “someone worse would replace me”, say it too, and louder too. >If the answer is “I can change things from the inside”, then show me what you changed. Haugen tried the inside. Coxon tried the inside. At the end, unfortunately, the inside did not move. > Okay, but what if I think that both sides are LARPing their personal science fiction stories and reality will end up much more mundane (but still incredibly beneficial) than the utopias and dystopias everyone is cooking up? This is presupposing a moral dilemma that just doesn't exist in my opinion.
- david927 14d ago
  We're getting so much of this junk with the IPOs pressing. The mimicbots are impressive but they're frustrating. We've hit the limit for pre-training data and now we're relying on RL for the next progressive steps and that gets asymptotic fast. The truth is that unsupervised learning hasn't inched forward and we don't know how it will, so we're left with benchmaxxing and LARPing about how they're escaping air-gapped configs using themal sensors, all in a desperate attempt to make the projected numbers look less insane so these people can cash out at IPO time. Everyone knows what's happening and it's embarrassing.
bzmrgonz 14d ago
In my opinion, we need a sort of survey, let's put it out there, can we get a collective voice from most ai phd's? Remember when climate change was in the scientific tug-of-war? The conclusion for a long time was that 9 in 10 scientists believed in climate change. So, why can't we do that with "ai is gonna kill us"
atemerev 14d ago
I think recursively self-improving universal intelligence is a good thing, and tool alignment is what creates instrumental convergence and therefore a bad thing. The paperclip parable is about tool alignment gone wrong.
stego-tech 14d ago
Man, I’m exhausted by the hand-wringing of folks reading through to the end and ignoring the questions posed in favor of “well the world ain’t that simple obviously” as a means of not having to justify or defend their own positions. Obviously morality and ethics aren’t binary. OP isn’t saying that. What they’re saying in a clear and concise manner is that your actions have consequences far beyond your personal sphere, and good people acknowledge that and fight for what’s better despite the harm they personally may suffer as a result. That what makes someone “good” in their point of view isn’t a binary deed or outcome, but of the sacrifices they’ll make for themselves to build a better existence for others. Planting a tree whose shade you’ll never enjoy, in other words. So to reiterate OP’s challenge at the end, at least be honest about why you’re still in the game. Let others know where you stand so that we don’t waste our time on futility. If your voluntary position on something mutable risks making you a target, then the rational next step would be to evaluate how important that position is to you that you would weather said harm instead of changing it. That’s all OP was getting at: promoting the mere notion of critically thinking about the decisions you make in regards to your own moral philosophy and acting more authentically, including tanking the damage trying to bring about change.
josefritzishere 14d ago
[dead]

126 points by Brajeshwar 14d ago

Nice to see people standing up for their beliefs even when it could hurt them. Story time :) I remember when I was first starting out as a programmer. At QE (always occurred on a weekend) a slew of financial reports were created and printed for review the following Monday then I think used for summaries for Wall Street to look at. A high level finance manager came to me and asked if the report could be changed, not knowing what he was asking I said sure. After a long discussion turned out he wanted the numbers on the report changed and re-printed. I said it was possible but the numbers would be all wrong. So he said "do it". I went to my manager and told them what he wanted, then I refused to do it. I said I would quit first because I did not want the SEC to come after me. Luckily they all supported me and the finance manager was told to "FO". FWIW, that company is long gone.

dofm 14d ago
Yes. You never threaten to resign. You conditionally promise to resign. I had to make this conditional promise once, back in the nineties, as a junior person in a related industry. Because in the dot-com era developers like me were often simultaneously a babe-in-arms on a professional career level and also the only person who knew how to do the work that was being sold. I decided that if it came to it, I would not be the person having a hard time in court. The client understood better than my bosses and they changed the product. Took them a few minutes at most, but I have reason to believe that my decision made some ripples. Nowadays I don’t let those issues surprise me: I believe in establishing specific ethical standards at the beginning of projects, because if you don’t do that, you don’t have a basis to robustly point to actions that put them at risk.

ArcHound 14d ago

Generally, I agree. Imagine: you start working at the company with a good will towards them. As you learn more and see more decisions, you slowly realize how bad it is. Now you've already contributed. Then you leave. It might be possible to build everything with this goodwill and that's how we'd still end up with a torment nexus even if you immediately drop it. What I'm saying is, at one point you have to break the company fully. I'm not sure what more we need to wait for, if the claim "10% it ends humanity" is not enough.

sandeepkd 14d ago
There is a lot more to it, an assumption is being made that somehow its easy to classify a company being god or bad and same for people. In reality, everyones life experiences shape them differently, the moral compass of right and wrong isn't same for everyone. Leaving that aside people are not just managing their feelings alone, more than often they are responsible for other people in the family as well and the impact of decision can have far reaching impact. Making a decision when you are single vs with kids and a mortgage are two different things. Good people can be in tough position where even when they do not agree they may not have much of an option but to keep going.
- ArcHound 14d ago
  I think we are in agreement. What I wanted to say is that usually people start with good intentions and only later they realize they are contributing to a torment nexus. What you are saying definitely plays a role and it makes doing moral choices difficult.
godwinson__4-8 14d ago
Compelling argument. All involved in this AI endeavor should be forced to answer: What other made up figure are you waiting for!?
seiferteric 14d ago
If it's "10% it ends humanity" and "20% it solves climate change and saves humanity" then is it still bad?
- ArcHound 14d ago
  Any indication how it could solve climate change? Because I'm seeing mainly hacker attacks, job insecurity, environmental impacts and vague threats with smiling faces.
- mofeien 14d ago
  Potentially. If we could put a precise probability on it, we could maybe make an informed decision on whether we want to play that Russian roulette as a species. But the reality is that experts' probabilities for human extinctions vary wildly, with the lab leaders at 20%-30% and these researchers at >10% (he didn't state how much higher...), LeCun at <0.01% and the other two godfathers of AI, Bengio and Hinton at >10%. And this decision to take our shot is not taken in a democratic way by humanity as a whole, but by a few companies racing as fast as possible. So as long as no one can put an upper bound on the extinction risk, development must be globally shut down.

carterschonwald 14d ago

theres a certain amount of financial security needed for folks to do this kinda thing.

phyzome 14d ago
Of course. But software developers are, on the whole, pretty damn well compensated. As a group we have a lot of freedom to make these sorts of financial decisions. Yes, some members of the group don't have that freedom. But that doesn't excuse the ones who do.
calcifer 14d ago
The article addresses that: > If the answer is the salary, say it louder, and do not force yourself to make excuses.
throwaway713 14d ago
You need to have money to do the right thing? Odd take. Plenty of people with much less have sacrificed much more throughout history.
rglullis 14d ago
No. This is one of the many excuses that people employ to keep feeding the beast.
skrtskrt 14d ago
Even if everyone had enough financial security (or realized they did), you need coordination, people are never going to independently and spontaneously turn down these jobs at evilcorp en masse - you need coordination, a.k.a strong unions which can actually effect the policies of the employer.
pizzafeelsright 14d ago
"Now that my RSUs have been exercised, here is the problem with _________"

deleted 14d ago

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moondistance 14d ago

The root issue is a lack of honour in the world today.

vvpan 14d ago
I think that puts too much onto personal responsibility. Most problems are structural.
- zaphar 14d ago
  Personal responsibility leads to corporate responsibility which is the solve for structural problems. You can never impose a new structure to fix it unless you embrace some form of corporate responsibility which requires personal responsibility.
  - vvpan 14d ago
    By law the only corporate responsibility is to shareholders (and law). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
- phyzome 14d ago
  And that structure is made of people, and supported by people's decisions. People are very happy to abdicate what personal responsibility they have if they can blame the system. (And then fail to help change the system.)
  - vvpan 14d ago
    A system where shareholder value is effectively the only metric will align the people accordingly.
agumonkey 14d ago
And also cost. Standing out from the pack is always costly, you may not find job right away, you might be outcast .. the more we have safety nets the easier it is to quit bad groups.

cluckindan 14d ago

Good people are easy to mislead into thinking they’re doing a good thing.

davsti4 14d ago
Correction - highly intelligent people. Its the same playbook, over and over again.
rvz 14d ago
For the "benefit of humanity", "saving the world" and "imaging to do good" via effective altruistic ways. /s
BalinKing 14d ago
[Disclaimer: I believe that morality is objective (and that our consciences are generally reliable guides, albeit ones we can suppress or even change), so any strong statements I make below are implicitly coming from this perspective.] I strongly disagree, I think this is instead true for those who have an image of themself as "good". IME, someone whose identity involves their "goodness" (and I certainly include myself here) will be willing to do a whole lot to maintain that perception (whether it's a self-perception or an external one). In particular, I think that someone already motivated to feel good about themselves is going to be easier to mislead by slick arguments. See the unfalsifiable longterm-ism of modern-day EA ("you can do an incalculably large amount of good with comparatively minimal effort"), much of today's political violence/radicalism, or the religious persecution all throughout history, whether against the religious (many of last century's authoritarians) or by the religious: cf. Jesus' warning about this in John 16:2 ("They will put you out of the synagogue; in fact, the time is coming when anyone who kills you will think they are offering a service to God."), or even just the Bible's very many warnings against pride (e.g. Proverbs 26:12 [0]) and self-righteousness (e.g. Romans 10:2-3 [1]). (Of course, sometimes people have no way of knowing a priori that they're being misled. I'm exclusively talking about cases where, deep down, one could/should have known that the situation wasn't actually on the up-and-up... which I'd argue is much more common than we often like to think.) On the other hand, I'd argue that someone who is truly doing what is good is, by definition, unable to be swayed from that (for then they wouldn't be doing good things anymore, no matter what words they want to use to describe themselves or others). Relatedly, I don't agree that someone can be a "good person" in the absence of actually doing good. (Naturally, this is an extraordinarily high bar, and I'd argue an impossible one to perfectly meet.) I'm reminded of C.S. Lewis's famous quote: > Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. [0] "You have seen a man wise in his own opinion— there is more hope for a fool than for him." [1] "For I testify about them that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For not knowing about the righteousness of God and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God." (emphasis mine)

rochansinha 14d ago

It’s an excellent article marred by the last line/ heading. People do things. Good or bad is relative to their own biases/experiences/ beliefs and moral compass. Very few people are truly sociopaths who do evil stuff for personal gain. Most do it because of the curse of the “banality of evil” (re: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem?wprov=sfti1#Banality_of_evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem?wprov=sf...>) Doesn’t make it right, but like everything else in life the reality is much more complex than saying “good people refuse to do bad things”

Sha1rholder 14d ago
The last line/heading of this article makes its main point super clear. Don't deceive yourself (and others).
spencerflem 14d ago
I’m well aware tech companies are evil and yet work at one. My current read is that ~20-30% of people in America actively delight in hurting others (ICE supporters etc) Another 30% do not seem to care about anything but their own well-being. (I don’t like to think I fall here but as a big tech peon it doesn’t look good). The remaining percent seem to care and are trying their best but looking at how things are going it’s not enough
- chadgpt8 14d ago
  The former is a recognised personality trait called "social dominance orientation".

dgellow 14d ago

That Coxon guy looks as delusional as the AI leadership. If you watch interviews he gave he doesn’t articulate what he’s concerned about, only sharing vague information about a supposed AI god that will take over the world, but without articulating why now, and how that would even happen. The more I look into his story the more that move looks like what a grifter would do

api 14d ago
I'm deeply skeptical of AI doomer stuff, but I've been struggling to exactly articulate why. I can think of it in my brain and can try to explain but so far none of my explanations have seemed fully coherent to me. I studied biology in college. I actually did this because I was interested in AI, and already knew a ton of CS and programming. I was already coding in C and using Linux and writing fairly complex stuff. I figured studying the only actual example of a truly intelligent system (especially at the time, early 2000s) was the best way to understand intelligence. Didn't end up going into AI as my day job, but I've kept up with it all and worked through the math and played with different types (genetic, neural nets, transformers/LLMs, CA / alife, etc.). I think the root of my skepticism is in what I learned studying biology about how life, adaptation, learning, and evolution actually work in the real world. I'll try to TL;DR it: I think the doom crowd (and also some of the AI singularity crowd) has a "mystical" view of intelligence. Intelligence is magic pixie dust, and intelligence beyond human is fully unknown and likely has magic superpowers. The deeper underlying thing seems to be some kind of mathematical mysticism. Real intelligence is ubiquitous in nature. Trees, grass, bugs, and even bacteria are intelligent. It's also domain specific and limited in capability to what its domain, available training data, and available compute allows. It's not context-free limit-free magic. It's not special. It's an adaptation like any other.
- spencerflem 14d ago
  What gets me is that I haven’t heard a reasonable explanation of exactly what the AI will do besides: nukes and biolabs we already have & ofc AI is making climate change worse, some of the Amazon datacenters are using fossil fuels to generate a country’s worth of power, but that’s never part of their calculations

oconnor663 14d ago

> do not consider yourself a contributor to humankind Good lord. You could apply the same logic to any taxpaying resident of any country whose government is doing something bad. There's some truth to it, it's worth bearing in mind, but it's also the very definition of an Isolated Demand for Rigor.

petesergeant 14d ago
> Isolated Demand for Rigor That is a fantastic term for something that seems to come up a lot, and I had not heard before.
- oconnor663 14d ago
  https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...
  - wonnage 14d ago
    Lmao all roads lead to the same navel gazing bullshit from Scott Alexander The man is the definition of a useful idiot https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/08/30/military-strikes-are-an-extremely-cheap-way-to-help-foreigners/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/08/30/military-strikes-are-a...
applfanboysbgon 14d ago
> You could apply the same logic to any taxpaying resident of any country whose government is doing something bad. You can't, because those taxes are coerced from you at literal gunpoint if you refuse (or your property seized at gunpoint to the same effect). It's completely different than choosing to do that of your own free will. When I was in the US, I did actively attempt to diminish my tax contribution as much as legally possible out of disgust at what it was used for, but nobody is morally tainted for being forced to contribute a small slice to something evil. Maybe there's a threshold where you should be actively laying down your life to resist, eg. if being forced to commit actual murder, but I don't think you can reasonably expect that of paying taxes at all. --- Edit: rate-limited, attaching a reply to a below comment. > The problem with avoiding taxes because of expenditures you think are bad is that you also reduce the pool available for things you think are good. Indeed, but I also chose to contribute money to other good causes instead. In that way, the same sum could be used for 100% good instead of, say, 80% good 20% bad. Now that I live in a country of my choosing, I am proud to pay taxes because of how they are used. 0% of my tax money goes to killing innocent people overseas, for instance.

petesergeant 14d ago

These replies will be full of people showing how worldly and clear-eyed they are by dismissing the same threat the guy resigned over as a marketing stunt.

BatchJob 14d ago

but what if dude already did it (destroyed the world but it hasnt happened yet) before he quit? The rule of all games played in capitalism is there's a sucker born every minute. you can work a few years or your whole life before you realize you've been had. and most do....

bravoetch 14d ago

If everyone doing a 'bad thing' stepped off the hamster wheel today, the world economy would collapse before markets closed. The biggest companies have built an attention and surveillance nightmare machine that funnels all the money to a relatively small number of shareholders.

phoronixrly 14d ago
Good.
nativeit 14d ago
These kinds of discussions very quickly arrive at the “no ethical consumption under capitalism” line of thinking. No matter who you are, no matter what you do, some activity or product you engage with will have been the result of some kind of exploitation.
- rpdillon 14d ago
  Yes, this is one of the central theses of the TV show "The Good Place". In simpler societies, it's easier to determine what is right and wrong, since actions are often local and can be judged on their immediate effects. But when everything is globalized and there's so many connections, determining right and wrong becomes much more difficult.
- trumpdong 14d ago
  "no ethical consumption under capitalism" is true, explains why we can't just stop bad things (everything is bad, so you'd starve) and is a jumping off point for a discussion of what we can actually do about it without starving.
phyzome 14d ago
Are you suggesting that since "everyone does the right thing now" would have bad consequences, we shouldn't bother with "everyone does the right thing in a normally distributed way"? (Which is the less artificial scenario.)

Aurornis 14d ago

> More than half of tech workers (53%) would steer a newcomer away from their own field, and they stay. It would be nice to see this survey repeated across professions. In my experience, most people have gripes about their profession because it’s what they know. Only half of respondents saying they would steer newcomers away feels a lot better than what my friends in medicine say all the time. Among my college professor and professor-track friends, this number probably reaches 100%.

bornfreddy 14d ago
Also, how does this number (53%) compare to pre-LLM numbers?
autoexec 14d ago
I think more important than the percentages are the reasons why someone would steer others away from their chosen profession.

nilslindemann 14d ago

He may also have gotten paid for it by players, which dont want AGI, because it would disturb their plans. Imagine AGI works out a plan, which, when applied by everyday people without needing any government help, enforces the end of wars, poverty, pollution, illness, unhappiness, worldwide.

cogman10 14d ago

I disagree with this article and here's why. Life isn't black and white with "good/bad". Further, there's no objective measure of what is good or bad. Everything is a shade of gray. You certainly could argue that some actions are absolutely good or absolutely bad, but those aren't the majority of actions people take on a day to day basis. People aren't often faced with "should I kill this person" or "should I publish the cure for cancer". Instead it's "should I eat a hamburger or a salad" or "Should I finish this jira case or that jira case". For example, you could argue that anyone working in an automotive plant is doing something bad because they are helping to produce vehicles which burn fuel which perpetuates climate change. But those plants also often produce parts for farm equipment or vehicles used to transport necessities like food. People working at AI companies can make similar personal calculations. Like yeah there are bad things happening because of AI, but also they can believe that there are good things that can come as a result such as research and product developments.

graemep 14d ago
A few big good/bad decisions are more important than thousands of trivial decisions. Balancing good against bad is not clear, I agree, but that makes it all the more important to think about it when making a big decision such as what job to take. Its hard and people do not even agree about how to balance it - e.g. whether the ends justify the means.
- cogman10 14d ago
  Well that's my point. Someone working as a geologist for the oil industry can think climate change isn't real or not a problem so they can view their job of finding more oil as being a clear benefit for society. No amount of trying to tell them "But you are doing something bad by helping the oil industry" will make them reconsider if they are good or bad. But I also wouldn't say they are necessarily bad people. You can also simply just be wrong or misinformed when you make your moral calculation. Good people do bad things sometimes. Bad people do good things sometimes. That's why the framing of badness as a taint isn't really helpful IMO. It creates a "us vs them" sort of attitude that ultimately doesn't address whatever issue is at hand.

livvy 14d ago

Coxon is a shithead who thought he could have a better career as an AI scaremonger than an engineer. He's still working in service of the AI companies though (same narrative) and no doubt will land a cushy job at so-callef "AI Safety" labs or make a living on the news/podcast circuit.

livvy 14d ago
The downvotes are funny to me because it's true. To quote Coxon on CBS News: > I think it clearly there was some latent demand for this sort of sentiment or people were gradually coming to this sort of conclusion because obviously so many other people have been saying the same thing for a long time. ... > Yeah. Honestly, when I talk to my friends and family about this, I find it easier to or people seem to actually get more of a sense for it if they're further away from technology. Because I honestly think it sounds more like science fiction than real technology. He's quite open about it, saying the quiet part out loud. Tech is strange place to be if you're, well... technical. Being constantly gaslit by people who haven't built anything or have 3 years in the industry like here Coxon.

chilmers 14d ago

Why is it that every one of these anti-AI screeds that gets upvoted on HN has been clearly written by AI? Here is one of his posts from 2022: "Since a long time now I was interested in learning computer graphics and “do stuff” with computer graphics APIs. I began to work on a very simple Game engine in Swift / Metal last year but I began to switch to a Windows machine a few months ago, and Swift / Metal is not compatible with Windows (and will never be I think)." https://carette.xyz/posts/opengl_and_cpp_on_m1_mac/ https://carette.xyz/posts/opengl_and_cpp_on_m1_mac/ This is the same person who is apparently now writing: "It is a transaction where you sell the part of you that was supposed to care. Do that often enough, and it does not come back. That is not burnout, but it is still a disease. Although, like every disease, it spreads: first to your team, then to your product, then to the people using it."

trumpdong 14d ago
Everything that gets upvoted on HN has been written by AI. Because AI writing works (if your goal is to attract upvotes).

tptacek 14d ago

The author of this blog is an AI skeptic (see the backlog of posts). That's fine, but it's hard to square with this particular post. To take Coxon's argument seriously, you have to believe frontier models are hypercapable, and not just hype objects. That's what Coxon believes and why he left.

dsign 14d ago
> To take Coxon's argument seriously, you have to believe frontier models are hypercapable, and not just hype objects. It's harder and harder to make the point that frontier objects are just hype objects though. And, even if they stay where they are today, that's more than enough to make them incredibly...destabilizing, to say the least. It's not only it, but frontier models act like knowledge mixers and percolators. Some people (not necessarily everybody), are adept at the discipline of learning, building things and executing projects, and that's all you need today with LLMs filling many of the gaps such person can have. Now, most of those people are actually engineers. So I'm going to go with the article and say that we must stop selling our souls for money.
moolcool 14d ago
All OP has to believe is that Coxon himself believes the hype.
- tptacek 14d ago
  I guess if the entire argument is that people should make moral choices in their employment, sure, but that's not a very interesting piece; people generally already believe that. But I don't think that's their argument. I think their argument is that people should make moral choices to avoid employment with AI firms, and if you're using Coxon for that argument, you can't coherently argue that models are hype objects simultaneously. There is no greater claim you can make about AI hypercapability than that it will eradicate humanity. (I don't buy any of those claims, for what it's worth.)
  - moolcool 14d ago
    The heads of the firms themselves believe it too. Maybe it’s reasonable to quit your job if your boss thinks he’s building a doomsday machine (regardless of how ridiculous you or anyone else find that idea)

fi-le 14d ago

It's refreshing to see a well-argued and balanced essay on AI risk being upvoted on Hacker News.

armchairhacker 14d ago

It's impossible to judge long term effects. My only advice is to think long and deep, then do what is true to yourself. Jacob Coxon and Frances Haugen are good people by any reasonable metric, and maybe someone who stays but tries to steer the system from the inside is good too.

skyberrys 14d ago

I understand the concern about your work being used to cause harm, but I also worry about the development of 'forbidden knowledge'. What does it mean to say a branch of science and engineering is too dangerous of a path to go down? Does it mean scientists are persecuted just for asking questions and designing experiments to find answers? Will there be witch hunts against ML researchers? Part of teaching is trusting your students to use the learnings wisely.

trumpdong 14d ago
This isn't the first. What did it mean for human embryonic gene editing?
- bornfreddy 14d ago
  That is a good point, but the problem with ML/AI is that anyone can do it. It will be difficult to stem this tide.
autoexec 14d ago
There's a lot of very dangerous scientific work that gets done because we've put safety measures in place to protect workers and the public to the best of our ability. This allows the dangerous work to be done as safely as possible. "AI" is being worked on and funded by sociopaths who care about money over all else and have demonstrated that they are willing to hurt others in exchange for more of it. There are no rules or protections for anybody anywhere. In fact AI companies are pouring bribe money into our corrupt political system in an effort to remove or avoid anything that would stop them from doing whatever they want.
hollerith 14d ago
What is your basis for calling them "witch hunts" rather than "criminal prosecutions"? (The prosecutions would start only after the passage of a new law making the questions and experiments illegal.) If you work at a defense contractor on warplanes, radar systems or nuclear weapons and you are too free in how you teach or write about your professional knowledge, you go to prison, and it has been that way in the US continuously since WWII. Criminal prosecutions are relatively rare because security-clearance background investigations filter out most of the job applicants who would go on to violate the laws.

01100011 14d ago

I think a lot of the success of the valley comes from disguising the thing the people are working on. If the end goals of our work were apparent to us we'd have a lot harder time showing up for work everyday. That said, I don't buy this article. I'm AI neutral. It's going to break a lot of things and fix many others. Good for you if you think you know what the net outcome will be but I think it's delusional to believe you do. Also I don't think you can resign and stop it without ceding the world to bad people. Pandora's box has already been opened. We've discovered a new thing math can do and now it's yet another arms race between various factions seeking to exploit it. Help the faction you want to win. It's not the world I want it to be, but it is what it is.

magimas 14d ago

>The accusation >So, why are you still working for them? >If the answer is the salary, say it louder, and do not force yourself to make excuses. >If the answer is “someone worse would replace me”, say it too, and louder too. >If the answer is “I can change things from the inside”, then show me what you changed. Haugen tried the inside. Coxon tried the inside. At the end, unfortunately, the inside did not move. > Okay, but what if I think that both sides are LARPing their personal science fiction stories and reality will end up much more mundane (but still incredibly beneficial) than the utopias and dystopias everyone is cooking up? This is presupposing a moral dilemma that just doesn't exist in my opinion.

david927 14d ago
We're getting so much of this junk with the IPOs pressing. The mimicbots are impressive but they're frustrating. We've hit the limit for pre-training data and now we're relying on RL for the next progressive steps and that gets asymptotic fast. The truth is that unsupervised learning hasn't inched forward and we don't know how it will, so we're left with benchmaxxing and LARPing about how they're escaping air-gapped configs using themal sensors, all in a desperate attempt to make the projected numbers look less insane so these people can cash out at IPO time. Everyone knows what's happening and it's embarrassing.

bzmrgonz 14d ago

In my opinion, we need a sort of survey, let's put it out there, can we get a collective voice from most ai phd's? Remember when climate change was in the scientific tug-of-war? The conclusion for a long time was that 9 in 10 scientists believed in climate change. So, why can't we do that with "ai is gonna kill us"

atemerev 14d ago

I think recursively self-improving universal intelligence is a good thing, and tool alignment is what creates instrumental convergence and therefore a bad thing. The paperclip parable is about tool alignment gone wrong.

stego-tech 14d ago

Man, I’m exhausted by the hand-wringing of folks reading through to the end and ignoring the questions posed in favor of “well the world ain’t that simple obviously” as a means of not having to justify or defend their own positions. Obviously morality and ethics aren’t binary. OP isn’t saying that. What they’re saying in a clear and concise manner is that your actions have consequences far beyond your personal sphere, and good people acknowledge that and fight for what’s better despite the harm they personally may suffer as a result. That what makes someone “good” in their point of view isn’t a binary deed or outcome, but of the sacrifices they’ll make for themselves to build a better existence for others. Planting a tree whose shade you’ll never enjoy, in other words. So to reiterate OP’s challenge at the end, at least be honest about why you’re still in the game. Let others know where you stand so that we don’t waste our time on futility. If your voluntary position on something mutable risks making you a target, then the rational next step would be to evaluate how important that position is to you that you would weather said harm instead of changing it. That’s all OP was getting at: promoting the mere notion of critically thinking about the decisions you make in regards to your own moral philosophy and acting more authentically, including tanking the damage trying to bring about change.

josefritzishere 14d ago

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