Posted by ilamont 1 day ago
For that kind of money, my AI paymaster could do no wrong.
Imagine going to work and getting paid $2300+ USD per day to sit on your ass all day thinking about ethics without having to produce any deliverables. This would be a dream job for me.
If anyone questioned my morals, I'd be like; "They're paying me $550k per year" and the other person would be like "Ahhh ok, my bad! Your logic is starting to make sense now!"
Or are you telling us in the hope someone makes you such an offer?
"Although the torment nexus may torment us in the short term, over the long term there will be fewer people to torment as we improve the capitalization of human's torment so that fewer people will be available to torment duing to the reduction in overall torment-forces globally, and thus, with less people being tormented, surely that will increase the over all torment reduction of the nexus. Win-win: less tormented people means less torment!
Like, a pure researcher for a corporation might have some genuine overlap and shared interests where breakthroughs in the research benefit both parties, but an ethicist?? For a legal construct that's defined by and bound to sociopathically pursue profit? Come on now.
At typical corporation, something like a Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer (CECO) would be largely focused on legal compliance - making sure company personnel aren't engaged in bribery, fraud, insider trading etc. The value of this role (and the medical example) is to prevent lawsuits and/or prosecution.
For a company like Meta, an ethicist is likely concerned with the inherent ethical concerns of running a social media company, which impacts the mental health of its users, many of whom are minors. For AI companies, the ethics of releasing models that are capable of doing dangerous things. In name, the job probably involves giving recommendations about how to ethically implement features in the platform to minimize harm. In practice, the job probably accomplishes very little.
I think a lot of it depends on the size of the company. Startup? Sure, maybe it's a real thing.
Gigantic company like a member of FAANG or MANGOS? absolutely a PR move.
I can't disagree with that, reminds me of the quote from the movie Rounders: If you've been at the table for 30 minutes and you don't know who the sucker is, you ARE the sucker.
When someone isn't competent to make decisions for themselves it's ok to pressure them into engaging in behavior that will lead them to get to a condition where they can start to make decisions for themselves. In Silicon Valley they have let their guilt be leveraged by a corrupt government system that lets grifters steal billions of dollars per year in 'homelessness funding'. Those same grifters fund political groups and bribe politicians. Anyone that questions it is accused of wanting to murder homeless people.
There are many, many places in the world that are much poorer and don't have homeless encampments all over the place.
I'm not as positive as you are about what makes California (and Seattle) create/attract so many, but it's definitely an outlier compared to "everywhere".
The weather is pretty nice, much more stable than in the east coast.
Like, do you know many addicts or seriously mentally ill? Have you tried pressuring them into being better? How did it work out?
What you can do when it already happened is kill them or make them die in some ways, jail them or try to support and/or treat them.
I hope it goes without saying that letting them just die or killing or jailing them is not an option in a western society.
Prevention is much more favorable of course. For example, don't let people become homeless easily. But even then, a significant amount will become homeless.
On the street they have access to almost endless support, at least in Silicon Valley, but much of that support is contingent on things like not openly using heroin or not repeatedly getting so intoxicated that they defecate or vomit on themselves, so they refuse it.
I don't care how liberal you are, no society is functioning when it allows people to get on BART and pee on themselves and defecate on the cloth seats and walk up and down the aisles dripping feces and urine on the floor. That is allowed and nothing is done about it for fear of upsetting homeless 'rights' groups who are funded by the tax dollars meant to help homeless people.
1. Widen the definition of 'homeless' to cover people that nobody would consider homeless in every day language. Include anyone who is staying with a friend, living in corporate housing, staying with a family member, etc. Include anyone you possibly can that is unlikely to be a drug addict.
2. Narrow the definition of homeless. Don't consider people that almost everyone does consider homeless. Make sure to target the subgroups of homeless people that are very likely to use drugs.
3. Narrow the definition of drug use. Make it as hard as possible to count someone as having used drugs. Raise the evidentiary bar so high that even when you have evidence they are a drug addict it doesn't qualify them as a "drug addict" by the studies definition. Bury that definition so it's technically there but you have to go through the study carefully to find it.
Lets pick a study in a big important journal and check it for the above:
How about CASPEH: "Illicit Substance Use and Treatment Access Among Adults Experiencing Homelessness," JAMA, 2025
JAMA is a very prestigious journal:
Who counts as a substance user: Only meth, nonprescription opioids, cocaine/crack count as addictions. Cannabis, alcohol, benzos, hallucinogens, inhalants are excluded.
Someone who has a valid prescription to opiates, even if they are being abused, cannot be methodologically counted as a drug user. THIS INCLUDES METHADONE.
What counts as addict: "Regular" = 3+ times per week. A twice-weekly meth user is 'occasional use'. They might take a gram and stay up for 3 days twice a week, but they are 'occasional user' and don't count in the 37% addict number quoted by this paper.
What counts as addict: Last 6 months only. If you admit you used fentanyl every day for the last 10 years but claim you got clean 181 days ago, you are not a drug user according to this study. If they have been diverted from heroin onto methadone 181 days ago you do not count.
How did they check? They asked each person face to face whether they used drugs and which ones and how often and just took their word for it.
The real numbers from the raw data the study used:
41.6% of homeless self reported 2x per week or more hard drug use before they became homeless. an additional 23.2% claimed they started regular use after becoming homeless.
That's about 65% already from their own data, 2x what the headline pretends.
Excluding high use subgroups: to be included in the data, the homeless person had to prove they were giving informed consent. Then they additionally had to be willing and able to spend 45 minutes or so filling out the survey. The people with psychosis or who were intoxicated at the time of the interview were excluded. How many people have you walked past and they were incoherent, unconscious, or high? They were ignored in this study.
Homelessness is created by high rents. High rents are created by high local productivity. The people who are productive enough to make it over the rent-bar are housed, and their marginal productivity above the rent-bar serves to raise the rent-bar (talk to any landlord about how they set rent prices: it's the local wages, stupid). This then pushes a greater proportion of people below the rent-bar, and then they are homeless.
There are few places in the world more productive per square foot than Silicon Valley, ergo one must be extremely productive in order to remain housed there, ergo it has an extremely bad homelessness problem.
That's why people making $200k+ (an extremely productive person by national standards) need public housing assistance in Silicon Valley (https://www.reuters.com/article/world/palo-alto-considers-su...). Which of course actually just... raises the rent again...
The charities may be full of grift and whatnot, but you can remove them entirely and you will not solve the fundamental problem.
Wrong. High rents have many reasons and also good policies to get them down and have affordable housing for more people, also in otherwise expensive and popular cities.
When you combine that with spiking wealth in Silicon Valley, you’ve got the perfect storm in Silicon Valley. With OpenAI and Anthropic both based in SF, it’s going to be worse than ever once they IPO.
It was actually the post-war housing boom that was abnormal, fueled by aggressive federal funding of suburban buildout. US municipalities are now broadly doomed to bankruptcy trying to maintain sprawling infrastructure that was never cost-effective to create in the first place.
Look at Austin TX. Influx of new building, prices stabilized, and now construction is dropping off a cliff. No one can afford to build into a stable or potentially falling local market. Construction will start again when local productivity grows enough for people to bid the prices back up again.
Therefore, government policies making sure people with lower income can still get housing in a city they grew up in, where they work, live and have family, is important.
Yes, one part of this is also building new housing and making sure that housing is built efficiently in terms of cost (but not throwing them on the free market, but making sure a certain % of it is desginated as social housing).
Rents cannot (at meaningful scale) exceed local productivity, or else there will be widespread vacancies and landlords will reduce their rents.
Rents cannot (at meaningful scale) fall below local productivity, or else landlords will simply raise their rents.
Go talk to a landlord about how they site prices.
Step 1. Look up income of your target demographic
Step 2. Eat 30% of their income
Can you show me a place with high local productivity and low rent?
Can you show me a place with high rent and low local productivity (that's not e.g. a vacation destination for people with high productivity elsewhere)?
You can certainly artificially suppress prices with rent control. But that just gets fed back into the system in the form of reduced supply, so it ends up raising rents on the non-controlled housing stock anyway.
Now make a law that makes construction cheaper. Or make a law that makes construction more expensive. What happens to rent and mortgages, even though productivity hasn't changed at all?
Productivity (or, rather, wealth) of the occupants is a very strong factor, but it is still just one of multiple factors.
No, you actually cannot do this in any lasting way.
The price of land would fall to the level required to make it construction viable again. Or the city would be abandoned, which is not generally the outcome since cities have so much shared capital investment that cannot be moved elsewhere.
Put the following prompt into your favourite AI and enjoy the reading:
"How do rents relate to productivity in the area? How does Vienna compare to San Francisco?"
Try this one: "Create a simple analysis approximating how much higher rents would be in Vienna if not for the aggressive public subsidization of supply"
In any case, Vienna has a good system! But it's not that it avoids high productivity → high rent, it's that it splits rent into subsidy costs and rent.
In other words, the amount of subsidy + rent required will grow with local productivity.
Yes, it can be done, and if we want to have a reasonable future, it should be done.
Vienna's solution is fine but has escalating costs and isn't necessary. Land Value Tax is better.
Manipulating the real estate market via direct economic manipulation, collusion, or regulatory capture is so common that the entire concept of manipulating the market to earn higher profits is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking.
It's not just that it can, it's that it does so often it's taught in Econ 101. That you don't know this implies you have never taken an economics class or that you forgot what you were taught, and in the meantime certainly have not spent any real effort in learning about economic theory. I think you read a lot of Ayn Rand and right wing libertarian popular books about the free market and how it's perfect. Stop posting confident nonsense.
The claim is not that rents are always at their optimal or most efficient level - they're not! The claim is that you cannot (at meaningful scale) charge people who earn $1,000/month in income $2,000/month in rent to live in a place. They will have to move.
Did you take any arithmetic classes?
And any case, you should stop mind-reading. You're bad at it. I'm not a Randian nor a right-winger nor a libertarian nor free-market idealist.
Your mistake was thinking that I, the corrupt landlord who pays bribes, cares about a macro analysis of every all the properties, or that some analysis about the current distribution of incomes and possible rents will stop me from doing exactly what you say is impossible. I don't own every property in the city, especially the ones that aren't built because I capture zoning, so arguments about average GDP and average rent and whatever else do not stop me. Your analysis is useless.
This is the only feature that's relevant. If productivity goes up, you can charge more. If it does not, you cannot.
You may do some corruption or some zoning or some whatever else you want, but at the end of the day, if productivity goes up you can charge more and if it does not you cannot charge more.
Hope that clarifies!
ie: blaming her for anything instead of the decision makers is... really weird?
now they are exactly like every other company that has zero ethicists on staff and expect the employees to weigh the ethical ramifications of their work.
I’d argue a lot of them expect the opposite. To suppress the ethical concerns.
Even in recent memories you had Mark Zuckerberg telling his employees to use pirated sources. And executives at fossil fuel companies have to act unethically.
Do you believe that no one in management in these fields pushes the importance of ethics?
Food-testing: There's literally a parasite going around right now. Look at the response from some of the for profit businesses that was allowed to happen.
Hospitals: It is not ethical to deny patients care based on their insurance.
Clergy: The cover up of child sexual abuse scandals.
Childcare: lots of examples of sub-par care given to save money.