> And it’s not just AI companies and this isn’t new. This is art of human nature and will always be.
Blaming "human nature" is an excuse that is popular among egomaniacs, but on even brief inspection it is transparently thin: Human nature includes plenty of non-profits and people who did great things for humanity for little or no gain (scientists, soldiers, public servants, even some sofware developers). It also includes people who have done horrible things.
Human nature really is that we have a choice. It's both a very old and fundamental part of human nature:
And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your
eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing
good and evil.
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and
that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be
desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof,
and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her;
and he did eat.
And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that
they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and
made themselves aprons.
That's the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, of course (Genesis 3). We know good and evil, we make our own choices; no blaming God or some outside force. If you do evil, it was your choice.
Since you seem to have this figured out and it's not just human nature, Care to list everything that is good and everything that is evil?
Back to reality on this topic. There is nothing wrong with OpenAI employees voting to keep the company for profit and maximizing their own personal gains.
I don't see how this can be anything close to "Evil".
> There is nothing wrong with OpenAI employees voting to keep the company for profit and maximizing their own personal gains.
There is something wrong if it harms others. For example, if AI is a risk to other people outside the company, and their vote increases that risk, then it's wrong (depending on the amount of risk).
Maximizing personal gains, despite recent hype, does not at all make something right. In fact, it's possibly the leading cause of doing wrong.
> Back to reality
Maybe you can come up with some better ideas than just offhand dismissal of ideas that have been embraced, examined, and followed by a great many humans for thousands of years. That's reality.
Tangential topic, but I've been thinking about that part of the bible recently.
It makes no sense to me.
I don't mean that God, supposedly all good and all knowing, didn't know about the serpent and intervene at the time — despite Christian theology being monotheist, I think the original tales were polytheistic, and the deity of the Garden of Eden was never meant to have those attributes[0].
I mean why was it appropriate to punish them for something they did in a state of naivety, and which was, within the logic of the story, both prior to and the direct cause of gaining knowledge of the difference between good and evil? It's like your parents suing you to recover the cost of sending you to school.
[0] Further tangent: if they're al the same god, why did it take 6 days to make the world (well, cosmos) and all the things in it, but 40 days to flood the Earth to cleanse it of all human and animal life except for the ark? It's fine if they're different gods, a creator deity with all that cosmic power doesn't need to care so much about small details like good and evil, and a smaller and more personal god that does care about good and evil doesn't need to have such cosmic power.
Your first mistake (by trying to make sense) is reading the Bible as a historic book of records that actually happened.
The bible isn't a book by an author (Like the Quran claims to be). It is a mix/match of stories over long periods of time from different people. You read it as parables from the times, not as a history lesson.
That's the problem. I think the first question is interesting (and a fundamental theological question - similar to why does God make people 'harden their hearts' and do evil at times), it's applying the Bible to the outside world.
The second question just seems purely internal - how does that affect our external reality?
It doesn't have to — I can say a plot item in Star Trek makes no sense just as easily.
That said, I guess I am curious what this story might have meant to be, at one time? How could it be reinterpreted in a way that isn't immediately self-defeating?
And I really don't get how people take this literally, given apparent contradictions like this, but biblical literalists are too alien to my world view for any explanation to really help me understand how they perceive things.
> It doesn't have to — I can say a plot item in Star Trek makes no sense just as easily.
We can say anything we like, but my question is really, what does it matter? Internal consistency matters much more to Star Trek, an adventure and grist for geeking-out, than the Bible, which provides material to help us spiritually. The point of the Biblical story is, what can we learn?
> The point of the Biblical story is, what can we learn?
That Christians worship an unreasonable, malicious or mad, god with unreasonable standards. "Even when you were a gullible idiot and faced an influence I'd not accounted for despite being all knowing, I'm still going to punish you and all your offspring forever for what you did wrong, especially the woman and that's why childbirth hurts."
That, even as literature, it shows the human condition is one of the vibes of a story without paying attention to details, one where just-so stories which get written backwards from observables don't need to make logical sense when read forwards in order to convince people.
Like I said, the difference world view is alien. I assume the same is true in reverse, and that True Believers (and perhaps not even casual holiday-only believers) can't understand how I might not see things the way they do.
I'd say you are looking for problems rather than value, a form of critical reading appropriate to contracts, public affairs, etc. The Bible and similar texts are generally not contracts you need to accept or reject as a whole. They are not literal. If you look at them as literal and 'contracts', there are far more flaws than the ones you point out (including the sexist story I posted originally). They take a different form of critical reading:
They are sources of inspiration. Don't look for the flaws, look for the benefits. Imagine you go to an art museum or you play a computer game. Do you look for the worst paintings? Scour the museum for mistakes in the paintings? Do you read the game's code for bugs and poor coding practices? When you go to a bookstore, do you look for the worst book? What a waste of time that would be - you want the best, the most enjoyable and inspiring, not the worst.
> That Christians worship an unreasonable, malicious or mad, god with unreasonable standards. "Even when you were a gullible idiot and faced an influence I'd not accounted for despite being all knowing, I'm still going to punish you and all your offspring forever for what you did wrong, especially the woman and that's why childbirth hurts."
FWIW, that passage is part of all Abrahamic religions.
For most, indeed. And that's good! But I have met people who claim to think they must be absolute truth, then put a huge asterisk around all the bits I point out and say those don't count for whatever reason.
There was a meme back in the UK, that amongst Anglicans, only extremists actually believe in God. No idea how true that is.
Widely regarded as beautiful and romantic. To me, it looks like the guy has a broken neck, and the woman has been decapitated at the base of her neck, her head rotated 90° and re-attached to her torso by the ear.
Likewise, movies. The plot holes in Independence Day annoyed me so much that when the sequel came out, I started (and still have not finished) writing a book that takes the opposite road with all the mistakes the film made.
So, while I've played the Eye Of Argon game, I never even tried to finish reading it once my friends and I stopped playing, and I've never bothered watching whatever the film is that has the line "you're tearing me apart Lisa".
> FWIW, that passage is part of all Abrahamic religions.
>That Christians worship an unreasonable, malicious or mad, god with unreasonable standards.
See now after a few rounds we see your real thoughts come out. I'm old enough to have had this thought and many more about God/Religion and why humans need it in their lives.
I don't have the time to go into it but perhaps as you get older and dig into this more it will start to make sense.
> See now after a few rounds we see your real thoughts come out.
It took you this long? I wasn't hiding anything.
> I'm old enough to have had this thought and many more about God/Religion and why humans need it in their lives.
> I don't have the time to go into it but perhaps as you get older and dig into this more it will start to make sense.
I was born and raised Catholic, then I found Wicca and realised that not all the gods and religions work like Christianity.
Then, sometime around 10-20 years ago but gradually rather than as a single event, I realised I could get stuff out of stories without believing them.
The ancient Greeks got on well with their very flawed pantheon. Those old tales put me very much in mind of the modern comic-book heroes (and anti-heroes), which I suspect is mainly due to where comic books get their inspiration from rather than the other way around. But I can be inspired by Miles Morales' struggles without needing to think he's real.
Blaming "human nature" is an excuse that is popular among egomaniacs, but on even brief inspection it is transparently thin: Human nature includes plenty of non-profits and people who did great things for humanity for little or no gain (scientists, soldiers, public servants, even some sofware developers). It also includes people who have done horrible things.
Human nature really is that we have a choice. It's both a very old and fundamental part of human nature:
That's the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, of course (Genesis 3). We know good and evil, we make our own choices; no blaming God or some outside force. If you do evil, it was your choice.