Ethics

Work - XKCD

The appeal to a golden era “when we used to make things” isn’t just nostalgia or judgmentalism. It refers to a qualitative but real difference between building vs. taking. Building things imposes a certain rigor not only on our thinking but also our values. When we build we are advancing the aggregate capability of humanity in some small way. We don’t all have to be sending people to Mars, we can also build by working out the inner mechanisms of some new gadget that others will find useful or putting together a cake others will find delicious. When we take, we are instead simply shifting around the spoils of such efforts from others to ourselves by, say, helping ourselves to their savings by opening fake bank accounts.…

Theranos Under Fire as U.S. Threatens Crippling Sanctions - The New York Times

In my experience, leaders that “make it” tend to be hugely ambitious when talking about what they want to do and incessantly conservative when discussing what they have done. Around the time Google flirted with being the largest public company in the world, Larry Page offered publicly and privately his observation that the company had accomplished maybe 1% of what it should be doing. You have to know a bit about engineers, relentless problem solvers, to not see that as a slight: the best reward to an engineer for a job well done is a new set of bigger and more interesting problems to solve. Larry made his observation with excitement, not disappointment. Almost a decade ago, Elon Musk declared his intention to colonize Mars and for years afterward was posting videos on YouTube of his company’s rockets blowing up. This was his way of telling his team at SpaceX that they were only 1% of the way there and what a cool thing that was.…

Tay, the neo-Nazi millennial chatbot, gets autopsied - Ars Technica

Children understand early on that words are spoken in a context and both word and context interact to create meaning. If a child points to a fruit bowl and says ‘apple’ the child is praised and maybe rewarded with a snack. If the child points to a man walking his dog and says apple, the child sees its grown ups chuckle bashfully. Each invocation is the child sampling a space of contexts and testing an intervention in each; the more dissimilar the contexts, the more information is contained in the grownups’ responses. The resulting repetition is unremarkable when the word in question is innocuous. All this changes, of course, when the word is a ‘swear,’ and every query into the context space is consistently jarring to grownups. Children may exploit the jarring nature of a swear in all contexts, or simply be discouraged from testing any further.…