I am having a hard time explaining why I’m curating this. I think for me this post is helping me move ethics from some mystical thing, into an engineering/design problem, which is how I think a lot of it should be thought of. I recently having been reading a book on the classic virtues, and it makes them sound so dreary and uncompelling; this account seems more true and healthier.
I think the examples were great and really illustrated this well. But I agree with a comment (from Wei Dai) that this post is weak on proving that the presence or lack of good ethical design patterns was critical in the success or failure of different systems, rather than other factors.
move ethics from some mystical thing, into an engineering/design problem
I like this vibe and want to promote my “Outcome Influencing System (OIS)” concept as a set of terminology / lens that may be valuable. Basically, anything that is trying to influence reality is an OIS, and so in that way it is the same as an optimizer, but I’m hoping to build up concepts around the term that make it a more useful way to explore and discuss these ideas than with existing terminology.
The relevance is that there are many “large sociotechnical OIS” that we have implicitly and explicitly created, and treating them as technology that should have better engineering quality assurance seems like a valuable goal.
Curated! Thanks for the post.
I am having a hard time explaining why I’m curating this. I think for me this post is helping me move ethics from some mystical thing, into an engineering/design problem, which is how I think a lot of it should be thought of. I recently having been reading a book on the classic virtues, and it makes them sound so dreary and uncompelling; this account seems more true and healthier.
I think the examples were great and really illustrated this well. But I agree with a comment (from Wei Dai) that this post is weak on proving that the presence or lack of good ethical design patterns was critical in the success or failure of different systems, rather than other factors.
I hope to see more writing about concrete cases, and more work to help turn our consequentialist analyses into ethical design patterns / folk ethics.
I like this vibe and want to promote my “Outcome Influencing System (OIS)” concept as a set of terminology / lens that may be valuable. Basically, anything that is trying to influence reality is an OIS, and so in that way it is the same as an optimizer, but I’m hoping to build up concepts around the term that make it a more useful way to explore and discuss these ideas than with existing terminology.
The relevance is that there are many “large sociotechnical OIS” that we have implicitly and explicitly created, and treating them as technology that should have better engineering quality assurance seems like a valuable goal.