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Comment by pffft8888 | Hacker News Reader

Legal and Ethical are completely different things in the modern Western mindset, so enjoy your legal existence ...

The issue with ethics is people make up plenty of conflicting and unsupportable ethics all the time. The law has evolved to handle more balance and stability to help people with competing ideas of ethics live together.

They're also clearly not "completely different things." That would imply no overlap, yet I find laws embody plenty of things I find ethical. If you find nothing in the law ethical then I certainly do not want your ethics.

So I'll gladly take law on the whole over a person on the internet's as hoc flavor of ethics.

A hundred and fifty years ago, not only was it legal to kill American-Indians, but the US and various state governments were paying people to. This ranged from sponsoring militias in California slaughtering entire settlements to paying individuals in Minnesota a $75 bounty per Dakota scalp.

Even in that time, there were many who could see that regardless of laws, the slaughter was not ethical. Others, committed atrocities for profit and consoled themselves that they were following the law.

It’s generally a bad sign when someone answers questions of ethics with law. People constrained only by the law with no further ethical concerns do terrible things, right up to the limit of what the legal system they live under allows.

To be clear, I am not claiming sama is unconcerned with ethics. I’m pushing back against conflating ethics with legality.

When people pull one post selected, cherry picked example to argue for a general trend, it baffles me. The proper way to do evidence on the pros/cons of a system is to take all evidence.

Yes there's outliers. But that's all they are. As ethics change, laws change, and vice versa. Neither exists or even is workable without the other. What is ethical in one time or place or situation changes, just like laws, and for the same reason- they're cultural constructs that evolve.

As to claiming ethics is superior to law, history is also filled with people having different ethics going outside the law and causing great harm, genocides, and wars. Ethics is not defined in any universal sense. One could argue every lawbreaker has different ethics than those not breaking laws.

Again, I prefer a society where people follow societally agreed upon laws over ones where everyone choose their own ethics and acts accordingly.

Law is a good thing, just not sufficient. Every legal system has holes, and society is much stronger if there are additional backstops to bad behavior.

Agreed. However, since everyone has different ethics, it's only when enough people believe the same thing is morally correct that it often becomes law. Most of the bad stuff we decry now happened because the masses found it ethical. And certainly plenty we now find ethical will be considered unethical in the future.

But of the two, only law is stable enough to run a society. It's what balances all the variety of ethical issues between beliefs.

@SideQuark, you are lost in your head. Where are you feelings about the matter? Are you ok with the bait-and-switch of starting a non-profit, taking $100M and then switch to a for-profit that has the complete opposite agenda to the non-profit that took the money?

It's not a bait and switch, no matter how you spin it. It's a company, taking investment from many places, and having a board of directors. Only an idiot assumes that every piece of corporate structure exists infinitely. There is always chance any portion of the structure may change.

Being a minority investor doesn't give Musk God powers. And he resigned from the board by his own choice.

You're still not answering the question of how you feel about Altman taking the money for a noble mission of Open AI then using that money and turning it into a Closed for-profit. If that's not bait and switch then you are being biased. Do you hae shares in "Open"AI? or are you building a product based on their API, or just cheering for Altman bc of kin or political/ideological alignment?

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