If you want to get a job working on machine learning research, the claim here is that the best way to do that is to replicate a bunch of papers. Daniel Ziegler (yes, a Stanford ML PhD dropout, and yes that was likely doing a lot of work here) spent 6 weeks replicating papers and then got a research engineer job at OpenAI.

Wait, a research job at OpenAI? That’s worse. You do know why that’s worse, right?

I don't know why, and I'm confused about what this sentence is saying. Worse than what?

I don't think anyone is proposing to offer this deal to Putin; it's not like the rank and file soldiers are able to make the "invade your neighbor" decision in a bid to get EU citizenship.

Wikipedia says:

Low confidence generally means questionable or implausible information was used, the information is too fragmented or poorly corroborated to make solid analytic inferences, or significant concerns or problems with sources existed.1

I haven't voted at all, but perhaps the downvotes are because it seems like a non sequitur? That is, I don't understand why Richard_Kennaway is declaring his preferences about this.

I don't understand what's the point of all the swearing? It's just kind of annoying to read.

I've read (I don't have any first hand knowledge of it though) that in sign language dialogues both signers can be signing to each other at the same time (full-duplex) as opposed to each speaker having to wait for the other to stop (half-duplex). Might be another thing to file under "neat features".

They also talk about the protestors entering government buildings, but never about any people working in those buildings being afraid or hurt, so according to Zvi's rules this would imply that the buildings were empty or something.

I don't know about the other stuff, but https://www.vox.com/world/2023/1/9/23546507/brazil-bolsonaro-lula-capital-invasion-january-8 says

Congress was in recess at the time, leaving the building mostly empty.

Huh. I literally have no idea what feeling this is referring to.

Also, any reason you swapped the friend for a stranger? That changes the situation somewhat – in degree at least, but maybe in kind too.

Yes, the other examples seemed to be about caring about people you are close to more than strangers, but I wanted to focus on the ethical reasoning vs internal motivation part.

examples of when it is right to be motivated by careful principled ethical reasoning or rule-worship

Thanks, that's helpful.

Okay, I think my main confusion is that all the examples have both the motivation-by-ethical-reasoning and lack-of-personal-caring/empathy on the moral disharmony/ugliness side. I'll try to modify the examples a bit to tease them apart:

• Visiting a stranger in the hospital in order to increase the sum of global utility is morally ugly
• Visiting a stranger in the hospital because you've successfully internalized compassion toward them via loving kindness meditation (or something like that) is morally good(?)

That is, the important part is the internalized motivation vs reasoning out what to do from ethical principles.

(although I notice my intuition has a hard time believing the premise in the 2nd case)