An absolutely lovely post by Maria Popova. Just read the whole thing.
"Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness. - Leo Tolstoy”
Leo Tolstoy on Kindness and the Measure of Love – The Marginalian
I loved this article, in part because I climbed different hills before I ended up as a professor. It’s okay to wander, to try different things. It’s the optimal way to find the biggest hills to climb.
"People early in their career should learn from computer science: meander some in your walk (especially early on), randomly drop yourself into new parts of the terrain, and when you find the highest hill, don’t waste any more time on the current hill no matter how much better the next step up might appear."
Poverty is a multi-dimensional issue, even if we tend to think of all poverty in the same way. But it’s possible to measure poverty using a wide range of different factors. What gets measured can shift perceptions and policies in big ways.
"The study examined four widely used poverty measurement approaches. Each metric is based on different priorities ranging from reported assets, such as appliances, to self-defined well-being milestones, such as being able to send children to school. Working with colleagues in Ethiopia, Ghana, and Uganda, the Stanford researchers surveyed 16,150 households. Surprisingly, the research revealed almost no agreement in how these approaches ranked households by poverty status. The lack of agreement persisted even among households classified in the bottom 20% in terms of poverty."
Why Our Definition of Poverty Matters | Greater Good Science Center
At least, GPT-4 is able to give the same quality of advice that an expert gives. Both laypeople and ethics experts rated the GPT-4 advice quite highly.
This was similar to my experience when I first tested ChatGPT against some dilemmas from our book, The Business Ethics Field Guide. I found that the responses it generated were much better than the average BYU undergrad business student.
It’s worth noting that the dilemmas presented were short, text-based summaries. It would be interesting to see how well GPT-4 performs in an ongoing dialogue that invites more nuance. Still, it’s quite exciting to think of a day when expert ethics advice is there at everyone’s fingertips. Will people use it, though?
"This study investigates the efficacy of an AI-based ethical advisor using the GPT-4 model. Drawing from a pool of ethical dilemmas published in the New York Times column “The Ethicist”, we compared the ethical advice given by the human expert and author of the column, Dr. Kwame Anthony Appiah, with AI-generated advice. The comparison is done by evaluating the perceived usefulness of the ethical advice across three distinct groups: random subjects recruited from an online platform, Wharton MBA students, and a panel of ethical decision-making experts comprising academics and clergy. Our findings revealed no significant difference in the perceived value of the advice between human generated ethical advice and AI-generated ethical advice. When forced to choose between the two sources of advice, the random subjects recruited online displayed a slight but significant preference for the AI-generated advice, selecting it 60% of the time, while MBA students and the expert panel showed no significant preference."