PhilPapers

The main paper I've been working on for the last 3 years is out: "Value Capture"! It's about the harms of taking on external metrics and rankings as your own core values. The argument: you're outsourcing your values. It's fast, but then your values won't be tailored to you.🧵:

C. THI NGUYEN: Value capture cases are cases in which you have rich, subtle, maybe inchoate values or you’re in the process of making them. And then you enter something in the world and the world offers you a simple, pre-established, already standardized, incorporated into a technology simple version of that value system.

With information effortlessly transferable at zero marginal cost and social platforms that blast content to the top of everyone’s feed, it’s difficult to for an ethics based on scarcity to sustain itself.

With information effortlessly transferable at zero marginal cost and social platforms that blast content to the top of everyone’s feed, it’s difficult to for an ethics based on scarcity to sustain itself.

To agree on tradeoffs collectively, tradeoffs have to be made explicit, then negotiated between stakeholders.

Greater scale should mean greater good as valued by an increasingly wider set of people: the creation of positive externalities.