Unless you can justify that grand narrative that the Gestapos are following is for the common good, I cannot consider the example a correct position to lie—as for me saving people is not lying.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your position here. But I think I would be pretty worried about having “truth” be defined to be inclusive of things roughly in the vein of “saying false things when I do not think the people I’m talking to are benefitting the common good.”
PS. As an aside, I do really appreciate your knowledge and professional experience here! Many of us are the forum are trying to figure out pretty hard questions from first principles, and are unwittingly thrust into a situation of having to figure out detailed questions about accounting, PR, financial law, etc, as they intersect with ethics. Perhaps some of us come across as brusque. But I do appreciate your expertise and experience in these trying times.
Thanks Linch, Probably I phrased it wrongly. But what my thought process was lying to save jews because the Gestapos where following a wrong worldview is not lying for me—that is doing the morally correct thing, prevent people from dying.
Money either can make or break anyone—it multiplies who we really are as a person. Thank you as well for recognizing that I am zeroing in at the fraud, internal controls and governance issues but these concepts will never get implemented properly if we do not agree with the basic notion of what is truthful in this community. This is why I am trying to ask questions related to how can the act of lying be justified—I run marathons and there is no way I can do it through without training, same with martial arts where I have to repeat certain front flips or left kicks for a year or two just to get it right or even the daily one hour routine of playing the guitar to get better. I have been to so many positions in life and never have found a use case for lying—ever.
Another thing, this community seems to be ahead of the existential risks research /actions yet got blindsided by SBF. I want to share that it is becoming a trend since we had the ability to increase the reach of our communication through phones, radio, tv, paper or now the internet—bad ideas that affects large swats of the population gets pushed so easily. Scandals like Theranos, FTX, Lehman were somewhat abstraction of post modernism that is an upgrade from the marxist view—I am very worried that the true existential threat is actually that we as a society is not equipped as a whole to understand complex bad ideas creeping into our daily lives. Nuclear weapons, AI misalignment, pandemics, climate catastrophe and etc are actually easier to solve if we get society to band together—yet these major frauds are hitting the us like gut punches and dividing the world more...If I will bet on what is the priority truly—it is totalitarian ideas like what SBF did can floor civilization to its knees.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your position here. But I think I would be pretty worried about having “truth” be defined to be inclusive of things roughly in the vein of “saying false things when I do not think the people I’m talking to are benefitting the common good.”
PS. As an aside, I do really appreciate your knowledge and professional experience here! Many of us are the forum are trying to figure out pretty hard questions from first principles, and are unwittingly thrust into a situation of having to figure out detailed questions about accounting, PR, financial law, etc, as they intersect with ethics. Perhaps some of us come across as brusque. But I do appreciate your expertise and experience in these trying times.
Thanks Linch, Probably I phrased it wrongly. But what my thought process was lying to save jews because the Gestapos where following a wrong worldview is not lying for me—that is doing the morally correct thing, prevent people from dying.
Money either can make or break anyone—it multiplies who we really are as a person. Thank you as well for recognizing that I am zeroing in at the fraud, internal controls and governance issues but these concepts will never get implemented properly if we do not agree with the basic notion of what is truthful in this community. This is why I am trying to ask questions related to how can the act of lying be justified—I run marathons and there is no way I can do it through without training, same with martial arts where I have to repeat certain front flips or left kicks for a year or two just to get it right or even the daily one hour routine of playing the guitar to get better. I have been to so many positions in life and never have found a use case for lying—ever.
Another thing, this community seems to be ahead of the existential risks research /actions yet got blindsided by SBF. I want to share that it is becoming a trend since we had the ability to increase the reach of our communication through phones, radio, tv, paper or now the internet—bad ideas that affects large swats of the population gets pushed so easily. Scandals like Theranos, FTX, Lehman were somewhat abstraction of post modernism that is an upgrade from the marxist view—I am very worried that the true existential threat is actually that we as a society is not equipped as a whole to understand complex bad ideas creeping into our daily lives. Nuclear weapons, AI misalignment, pandemics, climate catastrophe and etc are actually easier to solve if we get society to band together—yet these major frauds are hitting the us like gut punches and dividing the world more...If I will bet on what is the priority truly—it is totalitarian ideas like what SBF did can floor civilization to its knees.