Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

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> Maybe there is a subconscious belief that only "good" people deserve success and praise? I just find this so naive because if you've lived long enough and gotten to know yourself and other people you realize how complicated and flawed each and every one of us are.

We see this a lot in posts here and elsewhere: Some historical figure or someone with a lifetime of achievements and impact gets mentioned. Then, inevitably, a poster comes out of the woodwork to remind everyone: "Buuuuuut he was sexist" or "Buuuuuut he sometimes beat his kids" or "Buuuuuut he once cheated on his wife" as if that one fact nullifies everything else the person did.

I'm glad OP acknowledged that the person in question was "complicated". We all are complicated. People should not be reduced to a single dimension or a single bad thing they did. I hope when I finally pass away, my epitaph talks about the major things I did, rather than that one worst thing I ever did, that someone found by analyzing 40 years of comment history.

There's a reason human nature is to criticize and focus on flaws - that's how progress is made.

Great achievements speak for themselves. In most cases, people readily adopt proven new practices or inventions, flock to groundbreaking ideas, and celebrate those who produce them.

Meanwhile, they will happily stay silent about uncomfortable truths. Who dares pipe up about the charismatic but incompetent colleague? The successful boss who skims a little off the top? The beloved politician who touches female staff? Etc. Mistakes and wrongdoing have a way of hiding in plain sight.

Yes, people are complicated. It's better when folks point out the complexity, instead of sticking to the sanitized version.

I feel like we’re in a period of overcorrection where we’re not simply acknowledging flaws with accomplishments, we’re now letting the flaw become the lead narrative about a person when it may be one of the objectively smaller details about them in the scope of their accomplishments.

But in the case of Lowtax, the flaws- not only his abusive personal life but his petty webmaster dictatorship, his incompetent inability to monetize, his misanthropic persona- is part and parcel of his public profile. It’s how he’s always been regarded by the goons. Because Something Awful has always been a place to embrace misanthropy, antisocial ridicule, and looking at the crappy side of things.

If anything, to remember his flaws is to engage in the same spirit of mockery that he pioneered. It’s completely apt in this case, and to do otherwise and to whitewash would be to completely miss the point of this man’s life and accomplishments.

> There's a reason human nature is to criticize and focus on flaws - that's how progress is made.

This may lead to progress, but I don’t believe this is WHY we do this. People are moralizing creatures. Much like we are “programmed” to recognize faces, (even when they’re not there) so too are we programmed to see issues in moral terms. Once you start paying attention to what people say, this conclusion is almost unavoidable: often discussion will never get into the details of things, but simply focus on the question of whether something is “good” or “bad.” (Other times it will focus on who is to “blame,” and who is the “victim.”)

Hopefully my tone hasn’t come off too harsh, since evaluating moral claims is one of the most fundamental things which make us human. Like all those other traits though, sometimes we focus on it too much, or else can’t see past the moral part of the argument.

By your logic, funerals should be more like agile retrospectives where we examine every mistake a person made or person they hurt so people at the funeral don't repeat the same mistakes.

The reason people commit violence is not because of a lack of social pressure or not understanding the difference betweeen right and wrong. They have something broken inside.

Funerals are different from biographies, and this seems more like a situation for biography.

Especially because the people at a funeral already know the person well.

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