Hacker News Reader

Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

> Is that okay now that he is donating money to cancer research?

If someone was an asshole, but has decided to stop being an asshole and try out "being a nice person" instead — then your choice, as an onlooker, is between either encouraging them in their new take on life; or pushing back due to their past actions. Through your actions, you can choose to live in a society where "turning over a new leaf" like that is either incentivized, such that more assholes become not-assholes... or disincentivized, such that the assholes' takeaway will be "damned if you do, damned if you don't", and they'll likely not bother, and keep being assholes.

Clearly, one of those options is better for the public good than the other.

View on HN

As a sibling comment points out, there is always a tradeoff between forgiveness and commitment, forgive too much and you incentivize people to take advantage of you (why not? You always forgive in the end), but forgive too little and you incentivize people to go all-in once they make one initial mistake.

Abrahamic religions solve this by imagining an entity capable of deciphering all of your intentions perfectly and delegating the task of granting forgiveness to it, but this perfect oracle is obviously not realizable in practice. Even the communities that worshipped this entity fervently had to contend with the Prisoner's Dilemma nature of the problem of forgiveness frequently, and they solved it no better than others. It's a really difficult problem.

> Abrahamic religions solve this

Perhaps better worded as "attempt to solve this", as clearly it's not working for them in practise. ;)

No, because one of those options incentivizes people to do whatever it takes to get to the top, ethics and harm be damned, then once they get there to turn over a new leaf and be canonized as a saint while reclining on a pile of ill-gotten gains.

Most sociopaths won't get to the top, though. They'll just do the first half where they hurt people, then lose it all. You can watch them on twitter now, hawking crypto and MLM.

What is your alternative? Lock em up? Better to get all of them and a few more than let a single one go free…?

Yes, there's no middle ground between locking everyone up and letting people keep billions in ill-gotten gains /s.

I'm literally asking - genuinely asking - what a solution in the middleground would look like.

The purpose of the sentence that has bothered you is just to stake out the other side of the spectrum from where we are now. That's all. Please argue against the best possible interpretation of comments on this site.

>> Better to get all of them and a few more than let a single one go free…?

> I'm genuinely asking...

Your questions are not serious. You are not genuinely asking. If you want interlocutors to engage with your questions with anything other than dismissiveness, try asking questions that are not prime facie dismissive.

> Please argue against the best possible interpretation of comments on this site.

I am.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com