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Comment by alecco | Hacker News Reader

The golden rule has a serious problem of enabling sociopaths.

Only help people worth helping.

People like to argue against the golden rule, saying that if you are deranged, it gives you license to hurt others. First, this is an edge case. Second, it is out of context.

The golden rule was given by Jesus secondary to the command "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind."

If you follow both those commands, you'll only do good to your fellow man.

The greatest commandment was two parts: what you said + "love your neighbor as yourself". The golden rule is kind of redundant if you follow greatest commandment.

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+22&v...

This is the best chapter in the entire Bible IMO. It's funny how many Christian couples think they'll still be married in Heaven.

Your comment is wrong in so many levels it isn't worth refuting. And you sound like a brainwashed individual who won't listen to reason, anyway.

> People like to argue against the golden rule, saying that if you are deranged, it gives you license to hurt others.

You are shifting the argument. That has nothing to do with my comment. Straw man fallacy.

> The golden rule was given by Jesus secondary to the command "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind."

No, in the christian bible it says a man named Jesus gave a new commandment. The "Golden Rule" is a generalization made in more recent times to try to find a common ground across religions. And it's very vague as many religions are closer to what's named as the "Silver Rule".

> If you follow both those commands, you'll only do good to your fellow man.

That's not on the bible and even if it were, it's your dogma book. You provide me no proof it is that way. Not even a decent hypothesis.

Small problem:

alleco: The golden rule has a serious problem of enabling sociopaths.

lancefisher: People like to argue against the golden rule, saying that if you are deranged, it gives you license to hurt others.

alleco: You are shifting the argument. That has nothing to do with my comment. Straw man fallacy.

It isn't a straw man fallacy. It is a direct paraphrase of your statement. "enabling" and "giving license" are pretty much the same thing. As are forms of "sociopath" and "deranged (who will) hurt others" -- at least in common vernacular.

"The golden rule has a serious problem of enabling sociopaths" obviously means people following the golden rule helping indiscriminately are helping sociopaths. And sociopaths, by definition, do not follow the rule. Sociopaths thriving in society are very bad, obviously.

"People like to argue against the golden rule, saying that if you are deranged, it gives you license to hurt others", this vague accusation first generalices all criticism of the golden rule as the same. Second it states something that has nothing to do with my coments. I did not claim "if you are deranged, [the golden rule] gives you license to hurt others'. I wouldn't be surprised if that was made up on the spot by lancefisher.

Your points are hard-headed nonsense and a waste of time.

Edit: minor typos

Your claim of obviously is not true because you say so. You may have meant it the way you claim, but an equally valid interpretation of the term enabling is:

The golden rule allows sociopaths to justify behavior by claiming "I expect to be treated the way I am treating you". In a society that puts the golden rule at the top of social norms, this allows the sociopaths to do their thing while within the guidelines. Allowing something to be justified is in fact enabling it. This is why the term for codependent family who make excuses for their addict loved ones and who clean up the addict's messes is enabler.

It is important to note when there are multiple subtly different ways of defining words, it can lead to confusion when you think you are being clear.

you're making some pretty big assumptions that: 1) you can actually tell who is worth helping 2) even if the golden rule does enable sociopaths, that the overall benefits don't outweigh that downside

1) It's very easy to tell if you pay attention. Selfish people are trivial to spot. Also those who sweet talk others with compliments to use them and move on afterwards.

2) How do you know? Sociopaths break the trust of people and can easily break a working system. A classic real anecdote of mine:

We were about 100 people in a very large open space office. The vast majority of us were normal or nice. But two selfish idiots kept stealing/hoarding anything that was freely available. From coffee cups and plastic cutlery to toilet paper. This drove everyone to hoard all those resources, creating a bigger problem and masking the original culprits.

My point is a tiny fraction of the population can easily break a healthy system/society. Don't underestimate this.

A healthy system has a way of ejecting unhealthy influences. As in, "stop this crap or we're going to have to let you go."

You have to find them first. Most sociopaths take abuse as a full time job and usually are very good at hiding or excusing themselves. Sometimes they just say they're sorry, stop doing it for a while, but later resuming their original behaviour with some adaptation.

I don't see you responding very well to jwb's argument. You made a statement that the Golden Rule enables sociopaths. jwb made a counterstatement that your statement makes some assumptions that are not necessarily true. You address the first assumption with some logic and an anecdote of your own, but you by no means address the second, which seems to be the more important one.

Instead, you seem to (and if I'm misinterpreting you here, I'm sorry, but I see no other way to read it) say that the second assumption jwb pointed out is irrelevant because your anecdote demonstrates that the power of the horrible few can be larger by orders of magnitude. Not that I'm good at analogies, but it's like saying cats are absolutely horrible because 1 cat you used to have made 10 dogs go wild, while jwb is saying that whatever trouble cats may cause in our world, the world is still better off for having them.

And then ekanes responded to you with a statement that also reflects my own life experience. I can't think of a single time in my life when a small or large group of people have been unable to identify such similar culprits and then either reform or eject them. Aside from the fact that 1 anecdote does not a study make, I feel you're falling prey to anchoring bias, attentional bias, insensitivity to sample size, and belief bias all in one (the belief bias being the most ironic, given what appears to be your antagonism towards people of faith). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

edit: better word arrangement

I provide real examples behind my opinions. I don't have to prove or disprove vague statements made by others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

"the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making scientifically unfalsifiable claims rather than shifting the burden of proof to others, specifically in the case of religion"

The statements jwb made about assumptions you appeared to be making were not vague. And they had nothing to do with religion either. The only one who started making statements that included anything related to religion was lancefisher, and on a completely different thread branch. I think my original statement stands. You're not responding very well to jwb's statements. In fact, you're letting your opinion of lancefisher's statements influence your decision to respond to jwb. Again, jwb made no religious statements. In fact, the whole thread branch following jwb's comments is 100% free of religious language. I don't know why you're allowing yourself to do this. It makes you look unnecessarily obstinate.

edit: Looking at the lancefisher thread, you're not being just obstinante, but also dismissive. I don't think it's fair to complain that others aren't using reason if you're not willing to respond with reason. Whether you think of it as a waste of time or not, I think you lose the right to complain about lack of reason if you're not willing to display it yourself in detail like the way I'm trying to do now and the way others are trying to. If you think it's a waste of time, then it's better to just exit the conversation.

Wait, it's very easy to identify sociopaths one post ago, but they're good at hiding/excusing now? You might want to pick a side...

It's easy to detect a sociopath on a personal level. It's not easy to detect their sociopathic actions when they hide in groups. "Is Alice a sociopath?" is a lot easier than "Who are the abusers out of these 100?"

At personal level the work of detecting them is distributed, so it scales. If addressed at group level by controllers (e.g. HR) it doesn't. If the group follows blindly the Golden Rule, HR is lost.

Also knee-jerk solutions making strict rules trying to enforce the Golden Rule tend to make things worse, in my experience.

Meh. Only something like 5% of the population is sociopathic. As long as you take reasonable precautions, it's okay to treat most people you meet as if they're one of the other 95%.

Sociopaths drive people into cynicism.

I've had to work with sociopaths, and being used and abused ain't fun.

But I hope you'll get over it. For sure, cynicism, won't bring you happiness.

I never proposed cynicism! I clearly say you should be mindful who you help. That's it.

It's always hard to get the tone of a forum message. I thought that the contact of sociopath brought you to cynicism. Obviously, I was wrong.

Neglecting abusers perpetuates abuse.

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