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Comment by jwb119 | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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