Comment by throwaway150 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway150 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> I’ve been in the car with some drunk drivers, some dangerous drivers, who could easily have killed people: that’s a bad thing to do, but I wouldn’t say these were bad people.

If this isn't bad people, then who can ever be called bad people? The word "bad" loses its meaning if you explain away every bad deed by such people as something else. Putting other people's lives at risk by deciding to drive when you are drunk sounds like very bad people to me.

> They’re living in a world in which doing the bad thing–covering up error, refusing to admit they don’t have the evidence to back up their conclusions–is easy, whereas doing the good thing is hard.

I don't understand this line of reasoning. So if people do bad things because they know they can get away with it, they aren't bad people? How does this make sense?

> As researchers they’ve been trained to never back down, to dodge all criticism.

Exactly the opposite is taught. These people are deciding not to back down and admit wrong doing out of their own accord. Not because of some "training".

As writers often say: there’s no such thing as a synonym.

“That’s a bad thing to do…”

Maybe should be: “That’s a stupid thing to do…”

Or: reckless, irresponsible, selfish, etc.

In other words, maybe it has nothing to do with morals and ethics. Bad is kind of a lame word with limited impact.

It's a broad and simple word but it's also a useful word because of its generality. It's nice to have such a word that can apply to so many kinds and degrees of actions, and saves so many pointless arguments about whether something is more narrowly evil, for example. Applied empirically to people, it has predictive power and can eliminate surprise because the actions of bad people are correlated with bad actions in many different ways. A bad person does something very stupid today, very irresponsible tomorrow, and will unsurprisingly continue to do bad things of all sorts of kinds even if they stay clear of some kinds.

labelling a person as "bad" is usually black and white thinking. it's too reductive, most people are both good and bad

> because they know they can get away with it

the point is that the paved paths lead to bad behavior

well designed systems make it easy to do good

> Exactly the opposite is taught.

"trained" doesn't mean "taught". most things are learned but not taught

When everyone else does it, it's extremely hard to be righteous. I did it long ago... everyone did it back then. We knew the danger and thought we were different, we thought we could drive safely no matter our state. Lots of tragedies happen because people disastrously misjudge their own abilities, and when alcohol is involved doubly so. They are not bad people, they're people who live in a flawed culture where alcohol is seen as acceptable and who cannot avoid falling for the many human fallacies... in this case caused by the Dunning Kruger effect. If you think people who fall for fallacies are bad, then being human is inherently bad in your opinion.

I don't think being human is inherently bad. But you have to draw the line to consider someone as "bad" somewhere, right? If you don't draw a line, then nobody in the world is a bad person. So my question is where exactly is that line?

You guys are saying that drink driving does not make someone a bad person. Ok. Let's say I grant you that. Where do you draw the line for someone being a bad person?

I mean with this line of reasoning you can "explain way" every bad deed and then nobody is a bad person. So do you guys consider someone to be actually a bad person and what did they have to do to cross that line where you can't explain away their bad deed anymore and you really consider them to be bad?

> If you don't draw a line, then nobody in the world is a bad person. So my question is where exactly is that line?

I don't think that that line can be drawn exactly. There are many factors to consider and I'm not sure that even considering them will allow you to draw this line and not come to claims like '99% of people are bad' or '99% of people are not bad'.

'Bad' is not an innate property of a person. 'Bad' is a label that exists only in an observer's model of the world. A spherical person in vacuum cannot be 'bad', but if we add an observer of the person, then they may become bad.

To my mind, the decision of labeling a person to be bad or not labeling them is a decision reflecting how the labeling subject cares about the one on the receiving side. So, it goes like this: first you decide what to do with bad behavior of someone, and if you decide to go about it with punishment, then you call them 'bad', if you decide to help them somehow to stop their bad behavior, then you don't call them bad.

It works like this: when observing some bad behavior I decide what to do about it. If I decide to punish a person, I declare them to be bad. If I decide to help them stop their behavior, I declare them to be not bad, but 'confused' or circumstantially forced, or whatever. Y'see: you cannot change personal traits of others, so if you declare that the reason of bad behavior is a personal trait 'bad' then you cannot do anything about it. If you want to change things, you need to find a cause of bad behavior, that can be controlled.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com