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Comment by andy_ppp | Hacker News Reader

You’re actually suggesting being a sociopath is a good thing because it’ll make all the bad ideas eventually die by us trying them. This is simply not true, we have to make bad ideas die by reason and logic, before we do too much harm.

I suppose doubling down of fossil fuels and burning of rainforest is great, we’ll just have to adapt quicker to the super extreme weather. But we can adapt with more aircon! Yay!

Maybe we are just monkeys who can’t actually learn from things that we haven’t experienced but then we’ll be replaced by nature any day now. I’d rather learn things the easy way, if at all possible.

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This is an extremely uncharitable reading. Infosec is a field rife with kneejerk dismissals until people actually see the exploitation in action. How long has the (ethical) tech community been warning people about the NSA and Faceboot, until Snowden and Cambridge Analytica actually happened?

Infosec is totally different because it’s exposing problems people have already created in a standard way. This is using technology for maliciousness in the first place. Try telling to those people who were abused by that system they were just collateral damage in a bigger plan.

> You’re actually suggesting being a sociopath is a good thing because it’ll make all the bad ideas eventually die by us trying them.

Being a sociopath could be considered as a person's life choice, but it's not something to be considered bad. It's merely a medical condition.

I think there's merit to his argument. People really are very stupid, especially in groups. Maybe you're smart enough to realize that burning rainforests and doubling down on fossil fuels is a stupid strategy, but there is no shortage of people in the US, who actually have an education no less (unlike many people in developing nations where the rainforests are being burned), who really think we can't hurt the environment and laws to protect the environment are wrong. In fact, there's probably a bunch of them right here on this site; they usually call themselves "libertarians", and will scream about "private property rights" in regards to this issue.

It'd be nice if humanity was smart enough and empathetic enough to avoid the horrible mistakes we've made, but we're really not.

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