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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

We've lost the ability to evaluate behavior as it is in itself. Before we judge, we have to find out whether it was a "good" or "bad" person who did it. If that doesn't help, we can perhaps find some innuendo to the effect that the actor acted as an "agent" or even "asset" of some known-"bad" "foreign" power. When we fill our brains with garbage, only garbage can come out of them.

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In an extremely complex modern society it's nearly impossible to tell the effects that certain actions and policies will have. Popular discourse around politics and economics support this theory, since almost nobody can seem to agree. This leads to one of the best heuristics for evaluating the merits of an action as the intention of the actor or the ethics of the actor.

That is possibly the worst heuristic for evaluating an action. You may be right that it is somewhat natural to arrive at it, but it is by no means a good heuristic.

And why is it bad? For one, real intentions are inscrutable, so it is very easy to ascribe whatever intentions you want to an action. For another, the intentions behind an action have essentially no correlation with the effects of the action, at least insofar as the intentions are not explicitly malicious (e.g. 'hurt people').

Is there an alternative that you feel works better?

The most common alternative that I can see is "you can do whatever you want as long as it follows the letter of the law". However, that doesn't seem to work well either.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. The question I was essentially answering was 'how can we tell whether an action was "good" or not?'. Rather than looking at the intentions of the author, I think you need to look at the effects, or some proxy thereof (are people I know poorer/richer? How many people died because of this action? Or whatever else is easily measurable and pertinent)

That strategy seems like a sure way to get taken for a ride. The only way we can infer the intentions or ethics of other people is to observe their actions and the effects of those actions. The marketing usually lies about squishy things like intentions.

Right to the point. Quite similar to the ideas of Nickolas Nassim Taleb. And part of the reason VC invest in so many "foolish" ventures, but "foolish" only retrospectively.

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