Hacker News Reader

Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

Rhetoric? You've got people who just attempted to blackmail you and then take your service offline when you refuse. The descriptive term "criminal", i.e. one who breaks laws, is perfectly valid IMO.

View on HN

Of course it's valid, rhetoric != lies.

While I agree, the term blackmailer or extortionist would had been better.

Which are just specific types of criminals. I don't see the problem.

Criminals are just specific types of people, and people are just specific types of mammals. Being more specific sometimes aids understanding.

I think I get what you're saying here; it's an example of the non-central fallacy[1]. Calling someone "a criminal" calls to mind a set of stereotypes, to which blackmail/extortion don't quite fit (most crimes for which one gets called "a criminal" as a generic term are violent, for just one thing.) Calling them "a blackmailer" or "an extortionist" calls to mind a more accurate set of stereotypes, clustered more closely with how you'd react to kidnappers, con-artists, etc. than how you'd react to, say, a mugger.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst...

Not all blackmail is a crime.

I blackmail my kids all the time... ("Wash your hands after using the bathroom or you will put 25 cents in this jar")

That's not blackmail ... "wash you hands or I'll tell your sister that you killed her pet fish" ... is blackmail. What your describing is more like extortion.

it's just framing the scenario in good guys vs bad guys terms, it's childish regardless of how accurately the term describes the actors involved..

I agree with your general sentiment wrt to good and bad, but saying these people are criminals is just plainly accurate, and specifically not attributing "badness" at all. It's extortion, which is forbidden for very good reasons and as far as I know, uncontroversially so.

I was actually marveling at how precise the wording is in this piece. Curious how different these things can come across.

Why is it childish to point out when someone is acting criminally — in a literal sense being a bad guy? Is it somehow more adult to act as though you are morally equivalent to an extortionist?

I think people might be being offended-by-proxy by a sort of status-shift 37s is trying to work into its language. Calling someone "an extortionist" still implies a sort of high-status white-collar cunning-and-intelligence, of the kind you'd expect of a person in the tech industry. An evil person, surely, but the respectable, movie-villain-you-love-to-hate kind of evil.

Calling someone "a criminal", meanwhile, degrades their status to that of a common mugger; someone in the lower class who needs to commit crime to survive, and who doesn't have the intelligence required to come up with a clever crime.

Hackers are generally aesthetes--we tend to value our intelligence, curiosity, etc. more than we value our moral fibre. We can appreciate stories like "A hacked into B to see if it was possible, and reported the vulnerability all responsible-like, but then they threw him in jail! How horrible!" because we think the positive-status from the display of intelligence makes it less likely, rather than more, that they were genuinely seeking to harm the people they hacked.

Because of this, I think we here are scared of being potentially associated with dumb, low-status, lower-class criminals more than we are of just being considered evil. People hire "evil, black-hat" hackers. Nobody hires a dumb hacker.

Calling someone a criminal degrades their status from someone who doesn't commit crime to someone who does. It degrades them from someone who adds value to someone who takes value.

There is moral judgement involved with calling someone a criminal, and rightfully so. Taking what other people have created by force or extortion degrades society.

That is the scenario, it's not just framing it that way, it actually is that way. There's nothing childish about it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com