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Concerning that posts with the word "evil" in them seem to rocket up towards to the top of Hacker News. This post totally abuses the word "evil"

• derefr 17y ago
  Hackers (and I do think that, by and large, HN is still populated by "hackers") are aesthetes. When we say that something is "good" or "evil," we're not making a moral judgement, but rather an aesthetic one. Consider, for example, that most people here would consider the famous MIT pranks to be "good." There is no argument that can be made that they are morally good—but they are certainly aesthetically pleasing, and we respect that. This article points out the contrapositive: PayPal, no matter its ethical implications (which breck pointed out above), is aesthetically displeasing—it offers a bad communicative interface to the developer (a bad API), and the rules governing it cannot be elegantly described (a bad design). This also explains quite a bit of what HN seems to love or hate. We love Apple because they care about aesthetics, but we hate the App Store because it is capricious and seemingly internally shoddy/"crufty." We love Google because they're open about everything they do, and so they're predictable—they give us a sense of being a controllable force, even if they're too large to actually control. None of this has anything to do with whether their actions are helping or harming us. It's purely a matter of subjective Quality, with no quantitative measurements going on behind it. No one here ever shuts up and multiplies[1]—and that's okay. Humanity is pointless without subjective experience. But it's good to be conscious that that's what we're really talking about here. [1] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Shut_up_and_multiply http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Shut_up_and_multiply