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Yeah, I am quite ambivalent about this 'rule'. I think you start on a slippery slope once you can rationalize this type of behavior. Also, would you be comforta

• smallgovt 10y ago
  Whether you'd be comfortable explaining your actions to a journalist/public is a very poor heuristic for whether your actions are right or wrong. The public/press distort and misreport all the time. There are plenty of reasons to be cautious there.
  • kelvin0 10y ago
    Please note that I wrote: "If not, CHANCES ARE there is shadiness occurring". I used this to nuance and to denote the fact that this is a rule of thumb, not one of the 10 commandments.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• wahern 10y ago
  Some rules are best left unstated. By formalizing them everybody is incentivized to stretch them. By formalizing them we fool ourselves into believing that they're more objective than they really are. A [poor] analogy would be false precision. By stating something in overly specific terms we can communicate something completely opposite of what we mean. In the case of something like "naughtiness" there's really no decent way to communicate what the author has in mind, not even in an approximate fashion. It's not reducible to a term divorced from the messy details of real-world context. And that presumes what the author has in mind is at all consistent. Better leave it unstated and leave one's actions to speak in their stead.