10 ms·

I get angry when I realize I will never again be who I've always been before, someone who lived strong and free by the creed that people are essentially good, t

by edw519 15y ago

I get angry when I realize I will never again be who I've always been before, someone who lived strong and free by the creed that people are essentially good, that if you think optimistically, trust others. Please don't let them steal this too. I'm really sorry for your bad experience, but remember: - You can still live strong and free. - People are still essentially good. - You can still think optimistically. - You can still trust others. It's true, you will never be who you've always been. But you can be almost the same person, still optimistic and trusting, just a little less naive. You many not realize it now, but the time will come when you may actually appreciate this as a learning experience. There are bad people out there and some of them will want to hurt you. You don't have to sacrifice who you really are because of them. You just have to live a little bit differently. Don't let them take away you really are. Believe it or not, that would be much worse than what they've already done. Lots of well wishes for your quick recovery.

levigross 15y ago
IMHO There are bad people out there and some of them will want to hurt you. You don't have to sacrifice who you really are because of them. You just have to live a little bit differently. means don't use AirBnB
- ryanklee 15y ago
  If the implication is don't use AirBnB, then the implication is also: never leave your own home and never let anyone in, which is paranoid and absurd. You might object that what you say applies only to strangers and not to those you trust, but then you would be forgetting that everyone you trust was once a stranger. Simply walking down the street is a testament to one's notion that in general humans are good and that that goodness is worthwhile enough to risk the occasional social or even physical injustice.
  - sbov 15y ago
    There's a difference between all of those and giving a person you've never met free, intimate access to your home.
  - jholman 15y ago
    That doesn't follow at all. First, I'd like to be clear that I'm not advocating for or against AirBnB (and my sole experience as a buyer of accommodation via AirBnB was positive). It should be transparent that different actions have different levels of risk and reward. Often by accepting higher risk (e.g. accepting the risk of letting strangers into your apartment) you can get higher reward (e.g. some money, a sense of community and connection, etc). But risk is risk, and so you can also get anti-rewards, sometimes huge ones (home ransacked and burglarized and vandalized, identity stolen, sense of life violated, etc). If you want to draw conclusions from events like this, they should be about modulating your risk tolerance, not about setting your risk tolerance to zero (which is incoherent anyway). You might decide that although things like this happen, it's a risk you're willing to take. Or maybe not. You might decide that if you're going to rent your apartment out to sight-unseen strangers, you're going to put all your identity documents in a safety deposit box first, to slightly limit the maximum damage. Or you might decide that that would offset the benefit too much, and thereby just go back to the no-renting-to-strangers option. Or you might decided to take martial arts lessons, and not let strangers in. Or you might decided to install security cameras, with real-time transmission to offsite backup, so that if something bad happens you'll always be able to strike back and regain a sense of control. Whatever. All of those options are coherent alternatives, and all are a far cry from 'never leave your own home, never let anyone in'. It's certainly true that simply walking down the street requires trust, and it's certainly true that transforming strangers into friends is a process that requires risking trust, but both of those _can_ be done with very small trusts. Or they can be done with large trust, which has greater risk, greater possible reward, and greater possible injury.
maratd 15y ago
> - People are still essentially good. Out of every 100 people, 98 are absolutely wonderful human beings, 1 is an asshole, and 1 is a lunatic. My experience out of doing retail for a few years.
- PonyGumbo 15y ago
  Note that these can be the same people on different days.
  - rams 15y ago
    Great observation !
  - intenex 15y ago
    So it's possible that actually all 100 people are assholes.
    - chc 15y ago
      Only in the same sense that we can say "intenex wears a diaper" (because you were once a baby). Defining somebody by an off moment is one way to look at things, but I'm not sure it's particularly reasonable.
      - edj 15y ago
        Depends on the type of moment... I like Lord Acton's exhortation to "judge talent at its best and character at its worst".[1] [1]: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Dalberg-Acton,_1st_Baron_Acton#The_Study_Of_History_.281895.29 http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Dalberg-Acton,_1st_Baron_A...
        chc 15y ago
        I think that's good advice in general, but you'll miss the point if you stick too closely to it. You kind of have to weight your judgments. I mean, yes, a guy who beats his wife if he's had a bad day at work should be judged pretty harshly based on that. But if you-at-your-worst is somebody who is kind of grumpy and maybe a little bit selfish, you're a whole lot better than somebody who constantly acts like a crabby miser.
Shenglong 15y ago
You're very optimistic. While I don't agree that people are essentially good, I envy your ability to see the world that way.
- rkalla 15y ago
  I was sitting here mulling over why you wouldn't think that people are essentially good and it dawns on me that a lot of people are scared and likely have behaviors that suggest they aren't good (e.g. drive by someone with a flat tire in the rain because they are scared it's a robbery setup for passer-bys) I think if you just look at your day to day interactions, most people are decent. I doubt many people are trying to rob you, hit you or actively steal from you. Sure there are outliers, but the majority don't do this. Lastly, as a reformed paranoid "everyone is out to get me", I would make the observation that the energy you put out there has maybe 70% to do with the types of reactions you get back. A friendly, open-faced "Hello" gets a hell of a different response from a shrouded, closed off, nervous "Hello". Try and be more free for 3 days and see if the experience you have with others is better.
  - afterburner 15y ago
    Maybe it's the difference between "people act good most of the time" and people truly being good. I don't think the vast majority of people are up to something criminal right this moment, but I might be less confident that 99% of people are motivated by good intentions. "Good intentions" and "not a criminal" are very different standards, but that's the point. The fear thing made me think something else entirely: does it count as being good if a person acts good out of fear? (Of being caught/punished.) Everyone's answer to that question may also colour their views on peoples' goodness.
    - pyre 15y ago
      This just reminded me of an interesting idea one of my highschool teachers proposed: mother that doesn't love their child, but still performs all of her motherly duties because she feels a responsibility towards the child? Is she worse than a mother that loves her child? Is she better because she can 'do the right thing' even though her feelings might opposed?
DanielRibeiro 15y ago
You might also consider taking a look into this: "Don't punish everyone for one person's mistake"[1] [1]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPOezLL398U&feature=share http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPOezLL398U&feature=share
- jimbokun 15y ago
  I haven't watched the linked video, but the word "mistake" in no way applies to this situation. This was an entire week devoted to thinking up ways of being cruel to another human being.
  - nihilocrat 15y ago
    The fact that human beings are capable of spending "an entire week devoted to thinking up ways of being cruel to another human being" when the other human being has been nothing but honest and welcoming is why I believe that we are an inherently evil species that doesn't deserve its place on this planet.
hessenwolf 15y ago
People are generally good, but there is no bar so low that 99% of humans can not be convinced to slither under given the right circumstances. The world is full of horror.
bh42222 15y ago
But you can be almost the same person Some people are very badly affected by trauma. But most do get over it and the almost same person is actually a wiser slightly more careful person. A bit less idealist, yep, but that's growing up.
xster 15y ago
Key takeaway from your story: you're still healthy and unharmed. All the material stuff is superficial, the only thing of real value is you.
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago
  >All the material stuff is superficial, the only thing of real value is you. Our house was broken in to by youths looking for drug money. It took me a couple of years to get over the sense of not wanting to trust people. The sense of betrayal was considerably enhanced by two factors - I was on a neighbourhood committee with the mother of one of the youths that broke in; an amount of cash was taken that belonged to a group that we volunteered with to help children on the estate from whence the youths came. IMO the greatest harm was stealing [for a time] my trust in others. People kept empathising with me as to how violated we must feel, how awful having people in our home. None of that mattered to us really though.
AretNCarlsen 15y ago
> People are still essentially good. Experiment indicates that the majority (65%) are not: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment I am sorry to be a downer, and I agree that it is nice to pretend that people are essentially good. Ignoring the Milgram results, however, leads us to forget why we have to maintain societies with complex crime deterrent schemes, and why we should not trust anonymous individuals who cannot be located for punishment. "[H]alf ... were female, and their rate of obedience was virtually identical to that of the male participants." "Where participants had to physically hold the "learner's" arm onto a shock plate, ... 30 percent of participants completed the experiment."
- Steve0 15y ago
  That doesn't seem to be the conclusion of said experiment. "In Milgram's first set of experiments, 65 percent (26 of 40)[1] of experiment participants administered the experiment's final massive 450-volt shock, though many were very uncomfortable doing so; at some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment, some said they would refund the money they were paid for participating in the experiment." IMHO Milgram's experiment has more to do with obedience than ethics.
  - alanh 15y ago
    So people know what they do is wrong and do it anyway. How does this make people "good"? It makes them knowingly evil.
    - Hyena 15y ago
      Or they felt trapped by their agreement to participate in the experiment. They made an offer to annul the contract, which would indicate that they were following through with what they had agreed to do. Moreover, the situation they were in was greatly outside their experience with what people had ever asked them to do in fulfilling an agreement. If you promised someone "I'll do whatever it takes for you to have a good time while you're visiting", you probably aren't imagining that it will involve a triple homicide and a liquor store robbery. If it starts there, you'll likely refuse. But if you slowly build up to that, the pressure to keep complying with your agreement builds....
nosequel 15y ago
Someone once said (can't for the life of me find the quote), that the difference between a good man and an evil one was that the evil one did the things that the good man thought about doing.
ap22213 15y ago
Sometimes things go very very wrong. That's why they invented insurance. Most people act 'good' most of the time. That's why this whole society thing stays cohesive. But, everyone has a probability to act badly. Just consider someone who may have had a stroke that considerably changes their personality. A small portion of people act 'evil' under more common situations. It's odd that airbnb doesn't seem to risk mitigate these sorts of black swan events. They wouldn't lose much having a 100% loss redemption clause. It would seem that the property owner would be much less likely to game the system than the visitor.
Dn_Ab 15y ago
The vast majority of People are good yes. The main problem is that most people stop caring too quickly. On a multidimensional empathetic scale they stop caring with a nigh exponential drop off the further away from the this and now the other person is. Once someone's genetic and then phenotypic expression is far away from theirs, once the spacial, chronological and cultural locations etc. are diverged; people stop caring enough. Sometimes the person that they do not care about is their future self. The keyword is enough. Certainly if everyone was too empathetic that would neither be good. But I do think the world would be a better place if more people did not set the line of when to stop caring and empathizing so close to Now and Me. If they picked a slightly less steep atttenuation function then we would not have so many perfectly good people that were bigoted Xist bastards when it came to topic X. or peopele who were just following orders. or just having a bit of fun. or well at least it is not me. or on and on. for example.

by edw519 15y ago

levigross 15y ago

IMHO There are bad people out there and some of them will want to hurt you. You don't have to sacrifice who you really are because of them. You just have to live a little bit differently. means don't use AirBnB

ryanklee 15y ago
If the implication is don't use AirBnB, then the implication is also: never leave your own home and never let anyone in, which is paranoid and absurd. You might object that what you say applies only to strangers and not to those you trust, but then you would be forgetting that everyone you trust was once a stranger. Simply walking down the street is a testament to one's notion that in general humans are good and that that goodness is worthwhile enough to risk the occasional social or even physical injustice.
- sbov 15y ago
  There's a difference between all of those and giving a person you've never met free, intimate access to your home.
- jholman 15y ago
  That doesn't follow at all. First, I'd like to be clear that I'm not advocating for or against AirBnB (and my sole experience as a buyer of accommodation via AirBnB was positive). It should be transparent that different actions have different levels of risk and reward. Often by accepting higher risk (e.g. accepting the risk of letting strangers into your apartment) you can get higher reward (e.g. some money, a sense of community and connection, etc). But risk is risk, and so you can also get anti-rewards, sometimes huge ones (home ransacked and burglarized and vandalized, identity stolen, sense of life violated, etc). If you want to draw conclusions from events like this, they should be about modulating your risk tolerance, not about setting your risk tolerance to zero (which is incoherent anyway). You might decide that although things like this happen, it's a risk you're willing to take. Or maybe not. You might decide that if you're going to rent your apartment out to sight-unseen strangers, you're going to put all your identity documents in a safety deposit box first, to slightly limit the maximum damage. Or you might decide that that would offset the benefit too much, and thereby just go back to the no-renting-to-strangers option. Or you might decided to take martial arts lessons, and not let strangers in. Or you might decided to install security cameras, with real-time transmission to offsite backup, so that if something bad happens you'll always be able to strike back and regain a sense of control. Whatever. All of those options are coherent alternatives, and all are a far cry from 'never leave your own home, never let anyone in'. It's certainly true that simply walking down the street requires trust, and it's certainly true that transforming strangers into friends is a process that requires risking trust, but both of those _can_ be done with very small trusts. Or they can be done with large trust, which has greater risk, greater possible reward, and greater possible injury.

maratd 15y ago

> - People are still essentially good. Out of every 100 people, 98 are absolutely wonderful human beings, 1 is an asshole, and 1 is a lunatic. My experience out of doing retail for a few years.

PonyGumbo 15y ago
Note that these can be the same people on different days.
- rams 15y ago
  Great observation !
- intenex 15y ago
  So it's possible that actually all 100 people are assholes.
  - chc 15y ago
    Only in the same sense that we can say "intenex wears a diaper" (because you were once a baby). Defining somebody by an off moment is one way to look at things, but I'm not sure it's particularly reasonable.
    - edj 15y ago
      Depends on the type of moment... I like Lord Acton's exhortation to "judge talent at its best and character at its worst".[1] [1]: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Dalberg-Acton,_1st_Baron_Acton#The_Study_Of_History_.281895.29 http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Dalberg-Acton,_1st_Baron_A...
      - chc 15y ago
        I think that's good advice in general, but you'll miss the point if you stick too closely to it. You kind of have to weight your judgments. I mean, yes, a guy who beats his wife if he's had a bad day at work should be judged pretty harshly based on that. But if you-at-your-worst is somebody who is kind of grumpy and maybe a little bit selfish, you're a whole lot better than somebody who constantly acts like a crabby miser.

Shenglong 15y ago

You're very optimistic. While I don't agree that people are essentially good, I envy your ability to see the world that way.

rkalla 15y ago
I was sitting here mulling over why you wouldn't think that people are essentially good and it dawns on me that a lot of people are scared and likely have behaviors that suggest they aren't good (e.g. drive by someone with a flat tire in the rain because they are scared it's a robbery setup for passer-bys) I think if you just look at your day to day interactions, most people are decent. I doubt many people are trying to rob you, hit you or actively steal from you. Sure there are outliers, but the majority don't do this. Lastly, as a reformed paranoid "everyone is out to get me", I would make the observation that the energy you put out there has maybe 70% to do with the types of reactions you get back. A friendly, open-faced "Hello" gets a hell of a different response from a shrouded, closed off, nervous "Hello". Try and be more free for 3 days and see if the experience you have with others is better.
- afterburner 15y ago
  Maybe it's the difference between "people act good most of the time" and people truly being good. I don't think the vast majority of people are up to something criminal right this moment, but I might be less confident that 99% of people are motivated by good intentions. "Good intentions" and "not a criminal" are very different standards, but that's the point. The fear thing made me think something else entirely: does it count as being good if a person acts good out of fear? (Of being caught/punished.) Everyone's answer to that question may also colour their views on peoples' goodness.
  - pyre 15y ago
    This just reminded me of an interesting idea one of my highschool teachers proposed: mother that doesn't love their child, but still performs all of her motherly duties because she feels a responsibility towards the child? Is she worse than a mother that loves her child? Is she better because she can 'do the right thing' even though her feelings might opposed?

DanielRibeiro 15y ago

You might also consider taking a look into this: "Don't punish everyone for one person's mistake"[1] [1]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPOezLL398U&feature=share http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPOezLL398U&feature=share

jimbokun 15y ago
I haven't watched the linked video, but the word "mistake" in no way applies to this situation. This was an entire week devoted to thinking up ways of being cruel to another human being.
- nihilocrat 15y ago
  The fact that human beings are capable of spending "an entire week devoted to thinking up ways of being cruel to another human being" when the other human being has been nothing but honest and welcoming is why I believe that we are an inherently evil species that doesn't deserve its place on this planet.

hessenwolf 15y ago

People are generally good, but there is no bar so low that 99% of humans can not be convinced to slither under given the right circumstances. The world is full of horror.

bh42222 15y ago

But you can be almost the same person Some people are very badly affected by trauma. But most do get over it and the almost same person is actually a wiser slightly more careful person. A bit less idealist, yep, but that's growing up.

xster 15y ago

Key takeaway from your story: you're still healthy and unharmed. All the material stuff is superficial, the only thing of real value is you.

pbhjpbhj 15y ago
>All the material stuff is superficial, the only thing of real value is you. Our house was broken in to by youths looking for drug money. It took me a couple of years to get over the sense of not wanting to trust people. The sense of betrayal was considerably enhanced by two factors - I was on a neighbourhood committee with the mother of one of the youths that broke in; an amount of cash was taken that belonged to a group that we volunteered with to help children on the estate from whence the youths came. IMO the greatest harm was stealing [for a time] my trust in others. People kept empathising with me as to how violated we must feel, how awful having people in our home. None of that mattered to us really though.

AretNCarlsen 15y ago

> People are still essentially good. Experiment indicates that the majority (65%) are not: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment I am sorry to be a downer, and I agree that it is nice to pretend that people are essentially good. Ignoring the Milgram results, however, leads us to forget why we have to maintain societies with complex crime deterrent schemes, and why we should not trust anonymous individuals who cannot be located for punishment. "[H]alf ... were female, and their rate of obedience was virtually identical to that of the male participants." "Where participants had to physically hold the "learner's" arm onto a shock plate, ... 30 percent of participants completed the experiment."

Steve0 15y ago
That doesn't seem to be the conclusion of said experiment. "In Milgram's first set of experiments, 65 percent (26 of 40)[1] of experiment participants administered the experiment's final massive 450-volt shock, though many were very uncomfortable doing so; at some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment, some said they would refund the money they were paid for participating in the experiment." IMHO Milgram's experiment has more to do with obedience than ethics.
- alanh 15y ago
  So people know what they do is wrong and do it anyway. How does this make people "good"? It makes them knowingly evil.
  - Hyena 15y ago
    Or they felt trapped by their agreement to participate in the experiment. They made an offer to annul the contract, which would indicate that they were following through with what they had agreed to do. Moreover, the situation they were in was greatly outside their experience with what people had ever asked them to do in fulfilling an agreement. If you promised someone "I'll do whatever it takes for you to have a good time while you're visiting", you probably aren't imagining that it will involve a triple homicide and a liquor store robbery. If it starts there, you'll likely refuse. But if you slowly build up to that, the pressure to keep complying with your agreement builds....

nosequel 15y ago

Someone once said (can't for the life of me find the quote), that the difference between a good man and an evil one was that the evil one did the things that the good man thought about doing.

ap22213 15y ago

Sometimes things go very very wrong. That's why they invented insurance. Most people act 'good' most of the time. That's why this whole society thing stays cohesive. But, everyone has a probability to act badly. Just consider someone who may have had a stroke that considerably changes their personality. A small portion of people act 'evil' under more common situations. It's odd that airbnb doesn't seem to risk mitigate these sorts of black swan events. They wouldn't lose much having a 100% loss redemption clause. It would seem that the property owner would be much less likely to game the system than the visitor.

Dn_Ab 15y ago

The vast majority of People are good yes. The main problem is that most people stop caring too quickly. On a multidimensional empathetic scale they stop caring with a nigh exponential drop off the further away from the this and now the other person is. Once someone's genetic and then phenotypic expression is far away from theirs, once the spacial, chronological and cultural locations etc. are diverged; people stop caring enough. Sometimes the person that they do not care about is their future self. The keyword is enough. Certainly if everyone was too empathetic that would neither be good. But I do think the world would be a better place if more people did not set the line of when to stop caring and empathizing so close to Now and Me. If they picked a slightly less steep atttenuation function then we would not have so many perfectly good people that were bigoted Xist bastards when it came to topic X. or peopele who were just following orders. or just having a bit of fun. or well at least it is not me. or on and on. for example.