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It's a fair question, but would you trust them equally in an unanticipated crisis, where doing the right thing might be costly in hard-to-predict ways?
by mannykannot 1y ago
It's a fair question, but would you trust them equally in an unanticipated crisis, where doing the right thing might be costly in hard-to-predict ways?
- justbees 1y agoIf the two are indistinguishable from an outsider's perspective how would you know which one to trust?
- some_furry 1y agoThis sounds like a job for cryptography! (No, it doesn't, actually.)
- mannykannot 1y agoYou can phrase the same question thus: which set of traits is more likely to lead a person to stay true to prior form in a crisis?
- some_furry 1y agoThe trouble is, you can think you're dealing with a Bob, but you're actually dealing with an Alice, even after enduring multiple crises that didn't trigger their specific type of badness. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/03/how-i-discovered-i-have-the-brain-of-a-psychopath https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/03/how-i-... But as fun as this line of thinking is, my initial charitable post was only asking for a kind of "superficial" indistinguishability. As long as you don't think about it too hard, y'know?
- shandor 11mo agoWhich in the end is precisely the reason why we want to understand the intentions behind the actions, right?
- some_furry 11mo agoRight. My stance on this is: Try to find a way to do good that doesn't make you miserable. Lying is to yourself is a form of oppression, and lying to others is a tactic for enduring oppression. (Ask a queer person about their time in the closet if you don't understand what I mean here.) Oppression makes you miserable, and misery tends to result in vapid thinkpieces that don't scratch below the surface of the referenced source material. But also: Be honest with yourself about what you want and why you want it. Whether for good or for ill. That way, at least you can have a modicum of peace. I wrote more about this train of thought recently, if anyone's curious: https://soatok.blog/2025/10/15/the-dreamseekers-vision-of-tomorrow/ https://soatok.blog/2025/10/15/the-dreamseekers-vision-of-to...
- vacuity 1y agoYes, then there is no way to elevate Bob above Alice, but in practice I think the assumption of external indistinguishability is too strong, and even the suspicion that Alice is sketchy (i.e. without hard proof) is meaningful.