I don’t see human interactions having a “net effect”. If someone is nice to me 99% of the time, and 1% screams obscenities at me, the 99% does not excuse the 1%.
Bad behavior is bad behavior full stop.
Try slapping someone and then follow it up with “but I wrote X software that benefits Y amount of people”
> If someone is nice to me 99% of the time, and 1% screams obscenities at me, the 99% does not excuse the 1%.
That's true! But neither does the 1% spoil the 99%, or make it unimportant. People are very bad at seeing the good and the bad in a person; they want to distill it down to one single data point of "he was good/bad". But that isn't remotely just, and it's worth pointing out whenever people skew too far towards glossing over flaws or refusing to acknowledge the good.
Right now, the zeitgeist is to refuse to acknowledge the good in someone if they did something the speaker considers bad enough. So, one has to frequently nudge people to not forget the good even as they acknowledge the bad.
But also: they are not weighted the same. Bad things are usually "more important" -- both practically, and for evolutionary reasons. So the bias -- and I agree the bias has gone too far in our current zeitgeist -- does have some foundation.
Everyone has some flaws, yet generally we remember the positive deeds that great people did in history. The positive deeds are usually exceptional, while the flaws are often commonly found in many humans (at least relative to the era when that person lived) that they're unremarkable. And we remember and celebrate the exceptional deeds instead of dwelling on the human flaws.
I'm talking about relationships you have with real people in your life. Avoiding large threats is evolutionarily more important than taking advantage of good opportunities. So if someone does something bad to you -- lies, steals, betrays, physically hurts -- that will generally make a bigger impact, and be remembered longer by you, than nice, helpful, or otherwise positive things they did.
I think you have in mind someone like Jobs, who was known for being an asshole but also for exceptional accomplishments, and in cases like that it is true that history will remember the accomplishments. But historical figures like Jobs are unbelievable statistical outliers. In your entire life you likely won't have substantial personal dealings with anyone of comparable historical legacy. And by the way, I'd guess that for most who had personal dealings with Jobs and were treated badly that the abuse will personally be a more salient memory than his success, even if they are able to acknowledge the greatness of his achievements.
I totally agree, but I thought we were basically talking about Jobs and other famous people?
I mean, there's no reason for somebody who hasn't had personal interaction with Jobs fixate on whether he was an asshole (which did not affect them) and ignore his accomplishments (which probably affected them to some degree)... but this seems to be the fashionable thing to do here.
I'm of two minds here. I agree there is something petty and unwholesome in the fixations of cancel culture, and by and large they don't spring from a virtuous place.
Otoh, it's more nuanced than just "did not affect them". Multiple things are happening here, and some have validity:
1. Such discussions are often serving (or people feel they are) as proxies for discussions about what the current rules should be. In that context, an insistence of calling Jobs or anyone else out serves as an insistence that such behavior not be allowed now. To me, it's silly that people can't separate these two things, but alas many can't.
2. There is a genuine issue of incentives. If people observe that success buys you a free pass for being a raging asshole, many of them will take note. Indeed, being able to get away with being an asshole can even become a special marker of success.
I don’t know about the FBI MLK files. But if I were to meet MLK or Ghandi or <insert widely recognized figure> and they were an asshole, I wouldn’t excuse or overlook their behavior.
The underlying ideas here are greatness and individuals ascribed to doing great things.
Without any evidence I suspect an extremely large majority of progress is done by normal individuals whose names we’ll never know.
Hard disagree, I think I here are great men and they drive history. Its nice to valorize the every day working man, and I'm likely such a person. I mean a lot to my family and maybe a handful of others but I won't shape history no matter how hard I try. I can only hope to make the world better by bringing up well adjusted children that contribute to society. And that's fine.
Bad behavior is bad behavior full stop.
Try slapping someone and then follow it up with “but I wrote X software that benefits Y amount of people”