DSimon comments on Have no heroes, and no villains - Less Wrong

88 Post author: PhilGoetz 07 November 2010 09:15PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (73)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: DSimon 15 November 2010 08:24:25PM *  18 points [-]

Here is a This American Life episode about just such a real-life group of people: a collection of various chemical company executives arranging and implementing an international price fixing scheme that lasted years.

The episode focuses on an informant, a junior executive with one of the companies, who captured an enormous amount of footage of the executives jovially discussing the various ways and means they'd be using to knowingly screw over their customers and, in turn, a great deal of the agricultural and industrial economies that depended on their products. The footage is justly described as "probably the most remarkable videotapes ever made of an American company in the middle of a criminal act".

Everyone has reasons for the things they do, post-hoc or otherwise; I think what distinguishes a villian is a callous acceptance of their own selfishness and a pointed indifference to, or even enjoyment of, the suffering inflicted upon others due to their actions.

Comment author: David_Gerard 15 November 2010 08:50:27PM 4 points [-]

O_O

Okay. Mostly there's just sincere stupidity.

Comment author: ciphergoth 25 November 2010 07:14:37AM 4 points [-]

I'd want to see a lot more examples of covert villany footage to be confident that this footage was atypical.

Comment author: David_Gerard 25 November 2010 09:41:32AM 0 points [-]

Er, I don't understand. Do you mean "was typical" or "wasn't atypical", or have I misparsed?

Comment author: shokwave 25 November 2010 09:50:45AM 1 point [-]

Amusingly, I misparsed your sentence, and was about to point out that "was typical" is the same as "wasn't atypical".

I parsed ciphergoth's comment as saying "I would want a lot more footage before I said that this footage is an exception to the rule of 'mostly sincere stupidity'."

Comment author: ciphergoth 25 November 2010 01:33:21PM 1 point [-]

Yes, that's what I meant.