Anyone who doesn't want to deal with cheaters. Like a teacher. Do you know how much paperwork is involved in punishing someone for cheating?
So we make a parabole to discourage it
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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Parabolic hyperbole
I like this, but having skimmed it I didn't find a description I connected with.
For whatever reason, I feel the world isn't "just", but I personally will have a better life if I do good things. It's rooted in selfishness rather than celestial balance.
The world isn't just. The universe isn't just. Both of those have no concept of just.
Society is better when people try and act like good people. So I do that.
Sure you can alter circumstances to an extent and that's probably the best way to live life. But all the good in the world doesn't stop a freak car crash killing you or being struck by lightning. And while being struck by lightning is used synonymously with an act of god, I don't think it actually means you deserved it. That's the issue with the just-cause fallacy. It takes a huge spoonful of selection bias to only notice the people who did deserve it.
In my opinion the idea of karma is a convenient crowd control mechanism to prevent people from taking action to fix their situation when they have faith that the universe will magically balance itself out.
My favorite response to “why do bad things happen to good people?” is “what makes you think they were good?”
I don't understand. I think bad things (e.g. cancer) can happen to everyone (e.g. small childrens/babies, selfless people...). Is your argument that no one is really good?
It's easier for religious people to believe in original sin than to accept that one day they're going to die and they won't get to meet Space Santa.
Damn, Space Santa sounds so cool. Where can I meet him? Does he have buildings dedicated to him that I can go to?
I should make a religion out of that.
The argument is that you cannot really know. You don't know everything a person did. You don't know the motivations with which they act. You cannot look into their heart.
That is why you should refrain from judgement over a human in his entirety. You can and sometimes should judge individual acts that you have witnessed or are proven.
This is explicit the Bible i.e. Matthew 7:1 and the Qur'an i.e. 1:4. I don't know how it is written in the Torah, but generally in the abrahamic religions the final judgement is reserved to Allah, as He is the only one to truly know a human.
But also outside religion, why is it that anyone should rise to judgement of whether someone is "good" or "bad" in face of serious illness or injury? Saying someone is good so he doesn't deserve cancer implies that there is people who deserve cancer.
I know the statement is usally meant to signal compassion. The compassion should be unconditional though, as it is a fellow human that is suffering.
The argument is that you cannot really know. You don't know everything a person did. You don't know the motivations with which they act. You cannot look into their heart.
Yeah, we shouldn’t judge Hitler. Sure, we know he had millions of people killed, committed genocide and wrote a book detailing his exact motivations, but you cannot look into his heart and don’t know everything he did, so we should not judge him. He might just have been misunderstood and actually a really nice guy.
/s
You don’t need to know everything a person did to judge them. Good deeds do not erase bad ones.
Maybe include the second part of that paragraph i wrote:
That is why you should refrain from judgement over a human in his entirety. You can and sometimes should judge individual acts that you have witnessed or are proven.
But given the example of Hitler. Why is it important to consider the person in his entirety as evil? Aren't the intention and act of genocide by themselves an evil that needs to be condemmend and prevented?
I find Hitler and Fascism are great examples, because the story of the fascists being evil people is a form of "othering". They are the evil people, but we are not the evil people. This can all to easily lead to ignorance to how easily Fascism can spread and infect any people. And we see it in the way Germans wiggled themselves out of responsibility for their crimes after WW2.
To quote the Ausschwitz survivor Karl Stojka:
„Und das haben Menschen gemacht, so wie du, du und ich. Diese Leute kamen nicht von einem anderen Planeten. […] Es waren Menschen, so wie wir. Und nicht Hitler hat mich verhaftet, nicht Göring, nicht Goebbels. Der Greißler, der Hausmeister, der Schneider, der Schuster, der Bäckermeister, die haben auf einmal eine Uniform gekriegt, eine Hakenkreuzbinde, und da waren sie die Herrenrasse…“
And this was done by people like you and me. These people were not froma different planet. it was people like us. Not Hitler inprisoned me, not Goering, not Goebbels. [It was] the storekeeper, the house caretaker, the tailor, the cobbler, the baker. They suddenly received an uniform, a swastika armband and there they were the master race...
Or to say it with a caricature In Nuremberg and other places - "but he had ordered me to it":
The most common, if subconscious, response is: "bad things happened to them so they must be a bad person".
"Karma's a bitch."
They were unconditionally good in a Kant kind of way you know
They were kind of a Kant
The intent of the proverb isn't that bad people don't get good things, it's that a person who is cheating doesn't get value out of the activity.
If you go through life cutting corners, you don't actually get to learn and build a strong foundation.
You can still be rewarded with jobs, money, and sycophants, but that's not what really matters.
This heavily relies on the premise that there is always something deeper than winning that's valuable.
It's all about knowing when and where to cheat. Cheat as often as you can on meaningless stuff.
Cheat as often as you can on meaningless stuff.
My ex-wife would probably disagree.
tl;dr - "Winning" and "prospering" are two different things
You can still be rewarded with jobs, money, and sycophants, but that’s not what really matters.
I respectfully disagree.
Life isn't a meritocracy
Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.
Never forgive. Never forget.
what's this from?
That's Diego Maradona's infamous Hand of God goal against England at the 1986 World Cup.
It strikes me as pure Christian please-slap-the-other-cheek-then-too and you-should-be-grateful-they’re-even-playing-with-you-at-all-even-if-they’re-cheating propaganda to satisfy the worldview of the powerless and disenfranchised
Everyone always lies.
I don't believe you
Liar!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#Zero-determinant_strategies
Actually, mathematically speaking, in the long run they tend to eventually fail.
I don’t think that PD (or any of its variants) is a good proxy for cheating, because cheating involves deception or rule breaking, while “defect” is just a legal move.
A better proxy might be something like nuptial gifts in some spider species. So in some species, the male will present a female with whom he wishes to mate a nuptial gift - an insect wrapped in webbing. But the “cheat” move is when either the insect has already been sucked dry or when it’s snatched back too quickly for the female to feed.
We can estimate the degree to which cheaters prosper by looking at how common these and similar behaviors are in their respective populations - let evolution do the calculations. Animal behavior is replete with deceptive and manipulative communication, and because so much of it is genetically determined we can be reasonably confident that we have an objective metric.
It depends on if they had to lie or not. Eventually you will have to lie in order to cover the original lie until you it can't keep all of the lies straight. If you cheated your way through college, then you can probably get away with it unless you go into a skilled profession like a doctor. If you're just getting an MBA or something, then it's not a big deal since business/ office work is not skilled anyway.
politicians? clergy?
Just the cheaters that are caught, the ones never caught are living the life.
Long term losses > short term gains
Who else would try to convince others that Cheaters never succeed in profiting?
People who don't cheat and want to dissuade others from cheating. Because the statement is incorrect. Cheaters prosper all the fucking time.