When Good Intentions Backfire

https://points.datasociety.net/when-good-intentions-backfire-786fb0dead03#.c9xmyludh

by kawera • 9 years ago

47 17 9 years ago

points.datasociety.net

An awful lot of evil is done by people with the best of intentions. For example, Lenin said: "In order to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs" to justify mass murder.

RangerScience• 9 years ago

Best short discussion I've seen on "ends justify the means": https://strongfemaleprotagonist.com/issue-6/page-112-2/

watwut• 9 years ago

Lenin did not had good intentions. Neither did Stalin nor did Hitler nor Mussolini. These guys were comfortable with murder for pretty much any reason or personal ambition.

magic_quotes• 9 years ago

FYI, that's a misattributed quote.

Animats• 9 years ago

That reads like the introduction to something that could be good. But the meat isn't there yet. Maybe he needs to write a book.

tom_pulo• 9 years ago

*she

sampl• 9 years ago

and it looks like she's already written a few :)

http://www.danah.org/

ThrustVectoring• 9 years ago

You (and the author) might get a lot out of reading Seeing Like a State.

joecool1029• 9 years ago

That reads like the introduction to something that could be good. But the meat isn't there yet. Maybe he needs to write a book.

I think the essay is meant to be a thought provoking piece, not a how-to guide.

"My goal in writing these essays is not because I know the solutions to some of the most complex problems that we face — I don’t — but because I think that we need to start thinking about these puzzles sideways, upside down, and from non-Euclidean spaces"

errantspark• 9 years ago

I think society would be in a much better place if people conceptualized the ides in this article and held them close to heart. I may be a cynic, but I feel even this piece, long on question and short on answers is full of thoughts that many people never consider. And certainly not to the degree that they should.

esteves_• 9 years ago

Lesson of the day: stop being good.

jwatte• 9 years ago

"Objectivity" doesn't mean that all statements should go unchallenged in media, nor that all sides of an argument should get equal time or treatment. There exists such a thing as objective, empirically verifiable truth, and media owes its audience doing so.

gydfi• 9 years ago

True, but on the other hand people seem to believe their own opinions are "objective truth" more often than is justified.

This being the case, perhaps it's a nice idea to err on the other side for a change.

Sacho• 9 years ago

The audience does not pay the media nearly enough for it to even attempt to uncover "objective, empirically verifiable truth".

kyleschiller• 9 years ago

  There’s a reason that no one can tell you exactly how Google’s search engine or Facebook’s news feed works. Sure, the PR folks will tell you that it’s proprietary code. But the ugly truth is that the code has been patched to smithereens to address countless types of manipulation and gamification

I'm pretty sure the real reason no one can tell you how search works is because doing so would make it much much easier to game the system and do exactly what this author seems worried about.

Oh right, and also because it's worth billions.

chipperyman573• 9 years ago

It's probably a combination of the two. It would take tens of hundreds of man-hours to write a meaningful explanation of exactly how search acts, and doing so would provide no use to Google.

smallnamespace• 9 years ago

no use to Google

And little use to anyone except consultancies that will charge someone through the nose to help game the system.

When Good Intentions Backfire

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