Should we discard achievements made by unlikable people?

[Edwardo Piet]

Conditioning is in fact learning, by definition.  But I'm not sure wtf you are talking about right now, to be honest.  I was talking about psychopathy, and about how I communicate with others to discover if my own impulses and instincts are unique to me or common among others.  What does "societal conditioning" have to do with any of that?

All learning is conditioned but not all conditioning is learning.

Psychopaths don't learn to care they learn to pretend to care. The vast majority of people AREN'T psychopaths and you're talking like they might be. WTF are YOU talking about?

[Rev. Rye]

Conditioning is in fact learning, by definition.  But I'm not sure wtf you are talking about right now, to be honest.  I was talking about psychopathy, and about how I communicate with others to discover if my own impulses and instincts are unique to me or common among others.  What does "societal conditioning" have to do with any of that?

All learning is conditioned but not all conditioning is learning.

Psychopaths don't learn to care they learn to pretend to care. The vast majority of people AREN'T psychopaths and you're talking like they might be. WTF are YOU talking about?

I'm not sure about Bennyboy's thesis, but I do think he does have a point. The vast majority of people aren't psychopaths, but I do suspect that quite a bit of the time, people can fall into the same exact traps as the psychopaths, empathy-wise. This might be unusual, but here's an example that I think should illustrate this point succinctly.

Imagine a man, old enough to have several grandchildren, many of which (as well as his wife and some of his sons) live with him. He loves crochet, and Wallace and Gromit cartoons. In addition, at the moment, he has a friend and his family staying over. Now imagine that, in the middle of the night one night, police break into his home and start shooting people. No charges given, no warning that they may have to resort to deadly force that was met with rifle fire, no nothing. The old man, one of his sons, and that friend (as well as the friend's wife and brother) are all dead. The old man was shot in the face while unarmed and still wearing his nightgown.

Imagine seeing this story on the news. How would you feel?



(And now scroll down for the punchline)





Now, here's the twist: This incident did happen, and you almost certainly have heard about it. That old man was Osama bin Laden. Literally the only thing I outright changed from the historical record (as opposed to simply omitting) was that the police were actually Navy SEALs (yes, even the crochet thing). You almost certainly changed your initial reaction to the story, didn't you? It's not hard to see why you changed your mind about it; the motherfucker was responsible for 9/11 and even before that, he was on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted list for terror attacks. Because the victim in this case was a monster responsible for the deaths of more people than most natural disasters, we hear about this and just shrug it off. Who cares about what happens to him?

You see where I'm going with this, right? I remember someone on TVtropes making this point, and while the Nightmare Fuel page for Real Life (and its sections on psychological disorders, specifically Emotional Disorders) has since been cut, after trawling the Wayback Machine, I finally found it:

You don't have to be a sociopath to not care. You just have to convince yourself that someone doesn't count, isn't the same as you. Most of the worst things we have done were done by people with no inherent madness, just a belief that the victims somehow deserved it, or else a refusal to think of them at all, or just thinking that you are following an obligation. Think of the people who participated in the Nazi regime but responds while being interrogated with "I am just doing my job." Think of the famous Milgram Experiment, where it has been observed that authority by itself can actually override empathy.

Most people aren't psychopaths, but most of us can become incredible simulations of one with shockingly little effort, given the right stimulus and/or situation and/or victim.

[The Grand Nudger]

We've had this discussion with regard to civil war greats like General Lee, and now with cinematic greats like Harvey Weinstein.  I'm pretty sure if we knew more about Socrates or Sam Harris, about Ghandi or about Joe Rogan, we'd find quite the horror.

I've looked in my mirror more, and I have to say that I've seen the entire gamut of horrors and greatness in myself-- deep, deep depravity, inexplicable generosity, complete selfishness, and life-risking altruism.

Is it possible that Cosby, when he's in the public, actually IS a great guy?  Or is it that he is always, 24/7, a monster, and he's hiding the truth?  Am I a 24/7 monster too, someone who has imagined rape, murder, theft or violence in the past, but have had either the discipline (or the simple lack of opportunity) to keep my actions under control?

@OP Q

Why should we, and why would it be an item for consideration to begin with.  It's not as if we can "un-achieve" something, stuffing the genie back in the bottle waiting for a do-over /w a better cast of characters.  I don't even know what it's supposed to mean to discard achievements on account of the achiever.  The first guy to come up with a serrated edge was probably an asshole, so..would it be like "man..fuck that asshole, but I sure do love this knife!".  We do that all the time.  

@The above
I'm sure if you looked hard enough you'd find something on the sliding scale of shame in every human being on earth.  Yourself and myself included.   Some of us, however....are over-achievers.  Cosby's probably a better guy in public...and that would be expected on account of it being both a common human trait and a necessary career skill.  On the sum of it, however, when you're both being great guys in public...you still aren't a cosby in private....so you tell me?

[CapnAwesome]

The Nazis did a lot of unpleasant experiments in the field of exposure to the elements and how to treat it.

Should they be discounted because of they way they were done?

A lot of Nazi science was pure garbage. They regularly changed and manipulated data to for their world view.

Plus if the experiments can't be safely and ethically reproduced how can we even check to see if their results are valid??? It's only science of the results can be reproduced consistently. Otherwise you are trusting the data collection of 70 year dead Nazis with a history of gaming data.

[Edwardo Piet]

All learning is conditioned but not all conditioning is learning.

Psychopaths don't learn to care they learn to pretend to care. The vast majority of people AREN'T psychopaths and you're talking like they might be. WTF are YOU talking about?

I'm not sure about Bennyboy's thesis, but I do think he does have a point. The vast majority of people aren't psychopaths, but I do suspect that quite a bit of the time, people can fall into the same exact traps as the psychopaths, empathy-wise. This might be unusual, but here's an example that I think should illustrate this point succinctly.

Imagine a man, old enough to have several grandchildren, many of which (as well as his wife and some of his sons) live with him. He loves crochet, and Wallace and Gromit cartoons. In addition, at the moment, he has a friend and his family staying over. Now imagine that, in the middle of the night one night, police break into his home and start shooting people. No charges given, no warning that they may have to resort to deadly force that was met with rifle fire, no nothing. The old man, one of his sons, and that friend (as well as the friend's wife and brother) are all dead. The old man was shot in the face while unarmed and still wearing his nightgown.

Imagine seeing this story on the news. How would you feel?



(And now scroll down for the punchline)





Now, here's the twist: This incident did happen, and you almost certainly have heard about it. That old man was Osama bin Laden. Literally the only thing I outright changed from the historical record (as opposed to simply omitting) was that the police were actually Navy SEALs (yes, even the crochet thing). You almost certainly changed your initial reaction to the story, didn't you? It's not hard to see why you changed your mind about it; the motherfucker was responsible for 9/11 and even before that, he was on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted list for terror attacks. Because the victim in this case was a monster responsible for the deaths of more people than most natural disasters, we hear about this and just shrug it off. Who cares about what happens to him?

You see where I'm going with this, right? I remember someone on TVtropes making this point, and while the Nightmare Fuel page for Real Life (and its sections on psychological disorders, specifically Emotional Disorders) has since been cut, after trawling the Wayback Machine, I finally found it:

You don't have to be a sociopath to not care. You just have to convince yourself that someone doesn't count, isn't the same as you. Most of the worst things we have done were done by people with no inherent madness, just a belief that the victims somehow deserved it, or else a refusal to think of them at all, or just thinking that you are following an obligation. Think of the people who participated in the Nazi regime but responds while being interrogated with "I am just doing my job." Think of the famous Milgram Experiment, where it has been observed that authority by itself can actually override empathy.

Most people aren't psychopaths, but most of us can become incredible simulations of one with shockingly little effort, given the right stimulus and/or situation and/or victim.

... my point was they're not psychopaths.

Lacking empathy is a far cry from being a psychopath. Besides psychopaths don't necessarily have no empathy, they just have weak empathy that they can switch on and off at will.

[FatAndFaithless]

When it comes to scientific advancement and learning, I'm with Khem on this one. I don't think it's possible to discard some intellectual or scientific achievement based simply on the person(s) involved being terrible. It's not like we can 'un-learn' something in a scientific field once it comes out that a certain scientist cheated on his wife and kicked a bunch of puppies, for example. It's entirely possible (and reasonable) to recognize the usefulness or ingenuity of an advancement and also (where applicable) recognize that the person(s) involved were shitty people and should not serve as role models to emulate, rather than pressing a reset button on years in a field because a prominent scientist said a bunch of nasty words about black people.

If something is 'discarded' or 'un-learned', it should be based on the merits of the idea itself, not the people behind it. A mathematician could be a horrendous racist or sexist, but that has no bearing on whether or not his/her theorems and calculations are credible. Conversely, someone might be the sweetest, most humanitarian being in the world, but that doesn't make the pseudoscience of phrenology any more credible.

[bennyboy]

Conditioning is in fact learning, by definition.  But I'm not sure wtf you are talking about right now, to be honest.  I was talking about psychopathy, and about how I communicate with others to discover if my own impulses and instincts are unique to me or common among others.  What does "societal conditioning" have to do with any of that?

All learning is conditioned but not all conditioning is learning.

Psychopaths don't learn to care they learn to pretend to care. The vast majority of people AREN'T psychopaths and you're talking like they might be. WTF are YOU talking about?

I think you are seeing all people as monolithic, as though psychopathy is a property like skin color.  I see people as a complex interaction of parts, and I believe that most people have the capacity to willingly do harm to others, given the right social climate or other conditions.  I'm 100% confident that I have the capacity to kill, and in wartime or some other very serious circumstance, I can imagine descending pretty far and willingly into that capacity.

I don't think that's psychopathy, though, and it has little to do with social conditioning.

In the end, I'd say that nature is brutal, and that primates are particularly brutal, including people.  Our animal nature is violent and rapacious, and this nature is counterbalanced only by the evolution of memes in our modern Western societies.  Sure, people can say, "Not me," but any war and dozens of psychological experiments show that the "not me" crowd vastly overestimate the degree to which their ideals stave off their animal instincts, either to lead or to follow, to survive or to kill.

[Rev. Rye]

... my point was they're not psychopaths.

Lacking empathy is a far cry from being a psychopath. Besides psychopaths don't necessarily have no empathy, they just have weak empathy that they can switch on and off at will.

If it’s just a matter of being able to switch empathy on and off, then the fact is there’s no real difference between the sociopath and the normal person. Given the right circumstances (or the right target) most people tend to switch their empathies off, even if it’s usually unconsciously. My little example with Bin Laden should have demonstrated that.

[Edwardo Piet]

I think you are seeing all people as monolithic, as though psychopathy is a property like skin color.  I see people as a complex interaction of parts, and I believe that most people have the capacity to willingly do harm to others, given the right social climate or other conditions. 

I see psychopathy as a diagnosis . . . So yes you do either have it or you don't. Obviously there will be a spectrum and there are people who are almost psychopaths. But almost a psychopath is not a psychopath. The experts determine whether someone is a psychopath or not.

The fact we all might have psychopathic traits to some extent doesn't make us all psychopaths. Just as the fact that we're all on the autism spectrum to some extent doesn't mean everybody gets to be diagnosed with autism.

[downbeatplumb]

The Nazis did a lot of unpleasant experiments in the field of exposure to the elements and how to treat it.

Should they be discounted because of they way they were done?

A lot of Nazi science was pure garbage.  They regularly changed and manipulated data to for their world view.

Plus if the experiments can't be safely and ethically reproduced how can we even check to see if their results are valid??? It's only science of the results can be reproduced consistently.  Otherwise you are trusting the data collection of 70 year dead Nazis with a history of gaming data.

But these particular experiments were well conducted and documented. The fact that they tortured people does not invalidate the data. It may taint it.