Labeling people as villains (as opposed to condemning acts), in particular those you don’t know personally, is almost always an unhelpful oversimplification of reality. It obscures the root causes of why the bad things are happening, and stands in the way of effective remedy.

People are afraid to sound too critical. It's very noticeable how every article that points out a mistake anywhere in a subject that's even slightly politically charged, has to emphasize "of course I believe X, I absolutely agree that Y is a bad thing", before they make their point. Criticising an unreplicable paper is the same thing. Clearly these people are afraid that if they sound too harsh, they'll be ignored altogether as a crank.

> I can't believe I just read that. What's the bar for a bad person if you haven't passed it at "it was simply easier to do the bad thing?"

This actually doesn't surprise much. I've seen a lot of variety in the ethical standards that people will publicly espouse.

I was just following orders comes to mind.

Yes, the complicity is normal. No the complicity isn't right.

The banality of evil.

I guess he means that the authors can still be decent people in their private and even professional lives and not general scoundrels who wouldn't stop at actively harming other people to gain something.

There are extremely competent coworkers I wouldn't like them as neighbours. Some of my great neighborhoods would make very sloppy and annoying coworkers.

These people are terrible at their job, perhaps a bit malicious too. They may be great people as friends and colleagues.

> What's the bar for a bad person if you haven't passed it at "it was simply easier to do the bad thing?"

When the good thing is easier to do and they still knowingly pick the bad one for the love of the game?

I think the writer might enjoy Vonnegut's Mother Night.

> Vonnegut is not, I believe, talking about mere inauthenticity. He is talking about engaging in activities which do not agree with what we ourselves feel are our own core morals while telling ourselves, “This is not who I really am. I am just going along with this on the outside to get by.” Vonnegut’s message is that the separation I just described between how we act externally and who we really are is imaginary.

https://thewisdomdaily.com/mother-night-we-are-what-we-prete...

Connecting people's characters to their deed is a double edged sword. It's not that it's necessarily mistaken, but you have to choose your victories. Maybe today you get some satisfaction from condemning the culprits, but you also pay for it by making it even more difficult to get cooperation from the system in the future. We all have friends, family and colleagues that we believe to be good. They're all still capable of questionable actions. If we systematically tie bad deeds to bad people, then surely those people we love and know to be good are incapable of what they're being accused. That's part of how closing ranks works. I think King recognizes this too, which is why he recommends that Penalties should reflect the severity of the violation, not be all-or-nothing.

It is like in organisational error management (aka. error culture), there are three levels here:

1) errors happen, basically accidents.

2) errors are made, wrong or unexpected result for different intention.

3) errors are caused, the error case is the intended outcome. This is where "bad people" dwell.

Knowing and keeping silent about 1) and 2) makes any error 3). I think, we are on 2) in TFA. This needs to be addressed, most obviously through system change, esp. if actors seem to act rationally in the system (as the authors do) with broken outcomes.

I guess there isn't much utility in categorizing people as "good" and "bad," arguably. Better to think about the incentives/punishments in the system and adjust them until people behave well.

Never qualify the person, only the deed. Because we are all capable of the same actions, some of us have just not done them. But we all have the same capacity.

And yes, I am saying that I have the same capacity for wrong as the person you are thinking about, mon semblable, mon frère.

I think calling someone a "bad person" (which is itself a horribly vague term) for one situation where you don't have all the context is something most people should be loath to do. People are complicated and in general normal people do a lot of bad things for petty reasons.

Other than just the label being difficult to apply, these factors also make the argument over who is a "bad person" not really productive and I will put those sorts of caveats into my writings because I just don't want to waste my time arguing the point. Like what does "bad person" even mean and is it even consistent across people? I think it makes a lot more sense to label them clearer labels which we have a lot more evidence for, like "untrustworthy scientist" (which you might think is a bad person inherently or not).

> I can't believe I just read that. What's the bar for a bad person if you haven't passed it at "it was simply easier to do the bad thing?"

For starters, the bar should be way higher than accusations from a random person.

For me,there's a red flag in the story: posting reviews and criticism of other papers is very mundane in academia. Some Nobel laureates even authored papers rejecting established theories. The very nature of peer review involves challenging claims.

So where is the author's paper featuring commentaries and letters, subjecting the author's own criticism to peer review?

"It was easier for me to just follow orders than do the right thing." – Fictional SS officer, 1945. Not a bad person.

/s

This is a symptom of woke culture/ideology.

If you defend a bad person, you are a bad person.

Seems fair in the frame of what is responded.

But there is a concern which goes out of the "they" here. Actually, "they" could just as well not exist, and all narrative in the article be some LLM hallucination, we are still training ourself how we respond to this or that behavior we can observe and influence how we will act in the future.

If we go with the easy path labeling people as root cause, that's the habit we are forging for ourself. We are missing the opportunity to hone our sense of nuance and critical thought about the wider context which might be a better starting point to tackle the underlying issue.

Of course, name and shame is still there in the rhetorical toolbox, and everyone and their dog is able to use it even when rage and despair is all that stay in control of one mouth. Using it with relevant parcimony however is not going to happen from mere reactive habits.

It's 2026, and social media brigading and harassment is a well-known phenomenon. In light of that, trying to preemptively de-escalate seems like a Good Thing.