Comment by venturecruelty
3 months ago
>In 2015, I had a lot of interaction with a startup incubator you know well, and ended up sitting in the discussions and planning around banning and erasing a young programmer we considered a threat to our financial interests, due to his concerns about authoritarianism in technology. In retrospect, he was harmless, but an example had to be made. The decision was made to ban him here, try to get him fired though I don't know if we succeeded, and attack him with sockpuppets on Reddit, and it seems to have worked because you don't hear his name much.
Jesus Christ, dude. I'm going to be honest with you. While I feel bad for you in your current state, this is a pretty disgusting thing to have done. Have you tried to make any of it better? I mean, you could name this programmer (assuming that wouldn't make it worse), and you could definitely name the incubator and everyone involved in this decision. I'm guessing this kind of thing is quite common.
If you just want someone to tell you that it's okay, I'm not going to be the one to do that. Be as sorry as you want, but what have you done to make it better for him? Even part of this post reads a bit patronizing ("In retrospect, he was harmless..."). Not "this was intrinsically wrong and we shouldn't have done this", just "he wasn't even a threat to take down". My God, dude.
I wish you well because there are vanishingly few humans I wish to see truly suffer. If you make it, I hope you work towards righting the wrongs you've done.
Sociopaths also get sick.
Just because someone might be dying, it doesn't make them nice people.
There's a reason 'come to Jesus moment' is an expression.
Aka the uncertainty collapse of effective altruism -- in which someone realizes they might die before getting to the altruism part, and have to confront the "effective" things they did without any moral counterbalance.
If someone feels guilty about the things they've done when facing death, then they should immediately take actions that try and redress them.
Otherwise, there's an almost certainty they'll revert to being the same asshole they were so uncomfortable facing in the mirror, after mortal peril has passed.
Being someone different requires action, not just thoughts.