Comment by _carbyau_

> I've struggled with this point of view

Because it is much easier for people to universally accept a system where good or neutral deeds are expected by default, and misdeeds are punished.

It is very difficult to construct an alternative system that humans could internalise. Where would you draw the line? What about saving 50 people, and then killing 49? Should they cancel each other, too?

forget about murder, you make a terrible comment or single mistake in your young adulthood and you are done for ever. Kids are not allowed to make mistakes anymore.

This sounds more like scrupulosity than a moral framework.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrupulosity

> because it just consumes anything positive.

I was perhaps not as clear as I'd wish. The next dot point after you quoted me was meant to convey that equally, the good actions cannot be cancelled/consumed by bad ones.

Life is a complex thing.

I intend to do this very bad thing. How much karma do I need to accrue in advance, so that I don't go into the red from doing it?

Good does not cancel out bad, but bad does not automatically outweigh all good.

This is pure nonsense. The moral distance between a good deed and the level of bad deed that receives a meaningful penalty, socially (e.g. felonies) is enormous and there is plenty of fungibility of good vs. bad actions in that space.

That said, it is strange to even consider being good, which is generally a rather easy thing to be, to be some kind of task you should be paid for even virtually. Being basically good is the trivial cost to avoid becoming anti-social. Why should a social group even tolerate you otherwise? With that in mind, as mentioned before, I think you'll find that social groups are highly tolerant of many misdeeds.

? What strange moral posturing is this? Of course there is good that can exists in parallel to bad deeds. Invent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process fertilizer that feeds the planet and your contributions to poison gas are forgotten. Not forgiven.

But science and progress are decoupled from whatever a person contributes. And even a disgusting person, while it should be kept from power, should be capable to contribute to science and progress. Even a insane nazi can feed half africa, while the most saint like person, may give humanity nothing.

The value society assigns is not the value a person has. The value is determined by the objective outcomes the person produces. Werner von Braun has done more for humanity then all of the socialist icons combined. He is still a disgusting person.

Imagine humanity like a spacestation. Science and Industry forming the hull, society on the interior, hard physics on the outside. The things a EVA worker contributes to all life inside the hull, can be substantial while he is a useless drunk on the inside. And somebody with a fishbowl over his head, cosplaying astronaut on the inside contributes nothing. Somebody yelling - redistribute the spacesuits, its cold in here - does more damage to society, then the useless drunk ever will.

> I've struggled with this point of view since my early teens, and possibly even earlier. There is no amount of good one can do to compensate for even the slightest misdeed.

I think there's a hole in the thought somewhere.

If you save thousands of people and murder one, you should serve time for that murder, but you should still be appreciated for your other work.

The error is thinking of actions and life like a karmic account balance, even though it's an appealing metaphor, people are complex beings and seeing them reductively as good or bad is probably wrong.

Scott Adams was an asshat in later life. I don't know all the controversy he stirred because I drifted away from paying attention to him years ago. He gave me a lot of laughs, he had some great, fun insights into office life, he has some weird pseudo-scientific ideas in his books, and then he devolved into a bit of a dick. Maybe a lot of a dick. His is a life that touched mine, that I appreciate in some ways and am sad for in others.

Bye Scott, thanks for all the laughs, thanks for nurturing my cynicism, but it's a shame about what happened with you after twitter came along.

> "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences)

cancel culture isn't a synonym for shaming.

cancel culture is a modern phenomenon that is facilitated by modern media formats -- it could not have existed earlier.

shaming is about making a persons' opinion known to the public to receive outcry. Cancel culture includes deplatforming, legal action, soap-boxing, algorithmic suppression, networked coordination between nodes, and generally the crowds exert institutional pressures against the targets' backing structure rather than to the person themselves or individuals near them in order to get their target fired or minimized somehow.

You shame a child who stole a cookie by telling them that now they need to go brush their teeth, and that they won't get one after dinner , and that you're disappointed that you found them to be sneaking around behind your back.

You don't kick them out of the house and tell the neighborhood not to hire them under threat of company wide boycott from other moms.

> The difference is that now "cancelled" means a few commentators call you out and your life and career are never affected in the slightest.

Weird to read this assertion in a thread about Scott Adams, who literally had his whole career ended. That's literally the opposite of what you said.

Also let's remember that he was cancelled for saying that if black people (poll respondents) say "it's not okay to be white" that's espousing hate and he wants nothing to do with them.

If white people said "it's not okay to be black," that's certainly white supremacy. But the rules are different.

> "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences)

Those aren't the same thing. The former is abusing the latter as a pretext for a (social) lynch mob.

> I'd bet that a misogynist Frenchman in the early 1900s wasn't going to ruffle that many feathers.

GP wasn't referring to people of the time but rather people of the present day. There have been some surprising contradictions in what has and hasn't been "cancelled".

> John Brown got "cancelled" for opposing slavery.

John Brown got "cancelled" for leading guerilla raids and killing people, not for being an abolitionist.

I think cancel culture is a pretty serious and meaningful concept. 20 years ago I got drummed out of an organization I was a part of for saying I thought people should be allowed to argue that this organization didn't need race quotas.

Note I didn't say race quotas (i.e. hire minimum 50% non-white) were bad. I just said, there are people who oppose this idea, they should at least be permitted to air their views, a discussion is important.

I was drummed out for that. To me that's cancel culture in a nutshell. Suppression, censorship, purge anyone who opposes your idea but also anyone who even wants to discuss it critically (which is the only way to build genuine consensus).

Now 20 years on what I see when I interact with younger people is there are two camps. One of those camps has gone along with this and their rules for what constitutes acceptable speech are incredibly narrow. They are prone to nervous breakdown, social withdrawal, and anxiety if anyone within earshot goes outside of the guard rails for acceptable speech. Mind you what the First Amendment protects as legal speech is vastly, vastly vastly broader than what these people can handle. I worry for them because the inability to even hear certain things without freaking out is an impediment to living a happy life.

Meanwhile there is a second camp which has arisen, and they're basically straight up Nazis. There is a hard edge to some members of Gen Z that is like, straight up white supremacy, "the Austrian painter had a point," "repeal the 19th" and so on, non-ironically, to a degree that I have never before seen in my life.

If you don't see the link here and how this bifurcation of the public consciousness emerged then I think you're blind. It was created by cancel culture. Some of the canceled realized there was no way for them to participate in public discourse with any level of authenticity, and said fuck it, might as well go full Nazi. I mean I presume they didn't decide that consciously, but they formed their own filter bubble, and they radicalized.

We are likely to soon face a historically large problem with extreme right wing nationalism, racism and all these very troubling things, because moderate views were silenced over and over again, and more and more people were driven out of the common public discourse, into the welcoming arms of some really nasty people. It's coming. To anyone who thinks "cancel culture" is not a serious concern I really encourage them to rethink their views and contemplate how this phenomenon actually CREATED the radicalization (on both sides) that we are seeing today.

> "Cancel culture" (your social actions having social consequences) has and always will exist

I want to reinforce this fact. Consider the origins of the term "ostracism", where a sufficiently objectionable individual could be literally voted out of the village. If that doesn't count as being "cancelled" I don't know what does.

I'm still upset over the canceling of Socrates. Never forget.

Cancelling doesn’t affect people’s lives or careers? Are you serious?

This is kind of what I meant by good and bad actions don't cancel out.

I think people are perfectly allowed to appreciate the art while knowing he was not nice as a person. People are multifaceted, both as actors and in judgement of others.

So where to draw the line is the question.

And the answer is: this isn't linear. Context matters and is different for spaces and people. For example, you state seeing the art first, finding out he was not nice later and how that shaped your judgement.

------ Spaces

Not having Picasso art in your house is clearly fine. It's your space, your personal choice what you put there.

Demanding his art be removed from all art galleries around the world is not fine. Art galleries are mostly public spaces whose role is specifically to view artistic results largely from an artistic point of view. They are allowed to acknowledge his personal life and usually do - but that is not how you judge art.

And so we have two perfectly fine and yet contradicting choices towards housing the art of Picasso.

------ People

A victim of similar abuse as Picasso dished out may not want to see his art in the gallery due to association - this is fine.

A person who simply doesn't care for that style of art may be indifferent or also not want to see it - also fine.

A person who thinks Picasso fundamentally moved the art world forward may definitely want to see this art - also fine.

And so differing people's attitudes towards Picasso are also easily understandable and fine.

> Scott Adams seems to have confined himself to merely expressing prejudiced views, amplified somewhat by his modest fame. But then his creative work doesn't in any way match Picasso's or Gill's either.

Scott's body of work spans many years and - like music bands - the early stuff is much different to the later stuff. To say he confined himself to "expressing prejudiced views" seems to overlook a whole lot of that early work.

To say his work doesn't "match" other artists work is subjective. I got/get the occasional giggle out of Dilbert - more often in the earlier ones. I don't care for Picasso's art at all but I recognise that other people do. Who's body of work should I personally rate higher? The top comment mentions feeling like Scott was family, while acknowledging all the flaws of Scott.

This is why I mention that good and bad actions can both stand.