notes-politics-difficultyOfDiscerningEvil

people get screwed over when they dont have power. ijaf. it doesnt help, in fact it is counterproductive, to hate on the people in power at the time of the screwover. sometimes those people are jerks, often they have good intentions and were forced to make a difficult decision; due to the great human capacity for deception, there's no way to tell in a particular case which one it is unless you know the person personally (i bet that often the people who seem fairly evil are actually nice guys who aren't good deceivers, and vice versa).

the fact is that if they werent in that position of power, someone else would have been, so we need to either dissipate power so that people can protect themselves, or we need to have better mechanisms for increasing the ethical quality of the people in power. i think the former option is more tractable (b/c due to the human capacity for deception, it's really hard to measure ethical quality, so how do you design a system to filter it or to modify it if the system can't perceive it? the system can't get to know them personally, but that's the only way to perceive it clearly).