Remix clone Hacker News

In the context of when they want to borrow others' stuff. But then Chinese companies are _more_ than happy to take advantage of Western laws to defend their own IP. It's hypocrisy.

▲

simpaticoder 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Your comment inspires me to write an essay titled "What's wrong with hypocrisy?" because it seems like no-one really cares about it anymore. It's like the concept itself has lost meaning. Hypocrisy a big, abstract word that has the audacity to refer to other big abstract words like "character" and "virtue" and "fairness". Now many people accused of hypocrisy say "so what?". What's going on there? It has the feel of a situation where someone says your software has memory leaks, and you say "so?" not knowing what that even means. "Hypocrisy" and "memory leaks" share the notion of a characterization of a set of flaws that can and will show themselves in many disparate ways. Powerful signals to a specialist, and noise for a generalist. And not just noise, but a signal against the critic as an elitist snob that uses words and concepts no-one understands.

▲

thesuitonym 8 hours ago | parent [-]

The worst part about this trend toward hypocrisy acceptance is that nobody cares when you point it out. This empowers the hypocrite to answer with "So what?" because they know they will face absolutely no consequences. In politics, business, and even personal life, most people have everything to gain and very little to lose*. And our current hyper-individualistic society has only exacerbated the issue. "Who cares if the people around me don't trust me? I'll just get what I need from some faceless computer system."

* You actually have a lot to lose, but it's not tangible or very directly measurable, and the effects compile over a long time, so the results are not easy to see.

	▲	simpaticoder 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, a lack of disincentive to hypocrisy and, in fact, considerable disincentive to pointing it out, seems to be the case. Why? From a utilitarian perspective, at the societal level hypocrisy undermines the "cooperate" Nash equilibrium; at the individual level, it undermines "conscience". The question we might ask is how did we lose conscience? If psychological egoism is the default "philsophy" of humans (and I think that it is, just as "autocracy" is the default governing system), then the better question is how did we get it and maintain it in the first place? In an ideal world you get to do tests, where one group's values are tested against another group with different values to see which group is stronger. An example of this is with war - WWII was liberalism vs fascism, and the Cold War was liberalism vs communism. We won both. So what happened? Could it be that liberalism collapses on its own when it's not measured against an alternative?