I’m not sure that’s true in aggregate. I think most of the evil is done by people going along with things—like, if you talked to them about it for a while they’d concede that some aspects of what they were going along with were sort of questionable and maybe a bit bad, but they don’t think about that spontaneously.
Right, sure, every evil overlord needs a group of willing henchmen and an army of reluctant-to-object enablers. So, the original quote is probably right “in aggregate”, though not in the amount of evil per person. Even then, how do you attribute/distribute the amount of evil between, say, Pol Pot ordering the destruction of intelligentsia and the genocide of the Chinese minority and a peasant working his rice field in the countryside, occasionally affirming his allegiance to the regime, as required? Hmm, I recall HPMoR!Quirrell talking about it, but I’m not sure how much of it is author tract.
That’s not true at all. It’s those who made up their minds to be good but aren’t who do the most evil.
I’m not sure that’s true in aggregate. I think most of the evil is done by people going along with things—like, if you talked to them about it for a while they’d concede that some aspects of what they were going along with were sort of questionable and maybe a bit bad, but they don’t think about that spontaneously.
Right, sure, every evil overlord needs a group of willing henchmen and an army of reluctant-to-object enablers. So, the original quote is probably right “in aggregate”, though not in the amount of evil per person. Even then, how do you attribute/distribute the amount of evil between, say, Pol Pot ordering the destruction of intelligentsia and the genocide of the Chinese minority and a peasant working his rice field in the countryside, occasionally affirming his allegiance to the regime, as required? Hmm, I recall HPMoR!Quirrell talking about it, but I’m not sure how much of it is author tract.
Does this imply that it’s in the act of making up your mind?
What do you think? When did Nero, Queen Isabella, Robespierre, Lenin or Pol Pot become evil and why?
I think the problem is that it should take more than one explicitly evil person per country to cause that much damage.
I saw the quote as an allusion to friendly/unfriendly AI.