I feel like there is a strong tendency to average out people’s contributions.
Your comment is on the milder scale, so this is only tangentially a response to you.
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With highly related choices, it can make sense to add & cancel moral choices. Good & bad behavior are like positives & negatives.
But life and incidents are not simple sums. Relations between choices & their outcomes are highly nonlinear. They can have thresholds, be multiplicative, exponential, roots or logarithmic relations.
Choices & their outcomes rarely simply add or cancel.
Jobs was an incredibly prolific innovator whose personal characteristics often translated to important advances in the quality of computing, independent of the general industry’s shared march of compounding quantity/efficiency of computing.
No amount of moral lapses not on that scale cancel any of that.
At the same time, his positive contributions, no matter how large, don’t cancel out his poor behaviors.
Like a polynomial, or more complicated algebraic or calculus expressions, it takes several “numbers” to characterize human being’s contributions.
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The worst cases of overly reductive thinking happen in politics. The prevalence of judging people and peoples’ behaviors as simply net positive or negative, and their opponents as simply the other sign is endemic.
The result creates hard high-contrast divisions in ideologies & loyalties that don’t reflect reality much at all.
But over reduction also appears to be a common reflex when judging innovators.
Your comment is on the milder scale, so this is only tangentially a response to you.
—
With highly related choices, it can make sense to add & cancel moral choices. Good & bad behavior are like positives & negatives.
But life and incidents are not simple sums. Relations between choices & their outcomes are highly nonlinear. They can have thresholds, be multiplicative, exponential, roots or logarithmic relations.
Choices & their outcomes rarely simply add or cancel.
Jobs was an incredibly prolific innovator whose personal characteristics often translated to important advances in the quality of computing, independent of the general industry’s shared march of compounding quantity/efficiency of computing.
No amount of moral lapses not on that scale cancel any of that.
At the same time, his positive contributions, no matter how large, don’t cancel out his poor behaviors.
Like a polynomial, or more complicated algebraic or calculus expressions, it takes several “numbers” to characterize human being’s contributions.
—
The worst cases of overly reductive thinking happen in politics. The prevalence of judging people and peoples’ behaviors as simply net positive or negative, and their opponents as simply the other sign is endemic.
The result creates hard high-contrast divisions in ideologies & loyalties that don’t reflect reality much at all.
But over reduction also appears to be a common reflex when judging innovators.