FWIW, here is my take on this from an article I published in 2005:
"Look for success
There is an increasing trend towards feigning offence at trivial issues in order to look like a moral hero. I'm sure only half a dozen people through the United States were actually upset about Janet Jackson showing her breasts on television, but politicians around the country reacted with outrage. Fortunately this trend will be short lived.
In Scott Adams' book The Dilbert Future there is an anecdote about why all politicians seem to be crooks. The possible reasons he gives are
1. Crooks are the only ones who run for office
2. Politics turns people into criminals
3. All politicians are being framed
4. Every person on Earth is a crook, but only the only people we check out carefully are politicians
There is no reason to believe the first three are correct, so probably the best explanation for this phenomenon is reason four. Now clearly not everyone is really a crook, but it is true that we have all done both good and bad. The problem is that a scatter shot of everything that each person in the translucent generation has ever done is available online through a quick Google search. This is a great tool to find out if a potential employee has committed a felony. The problem is how should one react when reading logs of that person's online chats from when they were ten?
No matter how stupid, racist, offensive, or pathetic ones comments were as a ten year old it is unlikely that they would have a statistical correlation with job performance at age thirty. When everyone has dirt on everyone else, it won't be about the number of failures, it will be about—within reason—the number of successes. Instead of being judged on your gravitas, you will be judged on your ability to act appropriately in any given context."
If I were to rewrite it today, I think I would add that reputation is more important today than in any other point in history, but that what constitutes good and bad karma is rapidly changing.
Scott Adam's syllogistic analysis is only true if his items form an exhaustive set of possibilities. One thing time does tell us about human nature is that it is easy to overlook causes for other's behavior.
In this case, as an advocate of Objectivism, I would like to point out two things. First, the definition of "crook" seems to vary widely: some people would like to call former Pres. Clinton a crook because he had an affair. In my book, an affair may be immoral, but it should not be illegal. Second, if the 'game' in politics, as it seems to be today, is not protection of rights but allocation of loot, who do you attract? People who like to dictate allocations, not people who like to create more pie.
"Look for success
There is an increasing trend towards feigning offence at trivial issues in order to look like a moral hero. I'm sure only half a dozen people through the United States were actually upset about Janet Jackson showing her breasts on television, but politicians around the country reacted with outrage. Fortunately this trend will be short lived.
In Scott Adams' book The Dilbert Future there is an anecdote about why all politicians seem to be crooks. The possible reasons he gives are
1. Crooks are the only ones who run for office
2. Politics turns people into criminals
3. All politicians are being framed
4. Every person on Earth is a crook, but only the only people we check out carefully are politicians
There is no reason to believe the first three are correct, so probably the best explanation for this phenomenon is reason four. Now clearly not everyone is really a crook, but it is true that we have all done both good and bad. The problem is that a scatter shot of everything that each person in the translucent generation has ever done is available online through a quick Google search. This is a great tool to find out if a potential employee has committed a felony. The problem is how should one react when reading logs of that person's online chats from when they were ten?
No matter how stupid, racist, offensive, or pathetic ones comments were as a ten year old it is unlikely that they would have a statistical correlation with job performance at age thirty. When everyone has dirt on everyone else, it won't be about the number of failures, it will be about—within reason—the number of successes. Instead of being judged on your gravitas, you will be judged on your ability to act appropriately in any given context."
If I were to rewrite it today, I think I would add that reputation is more important today than in any other point in history, but that what constitutes good and bad karma is rapidly changing.