Professional news is usually written without expressing judgement and minimizing opinion.
> fraudsters
It's an allegation.
The author only hurts themself: My impression is that they don't believet the fundamentals of truth and humanity: they are certainly partially wrong, could be very wrong, will never know the complete truth, and their judgment of others is too flawed to rely on. Also it seems they are acting more on their emotions and less on fact and reason.
Makes me wonder if these people are just evil themselves.
So it makes sense to be cautious when I find myself feeling like one, or being pulled along by the emotions of another who does.
It seems like your company leadership missed that part of the lesson.
It's the danger with not updating your behavior when the balance of probabilities shows that the individual/group/organization you're dealing with is acting in bad faith.
Our modern era has so many megaphones blaring into the void that it's become significantly more difficult to determine which ones are overtly lying. Accordingly, it's far more difficult to establish a consensus about who's operating in bad faith.
Again, the failure point isn't with the assumption of good faith. It's with not recognizing bad faith when it's made manifest.
It helps the good people, who do good and influence their society to do the same, and live in a good society. The best societies give the accused the full protection of the law, and give them fair trials. The problematic ones have mob rule.
Much of what you write assumes the OP author and you know what evil is, with certainty. That is the critical and most dangerous flaw.
I think there's this sort of "moral impostor syndrome" where people who carefully work to present an image of themselves as good people are totally willing to participate in fraud or theft at any level - the only consideration is whether they will be caught, because they value the appearance of being good people (and of course, that appearance gives them more opportunities to commit fraud and theft safely.) If they want to do something and there's no way they'll be caught, they'll do it 100% of the time.
This is the only way I can understand people who refer to fraud as a "mistake." They see other people caught in a fraud that they can imagine that they themselves might have done, because they also wouldn't have thought that they would have ever been caught. The "mistake" was evaluating the chances of the success of a fraud badly.
The fact that they relate to these people also makes them want to give them a second chance, just as they would want to be able to recover their careers if any of their past (or future) frauds had become "mistakes."
"There but for the grace of God go I."
It's terrible. It incentivizes evil. The desperation to give people a second chance to expiate one's own secret sins by proxy creates a system where people only initially draw attention through frauds, then get caught, then get second chances. Meanwhile, people who didn't participate in fraud never get noticed. It's a perverse incentive that filters for trash. Do anything to get your name out there, then the fact that your name is out there gets you into the conversation.
Meanwhile, somebody is scolding you for being upset about it: "You're just perfect I guess. Never made a mistake." Fraud is not a mistake. You do it on purpose.
Some of your comments about controversial topics are egregious enough to warrant a ban. I don't want to ban you because some other comments are substantive contributions, but we need you to avoid inflammatory, ideological comments in future.
Please take a moment to remind yourself of the guidelines – https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html – and take the intended spirit of the site more to heart.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47951566 and marked it off topic.
Then again, I also found it rather funny. I suspect this is because I am a bad person.
Literally zero need for that; none. And it's that kind of language that calls into question the authors motives. I went from "Excellent reporting here" to "This guy is emotional and not a reliable source of information" in 6 words.
I certainly apologize for hurting feelings. That was not my intent.
I've just learned (the hard way, of course, because how else do we learn?), that using this kind of terminology, even though we may be feeling quite pithy, gives ammo to those that wish to discount us.
This goes double, in my experience, for any context that prizes objectivity and articulate discussion.
Doing them both together increases the amplitude of the signal at the cost of reducing the integrity of the signal.
If you wonder why the world is informationally too loud and too noisy these days, it's because everyone who does this is turning up the volume to be louder than others who are also, in turn, turning up the volume for the same reasons.
I’ve been using “pithy” as a a rhetorical hook for decades. It’s fairly common.
However, I am a bit uncomfortable with the pithy language used. It's possible (likely, even), that the fired editors deserve the pithiness, but it's still a bit weird to read that kind of prose, in a scientific context.