Sometimes doing good is about as cringe-inducing as being wrong.

Like most human beings with an ounce of self-awareness, I generally think of myself as a good person. Not the best, not a saint, but mostly good. I suspect even people who are not that great on paper must at least be able to justify to themselves that they are not, on balance, bad.

Also like most human beings, there are other human beings that drive me nuts, who I wish would fundamentally change their behavior or beliefs because in my mind, they are hurting the world and dragging us down with them.

(An example, from my point of view: those who would defund Planned Parenthood, militant gun-rights advocates unwilling to discuss regulation or reduction, anyone who still behaves in actively racist or homophobic ways. An example from the opposite point of view: people like me who don’t listen to the Bible or Constitution and want to ruin what’s great about America.)

If both parties think they are generally right, and generally good, then someone must be wrong. They can’t both be equally right. So instead of taking sides, maybe some objectivity can come into play.

Imagine Person X believes strongly in Issue X, where Issue X is something you disagree with strongly. (pro-life vs pro-choice, gun rights vs gun control, marriage equality vs tradition, etc).

You think you are on the right side of Issue X, obviously, and by living in the world not being wrong, not perpetuating ignorance, and voting your beliefs every two or four years, you are doing good. Maybe sometimes you fill out an online petition or donate money.

Person X is, in your mind, totally on the wrong side of history here. They are actively hurting the world with their ignorance. But they do volunteer work every week for the community (through church, school, etc) that helps actual people on a regular basis, and are overall very friendly and generous. Just wrong.

Who is the better person?

Who is helping/hurting society more in the big picture?

Putting your startup idea in cartoon form is guaranteed to make it seem friendlier.

Fast Company takes a look at why the utopian idea of borrowing things you only use rarely (tools, bikes, etc) through the internet never really took off. Today’s “sharing economy” businesses like Uber or Airbnb are actually more traditional pay-for-service than anything to do with sharing, but somehow the most pure common-good businesses fell by the wayside. This quote is particularly on point:

There was just one problem. As Adam Berk, the founder of Neighborrow, puts it: “Everything made sense except that nobody gives a shit. They go buy [a drill]. Or they just bang a screwdriver through the wall.”

Makes you wonder if it’s not the idea, but the people who are the problem. If we can’t be bothered to sign up or use simple web services like this that theoretically both save us money and helps communities feel more neighborly…

Is the sharing economy built on a flawed premise of cooperation?

Are we too self-involved for this to work at all, or is there hope that going about it slightly differently could make sharing more appealing?

At the root of it all: do you even want to be closer to your neighbors, or feel a stronger sense of community, or is that an old-fashioned ideal?

“I will not waiver in my belief: that my beliefs matter than the beliefs of others.”

The New Yorker puts a cap on the Kim Davis affair with a simple question-slash-concern for what this whole messy business means going forward:

The controversy in Davis’s county may now end without another confrontation (or incarceration). If the marriages are valid with her deputies’ signature, then that will probably defuse the situation. But the principle is still a troubling one—that religious belief carries with it a shopping-cart approach to citizenship. You can choose some obligations but not others, while the legislators and judges figure out which ones are really mandatory. It’s a recipe for further division in an already polarized society—and the prospects, in Kentucky and elsewhere, are for more conflict, not less.

My personal opinion aside (if you must know, I believe the whole thing could have been easily avoided without legal action, but the fuss did bring out an awful lot of idiocy, generally), the bigger issues do provide room for debate.

Whether you agree or not with Kim Davis in this instance, should people have the right to be excused from performing specific job tasks because of personal belief?

Is that answer the same when they are holding elected office?

In the balance between a personal freedom issue and a separation of church and state issue, which takes priority?

An altogether different sort of prisoner’s dilemma.

A bit late to this one, but FiveThirtyEight did a piece on using statistical modeling to aid in prison sentencing that will definitely spark debate.

There are more than 60 risk assessment tools in use across the U.S., and they vary widely. But in their simplest form, they are questionnaires — typically filled out by a jail staff member, probation officer or psychologist — that assign points to offenders based on anything from demographic factors to family background to criminal history. The resulting scores are based on statistical probabilities derived from previous offenders’ behavior. A low score designates an offender as “low risk” and could result in lower bail, less prison time or less restrictive probation or parole terms; a high score can lead to tougher sentences or tighter monitoring.

The risk assessment trend is controversial. Critics have raised numerous questions: Is it fair to make decisions in an individual case based on what similar offenders have done in the past? Is it acceptable to use characteristics that might be associated with race or socioeconomic status, such as the criminal record of a person’s parents? And even if states can resolve such philosophical questions, there are also practical ones: What to do about unreliable data? Which of the many available tools — some of them licensed by for-profit companies — should policymakers choose?

It’s almost as if they’re stealing my schtick right there in the article. But there’s an overriding question I think is the most interesting angle.

Is it inherently wrong to sentence people on predicted behavior, even if using this more mathematical model is a net positive for society?

If we get a certain percent of punitive imprisonments “wrong” now under the subjective sentencing of judges, but this system works “better” overall, which is more unfair?

May the odds… oh wait, wrong movie.

Recently I revisited the classic (and influential; looking at you, Hunger Games) film Battle Royale, about a near-future Japan where every year a class of students is shipped off to an island to battle to the death. Though it doesn’t delve into some of the class issues that makes the later Hunger Games so provocative and interesting, it’s still a must-see film. In fact, I love how Royale deals with dissatisfaction on both sides in a very Japanese way. The adults see ungrateful, unruly teens and feel like they need to be taught a lesson (which one could say about today’s entitled youth), but how can you not also sympathize with teens growing up into a world lacking in opportunity? It’s a fascinating exaggeration of reality where kids are forced into a cutthroat system against their will, and how they deal with that by trying to find rebellious ways out, whether suicide, bucking the system, or just finding their own way together despite the ‘rules’ that they’re supposed to play by.

But at the end of the day how can we not focus on the amazing hypothetical scenario the film (and its successor) proposes:

If you were in a Battle Royale/Hunger Games scenario, what do you do when you’re forced to kill or be killed? Make allies? Go fully aggressive homicidal? Play nice to get close, then betray those who trust you? Or opt out and kill yourself before they can do it to you, in some final act of defiance?