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Archived Post

This post is archived from my Posterous blog, which shut down in 2012. Some posts have been edited slightly to fix typographical errors, correctly represent the gender of some individuals, and remove unnecessarily-gendered language. You can view the full archive here.

Deception Inflection

Archive Post
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Sometimes I’m accused of being a good person, and I have to remind people that it being evil and appearing evil are only positively correlated for sufficiently small values of evil.

A graph showing a line progressing from less evil to more evil. The height of the line represents the appearance of evil. The line rises steadily until the half-way point. It then falls quickly.

The deceoption inflection.

Here it is with some data points:

The same graph with some points labeled. Mid-way across and high on the appeaance of evil sits Apple. On the other side of the peak, Exxon. Google is all the way to the right.

Evil corporations.

Note, for instance, that Exxon is doing it wrong. They only need to be a little more evil to appear completely good. Google, on the other hand, totally has it figured out. Be exceptionally evil, and then actually declare that you are not evil. People believe that kind of crap. Apple, love ’em or hate ’em, is completely upfront about its evilness, which means, by definition, it isn’t all that evil really.