Don’t Be a Nice Person.
<h1>The Problem With Being Nice.</h1>
<p>Most nice people are merely signaling their niceness. They aren’t good people in reality, they are just great at signaling. We are so good at it that we don’t realize we do it until it’s brought to our attention.</p>
<p>Here is a test from the trolley problem to see where you lie. Imagine there was a train heading toward five people. On the other train track, there is one person. You are near a lever that diverts the train towards the one person and not the five… would you do it?</p>
<p>Now imagine another scenario. Imagine you are standing on a bridge next to a giant man. There is still a train heading toward five people below the bridge. You observe the man leaning over and can push him over the edge onto the train, stopping it from killing the five. Would you do it?</p>
<p>Last scenario. Now you are a doctor and have five patients with five different organ failures. A patient comes in for a checkup and during diagnosis, you realize that his five organs are compatible with the five patients’ failed organs. You could conduct an organ transplant, effectively killing the one but saving the five. Would you do it?</p>
<p>What if now the one person is your parent, brother, or best friend?</p>
<p>The nice people would stop at the second scenario. “It feels wrong” is something they would say. This means they haven’t thought deeply about what is good.</p>
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<p><strong>Nice people aren’t good people, they are people who are brought up in environments where nice behavior is rewarded</strong>.</p>
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<p>They conform to social incentives. Murder is contrarian to social incentives hence it feels wrong to us.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Ask ourselves: <strong>Do we want to do good or have we merely conformed to what constitutes good behavior in social groups?</strong></p>
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<p>People who hold out signs saying to stop climate change are the aggressively nice types. They don’t put the engineering work to make it happen. Everyone hypes them up for being great people but in reality if they truly cared they would become an engineer. The problem is no one hypes you up as an engineer.</p>
<p><a href="https://medium.com/@marvelgomulya/dont-be-a-nice-person-9aa3f9bca28d"><strong>Learn More</strong></a></p>