
Quotes from Moral Mazes (2019) - luu
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/05/30/quotes-from-moral-mazes/
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probably_wrong
Good article, but I fear that sharing quotes without their context may do more
harm than good.

As a random example, quote 163 reads in part:

> _(...) Then I went into soda ash. Without it, there wouldn’t be a window
> pane in the whole United States. But at the time, because of the Clean Air
> Act and the Clean Water Act, suddenly I became a polluter. Children learned
> in school that chemicals killed. And, of course, there was no question in
> the academic community that I was perceived as an evil person doing evil
> things._

The full quote presents the author as someone who is unhappy because they
performed good-intentioned work and suddenly their good-intentioned work is
cast a bad light (it also talks about DDT and CFC). However, quote 25 reads:

> _The logical result of alertness to expediency is the elimination of any
> ethical lines at all._

which may or may not undermine the first quote's point entirely, depending on
how these two quotes are related to each other.

Given that the article itself starts with " _Reading and actually paying
attention to Moral Mazes is hard. (...) I effectively spent several months
forcing my way through the book, because it seemed important to do that_ ",
the risk of these quotes being misunderstood from small snippets seems quite
high.

------
zby
Related and a kind of counterweight:
[https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-
slack/](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/)

