Why are so many of the responses anti-intellectual / anti-curious?

This article, while not neccesarily great, made me think about my own personality defects and the nature of evil. It made me realize that I have strong, powerful "affective" and intellectual empathy, yet somehow there are many areas where I cannot connect with people.

Yesterday I **manipulated** a senior management council to fire a manager, who will have difficulty getting another job. I did not feel sad about this; I felt I had accomplished something. Sure, now that manager's young subordinates will have room to grow and not have a stupid, insecure, authoritative, backstabing micro-manager looking over them. But that intellectual argument is not what I feel. I feel powerful. I made the world move. Am I evil? Do I lack empathy? I was thinking about this when I read this article.

I think one glaring fault of the article is that it does not address the ways in which environment and development affect empathy. After all, we can probably assume that most of the most horrendous crimes people do to each other throughout history are not perpetrated by psychopaths.

Yet, responders here make such stupid generalizations:

*That board-room executives, who are tasked with preserving their companies (and hence, the jobs of many people) are all psychopaths/ evil-doers

*That evil is just evil, and does not need to be studied

*Out-right psychopathic examples of blasphemy; people defining the term "human" to be exclusive of other people

*Ignoring the role of "Theory of Mind" on sales skills, and associating sales with un-ethical manipulation.

*Generalizations about capitalism or our culture, as if Madoff does not live anywhere else in the world.

*Un-interest in studying the nature of evil, the nature of moral sickness. As if it could not happen to you. As if you don't need to learn skills to identify with it when you encounter others.

Really...I would hope Salon readers are usually more curious than this.

I started to use the Freshbooks app. Granted, the iPhone part just has time tracking and all other info (project, task, cost, invoice, etc) must first be set on the web. But that should be OK...the complicated stuff needs a full-UI anyway. Freshbooks is free for a version which supports 3 projects. After that, you need to pay (for the web-interface). Really seems to be good. Only thing I see it lack is a task management utility on the iphone itself.

Symbian phones have been able to use BT Keyboards for about 5 years as well. And now with the larger screen models, it will actually be practical to use a BT Keyboard with the bigger screen. I'm not a SW Engineer. But I believe the problem from Apple's perspective is much more complicated- FOR BUSINESS AND POSITIONING REASONS - than just putting some BT drivers on the phone.

The iPhone – the ones sold through official channels anyway - is really a feature phone, not a mobile computer (which is how Windows Mobile and to a lesser extent Symbian and Android sell themselves), and Apple wants to keep there phone in this category. I don’t even believe Apple refers to the iPhone as a smartphone.

On the iPhone, document management and customization are both limited. The file system is locked down so that you are forced to sync through iTunes. That does not work if you want the iPhone to be a laptop replacement… you would need to be able to create folders and sort documents on the device as well as on attached networks. Furthermore, developers are strongly discouraged from developing software which increases the functionality of the phone itself. As mentioned, cut and paste function is missing. So is landscape – mode text message editing. Why? In part because cut and paste is also a document management function. I do not believe there is a native Word-document editor for non-jail-broken iPhones either. This is all so that Apple can promote its online store and force users to use the iPhone as a content consumption device…Apple is, afterall, making money from content consumption.

For Apple to implement the BT keyboard driver would probably take exactly one engineer about 2 days of coding and 1 week of testing. After all, the drivers for Unix and OSX already exists and are free. But then, if people really tried to start using it as a computer replacement, they would VERY QUICKLY run into its other limitations (cut&paste being the least of them probably).

Hi Andrew,

I just had a really stupid idea, but I would like your opinion.

What if...what if the government enacted really really tough NATIONAL environmental standards on new housing developments for the next three years. And put all sorts of administrative blocks on building new houses. I mean...what if the government artificially froze the SUPPLY of houses for short period of time. Would that not make people think that what they have is more valuable or will become more valuable? And thus, decrease home foreclosures while increasing average prices? It would not even have to be all over...target restrictions in States that have high foreclosure rates.

Do you think this could have an effect?