Just heard you talking about the amazing vastness of space (and how average our sun is as a star) and wanted to blogspam you with a recent post on my own blog, with a mindbending video about relative sizes of stars.

The vastness of space is so difficult to get your mind around!

I remember discussing this some time ago with some friends. Imagine two civilizations start at the same time. One fosters the idea of helping one another, and as it grows forms alliances with its neighbors. The other becomes a death cult where the strong exploit the weak and it conquers its neighbors and sacrifices people to its gods.

Which one is evil? From out point of view the death cult one is evil, but assuming they both started at the same time neither is any more right then the other. What they are doing is what each society believes is right and might see what the other does as “evil”. After all its easy to say sacrifice is evil, but fostering weakness allowing you to be conquered later could also be evil.

Not sure how you could add the “social norm” into your equation, but im fairly sure its not going to be a case of plugging in some numbers to work out if someone is evil or not as its really subjective.

As for an equation for evil? I don’t think it’s easy to formulate. A good example of this (karma to SMBC-Comics) where if you, for example, count the number of lives saved by Batman (call it B), then by induction, the number of lives saved by the people who killed Batman’s parents = B-2.

I like to think of actions in terms of how they increase or decrease the complexity of the surrounding environment. But it’s easy to see that the evaluation of whether it’s an increase or decrease depends a lot on the size of the environment and the duration with which you use to measure the effects.

I bet most personal finance apps have started out of their creators’ own need. That’s my story, at least.