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I Am Deleting the Blog

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Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#601

Post by jki275 »

josinalvo wrote: post #584
entropyneur wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love "What You Can't Say" and have incorporated the conformist test into my moral compass. But I think the shift to use of shame for society regulation is a positive development. I'd much rather be downvoted on HN or called names on Twitter than beaten up or deprived of freedom. But maybe that's just me.

Maybe it is like police and tasers? In theory, tasers are good because they can substitute shooting. In practice, you had 5 shootings, and now you have 4 shootings and 200 taser uses

I get the overall point you're trying to make, but for the person who was going to be that #5 shooting and gets to live instead, that's a positive outcome for that person at least.

Overall there's certainly a larger discussion about the use of force, and maybe tasers contribute to that in some negative ways, but most of the time they're used everybody gets to live at the end of the day.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#602

Post by luckylion »

syshum wrote: post #405
luckylion wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anti-out-of-context-quote-hit-piece-insurance that Sam Harris went to in his recent podcast on police violence etc was insane. I fully understand why, he's been burned by the Twitter mob before, but it's eye-opening to the media-induced reasonable paranoia some "public" people will go through when there's basically three paragraphs of "I'm not saying this is the one and only truth, I believe in equality, justice.…

it has the feel of the religious witch hunt because that is exactly what is has become. Many of these groups no longer look at data or science or any empirical evidence for the basis of their positions or policy, it is pure emotional dogma at this point. They are non-theistic religions

And they heavily share the proselytizing aspect of many religions as well.

I generally doubt that the striking down of religion was a force for good. When we've kept the "group identity generation" only partially in this world and a lot in the next, you can feel all high and mighty knowing that you will go to paradise while the wrong-believers will go to hell, and God will judge everybody.

Now, there's no more God to judge, there's no more "in the afterlife", there's only here and now, and everything becomes an integral part of your identity, from your programming language to your favored comic universe, and it all feels much fiercer. Maybe it's the lack of the after-life where they can be punished, so you need to see them punished in this life.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#603

Post by FeepingCreature »

sov wrote: post #351
FeepingCreature wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People have mentioned that these sorts of actions legitimize the "fair play" of the NYT revealing his real identity, and I'm having a hard time finding umbrage with that statement. I don't see how these things legitimize each other at all, unless you're advocating or favoring personal harassment as a legitimate political strategy.

No, I don't think harassment in any form is acceptable. I do think the case of Hsu is worth using as an example here: an intra-university conflict; a group of grad students is petitioning for a professor that they believe is actively harmful to the institution to step down as director of research. Now, I don't think it really matters what you or I think about any of this--whether or not we agree with the students or…

I feel you're using a lot of noncentral meanings of terms here - "harassing" a "group" by drawing attention to something they're doing, publically, to another person, which severely impacts that person's life in a comparison with revealing somebody's identity in order to enable harassment of their private life.

I note that it's "the same" side in both situations that you're comparing, who thinks imposing personal consequences for civil, public speech is a legitimate substitute for debate. What Scott is doing is very dissimilar from what that group of students was doing, but what they were doing is very similar to what the NYT is trying to do.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#604

Post by wycy »

tosers4 wrote: post #515
_wldu wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great post. I wish more people would genuinely listen to those they disagree with. When we shut people down or make them feel uncomfortable/threatened to the point that they won't speak, what have we gained?

this forum literally hides opinions people disagree with. The up and down arrow are really bad icons for UX.

In my experience on HN, downvoted comments are almost exclusively low-effort, spammy, immature, etc. I'm not sure I've ever noticed an insightful dissenting comment downvoted here.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#605

Post by alecbenzer »

kerkeslager wrote: post #543

Damn. I've been reading Slate Star Codex for a long time, and he's always been one of the most insightful voices on the internet. I'm really sorry to see him go. After reading this, I looked up NYT's policy of using real names, and it turns out this isn't the worst time that the NY Times has done this[1]. I've long said that if you want to know who an organization serves, see where its money comes from. The NY Times…

The implication being that the NYT wants to use real names to drive clicks and appease advertisers?

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#606

Post by sugarpile »

voxic11 wrote: post #483

Isn't this a double standard? The NYT was one of the many papers that decided not to publish the name of the whistleblower in the Trump-Ukraine scandal. They published many articles on the scandal and his name is definitely known to them as they did a profile on the wistleblower without naming him and he has been named by the president's son and many others in government (and no, he was not a source for the NYT. He w…

The idea that the public "can't be trusted" with information like this has always deeply frustrated me. Information should be openly shared and this story serves as another demonstration that journalists are not a special class of citizens that can be trusted with the information.

His name is Eric Ciaramella for anyone else wondering. Took me a frustrating 30 minutes of googling to figure it out.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#607

Post by nogabebop23 »

holtalanm wrote: post #585
tinyhouse wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just thinking about this now after reading attacks on Yann Lecun on twitter. He's a prominent AI figure (head of facebook research and turing award recipient). My interpretation - he was saying that bias in AI is mostly a problem of data. He didn't say there's no bias or that you can't solve bias with modeling. Just that the model itself isn't what causing the bias. One woman researcher started attacking him an…

It has been this way for a while. Outrage/cancel culture is an absolute pox upon our population that really needs to stop.

Isn't a large part of this down to the forum of communication vs. the level of discourse? I mean, if you want to have a nuanced, balanced discussion about a potentially sensitive topic you just can't do that on twtter, SMS, message board, etc.

Even on HN you see issues and that's will pretty tight tribal norms, moderation and topics where commenters aren't usually deeply or emotionally involved.

I agree with your overall opinion, but i think that change actually starts with people reflecting on the impact of the chosen medium on their message. Not self-censorship but "positioning"

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#609

Post by jkestner »

frogpelt wrote: post #506
nojs wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where can one go to learn these controversial truths? I would love to see a list of these facts that apparently only insiders can talk about. Are they literally so confronting/offensive that they don’t exist on the internet?

It's not the "truth" and the "facts" that people are afraid to discuss. It's their opinions about truth and facts. When you see phrases like "wrong/right side of history" and you see things happening like mass cancellation of brands or people for their opinions, you are seeing it. When a police officer is immediately fired and then charged with murder for performing his job the way he was trained to do it, you are se…

Maybe we should find a more accurate alternative for “attacked by mobs of people” to avoid equating flamewars with, I don’t know, the Tulsa Massacre. We still need to have the capacity to describe the relative horror of that.

Re: I Am Deleting the Blog

#610

Post by nogabebop23 »

esperent wrote: post #591
cousin_it wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen moral fashions. What's happening now is bigger, rarer and worse. It's known as a "purity spiral" (Haynes), "mass movement" (Hoffer), "political religion" (Voegelin).

Living outside the US and watching what's going on (ok, it's not just the US, but it is just a few countries) is like watching a friend's slow motion descent into madness. It's pitiful and sad, and I feel powerless to do anything about it. At the same time, so long as I stay away from news and social media, I'm pretty much unaffected. Society in the various countries I've spent time in over the last few years (Irelan…

Well if you ignore the change that is reflected in what we call the news and social media of course society would seem the same, but that doesn't mean it's not changing. I agree that face-to-face interactions haven't deteriorated and may even be better than in the past, but the challenge is their share of communication and social interaction has dramatically shrunk.
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