301–310 of 882 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course a version of it existed, but the going concern with cancel culture is that it doesn't require much thought or effort to cancel someone now. Social media allows you to easily join a mob without judging a person deeply by yourself.
Because previous mobs were well known for their thoughtfulness and judgement?
I have come to intensely dislike most of PG's essays, for many reasons, but the two main ones are that 1/ he plays fast and loose with the facts, reduces the whole history of (the various peoples of) humanity to a single arrow, and confuses demonstration with affirmation and, more importantly 2/ he has an unhealthy obsession with "classifying" people, by which he actually means ranking them, from top to bottom. The p…
One answer is, they're valuable in war, where you have large numbers of people who are in a position to weaken the war effort and you want to make sure none of them do or even think about it.
The Trump campaign signalling early on that it was at war with certain large chunks of the U.S. population helped kick a lot of people into this war mentality, I think, which might be in their interest or all of our interests in some ways, and that seems to be one of the trends that provoked this essay.
Passively independent-minded people are really valuable too, because they gum up the works of conformism by refusing to go along with it, without giving the aggressive conformists targets for outrage.
I've also seen a separate axis of how into change and new ideas people are. Some people are into new ideas in an aggressive conformist way. Some people are really resistant to new ideas in the same way.
I agree that within some groups like humanities departments, twitter and liberal companies the social justice movement is out of control. Just promoting a white male employee, or calling the police in a black person you see commiting a crime would make you fear for your job in some of those circles. On the other side there was a member of Congress who called a female member of Congress a "fucking bitch" and also the…
Calling the cops has turned out to be a death sentence for Black people too often.
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I find it bizarre that comments like these seem to think the main battle ground for free speech is young people like myself "cancelling" people on twitter, when at the same time protestors are being arrested by secret police in the US. Like there is an authoritarian government right there for you to criticise, but you choose only to talk endlessly about tweets like "can white people make rice, or is it cultural appro…
I agree. I would like for someone to enumerate all the people who have been “cancelled” and then compare it to those that have been violently attacked.
If some organization starts killing everyone wearing a blue hat,pretty soone nobody would wear a blue hat.
And then people like you would think that since no blue hat wearers get murdered, this is fine. Even call it "non violent" perhaps.
Let's pretend that such a projection exists and we can assign people to points on the cartesian plane. This begs the question, how do the points change over time? Mathematically speaking, we can add to our model by assuming there is some notion of a flow or a vector field on the quadrant that pulls individual people/points in directions. There are also people moving in their own directions either due to inherit perso…
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This is silly. The world isn't balanced like that. Many improvements have no disadvantage. More efficient photovoltaic cells, not needing hfcfs in pressurized spray cans, discovering that you can add a bit of carbon to iron, ...
> Many improvements have no disadvantage Every improvement has, at the very least, its Luddite cost. It forces some people to change, and some of those people won’t like that.
As a passive independently minded, I can say that we also see natural fluctuation from epochs of independently minded reason to social conformity and back. These are good and necessarily healthy cycles because the independently minded, left unchecked, inevitably will achieve the freedom for certain individuals within that sector to explore avenues of thought and action that doom civilization and degrade reason and sa…
I could add so much more to this about the state of affairs which claims the problems in the present era were seeded almost 300 years ago and that the supposed freedoms of today enshrined in that hour were not, as it were, a byproduct of the age of enlightenment, but rather, an insideous plot concocted by masonic and conventionally minded globalists planning a society that would protect the issues they cared about an…
For it, an innovative voting system would probably be useful. Forums that have tried to promote anti-conventional ideas have failed before. Usually grossly disgusting things make their way to the top of the feed in such cases, and good, original thoughts, meander in that twilight zone between good and bad, or get mildly downvoted, but only enough to be pushed below the threshhold- not enough that the negative point association is itself an expression of dislike for the content. Essentially, people do not so much hate original ideas, as simply dislike hearing them.
What makes this tricky is that people will always think their opinions sensible. For example, lets say you post a not so popular but sensible opinion. If you instituted a mechanism for people to vote on your content on the basis of logic, or reason, or any other qualitative mechanism, they would downvote it on the basis of logic, reason, etc.
Instead, we must attack the fundamental cybernetic arrangement of authority over opinion.
First, we have an up thumb and a down thumb:
I feel that the content presented is good, and i believe it self-sufficiently so/ It makes me feel uncomfortable, and I believe the evidence is self-sufficient.
Secondly, we have an up arrow and a down arrow: I understand what the person is trying to say/ I don't understand their reasoning.
Casting a vote would require selecting both an arrow and a thumb.
Getting a down thumb and a down arrow results in getting one point for originality. Getting a up thumb and an up arrow results in getting a point for popularity. Getting a down thumb and an up arrow results in getting a point for controversiality. Getting a up thumb and a down arrow results in the post getting a point for absurdity.
The score of the post is determined as follows:
The ratio of originality to controversiality is used to assign a value up to 100. a 1:0 ratio is a score of 100, and a 0:1 score is a value of 0. This shall be known as the shittest variable, or SV.
The ratio of popularity to controversiality is used to assign a value up to 100. A 1:0 value is a score of 0, 0:1 score 10, and a 1:1 score is a value of 100. This shall be known as the shiteating variable, or SE.
The ratio of originality to absurdity is used to assign a value up to 100. A 1:0 value is a score of 10, 0:1 score 0, and a 1:1 score is a value of 1. This shall be known as the shittake variable, or ST.
The ratio of popularity to absurdity is used to assign a value up to 100. A 1:0 and a 0:1 is a score of 0. A 1:1 is a score of 10. This shall be known as the shit-brigading variable, or SB.
SV x SE x ST X SB determines the true value of the post.
However, a user can choose to set a variable in their user profile which shows all posts based on popularity alone, and all scores based on popularity alone.
However, if the true value exceeds popularity by more than a factor of 10, the post will be hidden from their view, and the same would go for any replies.
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Also from an ex soviet state. Also feel alarm bells going off. I'm legitimately scared. I've seen this before, I know where it goes. It's really hard to convey my feeling of alarm to people here though. Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it, I guess. Doesn't help that the conformists have been allowed to frame the narrative as 'either you agree with us, or you're literally Hitler/Stalin' depending on…
I find it bizarre that comments like these seem to think the main battle ground for free speech is young people like myself "cancelling" people on twitter, when at the same time protestors are being arrested by secret police in the US. Like there is an authoritarian government right there for you to criticise, but you choose only to talk endlessly about tweets like "can white people make rice, or is it cultural appro…
> you choose only to talk endlessly about tweets like...
Do you really think that's what people are complaining about here? Not the professors being fired, the well known economists being forced to resign? There was a professor who lost his status running a residence hall because he was on the legal defense team for someone despicable.
As a society, we've decided that yes, even criminals need lawyers. To cancel someone and permanently affect their career for engaging in the most liberal of virtues and defending even criminals (especially if you believe we live in an authoritarian state) is beyond the pale.
> when at the same time protestors are being arrested by secret police in the US.
I've been working for police reform in what I believe is a flawed system for years. Everything the protestors are doing has probably set us back a decade. Every protestor killed by a fellow protestor (17 is the current count), every major spike in crime due to police being defunded instead of retrained, and every cop sent to the hospital because of folks throwing glass bottles and chunks of brick is not going to magically dry up and go away the next time we want to raise a serious issue.
We have a legal and social framework for affecting longterm change and it works much better than arson.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of the people "being cancelled" on twitter are only freaking out because for the first time in forever, they get the direct opinion of people reading their texts unfiltered, and they find out that they are prey to criticism. For example, Kelly Loeffler, claims to have been "cancelled" while being a sitting US senator. Cancel culture by popular action is not new (see letter-writing to TV stations, Frank Zappa ha…
People expressing their opinions about one's ideas is not cancel culture: it's when critics go one step further and try to destroy the person they disagree with. Many people have lost their livelihoods and even more are afraid to express their opinion at all because of the disproportionate cost they might incur. People having been structurally shielded from mob justice in the past is a state worth returning to.
Hmm, sounds intriguing. Do you have any sources for this or concrete examples which can be fact-checked?
"Here's a taxonomy of people that I just made up. There are four types of people, classified by superficial characteristics. Actually, this classification is an extremely strong indicator for behaviour, certainly stronger than other indicators. How do I know this? I am very smart and I say so. Based on this fact, I notice that the social-justicy types of today bear some superficial and extremely tenuous resemblance t…
> Last I checked, opposition to "cancel culture" and censorship is about as mainstream a position as there is Not at all. I am 40. My father and one of my brothers share that position with me, but every single one of my friends and acquaintances from universities and workplaces, in the USA and in the European country in which I grew up, if they make their position clear on social media, it is in line with the progres…
