Funny it is posted on HN where your user score, which is called karma here for some reason, decides if you can or can't do stuff to engage with entire community fully. So either you are conformist or you will be downvoted and basically invisible.
Social Cooling (2017)
71–80 of 299 posts
Re: Social Cooling (2017)
#72You don’t need some kind of “social score” to have the chilling effect, if anything I think people self censor more because of the fear of getting berated by others for their beliefs—both by those they know and don’t. Interestingly I don’t think it’s really “cooling” that happened - if anything it’s been some people becoming extremely hot, and then the majority of people, myself included, are experiencing cooling. Un…
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This sort of vague, association-based reasoning can be used to prove anything. The US is a country with over 200 years of history, currently with hundreds of millions of citizens. You can cherry-pick whatever "visuals" from whatever "inflection points" you want, in order to prove whatever conclusion you want.
For example, here is a thread on /r/AmerExit, a subreddit you would expect to have an anti-American bias, on racism in the EU vs the US. The strong consensus is that EU racism is worse:
https://old.reddit.com/r/AmerExit/comments/17g68zx/pervasive...
Or here is the Wikipedia page on charitable giving by country, which shows the US is easily the most generous nation in the world as a fraction of GDP:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_charitabl...
If you learn about the history of other countries, you'll find that they usually have dark stuff in their past as well. You claim that standing up against Nazis is "very low hanging fruit", but there's a considerable list of countries which cooperated substantially with the Nazis, including Italy, Japan, Romania, Croatia, the USSR, etc. France was torturing thousands of Algerians who were fighting for their independence as recently as the 1960s.
Ultimately this entire project of trying to discover and interrogate a "national character" is a little silly in my opinion. Especially through the sort of cherry-picking I did above. Yes, it's a very popular topic of internet flamewars. But I've never seen compelling evidence that "national character" has significant predictive value. People are people wherever you go, people respond to incentives, etc. We should default to structural explanations for human behavior, rather than explanations based on "national character".
For example, consider this recent Substack post on how climate caused the US Civil War: https://substack.com/home/post/p-170433170
I expect the majority of historical events can be explained in the manner of that Substack post, if you look hard enough. Same way I'm rather skeptical of "Great Man" theories of history, I'm also rather skeptical of "Great Nation" or "Great Culture" theories of history.
Re: Social Cooling (2017)
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have a better solution to the paradox of tolerance, I'm all ears. (People still using platforms : the likes of Facebook, Discord, LinkedIn, Github, or ChatGPT being amongst the ones that undermine democratic ideals and that ought to be socially shamed, and, in some cases, beaten up.)
When you come to a paradox its probably better to reassess axioms than embrace the paradox.
We're talking about unsolved philosophical issues here, matters of barely stable equilibriums.
Would you rather be «team Plato», ruled by enlightened 'philosopher-kings' ? Comes with its own set of issues.
P.S.: Also, it's probably only a real paradox if you conflate the levels of application : what is really problematic is the systems that result in increased intolerance.
Re: Social Cooling (2017)
#74The social credit score doesn't exist in China. There were attempts in some cities with very restricted scopes but they were phased out. On the other hand, in Europe and with the coming chat control regulations, these systems will likely emerge in the West.
Perhaps you can explain something then, since you appear to be knowledgeable on this matter. On this[1] eBay item from a seller based in China, under their "Seller business information", they list
UNIFIED_SOCIAL_CREDIT_CODE: 91440300MA5ED70C7X
Re: Social Cooling (2017)
#75The good thing about younger zoomers and alpha is they've already incorporated this into their lives, so none of this is grotesque or surprising. They've adapted their culture to match.
That is not a good thing. It means they have internalized this level of control and slavery. Finding comfort in the panopticon.
Re: Social Cooling (2017)
#76The Americans (†) who grew up with constant surveillance (social media, cameras everywhere) aim for ordinariness. The entire generation is less likely to express a non-consensus opinion than prior generations. For good reason: with everything being recorded and broadcast, personal errors are both accentuated and persist longer with no corresponding rise in upside. Bold opinions and creative ideas are simply too risky…
My best friend from school days has a son who’s now in 7th grade. Recently, when we were talking about him, we realised his school years are far less dramatic than ours. We had drama, lots of bullying, tears, fights, and mean things were done. In contrast, his son’s school days are absolutely harmless and benign. I know it’s n = 1 and maybe we were very unlucky back then. But it also makes me wonder if any chaotic ex…
I think it is really hard to extrapolate from single examples. My first two years were a little like that. Then I had to repeat a school year, got in the nicest class imaginable and had five incredibly fun years that I look back at with a lot of fondness.
Having a kid myself, I think life is much worse now. There is the constant unconscious fear of getting filmed, etc. It was much easier for my generation to just experiment, do stupid stuff, etc., you know being a child/teenager, without the fear of repercussions.
Re: Social Cooling (2017)
#77Funny it is posted on HN where your user score, which is called karma here for some reason, decides if you can or can't do stuff to engage with entire community fully. So either you are conformist or you will be downvoted and basically invisible.
Meh, as long as you're contributing more than you upset people, it seems to balance itself out. I've made some egregious comments in the past (judging by the downvotes at least), yet you can still see this comment and probably my future ones too.
And even though some comments I've made been downvoted, they've stilled spawned interesting conversations, so I count that as a win regardless.
Re: Social Cooling (2017)
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
My best friend from school days has a son who’s now in 7th grade. Recently, when we were talking about him, we realised his school years are far less dramatic than ours. We had drama, lots of bullying, tears, fights, and mean things were done. In contrast, his son’s school days are absolutely harmless and benign. I know it’s n = 1 and maybe we were very unlucky back then. But it also makes me wonder if any chaotic ex…
I think it is really hard to extrapolate from single examples. My first two years were a little like that. Then I had to repeat a school year, got in the nicest class imaginable and had five incredibly fun years that I look back at with a lot of fondness. Having a kid myself, I think life is much worse now. There is the constant unconscious fear of getting filmed, etc. It was much easier for my generation to just exp…
> Having a kid myself, I think life is much worse now. There is the constant unconscious fear of getting filmed, etc. It was much easier for my generation to just experiment, do stupid stuff, etc., you know being a child/teenager, without the fear of repercussions.
I don't know what generation you belong to, but I was still in school when mobile phones that could record video became "good enough" that most of my peers in school had them, today I'm ~33. But we were also thinking about that sort of stuff, especially when we were doing stuff you kind of don't want to be public, and there was a few cases of embarrassing things "leaking" which obviously suck.
But I'm not sure how different it is today? Maybe it's more acceptable to film people straight in their faces, and less accepted to slap the phone out of people's hand if they're obnoxious about it? In the end, it doesn't feel like a "new" problem anymore, as it seems like this all started more than 15 years ago and we had fears about being filmed already then.
Re: Social Cooling (2017)
#79"Social Cooling", censorship, and self-censorship is a big reason why Trump is in office.
I would say that the fact people have had to self-censor when they held "conservative" views instead of engaging in public discourse without being villified is why they had to turn to someone like Trump when they were handing in their ballots. If they felt safe, perhaps more of them would have appreciated the other side's arguments (and vice versa, obviously). Is that what you meant? Or why did self-censorship help g…
Oh. What conservative views are those?
Re: Social Cooling (2017)
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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> The racism and selfishness of right-wing politics is just … ugh, honestly, I just can’t. It’s Godless. The first step would be to humbly recognize your side’s shortcomings. To me, aiding the destruction of malls, pardoning authors of crimes is bad, protesting against having borders is worse and defunding the police is a hallmark of criminality (and before you say it: Defunding doesn’t mean rearranging, it means def…
Ok, so it looks like you conveniently skipped over your own first step.