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Shame Storm

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Re: Shame Storm

#121

Post by darkerside »

jerf wrote: post #47

As I've mentioned before, one of the interesting things I like to study in a casual way is the effect of social community structures on behavior. At this point it is not terribly controversial that modern social media systems encourage shame storms, via things like easy "viral" sharing, the existence of moderation systems that can be used to nuke any attempt to defend oneself out of existence, and the way modern soci…

Ability to communicate or downvote could be rate-limited, perhaps by the character, to encourage conciseness and quality of thought.

Re: Shame Storm

#122

Post by nostrademons »

jf- wrote: post #107
Memosyne wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4chan (and other such networking media) attract individuals who have developed in an existing social environment. My understanding was that jerf wanted us to engineer a new type of social structure that could be taught to children during their formative years of development.

You want to teach them that they don’t have identities?

It's not as crazy as it sounds. PG wrote an essay about this once [1], and many East Asian cultures have much weaker conceptions of personal identities (separate from a family or larger society) than American and Western European culture does.

The challenge is that this is not an evolutionarily-stable-strategy from a game theoretic perception. When a person from a culture with a weak conception of personal identity meets a person from a culture with a strong conception of personal identity, the former tends to subordinate their desires to the latter, because that's what it means to have a weak conception of identity. As a result, the sphere of public discourse gets dominated by all those individuals with strong identities, even if the majority of people on earth do not have one. (Growing up half-Asian, this was a major source of angst for me, and still something I struggle with.)

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

Re: Shame Storm

#123

Post by nostrademons »

tomatotomato37 wrote: post #112
nostrademons wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be 4chan, and it seems to have the opposite effect.

Granted a large part of that is due to the Laissez-faire/incompetent moderation of the site Actually I'm surprised there hasn't been an anonymous website with strict rules and actually decent moderation; every single spin-off of the site also takes a freeform approach to everything

A site where everybody is invited to submit content anonymously but it's heavily censored & moderated becomes a mouthpiece for the moderators. It's basically Yelp, or the Op-Ed section of a newspaper.

Re: Shame Storm

#124

Post by jacobolus »

manfredo wrote: post #90
jacobolus wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Behavior such as repeatedly making easily disprovable statements (which numerous past acquaintances who had no particular reason to otherwise make public statements about his nomination called out as blatant lies), and pugnaciously asking a Senator whether she ever gets black-out drunk. After starting his career in politics as a vicious partisan hack e.g. involved directly in a conspiracy to undermine Judiciary Commi…

He repeatedly stated that did consumed large quantities of alcohol in late high school and in college. Maybe there is diagreement over the exact degree of inebriation, but I am not so sure it's correct to say he lied. Regardless, the two points after are where the problematic nature of the complaints against Kavanaugh surface: > who sometimes shoved his penis in women’s faces, Another allegation which he denies. As I…

> He repeatedly stated that did consumed large quantities of alcohol in late high school and in college.

No, he repeatedly denied it (while only admitting that he “liked and likes beer” and occasionally drank beer in moderation). He also made up comically absurd lies about his high school yearbook, and lied about several other more serious topics e.g. related to his work for Starr and his work as a Bush staffer. (I don’t intend to re-litigate this here. You can do a web search and find numerous analyses of the details.)

Re: Shame Storm

#125

Post by axelrosen »

weberc2 wrote: post #42
zozbot123 wrote: post #13

The rule for how to deal with this sort of "shaming" is quite simple: no matter what you may have been 'accused' of, always double down and never issue anything that might even loosely resemble an apology or an admission of weakness, no matter what the costs might be. Then simply wait until the mob gets bored and moves on to the next easy target. There are very high profile examples of this working quite well, but me…

It's hard to make heads or tails of this without a better definition of what constitutes "doubling down" or "working quite well". The example that comes to mind is James Damore and he "doubled down" in the sense that he stood by his original statements (which made sense because his original memo was clearly and explicitly not endorsing the things he was accused of endorsing). It "worked out quite well" in that he _on…

Might be wrong as I haven't followed this too much. But, my impression was that he mostly played a clueless person caught in a grotesque situation. Doubling down would mean going after his accusers directly.

He's in a tough spot given who he's up against. In an oligopolistic industry like ours it's risky to be hated by anyone.

But I do think it would work in the sense that he'd have a larger group of people cheering for him. And this is solely about clarity. If you're too nuanced in what you're broadcasting to the world people don't know how to react. Nobody wants to waste time trying to figure you out. Doubling down is exactly about taking out any nuance for a stronger message.

Re: Shame Storm

#126

Post by tsumnia »

nostrademons wrote: post #116
jerf wrote: post #47

As I've mentioned before, one of the interesting things I like to study in a casual way is the effect of social community structures on behavior. At this point it is not terribly controversial that modern social media systems encourage shame storms, via things like easy "viral" sharing, the existence of moderation systems that can be used to nuke any attempt to defend oneself out of existence, and the way modern soci…

You couldn't engineer one such social system, you'd have to arrange for multiple social systems, all with their own rules. Communities where people are nice to each other tend to be a.) small, so that you can't just find someone else to piss off b.) have lots of repeated interactions, so you're invested in maintaining good relations and c.) have freedom of exit, so when someone's values don't mesh with the community…

The more I hear of these new social rules I have to follow [retroactively, mind you] to ensure I'm not "shamed", the more lower income rougher occupations sound grand.

No one probably gives a damn about the sexist wielder or the extreme right/leftist garbage collector because no one wants those jobs and are just happy someone is willing to do it.

Re: Shame Storm

#127

Post by anonymouzz »

staunch wrote: post #23

One of the funny and snarky things Jordan Peterson has said is that he "figured out a way to monetize social justice warriors". Which is true in some sense. He's become well funded through donations and book sales even as groups of people direct a ton of hate at him. He can afford to almost totally ignore them, because for every hater there are ten fans. Which leads to a crazy thought: If the social media mobs knew t…

It was the same with Trump. I'm pretty sure the outrage directed at him (even though much more justified) was a big reason for his victory.

Re: Shame Storm

#128

Post by int_19h »

matt4077 wrote: post #29
api wrote: post #2

I had the thought the other day that what we're seeing here in the West is like an informal version of China's social credit system, and perhaps that something like China's social credit system is almost unavoidable when everything is hyper-connected like this. This is what humans do, and when you connect them all at scale they do it at scale. The specific mores and taboos don't matter. People get hung up on this bei…

The mere existence of the emotion of „shame“ shows that this mechanism is old, probably older than Homo sapiens. It’s simply a way to get people to behave in a society, without invoking the heavier tools such as the law.

Conversely, that the mechanism is so old indicates that it evolved to work in groups of the size humans (or their ape ancestors even) formed back when it first appeared - i.e. dozens, not millions. It's not a given that the way we scale it is optimal, or even good.

Re: Shame Storm

#129

Post by int_19h »

brodouevencode wrote: post #61
perfmode wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That office is so important that I’m happy to wait until the right candidate shows up. And I don’t want republicans or Democrats. I want scientists of law with integrity. And there are plenty competent people with integrity. It is people who lack integrity that marginalize them.

Shouldn't that office should be held to the same standards as the other three branches?

No, because the other branches have failsafes, such as periodic elections. But with SCOTUS, if you make a mistake and confirm the wrong candidate for the job, the only remedy is impeachment, which is very hard to pull off (by design). Thus, the standards have to be extremely high.

Re: Shame Storm

#130

Post by fromthestart »

nostrademons wrote: post #123
tomatotomato37 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Granted a large part of that is due to the Laissez-faire/incompetent moderation of the site Actually I'm surprised there hasn't been an anonymous website with strict rules and actually decent moderation; every single spin-off of the site also takes a freeform approach to everything

A site where everybody is invited to submit content anonymously but it's heavily censored & moderated becomes a mouthpiece for the moderators. It's basically Yelp, or the Op-Ed section of a newspaper.

Or Reddit.
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