Shame Storm • Hacker News Board

Re: Shame Storm

#131

Post by ThrustVectoring » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 8:33 PM UTC

ballenf wrote: post #108

I'd recommend people having kids give them very common names and consider giving them modifications of the last name if it's rare. It's depressing advice and a bit like paying a lifetime of insurance premiums that's likely never to be needed. Unless the concept of a search changes in the next couple decades, getting lost in a sea of similar names is the only defense against unfounded accusations. (Changing one's name…

When I registered for a library card as a kid, there were five other people with my exact first + last name. The doctor's office my parents used when I was an infant had to modify their policies to ask for my middle initial because there was another infant with the same first + last + birth month.

Definitely recommend it. The first ten pages of Google results for my first + last show like at least 50 other people that aren't me.

Only issue is that it can be difficult to use your name as an email handle - fortunately my parents were tech savvy enough to grab concat(firstName, middleInitial, lastName) as a gmail address and domain name for me.

Re: Shame Storm

#132

Post by manfredo » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 8:34 PM UTC

jacobolus wrote: post #124

manfredo wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

From his testimony:

> I drank beer with my friends. Almost everyone did. Sometimes I had too many beers.

It may be valid to say that his drinking was more serious than his tone seems to indicate, but to say that he did not admit drinking to excess is factually incorrect.

Re: Shame Storm

#133

Post by Zelphyr » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 8:47 PM UTC

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…

I don't think they would stop. I suspect what we're seeing is that the mobs shouting very loudly is being propped up by social media and the news media (who fall all over themselves to report it because of the controversy).

The reality, I think, is that the population of mobs is otherwise quite small, but because of the social media and news media megaphones they appear larger than they are. We're at a point now where everybody else is in fear of being attacked by those mobs so they quietly fund whoever they perceive to be in opposition of the mob. But at the same time, because of the media megaphones, the mobs incorrectly believe they are having success and thus the negative cycle continues.

Re: Shame Storm

#134

Post by jf- » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 8:48 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #122

jf- wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

I think it likely you’d just be replacing one set of neuroses with another.

I’m not even sure what “keeping your identity small” entails, other than assigning more of your merits/demerits to extrinsic factors, or in the Asian case to family or national affiliation. I’m not sure that either of those would help in the case of the online mass bullying that we’re discussing here.

Regarding the essay, I think PG was more right when he said politics and religion were topics which could not be decided upon, so everyone just lets loose. That echoes what Nietzsche said about modern (moral) debate being meaningless, because there are no objective grounds on which to judge anything, so people just shout at each other impotently. It’s an old one but a good one.

Re: Shame Storm

#135

Post by NathanKP » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 8:50 PM UTC

zestyping wrote: post #82

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…

It's weird to me that almost all posting/commenting platforms are about the same. You get a series of small boxes with text in them and a small box to type into, usually too small to fit more than a couple of sentences, perhaps a button to promote, a button to reshare, and that's it. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Medium, Disqus... all the same. We've explored so little of the design space. If I had to hazard in extrapo…

> We've explored so little of the design space.

The design space that we are willing to explore is limited by the fundamental evolutionary drive of social media platforms to hold your attention as long as possible by feeding you little hits of dopamine for minimal effort. Social media platforms thrive on size and activity and neither can be established by raising the bar, only by lowering it to new depths.

Re: Shame Storm

#136

Post by tzar » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 8:52 PM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #88

tlb wrote: post #8

Public shaming can either become less common or more common over time. If it becomes more common, it might eventually become less damaging. Right now, because only 1000s of people have been targets, it's feasible for employers to search online and not hire people who've been shamed. A historic parallel of diminishing effect is posting identifiable pictures on the Internet. It used to be a big no-no, because when only…

> If it becomes more common, it might eventually become less damaging. I mean that's like saying if a huge percentage of Americans have been arrested then it might eventually become less damaging; that happened, and it has become less damaging, but at the end of the day it's still extremely damaging.

> I mean that's like saying if a huge percentage of Americans have been arrested...

No, it's not like saying that. It's saying that public shaming might eventually become less damaging. If you want an analogy that expressed the point of the commenter, one was provided:

> A historic parallel of diminishing effect is posting identifiable pictures on the Internet.

This, also, is not like being arrested.

Re: Shame Storm

#137

Post by Zelphyr » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 8:53 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #115

motohagiography wrote: post #14

"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." -- Cardinal Richelieu

I'm 44, and either I'm just getting old enough to notice things I never noticed when I was younger, or there's something very concerning brewing - it seems to me like a small but growing subsegment of western society is working as hard as they can to escalate civilization to an actual violent conflict. And, based on my understanding of history, the biggest losers in that conflict will be the ones pushing the hardest…

I don't think there's a concerted effort to escalate. I think it's more of an emergence phenomenon. But yes, the outcome you describe is likely inevitable if something doesn't change soon.

Re: Shame Storm

#138

Post by tomatotomato37 » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 8:55 PM UTC

fromthestart wrote: post #130

nostrademons wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting comparisons, but I would have to say those places still have a sense of identity, even if it's one cooked up 30 seconds ago with a 10minuteemail address.

I'm more curious about a site with the "enforced" lack of identity present on those imageboards, except with the ruleset of Twitter or Facebook.

Re: Shame Storm

#139

Post by moduspol » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 9:04 PM UTC

jeremysalwen wrote: post #21

Don't really think the Kavanaugh example really fits in with the rest. Sorry, if you want to be a Supreme Court justice, yes, you should should be held to a much higher standard. Yelling about "revenge on behalf of the Clintons" does indeed count as "partisan bitterness".

Put yourself in his shoes for a moment, and pretend you're genuinely innocent of the accusations. Isn't a group of partisan operatives conspiring against you the most likely reason for very conveniently-timed and uncorroborated sexual assault allegations?

But put that aside. Maybe he's actually guilty of at least one of them. Even then, though, some of the allegations ended up being false:

Most recently here [1], but also here [2], and here [3], and here [4]. Four clear examples of accusations made that turned out to be completely false. So at best, one must acknowledge that this man endured a national media spotlight under four false accusations of sexual assault/rape, but came across as "too partisan" when speculating as to one of the few possible explanations for why these false accusers may have come forward.

I sure hope I'm never in the situation he's in, but if I'm on national TV being essentially questioned if maybe I don't remember all the gang raping I did because of how drunk I was, I can assure you my answers will be far less dignified.

[1] https://www.nationalreview.com/news/kavanaugh-accuser-admits...

[2] https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fifth-brett-kavanaugh-ac...

[3] https://www.apnews.com/c5ecf76c62ec4c398e35020b5df01061

[4] https://www.npr.org/2018/09/20/649787076/kavanaugh-accuser-c...

Re: Shame Storm

#140

Post by weberc2 » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 9:08 PM UTC

agentultra wrote: post #111

weberc2 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that public shaming can and does serve a useful function in dissuading fringe right-wing ideologies (among others); however, the whole reason we're seeing an uptick in these fringe ideologies is because public shaming has lost its potency after it was repeatedly abused (mobbing moderate liberals and conservatives for violating far-left moral tenets under the overtly false pretenses of fascism/racism/white-sup…

The difficulty I have with this is that many right-wing conservatives with radical opinions on everything from the rights of LGBTQ folks to race are trying, desperately, to rebrand themselves as moderate conservatives. In the same way that white nationalists are trying to avoid being called out as White Supremacists. I'm sure Jonah would like me to believe he is a moderate conservative. The history lesson in Liberal…

Whether or not you or I agree with his book or his beliefs, Jonah Goldberg has a long and distinguished career as a moderate conservative. He's an avid critic of Trump and he vocally condemns racism and white supremacy. Casting him as an extremist is witch-hunting, and it hurts our ability to keep actual racists and white-supremacists in check.

> Will my kids be shamed and called a f-g when they get to school and end up in a hospital with a fractured skull? Will we ever change?

The world has been changing for decades before this "moderates are actually white-supremacists in disguise" trend kicked off. It's precisely this kind of conflation that jeopardizes the progress we've made.