Shame Storm • Hacker News Board

Re: Shame Storm

#161

Post by manfredo » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 10:06 PM UTC

BryantD wrote: post #157

manfredo wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is a significant difference between saying "that's not accurate" and saying "the person who said that is a drunken loser who has been out to get me for years." Did Kavanaugh ever say the latter? In fact this line of criticism seems to work in his favor: the label "drunken loser" was applied to Kavanaugh much more frequently than it was applied to Ford, at least from the coverage I saw (admittedly, mostly from…

No, he did not say such a thing. I'm not specifically addressing Kavanaugh, I'm pointing out a flaw in your logic. You made a general assertion, which I'll quote again: "Defending oneself from an accusation inherently entails discrediting the accuser, to criticize defendants for doing so is essentially saying it should be socially unacceptable to defend oneself from an accusation." Did you mean that, or did you gener…

Yes, I meant precisely what I wrote. Defending oneself entails discrediting the accuser. Knowingly lying, or insulting the accuser in a way unrelated to maintaining one's innocense is not necessary. But as you stated yourself, the subject at hand did neither of these things.

How you made the leap from, "Defending oneself from an accusation inherently entails discrediting the accuser" to, "knowingly lying and needlessly insulting people is okay" is a mystery to me.

Re: Shame Storm

#162

Post by aswanson » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 10:07 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…

Do you think this weaker conception of personal identity is one of the causes of lower crime rates in Asian nations? It would seem an ethos more invested in the whole would exhibit this, along with a lower level of materialism in general.

Re: Shame Storm

#163

Post by manfredo » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 10:08 PM UTC

zozbot123 wrote: post #160

BryantD wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he did not say such a thing. I'm not specifically addressing Kavanaugh, I'm pointing out a flaw in your logic. You made a general assertion, which I'll quote again: "Defending oneself from an accusation inherently entails discrediting the accuser, to criticize defendants for doing so is essentially saying it should be socially unacceptable to defend oneself from an accusation." Did you mean that, or did you gener…

I would not say that the "inherently" in that comment should be read as a necessary condition, since some false accusations are the result of e.g. mistaken identity, that entails no blame on the accuser. However, it certainly is the case often enough to deserve mention, entirely aside from what the specifics of Kavanaugh's case might be.

Saying that the accuser mistook someone's identity is still discrediting them. It's selectively discrediting them, by specifically discrediting the part where the accuser claims it was the defendant that did the crime while not discrediting the fact that the crime took place. But it still is discrediting the accuser.

Re: Shame Storm

#164

Post by BryantD » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 10:21 PM UTC

manfredo wrote: post #161

BryantD wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he did not say such a thing. I'm not specifically addressing Kavanaugh, I'm pointing out a flaw in your logic. You made a general assertion, which I'll quote again: "Defending oneself from an accusation inherently entails discrediting the accuser, to criticize defendants for doing so is essentially saying it should be socially unacceptable to defend oneself from an accusation." Did you mean that, or did you gener…

Yes, I meant precisely what I wrote. Defending oneself entails discrediting the accuser. Knowingly lying, or insulting the accuser in a way unrelated to maintaining one's innocense is not necessary. But as you stated yourself, the subject at hand did neither of these things. How you made the leap from, "Defending oneself from an accusation inherently entails discrediting the accuser" to, "knowingly lying and needless…

> How you made the leap from, "Defending oneself from an accusation inherently entails discrediting the accuser" to, "knowingly lying and needlessly insulting people is okay" is a mystery to me.

Ah, I'm sorry that was unclear.

The word "discrediting" is ambiguous. It's sufficiently general so that it's hard to make a moral statement about it. You can discredit someone by pointing out flaws in their statements. You can discredit someone by lying about them. There are lots of ways to discredit people, so just saying that it's OK to discredit the accuser doesn't really imply any specific moral principle. It's not a useful statement.

Does that help?

Edit: whoa, crap, I missed something. I did not say "the subject at hand did neither of these things." I said "we have not established whether or not Kavanaugh was lying, and I'm not saying he was." Close one there!

Re: Shame Storm

#165

Post by dejawu » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 10:22 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…

> Short or low-information comments are discouraged; if your comment is short or an exact duplicate of something previously written (e.g. a common insult), it's blocked or you have to wait longer before posting it.

4chan tried this based on a script called Robot9000 (by Randall Munroe). Not to imply causation (since there are a ton of cultural factors as well), but that board is now known as the breeding ground of the incel and redpill movements.

I do think the R9K script itself is a good idea though.

Re: Shame Storm

#166

Post by Izkata » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 10:24 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #100

Memosyne wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe these tendencies exist because of a strong emotional attachment to personal identity. If you engineered a social system where people devalued personal identity, then I doubt these problems would be so invasive.

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

How so? Channers are all anonymous, so there isn't a public persona to shame in the first place.

Re: Shame Storm

#167

Post by manfredo » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 10:29 PM UTC

yongjik wrote: post #159

jerf wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stand in his place for a week and tell me that. To echo manfredo, if the only people we can nominate to the Supreme Court are people who can just calmly sit there while the absolute worst accusations possible are flung against them, we're not going to be nominating new justices any time soon (Democrat or Republican). Or, alternatively, we're going to get a very, very distorted set of justices who lack all emotional a…

> Stand in his place for a week and tell me that. Imagine going to the less well-off part of America and start a conversation like that. "Imagine you're accused of rape twenty years ago and you have to defend it in front of angry people." "So, if I fail, I go to jail?" "No, not really." "...Are they gonna beat me up?" "No." "Do I lose my job? My house? Will they take my daughter away for me being a rapist?" "No, none…

From my discussions, as well as from surveys conducted (remember, poorer less educated people were more likely to support his appointment), it actually resonated more with less well off demographics. True, for Kavanaugh the stigma of being seen as a rapist doesn't have much effect - his employment is guaranteed for life after all. But for a poor person it may greatly impede their ability to get employment, potentially even putting them on the streets. For the less well off, being seen as a rapist, is a lot more impactful than getting called names.

Re: Shame Storm

#168

Post by zozbot123 » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 10:37 PM UTC

all2 wrote: post #68

jerf wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"While systems can amplify or dampen certain behaviors" That is the topic I'm opening, yes. We're clearly amplifying it right now. How can that be changed?

HN lacks some features that allow (and focus) conversations in a single medium. At the very least, we could take notes from this interface for social interaction: things like 1) lack of notifications, for anything, 2) lack of PMs, 3) lack of any sort of 'personalized' stream of information. We have to pick and choose what we consume, rather than being spoon fed. Coming from the other side: what allows these storms to…

Come on. The Reddit user interface used to be quite similar to HN (it is obviously less so now), and Reddit has certainly seen its own share of detrimental "human flesh search engine" dynamics, if not outright shaming behavior - remember the whole "We Did It Reddit!" fiasco in connection with the Boston bombing?

Re: Shame Storm

#169

Post by dejawu » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 10:38 PM UTC

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…

Reddit's robin [0] experiment did this - the communities grew until they decided not to anymore. The stakes were a bit higher, you had to vote quickly or fall apart, but I think this could've made for a really novel way of organically growing healthy communities, and I wish they'd explored the idea more. Someday I'll revisit it and maybe implement my own, and see how it does.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/joinrobin/comments/6398yp/what_was_...

Re: Shame Storm

#170

Post by Izkata » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 10:51 PM UTC

zozbot123 wrote: post #7

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…

China's "human flesh search engine", with its attendant doxing and shaming culture, is perhaps even more famous than its social credit system - in fact, one of the points of the latter is to avoid the excesses of the former. There's nothing new here.

From what I understand, they're closer to old anonymous, doing things because it's interesting. Alongside the bad, there's plenty of stories out there of various HFSE reuniting long-lost loved ones, stopping animal abusers, etc.