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Shame Storm

firstthings.com

171–180 of 247 posts

Re: Shame Storm

#171

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.

Well there was one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrick_Garland A bipartisan moderate that everyone loved, recommended by both parties, poised to take the nomination, then blocked for years by the Republican party just as a total partisan f-you to Obama.

> blocked for years

He was nominated on the 16th of March 2016; the election was on the eighth of November of the same year, and his nomination expired on the third of January 2017, less than a year later. No matter how you slice that, his nomination to the Supreme Court wasn't 'blocked for years.'

Re: Shame Storm

#172
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't everyone support the idea that every philosophy and religious belief has the right to participate in the public sphere?

No. Because Nazis.

To quote:

> When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.

The best way to deal with them is not to turn them into a figurative martyr and make people wonder what you're trying to hide, but to convince others their ideology is stupid by putting it on display and publicly rebutting it. You may even convince them to change their ways, rather than just build up the anger and resentment.

Re: Shame Storm

#173
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…

> You must listen to your comment read back to you aloud before you can post it.

https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/youtube-adds-read-comment-alo...

Re: Shame Storm

#174
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem with Kavanaugh isn't what he did as a drunken teenager. It's what he did as a sober adult - his angry, petulant outbursts at senators . A Supreme Court seat isn't just a question of experience or background. It's a question of temperament. Even if he was completely innocent (and being too drunk to remember or too arrogant to think it important isn't the same as innocent), he should have been completely ca…

Again: It is now objective fact that at least four of his accusers were lying, so we're legitimately evaluating how someone should react when being questioned surrounding false sexual assault and rape allegations after being in the media spotlight for weeks.

Many of these senators opposed his nomination prior to his name even being selected, yet you're expecting him to sit back non-chalantly as senators try to trick him into acknowledging maybe he was just too drunk to remember the raping. Him getting a little testy after weeks of the most intense character assassination I've ever seen is not unreasonable.

> Think of it another way - it's a job interview. If you were crying and screaming about a conspiracy of your interviewers, would you get hired for any other job?

This isn't a job interview, and again: at least four objectively false accusers. If there wasn't any planning involved, then at least four people acted independently to make very conveniently timed false accusations. Both conclusions seem implausible to me, yet logically one must be true.

> The GOP should have pulled him and put forward another candidate, one without that controversy.

It is now political reality that if the stakes are high enough, especially on the Republican side, you can expect false sexual assault allegations. Again: this is factual. It happened here, and it can happen again.

Dropping candidates due to "controversy" stemming directly from uncorroborated sexual assault allegations would only give more power to false accusers. Maybe we can come up with a standard of how we expect people to respond when the mainstream media and political left are openly labeling you as a "potential gang rapist" for weeks, but until then, I can only judge him based on how I'd expect a potential SC justice (and human being) to act in such a difficult situation.

Re: Shame Storm

#175
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dueling implies that someone who is _better at one thing_ (hurting others) is inherently Right. It also means that someone who is sufficiently good at such things can act as a bully. Dueling introduces personal risk for libelous claims, but it _also_ introduces the same risk for those who are making true claims. People already fear the people that hurt them; giving them a legally supported way of hurting them even mo…

> Dueling implies that someone who is _better at one thing_ (hurting others) is inherently Right I don't think it does. Revisit the story of Jeffrey Hudson, and how winning a duel changed his life. What it does imply is some personal risk in making unsubstantiated claims against people. Try looking at the glass as half-full. Under the present system, true claims are suppressed well enough by the pay-to-play nature of…

From all I know about past press, it was full of manufactured controversies. It also fuelled wars.

The notion of journalistic objectivity was not even popular.

Re: Shame Storm

#176
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rather, 4channers are very adept at heaping shame on other people. They might avoid the return fire by virtue of being anonymous, but it doesn't actually solve the problem of shame storms, just turns it into asymmetric warfare.

Re: Shame Storm

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dunno. It seems plausible to me, but there are a lot of potentially conflating factors.

Re: Shame Storm

#178
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well there was one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrick_Garland A bipartisan moderate that everyone loved, recommended by both parties, poised to take the nomination, then blocked for years by the Republican party just as a total partisan f-you to Obama.

> blocked for years He was nominated on the 16th of March 2016; the election was on the eighth of November of the same year, and his nomination expired on the third of January 2017, less than a year later. No matter how you slice that, his nomination to the Supreme Court wasn't 'blocked for years.'

Whoops, you're right. I got that bit wrong.

Re: Shame Storm

#179
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…

> * You have to wait at least 30 seconds before you can hit the reply or reshare button.

I think there should be more and longer delays:

* a one minute delay before you can enter text into the reply box.

* a half-hour (or longer) delay before any comment/post/reply goes online. During that time you're free to edit or delete (but there must be at least a 5 minute delay after your last edit).

The idea is try to let any initial impulse of outrage pass before anything can be said, to force people to put more time into what they say, and lower velocity to keep things from snowballing out of control.

Re: Shame Storm

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

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