The Internet of Beefs • Hacker News Board

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#231

Post by egypturnash » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 3:16 AM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #191

pixl97 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our social connections have been replaced with commercial ones. Where at one point we socialized to relieve boredom and need, now we have never ending entertainment and those that would capitalize on selling it to us over everything else.

And, yet, here you are talking with other people all over the world for free. Someone older than me, of the hippie generation, once said to me "There were like three TV channels and they went off the air at 10pm. If you were still awake after that, there was nothing to do but sex and drugs." I strongly suspect the 24/7 availability of free entertainment, live online discussion, etc is a large contributing factor to t…

After a significant portion of my life spent online, I have kind of come to the conclusion that typing to other people is, in a lot of ways, a fundamentally different experience than talking to them.

It fills the same emotional needs just enough to make it hard to get up off your ass and put the effort into going out and finding people with common interests and making friends with some of them, but it does not provide anywhere near a full emotional diet.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#232

Post by DoreenMichele » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 3:20 AM UTC

fallous wrote: post #203

DoreenMichele wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The many articles I've seen in recent years related to the #MeToo movement and similar suggest to me that women are pretty routinely sexually assaulted for simply attending a rather wide variety of events, including simply having a job. (Keep in mind that doesn't mean raped -- it includes more minor offenses, like being felt up.) I was sexually assaulted as a child. I don't think I have been as an adult. I like keepi…

I certainly understand the attraction of a simplification of engagement and for decades I thought that was the true potential of the Internet (via usenet, IRC, later web forums, social networks, etc etc). I'm no longer convinced. The reason I'm no longer convinced is that such simplification carries with it a component of convenience that makes it awfully easy to isolate ourselves from those who may differ from our t…

I certainly understand the attraction of a simplification of engagement

Because of the context of what you are replying to, this comes awfully close to implying that women should politely endure routine sexual assault for some reason.

I assume that wasn't your intent. But I didn't engage with your comment earlier because I have no idea how to take your point seriously and respect your point of view without inadvertently implying myself "Why, you're right! Women shouldn't be so ridiculously picky about their personal welfare with regards to sexual matters!"

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#233

Post by woutr_be » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 3:26 AM UTC

tlb wrote: post #16

This framework helps me understand why prominent thinkers on Twitter get so much content-free hate in their replies. Most replies aren't even disagreements with the thing they're replying to. They're missiles in a beef war, against some perceived elite group. So it's not necessary to understand the claim and make a detailed refutation. They can just reply with a generic personal attack, and that keeps the culture war…

Maybe I used to follow the wrong people, but a lot of these prominent thinkers didn't really invite discussions, they just made constant statements, where if you didn't agree, the only thing you could do was write a short statement as to why.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#234

Post by woutr_be » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 3:32 AM UTC

pochamago wrote: post #61

I've always thought anonymous imageboards were excellent training grounds for how to deal with all of this. When there's no upvoting or ability to filter people by name, you have to learn how to deal with people who often truly are only posting to make you mad. There are two good responses, both of which are extremely difficult if you have no practice: ignoring it; engaging sincerely and with the assumption that the…

It's a good training ground to learn to control yourself for sure. But as soon as there's filtering and up- / down-voting, you'll quickly learn that none of that matters.

I tried to engage in some Reddit discussions regarding politics in my country, and as soon as you don't follow the general sentiment, you get downvoted and eventually banned. Even if you're absolutely sincere and have good arguments as to why you think like this, you'll just get labelled a troll for disagreeing with something. While it's very frustrating, it's also truly scary, they just end up creating their own echo chambers, only allowing people who agree with them to post or comment. Eventually this moves on to the real world where they'll assume everyone has the same opinion because they've been living in an echo chamber.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#235

Post by esfandia » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 3:38 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #198

mc3 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My initial thoughts when reading were cynical - along the lines of "this person is trying to look clever and sell freakonomic / pop-science type books, but are the statements and conclusions based in fact, likely to be correct or are they useful to me?". Since I can't answer I didn't read on.

Venkatesh has a very playful and idiosyncratic writing style - you see that in his other posts, like the Gervais Principle or the series or "premium mediocrity": https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-l... It's just his personality - I don't think it's a particular affection to try to sell more, although I do think a number of his readers are there…

> Rather, you read material like this for perspective. It's a way of training your brain to look at the same set of observations in an entirely different way. Then when you're faced with actual facts in your own life, you can apply the lens you just read about to it and see what the meaning of those facts is, and ideally shift rapidly between different perspectives to triangulate something approaching reality.

Wow, I think this last paragraph of yours manages to capture exactly what a philosophy or an ideology is for: perspectives to help create meaning.

My follow-up question then is: what makes for a "good" perspective? Can you judge it, to get back to the topic of this thread, by the number of mooks it enrolls?

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#236

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 3:40 AM UTC

egypturnash wrote: post #231

DoreenMichele wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, yet, here you are talking with other people all over the world for free. Someone older than me, of the hippie generation, once said to me "There were like three TV channels and they went off the air at 10pm. If you were still awake after that, there was nothing to do but sex and drugs." I strongly suspect the 24/7 availability of free entertainment, live online discussion, etc is a large contributing factor to t…

After a significant portion of my life spent online, I have kind of come to the conclusion that typing to other people is, in a lot of ways, a fundamentally different experience than talking to them. It fills the same emotional needs just enough to make it hard to get up off your ass and put the effort into going out and finding people with common interests and making friends with some of them, but it does not provid…

[deleted]

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#237

Post by hug » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 3:41 AM UTC

egypturnash wrote: post #231

DoreenMichele wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, yet, here you are talking with other people all over the world for free. Someone older than me, of the hippie generation, once said to me "There were like three TV channels and they went off the air at 10pm. If you were still awake after that, there was nothing to do but sex and drugs." I strongly suspect the 24/7 availability of free entertainment, live online discussion, etc is a large contributing factor to t…

After a significant portion of my life spent online, I have kind of come to the conclusion that typing to other people is, in a lot of ways, a fundamentally different experience than talking to them. It fills the same emotional needs just enough to make it hard to get up off your ass and put the effort into going out and finding people with common interests and making friends with some of them, but it does not provid…

I agree with you, but I also think it's worth pointing out that I feel like the inverse is also true.

'Typing to people' is different to talking to them, but it has its own very real and rich reward, that I feel is different to but overlaps with talking.

That overlap means that yes, sometimes my need for connection with other people can be sustained entirely by typing, but not forever.

Along the same lines, I do not get exactly the same reward from talking to people as I do typing, and I find that after several days without spending some time thinking and typing to other people, I itch to get back and just have a back and forth about something online.

Usually, I prefer this to be something that I and the person I'm talking to agree on, and we're plumbing the depths of shared experience, but sometimes to much chagrin it definitely is 'beef'.

Sometimes I wonder if this is because the sort of people I type to online are very different to most of the people I talk to offline, but I don't honestly think that explains the whole thing.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#238

Post by galimaufry » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 3:43 AM UTC

virtuous_signal wrote: post #19

Lammy wrote: post #12

This article resonates with me and my experiences online to a startling degree. Specifically: “We are not beefing endlessly because we do not desire peace or because we do not know how to engineer peace. We are beefing because we no longer know who we are, each of us individually, and collectively as a species.” I think we are seeing a genuine lack of strong family, social, and organizational ties among most people,…

This is spot on. I wonder if this exodus has resulted in people trying to make workplaces their "religious community"; but obviously people who happen to be at the same company don't have any reason to agree on important issues. So then the mission becomes trying to make everyone at work care about and agree on .

I strongly suspect that the cause of isolation is that we don't treat our workplaces as our community anymore.

My parents' community all met their spouses and friends at work, whereas people of my age seem to find something unprofessional about this. And I believe that old-fashioned civic organizations like the Elks were built from a tangle of professional relationships.

And realistically, where are you going to find a stronger community than among the people with whom you spend 40 hours a week?

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#239

Post by stallmanite » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 3:53 AM UTC

aristophenes wrote: post #117

nostromo wrote: post #3

At some point people will realize that Twitter doesn't matter. The sooner that happens the better. For whatever reason, our elites and media are convinced Twitter is very important . Nothing is worse than getting criticized by the peanut gallery. Twitter can end careers, cancel television shows, bring down elected officials. That power quickly turned from, "complain about lost baggage on Twitter and get an airline ti…

Twitter is amazing. I didn't get into it until a couple years ago, I was missing so much. Many of the most influential, intelligent, thoughtful people post what they think or are interested in. In the past, unless they were a journalist, you'd have to wait for someone to write a book, and then buy it. Now you can pick and choose from the most amazing people of the world, and actually interact with them. I kind of can…

I’m a long-time Twitter “not-getter” but this is well-articulated and has made me reconsider.

Re: The Internet of Beefs

#240

Post by AgentME » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 3:57 AM UTC

CommieBobDole wrote: post #2

This is an excellent analysis of the state of the modern internet, though I don't entirely agree with his diagnosis of the cause; I think it's more down to two main things: 1. We are all, at heart, covetous xenophobic apes, and we've been doing the same basic thing (arbitrarily define an in-group and an out-group and proceed to wage total war on the out-group) since before we were even human. This is just the latest…

I think your post is a good way to split up some of the ideas in the article.

I really think #2 is a good point, but I get frustrated at many arguments for #1. People are emotional beings and will seek out fights, but that doesn't mean all fights are arbitrary. People that talk too long about the Culture War on a meta level, without ever considering specifics and painting it all as pointlessly arbitrary, strike me like "both sides are the same"-type centrists, lacking any interesting positions or even understanding, and are just focused on feeling superior to both sides.

Maybe the issue is I see concerns that we can address bigotry in media and harassment in other environments as the core of the "Culture War", and the worst instances of "cancel culture"[0] as weird outliers to it that can be fixed, but some others think of the worst instances of cancel culture as what the Culture War is about, and the saner conversations are weird unimportant outliers. But as long as we're taking the hundred-foot view of talking vaguely about "Culture War" and treating it as arbitrary arguments, we're not going to realize we're not even talking about the same thing, and it's just posturing around how we already felt about the phrase.

[0] When I refer to the worst instances of cancel culture, I'm not referring to cases of celebrities just not getting renewed after publicly being bigots, but the cases where the backlash gets personal and mismatched for the issue. ContraPoint's video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjMPJVmXxV8 talks about the sort of thing I'm referring to.