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Shame Storm

firstthings.com

51–60 of 247 posts

Re: Shame Storm

#51
post #42

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…

Do you think that James Damore would have been better off had he apologized and groveled to the mob of shamers? Even after he lost his job? (which there was no chance of avoiding - as you say, he went against the CEO of "one of the most prominent companies in the world".) That seems rather implausible if you know how these mobs generally behave. Forbearance - of the sort you might expect from an individual who has been wronged and sought appropriate restitution - never happens, because it's not a stable equilibrium. What happens is that the "storm" eventually blows over naturally, but that's a rather different dynamic.

Re: Shame Storm

#52

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".

He was 100% right in speculating revenge on behalf of the Clintons in my opinion. It was a pointed reference to the accuser's lawyers, who kept her in the dark about the option of testifying privately. The lawyers had previously represented Bill Clinton. It's not a big leap, honestly.

Re: Shame Storm

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If allegation of a decades old crime at an unspecified date, time, and location, and with no corroborating evidence is enough to block a Supreme Court nomination then we're not going to be nominating new justices any time soon (Democrat or Republican).

His attitude while defending himself on the stand is the basis for which I would rescind his nomination. His behavior was not befitting of someone who is about to be conferred lifetime appointment to the highest court in the country. I don’t want him crafting laws and making decisions that impact huge groups of people.

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 affect or something.

Or, looking at it from another view point, there is this idea floating around (you're not the first place I've heard it from) that simultaneously, poorly-founded [1] accusations of rape are really, really terrible, like, the worst thing ever, more than sufficient to scotch a nomination to any serious office of the land... but at the same time, a person who is so accused of literally the worst thing ever should also have no reaction to this and be completely impassive in the face of these nominally terrible accusations.

Look, either it's that serious and it should be treated that seriously across the board, or it's not that serious at all, and it should be treated unseriously across the board. But if you try to have it both ways, the conclusion people are eventually going to come to is that it must not be serious. That's what's going to win out; are you sure you want that? Do you really want to say that the standard for reacting to being accused of serious crimes is that the accused should just wave the accusations away and be completely unaffected by them? Are you really asking for that to be the standard? Because if you think about it, I bet that's not what you want.

[1]: You want to consider them true, you want to consider them false, that's your business, but I'm very comfortable characterizing the accusations as very poorly founded either way.

Re: Shame Storm

#54
post #4

FYI, here's the agenda of these people: https://www.firstthings.com/about/ First Things is published by the Institute on Religion and Public Life, an interreligious, nonpartisan research and educational 501(c)(3) organization. The Institute was founded in 1989 by Richard John Neuhaus and his colleagues to confront the ideology of secularism, which insists that the public square must be “naked,” and that faith has no…

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

Re: Shame Storm

#55
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…

One does not simply 'engineer' a moral foundation. While the law of the land hints at what the morality of a people is, the people themselves are responsible for their behavior.

While systems can amplify or dampen certain behaviors, they cannot, without brutal authoritarianism, enforce behavior.

Re: Shame Storm

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment seems to woefully underimagine ways that public information can be used against you. Your public photos that are now just one in a large crowd are also subject to having your image deepfaked into revenge porn, used as a spam photo for bot account sign ups, scraped for facial recognition, found instantly by a background check seen by your employer, used to attach demographic info to your name in those shi…

The OP was saying that if shaming becomes common then being shamed can't hurt you relative to the general public, because most of them have also been shamed.

Yes, which fails to imagine the ways that preserved public info can be used to re-shame in the future. If new ways of using that info arise later, and your public info happens to be amenable to the new ways even if many other people aren’t, then it offers permanently-existing surface area for future possible shaming that singles you out in some way previously not anticipated.

Re: Shame Storm

#57
post #55
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…

One does not simply 'engineer' a moral foundation. While the law of the land hints at what the morality of a people is, the people themselves are responsible for their behavior. While systems can amplify or dampen certain behaviors, they cannot, without brutal authoritarianism, enforce behavior.

"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?

Re: Shame Storm

#58
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you think that James Damore would have been better off had he apologized and groveled to the mob of shamers? Even after he lost his job? (which there was no chance of avoiding - as you say, he went against the CEO of "one of the most prominent companies in the world".) That seems rather implausible if you know how these mobs generally behave. Forbearance - of the sort you might expect from an individual who has be…

Not sure if he would have been better off or not. I'm glad he didn't grovel; we shouldn't incentivize mobbing innocent people, especially under overtly false pretenses (though it's entirely unfair that the innocent party has to endure all of the consequences for doing what is right while the mobbers get off scot-free).

Re: Shame Storm

#59
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His attitude while defending himself on the stand is the basis for which I would rescind his nomination. His behavior was not befitting of someone who is about to be conferred lifetime appointment to the highest court in the country. I don’t want him crafting laws and making decisions that impact huge groups of people.

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…

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.

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