81–90 of 247 posts
I think one of the biggest misconceptions that highly educated people have is to think that they are immune to the effects of an angry/unruly mob. As participant or as victim.
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…
We've explored so little of the design space.
If I had to hazard in extrapolating from only a few data points, it seems that shame-storming behaviour correlates with (a) how easily you can reshare without thinking and (b) how easily you can reshare without context.
It would be fun to brainstorm all the possibilities for how we could be communicating online differently. Here are a few stupid ideas I've thought of; I'm sure there are millions more and I'd love to hear yours:
* You have to wait at least 30 seconds before you can hit the reply or reshare button.
* 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.
* You must listen to your comment read back to you aloud before you can post it.
* Even when reshared, your comment is always presented together with, and close to, the content of the original source article so it's hard to ignore the source.
* You have to correctly answer a simple question about the article before posting a comment on it. A Norwegian newspaper tried this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14883842).
* After you've gone back and forth a couple of times with the same person, the only option presented to you is to make a voice call directly to that person. You can't just type text at them any more.
* Variant: after a thread gets long enough, you can't type text any more. You must record yourself speaking.
* Every comment must be approved by its parent. (If you never approve replies, then your threads aren't interesting to read, and maybe you get a reputation for never approving, so no one will bother to reply to you.)
I think one of the biggest misconceptions that highly educated people have is to think that they are immune to the effects of an angry/unruly mob. As participant or as victim.
There is much hand-wringing over the handful of people wrongly shunned, but many of the wringers give no thought at all to the victims who are forced out of their careers, families, and communities every day because the people around them refuse to consider the possibility that there is a wolf in their midst.
Nieces absent from Thanksgiving while their uncle sits at the table. Talented women leaving tech while their spiteful coworkers are promoted.
Should we allow abusers to hold power because there’s a shadow of a doubt that they might be innocent, thereby sending their victims to start over in a new city?
Outside of the court system, shouldn’t we try to hit a 1:1 ratio of wrongful excommunications to failures to excommunicate?
Or should it be 1:1,000,000 like the courts do? A million unpunished rapes for every wrongful conviction? A million women pushed out of their rightful career path for everyone one man who was wrongfully fired?
When the information doesn’t exist to make perfect decisions, how do we decide who takes up the burden of our mistakes?
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.
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…
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, you're in luck, because he was confirmed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We used to have a simple system for this--duelling. Having all of these people on Twitter and cable news draw on each other at high-noon...
I know you're being facetious, but dueling wasn't such a great thing for society. It gave tough people an advantage in life over smart or conscientious people. You wouldn't like living in a society where toughness won. It was one of Queen Victoria's great contributions to make dueling socially unacceptable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Hudson#Duel_and_disast...
I'd much rather roll the dice with duelling again than introduce some new, elaborate, and untested form of social engineering.
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…
In order to post a comment on Hacker News, you simply cannot avoid seeing hundreds of other words around it, dozens of comments. It is much harder to read and reply to a single comment out of context.
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…
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.
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…
Of course I’m willing to be proved wrong about that if anyone has an example of people collectively being good and self-moderating.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Behavior such as? Most people who I've seen criticize his behavior essentially boil down to criticizing him for not admitting guilt, or because he tried to discredit Ford - neither of which are valid points in my view. 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…
Behavior such as repeatedly making easily disprovable statements (which numerous past acquaintances who had no particular reason to otherwise make public statements about his nomination called out as blatant lies), and pugnaciously asking a Senator whether she ever gets black-out drunk. After starting his career in politics as a vicious partisan hack e.g. involved directly in a conspiracy to undermine Judiciary Commi…
> who sometimes shoved his penis in women’s faces,
Another allegation which he denies. As I predicted, the core complaint is that he denies the allegations made against him. This is effectively constructing a situation in which the accused is guilty of something no matter what. Either 1) the accused does not defend themselves and is guilty of the alleged crimes, or 2) the accused does defend themselves, but in the world view you've constructed this makes them guilty of hostility and disrespect.
> and demonstrated some contrition
Contrition for what? He denies said allegations. Again, when you get to the bottom of it this is essentially criticizing the fact that Kavanaugh maintained his innocence. This is what was so pernicious about the Kavanaugh hearings that bothered even me, a lifelong Democrat. The fact that merely trying to defend oneself against an allegations is grounds for negative character judgement is at odds with the core principles of justice.
> and sign of personal growth, I and many others would have some respect for it.
If going from a binge drinking teenager to Supreme Court nominee (let alone Justice) doesn't demonstrate personl growth I don't know what does. This is greater growth than most people on HN will likely achieve (myself included).
Update: It appears the above poster had since edited their comment. My response took a while to write, so it could be that their edit was made before my response was done. I urge commenters not to assume bad faith on their part.