Shame Storm • Hacker News Board

Re: Shame Storm

#91

Post by dang » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 7:44 PM UTC

hopefulengineer wrote: post #34

progressives have taken us back in time to the days of the inquisition where heretics must be removed from society. These beliefs have absolutely taken on a religious fervor James watson, the man who discovered DNA structure, has been excommunicated for saying intelligence could be genetic and that would ruin the equality movement so he had to be removed It reminds me of galileo and his imprisonment related to helioc…

Please don't take HN threads into generic ideological tangents. That leads to equal parts tedium and nastiness—just what we don't want here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Shame Storm

#92

Post by weberc2 » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 7:46 PM UTC

erikpukinskis wrote: post #83

busterarm wrote: post #9

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.

I think one of the biggest misconceptions that anti-mob people have is that there is no cost to letting people go un-shunned. 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…

> I think one of the biggest misconceptions that anti-mob people have is that there is no cost to letting people go un-shamed.

You're conflating "shaming" and "mobbing". Mobbing includes shaming, but it also includes violence, threats, harassment, or the facilitation thereof. We should oppose mobbing, but shaming serves a useful social function and you can be "anti-mob" and "pro-shaming"; however, the anti-mob group probably does oppose the new trend in slandering overtly innocent people and then mobbing (including shaming) them on the basis of the slander.

Re: Shame Storm

#93

Post by neonate » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 7:46 PM UTC

zozbot123 wrote: post #13

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…

I'd be curious to hear some mentioned, in case there are examples I missed.

Re: Shame Storm

#94

Post by harimau777 » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 7:47 PM UTC

pmarreck wrote: post #73

harimau777 wrote: post #54

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?

I do not support the right of religious believers to promote their unsubstantiated-at-all-by-the-evidence causes, such as promise rings to prevent teen pregnancy, or that an abortion of a 5 day old embryo is morally equivalent to the murder of an adult human. Things like that are rationally indefensible. In short, I cannot stand idly by while BS is being promulgated. The sphere of permitted discussion should mainly i…

Regardless of what you think the public sphere should include, restricting religious opinions from it is discrimination and should be condemned.

Re: Shame Storm

#95

Post by dang » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 7:48 PM UTC

pmarreck wrote: post #73

harimau777 wrote: post #54

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?

I do not support the right of religious believers to promote their unsubstantiated-at-all-by-the-evidence causes, such as promise rings to prevent teen pregnancy, or that an abortion of a 5 day old embryo is morally equivalent to the murder of an adult human. Things like that are rationally indefensible. In short, I cannot stand idly by while BS is being promulgated. The sphere of permitted discussion should mainly i…

Religious flamewar isn't allowed on HN. Please don't post like this here.

Re: Shame Storm

#96

Post by commandlinefan » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 7:48 PM UTC

agentultra wrote: post #64

So the author of this piece appears on a panel to defend a book by an author who had published another book called, Liberal Fascism [0]. This piece is supposed to make me feel sorry for her? Well I don't fully understand the entire context of this person's story but I do know something about being publicly shamed. When I was a kid in high school I had to suffer being called a f got every day. By every one. I had been…

The subject of the linked article wasn't forced to resign because he was accused (but not convicted) of sexual misconduct, but because he didn't immediately and passionately _condemn_ somebody else who was. If this can happen to him, it can happen to you or me - the only difference is that our reputations are, for the moment, inconsequential and not worth destroying.

Re: Shame Storm

#97

Post by sethrin » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 7:49 PM UTC

Symmetry wrote: post #74

sethrin wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should read more about Gallileo. He was wrong in many ways, and it's entirely likely that he was punished for his tendency to be a jerk as much as anything else. Actually, the analogy isn't half bad, come to think... http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smac...

It's not good that people who come up with important new scientific theories should be forced to recant if they're jerks. Seriously, the progress of civilization depends on unreasonable men. Galileo's ideas about planetary motion weren't perfect but they were the seeds of our present understanding of planetary motion. And really he was persecuted more for saying that the planets were mutable with weather and so forth…

That's really not a very accurate description of events, in any particular. In addition to the linked article, you may want to read Dolnick's The Clockwork Universe.

Re: Shame Storm

#98

Post by Memosyne » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 7:52 PM UTC

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…

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.

Re: Shame Storm

#99

Post by nardi » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 7:53 PM UTC

jf- wrote: post #89

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 can’t be engineered, it can only be enforced. There have to be rules against these kinds of storms and those rules have to have some sort of effect. Social media platforms have to be actively moderated. There is no alternative to this. Having rules and enforcers is how we deal with negative behaviour everywhere, because that is the only thing that works. People’s lives are meaningfully impacted by these things to…

You can’t have a rule against a storm, only a raindrop. Rules have to be enforced against individuals. And what rule would you make that could be enforced?

That isn’t to say you couldn’t have a storm response policy. But then how would you keep the storm from happening first?

Re: Shame Storm

#100

Post by nostrademons » Fri, Dec 14, 2018, 7:56 PM UTC

Memosyne wrote: post #98

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…

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.