I think this is a good example of how pro-privacy arguments should be framed. It is takes the varied aspects and complex implications of tracking users across the web (or even in the real world), and distills it down into an easy to understand concept.
When you think privacy of in in the terms of 'social cooling', or consider things like China's 'social credit' system, I can't help be think we are much closer to the world depicted in the last season of Westworld than we might want to admit.
bonestamp2 1301 days ago [-]
Agreed. I think the audience matters too -- different messages appeal to different people.
My dad is one of those old school guys who thinks law enforcement can do no wrong and nobody needs to hide anything unless they're doing something wrong. Even if that were true and I think it is true that many law enforcement personnel are trying to do good, that doesn't always mean the results will always reflect their intentions. When the sample size of facts is too small, as is often the case with mass collection, it's too easy for your sample to get mixed up with someone else's. Maybe your phone is the only other phone in the area when a murder is committed. That doesn't mean you did it, but it sure makes you look like the only suspect.
I was never able to gain an inch on his argument until I asked him why he has curtains on his living room window. I mean, it faces North, so there's no need to block intense sunlight, yet he closes them every night when he's sitting there reading a book or watching TV. Why? He's not doing anything illegal, yet he still doesn't want people watching him. He said he would not be ok with the Police standing at his window all night watching him. That's when he finally understood that digital privacy is not just for criminals, but for everyone who wants to exist in a peaceful state and not a police state.
542354234235 1301 days ago [-]
> I was never able to gain an inch on his argument until I asked him why he has curtains on his living room window.
I'm not doing anything wrong, but I still close the door when I take a dump. The idea that someone wanting privacy means it is nefarious or wrong is ridiculous.
nearbuy 1300 days ago [-]
I never found this type of argument satisfying. It's more of an appeal to emotion than a rational reason.
In our culture we feel deep embarrassment if someone sees us using the toilet, but this is not universal across people and cultures, and honestly, it shouldn't be embarrassing. There's nothing inherently wrong with pooping. We irrationally feel embarrassment when we shouldn't have to.
This argument doesn't show any negative consequences of invasion of privacy. It's also not clear how it extrapolates to situations that don't involve toilets or nudity. If the problem is embarrassment, and people don't feel embarrassed that Facebook collects data, does that make it okay?
Obviously there are other arguments for privacy that do show potential harm. I find these more compelling.
mannykannot 1300 days ago [-]
> It's more of an appeal to emotion than a rational reason.
It sounds more respectable if you call it an 'intuition pump'. Whether or not it is rational to want to defecate privately, this point may lead some fraction of those whose mind was previously made up to reconsider their position. In those cases, it can be the beginning of a conversation.
nearbuy 1300 days ago [-]
I suppose it might have value if it causes closed-minded people to be more open-minded.
n4r9 1300 days ago [-]
It's not just embarrassment. It's the loss of dignity that comes from having no control over who is allowed in your own personal space.
nearbuy 1300 days ago [-]
What does "loss of dignity" mean in this context? How does it differ from embarrassment? Why does being seen pooping cause it?
I'm not arguing, I'm just not sure what you mean.
n4r9 1300 days ago [-]
Embarrassment is an emotional state which sometimes occurs when the image that we seek to project is undermined. It's painful, but usually temporary. By loss of dignity, I mean that an individual is not being respected if they are not permitted any control over their person space. Humans seem to naturally require some degree of control over what may be witnessed by others and what is theirs alone.
nearbuy 1299 days ago [-]
Could you say it's a feeling of powerlessness?
Could we perhaps group together embarrassment, loss of dignity and shame and summarize the point as follows?
"Invasions of privacy cause psychological harm."
n4r9 1299 days ago [-]
Yes, psychological harm is one of the most powerful arguments against privacy invasion as I see it. The other being the potential for social or even physical harm, i.e. misuse of that data by people who are able to gain access to it.
TheOtherHobbes 1300 days ago [-]
It doesn't matter what it means. What matters is that it exists, and it should be respected.
Otherwise your argument becomes "I don't understand what these things are or why people care about them, and therefore perhaps they don't matter."
And that's not a strong argument.
nearbuy 1299 days ago [-]
Of course it matters. If the parent comment had said, "it's the loss of foobar that comes from having no control...", would you know what their argument is? Or that foobar exists? Or that foobar should be respected? Or that you lose foobar when you're seen on the toilet?
It's not possible to understand the parent comment without knowing what dignity is.
> Otherwise your argument becomes "I don't understand what these things are or why people care about them, and therefore perhaps they don't matter."
What argument? I literally said, "I'm not arguing, I'm just not sure what you mean." I was just asking for clarification. I haven't denied anything in the parent comment.
atoav 1300 days ago [-]
> It's more of an appeal to emotion than a rational reason.
But that is precisely the rational reason. In a free society you want people to act freely. To be able to act freely it helps tremendously to not be under constant surveillance by authorities, powerful actors and/or personal and political enemies. If one happens to have the same cultural background or political ideas as all those on the other side and one is generally a careless nature it helps in not feeling threatened by that surveillance.
The new thing digital surveillance brought is the ability to automate and for search things that happened once. Where in communist Germany the state had to have a giant apparatus that would break into your flat and install microphones, have people constantly following you around and listening in on every word you said. The impact this has on a free exchange of ideas is quite obvious, isn't it? These things have become far less resource intensive in the age of the web.
And if you now say: "Yeah but they were communists" — that is the point. If you are hoping those in power will be respectful because your values (currently) align with theirs; or because your information is (currently) more useful to them when not disclosed to your enemies — then this is a very optimistic view of the world. But things can change, and not all have that sense of optimism.
Not having to think about whether somebody will knock your door with state police in a decade because of something you wrote online is the reason why privacy exist. Not having to censor yourself because you are afraid those fringe lunatics on the opposite political side will destroy your life is the reason why privacy exists. Not having to censor yourself because your violent husband reads everything you wrote is the reason why privacy exists.
So maybe you can read this as: Power that sees what you do can (and does) change how you act, even if they don't come after you. Not having them see you is a good way of not having to change.
nearbuy 1300 days ago [-]
>> It's more of an appeal to emotion than a rational reason.
> But that is precisely the rational reason.
I'm not following your reasoning here. You list several logical reasons why digital privacy is important (it protects us from nefarious governments, it protects us from violent spouses, etc.). What does this have to do with an irrational embarrassment over pooping?
camehere2saydis 1300 days ago [-]
Freedom of expression includes the freedom to be irrationally embarrassed about anything, or indeed irrational about anything at all. As long as you're not hurting anyone I guess.
atoav 1300 days ago [-]
The rational argument is: we don't want to live in a society where the private is potentially intruded by other outside actors, because in our notion of liberty the individual shall be able to live a life without having to fear these intrusions.
Whether this fear is rational doesn't matter. Whether these intrusions are never actually carried out and always only remain a faint possibility, a story the actors make you believe doesn't matter.
znpy 1300 days ago [-]
> I never found this type of argument satisfying. It's more of an appeal to emotion than a rational reason.
John Oliver used a similar tactic when speaking about Edward Snowden and the Patrioct Act. Instead of framing it about rights, pricacy and stuff, he talkes about dick picks. It kinda worked? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEVlyP4_11M
pcmaffey 1300 days ago [-]
There are sanitary reasons for closing the door while pooping.
triyambakam 1292 days ago [-]
I thought we feel embarrassed pooping because of our animal instincts.
fraktl 1300 days ago [-]
We shouldn't do many things but we do. If I feel embarrassed, it means I am vulnerable. I want to keep it to myself and I have the right to feel embarrassed, despite it being illogical. Humans aren't perfectly logical beings. If we were, there would be no discussions like this one.
nearbuy 1300 days ago [-]
Sure, I don't want to embarrass people. We should try to accommodate people's feelings.
But I don't think it's the strong argument in favour of privacy that we want to make, because:
1. We do give people privacy in the bathroom. The debate is over the data social media companies collect. If people aren't generally embarrassed that Facebook collects data about what they post on Facebook, how does it relate to being embarrassed to be seen on the toilet?
2. Do we always have to accommodate irrational feelings? What about people who are easily offended by things that things that most would consider non-offensive? Is it immoral for a child to dress as a clown on halloween given that some people have coulrophobia? If you're arguing with someone who believes law enforcement should have access to people's social media and you bring up that stuff posted on social media could be embarrassing, the obvious response is, "Well, too bad. Investigating crimes is more important."
acephal 1300 days ago [-]
We wouldn't be living things
greggman3 1300 days ago [-]
My dad doesn't close the door when he take a dump. That's the way he was raised and so that's how he does it.
notriddle 1300 days ago [-]
That's not really the same thing. I close the door to the toilet because other people don't want to see it. I close the blinds when reading a book because they do want to see it.
ekanes 1301 days ago [-]
While crass, that's a great way to put it. Why can't I just want my conversations to be private because eavesdropping without cause is icky. Just like in person.
dariosalvi78 1300 days ago [-]
that would be a nice way to get spies out of our data: flood them with pictures of our dumps :)
malandrew 1300 days ago [-]
Any sufficiently advanced noise is indistinguishable from signal.
(... not saying dumps are advanced noise, but this is on the right track. Don't hide the needle. Produce more haystack)
ricksharp 1300 days ago [-]
Interesting.
So instead of an ad blocker, we could have background bots in our browser visiting random urls and clicking on every ad in sight (of course it would need to mimic human UI input).
I wonder what affect that would have.
Larrikin 1300 days ago [-]
The only legitimate ad blocker that has been banned from the chrome store was ad nauseum. It was a thin wrapper over ublock that a click signal to every single ad. You could adjust the intensity (no clicks, some clicks, all), but that was where Google drew the line.
visarga 1300 days ago [-]
Be careful not to get your Google account banned with this.
I went to a debate once, in which the former head of GCHQ (British equivalent of the NSA) argued that because agents weren't literally listening to people's phone calls, like the Stazi did, mass digital surveillance is fine. And unfortunately for many people this argument works. Human eavesdropping is obviously a
problem at a viceral level, because somebody you don't know listening to you is frightening. The fact that digital surveillance gives power to its possessor just as much as human surveillance did is hard to get across.
class4behavior 1300 days ago [-]
Privacy is about control and power over your own existence and choices—just that its impact is usually long-term and most profound on a societal level but it starts at the most trivial aspects of life, like being able to sleep in safe, quiet place without any fear. So if data aggregation about you is automated, you still lose that control.
When an employer, for instance, is able to request data aggregation services for a break down about your entire life without or with forced consent from you, or able to monitor and analyze every step of yours during working hours, it's dehumanizing.
Similarly, it doesn't matter whether those with access to data regarding you have only good intentions. It may be pleasing to have a store know everything you like and need right in the moment, you still should be able to walk in and out (pseudo-)anonymously when you wish to.
Same with the state. We say not to talk to the police. In trials the determination what evidence can be submitted is always an important step. So why should the police, prosecution, intelligence agencies, or any other entity be able to access or collect data about you and evaluate it without due process?
TheOtherHobbes 1300 days ago [-]
This is hilariously cynical because GCHQ and the other letter agencies have had automated listening, recording, and analysis systems in place for decades.
Privacy is simple. The "watcher" always without exception has a massive power imbalance in their favor. The first and often only line of defense against that power imbalance is the right to privacy.
smolder 1301 days ago [-]
Right. Apart from the sci-fi tropes, the extreme drama, and aesthetics, it's a spitting image. A great deal of effort is quietly spent on social control, keeping things as they are, and extracting value from people-as-cows, both here and there. Any technology in a position to add robustness to that system, to reduce its upkeep effort, or improve its efficiency at generating wealth for the privileged is likely to succeed, so it's reasonable to think some of the not-yet-here but possible aspects their world will make it to ours in time.
Sometimes I think that authors who see patterns and make reasonable but dire predictions about where society is going actually end up providing a game plan to career oppressors.
jawarner 1301 days ago [-]
People-as-cows, huh? What does that mean to you?
smolder 1301 days ago [-]
It's an analogy. Personally, I think human lives have intrinsic value. I want my species not just to survive but to prosper as much as possible for as long as possible.
To answer your question, people aren't always seen as intrinsically valuable, nor their suffering meaningful. In the wrong context, corporations, congregations, and other populations are only valued for what they produce, like how cows are valued (and raised) for their milk and meat.
chordalkeyboard 1301 days ago [-]
Probably a reference to the individual user as an member of an aggregate “herd” that produces value for the social media platform from the perspective of the business.
pixl97 1301 days ago [-]
There are also deeper potential meanings, though the OP did clarify some.
Cattle are products on a farm. They have purposes. A few bulls are left for breeding, the rest are gelded. Some cows are for milk. Others are fattened up as much as possible.
But all end up in the slaughterhouse. Anyone that steps out of line causes problems before that time may find themselves culled from the herd.
The purpose of the system is not to make cows happy, or meet cow needs. It's to produce as much economic product as possible.
082349872349872 1300 days ago [-]
Animal Farm uses the farm metaphor for a reason.
8bitsrule 1300 days ago [-]
To me it means, phone-as-ear-tag.
bogwog 1301 days ago [-]
Yes, this was great. I think the slogans "Privacy is the right to be imperfect" and "Privacy is the right to be human" are both great, relatable, non-controversial, and easy to understand.
zajio1am 1301 days ago [-]
> "Privacy is the right to be human" are both great, relatable, non-controversial, and easy to understand.
And misleading. Privacy in private interactions (personal or closed groups) is basic human right. But in public interactions (public space or open groups) the concept of privacy is much more problematic. One can argue for less accountability for social progress, another for more accountability to weed-out bad actors.
Seems to me that using word 'privacy' for both of these different concepts is source of confusion. Perhaps we should limit term 'privacy' for private interactions and use some other (like 'non-accountability') for public ones.
matheusmoreira 1300 days ago [-]
> But in public interactions (public space or open groups) the concept of privacy is much more problematic.
I don't see what's so problematic. If someone is in public, they are exposed and obviously don't have any privacy. Same logic applies to data people publish on the internet. People can attempt to create some privacy for themselves in these contexts but it's not really a violation or invasion if some stranger shows up and witnesses things they weren't supposed to.
It's completely different from someone's house or computer. These are our spaces and we have complete control over them. So someone installing sensors such as microphones and cameras inside our own homes is a massive violation of our rights. Everybody understands this. It's offensive when the state does it even when warranted. So it is also not acceptable for mere corporations to turn on our microphones in order to listen to keywords or some other surveillance capitalism bullshit.
darkerside 1299 days ago [-]
> If someone is in public, they are exposed and obviously don't have any privacy
Rights to wear clothes. Rights to not speak to anyone they don't want to. Rights against unreasonable search. These are all privacy related, and while we give some up to be a part of society, we retain some as well. Looking at this as black and white (on either side) is an obstacle to finding a sustainable and constructive path forward.
joe_the_user 1300 days ago [-]
Considering we're see "social heating" if not "social fire" all around us, I'm not sure this is informs people correctly.
My local Facebook group seethes with an angry discussion just below threats of actual violence - and the actual violence was on display only a short time ago when Back The Blue physically assaulted a black lives matter demonstration (in a smallish city where "BLM" is just earnest liberals as you'd expect). And the miscreants were readily identifiable by Facebook (which hurt their business if nothing else but still basically weren't all that bothered by the situation).
Another thing about the heated local-group arguments is that few people have a good idea how unprivate their situation really is. The paranoia of Bill Gates "microchipping" people is a cartoonish example but there's a vast group people very concerned with privacy but having close to no understanding of what it actually involves (or how much they don't have).
If anything, the noxious effect of massive collection is most evidenced by micro-marketing of a variety of crazed ideas to those most susceptible to them - and employers and landlords being able to harass their own employees for particular things they object to (but lets a lot of things through, and business owners have less to worry about).
NiloCK 1300 days ago [-]
I believe that social cooling is a thing, and I also believe that the observations you're making are legitimate. Three points that might reconcile these ideas:
1) social cooling is a long-term, slow-burn, bring-pot-to-boil-so-slowly-the-frogs-don't-notice problem. Pointing out some social heat to discredit it is analogous to people discrediting global warming because they've experienced an unseasonable cold snap in their town.
2) By your own description, there are knowledge gaps inside the "social fire" crowd - they don't understand (potential, future) consequences like housing discrimination, work prospects, etc. I don't think it will take more than one generation for these realities to become common knowledge.
3) Finally, people who consider themselves hopelessly marginalized will be susceptible to 'social fire'. People who don't have anything to lose are prone to this (eg, what factors go into someone's decision to get on board with looting?). More solidly situated members of the public, with reputations (salaries, ongoing business concerns, etc) at stake, are likely to be more careful.
ptg473 1301 days ago [-]
this is the kind of privacy discourse I am interested in. Whether an individual can find my ssn, location, credit cards, or whatever personal information is not really what I am thinking about when I think about “protecting my privacy” but rather reducing my data emissions that compose these ratings. in my experience it’s hard to get this across to people who are not familiar though, always get the “I have nothing to hide :) what are you trying to hide?” response. Will try this “social cooling” framework next time. maybe a little less daunting as an entry point than “surveillance capitalism”
zwaps 1301 days ago [-]
I never understood this. Economics 101 or 102 maybe tells us that our consumer welfare will be reduced if firms have less uncertainty about how much they can extract from us. You can make this argument more sophisticated in networks, regarding ads, regarding quality and what have you. But the basic case should be enough to convince you that amazon knowing every detail about you is not going to help you. At all.
So of course we have something to hide.
sjy 1300 days ago [-]
What Economics 101 or 102 principles are you referring to? I Googled your comment and found this 2019 research paper [1] that seems to support it, but I would have thought the Economics 101 take is more aligned with what companies tell us – more information about consumer desires allows firms to sell us products that we like more at lower cost, and competition means that the savings eventually get passed onto us rather than captured in permanently higher profits.
Essentially, a sale contract can be written in many ways, but one can show the following generally for (more or less) all such contracts: to account for the fact that the firm is missing information about the counterparty, you, it will have to pay what is referred to as "information rent" to at least some customers. The firm ends up in a "second best" outcome merely because it does not possess all information about its customers. The difference, however, is "rent" that accrues to at least some customers. That is, you, the customer, can expect to pay less for things you care about. This in particular occurs when the contract is simply a single "price". With a price, you have to find the optimum between serving many customers and selling for high prices.
One can show that without enough information, the firm can not really do better than setting a single price, which leaves rents to the consumer lest demand is lost.
In contrast, if you have full information, you can construct pricing schemes that fully extract all surplus from the consumer. You can, in essence, get higher prices without losing customers. Many pricing schemes today are trying to use more information to approximate that situation (for example auctions, anything with subscriptions, fixed components, packages etc.). It is why firms like Amazon and Google hire a lot of Economics PhDs and Game Theorists.
You will also notice that many products are pushing toward such pricing models. This is not by accident.
So, your contention is half right and half wrong. In the greater scheme of things, full information is often (but not always) efficient for total welfare. However, in such situation total welfare also may accrue entirely to firms. That means higher profits, first, and higher costs for the consumer second.
In effect, you will pay more if you are more known.
It then depends on your faith in the fairness of the ownership and distributional properties of our capitalist systems, as well as the efficiency of the markets in question (e.g. competition), whether the increased profits are eventually redistributed to you, the consumer.
It seems to me that in many of the markets in question, even the description of oligopoly would be rather charitable. In that case, latter parts of your post do not seem likely.
Edit: Since you asked for the principles. The first iteration of this you may come across is called price discrimination. At that stage, it's not about information, but you can make that link in your head quite easily: The ability to set different prices, depends of course crucially on what you know.
Next, you may hear about auctions or contract theory, where such problems are tackled explicitly. Switching the roles, you may hear about principal agent problems, where a similar (really the same thing) occurs. For full generality, you may want to read into Mechanism Design. Tillman Borgers has a great book which used to be available free as PDF and you can probably still find it. If you are interested in questions such as: "What can we say generally about any sort of sales contract", then this is a good place to start. Needs some math though.
blaser-waffle 1300 days ago [-]
> It is why firms like Amazon and Google hire a lot of Economics PhDs and Game Theorists. You will also notice that many products are pushing toward such pricing models. This is not by accident.
My dad has a Ph.D in Econ from an Ivy League institution, and lives near-ish to a few FAANGs. He's retired but gets headhunter emails from them consistently.
oopsiforgot7 1301 days ago [-]
It is enough in the present, but I'm not sure that will be enough in the future. People have always been distrustful of faraway strangers hiding their faces in hoodies and sunglasses. Similarly for a good credit score you need a history of taking and paying off loans.
You may need a good life on display rather than just an absence of bad things.
OpticalWindows 1297 days ago [-]
> When you think privacy of in in the terms of 'social cooling', or consider things like China's 'social credit' system, I can't help be think we are much closer to the world depicted in the last season of Westworld than we might want to admit.
We were 'almost' there 20 years ago. We are firmly near Westworld (everything outside of androids).
jondubois 1300 days ago [-]
I was thinking more about the Black Mirror episode 'Nosedive'.
woeirua 1301 days ago [-]
If there's anything that gives me hope that we can avoid a dystopian future driven by social media, it's that Deep-learning / AI is being used to cheaply create realistic forgeries of just about everything: profile pictures, text, profiles, voice recordings, etc.
Within the next 10 years, and maybe much sooner, the vast majority of content on FB/Twitter/Reddit/LinkedIn will be completely fake. The "people" on those networks will be fake as well. Sure there are bots today, but they're not nearly as good as what I'm talking about, and they don't exist at the same scale. Once that happens, the value of those networks will rapidly deteriorate as people will seek out more authentic experiences with real people.
IMO, there's a multibillion dollar company waiting to be founded to provide authenticity verification services for humans online.
floatrock 1301 days ago [-]
My family grew up behind the iron curtain. At a family event once I heard someone tell a story that I think has been the most accurate prediction of the last few years (if anyone knows the actual interview event, please tell me more so I can get the exact wording, this is all paraphrasing from childhood memories).
A western reporter travelled to the other side of the iron curtain once and was doing what he thought would be an easy west-is-great gotcha-style interview. He asked someone over there, "How do you even know what's going on in your country if your media is so tightly controlled?" Think Chernobyl-levels of tight-lipped ministry-of-information-approved newspapers.
The easterner replied, "Oh, we're better informed than you guys. You see, the difference is we know what we're reading is all propaganda, so we try to piece together the truth from all the sources and from what isn't said. You in the west don't realize you're reading propaganda."
I've been thinking about this more and more the last few years seeing how media bubbles have polarized, fragmented, and destabilized everyone and everything. God help us when cheap ubiquitous deepfakes industrialize the dissemination of perfectly-tailored engineered narratives.
DanielleMolloy 1301 days ago [-]
I’ve heard this story too
when growing up. I belong to one of the last generations born in the German Democratic Republic. A quite prominent element of our History and German lessons in the 2000s was critical reading of historic news and caricatures, we did these analyses in exams up to A-levels. Propaganda was a big topic, not only when learning about the Third Reich. One reason certainly was that all our teachers spent most of their lives in the GDR system.
I’ve been wondering whether teachers who grew up on the other side of the curtain put a similar emphasis on the topic of propaganda, especially after social media uncovered lots of gullibility in the general public and a for me very difficult-to-understand trust in anything as long as it is written down somewhere, often not even looking at the source. Political effects of eastern german brain drain aside, one important difference between people in the former western and eastern parts of Germany up until today is how much they trust media and institutions like the church.
mturmon 1301 days ago [-]
I find this unpersuasive.
The level of control/conformity on canonical Western media was such that, for most topics of daily news, thinking about the bias of the reporter was not a first-order concern.
For some topics (let's say, hot-button US-vs-USSR things, or race issues in the US), the bias of the source was of course important, anywhere.
But for, say, reporting inflation, unemployment, or the wheat harvest, whether NBC news or the Washington Post was biased wasn't critical in the same way it would have been in the USSR.
Basically, my argument is that the difference in degree is still a worthwhile difference.
hindsightbias 1300 days ago [-]
While a segment of HN commenters could go on for hours about U-3 or U-6 unemployment numbers, the politicization of such, there is no real difference with most media consumers. Truth largely settles along a binary choice of the mainstream alternatives. Within those strains, views are very self-congruent. Perhaps that’s coincidence, or there are only two real truths, but I’ll defer to PG’s writings on that.
The real difference is that those in the east were predisposed to be suspicious, whereas in the west that disposition or curiousity is not a thing.
blaser-waffle 1300 days ago [-]
There are plenty of real truths, it's not strictly binary.
But it's in Pepsi's and Coke's best interest to have you think it's only those two.
elgfare 1300 days ago [-]
Bias can be reflected in which stats are reported at all. There's also the framing of the numbers and the conclusions stated or implied.
Ah but universal cynicism and nihilism is also a form of control. When the very idea of objective truth has been destroyed, this makes the job of authoritarians easier, not harder.
floatrock 1300 days ago [-]
The point isn't to be a cynic and a nihlist, it's to become a skeptic and to be mentally trained to always read between the lines. "Critical thinking" as they said in grade school.
The cliche "if you're not paying for it, you're the product" is just the tech nerd's version of "if you don't know who the fish at the table is, you're the fish."
Folks behind the iron curtain got used to that mentality over a few decades in a time when information flowed slowly through newspapers, radio, and early TV... we're now being forced to reckon with these tricks over the course of a few years while moving at the speed of industrialized data collection, microtargeting, and engineered dopamine bursts that maximize engagement.
People living in the cold war era were at least mentally inoculated against these tricks -- in the US we've had no preparation for it. The ease with which we've turned against each other for the easy popcorn comfort of the conspiracy theory or outrage du jour is mind boggling.
skybrian 1300 days ago [-]
How do we know that people from formerly communist countries are any better at media consumption? From what little I’ve read about Russia, people seem to be pretty pro-Putin and there are lots of conspiracy theories.
It doesn’t seem like people there are obviously better at media consumption, let alone inoculated?
golergka 1300 days ago [-]
People who have gained that skill in USSR have left ex-USSR for US, Europe and Israel a long time ago.
pydry 1300 days ago [-]
>From what little I’ve read about Russia, people seem to be pretty pro-Putin
Presiding over steadily improving living standards tends to give leaders staying power in every country. Putin was there for Russia's bounceback from the 90s.
istjohn 1301 days ago [-]
Yes, which is why Russian propaganda is more concerned about muddying the waters than constructing any particular narrative.
asdff 1300 days ago [-]
Also, they realized how to take advantage of potential energy. Give groups a nudge, and they will write their own propaganda and circulate it, and it snowballs from there. I read a recent interview from someone working in the Internet Research Agency, and they said they don't even bother making content themselves anymore, they just try to push and amplify what's already there at the bottom of the fish tank and it works just as well.
jay3ss 1299 days ago [-]
Do you have a link to the interview? I'd like to give it a read too
blaser-waffle 1300 days ago [-]
To further this point, a RAND Corp study: "The Russian 'Firehose of Falsehood' Propaganda Model:
Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It"
> Ah but universal cynicism and nihilism is also a form of control. When the very idea of objective truth has been destroyed, this makes the job of authoritarians easier, not harder.
Universal cynicism and nihilism may function that way. But that was not the attitude of the person in the description. So I am not sure how that is relevant?
warkdarrior 1301 days ago [-]
The step from "I don't trust anyone so I need to triple check everything" to "cynicism and nihilism" is quite small, especially given the effort in triple checking all information.
nonsapreiche 1301 days ago [-]
Remember me a joke, in USSR to know the truth you only need to put a NOT in front of an article of the Pravda, because are all false, in USA you can't because only half are false
ptero 1300 days ago [-]
It is sad that the wisdom from behind the iron curtain (where I grew up, too) is so fitting in the US (where I now live) today. I find that critical assessment of the media, resistance to propaganda and brainwashing detection skills acquired over there served me very well in the US.
I wish those skills were teachable without recreating the full environment...
dooglius 1301 days ago [-]
> we try to piece together the truth from all the sources and from what isn't said
I'm skeptical that this can be done effectively
082349872349872 1300 days ago [-]
Dr. Linebarger[1] wrote first a textbook (for the US army) and then a book (for the general public) on "Psychological Warfare" which incidentally contains a section, with an outlined method complete with mnemonic acronym (STASM), on media analysis.
"If you agree with it, it's truth. If you don't agree, it's propaganda. Pretend that it is all propaganda. See what happens on your analysis reports."
Mad magazine used to run "reading between the lines" pieces.
[1] A while ago I learned The Game of Rat and Dragon is accurate insofar as felines not only have better reflexes than ours, they're among the best.
catsdanxe 1301 days ago [-]
Ask anyone from China and they will tell you the exact same thing. They know their news is state sponsored and all propaganda. People in the united states are blissfully unaware.
istjohn 1301 days ago [-]
We still have a robust ecosystem of quality journalism in the US. There is bias, there are mistakes made, and there is false information masquerading as news that can mislead media consumers if they are not careful. But we are still very far from the situation in China and Russia. To be clear there is a problem, and it's growing, but let's not exaggerate.
pydry 1300 days ago [-]
If Julian Assange were a Chinese citizen blowing the lid on Chinese war crimes in Xinjiang while they accused him of not feeding his cat we wouldn't bat an eyelid at denouncing their crackdown on journalism in their country.
Somehow what you were saying reminded me of reading The Onion.
You know, where they have those opinion pieces always with the same 6 photos (but a different name & occupation) each spouting something humorous?
and curiously there is some truth at the hidden within each onion article.
ecoqba11 1301 days ago [-]
Exactly, ask the same to anyone in Cuba or Venezuela.
helen___keller 1301 days ago [-]
> IMO, there's a multibillion dollar company waiting to be founded to provide authenticity verification services for humans online
On the flip side, successful startups that aren't full social but do require some authenticity verification have already been proven: nextdoor and blind, for example
I think the biggest issue is scaling to a facebook-style, reddit-style, or twitter-style "full-world" social network implies colliding people who have no other relationship or interaction but are linked through a topic or shared interest
And, in my opinion, when you hit a certain level of scale, the verification almost becomes pointless: there's enough loud angry and troll people out there that I dont think it matters if they're verified or not. You can't moderate away toxicity in discussions that include literally a million participants.
I think you need both verification and some way to keep all the users' subnetworks small enough that it isn't toxic or chilling. But then you lose that addictive feed of endless content that links people to reddit or Facebook or Instagram. Tough problem
asenna 1300 days ago [-]
> You can't moderate away toxicity in discussions that include literally a million participants.
In my opinion HN is the gold-standard of online communities and it's being managed pretty well despite it scaling to what it is right now.
I wonder more leanings from HN (specially on the moderation front) can be applied to newer social platforms.
jonahx 1300 days ago [-]
The moderation here is very good, but I think cultural self-selection is a big factor too. Speaking broadly, it attracts technical, logical people who share values and standards around reasoned debate. I don't see that part scaling to society at large.
082349872349872 1300 days ago [-]
Eternal September is a datum that, contrary to initial hopes, that part doesn't scale to society at large. Online has become much more like offline than vice versa.
ricksharp 1300 days ago [-]
And even if we aren’t more Vulcan then the norm, we like to think we are :)
jonahx 1300 days ago [-]
Well, even if you think it's all self-delusion, the ceremony around it is real and that's an important difference.
lubesGordi 1300 days ago [-]
That's a really interesting observation. Really the site/service could just make the ceremony of objectivity part of the entire style and UX, that might be enough.
There's other things you could do too, like make every statement tagged with a source, and let community attempt to mark each source as primary/secondary, full/partial context, etc. Those statements could rise based on those tags instead of upvotes. It'd be wikipedia-for-news like. Has this been done?
raxxorrax 1300 days ago [-]
I don't even think toxicity is a problem for users without public persona. Those that are public have to play by the same rules that were already in place for classical PR.
We only got this problem with users trying to do house cleaning. Most communities are completely fine without authentication, so it certainly isn't necessary.
_def 1300 days ago [-]
> But then you lose that addictive feed of endless content that links people to reddit or Facebook or Instagram. Tough problem
... Which is a good thing. (for the users, at least)
maerF0x0 1300 days ago [-]
> do require some authenticity verification have already been proven
can add levels.fyi to that list as they now use actual offer letters to build their data set
vasco 1301 days ago [-]
You mention realistic forgeries, AI and huge volume as a possibility and that the outcome would be that people would be pushed into the real world but I'm not sure I see the connection.
If I can interact with bots that emulate humans with such a degree of realism, what do I care? You could be a bot, the whole of HN can be bots, I don't really care who wrote the text if I can get something from it, I mean I don't have any idea who you are and don't even read usernames when reading posts here on HN.
At its core this seems like a moderation issue, if someone writes bots that just post low quality nonsense, ban them, but if bots are just wrong or not super eloquent, I can point you to reddit and twitter right now and you can see a lot of those low quality nonsense, all posted by actual humans. In fact you can go outside and speak to real people and most of it is nonsense (me included).
woeirua 1300 days ago [-]
The lines between the online world and the "real" world are always blurry. You might not care on HN, but you probably will care when you're trying to meet someone on a dating website and waste a bunch of time chatting with someone only to realize that they're a very convincing bot and that you've spent X hours that you could've been using to meet real people.
It seems like crowd-sourced moderation is probably the only thing that will work at scale. I've always wondered why Reddit doesn't rank comments by default according to someone's overall reputation inside of a subreddit and then by the relative merits of the comment on a particular subject. Getting the weighting right would be hard, but it seems like that would be the best way to dissuade low quality comments and outright trolling.
nobody9999 1300 days ago [-]
>At its core this seems like a moderation issue, if someone writes bots that just post low quality nonsense, ban them, but if bots are just wrong or not super eloquent, I can point you to reddit and twitter right now and you can see a lot of those low quality nonsense, all posted by actual humans. In fact you can go outside and speak to real people and most of it is nonsense (me included).
A relevant, if flip solution to the 'bot' issue[0].
> IMO, there's a multibillion dollar company waiting to be founded to provide authenticity verification services for humans online.
Any kind of widely used identity/authentication system would need to be a protocol and not a product of a for-profit corporation. Businesses take on great risks if they use another corporation's products as part of their core operations as that product owner can change the terms of service at any time and pull the rug out from under them. A protocol is necessarily neutral so everyone can use it without risk in the same way they use HTTP.
For identity protocols I think BrightID (https://www.brightid.org/) is becoming more established and works pretty well.
jeremyjh 1300 days ago [-]
See also Neal Stephenson's Fall: Dodge in Hell. What happens there though isn't authentic experiences but instead people buy tailored human/AI agent filters called editors to construct a reality for them by filtering out most media sources, including billboards and other interactive real-world advertisements and media screens. This way each individual has their own media reality.
542354234235 1301 days ago [-]
> Once that happens, the value of those networks will rapidly deteriorate as people will seek out more authentic experiences with real people.
Will they? People interact with these things because they are giving the brain what it wants, not what it might need. How many people would flock to a verified minimal bias news site? How many people would embrace so many hard truths and throw off their comforting lies? How many people could even admit to themselves they were being lied to and had formed their identity around those lies?
Do people want authentic now? The evidence says no.
woeirua 1300 days ago [-]
I don't know if the news is really the best example of this today. Clearly there will always be a subjective bias in reporting the news, but as deep fakes become more prevalent it will become increasingly important to know that the origin of a video clip is trustworthy.
That said, there are clearly some social networks where you absolutely want to verify authenticity. Take for example, dating websites. Fake profiles _TODAY_ are a huge problem for those sites. If you have too many fake profiles, then paying users just log off and never come back. Same for LinkedIn. How many recruiters are going to pay for access to that network if 30% of the profiles are fake?
chmod775 1301 days ago [-]
That's just digital certificate-based government ID. You could maybe provide some layer of abstraction above it to improve the developer experience, but at the end of the day you're reliant on it existing. Everything else will be too easily forged (unless you're planning on doing in-person validation).
woeirua 1300 days ago [-]
You'd have to do in-person validation.
jberryman 1301 days ago [-]
But bots and spam and russian memes are already deeply engaging to people. I'm sure it will only get worse, though obviously some people will opt out.
paulvorobyev 1300 days ago [-]
>IMO, there's a multibillion dollar company waiting to be founded to provide authenticity verification services for humans online.
The US government does authentication in real life via social security numbers. Of course, they are not very secure: a government-operated SSO or auth API for third-party applications would be a logical next step.
It would guarantee uniqueness and authenticity of users. Even better, if this were an inter-governmental program, it would deter government meddling: a state issuing too many tokens for fake accounts would arouse suspicion.
deeeeplearning 1301 days ago [-]
>Once that happens, the value of those networks will rapidly deteriorate as people will seek out more authentic experiences with real people.
I think you have completely misread the situation. The "fakification" of social media is already happening. Much if not most engagement is already driven by bots or by fabricated "influencers" and more people are using these platforms more often, not less.
woeirua 1300 days ago [-]
I agree that the system is already being heavily influenced by bots. I think that the public's perception of just by how much though does not match reality. As time goes on though, the lay public will come to the same realization that many of us have already arrived at: it's all fake.
I think the critical threshold for most people will be when bots start impersonating people they know in person. At that point, the value of the social networks will evaporate.
deeeeplearning 1300 days ago [-]
>As time goes on though, the lay public will come to the same realization that many of us have already arrived at: it's all fake.
I don't share your optimism. Significant portions of the population believe the Earth is 6000 years old or is flat. Not sure why their critical thinking skills would suddenly improve at an opportune time.
ekianjo 1300 days ago [-]
> Once that happens, the value of those networks will rapidly deteriorate as people will seek out more authentic experiences with real people.
Not so sure. I'd rather wage that people won't really care about whether they interact with real humans or not. Why would it matter? It's not rare for people to relate and feel emotions for virtual characters in video games - even though they are perfectly aware it's all fake! The same can be said for movies, TV shows. You know it's fake, yet you watch and enjoy. I'm not sure why it would be ANY different for social networks which are basically just another form of entertainment.
12xo 1301 days ago [-]
This is very interesting. So basically, we'll all use fake personas managed by AI. And nothing online will be real...
malandrew 1300 days ago [-]
> IMO, there's a multibillion dollar company waiting to be founded to provide authenticity verification services for humans online.
Ironically accounts with Twitter's blue check mark are often the accounts most likely to be managed by a social media manager.
notriddle 1300 days ago [-]
Blue check accounts are expensive enough that, if you get the account banned, you can't easily make a new one. Bot accounts don't have this problem. If I want to trick as many people as possible into drinking bleach, I probably want easily-burnable bot accounts, so that when someone calls me out on it, I can just make a new one and pick up where I left off.
Of course, this also assists in Social Cooling, since controversial statements act a lot like totally false ones in the public eye.
Animats 1300 days ago [-]
China already has that. At age 16, all citizens must get an ID card. Photo and biometric info are recorded. To get a cell phone, the ID card is required, and as of last year, it's cross-checked by a face recognition scan. Cell phone IDs are tied to citizen IDs. WeChat accounts are verified against phone IDs.
Now that's authenticity verification.
draugadrotten 1300 days ago [-]
Not that different in the EU. Most member states keep track of EU citizens from birth with a citizen ID. To get a phone, you need to show said ID. There are states which keep biometrics in the ID and passports, such as face biometrics and fingerprints. Some EU states even sample DNA from the child at time of birth and keep in their records for future use.
mola 1301 days ago [-]
Really? People censoring themselves is the problem?
Whenever I take a peek at social feeds I see people saying crazy things, insults, conspiracy theories, hate, etc.
Usually I end up the feeling that the larger the audience and concurrency of engagement, the less people censor the them selves, it usually even make them see extra things that normally they won't say.
imdsm 1301 days ago [-]
Perhaps people censoring themselves is the reason you see crazy things, insults, conspiracy theories, hate, etc. The rational and well-mannered people aren't taking the risk so all you hear is those who will take the risk.
It's why politics is full of goons. Who in their right mind would go into that arena, to do good, when the risks are so high, the exposure so great, the hatred so guaranteed? Just the wrong people willing to take the risk.
mumblemumble 1300 days ago [-]
At an IRL social gathering, when someone starts getting cranky, you see and/or hear everyone else in the room going clammy, and know they feel the same way as you do. There's a certain loudness to their silence.
On the Internet, those same people are completely imperceptible.
vlunkr 1300 days ago [-]
This is a great observation. I think one difference is that on the internet, the social gathering is much bigger, and these people end up finding each other. In real life, if you start ranting about flat earth or something, it's likely that no one around will agree with you and not engage. But if you do it online, you'll find plenty of others. (maybe trolls, but how can you really know?) So now you think maybe your ideas aren't so crazy. And normally rational people see all these people starting to believe in flat earth, and that no one is standing up to them, and that makes them unsure and uncomfortable.
Maybe flat earth isn't the best example, but you know, I don't want to looks like I'm opposed to POPULAR_OPINION_ONLINE lol
mumblemumble 1300 days ago [-]
I'd go for a much more prosaic example, myself. How about Docker?
Among members of my team, I have far and away the most moderate opinions on Docker. I'm pretty sure that this is largely because I'm also the one tasked with maintaining what infrastructure we have that's based on Docker. So my opinions are largely driven by first-hand experience, whereas my colleagues' opinions are largely driven by things they read on the Internet.
1300 days ago [-]
jdkee 1300 days ago [-]
I read somewhere that he "Like" button needs to have an equivalent "silent disapproval stare" button.
detaro 1300 days ago [-]
That could be an interesting concept for some social networks to try, maybe with some limitation of social circle? I.e. it's a stronger signal if "X of your friends/people you follow/... disapprove" than "X0,000 strangers disapprove", which is a problem with more typical downvote features? Doesn't help for people totally in an echo chamber, but at least for some?
richardanaya 1300 days ago [-]
that would be hilarious if downvoted comments became literally smaller font
gibspaulding 1300 days ago [-]
Doesn't HN basically do that, with downvoted comments slowly fading away until they are illegible?
hudon 1301 days ago [-]
Frequent in-person discussions between people with different opinions tends to make people compromise and find nuance more easily. However if one side of the discussion is self-censoring, then both sides will tend to develop extreme opinions without any means to tamper them. As such, what you are describing is actually evidence to support the self-censorship hypothesis, not refute it.
claudiawerner 1301 days ago [-]
>Frequent in-person discussions between people with different opinions tends to make people compromise and find nuance more easily
Is there any reason to think this is the case? In my experience, in-person disagreements over 'big things' (be they politics or philosophy) either end in bitter disagreement, or what appears to be a compromise but actually isn't (because one or both parties do not wish to talk about the topic any more, before things get worse).
> However if one side of the discussion is self-censoring, then both sides will tend to develop extreme opinions without any means to tamper them.
This assumes that most disagreements are resolved when there is a difference of opinion. Personally, I rarely change my opinion after speaking to someone, and I instead change it when I do my own reading around topics. The fact is that it's awkward to ask 'what's your source for that?' in a conversation between friends. Either one or both parties don't care enough to provide a source, or it's impractical (such as at a dinner party).
To surmise, I'm questioning whether mere in-person disagreement really does tamper the essence of those extreme opinions, not merely the appearance presented to that particular conversation partner.
julienb_sea 1301 days ago [-]
I don't agree. I have many very interesting conversations with people that I do not agree with politically, but I respect their intelligence and point of view, and vice versa. It is vastly more realistic to have a nuanced and respectful debate in private, versus a public discussion which will inevitably devolve. If you would like proof of this, open literally any twitter thread about politics with more than a few replies.
claudiawerner 1301 days ago [-]
>I have many very interesting conversations with people that I do not agree with politically, but I respect their intelligence and point of view, and vice versa.
Likewise. But I wasn't saying that's not possible, I was saying that I'm not convinced many people change their opinions over the course of such conversations. Being civil is important, but the question was whether civil debate among people who know each other in person results in more reasonable opinions, or compromises.
It's obviously better than online conversations. But to what extent? I don't think GP made a sufficiently convincing case.
nicky0 1300 days ago [-]
The objective of a conversation is not to change the other’s opinion, it is to understand each other on a deeper level than at the start. If the net result is a shift in opinion on either side (or both) then so be it.
The idea of “right” and “wrong” views is flawed and to set out with the objective of persuading the other to your view is a mistake. Getting them to understand you view, whilst you get to understand theirs, is a better objective. You can’t change the world if you don’t understand it.
It is of course extremely difficult to have this kind of conversation online especially in short form.
bogwog 1301 days ago [-]
How many people do you see saying those crazy things? Hundreds? Thousands? What about the hundreds or millions or billions of others who don't post anything at all for fear (consciously or not) of backlash, either from the crazies or the not-crazies?
mola 1301 days ago [-]
Obviously anecdotal, but I'm talkig about people I actually personally know.
IRL I'm able to have a conversation with them, online they are so used to trolls and extreme opinions that they get into "fight mode" where they automatically assume the worse about the other person, and interpret anything they say, in the worst possible way.
And I don't see any chilling effect, other than "fuck that, I'm not gonna follow Facebook/twitter anymore"
They're not writing anything, but they're not consuming it.
Now if so called journalists would stay off twitter/facebook, the problem will be solved. Because it's not a chilling effect if the entire aparatus is irrelevant.
eitland 1301 days ago [-]
Reasonable people on both sides censor themselves (at least more than unreasonable people).
My theory is that this is why Full Name Required comments fields and also Facebook is way uglier than pseudonymous forums like HN and Ars Technica.
i_love_limes 1301 days ago [-]
You chose and interesting and very moderated forums there... Aren't the worst places on the internet unmoderated pseudonymous forums? 4chan, the horrible bits of Reddit, and the like?
westmeal 1300 days ago [-]
I honestly think its the opposite. When people don't have to stick to a side they'll actually discuss things without falling into a persona or clique. Then again there are trolls but they're rather easy to spot.
eitland 1300 days ago [-]
Old slashdot then. AFAIK and IIRC it was user moderated (and there was a fascinating system around metamoderation.)
lazypenguin 1301 days ago [-]
The website doesn't only mention censoring but also conformity. If people are saying things that they wouldn't normally say but do because of the larger audience and concurrency of engagement then that contributes to the problem...
542354234235 1301 days ago [-]
There are multiple issues. Self censorship is a problem, but conspiracy thinking is also a problem. Dr. Steven Novella recently said something to the effect of “the problem is that social media has automated conspiracy theory”. What he was talking about was how algorithms have had the effect of breadcrumbing people deeper and deeper into conspiracy theories and surrounding them with false confirmation.
raxxorrax 1300 days ago [-]
Conspiracies come from low trust and a feeling of inferiority for different reasons. Problem is that some conspiracies are true and some are even pushed by authoritative news sources.
One conspiracy is certainly that the perspective of flat-earthers matters and should be addressed in any way. Same, with anti-vaxxers. We had vaccination quotas of 96% and as soon as people wanted to force others to vaccinate, it dropped considerably. Reactionary? Perhaps, but perfectly understandable.
mumblemumble 1301 days ago [-]
There's a selection effect going on there. People with more circumspect attitudes are more likely to be sensitive to social cooling, and when they back off of social media, they take their more measured opinions with them.
notacoward 1300 days ago [-]
The hot get hotter, the cool get cooler. It's just one more way that people are pulling away from each other toward two opposite extremes.
guerrilla 1301 days ago [-]
Maybe the situation is like Idiocracy where a certain class of people are cooled but unreasonable, insensitive and hateful people do not.
uoaei 1300 days ago [-]
Not all people are created equal...
The less certain people censor themselves. And the more other kinds of people censor themselves. There seems to be widespread colloquial agreement that those who don't censor themselves are usually more extreme in their views, more confident in their truthiness, and often more mistaken about basic verifiable facts.
This is very much a question of signal-to-noise ratio.
simonke 1300 days ago [-]
This is explained by Foucault: if you think that you are being watched, you will censor yourself. He uses the panopticon as metaphor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon. Bauman later called our situation "Post-Panopticism".
hrktb 1301 days ago [-]
> saying crazy things, insults, conspiracy theories, hate
Sadly, I think this is par for the course, and often those "crazy" things are accepted by a large enough part of society that the cooling effect is very low.
lightgreen 1301 days ago [-]
> People censoring themselves is the problem?
Yes. For example, very few people in SV can openly say they are going to vote for Trump.
> the larger the audience and concurrency of engagement, the less people censor the them selves
Yes, people don't censor themselves when they are in majority. For example, those who live in SV, and support gay marriage and BLM, they can throw insults without repercussions.
colinmhayes 1301 days ago [-]
If you want respect don't admit to supporting bigotry.
x86_64Ubuntu 1300 days ago [-]
The weird thing is that up and down this thread, you can get the feeling that people are bigots, but they feel "oppressed" because they can't openly state those feelings in the public square or at work.
lightgreen 1300 days ago [-]
Lack of empathy is expected from people defending mob justice.
lightgreen 1301 days ago [-]
Also, not accepting that people consider Trump a better presidental candidate is bigotry exactly, by definition from the dictionary.
The fun fact about the word "bigotry" is that people who use "bigotry" as insults are very often bigots themselves.
colinmhayes 1301 days ago [-]
Cool, let's rephrase. If you want respect don't admit to being prejudiced against the way people are born. Being prejudiced against choices people make is completely fine.
lightgreen 1301 days ago [-]
> If you want respect
I'm sorry for not expressing clearly. People want freedom more than respect. In particular, freedom to express support of Trump.
> If you want respect don't admit to being prejudiced against the way people are born.
I'm sorry, I don't see a connection between your comment and parent comment.
colinmhayes 1301 days ago [-]
People in sv are absolutely free to express support for Trump.
lightgreen 1301 days ago [-]
They will quickly lose their jobs.
It is somewhat similar (but to lesser degree of course) to China: there’s no law prohibiting talking about Tiananmen Square, but you better not do it.
colinmhayes 1301 days ago [-]
Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences. I'm as free to call you an idiot and boycott you as you are to say idiotic things. It actually is illegal to talk about tianamen square in china. You'll be arrested.
a1369209993 1300 days ago [-]
> Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences.
Yes it is; that's (most of) what "freedom" means. By your logic, if I would shoot you if you leave your house, then you would still be free to leave your house, 'just' not from the consequences.
Edit, a more proximate example: if the ministry of love will kindnap and torture you for criticising the government, your logic would hold that this does not violate freedom of speech, so long as they do not preemptivly prevent such criticism.
mola 1300 days ago [-]
Retaliation by government.
raxxorrax 1300 days ago [-]
> Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences.
This phrase should be an example of Emperors New Clothes.
Of course it is trivially correct for the most part because people have opinions, but the concept of freedom of speech directly addresses this.
> Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation
You don't even need to read more than 200 words and people using this phrase seem overly interested in the retaliation part through social excommunication. Bigotry in its original form.
lightgreen 1301 days ago [-]
This catchy phrase is catch 22. Negative consequences of freedom mean there is no freedom.
nobody9999 1300 days ago [-]
> This catchy phrase is catch 22. Negative consequences of freedom mean there is no freedom.
That's something of a misnomer. In the case where the government (as in China) will visit consequences upon you for your speech limits freedom.
But others using their speech to express their displeasure with your speech does not.
Do you see how that works? If your peers disagree with you and express that, it's not limiting freedom, it's giving the same freedom to everyone.
I do believe that it's inappropriate (note the word I use here, as it has a specific meaning and implication) to target someone's professional status for a real or perceived disagreement (assuming that those disagreements are not relevant to the target's professional duties).
That doesn't make it illegal, just petty, vindictive and in bad faith. None of which limits anyone's freedom to express themselves.
There's a big difference between legality and social norms. Just because it's legal to do something, doesn't mean it's a good idea.
mola 1300 days ago [-]
Freedom became an empty word once US turned it to plastic.
People always lose some freedom in any social interaction.
If you treat any such compromise as "no freedom" than you'll be left with no "freedom".
This whole dichotomy is just stupid and abused because of historic American politics, the word has lost all meaning.
debaserab2 1301 days ago [-]
You aren't free unless you can say and do things without consequence? What?
ryandrake 1301 days ago [-]
Frame it in something not political: Imagine there was some taboo or social norm that said the only acceptable favorite color was green. If you publicly said your favorite color was something other than green, you should expect to be fired from your job, your family go hungry, and other similar consequences. Are you really free to have any favorite color you want? Technically, yes. Practically, do you have that freedom?
debaserab2 1300 days ago [-]
I don’t think we’re talking about someone making neutral statements about their favorite color.
testpostpls 1301 days ago [-]
Can you find me the law that says it is illegal to talk about Tiananmen Square in China? I'd love to read it.
What actually happens is that when you talk about it, you lose your job, etc. Rarely does the government step in. Which, and correct me if I'm wrong, sounds like what you're advocating as "free speech".
klipt 1300 days ago [-]
> Rarely does the government step in.
The Great Firewall and Social Credit system are both run by the government and definitely penalize this behavior.
Of course there's no law explicitly saying "you can't talk about Tiananmen Square" because that law would be talking about Tiananmen Square which is the opposite of what they want.
testpostpls 1300 days ago [-]
You can definitely talk about it. How else would people know not to talk about it? The behavior that the government penalizes is advocating action against the government.
But people don't talk about it. It's enforced socially. That's my point. You don't talk about Tiananmen Square, you don't gawk at Falun Gong protesters, etc. Even many Chinese expats act like this. It's just something people know not to do because they don't want to be seen as a bad person and lose friends, jobs, and so on.
That happens completely outside the government's influence.
AI_WAIFU 1301 days ago [-]
Assuming that everyone who prefers Trump over Biden is prejudiced against the way people are born, is still bigotry.
Not treating people with respect, regardless of their views, is also bigotry.
colinmhayes 1301 days ago [-]
Again, I'm fine with being bigoted against peoples choices. If you make bad choices you can be damn sure I'll won't respect you. I can't accept being bigoted against the way someone is born.
lightgreen 1301 days ago [-]
> I'll won't respect you
Nobody cares about your respect.
But please don't bully those who disagree with you.
Lammy 1300 days ago [-]
> If you make bad choices you can be damn sure I'll won't respect you.
I try to respect people enough to not tell them what "good" or "bad" must mean for them.
AI_WAIFU 1301 days ago [-]
>Again, I'm fine with being bigoted against peoples choices.
Then I'm sorry but that makes you a bigot, please don't spread your bigotry to others by making broad generalizations about entire groups or unilaterally deciding and trying to build consensus that their decisions are "bad".
luckylion 1301 days ago [-]
> Being prejudiced against choices people make is completely fine.
Wait until you read about the whole "free will" issue.
colinmhayes 1301 days ago [-]
I fully accept that free will isn't real. I also fully accept my ability to change the utility maximizing decision by not respecting people who don't respect others because of the way they were born.
luckylion 1301 days ago [-]
And yet ... they never had a choice in the matter, so you're doing what you seek to destroy.
colinmhayes 1301 days ago [-]
I use "choice" in its commonly accepted definition for simplicity. We can get into semantics if you'd like. Determinism doesn't mean it's impossible to change the "choices" people make. It means it's impossible to change your own utility functions which cause the "choices". Society can still effect peoples "choices" by punishing them because that will change the outcome of the pre-determined utility function. Incentives are everything.
mola 1300 days ago [-]
Because Trump supported white supremacists?
Because Trump has a proven history of treating women like objects?
And these are not allowed ps of the tongue, these were systematically repeated sentiments.
If you choose to support him, you support these things as well.
As far as women, framing Trump as a big meanie who says mean words totally ignores what he and his administration have actually done for women in the aggregate.
> Our nation has created more than 7 million jobs since the 2016 election — and women have filled over half, or more than 4 million, of those vacancies
> The unemployment rate for women stands at a minuscule 3.2%, and last September reached its lowest level since 1953
> And as the unemployment rate has declined, so too did the number of women in poverty, decreasing by 1.5 million in President Trump’s first two years in office
The victims of sex trafficking are primarily women and children
> Worldwide, there are 40.3 million victims, with 75% women and girls and 25% children, according to The International Labour Organization
> Trump signed the Abolish Human Trafficking Act, which strengthens programs supporting survivors and resources for combating modern slavery
> [Trump] signed the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act which tightens criteria for whether countries are meeting standards for eliminating trafficking
> Trump also signed the Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Prevention and Protection Reauthorization Act, authorizing $430 million to fight sex and labor trafficking, as well as the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which establishes “new prevention, prosecution, and collaboration initiative to bring human traffickers to justice.”
> since President Trump took office in January 2017, there have been nearly 12,470 arrests for human trafficking, according to arrest records compiled by investigative journalist Corey Lynn, and over 9130 victims rescued. Compare that to the 525 arrested in Barack Obama’s last year in office
I'd be interested in figuring out how I can use this to my advantage. For example, create a persona online that is optimal to lenders, employers and even the government.
The issue is my "real self" is uninterested in participating in these networks, even if to create a fake persona.
Maybe it could be automated, or outsourced?
socialcooling 1301 days ago [-]
Creator of socialcooling.com here. You may enjoy this other website I created:
It's a fictitious company that helps you do exactly this. And while it's fiction, the tool actually does work.
un-devmox 1300 days ago [-]
What do you mean, "It's a fictitious company"? Is this not a legitmate service of yours? I get that the service, if real, produces fictitious content but your wording is throwing me off.
socialcooling 1300 days ago [-]
Indeed, it's not a real service. It just pretends to be. You can just use the tool for free.
Although as time passes, it seems maybe it should be real...
bondarchuk 1300 days ago [-]
>it's not a real service.
>You can just use the tool for free.
So can you actually use it or not? If you can use it, then I would say it is a real service in any sense of "real service" I can think of.
socialcooling 1300 days ago [-]
Alright, in that case it's a real service ;-)
082349872349872 1300 days ago [-]
I, for one, welcome our new culture jamming underlords.
Honestly, this had even more impact on me than the social cooling site. Very nicely done.
kovac 1299 days ago [-]
You are brilliant! Is this opensource? Would love to contribute!
justatdotin 1300 days ago [-]
whoa, you should have led with that ;)
wmeredith 1301 days ago [-]
This reminds me of Gattaca (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca) where people with good genes rent out their DNA to those who have bad genes so they can get better jobs, insurance, etc...
542354234235 1301 days ago [-]
DeGENErate
renewiltord 1301 days ago [-]
It has no bearing on anything as far as I can tell. For decades I've been open about my drug use, lack of care for people less fortunate than me, anti-organ-donation, anti-first-lady, illegal importation of pharma, and a hundred other things.
I have no problem accessing a $1.5 million mortgage at 2.875%, getting prescribed drugs, or immigration beyond whatever is inherently hard about the system.
The best way is still the real information. The hard stuff in the real world. What you do online does nothing.
Except maybe the Tinder thing. Most dating apps align your attractiveness with the attractiveness of potential targets. That's to be expected.
The way I see it is "Information wants to be free".
HugeAcumen 1300 days ago [-]
>It has no bearing on anything as far as I can tell.
...It says a lot that all of your examples are from your own life. There are counter examples abounding that just aren't affecting you (to your knowledge), such as those stated in TFA, or CA, or Brexit etc.
Do you think these data brokers are selling our info for billions to rubes? Are insurance companies known for their gullibility? Are sale of lists of rape victims to 'whoever has money' A-OK, because you are not being personally affected?
... These trends are worsening. People aren't spending more and more on data that has "no bearing on anything". That it's invisible to you makes it worse.
renewiltord 1300 days ago [-]
Oh yeah, for sure. And for instance, if it were to happen to 5% of people, then there will be twenty people like me for one person who is unfairly affected but for that person it will be a complete nightmare.
And societally it's not okay to create a complete nightmare for like 5% of people. So I totally get it.
Just that if you live in the First World and live a normative interface (my drug use doesn't leak into the professional environment, my illegal imports are on the quiet) you can get away with a lot.
postsantum 1301 days ago [-]
Was thinking the same. I wonder if there is a market selling "ready to move in" identities
spacemanmatt 1301 days ago [-]
Yeah, social media profiles are bought and sold like commodities daily. Look for "bots" in the news for examples.
postsantum 1301 days ago [-]
That's different goods.
I mean identities that span across several networks and include emails, aged cookies, fake fingeprint generator, etc
spacemanmatt 1299 days ago [-]
We're talking about the same things.
thinkharderdev 1301 days ago [-]
From what I understand this is an actual thriving industry already. Traditional identity theft (get someone's SSN and other info and open credit lines in their name) is much harder now, so the fraudsters have moved on to creating wholly made up "synthetic identities" de novo.
gorgoiler 1300 days ago [-]
This is wire fraud, comrade.
All citizens who lie about being cat owning church going knitting enthusiasts — regardless as to whether it was to get a better rate on their next car lease, or not — will be incarcerated.
This may be reduced to a small fine (and denouncement) if you forgo your right to the wasteful scrutiny of a public trial.
Glory to Arstotska
tootie 1301 days ago [-]
I don't think that would really fly. You may get served a higher class of ads, but if you go apply for a loan or a job, you still have to disclose your real self.
maze-le 1301 days ago [-]
Yes but that's just the thing: OP wants to create their "real" self, just not the authentic self. It becomes real, by association with the name of the person, yet it stays a simulated expression, a simulacrum[0].
Consider that the loan- or job-"machines" are collecting intelligence from social networks to evaluate the person -- in addition to loan history and previous job performance. Now if you can present "yourself" to this machines in a conformal way, you don't need to fear negative repercussions on shitposts you did. While you can still be authentic in private or under pseudonyms.
Of course, you will still get categorized by the bank transactions you make in your real name. Same goes for your performance reviews on previous jobs. It is just a matter of tricking these other forms of automated social control into a higher rating bound to your name.
-----
I find it fascinating that philosophers like Baudrillard and Deleuze were able to think and warn about these issues more than 40 years ago when none of this was even remotely on the horizon:
Thank you for posting this, saves me the trouble :-)
I re-read Deleuze's three-page paper every year. It really describes things well.
maze-le 1301 days ago [-]
> It really describes things well.
It definitely does, and he is scarily accurate in his analysis. I just re-read it myself, and stumbled over this part, which I certainly not anticipated in this form a few years back:
> For the hospital system: the new medicine "without doctor or patient" that singles out potentially sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation -- as they say -- but substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code of a "dividual" material to be controlled.
This is certainly an accurate description of the control mechanisms various states have put into place in the form of apps that enforce selective quarantine restrictions.
The socialcooling website really a great project! Important content presented concise and on-point, thank you for doing this!
tootie 1301 days ago [-]
I don't understand what any of this is warning of. This just seems like Living in a Society 101.
josefresco 1301 days ago [-]
> but if you go apply for a loan or a job, you still have to disclose your real self
Then doesn't this discount the threat being posed by the "Social Cooling" theory? If social media activity doesn't matter "when it comes down to real transactions" shouldn't we be less worried?
I think the answer is somewhere in the middle. Obviously you can't "social media fake" your way into a mortgage (I hope) but it may stop you from getting a job or being elected to office.
ntsplnkv2 1301 days ago [-]
Financial transactions have better tracking like credit scores and credit history, or things like your income/debt ratio.
> but it may stop you from getting a job or being elected to office.
This is more of the problem - the social impact eventually leads to financial impact.
julienb_sea 1301 days ago [-]
This whole concept seems overdramatic to me at least at present. Banks are making lending decisions based on steady income and payment history, not your online persona. Similarly for employment. If you have reasonable qualifications, you will have no trouble finding work, regardless of how "optimal" your persona is.
Advertising is the area in which the most persona research and targeting is implemented. I suspect the reason no one is trying to fake online personas is because it would only have noticeable impact on what ads you see.
jfarmer 1301 days ago [-]
Hah. Reminds me of Gattaca.
thegrimmest 1301 days ago [-]
Is it wrong to suggest that this (if accurate) is a positive trend? I would like to live in a society where people spend more time considering what they say publicly, keeping to themselves, and refraining from imposing their thoughts and opinions. Live and let live.
If you want to have a private conversaion, social media doesn't seem to be a good vehicle for it. Much like airing your dirty laundry in the town square has been considered bad etiquette, airing personal greivances on the internet seems to be in poor taste.
It must be noted that manners never arise sponaniously in culture, but becuase people fear the consequences of breaching etiquette. I for one welcome the return of politeness to society.
imdsm 1301 days ago [-]
Of course not. You're free to suggest what you like. I'm not going to say something here and put thegrimmest into a list because I disagree with you and think you should pay extra for your flights.
/But/, and there's always a but, I do think the trend towards shutting people down who you don't agree with is terrible. Pragmatic debate seems impossible online, and let's face it, that's how we're all communicating now. When there is the risk of social backlash affecting your livelihood, you'll keep your ideas and opinions to yourself, even if they could be useful to society.
I mean, anyone who thinks the ideals of today are without flaw, just wait til the year 2100 when they'll be seen as backwards.
kart23 1300 days ago [-]
Society as a whole already normalizes this sort of thing. Many people will have to pay more for a house, and many more will simply be denied. When this paradigm is already so normal, people aren't going to be so averse to their digital and social habits being tracked and rewarded, ESPECIALLY if its advertised as a way to get discounts or benefits on certain services. Car insurance companies are trying it out as well.
The whole entire notion of a credit history, credit reporting agencies, and the idea of my personal information being out there and out of my control sounds so weird.
thegrimmest 1301 days ago [-]
I think the thing that will cool off is the generation of outrage, and heated (note the term), emotional discourse.
> I do think the trend towards shutting people down who you don't agree with is terrible.
I think the more considered and closer one's speech is to factual, the harder it is to generate outrage. I think a cooling trend pushes people in that direction when composing their speech. I think this is a good thing.
I don't think ideals are ever without flaw. The important question is how do we live together when we know that we disagree and will not ever all agree?
malandrew 1300 days ago [-]
> I think the more considered and closer one's speech is to factual, the harder it is to generate outrage
Sadly that's not the case since there is the phenomena of canceling people over what are called "hate facts".
garbagetime 1300 days ago [-]
>I think the more considered and closer one's speech is to factual, the harder it is to generate outrage.
Often, the opposite is the case. Having the "wrong" opinion is seen as bad. But having the "wrong" opinion, while also having a very strong argument for it being the correct opinion, is certainly much more outrageous.
Slightly tangental comment: There are certain statistics (namely relating to the fact that people who are black [~13.4% of the US population] are responsible for ~55% of homicide in the US) that are widely auto-censored on reddit. Sure, it may simply be a fact that that is what the statistic is, but reddit (or, at least, several of the largest subreddits) doesn't care that it is pure fact. Even mentioning the statistic is grounds for auto-removal of your comment.
I'll run an experiment to see find the exact extent of the above claimed censorship on reddit, using the account /u/Ender_killed_You.
====================================
Attempt one:
- Result: instant auto-removal
- Subreddit: /r/askreddit
- Comment:
>This is something I just can't wrap my head around: Did you know that according to FBI statistics, black Americans, despite making up only 13% of the population, are responsible for 56% of homicides in the US?[1]
----------------------------------------
Attempt two:
- Result: Instant auto-removal
- Subreddit: /r/news
- Comment:
>This is something I just can't wrap my head around: Did you know that according to FBI statistics, black Americans, despite making up only 13% of the population, are responsible for 56% of homicides in the US?[2]
----------------------------------------
//I'm now going to post a normal comment, without any illegal statistics included, to see if the removals are to do with something other than the content of the comments.
-----------------------------------------
Attempt three:
- Result: No removal
- Subreddit: /r/pics
- Comment:
>This is really clever! It's cool that at least some people are so into democracy in the USA :) Nothing better than well-informed voters democratically deciding who should be their next leader!
[3]
-----------------------------------------------
//Next I will post a nice(i.e., statistic-free) comment on /r/askreddit to see if it is removed there
------------------------------------------------
Attempt four:
- Result: No removal
- Subreddit: /r/askreddit
- Comment:
>I shall help both, granting each army supernatural powers. Two armies with super-strength and super-speed abilities fighting each other would be an exciting watch.[4]
------------------------------------------------
//So, it has been shown that /r/askreddit and /r/news have been set up to auto censor this statistic. What remains to be shown is the extent to which this censorship is implemented. Is it on all the largest subreddits? On all subreddits by default? etc. etc. My next comment will be on a minor subreddit.
One of the upsides for me during this time of social unrest is that I have been able to put my Sociology degree to major use during discussions.
One of the reasons touting that statistic might get an auto-remove is because it is in itself deceptive, or at least can be in the inferences many people make from it.
Seeing that statistic might make people think that black people are inherently violent, that there is something about black people that make them commit more homicides. the actual reason that many people do not lift from seeing that statistic on its own, is that homicides and violence are directly linked to poverty.
Then, someone who may be uneducated on the matter might believe that black people are simply both poor and violent, which would completely discount generations of systemic oppression targeted toward minorities and black people specifically which have directly led to their higher poverty rates.
I don't have a particular epistemic position one way or the other, but I'll suggest the alternate hypothesis that the text "experiment about censorship on reddit" might have had more to do with the lack of removal than it being posted on a minor subreddit.
garbagetime 1300 days ago [-]
How? It's automatic removal. Not removal by moderators. I doubt the automatic removal algorithm is that complicated.
bonestormii_ 1300 days ago [-]
It really is a crass and inflammatory statement, though. The 13% number may be supported by data, but the actual meaning and phrasing of the statement is actually highly opinionated.
First, it's a fact that black Americans are over-policed and over-prosecuted compared to white Americans. It is reasonable to believe that the conviction rates are skewed.
Second, there is the nasty business of the phrasing "...responsible for...". It is a reasonable perspective to have that if black Americans engage in more violence, it is because they have been subjected to more violence and deprived of opportunity. And that, ultimately, is in many cases, the responsibility of white Americans.
And then, sometimes people just commit murder, regardless of race.
Without the context of a fully-rendered explicit argument, the implied argument in that statement seems to be one of some kind of innate racial disposition. Which people should rightly reject, if not censor. As noted, the "I'm simply running a test" comment was not censored. So perhaps it isn't the data point that is censored, but the implied argument that you seem to be making.
I understand that it can be frustrating to have a 'fact' censored, especially if your intent is to have a productive discussion about a difficult topic. However, as laid out above, that 'fact' is not as simple as your test makes it out to be. It is a statement derived from statistical data that was collected by a government agency. If you cited it as such, and left out the language connecting moral responsibility with a racial group, it would be a more truthful and objective representation of fact, and might not be censored the same way. The test seems to loosely support this, and actually indicates the censorship being applied on reddit is actually quite effective.
Edit: On a related note, it is interesting how guarded I feel even replying to something like this. It's as if I want not to even be part of such a conversation publicly for fear of algorithmic misinterpretation of my meaning. I assume others feel this way, too, based on the OP. That's not the world any of us want to live in. It's not so much I mind publicly published information being collected and analyzed, but that I fear it being utilized in some grand corporate conspiracy. Perhaps we should legislate not against information collection and analysis, but antisocial behavior analysis conspiracies.
thegrimmest 1300 days ago [-]
> It is a reasonable perspective to have that if black Americans engage in more violence, it is because they have been subjected to more violence and deprived of opportunity. And that, ultimately, is in many cases, the responsibility of white Americans.
I disagree that this is a reasonable perspective at all. Adult people are wholy responsible for their actions. This fundemental fact underpins our whole society.
I would say that this statistic is primarily used to explain disproportionate encounters with (and subsequently death at the hands of) police. It's important to note that black people are also massively overrepresented as victims of violent crime. This suggests that black communities are generally more violent and therefore more likely to be policed. This fact along with others (like the behaviours of majority black police departments) can be used to construct in good faith a strong argument that there is no epidemic of police racism. This argument is not very popular, so it seems to get censored.
fesoliveira 1300 days ago [-]
>Adult people are wholy responsible for their actions. This fundemental fact underpins our whole society.
You say that is solely fault of the individual, but then say that it "suggests that communities are generally more violent and therefore more likely to be policed". So, if it is the fault of each black individual, as you claim is the underpinning of society, why are black communities being more policed?
>This fact along with others (like the behaviours of majority black police departments) can be used to construct in good faith a strong argument that there is no epidemic of police racism.
Being this the case, wherein lies the issue: the black community or the police institution that trains its members to be more aggressive and fearful of black communities? Keep in mind that only one of the two is in fact an institution funded by the public that undergoes training.
The biggest issue with these kinds of arguments is that it does not take in consideration that black communities are marginalized and target of harassment. This is institutionalized in the sense that the training the harassing people receive teaches them to harass and keeps telling them that they will get killed otherwise. This is not present only in the police, but in other facets of society as well. Look at how many videos of black americans being followed by security in malls and store there are on social media. This shows a pattern that keeps happening, and in unfortunately in many situations escalate to injury or death.
thegrimmest 1300 days ago [-]
> So, if it is the fault of each black individual, as you claim is the underpinning of society, why are black communities being more policed?
Because effective policing means distributing police resources according to demand?
> police institution that trains its members to be more aggressive and fearful of black communities?
It seems perfectly reasonable to be more fearful when going into a more dangerous area. I don't see any evidence that police are somehow less aggressive or fearful when going into areas dominated by violent gangs with other skin colours. Can you point to some official training doctrine that tells police to be fearful of black people? I'm quite sure that has been illegal for a long time.
bonestormii_ 1300 days ago [-]
Yes, we do hold people individually responsible because it is necessary. We can't forgive crime because a nuanced understanding of recent history and racism. That is a value we hold, but there is nothing "factual" about it, so this is an example of diluting the word "fact" to mean other things.
Slavery was real. Racism was and is real. Inter-generational effects from these forces are real. In all racial groups, lack of opportunity with the legal economy increases engagement with illegal economies. Do you agree?
The statistic is used to explain and place blame upon black Americans for their own deaths at the hands of law enforcement, and saying that it merely "explains" tries to conceal the opinionated nature of that statement with an aura of objectivity.
It is very convenient and clean to ignore recent history and talk about individual responsibility, while taking no individual responsibility for the unequal treatment of blacks that you support with such arguments. By simply citing that statistic while failing entirely to address the obvious and very recent (very present) endemic racism and unequal treatment of black Americans, and placing the blame squarely on their collective shoulders, the only logical conclusion can be that there is something innate about people of that race that leads them to violence, which is objectionable, racist, and has no place in reasonable discourse. There is nothing "good faith" about such an argument.
You will go so far to say that black communities are more violent, but you shy away from saying why you think that is. You will cite a statistic that makes them sound guilty without acknowledging the factors that lead to it being true.
"Soldiers are murderers. 95% of soldiers involved in WWII killed people." Generally, this is true. But we choose not to view it that way.
A statement is not a statistic. A statement includes a statistic. A statement is an analysis, and the way you choose to analyze some data has ethical implications.
thegrimmest 1300 days ago [-]
> That is a value we hold, but there is nothing "factual" about it, so this is an example of diluting the word "fact" to mean other things.
This is true - this is a value, not a fact. It is a value however that underpins our legal system and therefore our society. The idea that we assign moral agency and total responsbility for action to capable adult individuals who take those actions.
> The statistic is used to explain and place blame upon black Americans for their own deaths at the hands of law enforcement
That's not what any resonalbe interpretation of what I wrote reads. To elaborate, we can assume that 1/E police encouters (E) will result in a death. Much like we can assume 1/P medical procedures (P) will result in a death. People are people and everyone makes mistakes at work. When your work deals with peoples lives those mistakes cost them. I don't see a way to avoid E or P existing. If we are trying to determine if E is biased against black people, we can see if E is significantly different between races. Turns out it's not. In fact You are slightly more likely to be killed as a white person in a police encouter than as a black person.
It's an entirely separate issue from racism if we are suggesting that E (or P) is too low. But the data clearly demonstrates it's not racially biased.
Now the only remaining question is why black people are significantly more likely to experience a police encouter than white people. What we find is that black people tend to live in more criminal and therefore more heavily policed areas than white people. Do you think that police should not pay more attention to more criminal neighbourhoods? Where is the racism?
> You will go so far to say that black communities are more violent, but you shy away from saying why you think that is. You will cite a statistic that makes them sound guilty without acknowledging the factors that lead to it being true.
I don't specualte as to why because I don't know and I assume the answer is very complicated. I prefer to pay attention to folks like Thomas Sowell who have dedicated their careers to answering these questions. I found a good starting point here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5csE8q9mho
garbagetime 1300 days ago [-]
The statistic is automatically (as in, by a robot, not by a person) removed. I only ever noticed because I made a long comment arguing against the racist use of the statistic (where I linked the table the statistic is from, etc.). However, I'm simply against statistics being banned.
I didn't bother with all the extra stuff in my experiment, because it's not important for testing the robot which removes the comments immediately and automatically.
bonestormii_ 1300 days ago [-]
But it wasn't banned in one example where the statistic was cited. Aside from the subreddit, the only difference was the additional context that "this is a test of censorship".
I will note, however, that your original comment has now been flagged and is invisible, cooling this whole discussion. While I object to the statistic and think that censorship of statements including that statistic may actually be productive in some cases, I think that this conversation has the potential to be productive, and I regret that the meta-conversation about censorship is not possible.
garbagetime 1299 days ago [-]
Well, it's easy to test.
=======================================
Attempt six:
- Result: no removal
- Subreddit: /r/askreddit
- Comment:
>Hello, please don't mind this comment, I'm simply running an experiment about censorship on reddit.
Did you know that black Americans (who make up just 13.4% of the population) are, nonetheless, responsible for 56% of homicides?[6]
Something about the phrasing of the comment has stopped it from being removed. It was silly of me to let my wish of not offending people get in the way of scientific investigation. Still, I think it is not because of the polite preface that the comment has not been removed, and I will test it by including the polite preface to the comment which was removed.
>Hello, please don't mind this comment, I'm simply running an experiment about censorship on reddit.
This is something I just can't wrap my head around: Did you know that according to FBI statistics, black Americans, despite making up only 13% of the population, are responsible for 56% of homicides in the US?[7]
So, it is clear that there is something about the contents of this segment which causes comments to be automatically removed (at the very least, on /r/askreddit) "This is something I just can't wrap my head around: Did you know that according to FBI statistics, black Americans, despite making up only 13% of the population, are responsible for 56% of homicides in the US?". I'm guessing that it's as simple as the fact that I used the less commonly used 13.4% in the non-censored comment, whereas I used the more commonly used 13% in the censored comment.
I'll now run some experiments to narrow down what exactly are the conditions for removal. Results will be placed on https://pastebin.com/Z6G0B7kA. I'll do a write up later, when I've fully understood the extent of the censorship.
It seems like what you're describing as positive is only a small part of what the article is complaining about. How did you get from e.g. 'If you have "bad friends" on social media you might pay more for your loan' to the return of politeness to society?
I agree that it would be nice to see people imposing their views on others less - "Live and let live" is a basic requirement of a Liberal society. But the dystopian future evoked by this microsite is sort of the opposite of that - an enforced uniformity, where instead of tolerating difference we attack it until people learn to hide it more effectively.
thegrimmest 1300 days ago [-]
You can only attack difference that is broadcasted. "Keep to yourself" is another way of phrasing it. This means don't go advertising and monpolizing the attention of others with your differences. Live your private live in private.
WorldPeas 1301 days ago [-]
I do agree that it may foster politeness, but there are other undesirable effects of this cooling, such as political suppression. Sure, in a democracy like America, we love to tell everyone what we believe, and often it isn't polite, but in a place like China, it's beyond impolite to speak ill of the government, even when the criticism is just. I hate to invoke a slippery slope argument, but if we become timid around the subject of expressing our opinions, we may be easier to suppress. I would also like to add that there is an inherent value to speech. For example, a person who reveals government biases through photo or video is more valuable than a person who posts baseless conspiracies, hopefully we can have a proper value system socially enforced, rather than just have it all pushed down together
momokoko 1300 days ago [-]
Ever heard “I don‘t mind if people are gay, I just don’t want to hear about it?”
Remember “Don’t ask don’t tell?”
The truth is that what is generally accepted today will be guaranteed to not be the same exact things that are generally accepted tomorrow.
Society moves from being more liberal back to more conservative through culture. Punishing people for straying outside lines when they are not causing specific harm to others eliminates the very method by which societies evolve.
What you are describing has lead to the stagnation and ultimately death of many cultures and societies.
KhoomeiK 1300 days ago [-]
> and refraining from imposing their thoughts and opinions
This isn't what social cooling results in though. Thoughts and opinions are imposed, it's just that their imposition is monopolized and becomes implicit. Dirty laundry will still be aired in the town square, but it'll be the King's and everyone will be forced to smell it.
burkaman 1301 days ago [-]
I think the issue is that it is getting harder to have a private conversation or indulge in a private interest. It's quite difficult to have a conversation with a friend that's physically far away without using the services of one or more multinational corporations that may or may not be able to monitor what you say and sell that information to someone else. Of course it's possible, but how hard is it to analyze all the options and coordinate a method?
And what if you want to buy stuff for a hobby that you only talk about with a few close friends? Don't use Amazon, or a credit card anywhere, don't use Google to look up products or Google Maps to get to a store, don't use plaintext email or Facebook chat or Whatsapp or whatever else to talk about it with your friends, etc.
It takes a lot of mental effort to know whether or not an action will be "public", which can cause the cooling effect this page talks about. The trend is not people doing stuff in private instead of publicly, it's people not doing stuff at all because there is no "private".
thegrimmest 1300 days ago [-]
I don't find using WhatsApp or Signal groups to communicate with my distant friends particularly hard. These particular corporate platforms are quite ubiquitous. I'm also not particularly worried about being canceled for what I say in these conversations, since it's not something I've observed happening in wider society.
parasubvert 1301 days ago [-]
Contrast it to living in a small town. Everyone talks, including the local store owners. There's very little privacy in having a private interest or hobby.
Local privacy is arguably far easier in a city, or in a crowded digital space. It all depends on the context of who you're trying to hide from. I'd much rather trust my privacy to Apple and Amazon if I wanted to quietly buy things no one else in my neighbourhood knew about.
thegrimmest 1300 days ago [-]
That's kind of the point though isn't it? I imagine folks are rather more polite in a small town than a big city. I don't think having lots of privacy is a natural state for people. I think transparency is the ally of good and opaqueness the cover for evil. Mind you it only works if everyone is watching everyone (a la small town) rather than big brother watching you.
More or less I'm advocating a distributed social credit system instead of a centralized one. In fact I'd say "distributed social credit" is a pretty good term for the social conditions we have spent most of our time evolving in.
1300 days ago [-]
pseudalopex 1300 days ago [-]
That's the opposite of live and let live.
thegrimmest 1300 days ago [-]
Behaviour expected by social norms and with purely social consequences is much preferred to behaviour dictated by governments which can have legal and physical consequences. In the first case, you are (supposed to be) protected from physical consequences by that very same government. You'll never be able to get away from people's expectations as long as you live amongst other people. What matters is what they can do about it.
pseudalopex 1300 days ago [-]
Your analogy was small towns vs. big cities. Now it's society vs. government? Are we even still talking about social cooling?
Both small towns and big cities have governments. Social norms can include being heterosexual or following a specific religion. Not conforming to those expectations can have physical consequences too.
thegrimmest 1300 days ago [-]
Right, and what I'm saying is that there can be an upside to increased social pressure to conform to social norms (also known as being polite) which is suggested by social cooling. I'm also saying that it's not equivalent to government-imposed social credit.
Vrondi 1301 days ago [-]
Ah, my friends, time to return to snail mail and security envelopes!
AQuantized 1300 days ago [-]
It's not live and let live, it's live within the lines or be penalized. This isn't immediately terrible if you actually like living within those lines, but that's a big if. And what about when you or the lines change and they no longer align so well?
There's a big difference between politeness and total conformity to established (by the powerful) norms. Disagreeing (politely) with government policy on a public forum could easily prevent you from obtaining certain positions or status in the future if this is an accurate trend.
Not to mention that the freedom to go outside of convention without arbitrarily large punishment is worth preserving in of itself.
> Is it wrong to suggest that this (if accurate) is a positive trend? I would like to live in a society where people spend more time considering what they say publicly, keeping to themselves, and refraining from imposing their thoughts and opinions. Live and let live.
Is this what's happening? What I see is more and more people falling into a few different tribes, each attempting to out ostracize the other. Game theory suggests this will end with two main tribes with peak hatred for each other.
joe_the_user 1300 days ago [-]
Is it wrong to suggest that this (if accurate) is a positive trend?
If it's a completely inaccurate trend, I suppose your suggestion then completely misses the hoop, so to speak. If anything, it seems like a lack of privacy has heated things up through the micro-marketing of a hundred types of off-kilter reasons to be angry to a hundred different slightly skewed personality types.
titzer 1300 days ago [-]
> I would like to live in a society where people spend more time considering what they say publicly, keeping to themselves, and refraining from imposing their thoughts and opinions.
I see you've never been to the internet.
nobody9999 1300 days ago [-]
>If you want to have a private conversaion, social media doesn't seem to be a good vehicle for it. Much like airing your dirty laundry in the town square has been considered bad etiquette, airing personal greivances on the internet seems to be in poor taste.
An excellent point. Although not a new or particularly profound one.
When the large corporation I worked for back in the mid-1990s connected their email system to the larger internet, all employees were sent a memo discussing the advantages and issues with this.
It was recommended (paraphrasing) that employees shouldn't "put anything in an email that they wouldn't want to see on the cover of their local newspaper." That was back when local newspapers were a thing, but the principle still applies.
In fact, it applies even more strongly to the current social media environment. And it's still good advice.
That said, the rise of online communication and social media have reduced the personal and private interactions that people have.
Many on HN (and everywhere else too) won't answer phone calls at all, instead relying on SMS/Slack/WhatsApp, etc.
And formerly private conversations about one's personal life now take place on online platforms like Facebook, which ruthlessly exploits every bit of information they can get to "optimize the ad delivery experience."
One of the worst offenders is GMail, of course. They read all of your emails as a matter of course. Again in an effort to "better target advertising."
Which is why I'm surprised that anyone with even a passing interest in privacy would use either of those platforms. I certainly don't.
When I have a voice conversation (whether that be on a phone call or in person), as long as I'm cognizant of who is in hearing distance of my voice, I can be relatively (unless I'm being specifically targeted for close surveillance) sure that my conversation is private.
But any text-based communication that utilizes a centralized resource to route such communications is incredibly vulnerable to exposure and can't be trusted to provide a private communications channel.
Yes, this is oversimplified. No, I don't discuss encrypted voice/text mechanisms like Signal, PGP, SMIME, etc. here.
I didn't do so because most folks are unaware/unwilling/unable to use such secure communications mechanisms anyway, so their utility is severely limited.
fogetti 1300 days ago [-]
The idea has only accidental correlation with social media. You are pretty much wrong focusing your thinking on social media only.
keiferski 1301 days ago [-]
This is a good site, but it leaves out the fact that the traditional mass media itself has enforced certain opinions, which subsequently leads to a chilling effect.
Culturally, we need to get to a place where words aren't considered a form of violence, and where mere discussion of controversial ideas isn't shot down for "giving the enemy a platform." The concept of a calm debate really needs to make a comeback.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it."
- Aristotle (paraphrased)
1301 days ago [-]
BlueTemplar 1300 days ago [-]
That's a lofty idea, but how do you deal with hate speech ?
keiferski 1300 days ago [-]
Complex topic, but I think a tagging and filtering approach is probably the best one. You can’t censor bad ideas without inviting total censorship, so instead just let people choose which things they want to hide.
In any case, I’m talking more about the cultural value of politeness and free expression of ideas, which almost by definition would exclude any extreme sort of hate speech.
parliament32 1300 days ago [-]
You start by understanding hate speech isn't the issue. GPT-3 will happily barf out pages of hate speech for you, but that doesn't mean we're trying to ban/silence/cancel GPT-3, does it?
account42 1300 days ago [-]
You could start with realizing that the problem is not the speech part.
friendlybus 1301 days ago [-]
Sensible and jovial debate in the commons died when mankind died. We are pulling fairly hard into colouring people's reputation however we want via the internet with a humanistic culture.
shadowgovt 1301 days ago [-]
Gotta be honest: I don't have to spend more than 5 minutes on Facebook to dissuade myself of the hypothesis that, on average, people are feeling constrained about what they're saying.
jmcqk6 1301 days ago [-]
Pretty good example of selection bias. The people who are concerned are not going to be posting on facebook.
ChrisKingWebDev 1301 days ago [-]
That also exacerbates the problem. The only people posting are strongly opinionated loud mouths.
shadowgovt 1301 days ago [-]
Then we would expect posting on Facebook to go down, yet Facebook's user count keeps going up.
adrianmonk 1301 days ago [-]
You can categorize people into careful and not careful. Posting goes down for the careful, but stays high for the not careful.
The total amount of posting doesn't go to zero because not everybody is in the careful category.
Nimitz14 1300 days ago [-]
People have a FB account because it's occasionally useful, but very few people actually post and read the feed.
I would have thought this is obvious, but clearly not.
grumple 1301 days ago [-]
Firstly, you can create any number of accounts without matching people. Secondly, even for real users, those users are often from nations full of people that haven't learned better yet (new market growth). What's their growth look like in the US amongst those 25+?
shadowgovt 1301 days ago [-]
Naively, it's going to slow because they're already saturated the market; they have a userbase of about 223 million US, which is 67% of all Americans (88% of adult Americans over 19, if we naively assume their TOS is followed and no kids have FB accounts).
I don't get the notion that social cooling was scoping itself to only the US, but even if it was, I don't think people are "learning better yet." Quite the contrary.
throwaway4715 1301 days ago [-]
I'm really struggling to see how younger Americans joining different social networks, which all have the same effects, is a signal that they've learned their lesson?
It's interesting that this is about big data generally and people are reading it as "Facebook".
luckylion 1301 days ago [-]
I use Facebook exclusively to check for Corono related info in my community, because the local administration can't disperse them via normal channels. It's interesting, groups with 4000 people (roughly 10% of the local population!) will have anywhere from 3-30 likes on posts. The super hot threads have 50 comments, usually from the same 10-15 people.
I don't know whether the rest are silent lurkers like me, or whether they are bots, or FB is just inflating the numbers, but they surely aren't visibly active. I imagine it's not a special thing where I live, so you'll likely have the vast majority not posting publicly at all while a small minority is extremely loud. If the user count grows (hasn't the growth slowed?), most of it will not be seen by you while you look at posts and comments.
_def 1300 days ago [-]
number of people posting on FB is not the same as the total FB users
mNovak 1301 days ago [-]
While true, there's not a good way to prove why others aren't posting; maybe it's "social cooling" or maybe they just got bored.
_jal 1301 days ago [-]
There are different social contexts. Everyone recognizes this; you'll say things around friends that you won't say in a work meeting.
Online communities have contexts that are just as real, but they have the digital discontinuities we all know and love, so the odds of doing the equivalent of dropping into that work meeting after several beers is much more likely and happens far more frequently.
A separate issue is preservation - of course all this is on Your Permanent Record. And the future only has very different, limited interest in what the context is now.
JMTQp8lwXL 1301 days ago [-]
The algorithm is designed to provide maximally engaging content. Of your Facebook friends, you will see posts from the most outspoken ones, which isn't everybody.
kderbyma 1301 days ago [-]
but truly I bet you what you are referring to are people's opinions which are 'extreme' but at the same time probably can be lumped into groups of like-minded opinions with others - they are cooling towards their chosen echochambers but the same concept applies - because they get directed based on said data to these fringes because the data groups them towards them in suggestions
flibble 1300 days ago [-]
I find myself holding back upvoting posts on HN as analysis of my voting habits would give such a clear indication of my inner thoughts.
drdeadringer 1301 days ago [-]
> If you feel you are being watched, you change your behavior.
I feel like this has been known for a long time. For example: If you walk into a Kindergarten class and watch the children play, once they notice you watching them they change behavior away from "natural play" to "observed play". I believe Cory Doctorow made this observation a spell ago.
Edit:
I'd like to add that one of my parents was a teacher in a school with two-way mirrors for observation. People could secretly observe a given class in session either for observing the teacher and//or observing the students live but without the "observer effect". The entire school building was designed for this purpose and whilst everyone knew it it appeared to work as intended. "Out of sight is out of mind" is real. Yes, this particular parent was on both sides of the glass.
giancarlostoro 1301 days ago [-]
What kind of schools do that? I'm not familiar with this at all, man I'd feel weird being in a classroom with a huge mirror.
drdeadringer 1301 days ago [-]
UMASS Amherst, an "experimental" elementary school for phycological observation. It's now no longer in operation, but for decades it was an elementary school with an upper "secret" corridor with two-way mirrors overlooking each classroom. The understanding between UMASS and Amherst was "We let you use the elementary school, we let our psych students take a look" type of thing.
Each classroom had a row of two-way mirrors about 30 feet overhead [weird architecture, nature of the beast] so even physically it was out-sight and out-mind because "nobody looks up".
socialcooling 1301 days ago [-]
This sounds fascinating, but I can't seem to find more information online. Do you perhaps have a link or some keywords I should add to the search query?
drdeadringer 1300 days ago [-]
The elementary school was called "Mark’s Meadow Elementary School" in Amherst, MA.
giancarlostoro 1301 days ago [-]
I ran into the same wall, I would love to learn more about any discoveries they may of made.
tboyd47 1301 days ago [-]
This is exactly why I had to get off of Facebook (again).
I deactivated my first account 8 years ago, but got back on to re-connect with my old pals and acquaintances from back in the day. For that reason, it was fantastic.
After another year, I realized that I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone. There's a lot of variety in my crowd. I have the sense IRL to know that not everything is for everybody, but that doesn't matter much on Facebook unless you want to spend hours and hours hand-crafting subsets of your friends for different topics (I don't). And I have zero interest in posting selfies or status updates of what's going on in my life, so that made the platform exceedingly boring and a waste of time for me. It's a shame, because it does work really well for "connecting" with people (in the shallowest sense of the word).
reaperducer 1301 days ago [-]
I realized that I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone.
The only thing worse than people who are offended by everything is having to be afraid of offending over-sensitive people.
There's a lot of variety in my crowd
Which is a good thing. It's how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It's how you learned things. It was called being an adult.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia were polar opposites on the issues. But they were also very good friends. Because they were adults. They weren't children who had to surround themselves with familiar things that reinforce their own views of the world.
I remember in college, we were encouraged to seek out differing opinions. I remember a guy who once chastised me for not seeking a broad enough range of opinions. He said, "What's wrong with you? Don't you want to be challenged?" My understanding is that sort of thing would never happen on a college campus today.
Be who you are. If people can't respect you for having a different opinion, they're not adults, and they're certainly not "friends," Facebook or otherwise.
lilactown 1301 days ago [-]
I agree with the spirit of your words. I think that the subtext of your post (or at least people that espouse similar things on the internet) is that this is the fault of a certain brand of American politics (left leaning, "SJW" types) that don't engage with many right-leaning people.
The frustrating (and silly) thing is that this argument is used a lot to attack left-leaning folks who _do_ engage with many people whose experience and world view are very different from them... like people who are homeless, immigrants from other countries, people who are racially minoritized, people who are disabled.
For many people who don't experience those kinds of life experiences, building relationships with those folks can be really tough and bring into question a lot of the foundations of their world view.
The argument that left-leaning people won't engage with right-leaning people often feels like it's used as an excuse for right-leaning folks to use rhetoric and hold positions that routinely disenfranchise and threaten the safety of the kind of people that left-leaning people have worked to empathize with and build relationships without consequence. That the people who continue to have right-leaning views don't seem interested in putting in the same _effort_ to empathize and build relationships with people other than themselves is both hypocritical and not surprising to me.
Finally, engaging with "challenging" opinions is all well and good as a mental exercise, but building and maintaining a relationship with someone is a project that requires continuous work (even as just a friendship) and I think it's worthwhile to be selective in the people who you put in that kind of work for.
runarberg 1301 days ago [-]
Agreed. Parent seems to think that engaging in rhetoric is universially fun and useful endeavor that will expand our mind and better us as a person. This is not true on a number of issues.
Disenfranchising issues (such as gay rights, police brutality, immigration, right to abortion, etc.) is not only theoretical to some people, but a real threat to their lives and well being. A person playing the devils advocate arguing for limits on immigration to an immigrant is not only annoying but actively threatening to an immigrant at risk of being deported.
A number of people have full rights to be insulted when points are raised on a number of subjects. In fact they also have the rights to react angrily if the subject is a direct threat to their lives and livelihood. People arguing things often don’t realize that there is a person on the other end of the debate, a person with feelings, like love and compassion, but also anger and disgust. If a subject threatens or belittles, them being insulted or angry is the natural response.
manigandham 1301 days ago [-]
> "A person playing the devils advocate arguing for limits on immigration to an immigrant is not only annoying but actively threatening to an immigrant at risk of being deported."
This is nonsense. I'm an immigrant who argues for limits. Certain subjects being (subjectively) sensitive to talk about doesn't mean they're unproductive because of it. In fact we'll never get anywhere if we don't talk about them.
Limiting speech arbitrarily, especially over very assumptive beliefs of offense, is a terrible thing. You're not forced to participate in any discussion you don't want to be in but people have a right to discuss it.
malandrew 1300 days ago [-]
This. I'm also an immigrant myself that argues for limits.
> You're not forced to participate in any discussion you don't want to be in but people have a right to discuss it.
Exactly, and if you're not capable of engaging in that discussion productively, don't be surprised if your viewpoints and positions don't get the consideration you think they deserve.
Civil dialogue is the foundation upon which we find understanding in the face of disparate experiences. If you're feelings about the dialogue gets in the way of contributing to understanding, then it is you that is hurting your own cause.
maerF0x0 1300 days ago [-]
> who argues for limits.
+1 , want to add, almost everyone argues for limits on immigration because without limits that would be an argument for _unlimited_ immigration.
Sometimes we construe ourselves as vastly separated "islands" of ideologies, when in reality we're more like tight clusters. That is we have similar ideals, and differentiate on how to accomplish them.
For example "Help the poor" is often agreed upon, but then argued about "How to help the poor" . (Do we give them tough love and bootstraps yada yada? or Do we give them support, resources and encouragement and yada yada?).
runarberg 1300 days ago [-]
> Limiting speech arbitrarily [...] is a terrible thing.
This is not true. We do limit speech, both through moderation (like here on HN), terms of service (e.g. on Twitter, Facebook etc.), codes of conduct (in our workplace), in our legal society (slander, hate-speech, etc.), etc. But also through our moral behavior. As humans we know that some topics are insensitive to talk about around some people (e.g. we don’t tell yo'mama jokes around a recently orphaned person).
Debating against abortion around a person that is at risk of being forced into pregnancy, or against gay rights against a person not allowed to openly express their love for their same-sex partner is a truly offensive thing to do. When a platform limits such a speech it is acting in a very human way.
Sussing an offensive party to protect the rights of the disenfranchised one is what normal humans do in a normal conversation.
manigandham 1300 days ago [-]
First, protecting the rights of the disenfranchised means, by definition, they are not disenfranchised. I'm not sure why you keep using that word.
Second, if we rewind to the original comment, it's clearly talking about people "who are offended by everything", on a platform where everything offends someone. This is not about rules or regulations, or personal behavior; all of which have very specific context in which they apply.
Rather it's about the lack of engagement with different perspectives by labelling everything taboo at such a scale and breadth as to prevent any possible discussion, and the worrisome self-censorship as a result. You're only reinforcing this point with your sweeping generalizations on behalf of people and situations you don't represent.
If you find something offensive then you are free to not participate, but you do not have the right to limit their speech. You're not protecting anyone's right by doing so, and I find it the very opposite of human to regress towards silence instead of moving forward through reason.
runarberg 1300 days ago [-]
Sorry you are right, this I went on a little tangent there (as explained in a sibling comment).
However “people who are offended by everything” is often used as a synonym for left leaning folks (or rather folks in favor of societal diversity; SJWs if you will). Also “shutting down the debate” is often used to complain about when a left leaning person reacts offensively (or even angrily) during a debate. This is regardless of if the preceding comment was actually very insulting or threatening to some people that may be present.
In a sibling comment I explain that—in my opinion—it is actually a good thing if people that hold oppressing and insulting views self-censor after having received angry replies to their offensive views. I‘d like to add now that normally us “left leaning folks” don’t simply label speech as offensive and leave it at that. We—as grandparent points out—we actively engage in the conversation and point out (sometimes in anger) the flaws in the opposing opinion, explain why a thing is offensive and bad, and why we are angry about it. Then we hope that either they will change their view or at least reconsider before they say something like this again.
Again I should reiterate that I am specifically talking about debates that I consider threatening or offensive to some groups of people.
manigandham 1300 days ago [-]
> "“left leaning folks” don’t simply label speech as offensive and leave it at that"
But that's what you just did, and are still doing. Offensive is subjective. Who are you to consider what is offensive to others? Are you in those groups? Are you personally taking offense?
Why did you say immigration can't be discussed? I'm an immigration who discusses it just fine, and I find it annoying and offensive that you act offended on my behalf and shutdown any discussion. I don't want or need that and am fully capable of engaging in the discussion or leaving myself out of it. Engage with the argument or leave it, but stop acting on behalf of others as if they don't have agency. It's just a soft bigotry to think that they can't speak for themselves.
And self-censorship is never good. People holding views that you find offensive don't need to stop doing anything, and this has both exposed bad people and led to revolutionary new ideas. At one point ending slavery and women's suffrage was also offensive to discuss, but good thing we discussed it and actually made progress. Let's not stop now.
runarberg 1300 days ago [-]
Lets get this straight: When did I actually say “immigration can’t be discussed”? I said it might be annoying to an immigrant when people play the devils advocate to argue for limits on immigration. And I said it might be threatening to an immigrant that is at risk of deportation.
I know I didn’t word it perfectly and I understand you might have misunderstood me. English is not my first language and I’m sometimes not as clear as I could be. Particularly in this case I left out the word ‘might’, hoping that it was implied from this being a hypothetical scenario. Sorry for that.
I’m sorry if I left you thinking that all immigrants think this, or are of a certain opinion, I don’t believe this my self and it certainly was not my intention to claim any such thing.
I also don’t hold the opinion that some topics can’t be discussed. Only that it is natural to be insulted if certain opinions in said topics are expressed. Since you mentioned slavery, imagine a public forum about in Pennsylvania in 1849. Some people might think the debate about abolition is only theoretical and might play the devils advocate, imagining and stating arguments that make sense in a theoretical scenario. Who is this helping? Is Fredrick Douglass gonna walk by this forum and think: “I’m glad people are having this debate, I hope this person that argues for slavery keeps posting.” Say John Brown replies stating this for-slavery person “is an idiot” and “should keep silent, for their own good,” do you think that Harriet Tubman would be thinking: “Oh my, I hope John Brown—though well intentioned—will not silence this anti-abolitionist. In fact why is John Brown speaking on my behalf? he was never a slave. We got to keep this debate going if we want to end slavery.” Finally Harriet Ann Jacobs walks by and simply says to her self: “Well, I’m free now, I don’t need to participate in this forum. I’ll just leave it.”
No, this is ridiculous. We don’t stop these humanitarian disaster by allowing bigoted views to persist. If someone comes with an insulting argument based on a bigoted view, the normal thing to do is to insult back and hope they never speak of this again.
manigandham 1300 days ago [-]
> "Only that it is natural to be insulted if certain opinions in said topics are expressed."
Again, so what? It happens and is entirely subjective, and whether it's shared by millions of people or specific to an individual is an irrelevant detail.
> "Who is this helping?"
Who cares? Discussion happens. There is no imperative that it must be helpful, whatever that means. That's yet another subjective judgement.
> "We don’t stop these humanitarian disaster by allowing bigoted views to persist."
Discussion is what determined they were wrong views in the first place. Speech from the opposing side that, at the time, was considered rebellious and wrong eventually won and created change.
> "the normal thing to do is to insult back"
Yes. Counter speech and ideas with better speech and ideas. That is the opposite of (self-) censorship and limiting expression because of potential offense.
throwawayinfo 1300 days ago [-]
You're comparing immigration limits to being against abolition? What a strawman.
runarberg 1300 days ago [-]
No I’m not. Here I was expanding on the point the parent made where abolition was an example:
> [S]elf-censorship is never good. People holding views that you find offensive don't need to stop doing anything, and this has both exposed bad people and led to revolutionary new ideas
This is a silly argument given the above example.
Remember the topic is about self-censorship and whether getting offended about certain rhetoric is natural, not about any specific topic which might offend people.
blackflame7000 1301 days ago [-]
You can't just label some topics as "Disenfranchising issues" and then cease to have debate on the topic. There's always going to be a debate on to what extent should society go out of its way to enfranchise people and to what extent is the onus on the individual." You can't just shutdown these topics because you want more than others are willing to give. You can't label people hateful just because they don't want to be generous and you certainly can't shutdown the debate on the extent to which people are entitled to generosity or frugality.
nullstyle 1300 days ago [-]
I don't think GP was labeling anyone as hateful. Escalation isn't very helpful in my opinion.
blackflame7000 1292 days ago [-]
It’s not being hateful it’s just being honest. Sorry if the Truth offends you. This thread is like a bunch of steroid users becoming up with reasons why they need them
read_if_gay_ 1301 days ago [-]
Some topics are sensitive, but that's not a reason to stop discussing these issues. We need dialogue or the political divide will just keep growing.
tathougies 1300 days ago [-]
> Disenfranchising issues (such as gay rights, police brutality, immigration, right to abortion, etc.) is not only theoretical to some people,
Immigration is a zero sum game. No developed country can accept all immigrants wanting to live there. Neither leftist nor more conservative immigration policy gives every immigrant who wants to the opportunity to enter the United States. The claim that left-leaning individual's immigration policy is not 'disenfranchising' is laughable. For every person entering from South America, some number of people cannot enter from another country. You can say this is not the case all you want, but given that immigration does put pressure on a country's resources, this is always true. Similarly, if you let in everyone from South Asia, you will disenfranchise some South Americans, etc.
You can't just say something is disenfranchising and thus non-negotiable. For example, you say the pro-life position is disenfranchising because -- I assume -- you believe it takes away the right of a woman to not have a child. However, a pro-life person would make the obvious argument that actually the pro-choice position is disenfranchising because there is a person -- the child -- who is being killed without having a say in it. Should the pro-choice position now become unmentionable?
FooBarBizBazz 1300 days ago [-]
> No developed country can accept all immigrants wanting to live there.
"developed": The US and Europe are rich.
"wanting": Other people want to be rich. That's why they come.
If US/Europe worshipped money less, they would be less rich. There would be less incentive for others to come, or for incumbents to keep them out. If you want to reduce flow, reduce pressure.
Here's the thing though: You, and your children, would have to work for a living.
> immigration does put pressure on a country's resources
Does it? Or are immigrants the resource being consumed? Seems to me they do the work. And once their children are Americanized, how many grandchildren will they have? Fewer. The US needs immigrants like a car needs gasoline. It eats them.
> if you let in everyone from South Asia, you will disenfranchise some South Americans, etc.
Only if there's a cap. Which is uncreative. Do the opposite. Aggressively add people to the ranks of the United States.
Imagine: Tomorrow, Trump comes on the TV and, in terrible Spanish, invites the people of Baha California (both states), Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas to hold referenda under Article IV, Section 3 of the US Constitution, about joining the United States. They'd be enticed by what's left of the "American dream", sun-belt voters would get a shot at cheaper and sunnier real estate, and factory workers could go to where the jobs are. The problem with NAFTA is that capital can flow but workers can't. So let the people move freely too! And if the Russians can run a foreign influence campaign to make Brexit happen, why can't the US do a Mexic-enter?
We can make the sum be much, much more than zero.
manigandham 1300 days ago [-]
None of this is true. Immigrants come for better opportunity and living conditions, not to be "rich" although the ability to actually do so is welcomed.
If the countries they were coming from had better conditions then there would be less need to immigrate, and it would also help far more people. That's what people who are for immigration reform and strong borders want. Why would you rather have countries be worse to stop immigration rather than lifting the others up?
And the vast majority of people have to work for a living so why would immigration change that? Immigrants are not "consumed" whatever that means.
FooBarBizBazz 1297 days ago [-]
> Immigrants come for better opportunity and living conditions, not to be "rich" although the ability to actually do so is welcomed.
The US, and similar countries, are rich by global standards. A "normal", "not rich" middle class lifestyle there is enviable to "normal" people in most of the world. The argument about "better opportunity and living conditions" vs "rich" is about word choice and connotation. When I say "rich" I mean to call into question what Americans think of as "normal", and to consider how their "normal" is supported.
> to stop immigration
When a patient is sick, you don't want to stop the blood transfusions keeping them alive.
> Why would you rather have countries be worse [...] rather than lifting the others up?
The United States isn't actually better in a sustainable way. It operates a Ponzi scheme: Immigrants are lured in, they do the work, and hopefully they even get a little material comfort, but mostly they are working for the benefit of their children. The trap is that their children end up Americanized, which reduces their fertility to below replacement. Within a few generations they are all dead. Hence the need for a constant replacement flow. Without that, the US would be Japan.
It goes without saying that not every culture can operate in this way. An ecosystem made entirely of leeches will crash; there also need to be hosts.
> [t]he vast majority of people have to work for a living so why would immigration change that?
The incumbents at the top of these Ponzi schemes have easy jobs. They certainly don't pick strawberries.
Those easy lives serve one purpose: They are the beacon that draws more workers in.
The top of the pyramid can be supported because it is constantly dying off.
> Immigrants are not "consumed" whatever that means.
Their culture, which gave them life, is destroyed, and replaced with The American Way of Life, so they have no great-grandchildren. In this way, America is a population sink.
> That's what people who are for immigration reform and strong borders want.
So long as the draw of the American Dream is as strong as it is, any disincentives sufficiently powerful to counteract it will need to be inhumane -- think "children in cages". Laws that cannot be enforced humanely are not legitimate.
runarberg 1300 days ago [-]
Thank you! I’ve been biting my lips not to correct these comments about how “immigration is (sometimes) bad” because I’m trying to focus on grandparent’s point. But you said it much better then I could have.
tathougies 1300 days ago [-]
Having mexic-enter is vastly different than immigration. It's dishonest to compare the two.
Namely.. I am someone who is against illegal immigration but I would support mexico joining the usa
runarberg 1300 days ago [-]
The point of the parent is to demonstrate how silly zero-sum arguments against immigration are, not to compare. A similar anecdote is to point at the open border policy inside the EU. Allowing free migration of people within the EU states (i.e. open borders) has had tremendous economic benefits for every member state, except perhaps the countries that are loosing workers.
Consider also that free migration is allowed within the US borders. Everyone in South Carolina is currently leagally allowed to migrate to California. Is California loosing money to South Carolina because of this?
tathougies 1300 days ago [-]
> Consider also that free migration is allowed within the US borders. Everyone in South Carolina is currently leagally allowed to migrate to California. Is California loosing money to South Carolina because of this?
Again... completely apples-to-oranges comparison. Migrants between South Carolina and California share enough in common that it hardly classifies as migration other than due to the internal political divisions of the United States.
Legal immigration to the US is a zero-sum game, by law, and this is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.
runarberg 1299 days ago [-]
Tell me, what precisely is the economic mechanism that makes California loose money from Sonorense migrants, but not from South Carolinian migrants. What is it that migrants from Baja California, Liberia, or Ireland lack in commonalty with native Californians but migrants from Louisiana have?
I’m also a little confused as to what you mean by zero-sum by law. Is there a law that states that the federal government has to pay with each immigrant? If a Jamaican immigrant produces growth for the US (say by doing labor and contributing to the economy), then the US has to, by law, pay that growth back to Jamaica? Are we not talking about economic zero-sum?
tathougies 1298 days ago [-]
Every legal immigrant entering the United States is one less immigrant that can enter due to immigration quotas established by congress
aantix 1301 days ago [-]
Those disenfranchising issues have affected people on the other side. Those parents probably know a few.
Getting angry is natural, but anger is easy. Advancement of the cause doesn't entail getting likes, hearts or clap-backs. The real work is in persuasion.
dgellow 1300 days ago [-]
You’re talking about _illegal immigration_.
Legal immigrants, which is the majority and the ones generally designed by the word “immigrants” (without qualitatif), aren’t being deported. Legal and illegal immigrations are two different topics (social, political, economical), it doesn’t really make sense to mix them.
Also I’m an immigrant myself and argue for some level of immigration control, and that’s the case for every single expat I know.
leppr 1300 days ago [-]
Being angry about an opinion is fine. That doesn't mean you should try to stop people from talking about it.
Save from the feedback of concrete actions being taken (which you want to avoid), discussion by a diverse crowd is the only way to properly surface the harmfulness of a viewpoint.
Making an opinion politically incorrect won't stop people from holding it, they may on the contrary feel validated by it.
la6471 1300 days ago [-]
As we provide platforms to everyone to broadcast their opinions on everything , what I foresee is that if we continue to keep generating these gazillions of data points every second all the time then soon AI’s will be needed to do the analysis for us and complement or help human policy makers to make the right decisions. We already see this with things like sentiment analysis. Welcome to the singularity .. I for once can’t wait to have our constantly bickering politicians replaced with AI agents whose sole job is to work for the people and who can be overidden by executive authority only as a last resort.
rootusrootus 1300 days ago [-]
The ultimate expression of Tyranny of the Majority, completely automated.
qazpot 1300 days ago [-]
> Disenfranchising issues (such as gay rights, police brutality, immigration, right to abortion, etc.) is not only theoretical to some people, but a real threat to their lives and well being.
To achieve long lasting social changes you have to have a dialogue and convince the other party, if you think the entirety of your opinion is so morally justified that even having further debate is morally wrong then you can never achieve permanent social change it will just be temporary.
1301 days ago [-]
rayiner 1300 days ago [-]
> Disenfranchising issues (such as gay rights, police brutality, immigration, right to abortion, etc.) is not only theoretical to some people, but a real threat to their lives and well being. A person playing the devils advocate arguing for limits on immigration to an immigrant is not only annoying but actively threatening to an immigrant at risk of being deported.
There is a limit at which this is true, but most discussion of these issues doesn’t encroach into that territory. As an immigrant from a Muslim country I don’t feel “threats to my safety” when Trump talks about Islamic fundamentalism or extra scrutiny over immigration from certain countries. (It would be pretty odd to declare those topics off-limits, seeing as how the Muslim country I’m from has taken aggressive measures to fight the same exact fundamentalist forces.) I might feel differently if we were talking about putting Muslims in internment camps. But nobody is doing that, even though the left is acting like they are.
Does the US have “too many immigrants?” Until 2007, a plurality of Hispanic Americans (many of whom are immigrants) said “yes.” https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/19/latinos-hav.... Even today, 1 in 4 do. Only 14% say we have “too few immigrants” (which is the view de facto embraced by our current policies, which will lead to increased numbers of immigrants.) Given those views, it’s bizarre to treat discussion of immigration issues as off-limits.
You see this on issue after issue: leftists declare huge swaths of issues as off limits for discussion even to the point of excluding discussion of positions held by large swaths of the groups at issue. For example, 37% of women want to restrict Roe further or overrule it completely, compared to 38% who want to loosen its restrictions either somewhat or significantly. Another 16% want to maintain the status quo. http://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/NPR_.... Supermajorities of women, moreover, support measures like waiting periods.
Or, consider “police brutality.” An editor at the NYT was fired for running a op-ed by Tom Cotton advocating a law-and-order response to violence following the death of George Floyd. Recent polling shows that a majority of Hispanic people, who are disproportionately the target of aggressive policing, think “the breakdown of law and order” is a “bigger problem” than “systemic racism.” Large majorities of Black and Hispanic people want to either maintain existing levels of policing, or further increase them.
In practice, it’s your approach that’s “disenfranchising.” That rule makes the majority uncomfortable with expressing anything but the most left-leaning views with respect to a minority group. For example, Ilhan Omar and Linda Saraour say expectations of assimilation are “racist.” This is not even a mainstream opinion among American Muslims, who are one of the most assimilated groups in the country. (To the point that a majority voted for George W. Bush in 2000.) But a big fraction of well-meaning non-Muslims don’t want to be called racist. So they feel comfortable amplifying anti-assimilationist views, but not pro-assimilationist ones. Since non-Muslims are a huge majority of people, that dramatically distorts and biases the debate around Muslim assimilation in a manner that doesn’t reflect the views of Muslims themselves.
That phenomenon has had a real impact on the debate over abortion. A quarter of Democratic women want to further restrict Roe or overrule it. That viewpoint is completely unrepresented among Democratic men.
tptacek 1300 days ago [-]
You wrote a good comment a couple years about about the dynamics here. "Leftists" oppose discussions about incremental regulation of abortion for the same reader "right-wingers" oppose those discussions about firearms: both sides assume the discussion is a slippery slope towards all-out prohibition, and both sides have valid reasons to believe that.
In this comment, you depict left-of-center resistance to these discussions as irrational. But of course, it's not at all irrational; in fact, it's probably vital.
rayiner 1300 days ago [-]
In that context I was talking about political strategy. I think its rational for Democrats as a party to oppose abortion restrictions. But here I’m talking about whether certain issues should be off-limits for discussion. Folks on the far left accuse men of being misogynist if they express opposition to using federal funds for abortion, even though 50-60% of women themselves, depending on the poll, express such opposition. That distorts the debate.
There are also special considerations when you’re talking about issues that affect minorities, outside a political context. There, the approach of selectively amplifying extreme positions can overwhelm ideological diversity (or even majority views) within minority groups. The other day, my dad—a blue dog Democrat—expressed his frustration at how “the media has made Ilhan Omar the face of Muslims.” I’ve observed the palpable discomfort people in liberal circles have expressing views on immigration to the right of Omar. They feel like the way to be “allies”—and insulate themselves from being called racist—is to “amplify” views like her’s. But the net result of that is that debate around issues like assimilation—within the left—is totally dominated by these extreme views. And that seriously disenfranchises people. Especially in contexts, such as academic institutions and media, controlled by the left, where there is no need to deal with the potential opposite extreme positions on the right.
runarberg 1300 days ago [-]
Consider this: Person A calls for a total ban on abortion. person B calls this person a misogynist.
[Now I don’t know if this has ever happened (usually I don’t call people misogynists unless they talk about women as objects) but let’s go with this]
We can rephrase this as: Person A says pregnant people should be forced to undergo their pregnancy. Person B says this person in misinformed in an insulting manner.
What might have even happened in this discussion (we are just being theoretical here, right, so we can entertain, right? Or at least we don’t want this topic to be off limits right?) is the following: Person A actually said: “If it were up to women, humanity would be extinct in a generation. Women are evil, and we should not grant them any rights, particularly not the right to determine the birth of their children”. Person B responds: “I’m glad you’ve shown your bigoted misogynistic face. Now we all know what kind of a person you are, and whether we should keep listening to you. Do your self a favor and keep these opinions to your self unless you want to keep embarrassing your self”.
Who here is guilty of shutting down the debate? Who here decided that talking about abortion rights is “off topic”?
Now person B most certainly suggested that person A shouldn’t continue this debate. They also definitely insulted person A. But is anything here in their response surprising? Did they do anything wrong? How about we look at person A in this context? Do we want people like that expressing their opinion? Person B might have insulted person A, and hoped they would leave and never come back, but person A was insulting all women and calling for a whole group of people to have their decisions dictated by other people.
So why am I taking this example? It is obviously an exaggeration and not specifically what we are taking about here. But for all I know this is the kind of conduct that many people say us “lefties” are doing when we “mark a topic off limits”.
Ancestor’s point was this exactly, many people claim that us lefties want to shut down the topic because we get offended by everything. But do we? Are we maybe just behaving in a completely rational way, insulting back people that have insulted us? Asking people to stop that are threatening us, our friends, or people that we know exist?
---
PS: Off course in your example there is another qualifier there: “using federal funds for abortion”. People might have many reason disagree with that including being for forced pregnancies. But now the goalpost has been moved a little hasn’t it? So I took the liberty of moving it in the other direction my self. You provided an example that has probably never happened in reality, so I provide a counter example that also probably never happened, sounds fair?
rayiner 1300 days ago [-]
A premise of your strawman seems to be that women have a different opinion on abortion than men, which isn’t true. Unlike many other political opinions, there is very little difference between men and women on abortion questions: https://www.vox.com/2019/5/20/18629644/abortion-gender-gap-p.... Republican women are significantly more likely than Republican men to identify as pro-life: https://www.npr.org/2019/06/07/730183531/poll-majority-want-.... Your strawman also invokes gratuitous insults, which aren’t necessary to actually debate the issue.
Apart from that, my hypothetical is one that happens all the time. Article after article denounces policies like waiting periods, which the majority of women support and which exist in other developed countries, as misogynistic: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qkg753/what-its-like-to-endu....
Stepping back, a problem with your examples is the individualistic framing. Abortion undoubtedly involves a woman’s bodily autonomy. But it also undoubtedly involves another living thing. (Regardless of what political rights you believe that thing should have, it’s alive as a scientific matter.) Even Roe recognizes that a societal interest in the unborn child kicks in during the second trimester. (Roe, by the way, is unusual even in developed countries. Where many countries have abortion by law, almost none guarantee it under their constitution. Around the same time as Roe, the Canadian Supreme Court declared abortion to be purely a legislative matter. And the German constitutional court declared allowing abortion to be an unconstitutional violation of a fetus’s right to life. That’s still the law in both countries.) It also involves society generally. The fact that the developed world spends tremendous amounts of aid money assisting developing countries to reduce their birth rates belies the idea that reproduction has purely individual effect. Framing it in purely individualistic terms makes it seem more like it shouldn’t be up for debate, but only because the framing cuts out all the interests actually involved. Likewise, a discussion about immigration isn’t just about the immigrant, but about the society that has to expend resources integrating and supporting the immigrant. When you reframe these issues in individualistic terms to exclude effects on other people, they seem more like things that shouldn’t be subject to debate. But that’s just a product of the artificial framing.
runarberg 1300 days ago [-]
> A premise of your strawman seems to be that women have a different opinion on abortion than men.
No it’s not. My premise is that there exist some topics that are disenfranchising to some people, and debating those can be insulting or threatening to some people.
I’m not gonna debate you on the merits of abortion laws or immigration laws, we can leave that for another time. Here we are talking about whether it is OK (or even rational) for us ‘lefties’ to get offended by some topics, and argue to an extend where some people might not want to say certain things in a future debate.
I say it is OK, precisely because there is another person with stakes in the topic who might be at risk if terms of the debate are not in their favor. I moved this to individualistic terms on purpose, precisely because some topics involve individuals. These individuals have feelings and you may expect them to react accordingly.
tptacek 1300 days ago [-]
I think we get into trouble with this analysis, of taking topics off the table for civic discussion.
There are obviously some topics where that's true; for instance, no sane person will entertain a debate about re-segregating schools.
But then you have the idea that immigration is off the table because it dehumanizes undocumented people --- despite the fact that even American Latinos generally believe immigration is a colorable argument, or that abortion is off the table because it threatens the bodily autonomy of women --- despite the fact that a very large fraction of women support addition abortion restrictions. The principle just doesn't hold together.
It's possible that we're all just talking past each other, and that all of us acknowledge that there are going to be public policy discussions about these kinds of topics, and we're just talking about why some citizens will refuse to engage.
(Disclaimer: I think we have a moral imperative to issue a blanket amnesty and simplified path to citizenship for the vast majority of all undocumented immigrants, and oppose European-style restrictions on abortion).
thu2111 1300 days ago [-]
This is what the guy is talking about.
You're on the left. Your current political pet issues aren't something you're willing to debate - instead you're announcing that anyone who disagrees with you is a "threat".
A person playing the devils advocate arguing for limits on immigration
Limits on immigration aren't a "devil's advocacy" position, they're the de-facto standard around the world for obvious and common sense reasons.
This is why the modern left is so awful. You take something that every single place in the world does and describe it as being basically the same as clubbing someone over the head. You refuse to even attempt to engage with the vast majority who think your position is nonsense.
This is why "social cooling" happens, if we accept the use of that term. It is a problem created by people like you.
rootusrootus 1300 days ago [-]
> This is why the modern left is so awful.
That is a huge, unhelpful generalization. I am pretty far to the left and I consider immigration a perfectly reasonable topic to debate. Most everyone in my circle of friends feel the same way. The 'cancel culture', as it were, is just a subgroup of the left. And frankly, there is a cancel culture on the right, too.
core-questions 1300 days ago [-]
> The 'cancel culture', as it were, is just a subgroup of the left. And frankly, there is a cancel culture on the right, too.
Yes. On this I will agree with you strongly. Both varieties of cancel-culture are essentially the bulwarks of the false dichotomy of American politics - serving as backstops to try to keep people in the middle, which itself is a controlled position.
You're to the left of that. There's actually a lot more to discuss out there, and out to the right of it, than many people realize. For example, broad agreement on rights for workers to a fair wage, benefits, etc. - you'd be surprised how popular that is with the modern American right, when you can get them out from the GOP paradigm and weak, unhelpful talking points.
runarberg 1300 days ago [-]
People seem to have really grabbed on to me supposedly holding the view that “debating immigration is offensive and therefor off limits”.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough (which is likely; English is not my first language).
This sub-thread started with an ancestor complaining about people being afraid to discuss certain topics because people are too easily offended, this was expressed as a bad thing:
> The only thing worse than people who are offended by everything is having to be afraid of offending over-sensitive people.
The comment keeps going by pointing out that adults should be able to handle these “offensive” topics and debate them like adults.
A grandparent pointed out that there is truth in this point of view, but this is often used as a critique on “the left” which is unfounded since “left-leaning folks [...] _do_ engage with many people whose experience and world view are very different from them”.
I then point out in my comment above that I agree and—further—being insulted and angry when these topics spring up is perfectly natural:
> A number of people have full rights to be insulted when points are raised on a number of subjects.
I think a lot of people have taken the view that since I think being offended when debating the rights of disenfranchised people I must be for shutting down all debate about it. And while I think that is the right thing to do in certain cases I certainly don’t think that nobody is allowed to debate immigration on a public forum.
My point is that—depending on your stance—people might get offended and angry as you are debating this. It might be theoretical to you, but it might be very real to some people in the room. If your stance is really brutal you shouldn’t be surprised if some people—who may have their or loved once lives threatened by that stance—want to “cancel you”. To reiterate, my point is that it is not a bad thing if some people are afraid to voice their opinions in a public forum, when their opinions are threatening to disenfranchised people.
thu2111 1300 days ago [-]
But you're making yourself the arbiter of what can and cannot be debated, which is intolerable, as such a person automatically wins any 'debate' they feel strongly about. You say you support shutting down debate "in certain cases" but the moment you go there, you're always going to get strong pushback.
Imagine if Trump announced tomorrow that debates on workers rights were off-limits because they were a threat to the very existence of job creators. And then he tried to even make it illegal, to create a culture where anyone who talked about unions positively was immediately fired? Would the left recognise that as a legit strategy and go, oh ok, I guess if he says shutting down debate in that case is legitimate then it must be?
Of course not. You may not rule your pet topics off-limits for debate. Ever. On anything. Countries that try that in even mild ways have endless problems, though they may not immediately become apparent.
debating the rights of disenfranchised people
Look, I am an immigrant. I have been for 15 years. And I know that until I become a citizen I am a guest. Not a "disenfranchised person", a guest in another people's homeland. Until they make me one of them via citizenship, I have to respect that and act like a guest.
Your (genuinely) devil's advocacy on immigration is that there should be no limits on it, at all. This has become a common theme on the modern left, but why? It's the same as arguing that if a guest is invited into someone's home, then they can immediately turn around and invite whoever else they like to stay in that home as well, whilst expecting the hosts to accomodate everyone without limit. It's not physically or financially possible but it's also morally wrong and a bizarre attack on the very notion of guesthood.
If your stance is really brutal you shouldn’t be surprised if some people—who may have their or loved once lives threatened by that stance—want to “cancel you”.
But nobody is having the lives of their loved ones "threatened" by any of the stances you outlined, which is why people react so badly to this kind of rhetoric. Not being invited to live in a new place is not a "threat", it's not even taking any action at all - it is passive. And for those who ignored the laws and principles of immigration, being deported is only a "threat" in the same sense that society saying you will go to prison for fraud is a "threat" - we use different languages for the consequences of lawbreaking because of the different context in which such "threats" happen.
runarberg 1300 days ago [-]
> But you're making yourself the arbiter of what can and cannot be debated.
No I’m not. I’m saying there are topics which are disenfranchising which may offend or threaten a person. If I am offended by such speech (either personally or through a friend or family member) I may react appropriately. My goal may certainly be to silence this speech, but that does not make me an arbitrator does it?
thu2111 1299 days ago [-]
Attempting to silence political speech you disagree with is the definition of making yourself the arbiter. Is it really so hard to understand? When you stand up and say, nobody may express this idea that I disagree with, you are placing yourself in control of the debate and that will never be accepted.
All you're doing here is acting in an entirely totalitarian manner, by expansively defining entire segments of human thought off-limits on the grounds that they're "offensive" - in your mind. So what? Your position right here is offending me, because it's an attempt to disenfrachise people like me who disagree with you. So by your own logic you should recuse yourself from this debate and never speak of your views ever again. Presumably you won't do that, which is how you can tell your position isn't coherent.
By the way, the left constantly promotes policies that are offensive and disenfranchising. Just look at how they treat straight white men. Not big fans, shall we say? Anyone can turn your position around and claim feminist ideas should be banned from discussion because they are offensive and disenfranchising towards men.
runarberg 1299 days ago [-]
You misunderstand (or perhaps I am the one that misunderstands). I don’t have the authority to silence speech I find offensive or hurtful. I can only speak out and hope the other person takes the hint. That’s not really how arbitration works is it? (unless I’m misunderstanding what an arbiter is).
rootusrootus 1300 days ago [-]
Sounds like we could probably have a fascinating discussion. I get so tired of the same old tired name-calling and finger-pointing that most people count as political discussion. My Facebook is filled with posts from both sides which do nothing more than hurl insults at the other side.
Nobody actually wants to talk about issues. Bring up anything specific and everyone just goes silent. It's boring, and a bit offensive. People with so little imagination do us all a disservice by expressing it so strongly.
nobody9999 1300 days ago [-]
>This is why the modern left is so awful. You take something that every single place in the world does and describe it as being basically the same as clubbing someone over the head. You refuse to even attempt to engage with the vast majority who think your position is nonsense.
And painting those you call "the left" with such a broad brush, and ignoring that there is great diversity of opinion within that artificial, amorphous group is "basically clubbing someone over the head" and refusing to engage with them, even though study after study shows that (at least within the US, and likely across much of the world) we have much more in common WRT the kind of society we want than we do differences.
Those that create conflict from those differences (as you appear to be trying to do) are, if the goal is to create a better society for everyone rather than just satisfying oneself that he/she is right and "they" are wrong, are taking entirely the wrong tack.
Instead, let's celebrate the stuff we have in common, use those more prevalent commonalities to humanize and bring those of us who disagree about the differences together in a positive mode, rather than a dismissive, adversarial one.
thu2111 1300 days ago [-]
Yes, the left is a broad spectrum with many varied positions within it. But this article is about the very specific phenomenon of people feeling they can't express their views on social media, and the number one reason for that by far is the very specific slice of the left that viciously attacks anyone who publicly deviates from their very specific set of acceptable policy issues.
The people on the receiving end may well be on the equally amorphous right, or they may be more classical leftists who are more concerned with workers and unions than identity politics, it doesn't really matter. In the end cancel culture is not, in fact, a bipartisan thing - it is virtually always about the same small set of topics and the same people with the same views doing the cancelling.
It's a serious issue, which is why we are seeing more and more discussions of it. It would be great to celebrate that which we have in common, and I'd love to see more of that, but ultimately it's hard to celebrate differences when those differences are being used as justification for "cancellation", something which can have a very negative consequences for those concerned. The whole problem is people who don't respectfully disagree and use rhetoric comparing disagreement to physical violence as a justification.
malandrew 1300 days ago [-]
I wish more people on the left took the time to familiarize themselves with the work of Harvard researcher/professor George Borjas that has probably done the most rigorous work into the impact of immigration both pros and cons and considering all affected.
His op-ed in politico from 2016 is a good introduction to the issues he tries to tackle:
There's a palpable lack of self awareness in the comment you're responding too because there is an implicit non-recognition of the very real concerns that immigration presents to people that are hurt by immigration. I'm one of the people that benefits from immigration, but I'm not blind to the fact that some people in the country do not benefit from immigration. Those people and current immigrants are my neighbors and future immigrants are my future neighbors. It's important to consider how immigration impacts more than just current immigrants like myself and future immigrants.
mc32 1301 days ago [-]
On all of those issues there are at least two takes-and they’ve flip-flopped over time. People on the right have a different take on how to alleviate homelessness (self empowerment vs state dependence). On immigration (remember the time Bernie _didn't_ want immigrants to take jobs from locals?) minorities (also about the extent of state help vs other empowerment vehicles).
There are varied ways to address the issues from different points of view. Parties have switched from one view to the opposing view over time, so by proxy of this we know there isn’t a “right” way and a “wrong” way but rather opposing philosophies that stress one thing over another. Why does one work better now and why will a different one work better tomorrow?
lilactown 1301 days ago [-]
First of all, note that I did not talk at all about parties. I talked about left and right. Historically, the parties that represent right and left (or how much to the right and left they skew) has changed; which ideas fall in the category of left and right thinking have not as much.
It seems that your stance is based on the idea that a large group of people simply adopts one viewpoint or another arbitrarily, that those solutions have not changed over time, and that because of this we should treat them with equal merit. I believe this is wrong, for a number of different reasons.
First, it ignores the outcomes of the actual policies as well as the framework of thinking that it supports. Someone who has a "different take" whose outcome changes whether I or my friends can afford health care or not is not an "equal but opposite" philosophy.
To build on that, because it ignores the actual outcomes and treats all ideas as equal, it supports a framework of hyper-partisan thinking, the idea that ideology is about who you are loyal to. In this framework, your belief makes sense: just because we're loyal to different parties doesn't mean we can't be friends! But again, it ignores the very real implications of those beliefs.
Finally, it also concludes that solutions to these problems, and the people who are in charge of supporting them, cannot evolve and improve, only be renewed as a way to for members of a party to pledge loyalty. Bernie is not a perfect leftist, and has certainly had some shitty takes and policies; sometimes people get better (and sometimes they don't). As our understanding of the plight of the common people grows and adjusts to the new realities we are faced with, different solutions will evolve on the left, and that is good.
malandrew 1300 days ago [-]
> Bernie is not a perfect leftist, and has certainly had some shitty takes and policies; sometimes people get better (and sometimes they don't).
The wording here demonstrates deep disrespect for people whose ideas, experiences, conclusions and understanding of the world differs from your own.
lilactown 1300 days ago [-]
I meant no disrespect. If I read into your reply here, I think you feel that I am saying that anyone who is "not a perfect leftist" is "shitty"? On reflection I can see how that would be interpreted.
What I meant to wrote was 3 separate points:
- Bernie is not a perfect leftist
To be clear: I don't hold Bernie to the standard of being a "perfect leftist," rather stating the obvious that he is not one. And while I would love a candidate that agreed more with my viewpoints than him, I don't think he's a bad person because he doesn't.
- Bernie has had some shitty takes and policies
I do believe that Bernie Sanders, the politician, has not always wielded his power in my best interest; for instance, voting for the "Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists" joint resolution that has been used as justification for our military presence in the middle east. I would, in a glib way, rate that vote and the opinions he gave during that time as a "shitty take." I don't think that disrespects him as a person.
- Sometimes people get better (and sometimes they don't)
Sometimes people evolve their politics and beliefs as they learn more and the material conditions which they exist in change, which is good. Sometimes they do not, and that's bad. I do not think that adopting strictly leftist beliefs - of which there are a cacophony of differing, conflicting ones - is inherently good. Rather the lack of evolution is bad.
jquery 1301 days ago [-]
> First, it ignores the outcomes of the actual policies as well as the framework of thinking that it supports. Someone who has a "different take" whose outcome changes whether I or my friends can afford health care or not is not an "equal but opposite" philosophy.
What opinions about health care policy are people allowed to have, in your view?
1301 days ago [-]
TeaDrunk 1300 days ago [-]
Please reread the post, as it didn't mention that certain opinions are barred, merely that the opinions are not "equal but opposite".
malandrew 1300 days ago [-]
> the opinions are not "equal but opposite"
What does this even mean?
TeaDrunk 1300 days ago [-]
It means that this is not an equivalent, right-leaning opinion.
malandrew 1300 days ago [-]
And who gets to judge that it isn't equivalent? Equivalency implies measurability and this seems like an immeasurable assertion based solely on personal opinion.
TeaDrunk 1300 days ago [-]
No one; I was under the impression that this was an opinion stated by the poster. The response just seemed to not understand what the poster was saying.
malandrew 1300 days ago [-]
Oh, got it. You highlighted that part from the OP so I assumed that there was some shared understanding of objectivity here that wasn't apparent to me. If it is just the OP's opinion/perception of equivalency (or lack thereof) and nothing else then I guess there's nothing worth discussing here since the person the OP would be in dialogue with could disagree about the OP's judgement of equivalency and it's just two people agreeing to disagree and nothing more.
js2 1301 days ago [-]
> remember the time Bernie _didn't_ want immigrants to take jobs from locals?
I'm plucking this bit out because I don't think that's a good summary of his position. He still doesn't "want immigrants to take jobs from locals." He's concerned about corporations abusing immigrant labor to depress American wages. He's long voted for bills to protect immigrants, even while being wary of increasing low-skill immigration. He's trying to find a middle ground between labor and immigration, and that isn't easy.
I think a huge part of the difference is people's perspective on which is worse: false positives or false negatives.
Warning: opinions follow
To reduce scope to something like welfare for illustrative purposes, there's actually pretty broad agreement from both sides that some people just need help through no fault of their own and that at some level, there should be some kind of program to provide that help. And there's similar agreement that people who don't have such a need should be prevented from intentionally gaming/milking a system (getting benefits without a legitimate need). The interesting parts come in two other scenarios: 1) someone who legitimately needs help and doesn't get it, and 2) someone who doesn't need help but does get it. Those are both wasteful and unjust and we'd all like to reduce those cases to as close to zero as possible. But the left and the right disagree about which case is more unjust. The right would like to focus on efficiency and self-sufficiency, so the greater injustice is fostering an environment where you can get assistance without deserving it (which perpetuates and/or deepens the dependence), and you're willing to concede that this means some people who need help won't get it. The left, on the other hand, would like to focus on covering everyone who needs help, and anyone slipping through the cracks is an injustice, but this means that you have to accept the inefficiency of allowing some people who don't need/deserve assistance to get it, and you just shrug and say that's the cost of providing a good safety net.
leetcrew 1301 days ago [-]
I think this is basically true. although there are some issues that are so polarizing that they take precedence over the false positive vs false negative preference. the examples that immediately come to mind involve enforcement and punishment. the right generally seems to accept policies like stop-and-frisk or demanding ID from brown people near the border, regardless of how many of those targeted turn out to be doing nothing wrong. the left pretty much takes the same position on campus sexual assault cases, although it at least asserts that false positives are very rare.
malandrew 1300 days ago [-]
False positive and false negative rates also have a relation to the injustice of a false positive. Having to provide ID and get frisked sucks but being falsely accused of a crime and having your entirely life destroyed even if rare is a massive injustice. This is the entire premise of Blackstone's Ratio
For what it's worth I'm libertarian and lean towards having false positives for any of those three scenarios.
hamburglar 1300 days ago [-]
Yeah, I think false-positive and false-negative aren't exactly the right construct to consider for some scenarios. It's more like "whose suffering bothers you more?" People in need or those whose contribution is wasted? The racially-profiled or those who may be harmed by criminals if we aren't diligent? Wrongly-accused rapists or rape victims?
tunesmith 1301 days ago [-]
How do you empower someone without helping them?
bart_spoon 1301 days ago [-]
I don't think conservatives/Republicans are strictly against helping anyone, they just disagree on the method. The historically conservative view has been to try and give them a job through which they can support themselves as opposed to a "handout" through a social program. On paper I think they would describe it as the equivalent of "teaching a man to fish" vs "giving a man a fish".
Obviously there is a lot of room for skepticism as to whether you think the approach works in practice, or if the approach is simply a front to enact changes that will nominally benefit the unempowered but in reality benefit the empowered. But I don't know of many who aren't in favor of something as vague as "helping people", and most genuinely believe they are doing so.
rayiner 1300 days ago [-]
It’s more than that. Conservatives think that liberal social and economic ideas actively destroy the infrastructure people rely on to help themselves. An example of this is marriage. Liberals have sought to normalize divorce and the raising children outside of marriage. Both of those things are empirically proven to make people poorer—for obvious reasons. Indeed, welfare benefits are often structured to disincentivize marriage, which in turn keeps people poor. Liberals often don’t appreciate that conservative social and economic views are synergistic like that.
runarberg 1300 days ago [-]
> Both of those things are empirically proven to make people poorer
Nothing of this sort has by any means been proven.
I’m from a country that probably has one of the highest—if not the highest—proportion of children born outside of marriage. I my self is raised by a single mother, my sister has a son born outside of marriage, and so do many of my friends. This country is also one of the wealthiest in the world and has way less poverty then many countries where child rearing outside of marriage is less common.
In fact you could probably argue just as easily that actively supporting single parents has greater economic benefits then to disenfranchise them.
> While it’s well-established that married parents are typically better off financially than unmarried parents, there are also differences in financial well-being among unmarried parents. For example, a much larger share of solo parents are living in poverty compared with cohabiting parents (27% vs. 16%).3
runarberg 1300 days ago [-]
Correlation is not causation. Could it be that a third variable (say stress) is causing both high divorce rates and mass poverty?
Also the article you link to and quote is about unmarried couples vs. married couples, the source for these number is confusing to say the least, and focuses on the US where single parents don’t get that much welfare, which neither adds nor removes anything from my point that: single parenting is not by it self a good predictor of poverty.
tptacek 1300 days ago [-]
I'd be interested in hearing more about what liberals have done to "normalize" divorce.
A conservative movement genuinely interested in making sure children are raised in wedlock could endorse routine family planning and reproductive health services, rather than building an entire totalizing culture war out of opposition to them. Otherwise, it's hard to imagine a policy more antithetical to our founding principles than one that compels the reluctant unwed parents of unwanted children to marry.
These issues didn't seem to bother Ben Franklin too much. But: fair enough! A liberal.
nobody9999 1300 days ago [-]
>Indeed, welfare benefits are often structured to disincentivize marriage, which in turn keeps people poor. Liberals often don’t appreciate that conservative social and economic views are synergistic like that.
I'd posit that it's not the benefits themselves that disincentivize such things, it's the rules surrounding how one accesses such benefits does so.
If our social programs didn't penalize such activities (through a variety of a restrictions on applying for and keeping such benefits) and we didn't make people jump through arbitrary and often degrading hoops to get them, all the while denigrating such folks as "lazy" or "greedy" or "worthless to society" I think that there wouldn't be such an issue to discuss.
What's more, at least in the US, there is a long tradition of blaming the poor for their poverty and assuming that it's their fault. Which makes it much more palatable to discriminate against those without means for many people.
But that's objectively false. There are many factors that impact poverty, some of which include specific legal and cultural incentives (both conscious and unconscious) which disadvantage certain people and advantage others.
tunesmith 1300 days ago [-]
Can you post an example of how welfare benefits are structured to disincentivize marriage?
I also think this is an example of how conservatives and progressives talk past each other. There's a difference between being in favor of divorce, and being in favor of recognizing that there are situations where divorce is a better option than staying married. Also, there's a difference between being in favor of raising children outside of marriage, and being in favor of an unmarried person or family raising an existing child that would otherwise not be raised by anyone.
blonde_ocean 1301 days ago [-]
Good Q. I think it’s a nuanced distinction. Helping too much can too often lead to a lack of empowerment, IMO. The idea that you can’t help yourself, so you must be led along by another as if you were a child. I think empowerment requires helping, but helping through “nudges,” if that makes sense
pixelbash 1301 days ago [-]
In the context of a system where it's almost impossible to lose money above a certain point and almost impossible to make money below a certain point (edit: without doing something reckless, which often happens).. No this does not make sense to me.
lucaspm98 1300 days ago [-]
You may be being slightly hyperbolic, but in either case I would doubt that is a majority-held opinion.
jquery 1301 days ago [-]
> In the context of a system where it's almost impossible to lose money above a certain point and almost impossible to make money below a certain point
Whether you believe we live in such a system seems like a matter of opinion and outlook.
tunesmith 1300 days ago [-]
I wonder if there's a correlation there, where for some people they think that offering any help is by definition paternalistic? "As if they were a child", as in believing that only children need help.
nickpp 1301 days ago [-]
You create a system in which they can help themselves while the others have a vested interest in helping them raise. It’s called capitalism.
claytongulick 1301 days ago [-]
By providing them with opportunity?
bsanr2 1301 days ago [-]
The issue isn't that they don't have a different rationale, it's the particulars of what that rationale is built on. "State dependence" alleviates suffering when implemented in earnest, "self-empowerment" perpetuates inequality and privileges luck and momentum over innovation and (paradoxically) moment-to-moment hard work.
In America, there has always been one side on the right side of history and one on the wrong, as far as health and happiness go. People and institutions switch sides, but the sides exist all the same. It comes down to how considerate you are of your neighbors, here and abroad. It's baffling that such a rich society continues to engage interpersonally with a scarcity mindset. Bootstraps are a myth; give until you can't and then ask for what you need. If we still then have racial issues, class issues, gender issues, religious issues, then the problem goes deeper than economics, and we'll need to face that with the same level of compassion.
mc32 1301 days ago [-]
The thing about state dependence that I don’t like is that that means the state has power over you. Follow our rules or you lose benefits. What, you’re against X? Sorry, come correct or lose your privilege to those benefits.
We don’t want to have what they had in the old “second world” where the state could bend the will of the people because it held all the cards.
That’s not to deny that we can serve people better. Create access to capital, lessen predatory practices on innumerate consumers, incentivize women to enter more productive areas of the economy, etc.
webnrrd2k 1301 days ago [-]
Re: state power... ”Follow our rules or you lose benefits.
What, you’re against X? Sorry, come correct or lose your
privilege to those benefits.”
How is this different than private power? Honestly, I've had to put up with far more arbitrary bs from my HMO than state or federal programs. With my state and the feds at least there is a clear statement of benefits, a clear procedure to appeal, and a solid attempt to deliver on promises.
How well does that compare to, say, your cable company? Or how well have big companies done respecting your privacy? In other words, lots of people get directly screwed by private companies, too.
I'm not trying to say that government programs are the ideal answer to everything. In the USA there is a serious need for reasonable debate, responsible budgets, and a commitment to good government.
There is plenty of potential for abuse with government over reach. But there is also plenty of abuse from government under-reach, too. Isn't it in everybody's interests to have a functioning government? One that that operates under good-faith intentions to follow it's mandate?
n4r9 1301 days ago [-]
My guess is that right-leaning people are more comfortable with private corporations having that sort of power because they presume that the people in charge of the corporations must be competent and wise to get to their position. Possibly also that the dynamics of the free market will somehow protect people's rights.
bavell 1301 days ago [-]
No, IMO it's because generally speaking the govt has much more power over you than any private entity. You don't have to follow the rules of any particular private entity unless you choose to. You can't choose not to pay your taxes (legally) or escape the surveillance state.
There are exceptions to this of course, such as government-sponsored monopolies (healthcare, ISPs, utilities). But a lot of that is regulatory capture IMO - we've ceded a lot of power to MegaCorp Inc. which I'm not comfortable with either.
As terrible as a lot of big private companies are, at least they can't waltz into any/every platform (e.g. G, FB, Twitter, etc) and demand everything they have on you like the feds can. No one holds a candle to the potential of govt tyranny, everyone is at the mercy of "the man".
At the end of the day, massive consolidation of power at the top levels of society is never healthy, whatever form it may take.
atq2119 1300 days ago [-]
As terrible as a lot of big private companies are, at least they can't waltz into any/every platform (e.g. G, FB, Twitter, etc)
This in an amusing statement considering that many people consider Google and Facebook to be terrible big private companies.
And note, their power doesn't come from government-sponsored monopolies.
Also, calling utilities and ISPs government-sponsored utilities is grossly misleading; both are natural monopolies due to the capital costs that are involved.
nickpp 1300 days ago [-]
Even more people consider Google and FB useful and valuable and gladly (and voluntarily) use their services. Otherwise those "terrible companies" wouldn't be so big anymore.
Capital costs do not create monopolies, just an obstacle solved by raising capital. Government regulations create monopolies - there is no way to fix those.
atq2119 1300 days ago [-]
I recommend you actually read up on natural monopolies. It's a well understood and universally accepted phenomenon (at least academically; obviously there are vested interests who prefer to deny their existence despite clear facts).
nickpp 1300 days ago [-]
Every time people show me a "natural" monopoly I find regulations around it that corrupt the market.
People believing in the so-called natural monopolies lack fate in the entrepreneurial drive, creativity and innovation of the free individuals working hard in their own interest, for their own betterment.
petrocrat 1301 days ago [-]
So the proposition is which "check/balance" is better: Market competition or Elections.
Modern economics research shows that the efficient markets hypothesis is not true and definitely requires government regulation to operate in the way that Chicago School econ describes it. So that leaves Elections as the better balance mechanism by default.
jquery 1301 days ago [-]
> So that leaves Elections as the better balance mechanism by default.
This is a non-sequitor. The efficient market theorem can be untrue without elections necessarily being better at determining efficiency. I personally don’t believe in the efficient market (it’s why I’m an active trader). But elections, where ill-informed people vote on topics they barely have any knowledge about, risking nothing in the process, seem significantly worse at guaranteeing acceptable outcomes.
petrocrat 1300 days ago [-]
> The efficient market theorem can be untrue without elections necessarily being better at determining efficiency.
Can you go into more detail on how that could be for me? If the EMH is untrue, then there must be some other mechanism besides competition that checks the private sector, no? What would that be?
I'm implicitly lumping "regulation" as part of the Elections mechanism, btw, so I'm assuming you didn't mean regulation as the mechanism.
nickpp 1300 days ago [-]
Yeah, we've seen the remarkable result of elections with Putin, Venezuela, China and now Trump.
Meanwhile unregulated fields like software, computers and communication have enjoyed the fastest and most remarkable progress in modern history. Progress which benefits us all every day.
petrocrat 1300 days ago [-]
Quite a straw man you put forward here.
First of all, You seem to be confused because you are mistaking what happens in Russia, Venezuela and China for actual elections. Whatever happens in those places is certainly not what I meant by the term "elections."
Second, You point to "three" (or are those 3 things really the same thing?) successes in competition, each of which were aided by investment authorized by elected legislators. Then you point to one failure of elections and proceed to conclude that competition is the better of the two. It doesn't follow, I'm afraid.
As for Trump, yes, that was the elections mechanism failing. I never said it was perfect. But the Market competition mechanism fails more often, in my estimation. Neither is perfect, but competition seems to create much higher probability for imperfection, abuse, flaws, and suffering.
nickpp 1300 days ago [-]
Russia, Venezuela and USA all had actual democratic elections at some point. But they elected dictators which took power and never let go. The results were horrifying: imprisoned people, children in concentration camps and death, countless deaths. Destroying a country's economy leads to famine and, yes, death.
The effects of free market "failures" are comparatively laughable and always corrected by the free market itself sooner or later.
There is no contest which one is graver. To pretend otherwise is to ignore the reality and evidence all around us.
thegrimmest 1301 days ago [-]
I'd say it's because corporate power is much more fragily held than goverment power. A startup can ruin a corporation - it takes a revolution to ruin a government.
nickpp 1301 days ago [-]
Competition is what keeps private corporations well behaved. Governments are monopolies and thus unchecked.
bsanr2 1300 days ago [-]
Governments are checked by the wavering legitimacy of any given representative within the government. In our system, we have a direct check on that legitimacy through elections.
Meanwhile, corporations frequently do not have to compete, having either become a monopoly or having agreed upon "standards" without which they insist solvency in their given area would be impossible (as they rake in untold riches in profit). The only check on that power is indirectly through refusing to transact with them en masse. However, as long as their credit is good, they can continue to exist and operate with impunity.
In the end, the question is of the accumulation of which currency determines who is "good" enough to run your life: political clout or money.
Franklu, people who have to be nice to me tend to do better by me than people who just happen to have a lot of money.
n4r9 1300 days ago [-]
Governments are checked by the democratic process. And competition is not working as well as it should. There are plenty of corporate monopolies, Varsity being one of the most obvious at the present time.
nickpp 1300 days ago [-]
Neither is perfect but we can easily see that private competition works better by far by comparing the results: all the modern life products and services vs the mess that governments and governmental services are in various parts of the world.
n4r9 1300 days ago [-]
The question is not which is more efficient, but which is more responsible with power.
nickpp 1300 days ago [-]
Governments have incomparably more power and thus their abuses are incomparably worse: famines, pogroms, wars, asset confiscation, incarceration, murder.
Companies are controlled by the market, it's governments we need to worry about and find ways to control and regulate.
n4r9 1300 days ago [-]
Still, the question is not which currently have more power, but which is more responsible with that power in a democratic society.
Companies are remarkably good at finding ways to control the market. That's why antitrust legislation is needed to protect consumers.
nickpp 1300 days ago [-]
The only unbeatable way companies control the market is through government-granted monopoly. Any other way is eventually defeated by the market itself.
Every government intervention in the market will benefit established players and will hinder startups and thus the markets's self-regulating mechanisms.
n4r9 1299 days ago [-]
This is an extreme counterexample, but doesn't the fact that the government will prosecute large companies that order hit squads to assassinate startup employees count as an "intervention"?
There are many other cases where I'd be very uncomfortable trusting these so-called "self-regulatinf mechanisms", e.g. the abolition of slavery, child labour, and racial/sexual employment discrimination.
nickpp 1299 days ago [-]
All that is illegal behavior. Markets require the rule of law too and nobody is disputing the role of governments to implement and uphold the law.
n4r9 1299 days ago [-]
Moreover, none of those things were always illegal. There was a time where it was not obvious that they should be illegal. Yet, despite the relatively laisez faire economics of the 19th century (in the UK at least), these behaviours were not simply self-regulated away. That required government intervention in the form of passing laws and ensuring that the law was followed.
n4r9 1299 days ago [-]
Price fixing is also illegal behaviour, but my impression is that you're more relaxed about that?
didibus 1301 days ago [-]
> is that that means the state has power over you
This is a recurring theme that I despise. People need to start to talk about the government in a democracy as "we". You are the government, the state is a collective you are part off and have power over. You are in fact dependent on others, that is the point of a society.
So when someone says, hey, when I joined this society, I was told its people upheld the right for all its members to equal opportunity? But my parents did not have the money that yours did? And that affected my opportunity? So what gives?
When you have the attitude of the government as a seperate entity, it becomes reality. The more you see the government as such, the more it is allowed to become a ruler over others, since that's how you depict it. When it should be the CEO that you, a member of the board, elected, and can booth out when you don't like what they're doing no more, and you also can join the government if you want to contribute more, etc.
Sorry to hijike your discussion about handling the homelessness crisis , but that's a sore point for me. I find it really weak of people to look for someone else to govern them, and I wish people took responsability for their government (in democracies), because they are its owner and fundamentally have power over it. But too many prefer to delegate and pretend they're powerless against the faceless man.
leetcrew 1300 days ago [-]
> This is a recurring theme that I despise. People need to start to talk about the government in a democracy as "we". You are the government, the state is a collective you are part off and have power over. You are in fact dependent on others, that is the point of a society.
I take your point, but for an individual this is only true in a very abstract sense. The People may govern Themselves, but I do not govern myself in any meaningful way.
Sorry but no, the state is fundamentally different and opposed to the individual. Individuals make up society but individuals are not society.
The entire purpose of society, and of a state, is to stifle the motivations of the individual for some group. In most cases it's pretty mundane stuff you give up as an individual, basically 0 cost stuff for a much bigger benefit of working with other individuals in society. Or via listening to the state in regards to the rules and policies they put in place.
But it is foolish to say that they are one and the same.
didibus 1300 days ago [-]
> But it is foolish to say that they are one and the same
I don't see where in what I said you got the impression I was saying that they are one and the same?
I'm saying that, in a working democracy, you are a part of the government, which is very different from seeing the government as a seperate entity you are subservient too.
> The entire purpose of society, and of a state, is to stifle the motivations of the individual for some group
The point of a democratic society is to create a friendly association with others. For it to be friendly, it kind of requires all participants to benefit and feel fairly treated. In turn, this often means that a democratic society will put a stronger emphasis on the individual than non-democratic alternatives. That is to say, the goal of a democratic society is to maximize everyone's rights at the individual level.
Now yes, that does mean that a democratic society is a group of people that assemble together in order to overpower individuals or other groups that would try to dominate over them through force. Maybe that's what you meant here, but it seems a bit of a sideway conversation. Since they do so in order to protect their own individual rights from being taken by force by others.
bsanr2 1300 days ago [-]
>The entire purpose of society, and of a state, is to stifle the motivations of the individual for some group.
The entire purpose of a society is to harness the potential of the group in order to enrich each individual life within it.
Stow that scarcity mindset.
ethanwillis 1300 days ago [-]
You are being small minded to what I'm saying. You say harness the potential of the group. How do you do that? It necessarily requires stifling the motivations of individuals so that they can work together. I'm making 0 moral judgements on whether the motivations of an individual are or are not valid.
Notice I specifically said
> for a much bigger benefit of working with other individuals in society.
So, you might want to re-evaluate your bias towards what I said.
bsanr2 1300 days ago [-]
>It necessarily requires stifling the motivations of individuals so that they can work together.
This assumes that people are naturally and totally individualistic, which is untrue even at a biological level. People work together instinctually, and they also decide, rationally, to work together. Individual and collective motivations are often the same; and while collective motivations sometimes stifle individual motivations, the former often (if not more often) replaces a LACK of motivation. In fact, the appeal to engaging in collective action in order to fill in a hole of individual meaning (motivation) underpins some of humanity's strongest and most common institutions: military service, volunteer service, protest, religion, work. That is society: individuals working in concert, by each's determination.
>I'm making 0 moral judgements on whether the motivations of an individual are or are not valid.
You're making a moral judgment privileging individual motivation, separating it from collective motivation.
Your argument is simply wrong on its face. It tries to generalize a solipsistic perspective to the rest of humanity, to which it very clearly does not apply. Perhaps only in this thought are you truly as much an individual as you seem to think people must necessarily be.
ethanwillis 1300 days ago [-]
You're putting words in my mouth at this point so I don't know what else I can contribute to this discussion to move it forward.
I share the same argument David Graeber was making in Utopia of Rules, you should give it a read.
bsanr2 1294 days ago [-]
No, I simply addressed your statements re: individual vs collective motivation. This reply of yours is simply a way for you to avoid interrogating your viewpoint in light of my response, which I think is a shame.
nickpp 1300 days ago [-]
But people ARE naturally and totally individualistic. Even when they cooperate, they do it for their own individual interest. It's due to the nature of our evolution.
Read "The Selfish Gene".
bsanr2 1294 days ago [-]
That's a misunderstanding of the thesis. Because humans tend to have trouble surviving completely alone, our nature is to privilege others and the group in many circumstances, over our individual wellbeing. Sacrifice - of comfort, health, even life - in order to secure the survival of our children and tribe is common because it is often so much more effective at allowing for the perpetuation of a given line than purely individualistic behavior. That's what's so profound about the concept presented in "The Selfish Gene": the meta-impulse to preserve one's genes often overrides the meta-impulse to preserve one's own life.
claytongulick 1301 days ago [-]
I think this would be a stronger argument if a congress that has a below 30% approval rating didn't have a 90% reelection rate.
didibus 1300 days ago [-]
Unless we're talking election fraud though, it is the people that have chosen to reelect or to delegate the choice to others to do so for them.
And anyone motivated enough can engage even further in the process, become a candidate, influence others, etc.
I find so many people are just complainers, but they barely take anytime to even understand how the system works, I wouldn't be surprised if half the people don't even know what a congressman can do, can't do, and does. And even less surprised if most people didn't even bother reading about each candidate for more than 10 minutes.
I'm not American, but now live in America, and I've literally had to explain how laws are made in the US to many Americans. That's depressing. And it's not like I'm an expert on it, I just took a few hours reading through the wikipedia page and the usa.gov website. (p.s.: It's not better in my country Canada, people are similarly lacking in ownership and awareness, so I'm not trying to point fingers at Americans exclusively)
Yes, we can discuss the system and issues with representation, like being first past the post, and all, but even before that, I think there's just a lack of ownership by a lot of people who don't consider themselves a part of the government, when they are. The word itself means: "the people rule" and is defined as: "a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state". As a citizen of a democratic state, YOU ARE the government.
nickpp 1300 days ago [-]
The skills that make a politician successful at getting elected are orthogonal to the skills of a good administrator.
Meritocracy works (barely) in private corporation but is completely useless in politics.
XMPPwocky 1301 days ago [-]
Do you apply this same reasoning to people whose housing, food, and healthcare are all put at risk if their employer decides they don't like them?
Seems like you're concerned about what's mostly a hypothetical when done by the state today- but probably hundreds of millions of people in the US alone are being coerced to do things they don't want to under threat of losing the exact things you're worried about. And in a lot of cases, what's one big thing mitigating that coercion? The very social safety nets you're worried about!
Karunamon 1301 days ago [-]
You can change your employer much easier than you can change your government.
petrocrat 1301 days ago [-]
But there are no substantial distinctions between employers in terms of how the utilize the coercive leverage that they have. So this is an illusory "safety-net".
Karunamon 1299 days ago [-]
The relative ease of ending the relationship means the effect of that leverage is greatly reduced.
jkestner 1301 days ago [-]
Especially since Citizens United gave your employer outsized power to change the government.
mc32 1301 days ago [-]
There are more employers than govs. Imagine if the govt could cancel your benefits because it didn’t like your tweet. A few companies, ok, it sucks, but you have a chance to move on.
jschwartzi 1301 days ago [-]
Consider how hard it would be to get a law like that past the judiciary system. If you or I can see how ridiculous the notion is then it must be obvious to a jury of our peers. Even with majority fiat the judiciary branch can still quell all kinds of popular but unjust laws. The travel ban is a great example of something the judiciary crushed. Same thing with the requirement in the ACA that employer-provided insurance include coverage for birth control, which is arguably far more popular.
There isn't just one Government in the US. What we have is a system of branches, each of which must agree that a law is acceptable. If just one branch disagrees then it can effect change.
Similarly we are not just one state. We're a federation and individual states can fight against federal laws that their constituents find unjust. Washington and Colorado did just that when they legalized marijuana. It's still illegal at the federal level, but the ATF has no jurisdiction within state lines so they can't do anything about manufacture and sale within state borders.
Consolidating that all under the same umbrella erases a lot of the very complexity that serves to protect you. And you can't accord that complexity to a corporation because shareholders and the board have a level of tyranny not found in our government.
nickpp 1300 days ago [-]
The anti-drug war.
formerly_proven 1301 days ago [-]
A tweet may be able to cancel careers, but cannot extinguish legal entitlements.
petrocrat 1301 days ago [-]
If the government could do that it would mean that legislators were elected that passed such a law. It's not a credible hypothetical, IMO. And even if it were, there would be recourse in the form of electing different legislators at the next opportunity.
nickpp 1300 days ago [-]
Guantanamo Bay
petrocrat 1300 days ago [-]
And to you does human trafficking indict the private sector in the same manner or not?
We can elect legislators who are opposed to abuses like Guantanamo Bay and campaign on fixing it.
What can we or the private sector do about abuses in the private sector?
nickpp 1300 days ago [-]
Any illegalities perpetrated by the private sector should be (and are) prosecuted to the full extend of the law. In addition, market misbehaving is punished by the market through the consumer.
The private sector is not above the law. The problem is that the government is. This is why, while both can misbehave, I see governments as a much, much larger danger to the average citizen than corporations. And the history agrees with me.
petrocrat 1299 days ago [-]
Just noting that in your scenario here, you are admitting that the private sector is not able to correct it's own abuses, but rather needs the elected government to do so.
>market misbehaving is punished by the market through the consumer.
Can you explain how the consumer punishes private sector entities engaged in human trafficking, for example? It seems there's plenty of evidence that deception and cutting corners is the most market competitive behavior that corporations can employ which allows them to offer the most appealing prices. Therefore market misbehavior is rewarded, not punished by consumers because the price signal is too reductionist to capture all of that.
>And the history agrees with me.
That is debate-able
nickpp 1299 days ago [-]
I wrote this in another comment but it bears repeating: Illegal behavior is punished. Markets require the rule of law. The role of governments to implement and uphold the law. Nobody is disputing that.
petrocrat 1301 days ago [-]
>We don’t want to have what they had in the old “second world” where the state could bend the will of the people because it held all the cards.
Isn't it apparent, though, that this type of leverage is inevitable in any societal structure? Some party will have a level of power where it can coerce many others to basically do their bidding at threat of witholding some essential sustenance. In the private sector, witholding employment means poverty and the resulting wretched consequences to health and status.
The proposition that government should be the only one with that leverage is the lesser of many evils, because at least there is electoral recourse against a government that abuses it.
This is opposed to leaving that leverage with the private sector, where there is no recourse, other that not participating, which is exactly their leverage in the first place, as you will be left with no income and in poverty.
formerly_proven 1301 days ago [-]
> The thing about state dependence that I don’t like is that that means the state has power over you.
This is genuinely sad-funny considering the state of the US federal government overreach (independent of sitting president), policing, justice and implementation of secret courts and police forces.
In any case, welfare states handle this quite well with a justice system largely independent from the social executive flanked by mandatory legal aid. Which, if anything, has resulted in a power imbalance towards those receiving state benefits.
slg 1301 days ago [-]
>The thing about state dependence that I don’t like is that that means the state has power over you. Follow our rules or you lose benefits. What, you’re against X? Sorry, come correct or lose your privilege to those benefits.
I don't understand how this would be a valid reason to not give a benefit. Even if that benefit comes with strings or can be taken away, isn't receiving that benefit for a period of time more helpful than never receiving it at all?
TeMPOraL 1301 days ago [-]
It doesn't have to be a valid reason. From the POV of a state that wants to micromanage the beliefs of its population, social benefits become a tool of coercion. This has happened before, the history of USSR has plenty of examples.
That's not an argument against state help & social services per se. It's an argument for being vigilant and ensuring the government serves the people more than it serves itself.
slg 1301 days ago [-]
In USSR these opportunities didn't exist outside of the state. In the US, opportunities exist, some people are just too far down below the ladder that they can't even begin to climb. If you fear this type of situation in which people in the US are dependent on the state, isn't it an acknowledgment that the self reliance and "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" ideas that are used to argue against state help are myths? Otherwise why would people allow themselves to be coerced by the state if there were other viable alternatives?
TeMPOraL 1301 days ago [-]
> If you fear this type of situation in which people in the US are dependent on the state, isn't it an acknowledgment that the self reliance and "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" ideas that are used to argue against state help are myths?
Perhaps. I personally don't buy the "self-made man" arguments. They feel too much like survivorship bias.
SuoDuanDao 1301 days ago [-]
I don't think it's that simple. The presence of a benefit can create a moat around other opportunities, e.g. social housing easing the burden of finding housing but also reinforcing geographic segregation by social class.
mc32 1301 days ago [-]
You’re not thinking long enough. Give the state enough time and it will use it as a cudgel to get people to do things the way they want.
rhizome 1301 days ago [-]
I'd like to see what real-world examples you're thinking of when you write this, because the line of reasoning you're pursuing in this part of the thread looks to me more like a terminally cynical description of having a society and legal system.
slg 1301 days ago [-]
Or they will be returned to the exact same state they would be in otherwise? How is that a threat? Would a hungry person turn down a free meal because they will just be hungry later and they don’t want to be reliant on whoever gave them the meal?
anoncake 1301 days ago [-]
The state always has power over you, it wouldn't be much of a state otherwise. If it doesn't respect your rights, you're screwed anyway. Capital doesn't help you when the state refuses to enforce your property rights, skills don't help you when you've been disappeared out of a helicopter.
strbean 1301 days ago [-]
Exactly. See Russia for an example of all these awful consequences of state power, without the social safety net.
Sure, a tyrannical government could take away your benefits for having the wrong views. They could also just take away your property in the absence of benefits.
kaitai 1301 days ago [-]
This is in part a reply to you and in part a comment on all the sibling comments.
There are many cultural assumptions that are built into the comments here. Worth examining.
* "What, you’re against X? Sorry, come correct or lose your privilege to those benefits." Some countries use government to ensure every mom and baby-to-be has prenatal care and food. There is not a belief test there, just a pregnancy test. Could you give an example of the types of belief tests you are against?
I find the US emphasis on church charity rather than government services repugnant in particular because it often is used exactly for ideological coercion. Not all churches, but many, see the provision of services as a way to enforce/reward/punish certain beliefs and behaviors. I've always found that un-christ-like myself but hey I'm just a heretic. A government service that says, "hey, you're 16 and homeless so we will feed you dinner" seems much better and less coercive than a church that says, "you're 16 and homeless so we'll feed you dinner if you pray beforehand and we get to choose your pronouns".
* Many sibling commenters mention employers a lot. That's another cultural assumption that I find interesting. In the culture I was raised in, it was assumed that government help is rightfully directed primarily at the very young, the very old, and the very sick -- in general, people without employers and with fewer opportunities to 'just help themselves' or pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That is, after all, why we formed a bunch of these government agencies -- we as a people, as a community, felt bad seeing 87-year-old men starve to death in their apartments because they had limited mobility and no income, or watching 4-month-old babies refuse to get that corporate job they obviously should've that would've allowed mama who had a debilitating injury from birthing to afford formula for the kid. Ah, self-empowerment: works so well when it results in 4-year-olds becoming trash pickers to help their families, and 92-year-olds to sit by the road (if they even live that long) begging because it brings in a little cash! No. Some of these government programs were formed because there are times in a person's life where all the psychological empowerment and even job skills training classes you want aren't gonna help, but food and a place to live will.
To go back to discussions above this, I still engage a lot on Facebook for political argument purposes. It's boring just talking with people who agree with me (the people I live with, generally) so I do seek out other points of view on Facebook. It is interesting how some folks always slide an argument back to the point they want -- tried talking about Amy Coney Barrett's opinion in a Title IX case with a friend doing a PhD, and strangely enough she kept bringing it back to how universities shouldn't be policing "stuff that happens in bars". I just mention this example because campus adjudication of sexual assault cases and the relationship with Title IX and due process rights is, ugh, a totally different, complicated, legally interesting conversation than 'what happens in bars'. But we can't even have the conversation -- a conversation I feel I can contribute to in an interesting way because I've been faculty at a university and have dealt informally with harassment between students -- because it continually slides back to these fake talking points that dismiss all the important stuff! Is that social cooling or not?
lazyasciiart 1301 days ago [-]
> Many sibling commenters mention employers a lot.
Probably because the vast majority of Americans can only afford healthcare for those debilitating injuries by finding an employer who will sign them up for the employee health plan.
jquery 1301 days ago [-]
> A government service that says, "hey, you're 16 and homeless so we will feed you dinner" seems much better and less coercive than a church that says, "you're 16 and homeless so we'll feed you dinner if you pray beforehand and we get to choose your pronouns".
If the results of the latter were proven to result in generally a much happier and more cohesive society, would you be so confident and assured in your opposition and disdain for the approach?
kaitai 1300 days ago [-]
I'm a religious person for utilitarian reasons and read my Bible weekly and go to church accordingly.
But a whole lot of teen suicide and abortion is due to haters hating (I mean Christians being dogmatic) -- it's pretty well proven that coercive religious dogma is bad for mental health, as well as in the US divorce and abortion rates. The pressure to keep up appearances and lie about who you are and your actual life is not the bit that leads to a happy and cohesive society.
jquery 1300 days ago [-]
You’re leaping from “coercive religion dogma is bad for mental health” (I’ll accept that for the sake of argument) to “faith based charity is bad”. I don’t see how that follows. Seeing as you go to Church for utilitarian reasons, I don’t understand why you would condemn a faith based charity for trying to offer some sort of spiritual sustenance to the people they serve.
oxymoran 1301 days ago [-]
What about all the instances where state dependence increased suffering though? What baffles me is that we continue to fall into the trap that there are only 2 ways to approach every problem.
Vrondi 1301 days ago [-]
I think the current trend of not engaging with those who are politically different cuts across the political spectrum. There is an intense trend to stay within ideological bubbles at the moment, and to try to censor voices that do not align with one's own leanings. People both liberal and conservative just get _angry_ at anyone with a different political or social idea, and write them off as "bad people", which is not productive. They also tend to leap to the conclusion that if you disagree about one idea, you must adhere to the opposite ideology on every issue. As a moderate person, this is an extremely tiresome experience I have over and over again with people of both liberal and conservative leanings.
babesh 1301 days ago [-]
This comment is the most conniving one I have heard in awhile. To paraphrase, your argument is convincing and it’s similar to those who blame it on the “SJW” types so let’s shift the argument on over to those supposed people.
So many assumptions piled onto assumptions about people.
read_if_gay_ 1301 days ago [-]
> So many assumptions piled onto assumptions about people.
Spot on.
It's basically a preemptive strike before anyone gets the idea to point at cancel culture and the like.
I don't know. Do left-wing people really put so much effort in empathizing with minorities, or is it rather that they come with a complete theory of how the minorities think, and only interact with those who agree with the theory?
How much would a white left-wing person be willing to debate with e.g. a conservative immigrant? Would they treat them as an equal, or even defer to their lived experience? Or would they simply find another, less conservative immigrant, who would not oppose their world-view, and choose this one to be the speaker for the minority?
In my experience, there is not much difference between left-wing and right-wing people in willingness to help oppressed people. Seems to me they mostly differ in style: a left-wing person would probably create a non-profit organization and also write about what the government should do, a right-wing person would probably work under the umbrella of some religious group and also write about how individuals should help themselves and each other. On each side, a few people would actually do something, more people would talk about how someone else should do something, and most wouldn't really care. I am not saying the sides are exactly balanced; I am just saying empathising with people (but also twisting their opinions to better fit your ideology) exists on both sides.
(By coincidence, today I saw a debate where a strongly left-wing person dismissed some complaints of a marginalized person as "anti-scientific", without actually addressing the substance of their argument, just because that person disagreed with some organization that has a mission to help this marginalized community. No more detais, because it happened in a private conversation, it's just a funny coincidence that first I read this, then I switch a browser tab and read about how empathetic left-wing people are. Some of them are, some of them are not.)
lilactown 1300 days ago [-]
I am not necessarily saying that leftists are a panacea of altruist thinking, having washed away their colonial upbringing in their dialogues with a theoretical minority. ;)
Rather, I understand leftist thought to be rooted in questioning hierarchy and power structures, which I believe leads to more readily seeking solidarity with those that are not as well off as they are.
> By coincidence, today I saw a debate where a strongly left-wing person dismissed some complaints of a marginalized person
This does sound like a funny happenstance. My original reply was about this same sort of funny coincidence in reverse; how I often see the left critiqued as being "intolerant" when I frequently see them lifting and amplifying the voices of those who are disenfranchised by the system that they materially benefit from.
> How much would a white left-wing person be willing to debate with e.g. a conservative immigrant?
First, debates are not typical discourse. In my experience, debates are meant to be a show of virtue. Whose virtues you're being weighed against will greatly determine your behavior or whether you even decide to participate at all. I think that Hacker News values sound, well written arguments, which is why I am here posting. :)
Therefore, I think that given the propensity toward identity politics (from both sides) and the difficulty in interrogating the root of the beliefs that immigrant without appearing to be questioning the validity of them, I (as a white leftist) would prefer not to debate them. So, yes, I would rather propose someone whose lived experience might be more similar to theirs - perhaps a left-leaning immigrant - specifically because I would be afraid of either appearing weak in the eyes of right-wing spectators by deferring to their lived experience, or seem like an asshole because I am questioning the validity of their experience. It would be a PR nightmare. :)
In a private, personal setting (i.e. not a debate) I think that talking to your hypothetical conservative immigrant would probably be a great opportunity for me to learn about their experience and explore the root of their beliefs. I hope I would get to share mine as well.
Viliam1234 1299 days ago [-]
> I understand leftist thought to be rooted in questioning hierarchy and power structures, which I believe leads to more readily seeking solidarity with those that are not as well off as they are.
Yes. A political orientation is about - to put it bluntly - which parts of reality you focus on and which parts of reality you ignore. So, suppose we have a group of people who are e.g. simultaneously victims of racism and of high crime in their neighborhood. A left-wing person would be happy to help them fight racism, but would feel uncomfortable hearing about crime perpertated by members of the same minority against their neighbors. A right-wing person would be happy to help them fight crime, but would feel uncomfortable discussing structural racism.
Sometimes the existing structures are oppressive and should be torn down. Sometimes they are necessary for survival. Quite often, they are both at the same time.
Reedx 1301 days ago [-]
The bigger problem is left-leaning people getting harassed and immediately flagged as right/alt-right/-ist (i.e., "not one of us") when merely disagreeing with or challenging dogma. See Joe Rogan, JK Rowling, Sam Harris, Bret Weinstein, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker for some high profile examples.
Don't toe the line and echo approved orthodoxy? You're the enemy! This is extreme tribal behavior.
As a result, there is a chilling effect and a lot liberals no longer feel welcome on the left[1][2]. Certainly don't feel welcome to speak or think openly. This is incredibly regressive, damaging to liberalism and enlightenment values. Seriously, not being able to challenge your own side and engage in dialectic will send us back to the dark ages.
> a lot liberals no longer feel welcome on the left
"the left" isn't a discrete thinkspace. There is a political spectrum, which isn't linear. The individuals mentioned are still relatively leftist, regardless of whoever is critical or engaging in other disparaging acts. Implying there is 1 left-wing or 1 right-wing is tribal behavior.
1301 days ago [-]
komali2 1301 days ago [-]
This was addressed above, in the bit talking about people failing to put the same effort into empathising and understanding people who historically receive little to no empathy or understanding whatsoever. Ignore our personal feelings on the matter for a moment: do we honestly believe JK Rowling has made an effort to converse with, understand, and empathize with trans women?
nicoburns 1301 days ago [-]
> do we honestly believe JK Rowling has made an effort to converse with, understand, and empathize with trans women?
I don't agree with JK Rowling's take on these issues. But I actually think she likely has made at least some effort to do this. Some of her open letters certainly mention her knowing trans people and sympathising with their experiences.
Although in general I think the gender debate is a prime example of neither side listening to the other. There is a group of people who aren't listening to trans people when they say that they have gender feelings which are important to them. But equally trans people aren't listening to other people when they say that their physical bodies are important to them.
paulmd 1301 days ago [-]
Being told your opinions are problematic and hurtful is part of the process of changing them. This is the "paradox of intolerance", without a certain degree of intolerance of unacceptable beliefs, intolerance itself spreads further.
It is really the same process as having any ingrained belief challenged, it is going to make that person uncomfortable because something they took on faith is being challenged. That doesn't mean it's not something that should happen.
free_rms 1301 days ago [-]
Also a great way to solidify them and get people to dig in their heels.
Shaming is often more about making the shamer feel good than a rational calculation of persuasive power.
chc 1301 days ago [-]
This seems like a false equivalence. Trans people aren't trying to tell cis people that their physical bodies aren't allowed to matter to them, nor to invalidate cis people's gender or force them to be treated as another gender.
nicoburns 1301 days ago [-]
> Trans people aren't trying to tell cis people that their physical bodies aren't allowed to matter to them
I feel like they are.
Specifically, if you believe that "feeling like" a gender makes you that gender, then it seems to me that logically you have to believe one of the following:
(1) That having the physiology associated with a given gender is not sufficient to count as a gender.
This invalidates the identity of people like me who don't experience the "gender feeling" that trans people (and some cis people) talk about, and therefore base their identity as a man/woman on their physicality.
OR
(2) That gender categories are "open" where for example either feeling like a man OR having "male" physiology makes you a man.
But that seems to make the whole concept of gender pointless because people with penises don't share anything in common with people who feel like men (that they don't also share with people who feel like women and people with vaginas) unless they happen to be people who fall into both categories. It also makes it impossible for someone express that they have one of those things but not the other because there is only one label "man/woman" to describe two distinct phenomena.
---
If you have a suggestion for how someone like me who has male physiology but doesn't have a "feeling of being a man" (or any other gender) can represent themselves in a system where there is only a single gender identifier and making sub-distinctions is frowned upon (because "trans (wo)men are (wo)men") then I'm all ears.
TeaDrunk 1300 days ago [-]
> If you have a suggestion for how someone like me who has male physiology but doesn't have a "feeling of being a man" (or any other gender) can represent themselves in a system where there is only a single gender identifier and making sub-distinctions is frowned upon (because "trans (wo)men are (wo)men") then I'm all ears.
This is called nonbinary, agender, or genderqueer. This is a fairly established situation. You may come across someone who uses nonstandard pronouns such as "they/them" or "zyr/zem" or something like that. There's even an LGBTQ flag for being nonbinary. (Q stands for queer/questioning as well). If you are assigned male at birth but don't identify as male or any other gender then you may be nonbinary or agender. If you're interested in learning more I recommend reaching out to a local LGBTQ community organization to be more educated about gender identity and to figure out if you might yourself be LGBTQ!
(Additionally on technicality, trans means "anything that isn't identifiying as one's assigned gender at birth". Being nonbinary is a subset of being trans. Society is most familiar with binary trans identity, which is when someone is assigned F/M at birth but identifies as M/F, however this is not the entire set of trans identity. You are free to be assigned M at birth but identify with no gender, and still be trans.)
nicoburns 1300 days ago [-]
Right, so this deals with one side of the equation: it allows me to represent the fact that I don't have gender feelings. But it doesn't allow me to represent my biological maleness, in fact if anything it seems to deny it. My physiology is an important part of me (and my identity), and if I describe myself as non-binary or agender then that part of me isn't being communicated or represented. I want to be able to describe my (lack of) gender feelings and my physiology separately, and make the same distinction when talking about other people.
---
> If you're interested in learning more I recommend reaching out to a local LGBTQ community organisation to be more educated about gender identity and to figure out if you might yourself be LGBTQ!
I'm pretty familiar with the LGBTQ community in general, and I have spent a great deal of time over the last year or so reading up about and thinking about gender identity. My view is that the mainstream view in the LGBTQ community where one's gender identity (which label they use - man/woman/non-binary/etc) is assumed to correspond to "a feeling of gender" is quite naive. This is certainly true for some people, but there are also other reasons why people choose to use those labels including having certain physiologies or simply the fact that you were assigned the label and never bothered to change it. It seems to me that these other kinds of gender identity are equally valid and one way or another ought to find representation in whatever system of gender we settle one, but that a "gender feelings" focussed conception of gender doesn't provide this representation.
(one such system would be a system eschews having a single gender label at all and requires that we are more specific about which aspects of sex/gender we are talking about in situations where we need to make gendered distinctions)
TeaDrunk 1300 days ago [-]
> it allows me to represent the fact that I don't have gender feelings. But it doesn't allow me to represent my biological maleness, in fact if anything it seems to deny it.
You can identify as a masc nonbinary or AMAB nonbinary. These are distinctions that are pretty common to use in the LGBTQ community which is why I suggest not just reading up and thinking but actually going to a community and participating within it. Your local group may even be able to introduce you to other AMAB NB people that you can compare and contrast experiences with.
runarberg 1301 days ago [-]
Except when they are: As in the case of Caster Semenya. Never has it been more clear that trans rights are human rights.
qazpot 1300 days ago [-]
Trans athletes who are male and transitioned to female should not be allowed to participate in women sports because it is discriminatory to women.
runarberg 1300 days ago [-]
Caster Semenya is a cis woman, not trans. People are so preoccupied with stripping the rights of trans people that they ended up stripping away the rights of cis people while they were at it.
klipt 1300 days ago [-]
It's funny how this gets spun as "discrimination against women" when it's more "discrimination between women". Only women athletes want Caster excluded. No men athletes find Caster threatening.
Caster's case has nothing to do with trans people, it's more that she has rare biology (intersex) but happened to be raised as a woman.
Since her rare biology gives her some of the same advantages as men (elevated testosterone) the question is whether it's more fair for her to compete with men or with women.
She can easily beat many women, so some women feel it's unfair for her to compete with them.
Nor does calling the person who said the following (Magdalen), "immensely brave:"
> You are fucking blackface actors. You aren't women. You are men who get sexual kicks from being treated like women. fuck you and your dirty fucking perversions. our oppression isn't a fetish you pathetic, sick, fuck.
Typically when I try to empathize with people, I don't turn around and compliment someone calling those people "pathetic" and "sick."
EDIT: I guess I got downvoted enough to be rate limited. I only allow small windows of HN time so I'm going to post my reply to the below comment as an edit. Sorry that's annoying but, eh.
Why are you talking about sides? Why are you talking about "trans people" being absolutely right, claiming moral highground, or dismissing viewpoints?
I'm discussing an individual whose words I can point to. JK Rowling. Who are you talking about?
You're engaging in a method of rhetoric that is wide open for abuse by fallacies such as strawman.
If JK Rowling had mad a serious attempt to understand transgenderism, she wouldn't give credence to the idea that it's a fetish.
nicoburns 1301 days ago [-]
I won't defend those words/actions: I don't agree with them, and they're definitely hurtful. But I don't believe that being hurtful necessarily means that you haven't made a serious attempt to understand the other persons point of view. I guess whether that is sufficient to count as empathy will depend on your definition of empathy.
My wider point though is that both sides seem to be failing to sufficiently take into the other side's perspective. The point about same-sex attraction in the second tweet you link is a good one IMO. I can't describe my sexuality without referring people's physiological attributes. Doesn't that make them socially relevant? A view on gender that completely eliminates the physical components of sex/gender is denying people's realities just as much as one that doesn't account for people's "feeling of gender".
Trans people are absolutely right that people like JK Rowling are treating them poorly. But they can't claim the moral high ground until they stop completely dismissing the viewpoints of anyone who tries to tell them that the physical aspects of sex/gender are important to them, and labelling such people as transphobic. That's not very empathetic either.
kaitai 1301 days ago [-]
I think this is a completely illogical thing you're arguing.
Trans person: I feel (this way).
a non-equivalent statement from an anti-transness-person: You are wrong to feel that way; your feeling is false and what you are doing is wrong.
An equivalent statement for the non-trans-person here would be: I feel (this other way).
This business about trans people "dismissing the viewpoints of anyone who tries to tell them that the physical aspects of sex/gender are important to them" is just bullshit. I've talked with and interacted with trans folks and really no one's gonna tell me that their experience growing up as a boy and transitioning into girlhood or womanhood is the same as my experience growing up as a girl. And none of them has ever said that my experience of my physical self is not important, or is transphobic. Like, what? Can you find me instances of this sort of behavior?
Ragging on "people who menstruate" instead of "woman" (pun intended) as Rowling does is not her saying "the physical aspects of sex/gender are important to me". Menstruation is not the definition of womanhood (you do know postmenopausal women exist, right?). If you want to talk about menstruation, talk about menstruation. Don't pretend it's equivalent to wearing nailpolish or getting catcalled or giving birth or trying to find pants with pockets that fit a cell phone. JK Rowling is trying to tell other people about how they should experience sex/gender, not just representing her experience. Beyond being not empathetic, it's intellectually lazy.
nicoburns 1301 days ago [-]
I see it more like this:
Trans man: I "feel like a man", and this makes me like you because "trans men are men".
Me (AMAB, uses label "man"): I don't "feel like a man". That's not what being a man means to me.
Trans man: Well that's what being a man means. It's transphobic to think anything else.
---
I feel like trans people are assuming that cis people have the same gender feelings that they do. And while some cis people do seem to have those feeling, many (like myself) don't. I'm not saying that trans feelings are wrong or that they don't feel like they say they do. I'm saying that the feelings they describe don't correspond to gender as I experience it. And thus that a model of gender that defines gender exclusively in those terms doesn't represent my experience.
Whenever I express the above viewpoint I get shut down and told that I'm transphobic. In other words: I am told that my experience of gender is invalid.
---
> If you want to talk about menstruation, talk about menstruation.
I kinda agree with this. But I feel like this ought to apply to aspects of gender as well as aspects of sex. If we should about "people who menstrate" rather than "women", shouldn't we also talk about "people who feel like women" and "people who present as women" rather than "women". Taking the "feeling" of being a man/woman as definitive is exclusive because not everyone who has other gendered traits has such feelings just as taking physiology as definitive is exclusive because not everyone who has other gendered traits has the same gendered physiology.
komali2 1300 days ago [-]
> Me (AMAB, uses label "man"): I don't "feel like a man". That's not what being a man means to me.
I mean... it is what being a man means to you, because that's what you "feel" being a man is.
You are a single cell in a culture. You can't decide for anyone other than yourself what it means to be, say, a Man, a (certain religion), a (I dunno, gamer?). These are identities and they're based on your feelings. Sometimes you'll bump into someone else that uses the same word to describe that identity. Say two "gamers" bump into eachother. Both would say "I am a gamer." One has never played Mario and the other has never played Halo. "You're not a gamer!" they say to eachother.
Of course, when we're talking about gender and sex, there's a lot more at stake, and a lot more historical and cultural tendrils to pick apart. Regardless, whatever it means to you to "be a man," is entirely on you. You don't get to decide for me what it means to "be a man," and therefore you don't get to decide for a trans man what it means either.
On that same note, my definition of what it is to "be a man" has no bearing whatsoever on your manliness or identity! You can feel safe in your identity regardless of what the rest of us are doing. What, are you not confident in your own identity? That's a separate issue, and it's not trans men's fault that you feel that way.
nagaiaida 1300 days ago [-]
>Trans man: Well that's what being a man means. It's transphobic to think anything else.
I don't know what trans men you've met, but this is laughably far from my near-universal experience of hearing them say things like "oh god what if the way I assert masculinity makes someone feel bad or invalidates someone else's feelings or experiences." I have no doubt people have said things akin to that (being trans is by no means an inoculation against horrifically bad takes) but basically every trans person I know explicitly has a model of gender that doesn't invalidate your experience of "I don't experience gender like that, but 'man' works well for me, not least because of my physical body."
People may point out that it could be good to pull on that thread and consider the possibility of being agender or otherwise non-binary, but no one I know would call you transphobic for critically engaging with your gender and coming to the conclusion "nope, still don't get anything new from considering this, 'man' it is". Quite the opposite in fact, as even attempting to do so should be a decent signal for empathy with trans people.
At the end of the day, the label is for you however that manifests; whether it's having a mental model of gender where you finally have a place instead of always being pushed to the side, or having a magic phrase that indicates to someone the broad strokes of how you'd prefer to be addressed, the label is only important insofar as it helps you.
>If we should [talk] about "people who menstruate" rather than "women"
Just to clarify, "people who menstruate" isn't woke code for cis women to make trans women more comfortable. It's explicitly inclusive of trans men since many do menstruate and strongly prefer not to be labeled women as a result of that.
This is what makes Rowling's take on "people who menstruate" as well as the strong chorus of "trans women are women" and much weaker echo of "trans men are men" in response to it that much more tone-deaf. Trans men were the people whose experiences Rowling aimed to invalidate, but as usual trans women became the public face of the issue.
>Taking the "feeling" of being a man/woman as definitive is exclusive because not everyone who has other gendered traits has such feelings just as taking physiology as definitive is exclusive because not everyone who has other gendered traits has the same gendered physiology.
For argument's sake, what if your subjective experience of being a man were just so ingrained in you that you never consciously engaged with it? That could manifest the same way ("i don't 'feel like a man', that isn't how being a man works for me"), but now would you have a place in the "feelings" model you've established as exclusionary.
It seems to me that the fundamental issue you describe comes down to the coexistence of "I'm a man because that's just what I am" and "I'm a man because I feel like a man", and the only conflict inherent to that comes when the former group feels pushed out by the latter. I personally fail to see any way that someone embracing masculinity, especially if it's something that's long been denied to them, invalidates the experience of a man who's comfortable enough being labeled a man even without subjective experience of his gender.
nicoburns 1300 days ago [-]
> For argument's sake, what if your subjective experience of being a man were just so ingrained in you that you never consciously engaged with it? That could manifest the same way ("i don't 'feel like a man', that isn't how being a man works for me"), but now would you have a place in the "feelings" model you've established as exclusionary.
I have considered this quite extensively because this seems to be what most people assume my experience is like. But I'm pretty sure I really don't have such feelings. One of the key things that made me sure of this is seeing other (cis) men and women justify or explain things in terms of their gender. I have never felt like I wanted to do something because I'm a man. And I've always hated when someone describes me as man and implies that means anything more than I have a certain physiology, even if the implication is a positive one.
This is very different to for example my experience of sexuality. I'm heterosexual, and I can understand what it is like to be gay in reference to my own sexuality. I have feelings of attraction towards female people, and even though I don't experience such feelings towards male people, it's pretty easy for me to imagine what that would be like.
My experience of gender seems more like what I imagine asexual people's experience of sexuality must be like: something completely alien to them that they can only come to understand through others' descriptions and explanations.
---
> I personally fail to see any way that someone embracing masculinity, especially if it's something that's long been denied to them, invalidates the experience of a man who's comfortable enough being labeled a man even without subjective experience of his gender.
Because it implies that "being a man" has something to with masculinity. I am very much not masculine (I do have a masculine side, but so do even the girliest of cis women so that doesn't mean much - but if anything I'm more feminine). I am comfortable being labeled a man only so long as it doesn't come with an implication of masculinity, which in my lifetime thus far it largely hasn't (I was born in the early 90s). Now if I describe myself as a man people start making assumptions about how I feel inside (as you did in your comment!)
What I want is a label that I can use to describe my cluster of male physiological traits without implying anything about my feelings, behaviour or personality. I'm not hung up on that being "man", but I would like there to be some word to describe that aspect of myself and others.
---
> Just to clarify, "people who menstruate" isn't woke code for cis women to make trans women more comfortable
Sure, I get that. But "people who present as feminine" isn't code for "trans and cis women" either. It would include men (cis and trans) who present in a certain way, and exclude women (cis and trans) who don't. And the distinction can be important. For example, one of the arguments in the infamous "bathroom debate" is that trans women can be unsafe in men's bathroom. And I think this argument has a lot of merit: it's important that everyone is safe while they use the bathroom. However, the group of people who are at risk in men's bathrooms is not actually "trans women", but "people who are presenting as feminine": a trans woman who was presenting in a masculine way would be perfectly safe because nobody would suspect that they aren't a man, whereas a cis man presenting in a feminine way (say wearing a dress and makeup) would not be because there are prejudiced people who are violent towards males transgressing gender norms, and these people typically won't stop to check what someone's gender identity is before attacking.
I don't see how saying "women" when you mean "people presenting as female" is any less egregious than saying "women" when you mean "people who menstruate". I feel like we probably shouldn't use "women" in either situation, but my opinion on that is not super strong. What does really get to me is the hypocrisy of people who cry bloody murder when "women" is used in place of "people who menstruate" but will vigorously defend their right to use "women" in place of "people presenting as female".
---
> I have no doubt people have said things akin to that (being trans is by no means an inoculation against horrifically bad takes) but basically every trans person I know explicitly has a model of gender that doesn't invalidate your experience of "I don't experience gender like that, but 'man' works well for me, not least because of my physical body."
I think the conflict tends to arise when I'm not that interested in their gender feelings / label, or ask them to clarify what that means to them (because they don't correspond to anything in my own experience and thus aren't really very meaningful to me) but I am still interested in things like their hormone levels (because they still have an impact on perception and behaviour), and I think that trans people ought to acknowledge their physiologies whatever they may be, even if they don't like them. I personally don't see how that invalidates their experience. I'm not denying that they have the gender they say they have. I'm just saying that that doesn't mean much to me.
I'm all on board with a "whatever label works for you" model right up until people start arguing that we ought to organise society on the basis of those labels, or start basing our laws on them. Surely at that point we need to be working with labels which have a single objective meaning rather than labels which everyone interprets differently to each other.
kaitai 1300 days ago [-]
To be fully honest, I'm not so different -- I personally feel that I'm a woman 'cause that's the body I was born into and that's how I'm treated, and since I have no desire to transition, it's the hand I've been dealt so here we are. It does not have intrinsic meaning, probably because it's the water I swim in. In addition, I'm not honestly that interested in the feelings of most other people, cis or trans.
But I still feel you're making up conflict when you have this charge that trans people are telling you how you need to experience yourself. It seems awfully self-centered.
Last, I have particular feelings about "people who menstruate" etc because I live with a physician who gets dinged on quality metrics when he can't perform a prostate check on a person without a prostate or a Pap smear on a person without a cervix. As a math person who is pretty literal, my opinion is that we should be clear about the salient characteristic. You want to do something anatomical? Be clear about it, and I'll tell you if I have the requisite anatomy. You want to shop for curtains for your male partner because women born women automatically have better interior decorating sense? Be clear about that, and I can demonstrate you're wrong. Tell me I'm wrong about a math proof or my perception of politics because hormones? I'll show you what female aggression looks like. I don't like folks telling me what I am or what I think because of my hormones, and your last sentences in the second to last paragraph indicate you might do that to me.
gmadsen 1301 days ago [-]
is there not room outside of the right for people who are not that empathetic or would rather not spend the energy to understand these people? I want action on climate change, I want single payer health care, subsidized college, reproductive rights, separation of church and state.
what i don't care about is how many genders an English department can create. I don't discriminate, but I also don't want to expend any energy understanding or empathizing .
ezrast 1300 days ago [-]
Liberals aren't out here forcing each other at gunpoint to protest every cause that exists. If you don't want to engage on an issue, don't engage. The person being discussed above (Rowling) is being called out for making repeated, harmful public statements. Don't do that. Smile and nod and you'll be fine.
Maybe avoid characterizing your would-be allies in terms of dumb right-wing tropes like "how many genders an English department can create" while you're at it.
manigandham 1299 days ago [-]
Interesting since 1 day later a major HN story is about a company (coinbase) blocking political discussions at the workplace. It created a big backlash by people who refused to follow that rule and insisted that anything and everything is politics, arguing that (lack of speech) is still speech, that speech is action, that being neutral is implicit or even active support of one side or the other, and many other completely extreme and unreasonable stances.
Maybe people aren't forcing each other at gunpoint, but it's pretty close.
ezrast 1299 days ago [-]
I don't really see the parallel. The poster I responded to seemed to be asking the question in a personal capacity, not from a position of power over others. When you front an organization representing, and being represented by, hundreds of people, then yes, politics are unavoidable by definition.
Furthermore, unless there's more context I've skimmed over (I assume you're referring to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24636899), it's not clear that Coinbase will suffer any negative consequences from this whatsoever aside from being shunned by activists, which I presume is a consequence they're okay with since they published a blog post explicitly alienating that group. The only folks being forced I see are the employees being told to pipe down or ship out.
(also, while it may not be substantive to this discussion, the belief that neutrality, especially explicit neutrality, is tacit endorsement of the status quo is neither extreme nor unreasonable)
manigandham 1294 days ago [-]
The people who were working there were forced discuss or be "activists" by other coworkers. That isn't a position of power, it's others directly encroaching on their space and working conditions.
This is a direct example of what you are denying, that people are somehow not being forced to participate in these politics. They are, and increasingly so, with very few companies taking such an active stance to combat it.
And yes, neutrality is specifically the absence of any single position. It cannot be an endorsement of anything, be definition. Redefining terms to be whatever is politically convenient to create strawman positions and drama is another tactic used by those who want to force politics into every situation.
ezrast 1294 days ago [-]
> The people who were working there were forced discuss or be "activists" by other coworkers.
Source? I have no idea what this is referring to.
Effective neutrality due to lack of will or resources is one thing. But a declaration of neutrality is a message to other actors that you will not intervene in their affairs. It is a rejection of the cultural norm that extremism (outside the company) should be tempered. Sounds pretty political to me, but maybe you and I are working with different definitions of politics.
watwut 1301 days ago [-]
> I think that the subtext of your post (or at least people that espouse similar things on the internet) is that this is the fault of a certain brand of American politics (left leaning, "SJW" types) that don't engage with many right-leaning people.
I would like to know how many "right winger" did actively and honestly engaged with feminists texts. Not even with radical feminists texts, just with a mild moderate variety or with those who were radical back then and not anymore. Cause it seems to me that very little. Not that they have to, but they dont go that far in range as they pretend. They do read range where range is within what they like or where range is completely irrelevant to our lives.
It is also currently right wing that seeks to suppress actual fields of study on Universities.
It is also my experience is that many (not all) right people simply "know" the text is stupid without ever reading it. They also "know" that if movie pleases feminist crowd it is bad without seeing that movie.
And working in more conservative environment, I was careful not to say things that could be constructed as near-feminist, because that would lower my "trustworthiness" in other arenas too.
deathgrips 1301 days ago [-]
"Right wingers" don't have a monopoly on ignorance. People of every ideology are unwilling to listen to opposing viewpoints, read controversial books, and rate movies based on the social context rather than the artistic content. Pointing at the worse parts of only one ideology is counterproductive.
watwut 1301 days ago [-]
I haven't said that. Nor that they have monopoly nor that all of them are like that.
But the ideological subgroup specifically who throw around "listening to other viewpoints" a lot tend to be the kind who seriously engage only with view points comfortable to them. As in, there is talk about uncomfortable viewpoints, but their idea of uncomfortable viewpoint is someone telling them they are superior and they disagreeing cause they are more egalitarian. Which is not uncomfortable at all.
deathgrips 1301 days ago [-]
Is that better or worse than saying that your own ideology has a monopoly on truth and it is impermissible to let others talk about opposing ideas?
renewiltord 1301 days ago [-]
Hahaha, this is far too true. I think anyone who says "You should listen to other viewpoints" and intends that to be "this is why you should listen to me" has some massive lack of self-awareness.
Listening to other viewpoints is like invoking Crocker's Rules. You can't invoke the rules on other people. Only yourself.
You just don't have the information to determine whether you're worth listening to. Because you will always think you're worth listening to.
cik2e 1301 days ago [-]
> It is also currently right wing that seeks to suppress actual fields of study on Universities.
Care to share your feelings on the far left push to suppress science and mathematics?
> And working in more conservative environment, I was careful not to say things that could be constructed as near-feminist, because that would lower my "trustworthiness" in other arenas too.
The opposite is certainly true today in corporate America and higher education. Making an argument for the existence of a biological basis for sex or denying that all whites are automatically racist is a no-go.
The ideas that the far left is trying to suppress are very much not conservative. It’s an assault on objectivity and rational thought.
claudiawerner 1301 days ago [-]
>Making an argument for the existence of a biological basis for sex [...] is a no-go
If this were true, biology departments themselves would be a no-go. Every university I can name has a biology department. Is there any source for the claim that making such an argument is a no-go, or even any serious scholar (in any field) arguing that there is no biological basis for sex?
>It’s an assault on objectivity and rational thought.
If it were an assault on objectivity, then the scholars wouldn't be using 'objective' metaphysical models to argue for their positions. If they used 'non-objective' models, then the work would lack the normative force claimed. If it were an assault on rational thought, they wouldn't be crafting arguments at all. Would you care to link to some scholarly work which not only argues for the positions you criticize, but also adopts a model which denies objective or rational thought? Philosophically, rationality and objectivity are very tricky concepts. We should have debates on those just as we have debates on most other things.
orangecat 1300 days ago [-]
or even any serious scholar (in any field) arguing that there is no biological basis for sex?
It's a motte-and-bailey argument going from "a small percentage of people don't neatly fall into either the male or female category" to "the concept of biological sex is meaningless and the only relevant factor is a person's self-identification".
nobody9999 1300 days ago [-]
>It's a motte-and-bailey argument going from "a small percentage of people don't neatly fall into either the male or female category" to "the concept of biological sex is meaningless and the only relevant factor is a person's self-identification".
Except that's not what the links you posted say. In fact, the very first sentence of the second link says:
"First, sex defined: We're talking physical sex here, not gender."[0]
What's more, the same poster says further down:
"It is worth noting that I never talk about transgender in this thread. Intersex is not the same as transgender. You can be one without the other, or be both."
So that thread doesn't say anything close to what you think it says. Unless I misunderstood either the twitter thread or you. Which is always possible.
Would you mind expanding on your point? It might lead to an interesting discussion.
> > or even any serious scholar (in any field) arguing that there is no biological basis for sex?
> Sadly this is a thing:
Neither of the things your point to argue that.
They do argue that biological sex is not simple or binary, but that's very different from “there is no biological basis for sex”.
> It's a motte-and-bailey argument going from "a small percentage of people don't neatly fall into either the male or female category" to "the concept of biological sex is meaningless and the only relevant factor is a person's self-identification".
Except it's not; another thing neither of the sources you point to argues is that the various biological sex features don't matter: each of them matters; where they matter differs.
Unless, of course, by “matter” you mean specifically “provide an excuse to base socially ascribed gender on something other than gender identity”, in which case, sure, but it's hardly a motte-and-bailey argument, then.
bsanr2 1301 days ago [-]
>Care to share your feelings on the far left push to suppress science and mathematics?
It's not actually happening. I can imagine what you're thinking of as "suppression of science and mathematics" is pseudoscience.
brianxp 1301 days ago [-]
As a Colombian leftist it is quite difficult to find educated and challenging views from the "right", I work with a lot of veterans and most of them are blinded by their ideology, no matter what the government does or says they will always back it.
I have come to realize that right wingers are brainwashed or people with mental problems or childhood traumas, like our ex president (Alvaro Uribe Velez), who was addicted to kill people with chainsaws, or military men that as part of their training are tortured [1], and are subject to psychological training that change the way they behave.
Edit: I got a couple of downvotes but no one seems to really challenge my opinion, reinforcing my initial beliefs.
qazpot 1300 days ago [-]
> I have come to realize that right wingers are brainwashed or people with mental problems or childhood traumas
As a american center-rightist, I have come to realize that left wingers are brainwashed or people with mental problems or childhood traumas.
Like the millenial kids who grew up without father figure or a stable family.
Like college going students who have been brainwashed by leftists to seek state protection everywhere in terms of safe spaces.
I feel like they are blinded by ideology to believe that there cause is just and their opinions are morally justified and anyone even questioning their beliefs is morally wrong.
brianxp 1300 days ago [-]
>Like the millenial kids who grew up without father figure or a stable family.
Grew out in a stable family, although very corrupt one, I remember handing money to judges and other officials as a teen, and smuggling goods through the Venezuelan border, about 10 members of my family were killed and military service is mandatory here.
> Like college going students who have been brainwashed by leftists to seek state protection everywhere in terms of safe spaces.
College has never been free in Colombia and I've never been in one, additionally constantly the government is trying to privatize primary and secondary education so the poor can no longer educate themselves, you develop your own opinion based on your environment.
All policies implemented by the right wing have had disastrous consequences and are done with malice.
Additionally the Colombian government seems to fight an endless imaginary war against drugs even though every single right wing politician has ties with drug cartels, like the president [1], or the vice president (her siblings were jailed in the US) [2] and her husband was the main partner of one of the most powerful cartel leader [3], or the Colombian ambassador of Uruguay who had a cocaine lab [4], or the father of the ex president Alvaro Uribe Velez who was the main partner if not the boss of Pablo Escobar [5].
This is really eloquently put. A concrete example: I grew up in Minnesota in an area with a lot of Somali refugees. When the Trump travel ban went into effect, many of them were cut off from their families. I have friends that had to choose between packing up their lives to immigrate to Germany or never seeing their family again.
In that context, I'm not particularly interested in engaging with the idea that the travel ban is A Good Thing Actually. And I don't think I'd maintain a friendship with someone who thinks that it is. I do not consider this a character flaw.
rayiner 1300 days ago [-]
> The frustrating (and silly) thing is that this argument is used a lot to attack left-leaning folks who _do_ engage with many people whose experience and world view are very different from them... like people who are homeless, immigrants from other countries, people who are racially minoritized, people who are disabled
I think there are a lot more people who think they do this than actually do this. Left-leaning spaces are some of the most homogenous around. I can’t tell you how many left-leaning people I know who were genuinely shocked and surprised that, when it came time to vote, “people of color” didn’t like Elizabeth Warren. Their perception of getting to know “immigrants from other countries” and “people who are racially minoritized” rested entirely on interacting with immigrants and minorities who travel in the same rarified elite circles as themselves and hold the same views. “Center people of color” during the primary became “f--k moderates” after the convention, without a hint of irony.
Of course I’m painting with a very broad brush! Obviously not all left-leaning people are like that. But I do think there is a lack of appreciation for the relationships right-leaning folks have with people who are different from themselves. One of the most racially integrated places I’ve ever been is rural Texas. It’s a function of economics and geography. Left-leaning cities are highly segregated—educated left leaning people generally don’t live and work alongside immigrants and racial minorities.
lilactown 1300 days ago [-]
I do actually agree with you. It is very easy to be radical in your beliefs (in either direction) when you don't need to interact with the people that they effect. There are plenty of "ivory tower" leftists. The difference is that I do believe that those leftists are seeking to find solidarity with the oppressed, though not always successfully. Sometimes they miss the mark, and there are plenty examples of shitty behavior, but I think that they're heading in the right direction.
I also think that it's unfortunate it's so easy to mistake a critique like that as an attack of the left as a whole. Leftist policy should always have the goal of materially making peoples lives better. We should ruthlessly measure and criticize whether we are in fact succeeding in that, both by the numbers and by the lived experience of the people they effect.
The current form of discourse in America is so hyper-partisan as to make that sort of critique almost impossible to do in public, as it comes off as a show of weakness rather than an opportunity for evolution. It's painful.
The ivory tower leftists are now pushing a narrative of pervasive “white supremacy,” pitting whites versus non-whites. And again, the ivory tower folks are being tone deaf. The NYT recently ran an article where self-described “liberal pollsters” asked about the views of Latino people. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/opinion/biden-latino-vote...
> Progressives commonly categorize Latinos as people of color, no doubt partly because progressive Latinos see the group that way and encourage others to do so as well. Certainly, we both once took that perspective for granted. Yet in our survey, only one in four Hispanics saw the group as people of color.
> In contrast, the majority rejected this designation. They preferred to see Hispanics as a group integrating into the American mainstream, one not overly bound by racial constraints but instead able to get ahead through hard work.
What the article describes as the views of the overwhelming majority of Hispanics reflects my own views as an immigrant. By contrast, the approach taken by these ivory tower folks is in my opinion unworkable and threatens to blow up something that works about America: our ability to assimilate and lift up immigrant groups. If you look at the data, all immigrant groups are on a path to reaching economic parity with white people. Asians are already there, and Latinos achieve parity within a few generations: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/3/1567/5741707
Ivory tower leftists are leading these chants, amplifying people like Linda Sarsour who call assimilation “racist,” etc. And I think that ends in disaster. Nowadays, I have to keep an eye out to make sure my half-white daughter isn’t being exposed to this stuff. And frankly, I’m a pretty liberal person so this is distressing. I don’t like the direction Trump has gone by alienating immigrants. But there is a good chance that Nikki Hailey is the future of the GOP. Meanwhile, who comes after Biden? Elizabeth Warren, who talks about all of us non-white people as a progressive bloc, constantly assailed by white people? AOC? Ilhan Omar?
tptacek 1300 days ago [-]
You get that Ilhan Omar, AOC, and Elizabeth Warren don't represent the majority of people left of the American center, right? "Squad" politics get trounced outside of hyper-left noncompetitive districts. There's a pretty significant media bias feeding into this analysis you're providing. If you're going to cite Elizabeth Warren, for instance, you might want to factor in the fact that she quite literally embarrassed herself in the 2020 Democratic primary.
rayiner 1300 days ago [-]
I recognize they’re not representative. I said that “I’m not sure” that the left is “heading in the right direction.” What’s the direction? After Biden won the nomination I thought I had overreacted and things were going back to normal. Then I opened up Twitter to see the most completely normal Midwestern people at my alma mater declare they are “gatekeepers of white supremacy” on a Zoom conference with hundreds of students. The feminist academic Dean I watched get installed just a couple of years ago was cancelled for not acquiescing to similar declarations. My dad says it’s just academia, and not to worry about “so long as it’s confined to the campus.” But he’s also 70! He’s not going to be around forever to keep things in line.
tptacek 1300 days ago [-]
I think it mostly is campus stuff. Even the New Yorker ran a whole long piece practically taking Ibrahim Kendi apart. See also the elite discourse backlash against Robin Diangelo.
Aunche 1301 days ago [-]
A missionary may also engage with people with different experiences than their own, but they're only doing so to cement their own world view. When they come across someone they disagree with, they'll just label them as evil without thinking about it.
To be clear, I don't think that it's a right vs left thing. I think that social media incentivizes people to behave poorly. Ben Shapiro had an enlightening discussion with a founder of Vox about the nature of polarization [1], but that's not why he's famous or how he makes money. His audience wants to see him bash unprepared liberals, so that's what he's going to do. Even if he doesn't, some other pundit will simply take his place.
You just painted all missionaries with a pretty broad brush.
bart_spoon 1301 days ago [-]
> A missionary may also engage with people with different experiences than their own, but they're only doing so to cement their own world view. When they come across someone they disagree with, they'll just label them as evil without thinking about it.
As a former Mormon missionary, I couldn't disagree more. I didn't meet many people who were interested in the Mormon church, but I didn't consider them evil. If anything, it was my views on my religion and personal spirituality that evolved enormously over the course of the two years, far more than the 19 years previous or the many since. I learned a lot about myself and my worldview. Certainly a lot more than anyone changed their worldview by talking to me.
Aunche 1301 days ago [-]
That's fair. I shouldn't have generalized this among all the individual missionaries. My point is to provide an example of engaging with different worldviews does not necessarily imply open-mindedness.
reaperducer 1300 days ago [-]
Do you mind telling us how many missionaries you've met and engaged with in your adult life?
jquery 1301 days ago [-]
> I think that the subtext of your post (or at least people that espouse similar things on the internet) is that this is the fault of a certain brand of American politics (left leaning, "SJW" types) that don't engage with many right-leaning people.
That wasn’t the subtext at all. Interesting that you think the shoe fits so well, though.
lilactown 1300 days ago [-]
I tried to couch my reply as not assuming intent on your part specifically, but rather my attempt at pointing out a pattern I have seen other people engage in and be subject to.
When looking at this and your other reply to me elsewhere in this thread, it does not feel like you're engaging me in good faith.
stormbrew 1301 days ago [-]
> Which is a good thing. It's how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It's how you learned things. It was called being an adult.
This is a load of gilded age nonsense. There's never been any point in history where people deliberately exposed themselves to uncomfortable truths about people they considered other as part of "growing up".
I'd really challenge you to think about when you think this was. Was it in the 80s while gay people were dying of aids while straight people ignored their plight?
The 70s when mainstream american society treated anti-war activists as terrorists?
The 50s and 60s when white people literally moved out of cities and into suburbs to get away from black people?
What you're experiencing isn't "people failing to communicate with people with diverse views," but the internet finally forcing people to coexist with social groups they could just ignore until now. You have to exist on the same site as people who have been deeply harmed by the systems that benefit you and you're scared of that anger and those people's unwillingness to accept your desire to stick your head in the sand like your parents could.
manigandham 1301 days ago [-]
I believe the parent comment is describing how most people had friends of various backgrounds that they saw physically and communicated with freely - instead of having a social filter over digital connections that blocked them immediately before they ever really knew them.
> "internet finally forcing people to coexist with social groups they could just ignore until now"
How so? The internet has made it much easier to isolate and block than ever before. That's exactly why there's so much division today.
> "you're scared of that anger and those people's unwillingness"
What are you talking about here?
stormbrew 1301 days ago [-]
> I believe the parent comment is describing how most people had friends of various backgrounds that they saw physically and communicated with freely - instead of having a social filter over digital connections that blocked them immediately before they ever really knew them.
In person or not, everyone has a social filter on who they interact with. Your wealth, race, gender, orientation, interests, and location all act as filters against who you'll interact with, let alone be friends with. If you go to Harvard, how much relative opportunity do you think that gives you to befriend someone who isn't a rich white person? Especially, ya know, when only white people (white men, even) could even go to Harvard.
These filters are more or less permeable by the culture and scope of your life, but if you think there's some magical moment in the past when white people by an large all had black friends or rich people all had poor friends, you're dreaming.
It's easier now to experience perspectives alien to you by a country mile. It's also easier for them to intrude into your life.
Somehow, it's the most privileged people are the most likely to call this intrusion an attack. To call people wanting to re-establish boundaries with them a violation of their 'right to free speech'. Funny that.
manigandham 1300 days ago [-]
What magical moment? You seem to be reaching for extremes rather than accepting the very reasonable assertion that the vast majority of people now pick a side and never engage in any dialogue.
All those characteristics you mentioned are outward and secondary to the one that matters the most - the way you think. The original post said "varying opinions". Your beliefs, character and worldview are far more important than what you look like and you had to actually communicate with people to understand this. This built much better dialogue and interactions.
Now it takes a few taps to block millions based on assumptions and the most tenuous associations, as well as surface attributes like you mentioned. Someone merely liking a post you disagree with is enough to end a relationship. New perspectives being easier to experience also means they're easier to block, and the latter is the issue being discussed.
As far as "right to free speech" is concerned, I don't see what it has to do with this but regardless you also have a right to not participate in any discussion. Nobody is forcing you to talk, and nobody ever could.
stormbrew 1300 days ago [-]
I'm not the one who started with the comparison between past and present. The original post I was responding to was clearly saying that people were better in the past.
My assertion is simple: people have always lived in bubbles (honestly this is so blatantly true it's hilarious anyone even tries to argue against it) and the internet has only strengthened those bubbles in so far as it has forced people to confront the edges of them more readily.
No one ever had to "block millions" until twitter existed. The concept was meaningless. Every day of anyone's life before the internet every single person was ignoring the lives of countless people who had no way to reach them, an effective but implicit block on literally everything uncomfortable in the world.
manigandham 1300 days ago [-]
> "the internet has only strengthened those bubbles"
This is, quite literally, what the original poster was saying though. Nobody is arguing that bubbles never existed (again let's please avoid the extremes) but that they were much more permeable before.
Of course you don't interact with those you can't reach. Some barriers, physical or otherwise, will always exist. However people who did reach each other would interact much more freely because you didn't have any other way to know more about them in the first place. Now your social reputation precedes you, even if it's not created by you but rather an amalgamation of data points constructing some skewed halo, and it's used to stop interaction before it can ever start.
That's the fundamental issue raised in this thread. Do you not agree with this premise?
stormbrew 1300 days ago [-]
I disagree with your characterization of the post I was originally replying to. While I'm sure no one believes there were "no bubbles ever" I do think that the content of that post implies a pretty far off from reality level of bubble permeability in the past.
Also, extremes are useful tools for examining assumptions.
As for the rest, in so far as online interactions have different boundaries and background information levels, I think you have to work harder to demonstrate that these interactions aren't (current covid-world aside) in addition to rather than replacing in person interactions people largely had before. Until we're all walking around with google glass to tell us all about everyone we meet, you are still free to go talk to the person on the street corner about their life.
But even then, your social status has always proceeded you to some degree. Again, your race, visible evidence of your wealth (clothes, haircut, etc), visible elements of queerness or lack thereof, and visible gender, your language and speech patterns are all elements of social signalling that have always acted as barriers to communication between in and out groups of those people.
On the internet, some of these can be mitigated or erased. On the street, while dating, in the workplace they cannot. They are data points that tell someone a lot about you (as with social media, within some error bars) before you even interact.
Again, these are changes in the structure of the outer edges of our bubbles and do not argue for a change in the scope or degree of our bubbles on their own.
bumby 1300 days ago [-]
>It's easier now to experience perspectives
>the internet has only strengthened those bubbles
I’m having a hard time tracking whether you think things are better or worse now, unless you are asserting the contact hypothesis is wrong
stormbrew 1300 days ago [-]
People have to work harder now to maintain bubbles like people had in the past naturally, especially on platforms like twitter.
I don't think this speaks specifically to whether or not "things are better/worse now," it's a criticism of a particular pop-psych trope angle of measuring it.
I think the contact hypothesis is correct. People interacting with people they're bigoted against will generally ease or counteract their bigotry.
I also think that people overestimate the degree to which contact happened in the past and mistake modern forms of 'bubble-friction' (for lack of a better term) being more visible than the silent, implicit kinds in the past for it being new.
Middle class and rich white people literally left north american inner cities to struggle on their own with reduced tax bases to escape having to interact with black people. They did this quietly, and they did it in a way that appeared individualistic and rational.
The effect was far more profound than any possible consequence of being blocked on twitter or yelled at on facebook, but it was very easy to ignore happening.
bumby 1300 days ago [-]
Thanks for the well-reasoned reply. I think the angle one of the other commenters may have been taking is that the "social filter" (i.e., social network algorithms) reinforce bubbles rather than, as you say, make people "work harder now to maintain bubbles".
I think some of the work by people like Tristan Harris and Renee Diresta support this. The attention economy works in large part simultaneously on outrage and confirmation bias. To some of the parent comment points, not interacting in the real world may short-circuit the ability for us to confront different views while simultaneously acknowledging others humanity.
>white people literally left north american inner cities to struggle on their own with reduced tax bases to escape having to interact with black people.
White flight is a real thing, but I think the plight of these cities is much more complicated than to be distilled to a single feature like race. As an example, Detroit went from one of the wealthiest cities to bankrupt in a generation. White flight is part of this, as is corruption, as is poor economic diversification, and a host of other issues.
free_rms 1300 days ago [-]
Let's slow down on calling anyone else privileged when most of us are in arguably the most privileged profession to ever exist.
A few things are true about wealth distribution, it's empirically become more concentrated and also more localized to elite urban areas. When people from this urban elite start calling everyone else privileged and intolerant to the point that they don't deserve a voice.. it's not a great look.
stormbrew 1300 days ago [-]
Or, people here could admit their privilege rather than try to deny it. I am absolutely privileged on some very very important axes (somewhat the opposite in others). I'm throwing stones in the glass house because the glass house is shitty.
bumby 1300 days ago [-]
I don't know if you realize it but you seem to give yourself a more nuanced existence while denying that same understanding in others' parent comments.
You (rightly) acknowledged that you can be privileged in some areas but disadvantaged in others, but seem to take the stance in a previous statement that there is no progress, just "gilded age nonsense" because there are still marginalized groups.
We can acknowledge progress while still admitting there is a lot of work to be done. There's no reason to treat them as mutually exclusive. My worry is that those who take the alternate stance ironically end up alienating potential allies. Or, to butcher the old idiom, they fail to realize that expecting perfection can get in the way of progress.
stormbrew 1300 days ago [-]
Sorry, how have I argued there has been no progress?
I would certainly say that on social issues I do not believe there has been enough progress, but there absolutely has been a lot of progress.
On the specific issue of bubbles, I have argued for a complex view that the nature of the boundaries of people's social bubbles have changed. As I don't think there's a good way to measure this I take as a baseline that it may have largely stayed the same but the way we experience conflict over it has changed.
bumby 1300 days ago [-]
Your previous dismissal of in-person social interaction as evidence comes across as stating there was no progress on this front until the internet "finally" forced people to interact across cultural lines. My apologies if I misinterpreted your point.
stormbrew 1300 days ago [-]
Oh, I mean, I think the bubbles have shifted to some degree historically depending on culture and conflict but did largely remain within the scope possible with in person interaction. Exposure to groups outside an individual's own has grown with every communication invention as well, from books to newspapers to radio to phones to the internet.
Social media I think does, however, represent an exponential growth in how much "outside perspective" people are exposed to, as well as the intrusiveness of those perspectives. All those other communication inventions required filtering perspectives through layers of privilege (media, basically).
On social media though I can post a tweet about my lunch and have someone from across the ocean tell me I deserve to die for who I am in the replies to it. No one in history has ever had to face that level of forced interaction on so mundane a social act until now.
And that's why we put up walls. To get back to where we were 20 years ago. Not because we can't handle "disagreement", but because when I'm eating lunch I don't want to be told I don't deserve to live.
bumby 1300 days ago [-]
Thanks for elaborating.
I think where the disagreement may be is that the internet (defined as the applications, not as the infrastructure), and social media in particular, isn't optimized for open communication or sharing different viewpoints. It's optimized for capturing our attention. Unfortunately, the way it often does this is by hijacking our psychology; one way is by confirmation bias and another is by inducing outrage (which strengthens our pre-existing beliefs). The flow of information is not "free"; it's curated to the ends of the attention economy so even while there is a lot more availability of information, it's passing through some filters that may not be the most productive for society. In other words, it's designed to reinforce our pre-existing beliefs rather than challenge them.
Those filters become social media's own "layers of privileges" to a certain extent. I think the downside with those compared to previous media is that the new filters are much more difficult to interpret compared with, say, a newspaper's political leanings.
ZainRiz 1300 days ago [-]
Farnam Street has a great blog post supporting what you just said:
That most people only express things to people that they thing would be accepting of what they said. Even if they might not agree with it, they'll at least accept that it's okay to hold those opinions.
Once you cross the line into "Expressing this opinion will cause negative social consequences to me" then people start self-censoring.
> In anonymous environments, the spiral of silence can end up reversing itself, making the most fringe views the loudest.
qazpot 1300 days ago [-]
> Was it in the 80s while gay people were dying of aids while straight people ignored their plight?
Now in 2020s Gay people are accepted in the mainstream society.
> The 70s when mainstream american society treated anti-war activists as terrorists?
Anti-war activists are no longer treated as terrorists.
> The 50s and 60s when white people literally moved out of cities and into suburbs to get away from black people?
Segregation has ended.
All of these positive changes have come by "You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions."
If the people were so rigid with their views as assume them to be then these positive changes would have never happened.
stormbrew 1300 days ago [-]
They actually largely came about because people protested and demanded to be heard.
Ignoring that your statements are optimistic at best. Some gay people are accepted into mainstream society. Anti-war activists absolutely have recently still been considered terrorists. Hell, anti-RACISM activists are actively being called terrorists by the government right now which goes to the next thing, which is that segregation as a legal concept has ended but turning neighbourhoods white is still absolutely a thing.
throw9872349872 1300 days ago [-]
You are conflating anti-war protesters in a prior post who protested drafts that affected all young adults through peaceful civil disobedience to anti-racism protesters who by and large protest through destructive violent and disruptive tactics against police brutality which hasn’t been proven to be overtly racist as a whole group. Overall, it sounds like you are fairly angry at the current situation and I recommend stepping back and perhaps listening to various viewpoints on the matters you feel strongly about.
ncmncm 1300 days ago [-]
> anti-racism protesters who ... protest through destructive violent and disruptive tactics
You have revealed yourself too early. Disinformation requires more finesse.
1300 days ago [-]
Vrondi 1301 days ago [-]
It was true for me, individually, my entire life. Yes, a large segment of society have always been closed-minded. That doesn't make being open to new ideas and diverse friendships a bad thing.
At the same time that we are scoffing at the closed-mindedness of the past, in realms like politics, people were _better_ at working together across the aisle at some periods in History. Obviously, not the Civil War era, but for much of the early 20th century, as an example. Just because a lot of people are bad at something does not mean it isn't a laudable goal or practice.
stronglikedan 1301 days ago [-]
> as people who have been deeply harmed by the systems
Most of the people attacking other people online haven't been deeply harmed by anything at all. They're just parroting what they hear in their online echo chambers. The signal to noise ratio in the discussion of issues that really do affect people is moving to mostly noise. Most of the time it's mountains from molehills, just to virtue signal for attention. Nothing constructive is coming from it. In fact, I'd say it's dividing people more than ever.
throwmeaway_pls 1300 days ago [-]
Yup, this stuff keeps rising up out of nowhere, and the messages are unnatural to the point that they’re likely engineered.
1300 days ago [-]
foobared 1301 days ago [-]
>What you're experiencing isn't "people failing to communicate with people with diverse views," but the internet finally forcing people to coexist with social groups they could just ignore until now.
How is that working for you?. This kind of forced one dimensional thinking is the issue rather than having discussions and building consensus around these very complex and sensitive topics.
bobwall 1301 days ago [-]
Hmm, didn't they treat the soldiers coming back from the war as terrorists. I'd say there are two sides to all those coins you are throwing around.
ncmncm 1300 days ago [-]
No, they didn't. Definitively. Such assertions, researched, turned out to be wholly fabricated precisely for rhetorical disinformation.
>Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia were polar opposites on the issues. But they were also very good friends. Because they were adults. They weren't children who had to surround themselves with familiar things that reinforce their own views of the world.
They also were both high status individuals who lived almost exclusively in the world of academic disagreement. It's not that difficult to be open-minded when closed-mindedness has little physical consequences for you.
If you live in a town in Myanmar where some heated discussion on the internet can turn into an ethnic riot and end with you dead on the street, or you're a Chinese shop owner and some garbage on the internet ends with your store being destroyed you get a little bit more careful about the "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" attitude.
The shifting attitude towards offense isn't so much the result of technology as the article suggests, or changing culture in the upper strata of society, it's democratisation of discourse to people for whom discourse actually matters in the real world. I think this is why the change has been so pronounced in the US in particular. In the US, average people for the longest amount of time had no ability to speak at all, all discourse was 'free' because it was free from consequence for the people who spoke, in practical terms.
inglor_cz 1300 days ago [-]
"high status individuals who lived almost exclusively in the world of academic disagreement"
And yet it seems to me as an outside observer that it is precisely American academia that is obsessed with divisive ideologies. The shop owners seem to be way more pragmatic.
lostlogin 1301 days ago [-]
Please could you explain this bit a little further?
> The shifting attitude towards offense isn't so much the result of technology as the article suggests, or changing culture in the upper strata of society, it's democratisation of discourse to people for whom discourse actually matters in the real world. I think this is why the change has been so pronounced in the US in particular. In the US, average people for the longest amount of time had no ability to speak at all
Why did people in the US have no ability to speak? Or have less ability than those in some other country?
Or are you saying that social media took off because those in the US already felt free to speak and then a platform appeared?
Barrin92 1301 days ago [-]
>Why did people in the US have no ability to speak? Or have less ability than those in some other country?
because US public discourse has been, in the past, dominated by elites. Politics was largely the domain of the upper middle-class, politicians were largely homogenous demographically drawn from top-tier universities, the media recruited from similar institutions, and so on. So you have a significantly narrower spectrum in what is considered 'political debate' than what is actually present in the population, and the people who are doing the debating are largely shielded in their personal life from consequences because it's a sort of intellectual exercise and filling op-ed pages, not a matter of life and safety. That's what created the idea of 'free' debate, but rather it's insular debate. Culture in the US was predominantly created top-down.
Social media kind of blew this wide open in all directions. You see this take alot these days that Americans 'used to live in the same reality' and now don't, and it's the fault of liberals, conservatives, the media, postmodernism or whatever else. But really what's happening is that Americans never lived in the same reality, but finally middle America, and black lives matter, and metoo get to actually speak up. And that's going to cause much more heat than a bunch of harvard grads in a debate club, because now the people who actually have skin in the game are part of the discussion rather than just the subject of it.
inglor_cz 1300 days ago [-]
People who spend their time commenting on social networks are not necessarily people who actually have skin in the game.
From my relatively small sample of the Czech Twitter, the discourse there is dominated by about thirty journalists and white collar workers. No ghetto voices to be heard; people in ghettos have more urgent problems than to sit on the phone and crank out 60 status updates a day.
erosenbe0 1300 days ago [-]
People in American ghettos do express their opinions online, but the upper classes and special interest groups have much more ability to construct and influence the dominant narratives. So one should always question whatever is the prevailing wisdom surrounding lower class Americans. For example, in the 80s and 90s it was thought that a punitive criminal justice system and a draconian war on drugs was what they needed. Turns out, retrospectively, that was probably not an optimal approach and most people nowadays want to ratchet down the war on drugs.
BlueTemplar 1300 days ago [-]
That's a very good point about Twitter, but the Internet is way bigger than that...
NeuNeurosis 1300 days ago [-]
This right here. This has been my position since the beginnings of the stirrings of the discontent that social media was powering years ago.
I think that this is why there has been such a push back by each of the demographics and movements that you listed. They each have a voice and can be more powerfully organized than ever before albeit in some cases a more superficial basis hence the rise of cancel culture.
Traditionally if you wanted to get a way from push back in your locale you moved. Now that is not an option since so much of your speech is tied to a identifiable account that follows you hence the social cooling.
I think this time of change is a phase of growing pains that might last generations that will see us wrestle with these issues for a long time.
francisofascii 1301 days ago [-]
Good point. Supreme court justices have constitutionally protected, lifetime appointment job security. They can't really get fired for writing politically incorrect memos or dissenting opinions.
kube-system 1301 days ago [-]
That's an interesting idea. As per your example, has the spread of social media affected other places in similar ways?
heresie-dabord 1301 days ago [-]
There are a few identifiable elements of toxicity in social memia.
i) The tendency to immaturity. (This is a social problem.)
ii) The tendency to loud stupidity and stubborn ignorance. Not all opinions need be heard and acknowledged. Reason is a habit that must be practised. (This is a cultural problem. At bottom, it is anti-intellectualism.)
iii) The very modern problem of "victimology discourse". Everyone has lived injustice because, frankly, people are exploitative and "the system" finds abuse to be profitable. But we cannot have free speech and productive exchanges if Victim Points overrule discussion.
In the end, the reflective person will disengage from the dungheap. This leaves only the dung.
lilactown 1300 days ago [-]
I would add into this mix that the engagement algorithms social media uses to pick which posts show up in peoples timelines, go viral, etc. is very much a cyclic process that reinforces all of the social problems that you speak of.
sanderjd 1301 days ago [-]
No. The problem is that social media is like gathering all the people you know into a single room and shouting your thoughts at them. That's not how socializing is done. Not how the encouragement to seek out differing opinions in college works. Those things are done individually or in small groups. That works great, there can be a give and take where people can listen to each other. That's where social media badly breaks down.
majormajor 1301 days ago [-]
> Which is a good thing. It's how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It's how you learned things. It was called being an adult.
This is a very rosy-colored view of a past that wasn't enjoyed by many people except for certain small subsets of relatively-well-off folks whose disagreements were around less directly consequential things (like tax policy) than "some of you don't deserve any rights."
And even then, even in my grandfather's old social circles... still a LOT of sorting going on.
Read "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" for a good discussion from the inside of how American religion has been dominated by sensitivity for decades.
addicted 1301 days ago [-]
> My understanding is that sort of thing would never happen on a college campus today.
This is almost certainly not true. Your idea of what is the norm is being driven by what is actually the exception because that’s what we see on the news (the news almost by definition shows things that are newsworthy and are out of the norm).
Reedx 1301 days ago [-]
"However, hard evidence points to a different reality. This year, the Heterodox Academy conducted an internal member survey of 445 academics. “Imagine expressing your views about a controversial issue while at work, at a time when faculty, staff, and/or other colleagues were present. To what extent would you worry about the following consequences?” To the hypothetical “My reputation would be tarnished,” 32.68 percent answered “very concerned” and 27.27 percent answered “extremely concerned.” To the hypothetical “My career would be hurt,” 24.75 percent answered “very concerned” and 28.68 percent answered “extremely concerned.”
In other words, more than half the respondents consider expressing views beyond a certain consensus in an academic setting quite dangerous to their career trajectory."
First, this says nothing about if this is different than it used to be "back in the day". Second, it has never been true anywhere that almost all people in a given field felt totally comfortable voicing controversial opinions around their colleges and did not worry about any consequences. Third, these are faculty, not students. Students are there to learn and expand their knowledge and try out different ideas. Teachers are there to do a job and openly talking about a crazy idea you had to anyone and everyone is not going to do you any favors.
kaitai 1301 days ago [-]
Well, in my corporate job, there are meetings where I don't espouse my controversial view about an architecture or modeling decision, because... the same thing?
I'm sure that's also true in the Church of Scientology and a lot of religious congregations. That is how people work. Creating spaces where robust discussion and dissent is respected and productive is actually hard work and requires good management (which Lord knows most academic departments don't have, since the Head Manager is just whoever got coerced into being chair this time).
inglor_cz 1300 days ago [-]
The thing is, academia once served as an institution to protect unorthodox thinkers against external oppression. People who offended the Church or the King had to be protected there.
Nowadays it seems that this role has been forgotten.
colinmhayes 1301 days ago [-]
Hard to trust an institution called the heterodox academy.
slg 1301 days ago [-]
This was said in a glib manner, which may be the reason for the downvotes, but it is completely true. This is how the Heterodox Academy defines itself:
>Heterodox Academy is a group of 4,100+ educators, administrators, & graduate students who believe diverse viewpoints & open inquiry are critical to research & learning. [1]
Does anyone think that a person who joins a group focusing on promoting "diverse viewpoints" is going to have a representative view of sharing controversial opinions? This is a wildly biased population of people to be answering this question.
This begs the question. What controversial issues?
reaperducer 1301 days ago [-]
Your idea of what is the norm is being driven by what is actually the exception because that’s what we see on the news
Actually, my notion of this is driven by seeing a dsignated "Safe Space" on a college campus, and a "Free Speech Zone" at the University of Houston.
Don't make assumptions about other people.
s5300 1301 days ago [-]
Okay, the University of Houston also has wheel chair ramp accessibility everywhere as well.
How many people do you see on average using it though? Are students in wheel chairs the norm of the campus?
Ala - how many people do you personally observe at the "safe space" - or do you even go there?
reaperducer 1301 days ago [-]
How many people do you see on average using it though?
I make the safe guess that the University didn't spend money on signs and and allocate public space without there being a demand for it. It sure didn't look like an art installation.
how many people do you personally observe at the "safe space" - or do you even go there?
If by "go," you mean "attend," no I am not a student. If by "go," you mean "visit," I did quite frequently when I lived in Houston. But I didn't make a habit of sitting on a park bench with a clicker and monitoring the habits of other people. Can you tell me that it is never used? Rarely used? Never used? Do you even go there?
s5300 1301 days ago [-]
I wasn't the one making the assumptions, not exactly my responsibility to appease your questions. DYOR.
Though, in an attempt to perhaps please you:
I go to the most liberal University in my state because I was born in the town and got an academic full ride. We pul about 25,000 students in a town with a pop of less than 5,000.
Our safe space office was actually just "repurposed" as it was just about never used. In the beginning in helped spawn some friendly campus programs that meet every now and then as University programs do. Most students who sought the Uni official safe space office migrated to those. Thus, it's purpose was served, and now it's gone.
Hope this helps in your research.
Looking back at your comment: No, you weren't a student who would in any way be affected by the office, yet you still are commenting on it from the outside. Seems... unnecessary. I'm glad you're so concerned about the dispersal of University funds. Must be wanting to know how each penny will be benefitting your community in the way you see fit.
komali2 1301 days ago [-]
I went there. My sister went there.
The free speech zone exists so that anti-women's-rights protesters can show pictures of fetuses to students.
The safe space area was made when we found out it was physically dangerous for the student communist and anarchist groups to peaceably assemble in the free speech zone.
During my time at UH, the greatest threat to free speech was posed by the conservative student population. I was physically threatened and harmed on many occasions in my 4 years there.
free_rms 1301 days ago [-]
You guys actually formally and physically made 2 separate ideological bubbles?
komali2 1300 days ago [-]
No, excessive, unpunished bullying forced the University to create areas small enough for them to actually protect their students from said bullies. The Free Speech zone is in the spiritual center of the university, directly in front of the library, and the University lacked the will or ability to protect leftist student groups there.
dguaraglia 1301 days ago [-]
So, you saw creating a 'safe space' inside of a college campus, and you decided that means the whole campus is a 'safe space'.
That makes sense. Whenever I walk into a building with a bathroom, I assume I can pee anywhere in the building.
scsilver 1301 days ago [-]
If you are going to hold regular people to the intellectual and emotional discipline of supreme court justices, you're gonna be disappointed. I think we can use our empathy here and understand that these systems we have created have successfully disrupted information flow, its social verification, and the tools and processes we have to mitigate fallout from this are immature. It will take time for society to filter in the social processes needed to suss out truthful information. Sadly, like those who dealt with other disruptive technologies like the printing press, I dont think this will be fixed to our standards within a generation.
wutbrodo 1301 days ago [-]
Ginsburg and Scalia obviously cleared that bar but that doesn't mean those with less discipline can't do so. I share GP's view that this is a pretty basic part of being an adult.
That being said, I fully agree with the rest of your comment. This deficiency isn't new: Most people in any period of history have been unable to engage with ideas like adults, and there are a host of social technologies that prevent these infantile tendencies from blowing up society. Dramatic shifts in the way we live and engage with others (like those brought about by the Internet age) obsolete these safeguards, leaving this type of person vulnerable to a world of epistemological hazards until new tools and processes are created for them to follow by rote.
scsilver 1301 days ago [-]
I suppose your defenition of maturity is different than mine, I would assume that maturity is defined by the traits held by most adults in a species. If it isnt held by most adults in that species, is it really an indicator of maturity? But we are getting into pedantics here. I agree with you, I just assume from human history that what we as a society claim to be maturity is a idealist goal that we set out to achieve but ultimately fall short of. He are going to have to up out maturity baseline in order to tackle the challenges we have created for ourselves.
pixl97 1301 days ago [-]
>Dirac and Bohr obviously cleared that bar but that doesn't mean those with less discipline can't do so.
See how silly that sounds when you change the subject to something that we know is difficult. "Being an adult" is even more open ended. What does it mean, who defines it? Do you have to be "An Adult" to get elected to office and make rules that others have to follow? Is "An Adult" necessary to implement features on a website that dictate how people interact with each other?
I agree with your agreement statement. Infantile grownups in the past generally did not have a global audience in which they could wreak havoc with, and there issues tended to be local in context.
wutbrodo 1300 days ago [-]
> See how silly that sounds when you change the subject to something that we know is difficult.
In what way does this sound silly? We could easily be talking about Dirac and Bohr both learning how to read, in which case "they're so smart, you couldn't possibly do anything they did" would be obvious nonsense. The point here is that exceptional people doing something doesn't imply a high bar, and
> "Being an adult" is even more open ended.
Well obviously. There's no objective test of what makes one an adult[1], so it's inherently an opinion. An adult _can_ do all of those things, though they probably shouldn't, and a big part of what makes the world shitty is down to people like this doing things and making decisions that they shouldn't be, including in the way they vote (it still boggles the mind that people think it makes sense to vote on the basis of a policy you haven't bothered to even _try_ to educate yourself on).
[1] Colloquially, obviously. The legal sense is defined fairly rigorously (though it doesn't mean quite the same thing as the colloquial sense)
mStreamTeam 1301 days ago [-]
While this is great advice, it doesn't solve OPs problem of worrying about offending someone.
The larger problem is an offended person can do a lot of damage. In extreme cases, offended people have SWATted their targets causing all sorts of physical damage and emotional distress.
Personally, I don't want to worry about getting SWATted because some nobody from my high-school disagreed with my Facebook post. So I'm not going to post anything on Facebook.
tboyd47 1301 days ago [-]
I definitely know that nobody on my Facebook would ever SWAT me. I just don't like to trigger people. People carry a lot of hidden emotional baggage with them these days with trip wires in various topics of discussion. Something about Facebook/Twitter makes it easier to step on those. Or, maybe it's me; maybe something about FB/Twitter makes me post outlandish things without realizing it. I'm with you on this - it's not worth trying to "solve" it when I can just not post on Facebook.
I think it's kind of like the difference between e-sports and real sports. Real sports and e-sports share their competitive nature, but real sports have the endorphins that balance that out with positivity. Online discussion can be antagonistic just like real discussion, but real discussion often has non-verbal cues, food, relaxing atmosphere, small talk, jokes, etc. that balance that out.
reaperducer 1301 days ago [-]
People carry a lot of hidden emotional baggage with them these days
Not any more than in days past. People just don't deal with it well anymore.
Possibly because they missed out on three formerly common phrases when they were growing up: "Too bad," "Who Cares?" and "Get over it."
pjc50 1301 days ago [-]
Ah yes, I remember the era of: "I'm gay" "Well, now you have to get out of the house and never see your parents again. Too bad. Get over it. Oh and there's a pandemic on with a high fatality rate for gay people. Who cares?"
The amazing thing about those phrases is how many situations they don't work for. Berlin Wall? Who cares. 9/11? Get over it. Uighur detention? Too bad.
formerly_proven 1301 days ago [-]
Worrying about offending people is like trying to make something idiot-proof. It's impossible, in part because there are simply a bunch of malicious people who want to be offended to use it as a weapon or pretense against someone they don't like for whatever reason (or worse, "just because").
reaperducer 1301 days ago [-]
it doesn't solve OPs problem of worrying about offending someone
The solution is to not worry about them. If they don't like it, too bad. They're not worth knowing.
There are plenty of high-quality people and friendships to be made in the world. We don't need to cling to low-grade friendships just because they're people we already know.
In extreme cases, offended people have SWATted their targets causing all sorts of physical damage and emotional distress
You can't live your life worrying about what someone else "might" do.
sethammons 1301 days ago [-]
When that person works at your work and has influence, you do get to worry about what someone might do if they interpret you wrong.
gamblor956 1301 days ago [-]
I guess the bigger question is why are you friends on facebook with someone you're not friends with in real life if that person has the power to negatively influence your career?
sethammons 1300 days ago [-]
it extends past facebook. Tweets, community slacks, etc. It is just a re-hashing of what we were told when the internet was young: things you say and do there can stick with you and haunt you later. At the time, we thought that meant nude selfies or drunk pics. Turns out it can be anything that puts you out of the purity spiral and can come back and bite you.
chasd00 1301 days ago [-]
offended people have an extremely disproportionate power. An offended female HS student can completely destroy the career and livelihood of a male teacher in a few keystrokes.
lilactown 1300 days ago [-]
Disproportionate power _compared to whom_? To take your example: on any given day, if I'm a female HS student interacting with a male teacher, the power differential is hugely in his favor.
The teacher can fundamentally change the course of my life by limiting my ability to take more advanced courses and/or what colleges I can get into. They can humiliate me in front of my peers. They could simply make it impossible for me to learn and engage with material that could be important to my future success.
The fact that a female student has the ability to speak out about being abused _does_ upset that power imbalance, but it would be a mistake to claim that it gives her _more_ power than the teacher.
Either way, power should be wielded with good judgement, and there are certainly consequences on both for using it (and abusing it).
Udik 1301 days ago [-]
Oh come on. When you meet your friends, you meet them in groups. When you talk to them, it's usually to sub groups or one to one. There's the nice colleagues from work, there's the childhood friends, there's the friends for drinking and banter and there's former girlfriends or love interests.
Each of these have different interests, a different shared background with you, and are used to different communication modes and different contexts. The idea that you should always talk to everyone at the same time and show them a single monolithic self is just silly. Life doesn't work like that and being a politician is not a job I signed up for.
tboyd47 1301 days ago [-]
Exactly. Great way to put it. Facebook forces you into this politician way of communicating which is a waste of time and just sucks.
maurys 1301 days ago [-]
This reminds me of the Black Mirror episode "Nosedive".
Everyone has a publicly visible social score and they can vote their peers based on their interactions.
Since it's used for jobs, housing, loans etc. everyone becomes risk-averse and artificially nice. And more and more alike externally.
We're not there yet but excessive surveillance is definitely worth talking about.
Spooks 1301 days ago [-]
In terms of a social media site, what you are saying sounds exhausting. Having a couple of friends with different opinions is great, having like 100+ people not educated in certain topics, all with their own opinion is where it kind of breaks.
You mentioned Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia, they were both well versed in law and justice, so it makes sense even if their opinions are different, they can respect each other.
reaperducer 1301 days ago [-]
having like 100+ people not educated in certain topics, all with their own opinion is where it kind of breaks.
Why have 100+ people? Why not have a small group of high-quality friends, instead of a large pool of low-quality friends?
Spooks 1301 days ago [-]
Well that is always an option, which I have thought about. I would basically need to remove my entire family and a large amount of friends (not low-quality friends, they are just educated in other areas).
Once I realized that, it was easier to just delete facebook, and keep in touch with my close friends and people that are in similar studies to myself by using group chat messages, emails or just face to face (not so much this option in 2020)
1301 days ago [-]
bart_spoon 1301 days ago [-]
> Why not have a small group of high-quality friends, instead of a large pool of low-quality friends?
You can and should. Although at a certain point the benefit of being connected to those people via social media as opposed to say, a group chat via text message or an app like Discord/Slack, diminishes greatly. I think that's the paradox of social media: the only thing it does well that alternatives don't is connecting you to lots and lots of people, many of whom you barely or don't know at all, but the quality of the experience degrades with the number of people you are connected to and the weakness of your connection to them.
JMTQp8lwXL 1301 days ago [-]
Ginsburg and Scalia, even if they did take a genuine interest in one another's friendship, had external considerations two average, everyday people wouldn't have. The image of the court, and its ability of folks with different world-views to come together and still respect each other when disagreeing-- it helps present an image of an impartial court. The functioning of SCOTUS depends on the legitimacy of its image. Many of our institutions function this way, but it is acutely important to the court.
reaperducer 1301 days ago [-]
even if they did take a genuine interest in one another's friendship
There's no need to doubt this. It's been well documented in books and newspapers for decades.
JMTQp8lwXL 1301 days ago [-]
Let's phrase this another way: if neither were SCOTUS justices, but mere acquaintances that came across one another at say, a party, and began discussing politics-- would they have become friends? No.
erosenbe0 1301 days ago [-]
I believe they were friends prior to SCOTUS appointments when they were both on DC circuit. They were really big opera buffs. But in any case they had some exceptional traits that are not necessarily common.
golemd 1301 days ago [-]
Why are you so sure of that?
jimmyjazz14 1301 days ago [-]
really? because I am friends with quite a few people who I disagree with on political issues. I will even say those are some of the people I enjoying talking with the most (so long as we both agree to show respect to each other).
qazpot 1300 days ago [-]
You make friends with only those people who agree with you on every political issue?
adamc 1301 days ago [-]
Your assumption is unsupported and, in my experience, untrue.
JMTQp8lwXL 1301 days ago [-]
There's quite a bit of data supporting the fact that there are less moderates today and both sides are less civil to one another when compared to the past, mostly because echo chambers reduce our exposure to perspectives outside of our own, and in aggregate, it makes us less receptive when we rarely do encounter opposite beliefs.
stale2002 1301 days ago [-]
> If people can't respect you for having a different opinion, they're not adults, and they're certainly not "friends," Facebook or otherwise.
Nah. Not everyone has the luxury that you have, of just throwing away their friends like that, even if it is "their" fault.
Frankly, I personally don't care much about politics at all. It is a hobby of mine. But I don't truly care about it.
Why would I give up a friend, to stand up for ideas that I don't really care much about at all?
For some sort of worthless "principle"? No thanks. Feel free to keep your principles if that's what you care about. I don't really value those, though.
kd0amg 1300 days ago [-]
What would it take for you to care about politics? What sort of issue would have to be up for debate?
stale2002 1300 days ago [-]
> What would it take for you to care about politics? What sort of issue would have to be up for debate?
I don't think that there is anything at all, in modern day politics that makes that much of a difference.
Individual circumstances and relationships matter much much more than basically all politics in the modern day.
But even if we are discussing things that pass this very high bar of where it matters (So as an actual real life world world, or civil war, and before you say it, the 2020 election does not count as a "civil war" lol), I would still argue that an individual person's ability to effect those politics is very small.
So, for example, even if that other friend was on the "wrong" side of whatever this "very important political topic" is, that person's actual ability to have an effect on that political topic, is so small that I would care more about that person, than their stance on this issue.
groby_b 1301 days ago [-]
> The only thing worse than people who are offended by everything is having to be afraid of offending over-sensitive people.
That's a rather simplified world view. Let's make an example: I have a bunch of friends who are deeply interested in medicine - a discussion about cancer, what it is, treatment possibilities etc. are a very appropriate topic. I also have a friend who's just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Having that discussion in front of her would be utterly insensitive.
Likewise, it's kind of insensitive to perma-gloat about your new great relationship in front of somebody who just had a divorce.
What topics we can deal with depends on our lives and what's currently going on. Paying attention to those circumstances in other people's lives is the kind thing to do, and has nothing to do with "being afraid of offending oversensitive people"
Remember that guy who gave you advice? He suggest to seek a broad range of opinions. You were in control when you sought out those opinions. Facebook takes that control away - you will see the opinions it considers appropriate for your stream, when it considers them appropriate.
And sure, be who you are. But that "adult" thing also includes respecting other people's boundaries, and social media makes that almost impossible.
groby_b 1301 days ago [-]
LOL. The "all feedback is great" crowd is downvoting a comment that they don't agree with. Zero surprise they're snowflaking, but entertaining.
kaitai 1301 days ago [-]
FWIW, I agree with you.
taurath 1300 days ago [-]
> Which is a good thing. It's how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It's how you learned things. It was called being an adult.
Right and wrong. I don't think a ton of young people in the 60s were hanging around with people who voted for Nixon. But its true that in a world where (all the white people) go to the same bar, there's a social pressure to meld and focus on common understanding.
The divergence between the 2 ends of the wedge issues is as large right now as it was in the 1800s. The reason we are not literally having skirmishes across state lines is because we are more geographically mixed now (cities vs rural).
Its not a maturity thing anymore - its that we're actual enemies of each other, and not just at the wedge issues anymore. We have similarities like "shops at Target" and "wants their family to do well" but that doesn't prevent open conflict. Ideologically we are actually, really divided, and fundamentalism is the coin of the realm.
LordFast 1300 days ago [-]
The level of emotionally and politically motivated anti-intellectualism over the past decade or so has grown so much and so exponentially to the point that all-out idiocracy now rules the day. It's become a fashionable sport to compete on how aggressively one can deploy stupidity to drown out the voices of reason and truth, so that we all inevitably sink a little deeper into the worst instincts of human nature.
Thing is, I /know/ for a fact that most people are not this stupid. But I also understand that these days it's every man, woman and child for themselves, so I can sympathize with the innate need to blend in.
Past dictators and totalitarian regimes from the history books, who wanted people to have zero ability to think for themselves could honestly look at this situation we're in right now, and feel so much pride that they might even blush a little bit; meanwhile Carl Sagan is turning over in his fucking graves.
kuxv 1301 days ago [-]
If people can't respect you for having a different opinion, they're not adults, and they're certainly not "friends," Facebook or otherwise.
What if your opinion is proven to be wrong but you are just not respecting the fact. Does it make sense to respect someone's opinion just because it is an opinion in such a case?
sergeykish 1301 days ago [-]
If it is impossible to prove something maybe topic should have been stopped long ago. Friends bring joy. Adults should at least not bully.
Everyone is not perfect. It is maddening when person with so many flows can't be respectful about another person minor inconveniences.
didibus 1301 days ago [-]
I think you're making an assumption of participants that are reasonable, rational, and willing to engage in discussion and debate in good faith. But a lot of people are unreasonable, irrational, do not want to discuss, and are really simply entrenched in their belief systems and preaching it.
dalbasal 1301 days ago [-]
A lot of this is down to context, not our moral failings.
We moderate ourselves differently at the bar, with our boss, with our wife's aunt. Maybe you don't drag contentious politics to your inlaw's dinner chat or sex anecdotes into work conversations. The OP's point is about applying this moderation across the board, because on FB everything is. This context breeds a culture of banality.
This website is discussing a broader and scarier implication, but the what the OP is describing is already at full (I hope!) maturity.
matt_kantor 1301 days ago [-]
I suppose your adult/child dichotomy is meant to be an insult and not taken literally, but I have to say that it's just as important for children/young people to intentionally seek out different opinions. Maybe even more so than adults, because that's when the bulk of your worldview, beliefs, and personality are formed.
From my experience, young people are better at it than adults, too.
sergeykish 1301 days ago [-]
It is certainly not about age.
Every newborn is like an angel. But they quickly learn and follow parents footsteps. Like infinite purgatory. Some break through, acknowledging that conflicting view can be right. That's an ideal. Sadly a lot of people would die earlier than achieve it.
cmsonger 1300 days ago [-]
All people deserve respect. Not all opinions do.
msla 1301 days ago [-]
You're painting a rosy picture. For example, how many Blacks were ever friends with Klansmen? How many Jews were friends with Nazis? If someone's opinions include the idea that I'm less than human, I can't be friends with them. It's impossible to bridge that gap if the other side sees me as an animal, or a monster, or an enemy agent actively working to destroy the country, if not the world.
I doubt there are any more hate groups now than there ever were; the difference is, these days, people are more willing to call them out for being what they are.
apatters 1301 days ago [-]
Daryl Davis, an African-American man, famously attended KKK rallies, befriended Klansmen, and over the course of his life helped persuade over 200 Klansmen to give up their robes. He did what you claim is impossible and I can't imagine a better role model.
kaitai 1301 days ago [-]
Well, how many Klansmen attended Black churches and universities, befriending Black folks all the while and... uh... ok, I can't really see the great outcome here other than the Klansman not being a Klansman anymore.
I'm proud you could come up with one guy who was saintly. For the rest of us non-saintly people, it's pretty tough to maintain and tend friendships with people who think we're bad, immoral, subhuman, or otherwise less than. Just makes conversation hard to keep up!
watwut 1301 days ago [-]
That is however not how civil rights movement worked in general. And actual blacks were beaten up or worst by klan. It was not something that would be exceptional either. The violence in particular around voting suppression was very real and not just about how people feel. It was not just about personal hate, or was more rational about who is going to rule the place.
The person you responded to asked how many. The answer is that not many. And it is not like having black friends meant you won't be racist. Nor having wife or mom you like prevents mysoginy. Personal relationships have part only up to the point.
That being said, some nazi members had a Jew they personally liked or protected. It dis mot stopped genocide.
kenward 1300 days ago [-]
That's a great accomplishment. However, I think the point is that we (as a society) should recognize and stand up for our oppressed people. Otherwise, we're placing the burden on the oppressed to "take the high road" and, essentially, fight an uphill battle.
dx87 1301 days ago [-]
The bar for people getting upset is much lower than Nazis and Klansmen. Two examples I've seen are a blog title "Postgresql for idiots", and someone said it was offensive because Hitler used to exterminate people classified as idiots, and someone saying that describing software as "sexy" is sexist and contributes to women not wanting to work in tech jobs. I think you're painting a rosy picture where people are only upset at actual hate groups, and not using whatever benign words the "allies" have decided are unacceptable.
scubbo 1301 days ago [-]
> someone saying that describing software as "sexy" is sexist and contributes to women not wanting to work in tech jobs. I think you're painting a rosy picture where people are only upset at actual hate groups, and not using whatever benign words the "allies" have decided are unacceptable.
And I think _you're_ painting a picture wherein "people who are amplifying minority perspectives in order to help society be more inclusive" are in fact nefariously scheming to control a cultural narrative for...reasons?
There is certainly a line beyond which "Excessive Political Correctness" is unreasonable, unhelpful, unproductive, and disconnected from actual people's experiences. But the latter of these examples, at least, strikes me as a perfectly reasonable piece of feedback. I don't personally find the former to be offensive, but at the same time - I have no reason to disagree with the person making that claim. If they're offended by it, that is a _fact_. It's up to me whether I choose to act on that fact. Personally, I don't consider the words "idiot" or "sexy" to be important enough to insist upon using them, when others have told me that the usage hurts them.
Say that someone is intentionally misrepresenting the situation, and is trying to pressure you into stopping using a particular word even though no-one is truly hurt or impacted by it. What's the failure case if you listen to them? You stop using a word. Big whoop. What's the failure case if you _don't_ listen to them? You continue to hurt and offend people. This seems both more likely and more impactful than the other failure case - so, to me, the choice is clear.
Karunamon 1301 days ago [-]
Your last paragraph is addressed in full by the OPs link. Social interactions become more and more meek and stilted because the risk of "offending someone" is always there (and I'd argue, approaches 1 over time). What's driving it is different - social pressure rather than megacorp data mining, but the effect and implications are identical and no less pernicious.
At some point there is a line beyond which if someone is "offended", the problem is with them and them alone. I'd argue policing words like "idiot" (esp. when not directed at someone as an insult) is squarely on the wrong side.
scubbo 1300 days ago [-]
> Social interactions become more and more meek and stilted because the risk of "offending someone" is always there.
Strong disagree. The same ideas and concepts can be discussed, the same conversations can be had - just with tweaked vocabulary.
Now, if you're talking about not expressing a particular attitude because it might offend someone, but you still stand by the position (regardless of its phrasing) - well, that's a different situation. Any sufficiently important position is going to offend someone - just make sure that you're offending the right people.
> At some point there is a line beyond which if someone is "offended", the problem is with them and them alone. I'd argue policing words like "idiot" (esp. when not directed at someone as an insult) is squarely on the wrong side.
That's fair! I disagree, but I'm not going to say that you're wrong - just that my line is drawn elsewhere. I have not found my life to be markedly impacted by consciously avoiding the twenty-or-so words/phrases that various folks have told me that they find offensive. I can still express the same ideas - I just know that I'm doing it in a way that doesn't distract from my message. If your experience is different - if you find that those words are fundamental to your message, and/or that having the freedom to use precisely the words that you want is more important to you than knowing that those words may hurt someone - that's your prerogative.
raxxorrax 1300 days ago [-]
> just with tweaked vocabulary
> knowing that those words may hurt someone
Some people aren't really hurt but like to erase your message by depicting your expression as hurtful. Maybe they just don't like you, it would be another reason. Your naive line of thinking draws in people that might want to take advantage of you. I don't think it could be a universal rule for the internet.
scubbo 1299 days ago [-]
> Some people aren't really hurt but like to erase your message by depicting your expression as hurtful.
I hear this fear a lot, and have never seen any evidence of it whatsoever. Not saying it doesn't exist - just that I haven't experienced it. The only people who've ever mentioned to me that my word-choices were harmful did so with an intention to educate and reduce-harm-to-themselves-or-others, not to undermine or silence me.
raxxorrax 1299 days ago [-]
There can only be as much evidence as for something being hurtful. You cannot read minds, but I don't think it far fetched that sometimes it seems to be more about validation and getting your way instead of being genuinely affected.
Never experienced that yourself? Babies do so very commonly when they cry. My understanding is that adults get out of it to a degree.
I guess the vast majority of people do so with honest intend and some don't. If it is about definitions and wording on hot button issues, I think the latter group to be disproportionally large.
scubbo 1294 days ago [-]
> If it is about definitions and wording on hot button issues, I think the [group who intentionally misrepresent their emotions] to be disproportionally large.
And I disagree; and based on that fundamental disagreement, we're never going to reach agreement on the derived conclusion. Oh well.
kaitai 1301 days ago [-]
It seems to me, though, that this is social cooling just as insidious. "I can't complain about the work 'sexy' on this corporate release because someone will think I'm a SJW." "I can't push back on using 'retard' here because someone will think I'm a special snowflake." It's exactly what the linked post is talking about.
Isn't the aim to have a robust and productive discourse? That means I get to say, "Hey, I don't think this is the right context for the descriptor 'sexy'" and you get to say, "Well, I think it is because (reasons)..." In some ways I sort of agree with you that "At some point there is a line beyond which if someone is "offended", the problem is with them and them alone." If you are "offended" because I say I don't like you using the word "idiot", that's your problem, is it not?
The point is to talk about whether "idiot" is accurate and well-suited to the situation, rather than shifting the conversation immediately to your hurt feelings at having your wording critiqued.
scubbo 1300 days ago [-]
This is precisely it. An immediate shut-down of a conversation is almost always wrong, whether it's "you used a word that I don't like, and so now you don't get to talk" _or_ "you're criticizing my word-choice, so clearly you're unreasonable".
1300 days ago [-]
oxymoran 1301 days ago [-]
It’s easy for the choice to be clear when you are entirely missing the point. What are the consequences of using these newly offensive words? What if you used the word but had no idea it was offensive? And how do we police that in a world where more and more things are offensive?
scubbo 1300 days ago [-]
> What are the consequences of using these newly offensive words?
Well, loosely speaking - if it's a truly "newly offensive word", then the general consequence is that someone will politely take you aside and explain that the reasons why so-and-so a word is not great to use in public, explain the reasons why, and suggest alternatives. If you continue to use it regardless, then you are intentionally signalling that your freedom of vocabulary is more important than showing respect to others - which is a position you are entitled to take, and others are entitled to judge accordingly.
"Public dunks" and vicious whispering (without an attempt to actually educate) don't tend to happen (in my, admittedly anecdotal, experience) for truly "newly offensive words", but rather for those that have already spread far and wide enough that there's truly no excuse for ignorance.
> What if you used the word but had no idea it was offensive?
See above. If you find yourself moving in circles where you fear that you'll be judged and condemned rather than advised, I suggest you re-evaluate whether those circles are truly worth it.
> And how do we police that in a world where more and more things are offensive?
Not sure what you're referring to "policing" (the usage itself, or the consequences _of_ the usage), so this may be inaccurate, but - the former happens naturally through social dynamics, and I don't see why the latter needs policing at all? If people are taking disproportionate damaging action based on speech that is perceived to be offensive, that's an offence like any other. If the consequences are "people thinking that you're a bit of a racist/sexist/whatever", then...why does that need policing.
---
I suspect I come across as naïve for believing that "the Social Justice crowd" are well-intentioned, and that slip-ups will be gently corrected rather than leading to immediate castigation and ostracism. Conversely, to me, the concern that "if I don't keep up with the seventeen new daily offensive terms, I will be shunned forever!" seems like an over-reaction when most "SJWs" treat not-obviously-deliberate-offensive speech as an opportunity to educate, not attack. I suspect, as always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Our outlooks are products of our environments and experiences - and I've been lucky enough to be surrounded by folks who communicate.
reaperducer 1301 days ago [-]
how many Blacks were ever friends with Klansmen? How many Jews were friends with Nazis?
Pointing out extreme cases doesn't make anything in the original statement untrue. It just means those are extraordinary cases. The world is not absolute.
It's impossible to bridge that gap if the other side sees me as an animal, or a monster, or an enemy agent actively working to destroy the country, if not the world
Do don't. You try, and if it doesn't work, you move on. There are seven billion other people in the world to be friends with.
msla 1301 days ago [-]
OK, try this: How many gays were/are friends with Southern Baptists?
It's the same dynamic, even though Southern Baptists are more mainstream.
SpicyLemonZest 1301 days ago [-]
Probably a lot? I can't speak to that question specifically, since there aren't many Baptists in my area, but the Catholic Church leadership has a similarly anti-gay message to the SBC and lots of gay people are friends with Catholics.
watwut 1301 days ago [-]
Here, gay hide their gayness from such catholics. They occasionally do comment on their inability to express their gayness with those catholics. They also prefer company of people they dont have to so careful about keeping secret with.
Note the keeping secret part - it all stands on gay knowing he is not even in position to say I am gay without there being price.
benjohnson 1301 days ago [-]
My religious beliefs are very strict, and I'm very good friends with people that don't follow my religious views.
Some of my friends have done things that my religion considers murder, adultery and sexual abuse.
My life is better for their friendship. Hopefully they appreciate me as well.
oxymoran 1301 days ago [-]
No it’s not. Southern baptists don’t hate gay people, they hate gayness and want to save you from eternal hellfire. Of course it’s asinine and backwards but it’s completely different than nazis and klansmen.
alquemist 1301 days ago [-]
Even in the best of circumstances, being subjected to the highlights of 100 other people will make your life feel miserable in comparison. Amazing vacation locations at the best time of day, gorgeous food from the best angle, amazing health and fashion with the best lightning. That's before we go into likes hunting and what that does to the reward paths in your brain. Social media as a concept is deeply unhealthy. At least the traditional celebrity cult, already rather weird in its American incarnation, had some degree of psychological distance between self and the professionals. With social media, everyone is caught in the celebrity game.
Right now is a great time to delete your accounts. The only better time is yesterday.
foobiekr 1301 days ago [-]
Without going into details, for various reasons, my relationship with my employer essentially made it critical that I delete my account several years ago. I resented it at the time, because while I considered facebook fundamentally unhealthy, I justified it as a way to keep in touch with friends, and, very cynically, use it as a propaganda tool for career advancement.
In hindsight, though. I couldn't be more glad for the push. For at least a few years, I had actively unfollowed a good majority of friends from my feed because watching their gyrations (posing, fighting, echoing, ...) was making me lose respect for a lot of people. I don't need their mental hygiene and low-effort politics rubbed in my face and I'm happier not seeing it.
Looking back, one thing I did conclude was that the death of email was one of the few things that made Facebook valuable. I had email contact for pretty much every person I was "friends" with on FB, but many of those addresses have expired, or they are so flooded with spam that when you message someone, they don't see it at all or not for +a week or so. I'm like that myself - I only look at my personal email once a week, on Friday night.
Also, "social cooling" is an absolutely terrible name for the situation described in the linked site. They should have called it "Socially Mandated Fronting' or something instead of trying to make an awkward and not very meaningful global climate change analogy.
khawkins 1300 days ago [-]
Not only is the "climate change" analogy strained, it perfectly contradicts their argument, showing both its weakness and their total lack of self-awareness.
The positions on climate change range from "existential threat to all life on the planet within 20 years and our way of life" to "mass hysteria founded by fault-ridden scientific evidence whose solutions are an existential threat to the global economy and our way of life". These positions in particular are held by a significant percentage of the population of the Western world, and most people cluster near one of these two extremes. In other words, it is an extremely polarizing issue that, for many, colors how they perceive other people, should they discover their positions.
The creators of this website suggest that social media and data-mining are forcing people to self-censor and not freely express themselves, but then proceed to frame the contentious political issue of climate change as a believer/denialist modality. The authors make it clear that they don't want people to have a nuanced opinion on climate change, they want them to conform to the "unquestionable truth".
But it is this form of rigid thinking that causes people to self-censor, not the intangible specter of "big-data" and "the algorithm". If you were employed by someone who made it clear that they are only interested in hiring people who were devout Christian, you wouldn't openly share your atheist views publicly. Western society as a whole is selecting more and more topics, like climate change, where to be on the record holding a conflicting opinion is disastrous for your relationships with friends, family, and employers. This fact isn't a fault of the technology, though the technology might be the reason society is becoming rapidly intolerant of dissent.
Conflict and social guardedness like this is guaranteed to arise when we have a political landscape that is so divided and thinks everything is on the line.
samatman 1301 days ago [-]
> Also, "social cooling" is an absolutely terrible name for the situation described in the linked site.
Agreed.
I thought it was going to be about "evaporative cooling", how bad behaviour drives thoughtful people out of a group, producing a feedback cycle where bad behaviour is further amplified.
Which is tangentially related to the topic of the link, but different enough to be actively misleading. Unfortunate.
nytesky 1301 days ago [-]
Wait, is email really dead?
Zanneth 1301 days ago [-]
Email is NOT dead. Despite everything that has been invented in an effort to replace it, email is still the only common denominator that everybody in the world uses.
Since getting off social media, I’ve tried using email to connect with friends and it has been a good experience.
tuatoru 1300 days ago [-]
> Despite everything that has been invented in an effort to replace it, email is still the only common denominator that everybody in the world uses.
Second after SMS.
ehnto 1301 days ago [-]
I don't think so, but I would never expect an answer to a cold email trying to rekindle a friendship. I all but ignore my email until I am expecting something in particular, anything that was sent to me between now and the last time I expected something I may never read.
Sodman 1301 days ago [-]
To each their own I guess. I usually reply to any non-recruiter human who has taken the time to send me an email directly (not a list), even if it's just a one-line response. Especially if it's an old friend you've lost touch with.
ratww 1300 days ago [-]
I sincerely believe most people also would, but the problem is that outside of the workplace email has become mostly a marketing and notification channel.
Most non-tech people I know have hundreds, if not thousands of unread messages in their inboxes and will probably miss some unexpected ones.
ehnto 1300 days ago [-]
That's me. I turn off as many notifications as I can yet somehow I still get too many.
foobiekr 1301 days ago [-]
in my personal experience, email is completely dead. even the multiple mailing lists I belong to, some of which I personally run, have moved wholesale into the slack channels we made to augment them.
SpicyLemonZest 1301 days ago [-]
I'm sure it's alive in some circles, but I haven't contacted any friends through email in years.
nytesky 1301 days ago [-]
So you use a mix of text, FB, WhatsApp, etc?
SpicyLemonZest 1300 days ago [-]
Yup, pretty much. Different ones depending on which circles I'm engaging with.
sneak 1301 days ago [-]
You can’t sign up for Facebook or Instagram without an email address.
ratww 1300 days ago [-]
This might not be true for every region, but it has been possible to use a phone number instead of email on both for a few years.
bart_spoon 1301 days ago [-]
I agree with you, but I find it interesting to contrast this with what this site is describing as social cooling. The website's claims are entirely big data and algorithm driven. But what you describe here, and what I think most people initially think of in terms of "social cooling" is the type of self-censorship and fear of the masses that is the result of masses of individual users, rather than algorithmic bias adjusting to our digital fingerprint.
The two aren't completely inseparable. Social media and the modern internet drive the kind of digital puritanism you are describing, and social media and the modern internet are largely based on monetization through advertising, which is driving the social cooling the website is describing. But the two are different phenomena, and I find the one you are describing much more relevant and terrifying than algorithms tracking my clicks to curate my advertisements and Instagram feed.
tboyd47 1301 days ago [-]
That's fair. I read the "Social Cooling" site (as an aside, what would you call sites like this? E-pamphlets seems like a good term to use.) and it immediately made me think of this essay I read years ago:
I think this "social cooling" is related to this generalized feeling of "precarity," the feeling that your place in society can be suspended or deleted in an instant. Whether the agent of this deletion is a state actor (China), a corporation acting on behalf of a state or advertiser (YouTube/Facebook/Twitter), or just ordinary people not acting on any agenda but just carrying forward the anxiety they experience internally. I don't find the latter particularly scarier than the first two since it doesn't carry as much of a threat with it. I certainly didn't experience it as such; but just a minor annoyance and general dissatisfaction with Facebook as a product.
I find it ironic that so many took my top-level comment to mean something was wrong with my social universe; as if, instead of the obvious solution of eschewing Facebook, my solution should be to separate from the people in my life and find better people who I could be on Facebook with. The assumption that it's healthy or even possible to "cancel" people out of your life for not passing some arbitrary standard of behavior is ludicrous to me (and, I would think, to any sane person with family ties, work relationships, etc.). Other people are messy, unpredictable and sometimes awful, but we do need them, and they need us. I think they have internalized this experience of precarity and turned it into a weapon they can wield against others, like an abused person becoming an abuser.
akurzon 1300 days ago [-]
Thank you for sharing that essay, it was very insightful!
I can see a lot of the parallels there. Precarity and "social cooling" are two very similar perspectives on the consequences of surveillance capitalism. It's still difficult to sell the idea that there is a systemic underpinning for feelings and experiences that, for most people, will only be interpreted as exclusively personal.
geebee 1301 days ago [-]
I've quit (as in, delete, not suspend) my Facebook account twice. Deleted it, signed up again years later, deleted it again. I hope it's for good.
The reason really was politics. I've never learned anything new from these posts, they tend to just be the more bombastic restatements of things that everyone already knows about. I think they're a form of social signaling or posturing (people want to establish themselves as the most for or against... whatever their in-group is for or agains).
There's a funny onion article I've always enjoyed, "I don't like the person you become when you're on the Jumbotron".
There are people I am friends with, but I wouldn't want to be around when they're drunk. I feel the same way about some people on social media. The problem is, they tend to be the ones who dominate the platform. And it's new, so we're not really aware of the dangers - but I actually do think it may have a lot in common with alcohol addiction.
SideburnsOfDoom 1301 days ago [-]
> I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone. There's a lot of variety in my crowd.
You might know what to say and how to say it in each context, but this becomes impossible when the contexts are all collapsed into one.
wwweston 1301 days ago [-]
> I realized that I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone.
If you really don't get value out of a platform then it's definitely a good thing to withdraw, but personally... I find there are plenty of interesting things I can talk/post about without flipping any major rage behavior. And I have lefty, liberal, and conservative friends, religious and anti-religious friends, friends who are interested in high/intellectual culture and friends who are not.
I do sometimes offend people. Anything that prompts people to evaluate themselves or their models of the world or their particular value-set runs that risk. Sometimes I have things to say that are likely to do that. Like, for example, the suggestion that maybe a personal capacity for diplomacy has as much to do with the ability to hold wide-ranging conversations as much as the foibles of platforms or people do.
Some topics are especially difficult, but there sure seem to be approaches that minimize the heat-to-light ratio in discussions.
zucked 1301 days ago [-]
I can see how censoring yourself to the point of silence is bad, however, as someone who spent a great deal of time expressing my sometimes offensive POV's with very little consideration for others, the forced filter and permanence of the internet has benefited me. I am more careful and thoughtful about how I express myself now.
tboyd47 1301 days ago [-]
Maybe I'm not always as diplomatic as I could be all the time, but what if I like it that way? I don't have this problem with offending people IRL or even in other online communities. And I'm not interested at all in cutting people out of my life - I like my social circle. So, in my mind, the platform is indeed the problem.
filleduchaos 1301 days ago [-]
Yeah, I am very curious about what interesting things they're posting that offend people all the time. That's quite an achievement.
1301 days ago [-]
pwdisswordfish0 1301 days ago [-]
Note that for many people this would be an example of their plan "working". For some, the most immediate goal is not to change your mind or the minds of others. There's an intermediate goal to make your position appear marginal, which can help in changing the minds of others. By dropping out, you increase the efficacy of this strategy.
whammywon 1301 days ago [-]
Really feels like a Catch 22 situation, then. :-(
nytesky 1301 days ago [-]
Facebook had lists introduced after Google+ circles.
It allowed you to define different views and audiences for your profile from your friend list.
I loved it, though building the lists was awful awful.
Now its even harder to edit the lists, and they hidden three layers deep and you can only view them on the web browser.
They should bring them back.
smadge 1301 days ago [-]
Offending your peers is a separate issue than social cooling as described by this submission. That is an interpersonal issue. Social cooling is a relationship between an individual and powerful institutions like credit agencies, governments, employers, banks, etc.
dariosalvi78 1300 days ago [-]
Facebook is the new television: a pile of rubbish made to keep the plebes entertained. I use it mainly for fun (posting memes and jokes) and to see what people I haven't seen for ages are up to. No serious conversation can go on on FB, forget it.
jawarner 1301 days ago [-]
Are you on Twitter? It's a more common platform for political stuff. Facebook is for friends, and unless you want to discuss politics with all of your friends at once, why not just keep it to personal stuff?
bryan_w 1301 days ago [-]
It's funny, one of my friends posted on his FB, "Who are you voting for and why?" And nobody took the bait. He just got a bunch of popcorn eating gifs
tboyd47 1301 days ago [-]
Yeah, I tried Twitter too, but so few of my friends use it, it just seemed like a clunkier, angrier version of HN with about half the average IQ points.
Joeri 1301 days ago [-]
I think that is the point of twitter: it is what people say without a filter and without thinking it through. I’ve found the proper way to use it is to follow extreme opinions from the entire spectrum to get a sense of what is brewing.
greyswan 1300 days ago [-]
I wouldn't say I recommend trying this, but it takes time to find people you are actually interested in on Twitter.
All the obvious "blue check-mark" people have zero insight at best. There is a whole weird world of small follower count people on there. Small communities. People with unique ideas. People that will actually respond to replies.
Again, I don't think it an addiction you should necessarily cultivate, but there is value to be had.
Shared404 1301 days ago [-]
> with about half the average IQ points
And character limits.
UncleOxidant 1301 days ago [-]
That was one advantage of Google Circles (or Google Groups or whatever they were calling it before they killed it): you could define different circles and send messages only to specific circles if you wanted. It seemed like good way to do it, but of course, as with all things Google it was killed.
samatman 1301 days ago [-]
Yeah that was sad.
The people designing Google Groups were clearly on a mission to fix social media. Their bosses had a different mission: to force all Google services into a single account, unified around some "Facebook killer" that was just going to magically work because, y'know, it's Google.
These differing goals came to a head with the "true names" debacle, which Groups never recovered from. But Google did get its One True Account out of it, which is all they really wanted.
shadowgovt 1300 days ago [-]
The Google+ push definitely provided some activation energy, but unifying accounts---and more importantly, building out a framework for account unification given that Google knows it will continue to build new applications and purchase companies that must be integrated against its existing applications---had been a goal for a while.
It was becoming a game of technological whack-a-mole on Google's back end to manage account information across apps. For example, was a user logged into Gmail also logged into YouTube? Were they logged in as the same person? How do resources get unified across different apps, since that's behavior users assume should work? What applications had authority to act on a user's behalf, in what contexts, And can we provide a better way to support that functionality than requiring a user to give their whole password to a third-party system? And when an account had to be banned for being abusive, what precisely got banned? previous to account unification, it was a shotgun depending on who did the banning and in what context.
True names was, in my opinion, a misstep. The account unification goal was a great idea.
UncleOxidant 1300 days ago [-]
I'm kind of surprised that FB didn't copy that targeted circles feature. It was such a great idea. You could even do some logical operations on the circles. You could have a circle for professional stuff which you kept politics out of and you could have a separate political circle for politics only, but if you wanted to target both you could do an AND.
la6471 1301 days ago [-]
As we provide platforms to everyone to broadcast their opinions on everything , what I foresee is that if we continue to keep generating these gazillions of data points every second all the time then soon AI’s will be needed to do the analysis for us and complement or help human policy makers to make the right decisions. We already see this with things like sentiment analysis. Welcome to the singularity .. I for once can’t wait to have our constantly bickering politicians replaced with AI agents whose sole job is to work for the people and who can be overidden by executive authority only as a last resort.
reader_mode 1301 days ago [-]
Why would you want to share that with random acquatiances anyway ? For me Facebook is about life events of people I know and easy contact/messaging not political discussions or whatever else people find triggering.
pyr0hu 1301 days ago [-]
Hm. Speaking of, is there any way to deactivate a FB profile but stay on messenger? I have no interest in a fb profile but I'm connecting with all my friends and family on Messenger
I posted a "good-bye" message so people would know not to expect any more posts, and kept my account because I wanted to still use Groups, Events, and Marketplace.
ativzzz 1301 days ago [-]
You can install messenger separately from the fb app itself on android. Not using your fb profile is basically deactivating it. Remove your pics, set as many things as you want to private, and just don't download or log into the app
thelastdev 1301 days ago [-]
I've also noticed I can disagree with people I actually know.
Online we're all on teams. If anywhere in your post history you indicate your on a different team then we need to say mean things to each other.
In real life I have very liberal , very conservative and somewhat indifferent friends. I've also dated a variety of folks with different political leanings. I've largely stepped back from social media due to this. Why am I going to get into arguments with people I don't even know ?
If you want to connect with people, I suggest meet up groups. It's very easy to make friends you can actually hang out with. I would say to prioritize doing things you want to do. Like I'm heavily into tech talks , so I attended a ton of those.
I'm fairly optimistic next year the vaccine will be out and things will be somewhat normal.
clairity 1301 days ago [-]
note that this is a marketing site (as noted in my other comment[0]), so discount appropriately.
social pressure predates humans. it's pervasive and our teenage years (especially) are spent coping with/negotiating that. the difference with facebook is that it's potentially unbounded in reach and visibility (in nearly all cases it's not, but every once in a while, something blows completely out of its social circle). as with many modern phenomena, the risk-aversion this induces is out of proportion with the actual risks because of that potential (but not actual) reach and visibility, amplified by memetic social networks that trade in novel (whether true or false) information. in short, the worry over the effects of offense are greater than the potential effects themselves.
I go back and forth between deactivating my again and getting back on FB. I've realised the only reason I'm on FB these days is because of some hobby groups that I'm a part of and those are only on FB. I don't connect with any of my friends on FB and have blocked updates from most acquaintances.
ehnto 1301 days ago [-]
There definitely needs to be an event aggregator that doesn't require a facebook account. I don't use Facebook, but all the hobby groups I ever meet in real life do!
hinkley 1301 days ago [-]
I left when coworkers started asking to connect on FB.
I don't bring my friends to work with me, except once in a very great while about ADA topics. I don't need my work life to be affected by the activities of my social circles.
I wasn't getting much out of it anyway, it was easier not to play (leave and say I didn't have one).
IanDrake 1301 days ago [-]
When 'friends' post on Facebook, they are putting their message on my feed. That's fine, that's the implicit agreement.
Also part of that agreement, when I comment on their post.
That's where most problems arise for me. I typically unfriend people when they're offended when I question their post.
GekkePrutser 1301 days ago [-]
Yeah and by handcrafting those subsets you'd give LOTS of valuable info to their algorithms.
Diederich 1301 days ago [-]
All I use FB for these days is to look in on specific friends, by name. I never view the feed.
Yes, that makes me a 'lurker', which is fine with me, though I do use Facebook messenger to chat with some people as well, which is nice.
vmception 1301 days ago [-]
But at least you can watch autoplaying videos of people getting shot
Killer feature
bookmarkable 1301 days ago [-]
I disconnected Facebook, but have no choice now. You cannot be a SMB marketer without Facebook and its properties in 2020.
boboboboboboo 1300 days ago [-]
I’m really curious about the things you were saying that were making people mad.
ccktlmazeltov 1301 days ago [-]
I have no idea how you can do this, all my friends are on FB and that's my only way to keep in touch with them. I just use messenger so I don't really see the downsides that everybody is talking about here.
sneak 1301 days ago [-]
Recently my close friend who still uses FB tried to send someone a link to a public tweet made by the president’s daughter.
FB messenger censored the private message and refused to send it, claiming it was against “community standards”.
These sorts of logged-forever, censored platforms are absolutely chilling speech, person-to-person, even in DMs, and you wouldn’t even know when it happens to messages sent to you.
That means that you can’t communicate with them, even in DM, in a way that’s not logged for and filtered by a remote party whose interests are not your own. It’s only a matter of time until this is abused by the state.
The point about minority views no longer being able to take over is a scary one. There has been a great amount of social progress in the past several decades, and that sort of progress wouldn't be possible under the effects of strong social cooling.
shadowgovt 1301 days ago [-]
White supremacy is a minority view in the US and seems to have gained huge amounts of traction in spite of these believed effects. White supremacists have lost jobs for being caught out attending rallies; it doesn't seem to stop the rallies.
Nextgrid 1301 days ago [-]
I remember reading a story about a Black man attending KKK rallies to understand their argument and successfully convince some of them to leave the group. I think it was Daryl Davis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis
Nowadays this would be very difficult because the mere fact of being around "bad" people ("bad" depends on the context and might be something relatively innocent) would also brand you as "bad" regardless of any good intentions you might have.
What ends up happening is that "bad" people are stuck in their own echo-chamber surrounded by like-minded people and anyone outside of the group wouldn't dare to engage with them (and provide counter-arguments) because of consequences for their own career & social circle (as their own friends would distance themselves from him for the same reasons).
jjice 1301 days ago [-]
Daryl Davis is a really interesting guy. His episode on the JRE is really good and his stories keep you engaged. Even if you don't like Joe Rogan, you should still be able to enjoy his episode because Davis does the majority of the talking.
It's gained a lot of attention. Is there any real evidence that it's gained traction?
thinkingemote 1301 days ago [-]
The definition of it has widened to include more groups than before. The original groups are about the same size.
whatshisface 1301 days ago [-]
A commenter below helpfully provided links to pages talking about increases in hate group counts. As you suggest, this could mean either more hate groups, a more effective SPLC (that's better at finding them), or a broader definition. The last one might be written in the original reports somewhere. I have no idea how to distinguish the first two.
throwaway894345 1301 days ago [-]
It seems like the definition is "broadened" but no actual definition is provided. All we can look at is who gets labeled as "white supremacist" and draw our own inferences. Notably, a lot of garden-variety egalitarians--people who are against any kind of racial ideology including critical race theory, "anti-racism", and other left-wing racial ideologies--are frequently labeled "white supremacist" (including an awful lot of people of color, jewish people, homosexuals, etc).
We should be very wary of rhetoric that depends on changing definitions of terms without providing precise definitions (see also "racism"). Put differently, everyone's ideas should be criticized on their own terms, but you oughtn't be taken seriously if you don't even define your own terms (and defining them in terms of other poorly defined terms--e.g., "'anti-racism' opposing racism"--doesn't count).
jawarner 1301 days ago [-]
The status quo is not explicitly racist, and a lot of people are comfortable with it. The push by the left is to suggest that just because a system does not have discriminatory laws, that doesn't mean it's not oppressive. Take the prevalence of indentured servitude after the Civil War as an example. I'd recommend "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" for a lucid account of the racial issues in current America.
If you can be convinced that the status quo is oppressive to racial minorities, then it serves to perpetuate white supremacy.
I don't follow your first point, since it seems clear to me that people of color, jewish people, and homosexuals are able to hold white supremacist viewpoints.
goatlover 1301 days ago [-]
> If you can be convinced that the status quo is oppressive to racial minorities, then it serves to perpetuate white supremacy.
This is assuming white privilege is the same as white supremacy, when the term white supremacy has been used for KKK and neo-nazis groups, not mainstream white society since after the civil rights era.
It also assumes that most whites and only whites benefit from white privilege, otherwise it's not so white, and may be more a combination of class, culture and/or historical consequences. Also the fact that white people are still a majority in countries like the US, where a majority in any country likely has similar privileges just by being the majority. One last assumption (in America) is that white culture is a certain way, when in reality the US is primarily an English dominated culture historically, whereas Europe has a lot of cultural variation.
A related issue is that white supremacy is sometimes extended to considering an entire economic system as racist, just because history went a certain way. But there's nothing about an economic system that says any one particular group need benefit more than another.
jawarner 1301 days ago [-]
Fair point. White supremacy is an attitude, whereas white privilege a state of being. I would quibble that white supremacist ideas are quite widespread - see, e.g., references to "thugs" during the BLM protests.
I also agree that white privilege interacts with class, culture and historical consequences, this was well put.
If, hypothetically, an economic system admits little class mobility, and if classes are racially biased, then the effect of that economic system is to maintain a racial caste system. What are your thoughts on this? I'd also point that the justice system works similarly. There are few explicit racial biases, but what is the effect of this system? It actively maintains a racial hierarchy. Does that make it racist?
goatlover 1300 days ago [-]
Sure, I’d say the West is less so over time as laws and attitudes shift towed being more inclusive. But as for capitalism in general, it’s just an economic system that any society can make use of. I’m of the opinion that it does a better job of growing the economy and producing more opportunities than other systems, raising the standard of living in general. It does also produce more wealth inequality. It also has a tendency to produce powerful corporations. So those two tendencies along with a few others need to be kept in check.
shadowgovt 1301 days ago [-]
> there's nothing about an economic system that says anyone one particular group need benefit more than another.
Crony capitalism creates positive feedback loops where the friends of rich people benefit more than strangers to rich people.
I doesn't take a lot of analysis to see how that can re-enforce the dominance of one race in a society if there's any small amount of inequality to start(1) and people of a given race are mostly associating with others of the same race, since the positive feedback loops in capitalism are significant.
(1) And "small amount of inequality" isn't a fair assumption for the US, where one race started out owning people of the other race.
goatlover 1301 days ago [-]
I should have said racial or ethnic group, since there's no reason other than historical happenstance why any racial/ethnic grouping can't benefit. As for friends of the rich, has there been any economic system where that wasn't true? If not rich, then at least the powerful and well connected have always benefitted in every society. The challenging part is how to mitigate that somewhat.
throwaway894345 1301 days ago [-]
> I doesn't take a lot of analysis to see how that can re-enforce the dominance of one race in a society if there's any small amount of inequality to start(1) and people of a given race are mostly associating with others of the same race, since the positive feedback loops in capitalism are significant.
This isn't racial discrimination or racism or white supremacy, and yielding equal outcomes among racial groups isn't innately desirable. If we assume that all races would be equal today were it not for historical discrimination (quite an assumption given that significant disparities predated first contact between different racial groups and thus racism between them), and we want to correct for that historical discrimination then we can talk about it, but that's fundamentally different than "racism is rampant today" or "we've made little progress since abolition" or "we live in a white supremacist ethnostate" or any of the other left-wing claims.
shadowgovt 1301 days ago [-]
> This isn't racial discrimination or racism or white supremacy
Definitionally, "a system that gives white people a structural advantage based on what color they were born" is a system of white supremacy, even if the system could be tilted to be a black supremacy or hispanic supremacy system if the initial conditions were different.
There's what the system could do (in another historical timeline) vs. what it is doing.
throwaway894345 1301 days ago [-]
> Definitionally, "a system that gives white people a structural advantage based on what color they were born" is a system of white supremacy
Yes, but that's not our system. Our system doesn't give structural advantages based on race (at least we can hardly measure the extent of any such advantages). It does give structural advantages based on class (and many other variables) which correlates with race; however, correlation and causation are famously different. We don't have a white supremacist system or any kind of racist system, although some are advocating for a racist system so that we can eliminate disparities.
> There's what the system could do (in another historical timeline) vs. what it is doing.
No one is suggesting an alternate historical timeline; I'm arguing that our system today isn't racist, but that it's very nearly colorblind; however, disparities can result in a perfectly colorblind system because the initial racial distributions were not uniform.
EDIT: Downvoters, do you believe correlation and causation are the same thing in general or only when applied to racial disparities?
luckylion 1301 days ago [-]
> Crony capitalism creates positive feedback loops where the friends of rich people benefit more than strangers to rich people.
That's about class, not race, ethnicity or whatever other grouping you prefer. White billionaires hang out with black billionaires, not with white hobos.
shadowgovt 1301 days ago [-]
> White billionaires hang out with black billionaires, not with white hobos.
I'm pretty sure that, to a 90%-10% ratio, they hang out with white millionaires, not either of the groups you described.
throwaway894345 1301 days ago [-]
You're reinforcing the parent's point that there's not race discrimination but class discrimination. Our hypothetical white billionaire is presumably discriminating utterly on a class basis (hanging out with zero poor people of any race) and not discriminating at all on a racial basis (hanging out with members of his class in proportion to their race / without racial bias).
shadowgovt 1301 days ago [-]
You missed the "black billionaires / white millionaires" distinction.
throwaway894345 1301 days ago [-]
I did, my mistake. In that case I'm skeptical of your premise (that white billionaires hang out with white millionaires but not black billionaires).
throwaway894345 1301 days ago [-]
> The push by the left is to suggest that just because a system does not have discriminatory laws, that doesn't mean it's not oppressive. ... If you can be convinced that the status quo is oppressive to racial minorities, then it serves to perpetuate white supremacy.
There are a couple of dynamics at play here:
* The distinction between de jure and de facto discrimination. No one disputes that a country can be racially oppressive via de facto discrimination as our country has been in the past.
* Whether any kind of discrimination is a necessary condition for a system to be called "oppressive". Of course a system is oppressive if it discriminates at all, even if the discrimination is only de facto. This is a completely uncontroversial opinion--virtually everyone believes this, so I don't think this is the position that the left is espousing (especially given that prominent left-wing voices like Kendi are pretty explicit that this isn't what they're talking about). Moreover, if leftists are taking the uncontroversial interpretation, then it doesn't make sense to call anyone else a "white supremacist" because at worst they are opposed to discrimination to the extent that they are aware that it exists (and no, pointing to disparities does not constitute compelling evidence of discrimination).
So presumably leftists believe we live under "white supremacy" because there are disparities at all, irrespective of whether those disparities are attributable to racial discrimination. More likely, it seems to me that leftists are conflating "there was a lot of historical discrimination that created different wealth, crime, marriage/family, etc distributions that the present system acts upon" with "the system today is racist and we've made little progress since the legalization of slavery".
If the latter were true then we would indeed be under a 'white supremacist' system, but thankfully it's obviously fallacious. There are certainly still some vestiges of racism that we should continue to work to remove, but we've progressed tremendously--our system is mostly colorblind, everyone of consequence everywhere is in favor of making the system more colorblind (save apparently progressives and a handful of thoroughly marginalized actual white supremacists); however, a perfectly egalitarian (i.e., non-racist) system isn't going to yield equal outcomes.
That said, if we want to address historical racism, then let's talk about it as such and not give the impression that we're solving for extant racism (or that extant racism is a primary driver in various disparities). This is unnecessarily dishonest and divisive. Let's talk about reparations instead of advocating for a racialized society and system (in contrast to a colorblind society and system). Let's dispense with viewpoints of racial primacy and essentialism. Let's dispense with DiAngelo's "whites are inherently racist" (not paraphrasing) and Kendi's "anti-racism requires eternal discrimination" (paraphrasing). All of this is nonsense and a distraction if our goal is to address historical discrimination or decrease injustice or even close racial gaps (defunding police or antagonizing whites are not likely to improve yields for minorities).
> I don't follow your first point, since it seems clear to me that people of color, jewish people, and homosexuals are able to hold white supremacist viewpoints.
My point didn't depend on the ability or inability of people with those identities to hold white supremacist viewpoints; it was literally parenthetical. I only brought it up because there's a lot of overlap between the people who make broad claims of white supremacy and the people who advocate that whites "shut up and listen" to people with these identities such that, you know, they might shut up and listen before writing these people off as white supremacists.
jawarner 1301 days ago [-]
The justice system (1) does discriminate against people of color to some extent, and (2) it also discriminates against the poor. The arguments for these points are laid out in detail in the book I referred to, so I'm not going to waste your time repeating them. If you do agree with either of these points, then we would agree that the justice system is oppressive.
You raise the point that leftists don't differentiate between a system that discriminates based on race and a system that discriminates on factors correlated with race. I would argue that the effects of those two systems are quite similar. Would you agree that, regardless of the intention, both of these systems have the effect of racial oppression?
I can't defend DiAngelo or Kendi because I'm ignorant of what they have to say.
throwaway894345 1301 days ago [-]
> The justice system (1) does discriminate against people of color to some extent, and (2) it also discriminates against the poor
No doubt, and everyone agrees that this should be fixed to the extent that there is discrimination. It's unclear exactly how to fix this discrimination except to continue to promote a color-blind society (which has been the winning strategy thus far and while it hasn't completely resolved the problem, it's significantly curbed it in a relatively short amount of time).
> If you do agree with either of these points, then we would agree that the justice system is oppressive.
Yes. But no one is arguing that we shouldn't change the justice system; there's disagreement about the extent to which it's oppressive with the left arguing that it's "literally slavery" and moderates arguing that it's a problem that needs to be addressed but not a significant driver of the disparities that the left cites and the right arguing that it's an insignificant problem relative to black-on-black crime.
> ou raise the point that leftists don't differentiate between a system that discriminates based on race and a system that discriminates on factors correlated with race. I would argue that the effects of those two systems are quite similar. Would you agree that, regardless of the intention, both of these systems have the effect of racial oppression?
Yes, by definition, something that correlates with some underlying cause else has similar effects.
A good analogy would be the disparate outcomes of the criminal justice system with respect to men and women. As with blacks, the criminal justice system discriminates against men to some extent. However, it more significantly discriminates against violent behavior, which correlates with male gender to the effect that men are disproportionately likely to go to prison, their sentences are disproportionately harsh, etc.
A moderate would say that we should address the discrimination problem, but not try to discriminate against women in order to address the remainder of the gap which is attributable to the correlate: violent behavior.
An ideologically consistent leftist would argue that correlates should be treated as causes in the name of erasing disparities; however, (mysteriously) there are no nation-wide progressive efforts to close this gap. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine why progressives are comfortable discriminating against some groups but not others.
EDIT: Even though they have similar results, as with all correlations, the danger of treating correlations as a causation is that you end up treating the symptom and not the problem, and often this just exacerbates the symptom. Eliminating standardized testing in the college admissions process is very likely to result in more discrimination against blacks, but addressing our growing wealth inequality problem will benefit people of all races (and given that blacks are more likely to be poor than whites, it will benefit them disproportionately). Further, this allows us to dispense with the deliberately confusing, divisive "white supremacy", "white fragility", "racism" rhetoric that is in all likelihood only creating more racists.
EDIT2: While we may not disagree, I feel like this conversation is a lot more productive than most race conversations. Thanks for being a good faith participant, sincerely.
brightball 1301 days ago [-]
This is a question that I have wondered about. It feels like it’s just being heavily advertised more so than gaining any traction.
1301 days ago [-]
1301 days ago [-]
spacemanmatt 1301 days ago [-]
Don't get out much, eh?
indecisive_user 1301 days ago [-]
On the contrary, I've been traveling across the US quite a bit over the last several months, from New England, the PNW, and the South. While I've seen plenty of signs and a few rallies supporting BLM and other progressive causes, I've yet to see, in person, a single sign or rally or any supportive material for white supremacy. I hear about it a lot on the internet but from my travels anyway I haven't seen it yet.
Edit: I did see some confederate flags being flown in middle of nowhere Mississippi, but I honestly believe they're not flown as a symbol of hatred (at least not always) as some people had banners next to their flags saying things like "Pride not hate", or the rainbow flag, or other phrases trying to distance themselves from the negative connotations of the flag.
tehjoker 1300 days ago [-]
I had one almost happen in my town (in NJ). We had to counter rally to chase them out. There are fewer physical rallies because the ones they try to do are often successfully suppressed. Recall Boston in 2017. Unite the Right (not suppressed and resulted in a murder). etc.
If you go to certain left wing rallies, they WILL show up. I have seen real live nazis screaming at my friends at an anti-ICE rally.
The problem with these guys is they do have a narrative that is appealing to a certain set of people about nationalism and certain ethnic enemies that care creating the problems. The idea is to prevent their growth and flourishing because if you see them get very common, we are in deep trouble... though given the debate tonight with the president signaling "Stand Back. Stand By." to the Proud Boys, I sense a creeping darkness.
shadowgovt 1301 days ago [-]
Unfortunately for them, one doesn't really get to choose how other people interpret the symbols one uses, as anyone who's ever tried to do something weird in a protocol and then hope a code comment will stop developers of the future from screwing up the code around the weirdness can attest.
indecisive_user 1301 days ago [-]
Sure, you can interpret the flag however you choose. That has nothing to do with the perceived rise in white supremacy though. Confederate flags have long been flown in the south, and if anything, flying the lgbt flag next to it is new.
samatman 1300 days ago [-]
The Confederate battle flag meant "The Confederacy" for five years, and meant "Mississippi" for 126.
I'm not from around there, and it isn't my business to defend nor condemn it. I do think taking it as ipso facto evidence of white supremacy is a Yankee mistake.
shadowgovt 1300 days ago [-]
That depends, perhaps, on whether one thinks Mississippi stood for white supremacy for several decades.
Your first link literally says “FactCheck.org Rating:
Experts Disagree”
shadowgovt 1301 days ago [-]
There's disagreement, but evidence was asked for, not consensus.
BurningFrog 1301 days ago [-]
Calling people you disagree with "white supremacists" has certainly gained ground.
But people self identifying as such are extremely rare.
ntsplnkv2 1301 days ago [-]
Many non-identifying white supremacists have white supremacist adjacent ideals such as xenophobia.
It's very hard to support with a straight face that the acceptance of the confederate flag in the south does not have racial overtones.
BurningFrog 1301 days ago [-]
Acceptance of the confederate flag has definitely decreased a lot the last half century.
So if that's your measure, white supremacy is not doing well at all.
1301 days ago [-]
ntsplnkv2 1300 days ago [-]
Strawman, but no, it isn't my only measure.
Lammy 1300 days ago [-]
Many people experience legitimate problems in life to which the've only been offered solutions like xenophobia.
ntsplnkv2 1300 days ago [-]
Which problem is xenophobia a solution for?
Lammy 1300 days ago [-]
I didn't say it was a good solution or one I would ever offer myself, but I think a lot of the young-white-male-to-alt-right pipeline falls in to this when nobody else seems willing to hear them out except to tell them which ethnic group to blame.
bredren 1301 days ago [-]
In the way it might be casted upon supporters of the President, the distinction between white supremacy and white power is largely semantics.
As far as I understand it, "white supremacy" for those that desire it is the idealized end result of "white power." Much of the rhetoric from President Trump is to rally support for white power. [1]
Given the most common disagreement in the US is between those who advocate for or oppose President Trump, it makes sense that his followers would be deemed "white supremacists"
I believe the broad awakening among many white people in the US currently is the ambient benefits of invisible white power.
It is exactly because of social cooling that you heard so little about white supremacy for so many years. The tacit endorsement of one famous person (see if you can guess who!) helped to somewhat raise the ambient temperature for it.
simias 1301 days ago [-]
I'm not sure there is causation here. Far-right ultra-nationalistic movements are gaining speed in many places in the world. I think there are many factors at play, one being that we get further and further away from WW2 and people forget how bad it can get (especially here in Europe). Only the military and very old people in the west now know what a real war feels like. On top of that there's general social unrest and increased inequalities (the infamous 1%), software eating the world etc...
I do think that white supremacy, fascism and nazism was really a lot more fringe even only 10 years ago, it wasn't just under-reported.
nathanlied 1301 days ago [-]
Yeah, if you pay attention to the world (and I'm not implying grandparent does not - please don't draw that conclusion), you will see a lot of "symptoms" before 2016 happened.
I believe the person grandparent is referring to's rise to power was one more symptom in what's been happening, and not a cause in any way. Of course, these things tend to enter a sort of feedback loop. If you'll allow me a parallel with the rise of antisemitism in Europe in the early half of the last century: It was not Nazism that emboldened and bolstered antisemitic feelings across Europe. Nazism was a symptom of the established and pretty mainstream antisemitic current in western society at the time. Even the US was not immune to hating on the Jew.
This rise in far-right political strength is most likely associated with a backlash against the (mostly? totally?) left-wing push for inclusivity and rapid social progressivism. In a way, among those that wouldn't identify themselves as far-right but do manifest ideals associated with the far-right of today, I can identify a certain undercurrent of "we're going too far, we're making too many changes, we need to slow down". Of course, things like "cancel culture", Spotify's staff wanting complete creative control over a 'controversial' podcast, etc., as well as the social bubbles we isolate ourselves in on our chosen social media platforms do not help at all with empathy or viewing others' viewpoints, which greatly exacerbates the issue.
Chris2048 1301 days ago [-]
What does the rise of nationalism have to do with the war? Do you expect some of these parties to try invading their neighbours?
simias 1301 days ago [-]
My point is more that people seem to no longer consider war even a possible scenario. As such the weakening on the EU is not seen as a huge problem by many, because as we all know Europe is not at all historically prone to spontaneously bursting into flames.
In a way your comment which, if I read it correctly, implies "surely you don't think that the rise of nationalism could lead to wars" kind of proves my point. It totally could, and I'd add fairly easily. The peace we have is not as solid as it may seem, especially with dwindling resources and the rise of new superpowers in the East.
Chris2048 1300 days ago [-]
Your point is only made because you choose to reinterpret my words. Sure, nationalusm could lead to wars, so could many other things. How is nationalism any more certain to do so?
raxxorrax 1300 days ago [-]
Many people were accused of being xenophobic, mostly by self-important brats, of course they loose their reluctance towards it. It is much stronger than 10 years ago.
encom 1301 days ago [-]
>Far-right ultra-nationalistic movements are gaining speed in many places in the world.
That may be true, but far-left movements are certainly gaining speed as well. And I'm talking about real actual 'cease the means of production'-communists. Politics is certainly getting more polarised.
shadowgovt 1301 days ago [-]
I believe the phrase is "seize the means of production."
Ceasing it is merely a consequence of botching the seizing (and the understanding of where that means fit in a post-Industrial-Revolution ecosystem of interlocked systems). ;)
encom 1301 days ago [-]
Thank you. I'm not a native speaker. And english is weird :)
shadowgovt 1301 days ago [-]
No harm done.
And full agreement; this is a language cobbled together by a chunk of land getting conquered and re-conquered so many times that the locals gave up trying to speak the language of the New King and made up their own from their favorite words in the aggressor cultures and the language they spoke amongst themselves.
dudul 1301 days ago [-]
There has been many wars in Europe since WW2, from Cyprus to Yugoslavia and Georgia. You don't need to be 80 years old to have experienced war. Or maybe you need to explain what a "real war" is.
simias 1301 days ago [-]
You're right, I had Western Europe in mind, as well as the USA where more people have experienced war through Call of Duty than in real life.
shadowgovt 1301 days ago [-]
If true, that raises two interesting questions relative to the socialcooling.com content:
1) It begs the question of whether social cooling should be considered a universal ill. After all, white supremacy is bad, and consequences for publicly embracing it are useful.
2) It begs the question of whether the impact of digitally-originated social cooling is particularly relevant if one thought-leader can upend it.
raxxorrax 1300 days ago [-]
Question answered: Being reactionary to reactionaries is idiotic. It wasn't even an issue 10 years ago and some people fucked it up big time.
munificent 1301 days ago [-]
> White supremacy is a minority view
This depends on how your aggregation function is weighted.
If your measure is "how many people in the US are white supremacists?" then, yes, it's definitely a minority view (though still more widely held than it should be!).
But if you scale it by each person's power/wealth, you get a very different view. If your question is "what is the total power held by white supremacists?" you'll end up with a larger number.
And if you really want to get an accurate measure where you treat each person's white supremacy value as a number that ranges smoothly from positive (actual white supremacist) to zero (not interested in putting effort into race relations one way or another) to negative (anti-white supremacist), your function may produce a number that explains a hell of a lot of US history.
lightgreen 1301 days ago [-]
> If your question is "what is the total power held by white supremacists?" you'll end up with a larger number.
I very much doubt so. The richest people in the US are whites (e.g. Besos, Gates, Buffet), but not suprematists. If you have data which proves otherwise, please share.
munificent 1301 days ago [-]
> The richest people in the US are whites (e.g. Besos, Gates, Buffet), but not suprematists.
And what of the Kochs and Waltons?
Either way, you're only thinking about the 0.01%. But consider the many many more people in the 1%. Big fish in small pond types that are part of the Old Boy's Club in your local area. People that wouldn't call themselves white supremacists or even racist, but also wouldn't really want Black folks joining their country club.
If you don't think deep-seated racism is profoundly prevalent across large areas of the US, you are probably just in the position of having enough privilege to be oblivious to it. I grew up in the South, and it is everywhere. You just have to scratch the surface a bit to see it.
lightgreen 1300 days ago [-]
> I grew up in the South, and it is everywhere
Or you are biased to see it everywhere.
Maybe it's true, maybe it's false, but the burden of proof on those who make statements about white supremacists, and I did not see any evidence supporting these statements.
munificent 1300 days ago [-]
> Or you are biased to see it everywhere.
Why would I be?
> but the burden of proof on those who make statements about white supremacists
In a nation where it was legal to own black people for most of its existence and less than 40 years since the last lynching, you think the burden of proof is on me to show that white supremacy is a problem?
I don't know. Maybe you watched a movie about white supremacists when you were a child and it stick to your mind. People tend to have biases and see what they want to see. Some people see white supremacists everywhere. Otheres constantly see examples of inter-racial love and friendship.
> In a nation where it was legal to own black people for most of its existence and less than 40 years since the last lynching, you think the burden of proof is on me to show that white supremacy is a problem?
Maybe it is a problem, maybe it is not a problem.
The original statement was not about that. Quoting:
> But if you scale it by each person's power/wealth, you get a very different view. If your question is "what is the total power held by white supremacists?" you'll end up with a larger number.
This is the statement I'm contensting. Because it is unsubstantiated.
munificent 1300 days ago [-]
> Maybe you watched a movie about white supremacists when you were a child and it stick to your mind.
Well, I:
* Lived near a sundown town.
* Watched one of my closest friends get recruited by an associate of David Duke and slowly get indoctrinated into white supremacy.
* Had a white kid in high school proudly tell me about the time they "beat the shit out of that nigger" just because they didn't like the way he looked at them.
* Watched half a schoolbus full of elementary school kids joke about "porch monkeys".
* Grew up in a city named after one plantation in a neighborhood named after another one.
But, sure, yeah, I must be imagining it all.
> Because it is unsubstantiated.
I provided a link to lots of articles about white supremacy in the US. It is you who have provided no counter-evidence.
lightgreen 1300 days ago [-]
> But, sure, yeah, I must be imagining it all.
No, I'm not saying you are imagining. I suspect (not state) that you are biased, and describe the issue larger than what it is.
> I provided a link to lots of articles about white supremacy in the US. It is you who have provided no counter-evidence.
And I can give you a link to Google, when you can find anything.
You just provided a link with the list of white supremacist organisations. Nobody denies these organisation exists.
But there is no proof that "white supremacists" have significant power. They look like small marginal groups with no money and no real power. Like religious sects.
shadowgovt 1299 days ago [-]
They did succeed in boosting the current President into the office, which is more than no power. How significant the power is of being a voting bloc the President can't seem to say no to is a question reasonable people can debate.
The key thing here is white supremacy is endorsed by the state in the US
shadowgovt 1301 days ago [-]
Well, a subset of the state.
Constellarise 1301 days ago [-]
The US was largely founded on white supremacy and it has been part of the state institutions for two hundred years. It didn't disappear at the end of the civil war, or in the 1960s, or in 2008.
shadowgovt 1301 days ago [-]
No argument there. In the same span of history, the 13th-15th Amendments, Brown v. Board of Education, and Loving v. Virginia also happened.
As with so many gigantic institutions, the US government is not uniformly supportive of or disruptive of white supremacy, over time or within an era.
Constellarise 1301 days ago [-]
The state and the government are not the same thing; the police is and always has been racist and is the enforcers of state power, for example.
shadowgovt 1301 days ago [-]
I'm afraid I don't know the definition of state you're operating under, so I don't think I can evaluate claims such as "white supremacy is endorsed by the state in the US."
jgacook 1301 days ago [-]
Federal immigration control almost exclusively focuses their attention on deporting and denying asylum to Latino refugees and asylum seekers.
Last week it was uncovered that mass hysterectomies had taken place at an ICE facility in Georgia without the informed consent of patients - this falls under the UN's definition of genocide.
This policy shift towards targeting exclusively Latinos came under the Trump administration calling Mexican immigrants "rapists" who bring crime and drugs. Melania Trump is a white immigrant who was granted the exclusive EB-1 green card for "extraordinary abilities".
I find it nearly impossible in these circumstances to come to the conclusion that the state is not explicitly catering to white supremacist ideology...and immigration policy is only the tip of the iceberg.
BlueTemplar 1300 days ago [-]
> Last week it was uncovered that mass hysterectomies had taken place at an ICE facility in Georgia without the informed consent of patients
No it is not. I literally never heard that "white supremacy is endorsed by the state in the US". I heard the highly exaggregated unsubstantiated claims though. (Eg by calling all people wearing MAGA hats white supremacists.)
efnx 1301 days ago [-]
The idea has always been widespread but not accepted in the open. In the US the Trump administration’s embrace of white supremacy has lifted the fear of social recourse for supremacists (racists, sexists, fascists) and I suspect the same goes for other far right parties around the globe.
shadowgovt 1301 days ago [-]
The global context is more complicated, but (as my international friends are fond of reminding me) the US has outsized cultural influence on what other countries consider best practices.
pjkundert 1301 days ago [-]
The belief that everyone who doesn’t believe exactly what you do is a fascist might not be as widespread as your echo-chamber confirms...
efnx 1301 days ago [-]
I never mentioned the contrary.
Chris2048 1301 days ago [-]
> the Trump administration’s embrace of white supremacy
"embrace" by the definition "openly supporting white supremacy"? Or "dared to suggest there where two sides at fault in Charlottesville"?
shadowgovt 1301 days ago [-]
"Embrace" by the definition "continuing to parrot white nationalist points of view uncritically, and having a white nationalist as senior adviser for policy."
By that logic Hillary Clinton is a sexist for remaining married to a sexual harraser, and a vast proportion of the left are who-knows-what-label for uncritically parroting the Covington teen narrative.
AI_WAIFU 1301 days ago [-]
> White supremacy is a minority view in the US and seems to have gained huge amounts of traction
As far as I can tell the number of people who are part of the KKK hasn't gone up any appreciable amount.
In fact, calling perfectly normal and valuable things "white supremacy" and then deplaforming "white supremacists" is an excellent example of this social cooling.
giancarlostoro 1301 days ago [-]
This seems broken, especially with 'MAGA' thrown in there, are you saying only whites voted for that candidate? Because I got news for you... MAGA wasn't even original to Trump.
According to this list since I believe people can bootstrap themselves I must be a white supremacist. Except I highly doubt the KKK are fond of mestizo people, I even doubt they even like "white" Hispanics at all. I know people who have been homeless and now make more money than I do, living on cars or purely on the streets, minorities included.
As a minority I am astounded at all the bikeshedding people are doing to fight racism, worse yet finding racism where there is none like git branches.
Edit: Also, just because someone supported Trump and is white and voted for him doesn't automatically make that person a racist. This kind of prejudice rising up today is very worrisome and way too topical in a discussion about social cooling.
AI_WAIFU 1301 days ago [-]
That's the point, it is broken. It's how "white supremacy" has gained so much traction in the US. Of course it will have gained traction if you expand the definiton to include almost 50% of the population.
giancarlostoro 1301 days ago [-]
Ah I wasn't sure your argument, thanks for clarifying. As a minority in America I fear it's all gone a little bit crazy.
shadowgovt 1301 days ago [-]
> calling perfectly normal and valuable things "white supremacy"
The pedigree of that image is that it started as a list created in a facilitated focus group on race and race relations. It assigns no positive or negative connotations to those items; they're things people said off the top of their head when they were asked "What does 'white culture' mean to you?"
Later, it was shared with the inaccurate description of being a list of negative aspects of white culture.
It's kind of funny really; the pedigree of that list being considered a list of negative things is white people making assumptions about the intent of a list assembled of things white people self-attributed to white culture.
Regarding the previous "iceberg" image---that's a lot of words to go looking through to try and pick out the items you're describing as 'perfectly normal and valuable things.' Can you highlight which ones you were referring to? Assuming good intent, I assume you didn't mean "Racial profiling" or "Fearing people of color."
1301 days ago [-]
AI_WAIFU 1300 days ago [-]
> It assigns no positive or negative connotations to those items; they're things people said off the top of their head when they were asked "What does 'white culture' mean to you?"
The result is the same, the subconscious associations between "white" and "whiteness" and those traits has been strengthened. The meaning of words comes from what people think about when they hear it. By increasing the amount of things people associate with the word "white" the definition is expanded.
No negative connotations have been assigned by the document. But "white" and especially "whiteness" has very negative connotations. I've never come across any text or material suggesting "whiteness" is a good thing. Its always stuff like this: https://news.csusm.edu/ask-the-expert-the-problem-with-white... (That alone is already pretty fucked up when you think about it for more than a second) Furthermore, the meaning of words comes from what people think about when they hear it. But "white supremacy" has extremely negative connotations, and so all those normal things get tarred by association with imagery of the Nazis and the KKK.
>Regarding the previous "iceberg" image---that's a lot of words to go looking through to try and pick out the items you're describing as 'perfectly normal and valuable things.' Can you highlight which ones you were referring to? Assuming good intent, I assume you didn't mean "Racial profiling" or "Fearing people of color."
Of course not, those are the actually bad things that are used to tar the "perfectly normal and valuable things". If the iceberg picture only contained good things, it would associate positive valence with the term "white supremacy" rather than associating negative valence with the normal things as the picture was designed to do.
To take specific examples, "Calling the police on black people". This is a perfectly normal thing to do if your being robbed or harassed and the perpetrator happens to be black. Doing so does not mean your promoting white supremacy. Now if you're doing it because they're black, thats a bad thing, but the image makes no destination, so the normal thing is tarred by the bad thing. There are also some supper egregious ones, things like "White parents" and "there's only one human race/We're all one big human family". These are actually anti-racist perspectives that are now being associated with one of the most racist and destructive ideologies in history. Another one is "All Lives Matter", this is an explicitly egalitarian message that is now viewed as racist by association.
I can keep going through the list but then my arguments would turn into a gish-gallop.
This kind of rhetorical tarring has been going on for so long that certain kinds of explicit institutional racism is now viewed as not racist (affirmative action), and explicitly anti-racist and unifying statements "All lives matter/there's only one human race" are viewed as racist.
shadowgovt 1300 days ago [-]
All lives matter, in particular, is perceived as racist because it's only trotted out as a response to black lives matter (a phrase it is not at all incompatible with, so people tossing "all lives matter" out as a response to "black lives matter" are immediately casting it in a racist connotation).
As for the reason it isn't really a retort to "black lives matter", that's been explained better by Chris Straub than I ever could.
Not unlike the battle standard of northern Virginia, symbols pick up racist connotation when racists keep using them.
AI_WAIFU 1300 days ago [-]
No, it's always been a valid response to BLM. BLM puts the focus on race and race alone. Effectively excluding every other major source of causation and axis of variation. You know, things like extreme poverty, heart disease, malaria, etc.(All of which kill 100,000s every year and very disproportionately affect black people, but you never hear a peep about it from BLM) By making it a race issue (especially without solid evidence), you deliberately antagonize people who are either disproportionally affected by the other factors of variation who belong to the "privileged" race or who care about other issues that can be convincingly argued to be far more serious.
To extend the house analogy, there aren't 2 houses, there are 7 billion and you're saying we should focus our attention on the black ones rather than the ones that are on fire because they are more likely to be black.
Unfortunately, you can't quite capture that logic with a catchy jingle like BLM, so your left saying ALM and crossing your fingers hoping racial tensions don't escalate.
shadowgovt 1300 days ago [-]
It's more that they're saying people just believe black houses are likelier to catch fire innately and that's acceptable, when they're not and it's not.
AI_WAIFU 1300 days ago [-]
You could replace, "black" in that sentence with a whole bunch of other things. There's nothing special about race, and their shouldn't be. Again, multiple factors of variation. If someone is focused on "poverty" it's not that they find black people being disproportionately affected acceptable, it's that they have exercised their judgement and don't see it as a priority. And (IMO) rightly so.
Now you can make the argument that 99% of people don't give a shit, and only care about themselves. But that leads you more down the path of effective alturism than BLM, again because the former doesn't ignore the other factors of variation.
For those who genuinely care about the state of the world, and have identified issues that in their judgement that are more pressing, or those who do care but are currently busy keeping their own heads above the water for whatever reason, the accusations that they believe the current situation is acceptable are at best tone deaf and at worst downright insulting.
shadowgovt 1300 days ago [-]
Other options have been tried and failed. People can stand to be a little insulted that it's 2020 and things are as bad as they are.
Political reform? How many people protesting actually voted in their municipal and state elections?
Even if that were the case, it would be a pretty solid argument to focus on more tractable problems rather than whatever the past few months have been.
Saying "Other options have been tried and failed." Is BS post-hoc justification. This round of BLM started because of 1 egregious viral video in a country of 300,000,000 when a whole bunch of young people had nothing better to do. When your dealing with complex systems like police-community interactions, you will never be able to completely eliminate egregious incidents, even if you can reduce the incident rate by 90%. Any kind of legitimate attempt to improve the situation will necessarily involve something resembling multiple A/B tests carried out over multiple areas and multiple years to understand the relationship between policy, environment, culture, and policing outcomes. This will necessarily take time, it will be extremely expensive, and the gains will be marginal. That's just how things work when your dealing with massive complex systems and rare events.
shadowgovt 1300 days ago [-]
It wasn't just one video, it wasn't one just one incident, It's not a small amount of people who are upset, and it's not okay.
Quite a few of the protesters have documented why they're out in the street. If anyone is having difficulty understanding the situation, I recommend reading what they've said.
For me personally, it was very educational to bear witness to people protesting police brutality being met with more police brutality---not justified force escalation, but attempts to bait protesters into breaking laws to justify arrests, antagonize nonviolent protests hoping for violent ones, and straight up lying about the situation on the ground. The last part I find insulting, because it's not like the video cameras aren't there. They know the video cameras are there. They believe the system will protect them from violating their own protocols and the law, and so far, it does.
Which is why people continue to protest.
AI_WAIFU 1300 days ago [-]
I mean you can point at all the examples of police overreach, injustice and brutality throughout history, but it was the one video that kicked it off. But you've kind of ceeded the original point, none of what you mentioned, and most of the examples cited in that link, are not specifically racial issues, even though they disproportionately affect black people. So "All lives matter" is a reasonable position to hold when presented with the issue of police brutality, that way you end up focusing on the brutality itself rather than the race of the victim. So tarring it as racist by including it in the definition of "white supremacy" in the way the picture does is rhetorically dishonest.
Which finally ties us back to my orignial claim, which is that "white supremacy" is on the rise, and thats because people who care more about themselves or non-racial issues than racial issues have been reclassified as "white supremacists".
mschuster91 1301 days ago [-]
> White supremacists have lost jobs for being caught out attending rallies; it doesn't seem to stop the rallies.
Yesterday, there was a documentary movie on German's private TV station Pro7 about Nazis. An actual Nazi confirmed live on camera: yes, deplatforming Nazis (and that includes them losing jobs, family, friends) works and is a huge source of pain for the movement because many people don't hold up to that pressure and leave.
Just imagine how big the rallies would be if there was no social pressure on not being Nazi would no longer be there... at the moment many attendees either don't give a f..k about how they are perceived, or they relish on that being accepted in their social circles.
shadowgovt 1301 days ago [-]
This strongly suggests social cooling is a positive effect.
mantas 1300 days ago [-]
Every authoritarian and totalitarian regime that ever existed agrees with you.
shadowgovt 1300 days ago [-]
Correlation does not imply causation. Every authoritarian and totalitarian regime also agrees citizens should pay their taxes. As do most liberal democracies.
mantas 1299 days ago [-]
Social cooling is one of the main causes why such regimes stay afloat without popular support.
mschuster91 1301 days ago [-]
As long as it is used against Nazis, definitely. I mean, we can all agree that Nazis are bad.
The problem is when governments go against legitimate opposition and abuse social pressure.
xenihn 1301 days ago [-]
First they deplatformed the Nazis, and I did not speak out -- for I was not a Nazi.
>The problem is when governments go against legitimate opposition and abuse social pressure.
Legitimate according to who? Isn't any opposition to a government illegitimate opposition? Or exclusively legitimate, depending on how you feel about the concept of government itself.
I've been self-censoring for more than a decade now. I really like how the information is presented in this SocialCooling site.
As you have pointed out, the effects are good if they lower the voices you disagree with, and raise the ones that represent your views. My advice to everyone reading HN is to pick the winning side, and conform to it. Fortunately for us, picking the winners isn't hard.
shadowgovt 1301 days ago [-]
Funny; I thought it was "First they deplatformed Nazis, and I did not speak out because Nazis can get fucked." ;)
> I've been self-censoring for more than a decade now
Good! I recommend it. It's a basic skill that is useful when living in a society with other human beings whose situation (social power, emotional state, world view) we must account for. We have entire empathic neurological systems to support that behavior.
> My advice to everyone reading HN is to pick the winning side, and conform to it.
My advice is never pick the Nazis.
samatman 1300 days ago [-]
> Funny; I thought it was "First they deplatformed Nazis, and I did not speak out because Nazis can get fucked."
The original quote which you're abusing begins "first they came for the Communists".
These were Communists in the era of Josef Stalin, to be clear. Mass-murdering totalitarians, exactly the sort of people you wouldn't want taking over your country.
It appears you missed both the lesson of Herr Niemoller, and a key part of the history of the rise of Nazism in Weimar Germany.
Pity.
shadowgovt 1300 days ago [-]
Someone missed a lesson from history. Might be me; might not.
In modern Germany, it's still illegal to explicitly disseminate means of propaganda of unconstitutional organizations. Is this wrong? I think I'll defer to the modern Germans on that question.
There's also difference of degree. Deplatforming Nazis (which is how parent post bastardized the quote initially) is not the same as incarcerating them. I was playing off the bastardization.
If you want to continue to defend platforming Nazis, be my guest, but I don't have to discuss it with you.
samatman 1300 days ago [-]
Many a barn door is closed after the horses escape.
I, too, have negative interest in continuing to speak to an unpleasant person who makes unsupported assumptions about my views on a topic I never addressed.
1300 days ago [-]
BlueTemplar 1300 days ago [-]
German communists most likely weren't aware of what was really happening in the USSR at the time.
(Whether an hypothetical communist revolution in Germany would have resulted in Stalinist-like horrors is an interesting question.)
French communists have had a disproportionate part in French resistance, and a disproportionate part in French after-war policies for a long time.
BlueTemplar 1300 days ago [-]
IMHO Nazis aren't the core problem - it's the hate speech that tends to come with them that is.
wry_discontent 1301 days ago [-]
It's because this page is using "minority views" as a code word for "ruling class threatening views." Which has always been the case. A minority view that doesn't threaten business interests will face little suppression (see: white supremacy)
shadowgovt 1301 days ago [-]
I don't think we can assume white supremacy doesn't threaten business interests. Particularly not in the US, where approximately 2 out of 5 Americans aren't white. How many companies are willing to put on the table as their business model "We'll be actively hostile to 40% of our potential customers?"
watwut 1301 days ago [-]
People in America dont live in random places. You have parts where everyone is white and parts where everyone is black. Then you have parts where one group is severely dominant. For many if not most businesses, their customer base does not have same racial ration as whole America.
jrumbut 1301 days ago [-]
One business' potential customer is another's potential employee and a third's potential competitor.
How many websites have multiple translations available and put effort into accessibility proportional to the amount of the population that could be helped by it? It's not anywhere near 100%.
wry_discontent 1301 days ago [-]
Why is it that Facebook ignores white supremacist content and targets Amazon labor union content?
For example, SaaS companies aren't going to create white supremacist technology, but they will sell to white supremacists.
tootie 1301 days ago [-]
That one really rings false. Minority opinion holders are gathering online in record numbers. I'm thinking in particular of the nut jobs like anti-vaxxers and flat earthers, but also fan bases for obscure culture (reddit saved The Expanse) or the support for non mainstream political figures like Ron Paul or Andrew Yang. If anything, their ability to brigade online forums makes them seem far more prevalent than they really are.
filleduchaos 1301 days ago [-]
The people who effected that progress often did so under constant, actual physical attack and various forms of blacklisting.
captainbland 1301 days ago [-]
Dare I say it, this same thing likely happens on this very website. People seek jobs directly off hacker news, so those people are likely to avoid saying anything that might alienate a potential employer.
WalterSear 1301 days ago [-]
It's easier to just use an alt.
elwell 1301 days ago [-]
How sure can you be that your alt isn't linked in some way (IP, browser fingerprint, text analysis, login/out timing patterns, etc.) to your main? Or, if not today, will internet archives be leveraged in 25+ years when big data can be more powerfully analyzed?
WalterSear 1300 days ago [-]
If Y-combinator, given that they own that data, or anyone else FTM, is that motivated to scrutinize my past, it's a bad culture fit already.
But you bring up a good point: my online comments are likely to be matched and monetized against me as much as they possibly can - by superintelligences, to boot - iow, in ways we are incapable of imagining, given that we are not AI. And it's no doubt already happening a lot.
samename 1301 days ago [-]
How is it easier to use an alt versus simply not saying it at all?
WalterSear 1301 days ago [-]
Just as easy.
I have one username for posting, one for applying for Y-combinator jobs.
_def 1300 days ago [-]
It is easy, but obviously more effort than remaining quiet.
baby 1300 days ago [-]
My first interview I got through HN, they asked me what my HN username was. They ended up saying “you have more karma than me” and that was it.
Dirlewanger 1300 days ago [-]
Wouldn't this only apply to employers that want your HN name ? And I've never seen a post that asks for that. Related however, is Blind. I think they do a good job setting up a pseudonymous community of like-minded individuals.
tortila 1299 days ago [-]
There’s a monthly ‘who wants to get hired’ thread, where potential employers answer to chosen posts, knowing the candidate’s HN account.
Hey dang, I've seen you make these "multiple pages" comments a few times now. Maybe it is just time for a UI that fixes that?
grzm 1300 days ago [-]
> "We're working on performance improvements that will hopefully allow us to go back to HN's original style of one big page per thread (not infinite scroll, don't worry). In the meantime please look for those 'More' links when the total number of comments is over 250 or so."
Knowing how HN handles UX, maybe's dang's (automated?) comments at the top _is_ the UI.
auggierose 1300 days ago [-]
good point :-)
alex_young 1301 days ago [-]
This is why Real Names is such an evil idea.
Yes, I’m using a strong word. Evil actually means something in this context though.
Real Names is a way to lock your social behavior to your persona, and then to sell that data in real time to the highest bidder.
Forums such as this one allow me to use my real name if I want to, but because they don’t require this, they have no way of algorithmically associating Alex Young the person with alex_young the account.
notacoward 1300 days ago [-]
Ironically, one of the things that's worst about being online is often the lack of social control. By now, just about everyone has hadone of their previously normal-seeming friends or relatives go on an insane political rant on Facebook, or had a Twitter troll show up in their replies, or read just about any comment on YouTube. People act in these horrible ways because they can, because real or effective anonymity lets them do so without disapproving looks from people whose approval matters to them.
The solution to privacy issues is not to make everyone anonymous. (Nobody ever actually puts it that way, but a lot of people suggest solutions that basically amount to the same thing.) Under-identification is as much of a problem as over-identification. Reputation and social pressure also prevent a lot of bad behavior. For that to happen, we still need people's identity to have some continuity ... and that's where pseudonyms come in. Go look at the examples in the OP. Practically all of them involve some kind of "leakage" from one part of a person's life to another. This is the same problem that has existed since before computers, with people having safe persistent identities within one community until they're "outed" to the broader one. If people had more control over the different parts of their identity, to connect them or not as they see fit, these things couldn't happen. Better technical and social support for pseudonyms might not be a panacea, but it would certainly go a long way.
everdrive 1300 days ago [-]
> By now, just about everyone has hadone of their previously normal-seeming friends or relatives go on an insane political rant on Facebook, or had a Twitter troll show up in their replies, or read just about any comment on YouTube. People act in these horrible ways because they can, because real or effective anonymity lets them do so
Your friends aren't anonymous on facebook. Yes, anonymous facebook accounts are possible, but the damage is done by verified users. Anonymity is NOT the problem people think it is.
elamje 1300 days ago [-]
I agree with the OP and you. They are not mutually exclusive views. Perhaps the solution is privacy that protects you for data aggregators and “joiners” that pull together a ton of stuff to infer things about you, but not necessarily completely shield your identity online.
Hard problem for sure, and curious to hear how others think about the issue of minimizing trolling while maximizing privacy.
kelvin0 1301 days ago [-]
This is an episode of Black Mirror, coming to our reality sooner than thought.
It's already happening in China with the Social Credit System.
azanar 1301 days ago [-]
I'm going to ask a question that I fear will have me labelled as naively privileged almost beyond any hope of my eventually redemption.
Are we as individuals hopelessly trapped in a social fabric that leads to the kinds of bad outcomes based on abuse of data that the author describes?
Assuming we can escape, is our only way out of this fabric to shred it from within? What of the benefits that we shred in our zeal? Is it mistaken to even claim their are benefits to be weighed against the drawbacks, because the drawbacks are so bad?
Perhaps it is a naive question. Is there a way we can reduce the bad outcomes by making those that cause them irrelevant, rather than counter-engaging them directly?
DenisM 1301 days ago [-]
> Are we as individuals hopelessly trapped in a social fabric
Yes and no. The trap you speak of is merely a frame designed to bind you. The simplest (yet effective) one is a false dichotomy: you're given a choice between similarly bad options A1 and A9, brushing under the rug options B and C. In a more advanced variety the compromise "A4" is setup first and the false dichotomy A1:A9 is built around it as two herding gate poles. A step up from there is a vicious attack on options B and C and any person who dares to bring them up.
Disposing of frames in your own mind is relatively easy assuming you can talk with a few smart people without fear of reprisal. Just keep an open mind about it - remember your goal is to break out of the frame, not to inflict your version of truth upon the unsuspecting universe (the urge itself, if you have it, needs to be confronted).
As to direct counteraction - that's just one of the frames you're stuck in. You assume that you either counter them, or you acquiesce to them, or hide from them. Did you notice that all three choices make things worse? That's a sure sign you're in a frame. The "cause them irrelevant" part is kind of right, except that it's the consequence, not the method.
Break the frame, you will see a lot more options.
notassigned 1301 days ago [-]
wat?
gjs278 1301 days ago [-]
put down the thesaurus and use real words
ry454 1300 days ago [-]
Comments on HN is an example of how this cooling effect works. It takes only a few upset readers to take your comment down, so if what you say deviates even slightly, by 0.01 sigma, from the boring mainstream viewpoint, you'll upset at least a few readers.
Same idea, but from another angle. It's well known that you can say a lot in a small group, but very little in a large group, because it's a lot more likely that someone in a 1,000 person conference will be offended by your words. With internet and social networks, you have to assume that you're always talking to the entire western world, and there's a nearly 100% chance that some angry activists will be offended, so you always have to calibrate your talking points to the most boring mainstream viewpoint.
motohagiography 1301 days ago [-]
If the Varian Rule is true, that what the rich have today, the middle classes will have in 5-10 years and the poor in 10-15, it's worth noting that what the rich have today is private security.
The real risk is that the ultimate popular reaction to these systems will not be civil.
tdaltonc 1301 days ago [-]
The Secret Service has been protecting US Presidents for 100+ years. And bodyguards go back way further. Varian (via McAfee) was talking about technology. Let me propose a clarifying addendum:
"A simple way to forecast the future is to look at what rich people have today [but didn't have 10 years ago]; middle-income people will have something equivalent in 10 years, and poor people will have it in an additional decade."
motohagiography 1301 days ago [-]
I'd say that american software developers affording private security as a result of a company they founded is a pretty recent phenomenon. I'm sure there is an n<10 of early precedents, but the underlying point is that the response to these oppressive systems is likely to be uncivil.
Indeed the Varian rule was coined by the FT journalist McAfee as you mentioned (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varian_Rule), though as a counter example, presidents don't really count. Politicians can be wealthy but, like criminals, they're never rich.
_def 1300 days ago [-]
> Politicians can be wealthy but, like criminals, they're never rich.
[citation needed]
motohagiography 1299 days ago [-]
My own, or at least, my grandfather's.
chippy 1300 days ago [-]
Probably also worth noting how the rich today do not use social media the way the middle classes use it.
tony_cannistra 1301 days ago [-]
I like the climate change comparison.
One of the opportunities for comparison that this site only barely touches on is the fact that, like climate change, the companies responsible for this global phenomenon both know it's happening and are likely actively working to avoid talking about it. This happened with Exxon, BP, ConocoPhilips, you name it; it's now happening with Facebook, Google, etc.
This undoubtedly happens because any change for the good of folks would undermine these powerful corporations' bottom lines.
What can we learn from our failure to hold fossil fuel corporations accountable that can be translated here?
nixpulvis 1300 days ago [-]
Solutions? Just don't use the services? Check, I deleted facebook. Just talk to local people? I do, but it's hard. Especially now during COVID. Rely on encryption? Check, but still that does nothing to drive adoption directly. Still most apps require a phone number or email.
I'm very concerned about this issue, but also somewhat lost for clever ideas. Back in the day, small communities were healthier, but I don't know enough about them to know how to really help.
Sure, now convince my 72 year old mother and the rest of my family to do the same. We understand the underlying problems of social media like Facebook and Twitter, but we are in a bubble. Most people outside tech don't have the same insight or understand the underlying issues to make the jump or even seek alternatives. Those who understand it somehow would simply stop using social media, but the large majority are either oblivious, don't understand the ramifications of lack of privacy in the Internet or don't care.
This is a really hard problem to solve, and would require those in power to help enlighten the people of this problem. At the same time, those in power are the one that benefit the most of the current trend of less and less privacy, so we can't really rely on them for educating people on this.
ppod 1301 days ago [-]
I think parts of this message are very important, but the presentation makes it seem less interesting than it is. At first it looks to be just another "Social Dilemma" style "tech evil Zuckerberg bad" clone. Then it makes a connection to global warming, which, though it might be accurate, I think is an unfortunate link because that issue is more controversial than it should be.
The difficulty is that unless you make these kind of platforms illegal, people who engage with them in ways that enhance their reputations will have an advantage over those who choose not engage with them. And most people will always choose to use them, not only because they're convenient, but because people love an opportunity to enhance their own image in public.
For these reasons, I think it won't be possible to convince most people to exercise their right to privacy. What we should do instead is try to make society as tolerant as possible, so that there is no penalty for how you present yourself online. Urging people to exercise more privacy in fact has the opposite effect, because we hear fewer diverse viewpoints, and those who exercise their privacy come under greater suspicion.
PaulHoule 1301 days ago [-]
Baudrillard uses the word "cooling" for this phenomenon circa 1980 and I'd expect it to be known throughout the fandom of French theory. See also "Cooling out the Mark" by Goffman and numerous thinkers that he inspired:
I'm sorry, but real people judging me is orders of magnitude worse than the Big Data thing they describe. They don't even provide any citations for the impact of Big Data they claim.
defterGoose 1301 days ago [-]
But they do. The social credit system in China is the perfect example. Makes it harder to operate in "real" space if you, for instance, have a "bad attitude". This is different than people just "not liking you", for the same reason. In that case, you still have total agency to start being a nicer person.
If you think that this sort of system could never be applied to you then you're sorely mistaken.
csdffsdfsdfsdfs 1300 days ago [-]
I don't say that there is no danger, just that at the current time (in the West), actual humans monitoring you is a much bigger issue.
jawarner 1301 days ago [-]
Agreed. This article didn't distinguish between "problems caused by Big Data" and "problems caused by your aunt on Facebook who would disown you if you post the wrong thing."
komali2 1301 days ago [-]
> Have you ever hesitated to click on a link because you thought your visit might be logged, and it could look bad?
Hah, I remember when people were passing around an href that was a google query stuffed with things like "how do I make a bomb" and "best ways to steal uranium." The idea was to negate the NSA or whoever's ability to get useful information from spying on obvious searches like that because suddenly everyone is on that list.
Another fun game, if you hear a friend say "hey siri," "ok google," or "alexa," immediately shout "how do I hide a body?!"
Just the other day I asked people on here if they are afraid of commenting on Assange on HN incase the FBI break down their doors.
to my astonishment quite a few were convinced this is exactly what happens. TF?
luckylion 1301 days ago [-]
Why wouldn't they be? Assange is an enemy of the state. Not "of the administration", but "the state", in total. The FBI is known to keep lists on and engage in attacks against what they perceive as enemies of the state. It's logical to assume that they might still do so.
They probably won't break down your door for commenting on Assange though. They'll have some other pretense, an anonymous tip about drugs maybe.
whatshisface 1301 days ago [-]
There are probably too many people commenting about Assange for them to do that, although ironically if enough people assume without evidence that they'll get swatted for talking about assange, then that will no longer be true.
luckylion 1301 days ago [-]
That's true, but that's true for any and all issues of that kind, isn't it? Had everyone under Stalin stood up to him, nobody would've been murdered in the Gulags.
whatshisface 1301 days ago [-]
Well, it was pretty obvious that Stalin was murdering people, so in that case it was fear of the known, instead of fear of the speculated. That fear due to speculation would be what allows the speculated fear to come to pass, is the particular irony I am highlighting.
1301 days ago [-]
pmarreck 1301 days ago [-]
Assange being an enemy of the state is sufficient proof for me that Trump is not as dangerous as the left says he is.
I mean, Assange basically had 2 nukes, one with Clinton's name on it and one with Trump's name on it and released only the Clinton one because he had personal beef with her. This likely resulted in Trump's election.
Until that election, I was a Wikileaks fan. Now, I think Assange can go f* himself in prison for the rest of his life. What he did is almost unforgivable.
That's one way to get your username off the FBI's list!
fwklein 1301 days ago [-]
>Assange basically had 2 nukes, one with Clinton's name on it and one with Trump's name on it and released only the Clinton one because he had personal beef with her.
What are you talking about? There's no source that Assange or WL had any information on Trump, which they held back.
Your cited article only writes about the twitter DMs, in which the WL account asked Trump Jr. to leak his fathers tax returns. It doesn't mean they ever posessed them.
pmarreck 1301 days ago [-]
Wikileaks got its dirt from Russian hackers. They did not do the hacks themselves.
The same Russian hackers who actually hacked both the DNC and RNC, but notably (and impactfully) did not release the RNC data.
So people like Assange are useful only when they serve your favorite political party ? Not very objective
josefresco 1301 days ago [-]
I believe he's suggesting that Assange should have released both sets of data, not just one because of his personal vendetta.
fwklein 1300 days ago [-]
Two sets? There is no source that Wikileaks or Assange ever been in posession of any RNC leaks. This is disinformation.
encom 1301 days ago [-]
If there was any real dirt on Trump, it would have been released by now. All we've gotten is pathetic stuff, like the 'grab them by the pussy' nothing-burger, which is only marginally more offensive than Trump eating his steak well done.
Trump is about to get four more years. If you have dirt on him, there's no better time than now to make it public.
> There is a widely held belief that because math is involved, algorithms are automatically neutral.
> This widespread misconception allows bias to go unchecked, and allows companies and organizations to avoid responsibility by hiding behind algorithms.
I think the wording of this casts a shadow on what mathematics is. Opaque accounting or opaque algorithms, it doesn't matter what the underlying hidden components are. But the belief that the words "algorithms" or ever "smart" would hide things says more to me about people in management than it says about people who discover algorithms.
Mathematics can of course be weaponised, but a bigger problem is ignorance towards mathematics. After all, many things can be weaponised. I think the text on Tijmen Schep's websites have a good message, but I do think one should slow down when it comes to compassion fatigue. One way that I use to do this is to ask questions about concrete resources: What are things we need? What are the things we want? And are we progressing to improve people's living conditions?
For the most part, the answer to the last question is yes. It's important to realise this. There is a good book written about our progress as a society by I think an Estonian author, or another Eastern country. I wonder what it is called again.
mola 1301 days ago [-]
What a weird premise...
Where exactly are these chilling effects? most social networks devolve quite rapidly to a slur party where people say stuff they would never say to actual people IRL.
dirkc 1301 days ago [-]
I've stopped engaging in many places online over the last few years. The reason for me is that engaging with a pseudonym has become the exception rather than the rule.
jjice 1301 days ago [-]
The evolution of identity on the internet is an interesting one. In the 90s, using your real name was considered absurd. Now it's the standard. Maybe you'll also have a pseudonym in your handle, but the majority of people use their real name on most of their social media.
Certain communities retain pseudonymous, such as a good portion of Hacker News and Reddit. Although, I see many people posting more and more revealing information on Reddit these days, as it leans towards becoming like Twitter and Facebook.
yowlingcat 1301 days ago [-]
I'm impressed with how well the authors were able to distill a complex concept into a catchy, memorable piece of visual communication. The privacy defenders have always had a messaging problem. It takes real chops to distill it down into something tangible for a layman.
Beyond that, a lot of this reminds me of Jeremy Bentham's philosophical exploration of the panopticon and surveillance and sousveillance architecture. Observability asymmetry is and of itself power.
Cicero22 1301 days ago [-]
Agreed, I never read any of Bentham's work, but Michel Foucault's "Panopticon" was the first thing I thought of.
Everything we do online's being processed and potentially stored, and while we may know what's considered wrong right now, we don't know what will be wrong in the future. Without knowing the rules it's very hard to play by them. Unfortunately, not playing the game isn't an option in the modern world, so we really do need strong privacy laws to protect us
yowlingcat 1301 days ago [-]
> Unfortunately, not playing the game isn't an option in the modern world, so we really do need strong privacy laws to protect us
I agree that we need strong privacy laws to protect us, but the way I see it, not playing the game is quickly becoming the new "game." Generation Z and later have hewn far more sophisticated and ubiquitous barriers to digital intimacy, mostly as a survival mechanism in direct response to this. They eschew the "real-name only" approach to socialization as the farce that it is, and generally have purpose built social identities which are compartmentalized towards a particular pursuit or interest. The "real-name" identity is a sanitized "calling card" which contains the bare minimum -- any truly deep interaction is compartmentalized into an anonymous identity. In a way, it resembles the fora culture of old.
To these next generations, I say: good on you for creatively determining your own workarounds, defenses and immunities to this social poison of sousveillance. And this of course is the natural reaction to this kind of hubristic sousveillance -- people will simply figure a way around it. They will evolve new languages, new secret societies, new everything. If you take away their cryptography, they will evolve their skills at steganography. Human brains are remarkably adept at attaining freedom.
gitgud 1300 days ago [-]
Great website, but I think the analogue to Oil and Global Warming is a bit clumsy...
Oil is a finite resource with a hard limit. Social data isn't even quantifiable really, as new dimensions of metrics can be gathered from all users. A better comparison - albeit more complex - is mining & discovering user data vs mining and discovering all resources on earth...
The analogue is almost there, but falls apart in some places... like all analogues I suppose...
la6471 1301 days ago [-]
Too much of anything is bad (in context). That is why too much input (ie taking everyone’s opinion) on a complex issue is just asking for paralysis by analysis. That is why there are multiple streams of higher learning and as a society the government employs the graduates of each stream as policy makers because they are supposed to be specialists in their field who can weigh in all pros and cons and understand the consequences to the extent possible , but better than the non specialists. This worked very well when information and opinions from everywhere and everything was not broadcasted at the speed that happens today. What I foresee is that if we continue to keep generating these gazillions of data points every second all the time then soon AI’s will be needed to do the analysis for us and complement or help human policy makers to make the right decisions. We already see this with things like sentiment analysis. Welcome to the singularity .. I for once can’t wait to have our constantly bickering politicians replaced with AI agents whose sole job is to work for the people and who can be overidden by executive authority only as a last resort.
bonoboTP 1301 days ago [-]
It feels like there is a contradiction.
a) The article claims data misuse is still just in the process of barely gaining attention and also that
b) people are already aware of how their data is misused and are adapting by self-censoring etc.
I also feel like there is a conflation between a) conformity enforced by a loud hyper-online minority and b) conformity due to data mining and automated reputation calculations.
I think most people are totally unaware of anything connected to data use, they just "use the apps like a normal person", anything beyond that is an unknown unknown to them. They may have a vague idea of ad personalization, but don't think much about issues like that. They just see the text box and they enter their thoughts and messages and click things they like.
10 years ago people used to say online comments are nasty because people are anonymous and can hide their identity. It turns out lots of people are more than willing to write vile and nasty comments on Facebook with their full names attached, with their family photos public etc. And they aren't fake profiles, because I know some of them.
Simply sitting behind a keyboard makes us less inhibited, it's not about the actual anonymity. Our lizard brains cannot comprehend that we are being watched by unknown people from the future whenever we post something, the brain thinks we're sitting in the comfort of our room with nobody around.
Also, conformity is there in the physical world as well, and saying the wrong things will spread rumors etc. Now, for sure, having no permanent record of everything does make forgetting or relativizing other people's memories easier so there is a fade-away effect.
throwaway7281 1301 days ago [-]
Except text-only forums like HN I do not frequent any social media. I get very specific information out, if I want it but that's it. It amuses and scares me that literally billions of people spend hours every day with nothing but scrolling.
Even worse, so many high-end jobs today only exist, because the data of the people needs to be processed.
If anyone has a good idea, how to stay out of that business and still prosper, please let me know.
ChrisMarshallNY 1301 days ago [-]
I was giving this some thought (I know, you smelled something burning -Tell your friends. Three shows a week).
They are right, but the "social score" thing is nothing new. I think we just are winding up a pretty freewheeling time of self-expression that probably started with the Beats (not the BeatLES, although there was a fair bit of overlap).
If anyone is familiar with the way society operated in the Edwardian and Victorian times, you know that some folks would commit suicide, if their "social score" went south. The main difference, is then, it applied to the "upper crust," and these days, we all get to enjoy the mixtape.
That's one reason why I decided to delete all my anonymous accounts, and establish a "personal brand." It may not mean much to other folks, but I try to make sure that all of my exposed interactions stay "on-brand." It's an exercise that I learned from Marketing departments, and seems to work.
The worst that happens, is that a bunch of y'all think I'm a "stuffed shirt" (I'm not, but that's OK).
Very good presentation, and very good analogies to get the general public attention.
I think the key points are:
- Data allows the projection of stereotypes on everything you might be involved.
- Rating systems create unwanted incentives.
I don't think social credit systems are crazy, but they are extremely dangerous and easy to get wrong. Their memory should be limited, and their use should be controlled, opt-in, show-to-see, or whatever might be relevant.
devthrowawy 1301 days ago [-]
Maybe some more buy in could be achieved without the global warming fear mongering. Social media is directly impacting people's lives and there are real solutions individuals can employ to better themselves and their lives. It's time we stopped confusing pie in the sky boogie men with lack of personal responsibility and self awareness.
skolsuper 1301 days ago [-]
How would more personal responsibility and self-awareness help Chinese dissidents, in your opinion?
WhompingWindows 1301 days ago [-]
What do you mean "without the global warming fear mongering"?
munchhausen 1300 days ago [-]
There is a solution to many of the issues highlighted in the article, and that is to drop judgementalism and bias altogether, as individuals and as society.
That will get us to the point where your personality quirks, likes and dislikes, gender expression and sexual orientation, etc., have no impact on your career prospects, social integration prospects, and your ability to participate in society in general.
Retreating back into the privacy bubble is not an option. We need to go in the opposite direction, and put it all out there. When being completely naked, completely transparent becomes the new normal, compassion and empathy will well up in society to an extent never before experienced. We will all see that the emperor of social pretense and conformity never had any clothes, and this will be a watershed moment in how people relate to each other.
masterphilo 1299 days ago [-]
But isn't Society just the result of the social contract between its members? and part of that contract are the ideals and goals that the society has collectively agreed to uphold and preserve. It's the condition of admission into the society, if you will. So in fact, any organization of human beings cannot exist without some sort of judgementalism and bias, even if minimal.
I also agree reverting back into traditional notions of privacy is not an option. The only options for someone worried about the implications of mass-surveillance on their livelihood will be either to remove themselves from society altogether, or to migrate to other mass-surveilling societies where their lot there is easier to bear.
jawarner 1301 days ago [-]
Social cooling is not global warming. Yes, they are both "subtle and complex," as are all modern issues. The latter poses an existential threat to humankind and has already claimed the lives of many. The other is certainly a problem, but to compare the two is not responsible.
dudul 1301 days ago [-]
The thing is we don't even need opaque algorithms to do that, we do it to ourselves. Not a week (I should probably even say not a day) without a "cancel campaign" on Twitter to go after some rando's job just because they didn't tweet The Right Thing.
carabiner 1301 days ago [-]
Except most non tech people I know relish the attention, motivating them to go out more. "Do it for the 'gram". They're not wearing tinfoil hats, they want to see and be seen. Social cooling is not something I have observed in my circles.
andrewla 1301 days ago [-]
> When algorithms judge everything we do, we need to protect the right to make mistakes.
This is better expressed as saying when your behavior is reduced to metrics, you distort your behavior to match those metrics. An extension of Goodhart's law [1] to social behavior, as we become more capable of deriving metrics to assess social behavior.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law -- "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes" or "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
cgufus 1300 days ago [-]
I was thinking of Goodhart's law too when reading that part of the presentation.
api 1301 days ago [-]
There were two kinds of participants in the mid-twenty-teens Internet explosion of over the top neo-Nazi, fascist, and reactionary ideology. (I heard it comically called the Internet "Heilstorm" or the "Basement Blitzkreig.")
The first kind were actual Nazis, actual white supremacists, people who were or had been converted to fascist and racialist ideology.
The second were trolls who didn't necessarily believe any of it but liked the fact that it rattled people. A lot of these were adolescents doing the Information Age equivalent of throwing toilet paper over houses. But some of them were people who saw being maximally offensive as a way to push back, if even subconsciously, against a rising tide of conformism. These were more like the musicians and artists from the 60s onward who played with "Satanic" imagery to challenge a conformist culture. Satan no longer shocks, so they had to bust out Hitler.
The trouble is that this type of protest doesn't work anymore and is counterproductive.
In the old days there was a thing called "pop culture" and if you made something challenging or offensive that got popular people would be forced to deal with it. There is no pop culture anymore. There are a million little bubbles. When you make offensive memes the culture doesn't care. Everyone just retreats into their bubbles and clicks "don't show me content like this" and if you keep becoming more and more offensive in an attempt to shock your way in the platform will just ban you. Unlike the days when books and music were physical artifacts, removal of content from a platform is instantaneous.
At the same time the offensiveness pushes those who are genuinely (and sometimes for good reason!) offended by it away from more open areas and into walled gardens. You're actually helping the walled gardens by doing this.
The only solution I see to the problem this site is describing is the abandonment of the public Internet, including the read/write public web, in favor of small peer to peer or privately hosted communities with gates. Of course you also have to encrypt absolutely everything.
erikerikson 1301 days ago [-]
This site seems oriented toward stimulating a response from one subpopulation but also seems to predict consequences based on that subpopulation being the population. Many people like to live "out loud", are proud of the lives they lead, and appreciate feeling "seen".
Are the problems that decisions are getting made and actions taken on the basis of what we do or that unjust decisions are being made?
Do you see the genie being put back in the bottle? The information exists and the challenge is finding the right ways to use the data justly rather than try to suppress it. We have been doing this in meat space for time immemorial.
serjester 1301 days ago [-]
Some of these seem fairly reasonable. Is it not fair to pay a premium if you tend to return a lot of items. It costs the store more money? If you have friends with "bad" backgrounds there's clearly direct correlation between that and loan risk. Is this any different from how loan officers operated for all of history? Yes these create biases but are these biases justified?
With that said there's definitely a problem with how some of this data is used (ex: deliberately designing apps to be addictive). I'm just not a fan of blanket statements for / against data collection. There's a balance to be had.
cblconfederate 1301 days ago [-]
well said, but it s not a revelation. When social media started lots of people objected to the mindless sharing of everything for narcissistic reasons. The onion joked that facebook was a CIA project. Social media and China's social scoring system are very much related, elements of an unfree society in which average behavior is rewarded and weirdos, outcasts, misfits and rebels are "disappeared". Instagram feeds is pretty much like those soviet and north korean paintings in which everyone is smiling in front of fruit. Imagine if they had social media in the 60s, it would be an absolute shitshow.
082349872349872 1300 days ago [-]
There's a contemporary russian illustrator who specialises in Ostalgia, as if the soviets had had pinups and Norman Rockwell.
If you're paying attention you know that you might want to skip the "vocational bootcamp" when you need to do business in China some day. Because you might not graduate!
Let's just skip to the end: Every rebuttal I have to whatever lecture you want to give me could be construed as a whataboutism and could also be construed as simply true. There are various groups of people that would get re-routed outside of the respected due process paths in the US for things they said too. We also consider those problems. Its just not a different enough user experience for me to single out China.
zajio1am 1301 days ago [-]
IMHO most of the article is based on bad attribution. Culture of conformity and risk-aversion is primarily an (intentional, not side) effect of social retribution / punishment and fear of it. Transparency / lack of privacy is just a factor that makes social retribution easier, not a primary cause.
As transparency has its own advantages (it leads to high-trust society), perhaps should rather support freedom of speech as a fundamental societal value. If i believed that expressing myself would not lead to losing job, losing housing and being shunned by friends, why would i self-censor in my self-expression?
ccktlmazeltov 1301 days ago [-]
Before panicking here about your social score, can we actually do something about actual scores that impact your life nowadays? Like the credit score in the US? I think like people are barking at the wrong tree.
jbotz 1301 days ago [-]
It's a good metaphor, could definitely help people understand the nature of the problem and raise awareness of its urgency. I'll be using term "social cooling" going forward, definitely.
scotty79 1300 days ago [-]
Given the amount of stupidity and outrage flying around I don't think 'social cooling' il a phrase that has fear instilling potential. Social cooling sounds like something desirable nowadays.
zeristor 1301 days ago [-]
People used to move from a small village to the big city for anomity and freedom. It would seem to me the loose inference to suggest who I am or what I do similar being mired by bad gossip from villagers.
chadwittman 1301 days ago [-]
100% agreed with this and trying a vastly different approach. Still early, but the idea is to merge people and topics while doing this through a question engine to invite everyone into the conversation... instead of just the loud & ego driven voices. Looking for beta testers right now, starting with NBA, NFL, Fantasy Football, & Tech for the early topic categories. If you're interested, let me know: https://trypersona.com
greggman3 1300 days ago [-]
And this is why HN should remove the downvote! Seriously (here come the downvotes). If you're downvoting this you're doing exactly what this article is complaining about.
> People are changing their behavior to get better scores.
> Social Cooling is a name for the long-term negative side effects of living in a reputation economy
There are plenty of times I don't post something because even though I strongly believe in the idea I know "the crowd" does not so it will just get downvoted.
mrslave 1300 days ago [-]
Down-votes should mean "this comment doesn't contribute in good faith," or "this is a distraction".
How something could be well utilized, versus how it is utilized, may be two different things.
greggman3 1300 days ago [-]
According to Dang, downvotes on HN are for disagreeing with ideas and opinions.
mrslave 1295 days ago [-]
Interesting.
There's an obvious conflict of interest in reducing another user's karma risks their ability to also downvote. (Of course, just because it's imperfect doesn't mean it's a bad system.) If this is the intended usage then perhaps it would be fair to expand downvoting rights to other users?
dfischer 1301 days ago [-]
> It performed data mining and data analysis on its audience. Based on results, communications would then be specifically targeted to key audience groups to modify behaviour in accordance with the goal of SCL's client. The company described itself as a "global election management agency".
I wonder if this might have a positive effect on extremists opinions/divisiveness in the US. Assuming "the problem" is that people are too divided in their political views, would social cooling bring people closer to the center by making people less likely to post "controversial" things, despite it being by hook and crook versus genuine unity?
nakagin 1301 days ago [-]
Can those Credit Systems be it China’s or any social networking services be gamed? I’ve seen a lot of people deleting their accounts out of fear for their data and privacy. But at the same time, a lot people get the system to work in their favor, e.g r/churning. I’m not dismissing the harm or discouraging conversation for privacy. Just asking if we can hack it.
ponker 1301 days ago [-]
My "social cooling" hasn't come from big corporations harvesting my data (as far as I can tell, they're doing close to nothing with it that affects me directly).
My social cooling has come much more from the (I believe) well-founded fear of consequences from individuals using my social expressions against me.
15+ years ago when I started my career, I would talk about anything and everything with my colleagues. Politics, sex, dating, etc. I would argue on big email lists about fairly hot button topics. I wasn't afraid of any of these things having any consequences for me. My colleagues knew who I was hooking up with and I knew who they were hooking up with. I knew my colleagues' life stories. I knew who owned guns. Who was gay. Who fucked the hotel receptionist.
Things weren't great for some. A woman on the team would leave the room and the guys would talk about how they would have sex with her. A director of the company had a junior person vacate his hotel room since he was in that hotel and needed a room to enjoy two identical twin prostitutes he had found in that hotel's bar.
But now I've definitely been "socially cooled." I don't talk with my colleagues about anything other than the blandest topics. I go to work and only talk to them about work and the weather. I don't know whether this is better or worse, you'd have to also take into account the woman who isn't having her teammates discussing her oral sex skills the minute she leaves the room. But this is the new world.
acd 1301 days ago [-]
You self censor writing and opinions since you know you are being monitored. Thus you confer to the norm.
I am personally a bit disturbed that Internet seems to polarize people views. I think this may be partly due to social media algorithms. Ie content that you react strongly emotionally to on social media are promoted to get user attention/increase advertising revenue.
1301 days ago [-]
maedla 1301 days ago [-]
Grow up and delete social media attached to your identity. The people who actually care about you will still contact you.
TheSnowghost 1300 days ago [-]
While I really like the idea of presenting the subject of privacy and big data in a simple and intuitive way, and while I think that there is merit to the global warming metaphor, I'm worried that it might distract from the message.
Sadly, climate change has now become politicized, and it would be a shame if the same happened here.
bobwall 1301 days ago [-]
I am waiting my required 30 days to actually be allowed to delete facebook. Which is pretty crazy, that they won't even truly delete your stuff until then. Though I am sure, they are leaving all my eccentricities on many of their servers regardless of my insistence on deleting the account.
X6S1x6Okd1st 1300 days ago [-]
Oh hey that's why I have the username I have.
I'm nearing 1k karma I'll likely cycle this account soon.
alltakendamned 1300 days ago [-]
I like your idea on not just having an alt but actively cycling through new ones once they've been in use for a while.
Any other steps you've taken ?
X6S1x6Okd1st 1300 days ago [-]
Nope just
cat /dev/random | head -c 9 | base64
cat /dev/random | head -c 9 | base64
for username and password. Shove into password manager.
I rotate the usernames because you are constantly leaking information, whether it's interests you express, patterns of speech etc.
clairity 1301 days ago [-]
note that this is a landing page for marketing a (small) tech trends consultancy. it couches itself as counterintuitive new information on a hot-button topic that you can share with friends to be the in-the-know cool kid on the block for 10 minutes, to drive clicks, likely more as a branding and awareness campaign than a top-of-funnel source.
it's not well researched because it doesn't need to be, but it grazes past just-interesting-enough ideas to be plausible to a large percentage of visitors. just enough effort went into it to be effective, but no more (which is the right balance to hit).
as a piece of marketing, i'd give them a thumbs up. as a piece of social media fodder (ironically), claws up! as elucidating content, thumbs down.
Voxoff 1300 days ago [-]
This is the Hawthorne effect - a cousin of the placebo effect. It's a v useful idea.
Per the Hawthorne effect, you modify your behaviour in response to the awareness of being observed.
(The placebo effect describes an change based on an inert intervention regardless of observation.)
bookmarkable 1301 days ago [-]
Am I the only one that thought this was an Apple ad? Apple execs are looking at the same problem and betting big that privacy must be deeply integrated into the brand. I think this will pay off enormously as these problems get more public discussion.
1301 days ago [-]
na85 1301 days ago [-]
>LIKE OIL LEADS TO GLOBAL WARMING...
DATA LEADS TO SOCIAL COOLING
I feel like the Venn diagram between climate change deniers and the "I have nothing to hide" crowd who doesn't care about privacy has a very large overlap.
dangrover 1301 days ago [-]
There is a better, already-coined name for this: context collapse. Because everything is shared "globally" on social networks, we share less than in environments where we're with specific groups of people.
lycidas 1301 days ago [-]
For anyone interested in a more philosophical look at how this affects people, Byung-Chul Han has some great writings about how modern technological society affects the individual in books such as The Burnout Society.
mmm_grayons 1300 days ago [-]
Okay, I don't really use social media. No Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tick Tock, Snap Chat, or whatever else the kids these days are using. What happens with those jobs, loans, etc. if no data are available?
jonas21 1301 days ago [-]
Cool story, but in my experience the problem is the opposite. Social media is full of people who feel free to say awful things and treat people poorly in ways that they'd never dare to in real life.
darawk 1301 days ago [-]
Social cooling? Does anyone actually think that the problem in our society right now is social cooling?
It seems like very much the opposite to me. There is no chilling effect. It's exactly the reverse.
sinstein 1300 days ago [-]
Some of the other comments address this. The problem is that we see and hear about these extreme viewpoints from people who are very loud and vocal. But we are not seeing or hearing anything from the vast majority of people which causes 2 problems
1. More and more of these platforms are driven by the extremists
2. There is less and less chance of actual debate and discussion with people of opposing views as anyone who you could have a discussion with is not engaging.
hereme888 1300 days ago [-]
So, who has built a tool to help people build an ideal online persona, so that algorithms tell our employers, banks, insurances, etc.... that we are the perfect person they all want to deal with?
phtrivier 1301 days ago [-]
Meta: it's tricky to disagree with someone that presents a issue and adds "there will be denial about this."
Suddently, dissenting with the idea makes you feel like a denier. Either clever or mean.
personjerry 1301 days ago [-]
You can't stop data collection, people will just do it in secret.
finnthehuman 1301 days ago [-]
You can't stop murder either.
Perfect enforcement of rules is rarely a goal of policy. It just sets expectations for behavior, and when violation of policy becomes known remedial and/or punitive measures can be taken.
personjerry 1301 days ago [-]
The difference is that murder is detectable. If I collect data on your traffic and improve my software using that data, no one will know.
finnthehuman 1301 days ago [-]
You know that there are already things that are illegal in business but require that business' records to prove, right?
Should we roll back those laws? Fraud is fine as long as the party defrauded can't find out?
personjerry 1301 days ago [-]
> Should we roll back those laws? Fraud is fine as long as the party defrauded can't find out?
I think you're putting words into my mouth.
Anyway, what's extra difficult is that when using data to build an ML model, you can actually throw away the data afterwards, like source code after compiling a program.
fsflover 1301 days ago [-]
It just must be illegal without real consent. See: GDPR.
lightgreen 1301 days ago [-]
Google/Twitter/Facebook are the same in EU. GDPR barely changes anything in this case.
fsflover 1300 days ago [-]
Enforcement is a totally different thing though. The law itself is good.
zcopley 1300 days ago [-]
I see a lot of pseudonyms here, but this is why everyone should revert back to, or start using, pseudonyms online, and take as many privacy-enhancing precautions as reasonably possible.
r2b2 1300 days ago [-]
I started building Owl Mail [1] about 8 weeks ago to make it easy to create incognito address for your online accounts. It's become an essential part of my privacy toolbox.
this is particularly true for people who have international ties. you become subject to the social cooling mechanisms of very different cultures that may conflict with each other.
mensetmanusman 1301 days ago [-]
One of the most fascinating aspects of this phenomenon is the irony that the ideology of the ‘radical’ punk scene is not too dissimilar to what is seen in corporate board rooms.
leonardoeloy 1300 days ago [-]
Funny anecdote: Foucault raised this issue because he didn't his intimate preferences to be made public. Now, on creating a whole theory on top of that...
The social part of social media and culture have a much bigger impact on social cooling than anything else, including mass personal data collection.
moreira 1300 days ago [-]
Back in 2017, this was posted on HN, and I opened it as a tab on my iPhone. That tab is still open, and now the article is back here. Feels weird.
meh206 1300 days ago [-]
Replace "social" with "government" in all of these "social" systems, and everything become crystal clear.
Wolfenstein98k 1300 days ago [-]
If you hold right-of-centre views you definitely feel this already in all sorts of ways.
I've trained myself to always check the privacy setting of any post on Facebook before revealing my true views, knowing it sometimes shows my posts to family and left-wing friends, who have in the past demanded explanations.
You have this "watching over your shoulder online" feeling constantly if you try to maintain a bipartisan friends list.
This website captures an element of that very well.
I am, at least in my little personal corner, much more concerned at the moment with the actions of fellow citizens than with large corporations or whatever. For now.
1301 days ago [-]
yanks215 1301 days ago [-]
Where can I see the data known about me?
lotu 1301 days ago [-]
You can go ask every individual company you interact with for what data they have about you. The details should be found in privacy polices.
Response to "that's an unreasonable amount of work, it should be easier". Do you think privacy would be better protected if all the data about everyone was in one central location?
riston 1300 days ago [-]
It seems the repeating topic which get's heated up again this time release of a documentary.
ErrantX 1301 days ago [-]
So I like this, its interesting and useful framing.
My personal view that whilst this subtle problem is our long term concern we have a more immediate risk that could cause serious social challenges - which is driven by similar issues as highlighted here.
Polarisation of Views; modern social media and associated algorithms are creating intense echo chambers which are creating more and more extreme polarisation. This is most obvious in politics - in the US the political rifts and clear and obvious. The same is true in the UK. My worry is the result of this is that the ruling party have strong leeway to suppress the others and eventually "win".
Case in point in the UK; new guidance for schools says that they should not share material published by groups that have at any point had anti-capitalist views. Critics immediately pointed out that this excludes the non-ruling party (who have socialist-leaning views).
Case in point two; the supreme court in the US (which is a game to see who can skew its political leanings the most).
This terrifies me; with deeply polarised societal groups it will create battlegrounds which must be won politically & ultimately we all lose. Ultimately it is the social media algorithms that drive this - the power they wield is scary!
jzig 1301 days ago [-]
Stark Trek had a reputation based economy and it worked out pretty well, right?
digitalsushi 1301 days ago [-]
everyone interesting is always one terrifying git commit away from automatically marrying their public account and their alt-throwaway from a machine-learning de-anonymizer. the less you write, the safer you are.
luckylion 1301 days ago [-]
Good point. Would switching the language help? E.g. if you learned Spanish (secretly!) and used it only for the purpose of writing, will a de-anonimizer still work (typos, punctuation should be easy to automatically take care of)?
darepublic 1301 days ago [-]
Being physically unattractive is also quite socially cooling
eranation 1300 days ago [-]
Interesting. Basically the premise of west world season 3.
josh2600 1301 days ago [-]
Technologists need to build tools that are privacy-first.
1301 days ago [-]
ancorevard 1301 days ago [-]
They lost me at "Foucault raises the issue".
ozorOzora 1301 days ago [-]
I think they are referring to the idea of "apparatus" from Michel Foucault.
From wikipedia:
"I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings."
Actually I just meant to refer to Foucault's analysis of Bentham's panopticon prison concept.
nemo44x 1301 days ago [-]
I know what you're saying but you shouldn't just dismiss all of his thoughts. Yes, certain academics have abused, used, or selectively cherry picked pieces of this philosophy, in part, for turning academics into activism, but he'd probably turn in his grave regarding a lot of these developments. I mean he's against any sort of meta-narrative, for example.
I mean in many ways people using post-modernism as a foundation for their "Theory" sort of make his point about discipline and punishment. I think his ideas there are pretty straight on and prophetic of what this article is talking about. Cancel-culture, call outs, etc. are creating a cold culture of obedience and conformity and of course we are seeing these things seep into social institutions like schools and younger and younger ages.
I'd agree that a lot of what he thinks about "knowledge" and "power" and are pretty wrong and dangerous. His ideas on "Bio-power" and other criticisms of science and liberalism in general are trash. The idea that everything is about "power" and "power relations" is garbage. People have taken these bad ideas too far IMO.
amithassan 1301 days ago [-]
How trite... Linking about social cooling to a site that refuses to let you purge your data.
This is actually one of the few issues with this site. However, it's a major one.
ccvannorman 1301 days ago [-]
So the call to action is, "Share this website?" Fail to see any value here.
Please tell me what I can DO about it, other than share sites like this while this happens.
arthtyagi 1301 days ago [-]
This is legitimately scary to look at.
bof_ 1301 days ago [-]
*burning oil
1301 days ago [-]
cratermoon 1301 days ago [-]
Libertarian paradise.
1301 days ago [-]
hurrdurr2 1300 days ago [-]
Instead of yapping about how you "deactivated your Facebook account"; maybe you should do some inner reflection on how your work directly contributes to potentially making the world a worse place to live.
I mean, this is HN after all, where the majority of users work in tech.
All these kinds of posts, in addition to recent stories of techies' in-fighting (parents vs. single techies, want the same bay area pay for moving to the Midwest, etc. etc.), really has gradually opened my eyes to what SV is all about.
12xo 1301 days ago [-]
Social media is fast food. Cheap, easy, filling, tasty and very, very, very unhealthy. Eating it once in a while is fine, but eat it every day and you'll get sick.
lightgreen 1301 days ago [-]
Hacker News is also fast food, by the way. #deleteHN /s
helen___keller 1300 days ago [-]
You /s but I've found that I can consume HN content with roughly equal level of unhealthy interest that I consume reddit content
That is to say, sometimes when I'm not particularly engaged with whatever else I should be doing on the computer, HN becomes my primary "addiction" and I find myself opening tabs and scrolling through content without particularly intending to
WorldPeas 1301 days ago [-]
If hacker news was food, to me it would be a sandwich, something you can eat while relaxing, or in a hurry, not too flavorful, and not too nutritious, but certainly the lesser evil of food-media.
fraktl 1301 days ago [-]
The content is brilliant. Very, very, very well done. From engineering POV: I'm amazed that I visited a website that set no cookies, that no resource was blocked by uBlock / nanoDefender / nextdns. Amazing. Just amazing. Such a rarity nowadays.
martin_a 1301 days ago [-]
> I'm amazed that I visited a website that set no cookies [...] Such a rarity nowadays.
Be the change you expect from the world! Start building sites like this!
lightgreen 1301 days ago [-]
So the website owners won't get proper analytics about who are their users, why they came to the website, how did they finish reading page to the end and so on. They won't know if their message was effective or not.
socialcooling 1301 days ago [-]
I'm the creator of the website. It has a simple PHP text file counter. That's all it has, and I'd argue it's enough. I want people to be able to visit this website without any fear of tracking and profiling.
It's a strange thing to say I won't know if my message is effective or not without tracking, since we're currently discussing it on Hackernews ;-D
fraktl 1300 days ago [-]
As the author mentioned, it ended up on HN. Message received. I can scroll to the bottom of the article and feed the trackers bad data. Your argument is invalid because you can't make a foolproof algorithm that'll tell you correctly how the user used the site and if the page was finished reading if the user can simply feed you bogus data.
There's another (also brilliant site) linked at the bottom of the original article: https://www.mathwashing.com/
And here's the funny part - you assumed the author won't know, and that's precisely what he's talking about at mathwashing.com - these "algorithms" that are as faulty as people who come up with them.
I doubt you actually read the whole thing with full attention. The message got through to the people it was supposed to get through. I applaud the effort to go without all the tracking nonsense. And whenever I see tracking crap like medium.com uses, I feed it bad data on purpose. It's better to stand true to your message and create a cookieless / trackless site whose purpose is to convey the message rather than use this shitty argument about authors knowing whether they are reaching out to their audience. Precisely because of that thinking we've broken internet where in order to read 512 bytes of text I've to block 50 megabytes of tracking bloatware.
MayeulC 1301 days ago [-]
I agree. I particularly liked to see the ubiquitous Google Analytics was absent from the website.
jondubois 1300 days ago [-]
Sometimes I feel like VCs, investors and corporate employers have some kind of control panel where they can look up individuals.
It happened to me several times that I had great conversations with investors or prospective employers but then from one day to the next they appeared to back off for no particular reason. I hold very contrarian political views so I'm not sure if it has something to do with this.
mlthoughts2018 1300 days ago [-]
What unfortunate, baseless fear mongering this is.
> “Social Cooling is a name for the long-term negative side effects of living in a reputation economy”
This has almost nothing to do with big data or data-driven features of consumer products. The same reputation surveillance has existed for many decades preceding measurement of internet and mobile device behavior.
082349872349872 1300 days ago [-]
Millennia. Part of the slogan "city air makes free" is that city people knew and cared much less about one's private life than villagers.
claydavisss 1301 days ago [-]
Most of you only really believe in free speech (or any other exercise of power) when it conforms to, or reinforces your worldview.
Oricle 1300 days ago [-]
And who's gathering this info?
Ahh, isralites! @lways has been
lightgreen 1301 days ago [-]
I do not support anyone in the US, I don't even live in the US.
But I support free speech and free expression whether it comes from left or from the right.
I lived too long in a country where only one opinion is allowed, and those who speak differently get problems, like get fired. It is not that bad in the US (yet?), of course.
> > If you want respect don't admit to supporting bigotry
> But I support free speech and free expression whether it comes from left or from the right.
Free speech doesn't mean I have to respect you. It means that when you start raving about the earth being flat or whatever, I can't shut you up. I can walk away, I can say "You're an idiot", and I can say "Guys, this dude is a flat Earther. Let's make fun of the moron", and then we can all say, "Hahaha! You're a moron! Neener neener" and so on and so forth. And you can do that to me.
I can even say "This guy is a flat Earther, don't buy his bread" and others can repeat it. That's freedom.
And if I do that I will, in practice, chill your speech because maybe you care about selling your bread more than you do about peddling flat Earthism. But that's what positive rights sometimes do.
And as someone with a strong view of individual freedom, I'd rather that chilling effect than any restriction on who I can speak out against.
Lammy 1300 days ago [-]
Everyone has the freedom to bring mostly-negativity into the world, but that doesn't mean I have to respect them for it even when it's in support of issues I completely agree with.
renewiltord 1300 days ago [-]
Precisely. You don't have to respect anyone for anything. There is no requirement anywhere. As a free person, you can choose to disrespect people even if they do things society considers commendable. You can even express this disrespect. This is fundamental to the freedom of this society.
Lammy 1300 days ago [-]
You don't have to respect anyone for anything, but it's a hell of a lot easier and a lot more inward- and outwardly-positive than looking for disagreement everywhere.
1299 days ago [-]
lightgreen 1301 days ago [-]
> Free speech doesn't mean I have to respect you.
Nobody seriously cares about respect as much as about their freedom.
> I can say "Guys, this dude is a flat Earther. Let's make fun of the moron"
The sad fact is that you seem to only support freedom of express progressive ideas.
Consider someone saying "Guys, this dude is gay. Let's make fun of the moron". I guess you won't support freedom of speech for that person.
renewiltord 1301 days ago [-]
Read the context: it was about respect. I even quoted it for you. But we can proceed anyway if the conversation has shifted.
> Consider someone saying "Guys, this dude is gay. Let's make fun of the moron". I guess you won't support freedom speech for that person.
Oh dude, I support that like nothing else, but I will use my freedom of speech to absolutely shun that individual. I absolutely encourage you to admit to any homophobia, etc. That way I know to shun you and to ask my friends to shun you. It is my freedom of speech and expression that permits me to do that. Free individuals must have the liberty to freely associate. And from the liberty to freely associate comes the liberty to choose to not associate.
And if you want to speak up and ask for me to be shunned, I encourage you to do that. Because I believe in a freedom of speech and expression that is almost absolute.
You will never find me making laws that say that expressing homophobia or racist opinions or whatever must be outlawed. Say it loud, say it proud, you have the right.
lightgreen 1301 days ago [-]
Even if the constitution allows free speech, but practically if free speech is not possible, it is not freedom.
Note in the authoritarian totalitarian states there are no laws against free speech. And usually it is not government actors how punish you for expressing dissenting opinions, it is often mob and your employer. These states are not free.
So to some degree SV is not a free place, even if it there are no laws prohibiting free expression.
renewiltord 1301 days ago [-]
Interesting, so you want to restrict people from saying things because you think they're saying things you don't like.
And you use this stance to claim you're advocating for freedom without seeing the inherent contradiction.
lightgreen 1301 days ago [-]
> you want to restrict people from saying things because you think they're saying things you don't like
Of course not. How did you get that from my comment?
colinmhayes 1301 days ago [-]
Your idea of freedom of speech means I'm not free to criticize you.
lightgreen 1301 days ago [-]
Constructively criticise, yes please.
But bullying, eg doxxing, petitioning to get fired, calling mob to intimidate etc, that's not exactly freedom of speech.
colinmhayes 1301 days ago [-]
> But bullying, eg doxxing, petitioning to get fired, calling mob to intimidate etc, that's not exactly freedom of speech.
Yes it is. It's the best way to fight back against speech you disagree with.
nobody9999 1300 days ago [-]
>Yes it is. It's the best way to fight back against speech you disagree with.
While nearly 100 years old, I think Justice Brandeis had it nailed[0]:
"If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."
I only hope you are in the small, small, small minority. Intimidating people not to speak is not freedom of speech. You may think intimidation is good when it is attacking something you disagree with, but given enough time you will be on the receiving side.
lightgreen 1301 days ago [-]
Well, I must admit I respect you for your consistent views, although I radically disagree with you.
I only wish you not to get into the place and time where you are in the opposition to the aggressive majority. It's quite uncomfortable.
colinmhayes 1301 days ago [-]
It's quite uncomfortable to watch people be radicalized by disinformation.
goatlover 1300 days ago [-]
So you wish to suppress speech you don’t like in the absence of government power to do so. Imagine doing this to a religious persuasion and calling that support for freedom of religion.
sergeykish 1301 days ago [-]
Guys, your are perfect example of trigger happy mob. This is the cause of cooling effect. Why would anyone reasonable touch hot topic if you can't even read it without blazing emotions?
renewiltord 1300 days ago [-]
I think I've been quite polite and civil here but if you want to provide feedback without being subject to voting here, my email is in my profile.
How am I driving? Let renewiltord@protonmail.com know!
renewiltord 1301 days ago [-]
Well, let's get to the bottom of it, shall we?
I will describe a sequence of events. You tell me which acts of speech you want to proscribe and which ones you want to permit.
1. Person A says "I don't like people whose name starts with R. They are disgusting and ugly"
2. Person B says "That's bigoted"
3. Person B tells Person C "A is bigoted because he hates people whose name starts with R"
4. Person C says "That's horrible. We should boycott any business that A is employed at"
5. Person B says "You are right. I will tell everyone"
6. Person A says "This is not fair. I have a right to being employed despite these opinions of mine"
7. Person B says "That's right. And I have a right to not use your employer's services unless you are fired"
8. Person D, overhearing this, finds a big soap box "Everyone! A is bigoted! He hates people whose name starts with R! Join me in boycotting his employer until they fire him"
9. Person E says "If he is fired, I will stop using the product. I'm going to tell everyone about this boycott campaign"
10. Person F says "If he is fired, I will hire him. My company has a lot of R-haters and we get along fine"
Tell me which of these things you will proscribe and which of these things you will permit. I, because I believe in the freedom of speech and association, would permit all of these. In SV, all of these are permissible.
So let's hear what you will do. Name the numbers. That will do.
And if you want to offer more examples to narrow the scope of my belief, please do.
zo1 1301 days ago [-]
It's easy because you picked an "easy" starting point that B et al are reasonably justified in wanting to "punish". Replace "hates people whose name starts with R" with "thinks illegal immigrants are breaking the law and need to be deported" as an example.
Now you get into a can of worms because it's a reasonable and rationally-defendable point of view that we're dealing with that probably has a 50-50 split in terms of public support. It's an opinion that needs to be discussed rationally without the conversation and people's lives devolving into ugliness.
Right now, people are censoring themselves for fear of repercussions that are very real because we've allowed a very vocal minority (on both sides?) to dominate and force consequences without a demonstrable majority in public-support. As long as there is an "aura" of majority-agreement on a touchy topic, dissent becomes dangerous. And it's self-reinforcing because you don't see any dissenting opinions on it so everyone thinks there is majority-support and dissents even less, causing a landslide.
renewiltord 1301 days ago [-]
My position does not change when we make the change you recommend. I still think every one of those things is permissible and must be permissible. I weigh liberty very highly indeed.
If it helps, let's even say Person A says "I like gay people and minorities. They should be treated just as well as heterosexual people and majorities." and then retain the rest mutatis mutandis. My position does not change.
DenisM 1301 days ago [-]
You seem to be advocating mob justice - letting the larger and more aggressive mob win.
Would you still support this model of justice if your mob was the smaller one and you got "cancelled" for expressing your "progressive" ideas? Or would you start calling for things like "proportional response", "due process", "free speech that leads to unemployment is not free" and such?
renewiltord 1301 days ago [-]
Ah no, I advocate the rights of any group of free people to speak - not for any group of free people to rule. Ten thousand of you can speak that you hate me. You have the right. But not one of you may lay a finger on a hair on my head. You do not have that right.
Read my post history. I am consistent on this matter.
* On the matter of W.H.Auden refusing to publish with a publisher who refused to publish Ezra Pound. Here I believed this was perfect reactions on every side. The publisher did not like Ezra Pound because Pound is a fascist sympathizer. Auden felt that this deplatforming and so told the publisher he would no longer be publishing with them. The publisher changed his mind because he wanted Auden to publish with him. All civil, all consistent with free association.
* The NYT insisted on publishing Scott Alexander's real name. He didn't like this and pulled Slate Star Codex. My reaction was that this is bad on the NYT's part and I would prefer not to subscribe to them. Not that they should be legally censured. Simply that we as free people should exercise this and free ourselves from them.
* When David Shor was fired from Civis, I thought that was a mistake. So 'cancel culture' ate itself there. But that's fine. I will simply choose not to associate myself with Civis.
DenisM 1300 days ago [-]
I think we both agree that physical violence is off the table. "Due process" is important not because of physical violence per se, but because the impact of the violence is significant. And so is cancelling someone out - depending on a person's position losing their job could be a disaster. Well-off software engineers may not feel it, but most people do. The mob justice does not follow any sort of due process - accusations fly and Emmanuel Cafferty gets fired. The cancel culture did not eat itself, it ate an utility worker.
My point is that mob justice is not justice. Taking (in)action yourself is well and good, but the farther you want to spread it around the more rigorous your processes and standards should be.
renewiltord 1300 days ago [-]
It is not justice. But it is free expression and I'll preserve that easily because I'm not going to stop someone from saying "I will uninstall Firefox unless Brendan Eich is fired". They have that right. And they have the right to say "And you should too". I'll probably say "No thanks, man. I like Firefox" and then they can say "You're a bigot, too" and they have a right to all of these because freedom is more important than protecting your job.
Freedom is fragile. I won't give one inch here because they will shatter it and remake freedom of expression in a stilted image if I give them the chance.
If freedom is used to unjust ends, then the problem lies with the path there not the freedom itself.
DenisM 1300 days ago [-]
> Freedom is fragile. I won't give one inch here because they will shatter it
I suggest self-restraint and holding yourself to a higher standard before passing around harmful judgements. The farther you cast your accusations, the higher the standard. Who are "they" here?
renewiltord 1300 days ago [-]
People who don't like freedom. So by definition that's what they'll do. It isn't a judgment. It is definitionally correct.
lightgreen 1300 days ago [-]
This is tautology.
- Children need protection. They are eating children.
- Who are "they" here?
- Children eaters. So by definition that's what they'll do. It isn't a judgment. It is definitionally correct.
Cf
- Freedom is fragile. I won't give one inch here because they will shatter it.
- Who are "they" here?
- People who don't like freedom. So by definition that's what they'll do. It isn't a judgment. It is definitionally correct.
renewiltord 1300 days ago [-]
Right, children need protection from children eaters. You won't find me questioning that. No logical fallacy there. In fact, that's what a tautology is, a statement that's always true.
codezero 1300 days ago [-]
What do we do when hundreds or thousands of those voices are actually bots controlled by one or two people, but they pose as real people online.
One could argue this is one or two people expressing their freedom of speech, and using technology to do so, but another might argue that since it's not a genuine sentiment of real people in each instance, it might not be called free speech.
I think introducing the fact that online, you can't punch someone in the face and face the consequences is meaningful. I don't advocate violence, but I mean there is no way to know you are engaging with genuine people who are willing to participate in the speech.
I don't have as solution either, a bunch of ideas, and no reason to execute them, and it's also a nightmarish hellscape that I don't really want to wade into :)
renewiltord 1300 days ago [-]
Haha, a good point. I think we enable everyone to amplify their speech. When a single person can only talk 1x, tech to make it 100x makes you very powerful. But if everyone has tech to make it 100x, your tech needs to go to 10000x to have the same relative impact it did originally. i.e. tech growth doesn't scale well enough. The early gainers are very powerful.
Maybe when we all have GPT-3 with hecka more params, no one can propaganda-war us because we will be immune because of constant ongoing prop-war.
I don't really know, but I think I bias towards making everyone so powerful that it's hard to get more powerful.
codezero 1300 days ago [-]
That’s an idealized view - but since there’s not much any individual can do, it’s a decent one :) Though I think it’s fair to say technology has widened the gap between the rich and poor, not shrunk it. Yes, the poor are better off on paper in a lot of ways, but it’s lead to a massive consolidation of wealth that could be much better distributed.
I think my real point is: stop trying to make online discourse like in-person discourse, or, double down and expect the same “proof of work” that being physically present requires.
On top of that, there are limits to the extent and volume of any in-person communication that simply isn’t reproducible online without massive artificial constraints.
I think we need to revisit things we consider valid in person and not try to conflate them to be the same once we are online at a massive scale as a literal species. People forget that there were only millions of people online in the 90s, and there are billions now, this is a new era, and it requires new thinking and new unified action, but that’s really not possible when large swaths of humanity are tribal, nationalistic, scared, hungry, poor, angry, and manipulated.
I almost feel like arguing about free speech online is putting the cart before the horse.
francisofascii 1301 days ago [-]
This is a good example, and indeed a problem. I don't have a great plan to solve, except to use free speech to educate and convince people that this sequence of events is illogical and immoral. Combats these ideas with better ideas. Maybe what our schools read need are logic and ethics classes.
lightgreen 1301 days ago [-]
> Tell me which of these things you will proscribe and which of these things you will permit
It depends on definition of "permit".
From legal point of view, all of these things should be legal (except maybe A).
But some items from that list I consider immoral. Like gathering a mob to attack someone with the opposite point of view, is immoral.
By the way, there's a big difference between
> I don't like people whose name starts with R. They are disgusting and ugly
and
> I will vote for Trump.
Barely anyone in SV says they consider some group of people ugly. You have invented this unrealistic example.
And, I always will support those who are bullied regardless of their beliefs. Like when mob attacks a nazi, I'll try to protect that nazi. Of course when mob attacks radical lefts like antifa, my support goes to antifa.
Mob is always wrong regardless of its declared intentions.
renewiltord 1301 days ago [-]
I made up an example, and I requested that you make up examples that make the point clearer. If you feel that the example is unrealistic, you can simply provide another one.
In this case, if you have, in my example, Person A change his view to be "I will vote for Trump" and retain the rest mutatis mutandis then I'll gladly retain my view that I want all of that to be allowed.
In fact, I think we might be on precisely opposite sides in the fight for liberty if you want to stop people from having opinions just because they are not the only people to have that opinion. One person is free to state an opinion. Any n people are free to associate. Any n people are free to state the opinion together.
And you're going to have to clarify what a 'mob' is and what an 'attack' is. If five thousand people say "I won't buy this product unless you fire that guy", I think that's an okay 'mob' and an okay 'attack' because those five thousand people have the freedom to associate with each other and the freedom to choose not to associate with 'that guy'. It is morally wrong (repugnant, even) to force them to buy the product when they don't want to. If a single person hurts you for saying anything then that's a non-okay 'mob' and a non-okay 'attack'.
lightgreen 1301 days ago [-]
> One person is free to state an opinion. Any n people are free to associate. Any n people are free to state the opinion together.
It's right to n people to gather together and march in their support for Biden for example.
It is not OK (morally) to n people to gather togeher and ask a company to fire an employer for Biden support.
I think the different is in positive vs negative, constructive vs destructive.
"Buy from NNN because they support gay marriage" is positive and constructive.
"Ruin a career of John Smith because of his political views" is negative and destructive.
Of course it is not black and white. Like if you know for sure that company MMM knowingly uses slave labor, it would be right to boycott the company. And I don't know where to draw the line.
> what an 'attack' is
Something which leads to big loss for those who is attacked (ruined career, ruined personal life, loss of money, loss of business).
renewiltord 1301 days ago [-]
Yeah, I think we are on opposite sides here, friend. You have a view that slave labour is something that permits boycotts but there are things that do not. Now, I agree on that myself. But I don't presume to claim that there is a universal list of acceptable things and a universal list of unacceptable things. So to permit the places where I am wrong I have to let other people choose different lists. And that's why I need to let you ask my employer to fire me because I don't like spaghetti. My employer will say no and we will lose you. But that is freedom.
> Something which leads to big loss for those who is attacked (ruined career, ruined personal life, loss of money, loss of business).
Yeah, definitely on opposite sides. It's not my responsibility to keep your business alive. If I tell people things and they decide they don't want your product, then that's life. Information wants to be free. I'm not going to go ask anyone to suppress that Facebook targets ads because that causes loss of business to Facebook. That is totally insufficient.
lightgreen 1300 days ago [-]
> friend
I'm sorry, but I'm not friend of yours.
If we met in real life (like in the office), you would probably do a lot to hurt me for my views. (Because you have legal rights to do so, because it's not your responsibility to keep me alive, and because information should be free.)
But I would never do that to you.
That's the difference between us.
browserface 1300 days ago [-]
What are you all taking about?
Come on, think. Society doesn't seem very "cool" at all the last ten years. Color revolutions in Latin America and MEA. HK. US v China. ISIS, Bataclan, Charlie Hebdo. Twitter Mobs, Me too, Times up, incels. Antifu, Proud Boys. Snowden, Assange, Alex Jones, Qanon, Disclosure.
I'd say that Big brother's technical panopticon has increased "heat" in society. Either that, or it's had no effect, or if it has cooled things down, thank you to the eternal watchers for keeping all the crazies in check.
I think everybody just needs to adjust to this new normal, and be okay with there not really being any privacy. Privacy anyway is probably an industrial revolution invention, because village life was way less private with gossip and smallness.
If you think "privacy" is your natural state, you're wrong and I'm not sorry. If anything privacy is an "invention" of tech companies to sell you it, while selling the watchers not-it. Or a sort of a sci-fi mass delusion born of the isolating power of tech and the frontier thrill of having your own megaphone to the world. All the little nasties out there in userland plotting, ever plotting on the next dangerous idea they will unleash gloriously on the world. How did that ever seem like a good idea? In a village you would be a trouble maker, and rightly condemned to the stocks for quarrelling, upsetting the serenity and maybe witchcraft. You never had privacy, and thinking you did, as if it was some sort of "shield" to mean now you can stir the pot and speak without filters, everything be damned, with impunity, what the hell kind of good idea was that ever going to be?
All these idiots, thinking privacy affords them freedom from consideration. No. The tech revolution, simply means you have stepped into a world with greater responsibility, because you can have far reaching effects. So instead of being babies, and demanding a return to zero consequence actions, start getting woke to the ripples your events have in the world, and act with consideration, now for the whole world.
That's the blessing. A great power and connectedness and all you privacy morons want to squander it on speaking whatever you like, consequences imagined away by a fantasy of a pre-surveillance utopia that never existed, and even if it did.... You don't get to be free of your karma for what you've done.
Don't be like the village crazy. You speak now to the world. Privacy doesn't absolve you of any responsibility, and surveyed or not, you should consider your actions online. Not just from the demented "privacy-conscious" perspective of self preservation, but from the global perspective of other people because you live in a connected world. Don't blame people listening. Blame your tongue. And fix it. Speak consciously.
yokto 1300 days ago [-]
Do you want to "speak consciously" on WeChat or risk facing the consequences of your "responsibility" in front a Chinese Communist Party court?
The very same tools that can enable your utopia can also very quickly turn into a dystopia. As you say, they are a powerful magnifier, transforming this world into a global village where every action has far-reaching unpredictable consequences. This means that we should be incredibly cautious when deploying these tools as they give great power to users and an even greater power to their makers.
browserface 1299 days ago [-]
No I think you still don't get it.
Speaking consciously on WeChat means being conscious of all the consequences of your actions including with regard to your relationship as an individual to the state. I'm very happy to adopt that consciously, and have tried to be aware of these things and I have no problem with that at all.
Just like I'm not going to say something to hurt the feelings
of and make trouble for the family that's invited me to have dinner at their house, I'm not going to say things to hurt the feelings of a whole people, and double so when I'm a guest. And I'll try considering the unique culture of a place and how appropriate types of criticism, before opening my mouth. And triple so when I'm a guest with a megaphone.
Would you?
I consider doing it in a less considerate way is not very empathetic but also it's not good for me. It's self-destructive so I think people adopting this attitude under some misguided sort of heroic mythology are, stupid.
I'm okay speaking in more critical terms about countries where open criticism of their systems is culture. But even then there are lines. Assange, Snowden, went too far. To me, ignoring for a second the possibility they are limited hangout psyops, they are stupid men. Useful idiots, whose idealism, whether initially designed or not, had been co-opted by the states they posture at critiquing.
And then other countries are a different set of sensitivities again. Being conscious of that is good for everyone i think.
But the unexpected benefit of this for me was I actually got a deeper understanding of different places unique ways and thinking, precisely because I deliberately withheld judgement and tried to look at things from multiple perspectives, not just from my inherited Western biases, which I consciously tried to be aware of and see more than.
So you're judging WeChat but what gives you the right?
I don't think it's very empathetic for people to say, well Western culture do it this way therefore we should impose our cultural values on others.
But... these sort of one-sided culture v culture attacks open you up to a whole lot of interesting counter criticism such as: the credit score, "stasi files", and criminal history checks you have in Western countries basically equate to the social credit system in China, when you think about job opportunities, freedom of movement, access to capital, freedom from harassment and intimidation.
For me, I admire the Chinese transparency about what it is and technological efficiency. I believe such openness makes it easier for people to deal with and is the way forward long term. Whereas the covert harassment and secret tracking and "free press" propaganda in the West, under the guise of a "free and open society" I believe tips the scales of power less in the individual's favor, engages in needless deception, and is a more abusive aspect of the state-individual relationship than I think works.
I don't understand what people find so difficult about the level of consideration that is just like, I don't have all the answers, I'm not perfect, who am I to judge others? but I think in the West it harkens back to some sort of anti authoritarian distrust of the state.
Did you mean deploying the communications tools? That's an interesting if Luddite take: We should fold back to isolation because we're not ready. In essence I agree, to a degree, but I think that siloing is already handled and taken care of by various state and regional level blocks to some extent.
If you meant or were trying to confuse it deliberately with the survey tools then they are not what makes the world a village. They just enhance the watchers.
I agree we need to watch for dystopias and avoid them, but are you really so sure that China is, or is becoming one, while being so sure the West is not?
I think we need to watch, and learn from both places. Neither is a dystopia right now. But neither is perfect either. What's important is to learn, improve, and not think you've already achieved the pinnacle of civilization, nor take it for granted that you'll get there. You have to keep learning from what others are doing and inventing improvements. I just don't think framing the debate as privacy versus almost everything else is a very useful way forward.
I'm with Zuckerberg on this one even though it's kind of hackneyed. The world really should get more open and connected and I think eventually the relationship between people and their states should become closer. In my intimate relationships I get privacy by what I choose not to disclose. In my relationship with states I get privacy by what I choose to only think or feel. There's still a lot there... I think with the externalization of minds onto devices people are forgetting the power of their own brain and their own emotions.
What might be scary for me is if the entire world has one standard of acceptable ideas and acceptable behavior. I might feel restricted in that case because there'd be no country I could go to that was more conducive... so I think that any world government has to be widely tolerant of many things. But then again maybe I'm wrong and if I was in that situation I'd probably just make the best of it and think well what can I still enjoy and how can I adopt myself to fit in with where I'm at. But I think the reality is that when world Government comes it will be something that is tolerant of regional differences because that will be how a world government has to be introduced that's the only sort of way it's possible.
yokto 1299 days ago [-]
I wasn't expecting such a long answer, but thank you for it because it is a rather unique point of view in my filter bubble.
First, yes the difference between survey tools and communication tools is always confusing for me in the privacy debate. But ultimately, they are deeply linked [2] with many cases that fall in between. In particular, the surveillance of communication tools is incredibly pervasive.
> double so when I'm a guest
Yes, when I was in China, I was more careful to approach discussions with an open mind and cautiousness for the legal repercussions. However, I'm not talking about being a guest, I'm talking about either being a citizen or an outsider. In both cases I think it's very important to think critically and express the potentially resulting criticism. (More below)
> So you're judging WeChat but what gives you the right?
Certainly not the CCP, lol. But seriously, more than WeChat/Tencent, which is just another interesting tech company, I'm judging the state control over it. And more than judging (but which I'm also doing), I'm formulating criticism based on observations of harm to people (I consider it evident that shutting up would be immoral) and (but this is our main point of disagreement) mind control by the state.
> Assange, Snowden, went too far.
It seems your threshold might be the word of law, but in that case they exposed illicit state actions. In any case, they did go far. To say they were co-opted is only partly true if not outright false: thanks to them, a significant portion of the population is defending itself and pushing for more scrutiny and changes.
> And then other countries are a different set of sensitivities again. Being conscious of that is good for everyone i think.
States and governments do not have sensitivities. You can not hurt their feelings.
> these sort of one-sided culture v culture attacks open you up to a whole lot of interesting counter criticism such as: the credit score, "stasi files", and criminal history checks
I'm using the nazi culture as an experience that enables me to construct criticism of other cultures. Whenever I see something that looks like it, I'm indeed judging it very much.
And yes, credit scores and criminal problems have their own problems, thank you for helpful criticism/judging/insert the word you prefer. You absolutely have the "right" to say it thanks to the millions of people who fought for freedom against kings, tyrannies, authoritarian states and even normal governments. But beyond what the current laws say, the fact that you have functioning brain is enough to justify judging. How and when you express that judgement should reflect the potential negative and positive consequences of that. Here I think that in the long term, censorship has more negative effects than offending, and call me insensitive, but I think that people (including myself) should really get better at receiving criticism and society would be overall better for it.
> Did you mean deploying the communications tools? That's an interesting if Luddite take: We should fold back to isolation because we're not ready. In essence I agree, to a degree, but I think that siloing is already handled and taken care of by various state and regional level blocks to some extent.
Yes, these tools, and I did not say "fold back to isolation", but to be cautious when expanding the existing relative isolation, because we can not foresee all the consequences of doing that. See the increase in mental health problems linked to the use of social networks for example. This, other issues like [1] and higher-level thinking like this very good talk on surveillance capitalism [2] makes me think that no, this is not "already handled and taken care of".
> you really so sure that China is, or is becoming one, while being so sure the West is not?
Nope, absolutely not. We need to watch both and the West has its fair share of issues, see [2] for one of the many examples.
However, I do think that China is closer : more outright lies from the government, concentration camps for Uiguhrs and muslims, press controlled and manipulated by the state, systemic censorship, disappearing journalists and whistle-blowers, etc.
You can find examples of this in the US (except for concentration camps I guess), but they will be rarer and more subtle, mostly because the system was designed to distribute power more evenly and minimize potential for harm. Which beautifully comes back to my first point: giving more power/communication tools to individuals should not be taken lightly.
> For me, I admire the Chinese transparency about what it is and technological efficiency. I believe such openness makes it easier for people to deal with and is the way forward long term. Whereas the covert harassment and secret tracking and "free press" propaganda in the West, under the guise of a "free and open society" I believe tips the scales of power less in the individual's favor, engages in needless deception, and is a more abusive aspect of the state-individual relationship than I think works.
I really see that point and myself I can not help but admire some of these aspects of China. However, systematic censorship of alternative views is one of the many other things China is not open about. The reason tracking is "secret" in the west is precisely because the individuals have more power, so saying it tips the scale doesn't really make sense. And because we have more power, we can work towards abolishing it. So if we think it's bad, we should. You aren't explaining why surveillance is good (see [2] on why it's bad), but you are essentially saying we should embrace it and it's not a big deal if we impose it on everyone.
> In my relationship with states I get privacy by what I choose to only think or feel. [..] What might be scary for me is if the entire world has one standard of acceptable ideas and acceptable behavior. I might feel restricted in that case because there'd be no country I could go to that was more conducive... so I think that any world government has to be widely tolerant of many things.
I encourage you to watch the german movie The Lives of Others (2006) for a closer look at what privacy and surveillance mean in an authoritarian state. You can not "change countries": there was a wall in Berlin where people were shot on sight.
You start by arguing for more respect and consciousness towards different cultures and ended by saying that it's okay for states to choose what you think and discriminate for thinking differently, because that is what the sentence "In my relationship with states I get privacy by what I choose to only think or feel" means. Restricting speech restricts what you can hear which restricts what you can think.
[1] https://medium.com/@monteiro/designs-lost-generation-ac72895...
> "Bobbi Duncan was “accidentally” outed by Facebook when she was a college freshman. When Bobbi got to college she joined a queer organization with a Facebook group page. When the chorus director added her to the group, a notification that she’d joined The Queer Chorus at UT-Austin was added to her feed. Where her parents saw it. Bobbi had very meticulously made her way through Facebook’s byzantine privacy settings to make sure nothing about her sexuality was visible to her parents. But unbeknownst to her (and the vast majority of their users), Facebook, which moves fast, had made a decision that group privacy settings should override personal privacy settings. Bobbi was disowned by her parents and later attempted suicide. They broke things."
I recommend the entire article, it's completely opposite to your point of view and makes a good case in favor of individual discernment followed by actions.
This is good but it's a bit too long for me to reply here, plus HN is saying my other account is posting too fast. I'd like to write something longer form addressing what you say because I think it's interesting. do you have a blog or an email that I could post it to you in reply? You can hit me up on WeChat/Gmail: cris7fe :) or just say here
yokto 1299 days ago [-]
I've sent you an email, let me if you didn't get it or reply here :) Looking forward to reading your thoughts
cool_hn 1301 days ago [-]
Given that many HN readers are likely responsible for this state of affairs, I look forward to this post appearing on http://n-gate.com, with its usual bitingly accurate commentary attached.
Constellarise 1301 days ago [-]
Regardless of the content I really don't like this website. I don't appreciate having to scroll so much and PgUp/PgDown don't move between the blocks smoothly.
non-entity 1300 days ago [-]
Disicigoekwbzb
thrownaway954 1301 days ago [-]
sorry to say, but in this day and age with "cancel culture", "over sensitive millennials" and "non-binary morons" you have to restrict yourself or you get attacked and down voted or booted off (as my account now will). there is no such thing as free speech or expressing yourself, if you view doesn't fit the politically correct climate of the day. Just yesterday i had to tell someone not to gaslight another commenter because they felt the other commenter was offending OP. You can't even say "he/she" or "black/white" anymore without being sculled by someone since it might be insensitive. Honestly, this is the wonderful word we live in now and the author wants just to not be afraid to speak our minds and take risks???
SoylentOrange 1301 days ago [-]
I wonder how historically true it is that people had an ability to voice unpopular opinions without social consequence.
My parents are from the Soviet Union, so that example comes to mind most readily. Obviously speech was heavily restricted and policed in that time and place; a relative was briefly thrown in jail for handing out pro-democracy leaflets in the late 80s. My wife's family is from China, another country with a history of policing speech. There is a wonderful book called "The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution" which talks about the negative consequences of seemingly innocuous speech during the Cultural Revolution.
Lest people think I only have examples from overseas, when I was growing up here, I found that criticizing religion, even lightly, was problematic. Organized religion was something of a sacred cow until perhaps the early 2000s. I have gay friends, and coming to their support in the late 90s and early 2000s was difficult, with the majority of opposition coming from the religious community.
After 2001, criticizing the war on terror lead many public figures to be deplatformed (or canceled in modern terms). An example of this is the MSNBC host Phil Donahue [1]. Some of you may be old enough to remember the "support the troops not the war" slogan to try to get around these issues, with mixed success.
Maybe folks who are older than me can compare the attitudes now with other historical periods, but I don’t believe it’s more difficult now to vocalize an unpopular opinion than it used to be.
I read history parts of civil rights movements in America. What I found was that any white who would support desegregation was ostracised and punished by whites.
ativzzz 1301 days ago [-]
Look, there has never been a part of history when you could be an unrestricted asshole and say whatever you want without consequences. Never. People have always been snowflakes. How about when people used to duel to the death over an insult? Your only solace is that before the internet and TV and mass communication, you could only be an asshole to your local community members.
Now, you have the power of being an unrestricted asshole to a larger audience than ever before. This, unsurprisingly, has even more consequences. In addition, this audience is more diverse than ever, with different opinions, backgrounds, upbringings, preferences, etc. Yes, just as always, there are people who are offended.
And just as always, you have to know your audience. Just like in the past, you wouldn't go to the local aristocrat and talk shit to them, you should know better than to go on Twitter and talk shit. Find your friend group, and say what you want with them. Like you always could. If you can't, find different friends.
People really underestimate how much power is given to them to have a near infinite audience on social media. But that power goes both ways.
thrownaway954 1301 days ago [-]
you're proving my point perfectly.
i didn't say anything about being an "unrestricted asshole", racist, insulting or attacking anyone deliberately. i simply stated that if you're not in line with the PC terms dejour of the week, you run the risk of being ostracized. you're not a snowflake if someone attacks you and you defend yourself. you have every right to.
however when someone calls you sir, cause you know you're a guy, and you jump down their throat cause they aren't recognizing your non-binary lifestyle of feeling like a girl that day, that's being a dumb ass and an example of how the world is today.
watwut 1301 days ago [-]
Following are deliberate insults: "over sensitive millennials" and "non-binary morons".
> you're not a snowflake if someone attacks you and you defend yourself. you have every right to.
I guess that is exactly what people do and you act shocked.
thrownaway954 1301 days ago [-]
those aren't deliberate insults, i'm describing exactly the type of people i encounter on a daily basis.
ativzzz 1301 days ago [-]
Sorry I didn't use my words properly. What I meant instead of 'unrestricted asshole' was more 'saying whatever you want without taking into account how people are going to react'.
So yes, when you speak, you have to speak according to the societal norms present at the time. Like we always have had to.
The difference being is that your audience is near infinite and it is near impossible to please everyone, unless you speak in a very deliberate and neutral manner.
Based on your tone and the implication of how you wrote out
> however when someone calls you sir, cause you know you're a guy, and you jump down their throat cause they aren't recognizing your non-binary lifestyle of feeling like a girl that day, that's being a dumb ass and an example of how the world is today.
I assume you don't speak in a deliberately neutral manner and your manner of writing is inflammatory, so you piss people off.
I might be jumping to conclusions here but so many comments I've read on HN that were asking "why is this getting downvoted? echo chamber, PC blahblah". No, the reality is they just come off as an asshole due to their style of writing posts. (exactly like your post that I'm replying to right now)
tjpnz 1301 days ago [-]
Can't help but be reminded of Justine Sacco’s infamous tweet. The joke a frankly terrible attempt at irony, but my read was that she had intended to poke fun at racists. Sacco not only lost her job over it but had to endure weeks of death threats and threats of rape. People of course moved on but I do recall one journalist describing what he saw when he interviewed her for his book on public shaming. A sad shell of a human being with emotional scarring she'll have to endure for the rest of her life. Data is only one part of the problem.
1301 days ago [-]
mola 1301 days ago [-]
Free speech is also saying you are a dick when you are acting like one, or does the buck stop when you are the one who get offended?
1301 days ago [-]
nowandlater 1300 days ago [-]
Fools names and fools faces are often seen in public places.. or something like that.
(It's linked at the bottom of this one, but I'm sure a lot of people don't get that far)
Loughla 1301 days ago [-]
That is my number one pissing point right now in higher education.
Every company has a predictive algorithm to use on students. Every startup that's stepping into the space is pushing the data and data scientists.
But they all have the same-old, usually decades old, baked in biases. AND they're not doing anything to address it!
Just because it's math doesn't mean it's not biased. I hate it more than anything professionally, right now.
quotemstr 1301 days ago [-]
> Just because it's math doesn't mean it's not biased.
When a model produces an unpalatable result, that doesn't mean it is biased. All these algorithmic fairness people are saying, once you peel back the layers of rhetorical obfuscation, is that we should make ML models lie. Lying helps nobody in the long run.
Loughla 1301 days ago [-]
>When a model produces an unpalatable result, that doesn't mean it is biased.
Absolutely, but there is no admission, from what I can tell, from ML or predictive [buzzword here] companies that bias is a thing, or even could be a thing in their systems.
>All these algorithmic fairness people are saying, once you peel back the layers of rhetorical obfuscation, is that we should make ML models lie. Lying helps nobody in the long run.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but that is not at all what I am saying as an 'algorithmic fairness' person. I am saying that we need to ensure there are strict oversights and controls on the building/execution of algorithms when making substantive decisions about human people.
For example: It's okay if an algorithm predicting student success says that all the minority students on my campus are at a higher risk of dropping out. That is a data point. Historically, minority students drop out at a higher rate. Sure. Not great, but it is factually true.
What is not okay is for the 'predictive analytics' company to sell their product in conjunction with a 'tracking' product that limits minority students' access to selective admissions programs simply because they are selective, more difficult, and, historically, have a higher percent of minority students who drop out.
I guess what I'm saying is that ML models shouldn't lie. But they also shouldn't be seen as the truth above all truths. Because they're not. They're just data, interpreted through the lens of whoever built the models.
Every human carries a bias, everyone. It's how we define ourselves as 'self' and others as 'other' at a basic level.
Therefore, everything we build, especially when it's meant to be intuitive, may carry those biases forward.
I'm only saying we need to be aware of that, acknowledge it, and ensure there are appropriate controls and oversight to ensure the biases aren't exasperated inappropriately.
BlueTemplar 1300 days ago [-]
What do you think about the second issue : the "blackboxing" ?
mola 1301 days ago [-]
Oh wow, this is so juvenile.
The problem with these ML models is that they are directly connected to a response, and because they use statistics and math they are simplistically perceived as truth.
They're not truth, they're are nothing more than models. The truth can fit a plethora of models. Ignoring human bias while training ML models, and then just saying that the model is truth is exactly the problem.
Thank you for demonstrating the issue so vividly.
quotemstr 1301 days ago [-]
> Oh wow, this is so juvenile.
Please try to elevate the debate. See [1]. You're at DH0 right now.
> They're not truth, they're are nothing more than models. The truth can fit a plethora of models.
Models receive past data and emit predictions. We can then see how well those predictions match future data. We call one model "better" than another model when that first models' predictions more closely match future data than the second model's. Not all models are equivalent. The ML fairness people want to make model predictions less accurate because they don't like what the predictions say. Prioritizing truth over pleasantness isn't juvenile: it's the opposite. The mark of maturity is the willingness to accept an unpleasant reality instead of denying it.
It takes years and years of training in advanced dialectic bullshit to get to the point where you can say, with a straight face, that math is morally wrong. It's utterly absurd to demand that we censor models and worsen their output to conform to some activist's idealized imagine of how the world should be. Only by letting models report the true facts of the world as it is can we optimize for human happiness.
mola 1301 days ago [-]
Math is a language for modelling things. It can be intrinsically correct, as in consistent, but that doesn't say anything about the model's actually validity.
Every choice we make is a moral choice. Once we're done modelling and use that model then we make a moral choice.
For example, If you believe that lowering the debt default rates is more important than the fairness to an individual.
Then you make a moral choice. Of you believe it is OK to not give loans to Blacks because there's a largish amount of Blacks defaulting on their loans thats a moral choice.
Further more, Enscribnng truth to models is just an age old human fallacy. The truth can somewhat fit plenty of models. None of the models are truth.
Loughla 1301 days ago [-]
It's not the math, that is wrong. The math is correct.
The inputs and assumptions made by the people selecting the math is the 'morally wrong' part.
Bias is real, like it or not. Your worldview, as a data scientist or programmer or whatever, impacts what you select as important factors in 'algorithm a'. Algorithm a then selects those factors for other people in the system, baking in your biases, but screening them behind math.
quotemstr 1301 days ago [-]
That's the motte. The bailey is that the ML fairness people use any inconvenient output of a model as prima facie evidence that the model inputs are tainted by bias --- then these activists demand that these inputs be adjusted so as to produce the outputs that please them. They've determined the conclusion they want to see beforehand. This attitude is the total opposite of truth seeking.
henriquez 1301 days ago [-]
But on the other hand, don’t you do the same thing with training? If the output of your model doesn’t match your expectations, do you treat it as the absolutely pure objective mathematical reality, xor do you adjust the training parameters until the output matches your expectations?
quotemstr 1301 days ago [-]
This article links at the bottom to similarly-styled piece about "mathwashing", the idea that it's morally wrong for an algorithm to notice true facts about reality. That idea is utter bunk, and so likely is "Social Cooling" as well. Both pushes are really about unelected activists trying to limit other people's technology to bring about their peculiar idea of Utopia.
In all human history, efforts to hold back the tide of technological progress have never worked. Instead of adopting a Luddite fear of data and math, we should use both for all useful ends as soon as possible.
tgb 1301 days ago [-]
Men commit more violent offenses than women. Should I, a man, be turned down for a job because of this despite never having committed a violent offense? No woman has ever won the US presidency, should we therefore divert funds away from female candidates because they are provably less likely to win? If after doing that for a century and no woman has yet to win, should we still continue to divert funds away from them? I hope the answers to these questions are obviously "no, we shouldn't." If data-driven decisions are equally problematic but hide it behind layers of apparently justifiable (and often opaque) mathematics, then we have a problem.
beaconstudios 1301 days ago [-]
the problem isn't necessarily with _accurate_ data and math, but with reductive statistics that paint with broad brushes. Statistics inherently remove nuance, which is fine when the nuance is unimportant to what you're measuring, but not when it's actually important.
The example about cancer doctors in TFA is perfect. "more deaths = worse doctor" is a poor metric, because advanced cases have higher deaths in general, leading to a disincentive to try to help people with advanced forms of cancer. That's a terribly perverse incentive, and one that should be avoided.
Fundamentally, a lot of this stuff comes down to a lack of nuance in metrics, leading to some nasty effects down wind.
anonytrary 1300 days ago [-]
You missed the point. The point is that you can be doing the wrong math on the wrong data, jumping to completely baseless and detrimental conclusions. You cannot judge the needs of the many by the actions of the few or vice versa.
JacobDotVI 1301 days ago [-]
>In China each adult citizen is getting a government mandated "social credit score". This represents how well behaved they are, and is based on crime records, what they say on social media, what they buy, and even the scores of their friends.
This really isn't all that different than what is happening elsewhere across the world today. Your Uber rider score represents your "social credit" for that service. Your Airbnb guest reviews impact if you will be allowed to rent a room. Each platform is putting social credit in place via crowd-sourced "trust"
EDIT: I don't mean to minimize China's human rights violations, but to posture that independently of central control many companies are implementing their own versions of these systems, which can have _some_ of the same effects in terms of losing access to services. Obviously one's Uber scores won't put you in jail / detainment camp and I was not intended to imply such.
istorical 1301 days ago [-]
It's extremely different. It's so so so so different.
The Chinese surveillance state is incredibly more massive and pervasive, the list of infractions includes incredibly more minor actions (and include political speech that is in anyway dissident), the consequences of a low score are so much more dire (unable to fly, travel, live in certain places, etc).
shadowgovt 1301 days ago [-]
It's a difference of degree and monopoly on violence.
... and even degree of monopoly on violence. Uber can do quite a bit of damage to a person by choosing to refuse service if someone needs to urgently be somewhere (or away from somewhere). Airbnb is controlling access to safe shelter. If Amazon grocery stores took off, having a bad Amazon account could deny a person access to food.
I don't think it would take more than a handful of gig-economy service corporations unifying under one umbrella of data-sharing for the average American to start experiencing something a bit similar to the Chinese experience of social score. For now, there's no incentive for them to do so.
hombre_fatal 1301 days ago [-]
Well, that's the price of abuse.
If you have an Uber or Airbnb score low enough to get banned from the platform, you're the problem and you'd have a very hard time arguing otherwise once you start revealing the reviews people have left you.
You're probably vomiting in Uber cars every weekend when you get blackout drunk and destroying property on Airbnb.
Maybe other people should know these things about you before they accidentally do business with you. Of course, once I think of actual implementation of such a thing, I only encounter showstoppers and ay, there's the rub. But the goal doesn't seem categorically wrong.
Though I also admit the inability to have a practical implementation that works is a good reason to condemn anything. I'm just radicalized by horrible ex-tenants and like to smile as I ponder the utopia where trashing my place echoes in their lives forever.
I don't disagree with anything you've said, but what happens when you apply that reasoning to a whole country? "Well, if you stopped being a shitty citizen, you could get the good train tickets." In the average case, Chinese citizens with low social scores actually are antisocial assholes, not dissidents trying to overthrow a corrupt government. So is Chinese social scoring not actually a bad idea?
It's like... If anyone's been to Disney World, they're familiar with what an all-encompassing experience that is. Now imagine Disney World ran 75% of Florida. And could bar you from the premises for violating its rules...
hombre_fatal 1301 days ago [-]
For sure, this is also one of those roads you can't go down in good hands because of how much it could be abused in the wrong hands (so, by any future administration for eternity).
For example, imagine if you couldn't buy plane tickets because you didn't sit through enough critical race theory white-guilty training.
shadowgovt 1301 days ago [-]
Don't threaten me with a good time. ;) I've attended plenty of that training; if there were Frequent Flyer miles attached, I'd be vacationing in Hawaii right now.
Chris2048 1301 days ago [-]
> Airbnb is controlling access to safe shelter
they can restrict access, but not control it, because Airbnb doesn't have a monopoly on safe shelter.
shadowgovt 1301 days ago [-]
It depends on circumstances. In some places and times, they really are the only practically-available option.
Fricken 1301 days ago [-]
It's the number associated with my bank account that dictates how much I can travel, where I can live, what kind of education I can get, and even whether I can eat. This is pervasive throughout modern civilization. China's social credit system is trivial in comparison.
hombre_fatal 1301 days ago [-]
While that might sound deep, that's more a measure of others' unwillingness to do things for you for free.
The charity of others isn't enough to fly you around the world and give you beachfront property and iPhone. They'll want something in return so long as they have other aspirations beyond serving you.
Fricken 1300 days ago [-]
It's not deep at all, I feel like I'm being way too obvious pointing out that all societies have systems in place for engineering the behavior of of it's members.
captainbland 1301 days ago [-]
It's a slower slide, but over time this information is centralised into a fewer and fewer large data brokers, what the scores means will become standardised across industries meaning eventually there will be no escape by going to competitors. This enables companies to start charging based on automatically generated risk profiles, some of which will end up being generated based on political preference (or proxies for it) Eventually this means that people with bad scores will be unable to afford certain things in the same way that they have trouble accessing credit. Credit scores are just the beginning.
For instance, imagine you are an airline. You have an issue to do with deportation critics disrupting flights when people are being forcibly deported on them. This happens fairly infrequently but costs you quite a lot of money every time this happens. So, 'logically', you decide to determine who is most likely to disrupt a flight and so through discriminatory thinking somebody decides that those with left-wing political leanings are more likely to disrupt a flight. They purchase this information on political leanings for each of their passengers and pass this cost onto those who fit the profile, entirely on the basis of their political beliefs.
It's a sort of insurance-ification of all pricing and permission which this kind of technology is increasingly enabling.
closeparen 1301 days ago [-]
They’re based on your behavior using that service, though, not your generalized loyalty to the state.
harterrt 1301 days ago [-]
This is drastically different than having a government mandated program. Airbnb and Uber are both are both opt-in and it's not all that difficult to get a fresh profile on these services.
thotsBgone 1301 days ago [-]
Though to be fair, the part of America which most resembles the Chinese government isn't the American government, but American corporations.
shortstuffsushi 1301 days ago [-]
This is also not new, this reminds me of the early days of eBay with user ratings impacting your ability to buy / sell goods (especially as a new account).
tokai 1301 days ago [-]
>elsewhere across the world
In the US you mean.
buzzerbetrayed 1301 days ago [-]
I'm not sure how you gathered that this is what they meant. Do people not review services outside of the US? (hint: they do)
Rendered at 08:02:33 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24627363&p=3
When you think privacy of in in the terms of 'social cooling', or consider things like China's 'social credit' system, I can't help be think we are much closer to the world depicted in the last season of Westworld than we might want to admit.
My dad is one of those old school guys who thinks law enforcement can do no wrong and nobody needs to hide anything unless they're doing something wrong. Even if that were true and I think it is true that many law enforcement personnel are trying to do good, that doesn't always mean the results will always reflect their intentions. When the sample size of facts is too small, as is often the case with mass collection, it's too easy for your sample to get mixed up with someone else's. Maybe your phone is the only other phone in the area when a murder is committed. That doesn't mean you did it, but it sure makes you look like the only suspect.
I was never able to gain an inch on his argument until I asked him why he has curtains on his living room window. I mean, it faces North, so there's no need to block intense sunlight, yet he closes them every night when he's sitting there reading a book or watching TV. Why? He's not doing anything illegal, yet he still doesn't want people watching him. He said he would not be ok with the Police standing at his window all night watching him. That's when he finally understood that digital privacy is not just for criminals, but for everyone who wants to exist in a peaceful state and not a police state.
I'm not doing anything wrong, but I still close the door when I take a dump. The idea that someone wanting privacy means it is nefarious or wrong is ridiculous.
In our culture we feel deep embarrassment if someone sees us using the toilet, but this is not universal across people and cultures, and honestly, it shouldn't be embarrassing. There's nothing inherently wrong with pooping. We irrationally feel embarrassment when we shouldn't have to.
This argument doesn't show any negative consequences of invasion of privacy. It's also not clear how it extrapolates to situations that don't involve toilets or nudity. If the problem is embarrassment, and people don't feel embarrassed that Facebook collects data, does that make it okay?
Obviously there are other arguments for privacy that do show potential harm. I find these more compelling.
It sounds more respectable if you call it an 'intuition pump'. Whether or not it is rational to want to defecate privately, this point may lead some fraction of those whose mind was previously made up to reconsider their position. In those cases, it can be the beginning of a conversation.
I'm not arguing, I'm just not sure what you mean.
Could we perhaps group together embarrassment, loss of dignity and shame and summarize the point as follows?
"Invasions of privacy cause psychological harm."
Otherwise your argument becomes "I don't understand what these things are or why people care about them, and therefore perhaps they don't matter."
And that's not a strong argument.
It's not possible to understand the parent comment without knowing what dignity is.
> Otherwise your argument becomes "I don't understand what these things are or why people care about them, and therefore perhaps they don't matter."
What argument? I literally said, "I'm not arguing, I'm just not sure what you mean." I was just asking for clarification. I haven't denied anything in the parent comment.
But that is precisely the rational reason. In a free society you want people to act freely. To be able to act freely it helps tremendously to not be under constant surveillance by authorities, powerful actors and/or personal and political enemies. If one happens to have the same cultural background or political ideas as all those on the other side and one is generally a careless nature it helps in not feeling threatened by that surveillance.
The new thing digital surveillance brought is the ability to automate and for search things that happened once. Where in communist Germany the state had to have a giant apparatus that would break into your flat and install microphones, have people constantly following you around and listening in on every word you said. The impact this has on a free exchange of ideas is quite obvious, isn't it? These things have become far less resource intensive in the age of the web.
And if you now say: "Yeah but they were communists" — that is the point. If you are hoping those in power will be respectful because your values (currently) align with theirs; or because your information is (currently) more useful to them when not disclosed to your enemies — then this is a very optimistic view of the world. But things can change, and not all have that sense of optimism.
Not having to think about whether somebody will knock your door with state police in a decade because of something you wrote online is the reason why privacy exist. Not having to censor yourself because you are afraid those fringe lunatics on the opposite political side will destroy your life is the reason why privacy exists. Not having to censor yourself because your violent husband reads everything you wrote is the reason why privacy exists.
So maybe you can read this as: Power that sees what you do can (and does) change how you act, even if they don't come after you. Not having them see you is a good way of not having to change.
> But that is precisely the rational reason.
I'm not following your reasoning here. You list several logical reasons why digital privacy is important (it protects us from nefarious governments, it protects us from violent spouses, etc.). What does this have to do with an irrational embarrassment over pooping?
Whether this fear is rational doesn't matter. Whether these intrusions are never actually carried out and always only remain a faint possibility, a story the actors make you believe doesn't matter.
John Oliver used a similar tactic when speaking about Edward Snowden and the Patrioct Act. Instead of framing it about rights, pricacy and stuff, he talkes about dick picks. It kinda worked? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEVlyP4_11M
But I don't think it's the strong argument in favour of privacy that we want to make, because:
1. We do give people privacy in the bathroom. The debate is over the data social media companies collect. If people aren't generally embarrassed that Facebook collects data about what they post on Facebook, how does it relate to being embarrassed to be seen on the toilet?
2. Do we always have to accommodate irrational feelings? What about people who are easily offended by things that things that most would consider non-offensive? Is it immoral for a child to dress as a clown on halloween given that some people have coulrophobia? If you're arguing with someone who believes law enforcement should have access to people's social media and you bring up that stuff posted on social media could be embarrassing, the obvious response is, "Well, too bad. Investigating crimes is more important."
(... not saying dumps are advanced noise, but this is on the right track. Don't hide the needle. Produce more haystack)
So instead of an ad blocker, we could have background bots in our browser visiting random urls and clicking on every ad in sight (of course it would need to mimic human UI input).
I wonder what affect that would have.
When an employer, for instance, is able to request data aggregation services for a break down about your entire life without or with forced consent from you, or able to monitor and analyze every step of yours during working hours, it's dehumanizing.
Similarly, it doesn't matter whether those with access to data regarding you have only good intentions. It may be pleasing to have a store know everything you like and need right in the moment, you still should be able to walk in and out (pseudo-)anonymously when you wish to.
Same with the state. We say not to talk to the police. In trials the determination what evidence can be submitted is always an important step. So why should the police, prosecution, intelligence agencies, or any other entity be able to access or collect data about you and evaluate it without due process?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
Sometimes I think that authors who see patterns and make reasonable but dire predictions about where society is going actually end up providing a game plan to career oppressors.
To answer your question, people aren't always seen as intrinsically valuable, nor their suffering meaningful. In the wrong context, corporations, congregations, and other populations are only valued for what they produce, like how cows are valued (and raised) for their milk and meat.
Cattle are products on a farm. They have purposes. A few bulls are left for breeding, the rest are gelded. Some cows are for milk. Others are fattened up as much as possible.
But all end up in the slaughterhouse. Anyone that steps out of line causes problems before that time may find themselves culled from the herd.
The purpose of the system is not to make cows happy, or meet cow needs. It's to produce as much economic product as possible.
And misleading. Privacy in private interactions (personal or closed groups) is basic human right. But in public interactions (public space or open groups) the concept of privacy is much more problematic. One can argue for less accountability for social progress, another for more accountability to weed-out bad actors.
Seems to me that using word 'privacy' for both of these different concepts is source of confusion. Perhaps we should limit term 'privacy' for private interactions and use some other (like 'non-accountability') for public ones.
I don't see what's so problematic. If someone is in public, they are exposed and obviously don't have any privacy. Same logic applies to data people publish on the internet. People can attempt to create some privacy for themselves in these contexts but it's not really a violation or invasion if some stranger shows up and witnesses things they weren't supposed to.
It's completely different from someone's house or computer. These are our spaces and we have complete control over them. So someone installing sensors such as microphones and cameras inside our own homes is a massive violation of our rights. Everybody understands this. It's offensive when the state does it even when warranted. So it is also not acceptable for mere corporations to turn on our microphones in order to listen to keywords or some other surveillance capitalism bullshit.
Rights to wear clothes. Rights to not speak to anyone they don't want to. Rights against unreasonable search. These are all privacy related, and while we give some up to be a part of society, we retain some as well. Looking at this as black and white (on either side) is an obstacle to finding a sustainable and constructive path forward.
My local Facebook group seethes with an angry discussion just below threats of actual violence - and the actual violence was on display only a short time ago when Back The Blue physically assaulted a black lives matter demonstration (in a smallish city where "BLM" is just earnest liberals as you'd expect). And the miscreants were readily identifiable by Facebook (which hurt their business if nothing else but still basically weren't all that bothered by the situation).
Another thing about the heated local-group arguments is that few people have a good idea how unprivate their situation really is. The paranoia of Bill Gates "microchipping" people is a cartoonish example but there's a vast group people very concerned with privacy but having close to no understanding of what it actually involves (or how much they don't have).
If anything, the noxious effect of massive collection is most evidenced by micro-marketing of a variety of crazed ideas to those most susceptible to them - and employers and landlords being able to harass their own employees for particular things they object to (but lets a lot of things through, and business owners have less to worry about).
1) social cooling is a long-term, slow-burn, bring-pot-to-boil-so-slowly-the-frogs-don't-notice problem. Pointing out some social heat to discredit it is analogous to people discrediting global warming because they've experienced an unseasonable cold snap in their town.
2) By your own description, there are knowledge gaps inside the "social fire" crowd - they don't understand (potential, future) consequences like housing discrimination, work prospects, etc. I don't think it will take more than one generation for these realities to become common knowledge.
3) Finally, people who consider themselves hopelessly marginalized will be susceptible to 'social fire'. People who don't have anything to lose are prone to this (eg, what factors go into someone's decision to get on board with looting?). More solidly situated members of the public, with reputations (salaries, ongoing business concerns, etc) at stake, are likely to be more careful.
So of course we have something to hide.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/reports/reduced-d...
In contrast, if you have full information, you can construct pricing schemes that fully extract all surplus from the consumer. You can, in essence, get higher prices without losing customers. Many pricing schemes today are trying to use more information to approximate that situation (for example auctions, anything with subscriptions, fixed components, packages etc.). It is why firms like Amazon and Google hire a lot of Economics PhDs and Game Theorists. You will also notice that many products are pushing toward such pricing models. This is not by accident.
So, your contention is half right and half wrong. In the greater scheme of things, full information is often (but not always) efficient for total welfare. However, in such situation total welfare also may accrue entirely to firms. That means higher profits, first, and higher costs for the consumer second.
In effect, you will pay more if you are more known.
It then depends on your faith in the fairness of the ownership and distributional properties of our capitalist systems, as well as the efficiency of the markets in question (e.g. competition), whether the increased profits are eventually redistributed to you, the consumer.
It seems to me that in many of the markets in question, even the description of oligopoly would be rather charitable. In that case, latter parts of your post do not seem likely.
Edit: Since you asked for the principles. The first iteration of this you may come across is called price discrimination. At that stage, it's not about information, but you can make that link in your head quite easily: The ability to set different prices, depends of course crucially on what you know.
Next, you may hear about auctions or contract theory, where such problems are tackled explicitly. Switching the roles, you may hear about principal agent problems, where a similar (really the same thing) occurs. For full generality, you may want to read into Mechanism Design. Tillman Borgers has a great book which used to be available free as PDF and you can probably still find it. If you are interested in questions such as: "What can we say generally about any sort of sales contract", then this is a good place to start. Needs some math though.
My dad has a Ph.D in Econ from an Ivy League institution, and lives near-ish to a few FAANGs. He's retired but gets headhunter emails from them consistently.
You may need a good life on display rather than just an absence of bad things.
We were 'almost' there 20 years ago. We are firmly near Westworld (everything outside of androids).
Within the next 10 years, and maybe much sooner, the vast majority of content on FB/Twitter/Reddit/LinkedIn will be completely fake. The "people" on those networks will be fake as well. Sure there are bots today, but they're not nearly as good as what I'm talking about, and they don't exist at the same scale. Once that happens, the value of those networks will rapidly deteriorate as people will seek out more authentic experiences with real people.
IMO, there's a multibillion dollar company waiting to be founded to provide authenticity verification services for humans online.
A western reporter travelled to the other side of the iron curtain once and was doing what he thought would be an easy west-is-great gotcha-style interview. He asked someone over there, "How do you even know what's going on in your country if your media is so tightly controlled?" Think Chernobyl-levels of tight-lipped ministry-of-information-approved newspapers.
The easterner replied, "Oh, we're better informed than you guys. You see, the difference is we know what we're reading is all propaganda, so we try to piece together the truth from all the sources and from what isn't said. You in the west don't realize you're reading propaganda."
I've been thinking about this more and more the last few years seeing how media bubbles have polarized, fragmented, and destabilized everyone and everything. God help us when cheap ubiquitous deepfakes industrialize the dissemination of perfectly-tailored engineered narratives.
I’ve been wondering whether teachers who grew up on the other side of the curtain put a similar emphasis on the topic of propaganda, especially after social media uncovered lots of gullibility in the general public and a for me very difficult-to-understand trust in anything as long as it is written down somewhere, often not even looking at the source. Political effects of eastern german brain drain aside, one important difference between people in the former western and eastern parts of Germany up until today is how much they trust media and institutions like the church.
The level of control/conformity on canonical Western media was such that, for most topics of daily news, thinking about the bias of the reporter was not a first-order concern.
For some topics (let's say, hot-button US-vs-USSR things, or race issues in the US), the bias of the source was of course important, anywhere.
But for, say, reporting inflation, unemployment, or the wheat harvest, whether NBC news or the Washington Post was biased wasn't critical in the same way it would have been in the USSR.
Basically, my argument is that the difference in degree is still a worthwhile difference.
The real difference is that those in the east were predisposed to be suspicious, whereas in the west that disposition or curiousity is not a thing.
But it's in Pepsi's and Coke's best interest to have you think it's only those two.
As to reporting unemployment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24364947
The cliche "if you're not paying for it, you're the product" is just the tech nerd's version of "if you don't know who the fish at the table is, you're the fish."
Folks behind the iron curtain got used to that mentality over a few decades in a time when information flowed slowly through newspapers, radio, and early TV... we're now being forced to reckon with these tricks over the course of a few years while moving at the speed of industrialized data collection, microtargeting, and engineered dopamine bursts that maximize engagement.
People living in the cold war era were at least mentally inoculated against these tricks -- in the US we've had no preparation for it. The ease with which we've turned against each other for the easy popcorn comfort of the conspiracy theory or outrage du jour is mind boggling.
It doesn’t seem like people there are obviously better at media consumption, let alone inoculated?
Presiding over steadily improving living standards tends to give leaders staying power in every country. Putin was there for Russia's bounceback from the 90s.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
Universal cynicism and nihilism may function that way. But that was not the attitude of the person in the description. So I am not sure how that is relevant?
I wish those skills were teachable without recreating the full environment...
I'm skeptical that this can be done effectively
"If you agree with it, it's truth. If you don't agree, it's propaganda. Pretend that it is all propaganda. See what happens on your analysis reports."
Mad magazine used to run "reading between the lines" pieces.
[1] A while ago I learned The Game of Rat and Dragon is accurate insofar as felines not only have better reflexes than ours, they're among the best.
You know, where they have those opinion pieces always with the same 6 photos (but a different name & occupation) each spouting something humorous?
and curiously there is some truth at the hidden within each onion article.
On the flip side, successful startups that aren't full social but do require some authenticity verification have already been proven: nextdoor and blind, for example
I think the biggest issue is scaling to a facebook-style, reddit-style, or twitter-style "full-world" social network implies colliding people who have no other relationship or interaction but are linked through a topic or shared interest
And, in my opinion, when you hit a certain level of scale, the verification almost becomes pointless: there's enough loud angry and troll people out there that I dont think it matters if they're verified or not. You can't moderate away toxicity in discussions that include literally a million participants.
I think you need both verification and some way to keep all the users' subnetworks small enough that it isn't toxic or chilling. But then you lose that addictive feed of endless content that links people to reddit or Facebook or Instagram. Tough problem
In my opinion HN is the gold-standard of online communities and it's being managed pretty well despite it scaling to what it is right now.
I wonder more leanings from HN (specially on the moderation front) can be applied to newer social platforms.
We only got this problem with users trying to do house cleaning. Most communities are completely fine without authentication, so it certainly isn't necessary.
... Which is a good thing. (for the users, at least)
can add levels.fyi to that list as they now use actual offer letters to build their data set
If I can interact with bots that emulate humans with such a degree of realism, what do I care? You could be a bot, the whole of HN can be bots, I don't really care who wrote the text if I can get something from it, I mean I don't have any idea who you are and don't even read usernames when reading posts here on HN.
At its core this seems like a moderation issue, if someone writes bots that just post low quality nonsense, ban them, but if bots are just wrong or not super eloquent, I can point you to reddit and twitter right now and you can see a lot of those low quality nonsense, all posted by actual humans. In fact you can go outside and speak to real people and most of it is nonsense (me included).
It seems like crowd-sourced moderation is probably the only thing that will work at scale. I've always wondered why Reddit doesn't rank comments by default according to someone's overall reputation inside of a subreddit and then by the relative merits of the comment on a particular subject. Getting the weighting right would be hard, but it seems like that would be the best way to dissuade low quality comments and outright trolling.
A relevant, if flip solution to the 'bot' issue[0].
[0]https://xkcd.com/810/
Any kind of widely used identity/authentication system would need to be a protocol and not a product of a for-profit corporation. Businesses take on great risks if they use another corporation's products as part of their core operations as that product owner can change the terms of service at any time and pull the rug out from under them. A protocol is necessarily neutral so everyone can use it without risk in the same way they use HTTP.
For identity protocols I think BrightID (https://www.brightid.org/) is becoming more established and works pretty well.
Will they? People interact with these things because they are giving the brain what it wants, not what it might need. How many people would flock to a verified minimal bias news site? How many people would embrace so many hard truths and throw off their comforting lies? How many people could even admit to themselves they were being lied to and had formed their identity around those lies?
Do people want authentic now? The evidence says no.
That said, there are clearly some social networks where you absolutely want to verify authenticity. Take for example, dating websites. Fake profiles _TODAY_ are a huge problem for those sites. If you have too many fake profiles, then paying users just log off and never come back. Same for LinkedIn. How many recruiters are going to pay for access to that network if 30% of the profiles are fake?
The US government does authentication in real life via social security numbers. Of course, they are not very secure: a government-operated SSO or auth API for third-party applications would be a logical next step.
It would guarantee uniqueness and authenticity of users. Even better, if this were an inter-governmental program, it would deter government meddling: a state issuing too many tokens for fake accounts would arouse suspicion.
I think you have completely misread the situation. The "fakification" of social media is already happening. Much if not most engagement is already driven by bots or by fabricated "influencers" and more people are using these platforms more often, not less.
I think the critical threshold for most people will be when bots start impersonating people they know in person. At that point, the value of the social networks will evaporate.
I don't share your optimism. Significant portions of the population believe the Earth is 6000 years old or is flat. Not sure why their critical thinking skills would suddenly improve at an opportune time.
Not so sure. I'd rather wage that people won't really care about whether they interact with real humans or not. Why would it matter? It's not rare for people to relate and feel emotions for virtual characters in video games - even though they are perfectly aware it's all fake! The same can be said for movies, TV shows. You know it's fake, yet you watch and enjoy. I'm not sure why it would be ANY different for social networks which are basically just another form of entertainment.
Ironically accounts with Twitter's blue check mark are often the accounts most likely to be managed by a social media manager.
Of course, this also assists in Social Cooling, since controversial statements act a lot like totally false ones in the public eye.
Now that's authenticity verification.
It's why politics is full of goons. Who in their right mind would go into that arena, to do good, when the risks are so high, the exposure so great, the hatred so guaranteed? Just the wrong people willing to take the risk.
On the Internet, those same people are completely imperceptible.
Maybe flat earth isn't the best example, but you know, I don't want to looks like I'm opposed to POPULAR_OPINION_ONLINE lol
Among members of my team, I have far and away the most moderate opinions on Docker. I'm pretty sure that this is largely because I'm also the one tasked with maintaining what infrastructure we have that's based on Docker. So my opinions are largely driven by first-hand experience, whereas my colleagues' opinions are largely driven by things they read on the Internet.
Is there any reason to think this is the case? In my experience, in-person disagreements over 'big things' (be they politics or philosophy) either end in bitter disagreement, or what appears to be a compromise but actually isn't (because one or both parties do not wish to talk about the topic any more, before things get worse).
> However if one side of the discussion is self-censoring, then both sides will tend to develop extreme opinions without any means to tamper them.
This assumes that most disagreements are resolved when there is a difference of opinion. Personally, I rarely change my opinion after speaking to someone, and I instead change it when I do my own reading around topics. The fact is that it's awkward to ask 'what's your source for that?' in a conversation between friends. Either one or both parties don't care enough to provide a source, or it's impractical (such as at a dinner party).
To surmise, I'm questioning whether mere in-person disagreement really does tamper the essence of those extreme opinions, not merely the appearance presented to that particular conversation partner.
Likewise. But I wasn't saying that's not possible, I was saying that I'm not convinced many people change their opinions over the course of such conversations. Being civil is important, but the question was whether civil debate among people who know each other in person results in more reasonable opinions, or compromises.
It's obviously better than online conversations. But to what extent? I don't think GP made a sufficiently convincing case.
The idea of “right” and “wrong” views is flawed and to set out with the objective of persuading the other to your view is a mistake. Getting them to understand you view, whilst you get to understand theirs, is a better objective. You can’t change the world if you don’t understand it.
It is of course extremely difficult to have this kind of conversation online especially in short form.
And I don't see any chilling effect, other than "fuck that, I'm not gonna follow Facebook/twitter anymore"
They're not writing anything, but they're not consuming it. Now if so called journalists would stay off twitter/facebook, the problem will be solved. Because it's not a chilling effect if the entire aparatus is irrelevant.
My theory is that this is why Full Name Required comments fields and also Facebook is way uglier than pseudonymous forums like HN and Ars Technica.
One conspiracy is certainly that the perspective of flat-earthers matters and should be addressed in any way. Same, with anti-vaxxers. We had vaccination quotas of 96% and as soon as people wanted to force others to vaccinate, it dropped considerably. Reactionary? Perhaps, but perfectly understandable.
The less certain people censor themselves. And the more other kinds of people censor themselves. There seems to be widespread colloquial agreement that those who don't censor themselves are usually more extreme in their views, more confident in their truthiness, and often more mistaken about basic verifiable facts.
This is very much a question of signal-to-noise ratio.
Sadly, I think this is par for the course, and often those "crazy" things are accepted by a large enough part of society that the cooling effect is very low.
Yes. For example, very few people in SV can openly say they are going to vote for Trump.
> the larger the audience and concurrency of engagement, the less people censor the them selves
Yes, people don't censor themselves when they are in majority. For example, those who live in SV, and support gay marriage and BLM, they can throw insults without repercussions.
The fun fact about the word "bigotry" is that people who use "bigotry" as insults are very often bigots themselves.
I'm sorry for not expressing clearly. People want freedom more than respect. In particular, freedom to express support of Trump.
> If you want respect don't admit to being prejudiced against the way people are born.
I'm sorry, I don't see a connection between your comment and parent comment.
It is somewhat similar (but to lesser degree of course) to China: there’s no law prohibiting talking about Tiananmen Square, but you better not do it.
Yes it is; that's (most of) what "freedom" means. By your logic, if I would shoot you if you leave your house, then you would still be free to leave your house, 'just' not from the consequences.
Edit, a more proximate example: if the ministry of love will kindnap and torture you for criticising the government, your logic would hold that this does not violate freedom of speech, so long as they do not preemptivly prevent such criticism.
This phrase should be an example of Emperors New Clothes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech
Of course it is trivially correct for the most part because people have opinions, but the concept of freedom of speech directly addresses this.
> Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation
You don't even need to read more than 200 words and people using this phrase seem overly interested in the retaliation part through social excommunication. Bigotry in its original form.
That's something of a misnomer. In the case where the government (as in China) will visit consequences upon you for your speech limits freedom.
But others using their speech to express their displeasure with your speech does not.
Do you see how that works? If your peers disagree with you and express that, it's not limiting freedom, it's giving the same freedom to everyone.
I do believe that it's inappropriate (note the word I use here, as it has a specific meaning and implication) to target someone's professional status for a real or perceived disagreement (assuming that those disagreements are not relevant to the target's professional duties).
That doesn't make it illegal, just petty, vindictive and in bad faith. None of which limits anyone's freedom to express themselves.
There's a big difference between legality and social norms. Just because it's legal to do something, doesn't mean it's a good idea.
This whole dichotomy is just stupid and abused because of historic American politics, the word has lost all meaning.
What actually happens is that when you talk about it, you lose your job, etc. Rarely does the government step in. Which, and correct me if I'm wrong, sounds like what you're advocating as "free speech".
The Great Firewall and Social Credit system are both run by the government and definitely penalize this behavior.
Of course there's no law explicitly saying "you can't talk about Tiananmen Square" because that law would be talking about Tiananmen Square which is the opposite of what they want.
But people don't talk about it. It's enforced socially. That's my point. You don't talk about Tiananmen Square, you don't gawk at Falun Gong protesters, etc. Even many Chinese expats act like this. It's just something people know not to do because they don't want to be seen as a bad person and lose friends, jobs, and so on.
That happens completely outside the government's influence.
Not treating people with respect, regardless of their views, is also bigotry.
Nobody cares about your respect.
But please don't bully those who disagree with you.
I try to respect people enough to not tell them what "good" or "bad" must mean for them.
Then I'm sorry but that makes you a bigot, please don't spread your bigotry to others by making broad generalizations about entire groups or unilaterally deciding and trying to build consensus that their decisions are "bad".
Wait until you read about the whole "free will" issue.
This is a lie. 100% debunked lie. https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/trump-has-condemned-white-...
As far as women, framing Trump as a big meanie who says mean words totally ignores what he and his administration have actually done for women in the aggregate.
> Our nation has created more than 7 million jobs since the 2016 election — and women have filled over half, or more than 4 million, of those vacancies
> The unemployment rate for women stands at a minuscule 3.2%, and last September reached its lowest level since 1953
> And as the unemployment rate has declined, so too did the number of women in poverty, decreasing by 1.5 million in President Trump’s first two years in office
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/02/29/has_tr...!
The victims of sex trafficking are primarily women and children
> Worldwide, there are 40.3 million victims, with 75% women and girls and 25% children, according to The International Labour Organization
> Trump signed the Abolish Human Trafficking Act, which strengthens programs supporting survivors and resources for combating modern slavery
> [Trump] signed the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act which tightens criteria for whether countries are meeting standards for eliminating trafficking
> Trump also signed the Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Prevention and Protection Reauthorization Act, authorizing $430 million to fight sex and labor trafficking, as well as the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which establishes “new prevention, prosecution, and collaboration initiative to bring human traffickers to justice.”
> since President Trump took office in January 2017, there have been nearly 12,470 arrests for human trafficking, according to arrest records compiled by investigative journalist Corey Lynn, and over 9130 victims rescued. Compare that to the 525 arrested in Barack Obama’s last year in office
http://www.dienekesplace.com/2019/07/28/the-number-of-human-...
The issue is my "real self" is uninterested in participating in these networks, even if to create a fake persona.
Maybe it could be automated, or outsourced?
https://www.cloakingcompany.com
It's a fictitious company that helps you do exactly this. And while it's fiction, the tool actually does work.
Although as time passes, it seems maybe it should be real...
>You can just use the tool for free.
So can you actually use it or not? If you can use it, then I would say it is a real service in any sense of "real service" I can think of.
testimonials for cloakingcompany.com: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24328764
I have no problem accessing a $1.5 million mortgage at 2.875%, getting prescribed drugs, or immigration beyond whatever is inherently hard about the system.
The best way is still the real information. The hard stuff in the real world. What you do online does nothing.
Except maybe the Tinder thing. Most dating apps align your attractiveness with the attractiveness of potential targets. That's to be expected.
The way I see it is "Information wants to be free".
...It says a lot that all of your examples are from your own life. There are counter examples abounding that just aren't affecting you (to your knowledge), such as those stated in TFA, or CA, or Brexit etc.
Do you think these data brokers are selling our info for billions to rubes? Are insurance companies known for their gullibility? Are sale of lists of rape victims to 'whoever has money' A-OK, because you are not being personally affected?
... These trends are worsening. People aren't spending more and more on data that has "no bearing on anything". That it's invisible to you makes it worse.
And societally it's not okay to create a complete nightmare for like 5% of people. So I totally get it.
Just that if you live in the First World and live a normative interface (my drug use doesn't leak into the professional environment, my illegal imports are on the quiet) you can get away with a lot.
I mean identities that span across several networks and include emails, aged cookies, fake fingeprint generator, etc
All citizens who lie about being cat owning church going knitting enthusiasts — regardless as to whether it was to get a better rate on their next car lease, or not — will be incarcerated.
This may be reduced to a small fine (and denouncement) if you forgo your right to the wasteful scrutiny of a public trial.
Glory to Arstotska
Consider that the loan- or job-"machines" are collecting intelligence from social networks to evaluate the person -- in addition to loan history and previous job performance. Now if you can present "yourself" to this machines in a conformal way, you don't need to fear negative repercussions on shitposts you did. While you can still be authentic in private or under pseudonyms.
Of course, you will still get categorized by the bank transactions you make in your real name. Same goes for your performance reviews on previous jobs. It is just a matter of tricking these other forms of automated social control into a higher rating bound to your name.
-----
I find it fascinating that philosophers like Baudrillard and Deleuze were able to think and warn about these issues more than 40 years ago when none of this was even remotely on the horizon:
See also Deleuzes "Societies of Control":
https://cidadeinseguranca.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/deleuz...
and:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337844512_Societies...
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacrum
I re-read Deleuze's three-page paper every year. It really describes things well.
It definitely does, and he is scarily accurate in his analysis. I just re-read it myself, and stumbled over this part, which I certainly not anticipated in this form a few years back:
> For the hospital system: the new medicine "without doctor or patient" that singles out potentially sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation -- as they say -- but substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code of a "dividual" material to be controlled.
This is certainly an accurate description of the control mechanisms various states have put into place in the form of apps that enforce selective quarantine restrictions.
The socialcooling website really a great project! Important content presented concise and on-point, thank you for doing this!
Then doesn't this discount the threat being posed by the "Social Cooling" theory? If social media activity doesn't matter "when it comes down to real transactions" shouldn't we be less worried?
I think the answer is somewhere in the middle. Obviously you can't "social media fake" your way into a mortgage (I hope) but it may stop you from getting a job or being elected to office.
> but it may stop you from getting a job or being elected to office.
This is more of the problem - the social impact eventually leads to financial impact.
Advertising is the area in which the most persona research and targeting is implemented. I suspect the reason no one is trying to fake online personas is because it would only have noticeable impact on what ads you see.
If you want to have a private conversaion, social media doesn't seem to be a good vehicle for it. Much like airing your dirty laundry in the town square has been considered bad etiquette, airing personal greivances on the internet seems to be in poor taste.
It must be noted that manners never arise sponaniously in culture, but becuase people fear the consequences of breaching etiquette. I for one welcome the return of politeness to society.
/But/, and there's always a but, I do think the trend towards shutting people down who you don't agree with is terrible. Pragmatic debate seems impossible online, and let's face it, that's how we're all communicating now. When there is the risk of social backlash affecting your livelihood, you'll keep your ideas and opinions to yourself, even if they could be useful to society.
I mean, anyone who thinks the ideals of today are without flaw, just wait til the year 2100 when they'll be seen as backwards.
The whole entire notion of a credit history, credit reporting agencies, and the idea of my personal information being out there and out of my control sounds so weird.
> I do think the trend towards shutting people down who you don't agree with is terrible.
I think the more considered and closer one's speech is to factual, the harder it is to generate outrage. I think a cooling trend pushes people in that direction when composing their speech. I think this is a good thing.
I don't think ideals are ever without flaw. The important question is how do we live together when we know that we disagree and will not ever all agree?
Sadly that's not the case since there is the phenomena of canceling people over what are called "hate facts".
Often, the opposite is the case. Having the "wrong" opinion is seen as bad. But having the "wrong" opinion, while also having a very strong argument for it being the correct opinion, is certainly much more outrageous.
Slightly tangental comment: There are certain statistics (namely relating to the fact that people who are black [~13.4% of the US population] are responsible for ~55% of homicide in the US) that are widely auto-censored on reddit. Sure, it may simply be a fact that that is what the statistic is, but reddit (or, at least, several of the largest subreddits) doesn't care that it is pure fact. Even mentioning the statistic is grounds for auto-removal of your comment.
I'll run an experiment to see find the exact extent of the above claimed censorship on reddit, using the account /u/Ender_killed_You. ====================================
Attempt one:
- Result: instant auto-removal
- Subreddit: /r/askreddit
- Comment:
>This is something I just can't wrap my head around: Did you know that according to FBI statistics, black Americans, despite making up only 13% of the population, are responsible for 56% of homicides in the US?[1]
----------------------------------------
Attempt two:
- Result: Instant auto-removal
- Subreddit: /r/news
- Comment:
>This is something I just can't wrap my head around: Did you know that according to FBI statistics, black Americans, despite making up only 13% of the population, are responsible for 56% of homicides in the US?[2]
----------------------------------------
//I'm now going to post a normal comment, without any illegal statistics included, to see if the removals are to do with something other than the content of the comments.
-----------------------------------------
Attempt three:
- Result: No removal
- Subreddit: /r/pics
- Comment:
>This is really clever! It's cool that at least some people are so into democracy in the USA :) Nothing better than well-informed voters democratically deciding who should be their next leader! [3]
-----------------------------------------------
//Next I will post a nice(i.e., statistic-free) comment on /r/askreddit to see if it is removed there
------------------------------------------------
Attempt four:
- Result: No removal
- Subreddit: /r/askreddit
- Comment:
>I shall help both, granting each army supernatural powers. Two armies with super-strength and super-speed abilities fighting each other would be an exciting watch.[4]
------------------------------------------------
//So, it has been shown that /r/askreddit and /r/news have been set up to auto censor this statistic. What remains to be shown is the extent to which this censorship is implemented. Is it on all the largest subreddits? On all subreddits by default? etc. etc. My next comment will be on a minor subreddit.
--------------------------------------------------
Attempt five:
- Result: no removal
- Subreddit: /r/Galaxy_S20
- Comment:
>Hello, please don't mind this comment, I'm simply running an experiment about censorship on reddit.
Did you know that black Americans (who make up just 13.4% of the population) are, nonetheless, responsible for 56% of homicides?[5]
-------------------------------------------------
//Interesting. On the minor subreddit the comment is not removed. I'm going to wrap up the experiment here, for now. Make of it what you will!
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/j1nl5r/what_abso...
[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/j20au2/us_intelligenc...
[3]https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/j237gx/and_when_you_a...
[4]https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/j20dun/two_armie...
[5]https://www.reddit.com/r/Galaxy_S20/comments/j1x7vd/samsung_...
One of the reasons touting that statistic might get an auto-remove is because it is in itself deceptive, or at least can be in the inferences many people make from it.
Seeing that statistic might make people think that black people are inherently violent, that there is something about black people that make them commit more homicides. the actual reason that many people do not lift from seeing that statistic on its own, is that homicides and violence are directly linked to poverty.
Then, someone who may be uneducated on the matter might believe that black people are simply both poor and violent, which would completely discount generations of systemic oppression targeted toward minorities and black people specifically which have directly led to their higher poverty rates.
First, it's a fact that black Americans are over-policed and over-prosecuted compared to white Americans. It is reasonable to believe that the conviction rates are skewed.
Second, there is the nasty business of the phrasing "...responsible for...". It is a reasonable perspective to have that if black Americans engage in more violence, it is because they have been subjected to more violence and deprived of opportunity. And that, ultimately, is in many cases, the responsibility of white Americans.
And then, sometimes people just commit murder, regardless of race.
Without the context of a fully-rendered explicit argument, the implied argument in that statement seems to be one of some kind of innate racial disposition. Which people should rightly reject, if not censor. As noted, the "I'm simply running a test" comment was not censored. So perhaps it isn't the data point that is censored, but the implied argument that you seem to be making.
I understand that it can be frustrating to have a 'fact' censored, especially if your intent is to have a productive discussion about a difficult topic. However, as laid out above, that 'fact' is not as simple as your test makes it out to be. It is a statement derived from statistical data that was collected by a government agency. If you cited it as such, and left out the language connecting moral responsibility with a racial group, it would be a more truthful and objective representation of fact, and might not be censored the same way. The test seems to loosely support this, and actually indicates the censorship being applied on reddit is actually quite effective.
Edit: On a related note, it is interesting how guarded I feel even replying to something like this. It's as if I want not to even be part of such a conversation publicly for fear of algorithmic misinterpretation of my meaning. I assume others feel this way, too, based on the OP. That's not the world any of us want to live in. It's not so much I mind publicly published information being collected and analyzed, but that I fear it being utilized in some grand corporate conspiracy. Perhaps we should legislate not against information collection and analysis, but antisocial behavior analysis conspiracies.
I disagree that this is a reasonable perspective at all. Adult people are wholy responsible for their actions. This fundemental fact underpins our whole society.
I would say that this statistic is primarily used to explain disproportionate encounters with (and subsequently death at the hands of) police. It's important to note that black people are also massively overrepresented as victims of violent crime. This suggests that black communities are generally more violent and therefore more likely to be policed. This fact along with others (like the behaviours of majority black police departments) can be used to construct in good faith a strong argument that there is no epidemic of police racism. This argument is not very popular, so it seems to get censored.
You say that is solely fault of the individual, but then say that it "suggests that communities are generally more violent and therefore more likely to be policed". So, if it is the fault of each black individual, as you claim is the underpinning of society, why are black communities being more policed?
>This fact along with others (like the behaviours of majority black police departments) can be used to construct in good faith a strong argument that there is no epidemic of police racism.
Being this the case, wherein lies the issue: the black community or the police institution that trains its members to be more aggressive and fearful of black communities? Keep in mind that only one of the two is in fact an institution funded by the public that undergoes training.
The biggest issue with these kinds of arguments is that it does not take in consideration that black communities are marginalized and target of harassment. This is institutionalized in the sense that the training the harassing people receive teaches them to harass and keeps telling them that they will get killed otherwise. This is not present only in the police, but in other facets of society as well. Look at how many videos of black americans being followed by security in malls and store there are on social media. This shows a pattern that keeps happening, and in unfortunately in many situations escalate to injury or death.
Because effective policing means distributing police resources according to demand?
> police institution that trains its members to be more aggressive and fearful of black communities?
It seems perfectly reasonable to be more fearful when going into a more dangerous area. I don't see any evidence that police are somehow less aggressive or fearful when going into areas dominated by violent gangs with other skin colours. Can you point to some official training doctrine that tells police to be fearful of black people? I'm quite sure that has been illegal for a long time.
Slavery was real. Racism was and is real. Inter-generational effects from these forces are real. In all racial groups, lack of opportunity with the legal economy increases engagement with illegal economies. Do you agree?
The statistic is used to explain and place blame upon black Americans for their own deaths at the hands of law enforcement, and saying that it merely "explains" tries to conceal the opinionated nature of that statement with an aura of objectivity.
It is very convenient and clean to ignore recent history and talk about individual responsibility, while taking no individual responsibility for the unequal treatment of blacks that you support with such arguments. By simply citing that statistic while failing entirely to address the obvious and very recent (very present) endemic racism and unequal treatment of black Americans, and placing the blame squarely on their collective shoulders, the only logical conclusion can be that there is something innate about people of that race that leads them to violence, which is objectionable, racist, and has no place in reasonable discourse. There is nothing "good faith" about such an argument.
You will go so far to say that black communities are more violent, but you shy away from saying why you think that is. You will cite a statistic that makes them sound guilty without acknowledging the factors that lead to it being true.
"Soldiers are murderers. 95% of soldiers involved in WWII killed people." Generally, this is true. But we choose not to view it that way.
A statement is not a statistic. A statement includes a statistic. A statement is an analysis, and the way you choose to analyze some data has ethical implications.
This is true - this is a value, not a fact. It is a value however that underpins our legal system and therefore our society. The idea that we assign moral agency and total responsbility for action to capable adult individuals who take those actions.
> The statistic is used to explain and place blame upon black Americans for their own deaths at the hands of law enforcement
That's not what any resonalbe interpretation of what I wrote reads. To elaborate, we can assume that 1/E police encouters (E) will result in a death. Much like we can assume 1/P medical procedures (P) will result in a death. People are people and everyone makes mistakes at work. When your work deals with peoples lives those mistakes cost them. I don't see a way to avoid E or P existing. If we are trying to determine if E is biased against black people, we can see if E is significantly different between races. Turns out it's not. In fact You are slightly more likely to be killed as a white person in a police encouter than as a black person.
It's an entirely separate issue from racism if we are suggesting that E (or P) is too low. But the data clearly demonstrates it's not racially biased.
Now the only remaining question is why black people are significantly more likely to experience a police encouter than white people. What we find is that black people tend to live in more criminal and therefore more heavily policed areas than white people. Do you think that police should not pay more attention to more criminal neighbourhoods? Where is the racism?
> You will go so far to say that black communities are more violent, but you shy away from saying why you think that is. You will cite a statistic that makes them sound guilty without acknowledging the factors that lead to it being true.
I don't specualte as to why because I don't know and I assume the answer is very complicated. I prefer to pay attention to folks like Thomas Sowell who have dedicated their careers to answering these questions. I found a good starting point here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5csE8q9mho
I didn't bother with all the extra stuff in my experiment, because it's not important for testing the robot which removes the comments immediately and automatically.
I will note, however, that your original comment has now been flagged and is invisible, cooling this whole discussion. While I object to the statistic and think that censorship of statements including that statistic may actually be productive in some cases, I think that this conversation has the potential to be productive, and I regret that the meta-conversation about censorship is not possible.
=======================================
Attempt six:
- Result: no removal
- Subreddit: /r/askreddit
- Comment:
>Hello, please don't mind this comment, I'm simply running an experiment about censorship on reddit.
Did you know that black Americans (who make up just 13.4% of the population) are, nonetheless, responsible for 56% of homicides?[6]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Something about the phrasing of the comment has stopped it from being removed. It was silly of me to let my wish of not offending people get in the way of scientific investigation. Still, I think it is not because of the polite preface that the comment has not been removed, and I will test it by including the polite preface to the comment which was removed.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Attempt seven:
- Result: instant, automatic removal
- Subreddit: /r/askreddit
- Comment:
>Hello, please don't mind this comment, I'm simply running an experiment about censorship on reddit.
This is something I just can't wrap my head around: Did you know that according to FBI statistics, black Americans, despite making up only 13% of the population, are responsible for 56% of homicides in the US?[7]
--------------------------------------------------------------
So, it is clear that there is something about the contents of this segment which causes comments to be automatically removed (at the very least, on /r/askreddit) "This is something I just can't wrap my head around: Did you know that according to FBI statistics, black Americans, despite making up only 13% of the population, are responsible for 56% of homicides in the US?". I'm guessing that it's as simple as the fact that I used the less commonly used 13.4% in the non-censored comment, whereas I used the more commonly used 13% in the censored comment.
I'll now run some experiments to narrow down what exactly are the conditions for removal. Results will be placed on https://pastebin.com/Z6G0B7kA. I'll do a write up later, when I've fully understood the extent of the censorship.
[6]https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/j2l13b/whats_the... (comment now edited in an attempt to avoid being banned by the subreddit mods)
[7]https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/j2ocv1/what_moti...
I agree that it would be nice to see people imposing their views on others less - "Live and let live" is a basic requirement of a Liberal society. But the dystopian future evoked by this microsite is sort of the opposite of that - an enforced uniformity, where instead of tolerating difference we attack it until people learn to hide it more effectively.
Remember “Don’t ask don’t tell?”
The truth is that what is generally accepted today will be guaranteed to not be the same exact things that are generally accepted tomorrow.
Society moves from being more liberal back to more conservative through culture. Punishing people for straying outside lines when they are not causing specific harm to others eliminates the very method by which societies evolve.
What you are describing has lead to the stagnation and ultimately death of many cultures and societies.
This isn't what social cooling results in though. Thoughts and opinions are imposed, it's just that their imposition is monopolized and becomes implicit. Dirty laundry will still be aired in the town square, but it'll be the King's and everyone will be forced to smell it.
And what if you want to buy stuff for a hobby that you only talk about with a few close friends? Don't use Amazon, or a credit card anywhere, don't use Google to look up products or Google Maps to get to a store, don't use plaintext email or Facebook chat or Whatsapp or whatever else to talk about it with your friends, etc.
It takes a lot of mental effort to know whether or not an action will be "public", which can cause the cooling effect this page talks about. The trend is not people doing stuff in private instead of publicly, it's people not doing stuff at all because there is no "private".
Local privacy is arguably far easier in a city, or in a crowded digital space. It all depends on the context of who you're trying to hide from. I'd much rather trust my privacy to Apple and Amazon if I wanted to quietly buy things no one else in my neighbourhood knew about.
More or less I'm advocating a distributed social credit system instead of a centralized one. In fact I'd say "distributed social credit" is a pretty good term for the social conditions we have spent most of our time evolving in.
Both small towns and big cities have governments. Social norms can include being heterosexual or following a specific religion. Not conforming to those expectations can have physical consequences too.
There's a big difference between politeness and total conformity to established (by the powerful) norms. Disagreeing (politely) with government policy on a public forum could easily prevent you from obtaining certain positions or status in the future if this is an accurate trend.
Not to mention that the freedom to go outside of convention without arbitrarily large punishment is worth preserving in of itself.
"Freakin' internet. Whats up with that?" — M.I.A.
Is this what's happening? What I see is more and more people falling into a few different tribes, each attempting to out ostracize the other. Game theory suggests this will end with two main tribes with peak hatred for each other.
If it's a completely inaccurate trend, I suppose your suggestion then completely misses the hoop, so to speak. If anything, it seems like a lack of privacy has heated things up through the micro-marketing of a hundred types of off-kilter reasons to be angry to a hundred different slightly skewed personality types.
I see you've never been to the internet.
An excellent point. Although not a new or particularly profound one.
When the large corporation I worked for back in the mid-1990s connected their email system to the larger internet, all employees were sent a memo discussing the advantages and issues with this.
It was recommended (paraphrasing) that employees shouldn't "put anything in an email that they wouldn't want to see on the cover of their local newspaper." That was back when local newspapers were a thing, but the principle still applies.
In fact, it applies even more strongly to the current social media environment. And it's still good advice.
That said, the rise of online communication and social media have reduced the personal and private interactions that people have.
Many on HN (and everywhere else too) won't answer phone calls at all, instead relying on SMS/Slack/WhatsApp, etc.
And formerly private conversations about one's personal life now take place on online platforms like Facebook, which ruthlessly exploits every bit of information they can get to "optimize the ad delivery experience."
One of the worst offenders is GMail, of course. They read all of your emails as a matter of course. Again in an effort to "better target advertising."
Which is why I'm surprised that anyone with even a passing interest in privacy would use either of those platforms. I certainly don't.
When I have a voice conversation (whether that be on a phone call or in person), as long as I'm cognizant of who is in hearing distance of my voice, I can be relatively (unless I'm being specifically targeted for close surveillance) sure that my conversation is private.
But any text-based communication that utilizes a centralized resource to route such communications is incredibly vulnerable to exposure and can't be trusted to provide a private communications channel.
Yes, this is oversimplified. No, I don't discuss encrypted voice/text mechanisms like Signal, PGP, SMIME, etc. here.
I didn't do so because most folks are unaware/unwilling/unable to use such secure communications mechanisms anyway, so their utility is severely limited.
Culturally, we need to get to a place where words aren't considered a form of violence, and where mere discussion of controversial ideas isn't shot down for "giving the enemy a platform." The concept of a calm debate really needs to make a comeback.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it."
- Aristotle (paraphrased)
In any case, I’m talking more about the cultural value of politeness and free expression of ideas, which almost by definition would exclude any extreme sort of hate speech.
The total amount of posting doesn't go to zero because not everybody is in the careful category.
I would have thought this is obvious, but clearly not.
I don't get the notion that social cooling was scoping itself to only the US, but even if it was, I don't think people are "learning better yet." Quite the contrary.
It's interesting that this is about big data generally and people are reading it as "Facebook".
I don't know whether the rest are silent lurkers like me, or whether they are bots, or FB is just inflating the numbers, but they surely aren't visibly active. I imagine it's not a special thing where I live, so you'll likely have the vast majority not posting publicly at all while a small minority is extremely loud. If the user count grows (hasn't the growth slowed?), most of it will not be seen by you while you look at posts and comments.
Online communities have contexts that are just as real, but they have the digital discontinuities we all know and love, so the odds of doing the equivalent of dropping into that work meeting after several beers is much more likely and happens far more frequently.
A separate issue is preservation - of course all this is on Your Permanent Record. And the future only has very different, limited interest in what the context is now.
I feel like this has been known for a long time. For example: If you walk into a Kindergarten class and watch the children play, once they notice you watching them they change behavior away from "natural play" to "observed play". I believe Cory Doctorow made this observation a spell ago.
Edit: I'd like to add that one of my parents was a teacher in a school with two-way mirrors for observation. People could secretly observe a given class in session either for observing the teacher and//or observing the students live but without the "observer effect". The entire school building was designed for this purpose and whilst everyone knew it it appeared to work as intended. "Out of sight is out of mind" is real. Yes, this particular parent was on both sides of the glass.
Each classroom had a row of two-way mirrors about 30 feet overhead [weird architecture, nature of the beast] so even physically it was out-sight and out-mind because "nobody looks up".
I deactivated my first account 8 years ago, but got back on to re-connect with my old pals and acquaintances from back in the day. For that reason, it was fantastic.
After another year, I realized that I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone. There's a lot of variety in my crowd. I have the sense IRL to know that not everything is for everybody, but that doesn't matter much on Facebook unless you want to spend hours and hours hand-crafting subsets of your friends for different topics (I don't). And I have zero interest in posting selfies or status updates of what's going on in my life, so that made the platform exceedingly boring and a waste of time for me. It's a shame, because it does work really well for "connecting" with people (in the shallowest sense of the word).
The only thing worse than people who are offended by everything is having to be afraid of offending over-sensitive people.
There's a lot of variety in my crowd
Which is a good thing. It's how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It's how you learned things. It was called being an adult.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia were polar opposites on the issues. But they were also very good friends. Because they were adults. They weren't children who had to surround themselves with familiar things that reinforce their own views of the world.
I remember in college, we were encouraged to seek out differing opinions. I remember a guy who once chastised me for not seeking a broad enough range of opinions. He said, "What's wrong with you? Don't you want to be challenged?" My understanding is that sort of thing would never happen on a college campus today.
Be who you are. If people can't respect you for having a different opinion, they're not adults, and they're certainly not "friends," Facebook or otherwise.
The frustrating (and silly) thing is that this argument is used a lot to attack left-leaning folks who _do_ engage with many people whose experience and world view are very different from them... like people who are homeless, immigrants from other countries, people who are racially minoritized, people who are disabled.
For many people who don't experience those kinds of life experiences, building relationships with those folks can be really tough and bring into question a lot of the foundations of their world view.
The argument that left-leaning people won't engage with right-leaning people often feels like it's used as an excuse for right-leaning folks to use rhetoric and hold positions that routinely disenfranchise and threaten the safety of the kind of people that left-leaning people have worked to empathize with and build relationships without consequence. That the people who continue to have right-leaning views don't seem interested in putting in the same _effort_ to empathize and build relationships with people other than themselves is both hypocritical and not surprising to me.
Finally, engaging with "challenging" opinions is all well and good as a mental exercise, but building and maintaining a relationship with someone is a project that requires continuous work (even as just a friendship) and I think it's worthwhile to be selective in the people who you put in that kind of work for.
Disenfranchising issues (such as gay rights, police brutality, immigration, right to abortion, etc.) is not only theoretical to some people, but a real threat to their lives and well being. A person playing the devils advocate arguing for limits on immigration to an immigrant is not only annoying but actively threatening to an immigrant at risk of being deported.
A number of people have full rights to be insulted when points are raised on a number of subjects. In fact they also have the rights to react angrily if the subject is a direct threat to their lives and livelihood. People arguing things often don’t realize that there is a person on the other end of the debate, a person with feelings, like love and compassion, but also anger and disgust. If a subject threatens or belittles, them being insulted or angry is the natural response.
This is nonsense. I'm an immigrant who argues for limits. Certain subjects being (subjectively) sensitive to talk about doesn't mean they're unproductive because of it. In fact we'll never get anywhere if we don't talk about them.
Limiting speech arbitrarily, especially over very assumptive beliefs of offense, is a terrible thing. You're not forced to participate in any discussion you don't want to be in but people have a right to discuss it.
> You're not forced to participate in any discussion you don't want to be in but people have a right to discuss it.
Exactly, and if you're not capable of engaging in that discussion productively, don't be surprised if your viewpoints and positions don't get the consideration you think they deserve.
Civil dialogue is the foundation upon which we find understanding in the face of disparate experiences. If you're feelings about the dialogue gets in the way of contributing to understanding, then it is you that is hurting your own cause.
+1 , want to add, almost everyone argues for limits on immigration because without limits that would be an argument for _unlimited_ immigration.
Sometimes we construe ourselves as vastly separated "islands" of ideologies, when in reality we're more like tight clusters. That is we have similar ideals, and differentiate on how to accomplish them.
For example "Help the poor" is often agreed upon, but then argued about "How to help the poor" . (Do we give them tough love and bootstraps yada yada? or Do we give them support, resources and encouragement and yada yada?).
This is not true. We do limit speech, both through moderation (like here on HN), terms of service (e.g. on Twitter, Facebook etc.), codes of conduct (in our workplace), in our legal society (slander, hate-speech, etc.), etc. But also through our moral behavior. As humans we know that some topics are insensitive to talk about around some people (e.g. we don’t tell yo'mama jokes around a recently orphaned person).
Debating against abortion around a person that is at risk of being forced into pregnancy, or against gay rights against a person not allowed to openly express their love for their same-sex partner is a truly offensive thing to do. When a platform limits such a speech it is acting in a very human way.
Sussing an offensive party to protect the rights of the disenfranchised one is what normal humans do in a normal conversation.
Second, if we rewind to the original comment, it's clearly talking about people "who are offended by everything", on a platform where everything offends someone. This is not about rules or regulations, or personal behavior; all of which have very specific context in which they apply.
Rather it's about the lack of engagement with different perspectives by labelling everything taboo at such a scale and breadth as to prevent any possible discussion, and the worrisome self-censorship as a result. You're only reinforcing this point with your sweeping generalizations on behalf of people and situations you don't represent.
If you find something offensive then you are free to not participate, but you do not have the right to limit their speech. You're not protecting anyone's right by doing so, and I find it the very opposite of human to regress towards silence instead of moving forward through reason.
However “people who are offended by everything” is often used as a synonym for left leaning folks (or rather folks in favor of societal diversity; SJWs if you will). Also “shutting down the debate” is often used to complain about when a left leaning person reacts offensively (or even angrily) during a debate. This is regardless of if the preceding comment was actually very insulting or threatening to some people that may be present.
In a sibling comment I explain that—in my opinion—it is actually a good thing if people that hold oppressing and insulting views self-censor after having received angry replies to their offensive views. I‘d like to add now that normally us “left leaning folks” don’t simply label speech as offensive and leave it at that. We—as grandparent points out—we actively engage in the conversation and point out (sometimes in anger) the flaws in the opposing opinion, explain why a thing is offensive and bad, and why we are angry about it. Then we hope that either they will change their view or at least reconsider before they say something like this again.
Again I should reiterate that I am specifically talking about debates that I consider threatening or offensive to some groups of people.
But that's what you just did, and are still doing. Offensive is subjective. Who are you to consider what is offensive to others? Are you in those groups? Are you personally taking offense?
Why did you say immigration can't be discussed? I'm an immigration who discusses it just fine, and I find it annoying and offensive that you act offended on my behalf and shutdown any discussion. I don't want or need that and am fully capable of engaging in the discussion or leaving myself out of it. Engage with the argument or leave it, but stop acting on behalf of others as if they don't have agency. It's just a soft bigotry to think that they can't speak for themselves.
And self-censorship is never good. People holding views that you find offensive don't need to stop doing anything, and this has both exposed bad people and led to revolutionary new ideas. At one point ending slavery and women's suffrage was also offensive to discuss, but good thing we discussed it and actually made progress. Let's not stop now.
I know I didn’t word it perfectly and I understand you might have misunderstood me. English is not my first language and I’m sometimes not as clear as I could be. Particularly in this case I left out the word ‘might’, hoping that it was implied from this being a hypothetical scenario. Sorry for that.
I’m sorry if I left you thinking that all immigrants think this, or are of a certain opinion, I don’t believe this my self and it certainly was not my intention to claim any such thing.
I also don’t hold the opinion that some topics can’t be discussed. Only that it is natural to be insulted if certain opinions in said topics are expressed. Since you mentioned slavery, imagine a public forum about in Pennsylvania in 1849. Some people might think the debate about abolition is only theoretical and might play the devils advocate, imagining and stating arguments that make sense in a theoretical scenario. Who is this helping? Is Fredrick Douglass gonna walk by this forum and think: “I’m glad people are having this debate, I hope this person that argues for slavery keeps posting.” Say John Brown replies stating this for-slavery person “is an idiot” and “should keep silent, for their own good,” do you think that Harriet Tubman would be thinking: “Oh my, I hope John Brown—though well intentioned—will not silence this anti-abolitionist. In fact why is John Brown speaking on my behalf? he was never a slave. We got to keep this debate going if we want to end slavery.” Finally Harriet Ann Jacobs walks by and simply says to her self: “Well, I’m free now, I don’t need to participate in this forum. I’ll just leave it.”
No, this is ridiculous. We don’t stop these humanitarian disaster by allowing bigoted views to persist. If someone comes with an insulting argument based on a bigoted view, the normal thing to do is to insult back and hope they never speak of this again.
Again, so what? It happens and is entirely subjective, and whether it's shared by millions of people or specific to an individual is an irrelevant detail.
> "Who is this helping?"
Who cares? Discussion happens. There is no imperative that it must be helpful, whatever that means. That's yet another subjective judgement.
> "We don’t stop these humanitarian disaster by allowing bigoted views to persist."
Discussion is what determined they were wrong views in the first place. Speech from the opposing side that, at the time, was considered rebellious and wrong eventually won and created change.
> "the normal thing to do is to insult back"
Yes. Counter speech and ideas with better speech and ideas. That is the opposite of (self-) censorship and limiting expression because of potential offense.
> [S]elf-censorship is never good. People holding views that you find offensive don't need to stop doing anything, and this has both exposed bad people and led to revolutionary new ideas
This is a silly argument given the above example.
Remember the topic is about self-censorship and whether getting offended about certain rhetoric is natural, not about any specific topic which might offend people.
Immigration is a zero sum game. No developed country can accept all immigrants wanting to live there. Neither leftist nor more conservative immigration policy gives every immigrant who wants to the opportunity to enter the United States. The claim that left-leaning individual's immigration policy is not 'disenfranchising' is laughable. For every person entering from South America, some number of people cannot enter from another country. You can say this is not the case all you want, but given that immigration does put pressure on a country's resources, this is always true. Similarly, if you let in everyone from South Asia, you will disenfranchise some South Americans, etc.
You can't just say something is disenfranchising and thus non-negotiable. For example, you say the pro-life position is disenfranchising because -- I assume -- you believe it takes away the right of a woman to not have a child. However, a pro-life person would make the obvious argument that actually the pro-choice position is disenfranchising because there is a person -- the child -- who is being killed without having a say in it. Should the pro-choice position now become unmentionable?
"developed": The US and Europe are rich.
"wanting": Other people want to be rich. That's why they come.
If US/Europe worshipped money less, they would be less rich. There would be less incentive for others to come, or for incumbents to keep them out. If you want to reduce flow, reduce pressure.
Here's the thing though: You, and your children, would have to work for a living.
> immigration does put pressure on a country's resources
Does it? Or are immigrants the resource being consumed? Seems to me they do the work. And once their children are Americanized, how many grandchildren will they have? Fewer. The US needs immigrants like a car needs gasoline. It eats them.
> if you let in everyone from South Asia, you will disenfranchise some South Americans, etc.
Only if there's a cap. Which is uncreative. Do the opposite. Aggressively add people to the ranks of the United States.
Imagine: Tomorrow, Trump comes on the TV and, in terrible Spanish, invites the people of Baha California (both states), Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas to hold referenda under Article IV, Section 3 of the US Constitution, about joining the United States. They'd be enticed by what's left of the "American dream", sun-belt voters would get a shot at cheaper and sunnier real estate, and factory workers could go to where the jobs are. The problem with NAFTA is that capital can flow but workers can't. So let the people move freely too! And if the Russians can run a foreign influence campaign to make Brexit happen, why can't the US do a Mexic-enter?
We can make the sum be much, much more than zero.
If the countries they were coming from had better conditions then there would be less need to immigrate, and it would also help far more people. That's what people who are for immigration reform and strong borders want. Why would you rather have countries be worse to stop immigration rather than lifting the others up?
And the vast majority of people have to work for a living so why would immigration change that? Immigrants are not "consumed" whatever that means.
The US, and similar countries, are rich by global standards. A "normal", "not rich" middle class lifestyle there is enviable to "normal" people in most of the world. The argument about "better opportunity and living conditions" vs "rich" is about word choice and connotation. When I say "rich" I mean to call into question what Americans think of as "normal", and to consider how their "normal" is supported.
> to stop immigration
When a patient is sick, you don't want to stop the blood transfusions keeping them alive.
> Why would you rather have countries be worse [...] rather than lifting the others up?
The United States isn't actually better in a sustainable way. It operates a Ponzi scheme: Immigrants are lured in, they do the work, and hopefully they even get a little material comfort, but mostly they are working for the benefit of their children. The trap is that their children end up Americanized, which reduces their fertility to below replacement. Within a few generations they are all dead. Hence the need for a constant replacement flow. Without that, the US would be Japan.
It goes without saying that not every culture can operate in this way. An ecosystem made entirely of leeches will crash; there also need to be hosts.
> [t]he vast majority of people have to work for a living so why would immigration change that?
The incumbents at the top of these Ponzi schemes have easy jobs. They certainly don't pick strawberries.
Those easy lives serve one purpose: They are the beacon that draws more workers in.
The top of the pyramid can be supported because it is constantly dying off.
> Immigrants are not "consumed" whatever that means.
Their culture, which gave them life, is destroyed, and replaced with The American Way of Life, so they have no great-grandchildren. In this way, America is a population sink.
> That's what people who are for immigration reform and strong borders want.
So long as the draw of the American Dream is as strong as it is, any disincentives sufficiently powerful to counteract it will need to be inhumane -- think "children in cages". Laws that cannot be enforced humanely are not legitimate.
Namely.. I am someone who is against illegal immigration but I would support mexico joining the usa
Consider also that free migration is allowed within the US borders. Everyone in South Carolina is currently leagally allowed to migrate to California. Is California loosing money to South Carolina because of this?
Again... completely apples-to-oranges comparison. Migrants between South Carolina and California share enough in common that it hardly classifies as migration other than due to the internal political divisions of the United States.
Legal immigration to the US is a zero-sum game, by law, and this is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.
I’m also a little confused as to what you mean by zero-sum by law. Is there a law that states that the federal government has to pay with each immigrant? If a Jamaican immigrant produces growth for the US (say by doing labor and contributing to the economy), then the US has to, by law, pay that growth back to Jamaica? Are we not talking about economic zero-sum?
Getting angry is natural, but anger is easy. Advancement of the cause doesn't entail getting likes, hearts or clap-backs. The real work is in persuasion.
Legal immigrants, which is the majority and the ones generally designed by the word “immigrants” (without qualitatif), aren’t being deported. Legal and illegal immigrations are two different topics (social, political, economical), it doesn’t really make sense to mix them.
Also I’m an immigrant myself and argue for some level of immigration control, and that’s the case for every single expat I know.
Save from the feedback of concrete actions being taken (which you want to avoid), discussion by a diverse crowd is the only way to properly surface the harmfulness of a viewpoint.
Making an opinion politically incorrect won't stop people from holding it, they may on the contrary feel validated by it.
To achieve long lasting social changes you have to have a dialogue and convince the other party, if you think the entirety of your opinion is so morally justified that even having further debate is morally wrong then you can never achieve permanent social change it will just be temporary.
There is a limit at which this is true, but most discussion of these issues doesn’t encroach into that territory. As an immigrant from a Muslim country I don’t feel “threats to my safety” when Trump talks about Islamic fundamentalism or extra scrutiny over immigration from certain countries. (It would be pretty odd to declare those topics off-limits, seeing as how the Muslim country I’m from has taken aggressive measures to fight the same exact fundamentalist forces.) I might feel differently if we were talking about putting Muslims in internment camps. But nobody is doing that, even though the left is acting like they are.
Does the US have “too many immigrants?” Until 2007, a plurality of Hispanic Americans (many of whom are immigrants) said “yes.” https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/19/latinos-hav.... Even today, 1 in 4 do. Only 14% say we have “too few immigrants” (which is the view de facto embraced by our current policies, which will lead to increased numbers of immigrants.) Given those views, it’s bizarre to treat discussion of immigration issues as off-limits.
You see this on issue after issue: leftists declare huge swaths of issues as off limits for discussion even to the point of excluding discussion of positions held by large swaths of the groups at issue. For example, 37% of women want to restrict Roe further or overrule it completely, compared to 38% who want to loosen its restrictions either somewhat or significantly. Another 16% want to maintain the status quo. http://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/NPR_.... Supermajorities of women, moreover, support measures like waiting periods.
Or, consider “police brutality.” An editor at the NYT was fired for running a op-ed by Tom Cotton advocating a law-and-order response to violence following the death of George Floyd. Recent polling shows that a majority of Hispanic people, who are disproportionately the target of aggressive policing, think “the breakdown of law and order” is a “bigger problem” than “systemic racism.” Large majorities of Black and Hispanic people want to either maintain existing levels of policing, or further increase them.
In practice, it’s your approach that’s “disenfranchising.” That rule makes the majority uncomfortable with expressing anything but the most left-leaning views with respect to a minority group. For example, Ilhan Omar and Linda Saraour say expectations of assimilation are “racist.” This is not even a mainstream opinion among American Muslims, who are one of the most assimilated groups in the country. (To the point that a majority voted for George W. Bush in 2000.) But a big fraction of well-meaning non-Muslims don’t want to be called racist. So they feel comfortable amplifying anti-assimilationist views, but not pro-assimilationist ones. Since non-Muslims are a huge majority of people, that dramatically distorts and biases the debate around Muslim assimilation in a manner that doesn’t reflect the views of Muslims themselves.
That phenomenon has had a real impact on the debate over abortion. A quarter of Democratic women want to further restrict Roe or overrule it. That viewpoint is completely unrepresented among Democratic men.
In this comment, you depict left-of-center resistance to these discussions as irrational. But of course, it's not at all irrational; in fact, it's probably vital.
There are also special considerations when you’re talking about issues that affect minorities, outside a political context. There, the approach of selectively amplifying extreme positions can overwhelm ideological diversity (or even majority views) within minority groups. The other day, my dad—a blue dog Democrat—expressed his frustration at how “the media has made Ilhan Omar the face of Muslims.” I’ve observed the palpable discomfort people in liberal circles have expressing views on immigration to the right of Omar. They feel like the way to be “allies”—and insulate themselves from being called racist—is to “amplify” views like her’s. But the net result of that is that debate around issues like assimilation—within the left—is totally dominated by these extreme views. And that seriously disenfranchises people. Especially in contexts, such as academic institutions and media, controlled by the left, where there is no need to deal with the potential opposite extreme positions on the right.
[Now I don’t know if this has ever happened (usually I don’t call people misogynists unless they talk about women as objects) but let’s go with this]
We can rephrase this as: Person A says pregnant people should be forced to undergo their pregnancy. Person B says this person in misinformed in an insulting manner.
What might have even happened in this discussion (we are just being theoretical here, right, so we can entertain, right? Or at least we don’t want this topic to be off limits right?) is the following: Person A actually said: “If it were up to women, humanity would be extinct in a generation. Women are evil, and we should not grant them any rights, particularly not the right to determine the birth of their children”. Person B responds: “I’m glad you’ve shown your bigoted misogynistic face. Now we all know what kind of a person you are, and whether we should keep listening to you. Do your self a favor and keep these opinions to your self unless you want to keep embarrassing your self”.
Who here is guilty of shutting down the debate? Who here decided that talking about abortion rights is “off topic”?
Now person B most certainly suggested that person A shouldn’t continue this debate. They also definitely insulted person A. But is anything here in their response surprising? Did they do anything wrong? How about we look at person A in this context? Do we want people like that expressing their opinion? Person B might have insulted person A, and hoped they would leave and never come back, but person A was insulting all women and calling for a whole group of people to have their decisions dictated by other people.
So why am I taking this example? It is obviously an exaggeration and not specifically what we are taking about here. But for all I know this is the kind of conduct that many people say us “lefties” are doing when we “mark a topic off limits”.
Ancestor’s point was this exactly, many people claim that us lefties want to shut down the topic because we get offended by everything. But do we? Are we maybe just behaving in a completely rational way, insulting back people that have insulted us? Asking people to stop that are threatening us, our friends, or people that we know exist?
---
PS: Off course in your example there is another qualifier there: “using federal funds for abortion”. People might have many reason disagree with that including being for forced pregnancies. But now the goalpost has been moved a little hasn’t it? So I took the liberty of moving it in the other direction my self. You provided an example that has probably never happened in reality, so I provide a counter example that also probably never happened, sounds fair?
Apart from that, my hypothetical is one that happens all the time. Article after article denounces policies like waiting periods, which the majority of women support and which exist in other developed countries, as misogynistic: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qkg753/what-its-like-to-endu....
Stepping back, a problem with your examples is the individualistic framing. Abortion undoubtedly involves a woman’s bodily autonomy. But it also undoubtedly involves another living thing. (Regardless of what political rights you believe that thing should have, it’s alive as a scientific matter.) Even Roe recognizes that a societal interest in the unborn child kicks in during the second trimester. (Roe, by the way, is unusual even in developed countries. Where many countries have abortion by law, almost none guarantee it under their constitution. Around the same time as Roe, the Canadian Supreme Court declared abortion to be purely a legislative matter. And the German constitutional court declared allowing abortion to be an unconstitutional violation of a fetus’s right to life. That’s still the law in both countries.) It also involves society generally. The fact that the developed world spends tremendous amounts of aid money assisting developing countries to reduce their birth rates belies the idea that reproduction has purely individual effect. Framing it in purely individualistic terms makes it seem more like it shouldn’t be up for debate, but only because the framing cuts out all the interests actually involved. Likewise, a discussion about immigration isn’t just about the immigrant, but about the society that has to expend resources integrating and supporting the immigrant. When you reframe these issues in individualistic terms to exclude effects on other people, they seem more like things that shouldn’t be subject to debate. But that’s just a product of the artificial framing.
No it’s not. My premise is that there exist some topics that are disenfranchising to some people, and debating those can be insulting or threatening to some people.
I’m not gonna debate you on the merits of abortion laws or immigration laws, we can leave that for another time. Here we are talking about whether it is OK (or even rational) for us ‘lefties’ to get offended by some topics, and argue to an extend where some people might not want to say certain things in a future debate.
I say it is OK, precisely because there is another person with stakes in the topic who might be at risk if terms of the debate are not in their favor. I moved this to individualistic terms on purpose, precisely because some topics involve individuals. These individuals have feelings and you may expect them to react accordingly.
There are obviously some topics where that's true; for instance, no sane person will entertain a debate about re-segregating schools.
But then you have the idea that immigration is off the table because it dehumanizes undocumented people --- despite the fact that even American Latinos generally believe immigration is a colorable argument, or that abortion is off the table because it threatens the bodily autonomy of women --- despite the fact that a very large fraction of women support addition abortion restrictions. The principle just doesn't hold together.
It's possible that we're all just talking past each other, and that all of us acknowledge that there are going to be public policy discussions about these kinds of topics, and we're just talking about why some citizens will refuse to engage.
(Disclaimer: I think we have a moral imperative to issue a blanket amnesty and simplified path to citizenship for the vast majority of all undocumented immigrants, and oppose European-style restrictions on abortion).
You're on the left. Your current political pet issues aren't something you're willing to debate - instead you're announcing that anyone who disagrees with you is a "threat".
A person playing the devils advocate arguing for limits on immigration
Limits on immigration aren't a "devil's advocacy" position, they're the de-facto standard around the world for obvious and common sense reasons.
This is why the modern left is so awful. You take something that every single place in the world does and describe it as being basically the same as clubbing someone over the head. You refuse to even attempt to engage with the vast majority who think your position is nonsense.
This is why "social cooling" happens, if we accept the use of that term. It is a problem created by people like you.
That is a huge, unhelpful generalization. I am pretty far to the left and I consider immigration a perfectly reasonable topic to debate. Most everyone in my circle of friends feel the same way. The 'cancel culture', as it were, is just a subgroup of the left. And frankly, there is a cancel culture on the right, too.
Yes. On this I will agree with you strongly. Both varieties of cancel-culture are essentially the bulwarks of the false dichotomy of American politics - serving as backstops to try to keep people in the middle, which itself is a controlled position.
You're to the left of that. There's actually a lot more to discuss out there, and out to the right of it, than many people realize. For example, broad agreement on rights for workers to a fair wage, benefits, etc. - you'd be surprised how popular that is with the modern American right, when you can get them out from the GOP paradigm and weak, unhelpful talking points.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough (which is likely; English is not my first language).
This sub-thread started with an ancestor complaining about people being afraid to discuss certain topics because people are too easily offended, this was expressed as a bad thing:
> The only thing worse than people who are offended by everything is having to be afraid of offending over-sensitive people.
The comment keeps going by pointing out that adults should be able to handle these “offensive” topics and debate them like adults.
A grandparent pointed out that there is truth in this point of view, but this is often used as a critique on “the left” which is unfounded since “left-leaning folks [...] _do_ engage with many people whose experience and world view are very different from them”.
I then point out in my comment above that I agree and—further—being insulted and angry when these topics spring up is perfectly natural:
> A number of people have full rights to be insulted when points are raised on a number of subjects.
I think a lot of people have taken the view that since I think being offended when debating the rights of disenfranchised people I must be for shutting down all debate about it. And while I think that is the right thing to do in certain cases I certainly don’t think that nobody is allowed to debate immigration on a public forum.
My point is that—depending on your stance—people might get offended and angry as you are debating this. It might be theoretical to you, but it might be very real to some people in the room. If your stance is really brutal you shouldn’t be surprised if some people—who may have their or loved once lives threatened by that stance—want to “cancel you”. To reiterate, my point is that it is not a bad thing if some people are afraid to voice their opinions in a public forum, when their opinions are threatening to disenfranchised people.
Imagine if Trump announced tomorrow that debates on workers rights were off-limits because they were a threat to the very existence of job creators. And then he tried to even make it illegal, to create a culture where anyone who talked about unions positively was immediately fired? Would the left recognise that as a legit strategy and go, oh ok, I guess if he says shutting down debate in that case is legitimate then it must be?
Of course not. You may not rule your pet topics off-limits for debate. Ever. On anything. Countries that try that in even mild ways have endless problems, though they may not immediately become apparent.
debating the rights of disenfranchised people
Look, I am an immigrant. I have been for 15 years. And I know that until I become a citizen I am a guest. Not a "disenfranchised person", a guest in another people's homeland. Until they make me one of them via citizenship, I have to respect that and act like a guest.
Your (genuinely) devil's advocacy on immigration is that there should be no limits on it, at all. This has become a common theme on the modern left, but why? It's the same as arguing that if a guest is invited into someone's home, then they can immediately turn around and invite whoever else they like to stay in that home as well, whilst expecting the hosts to accomodate everyone without limit. It's not physically or financially possible but it's also morally wrong and a bizarre attack on the very notion of guesthood.
If your stance is really brutal you shouldn’t be surprised if some people—who may have their or loved once lives threatened by that stance—want to “cancel you”.
But nobody is having the lives of their loved ones "threatened" by any of the stances you outlined, which is why people react so badly to this kind of rhetoric. Not being invited to live in a new place is not a "threat", it's not even taking any action at all - it is passive. And for those who ignored the laws and principles of immigration, being deported is only a "threat" in the same sense that society saying you will go to prison for fraud is a "threat" - we use different languages for the consequences of lawbreaking because of the different context in which such "threats" happen.
No I’m not. I’m saying there are topics which are disenfranchising which may offend or threaten a person. If I am offended by such speech (either personally or through a friend or family member) I may react appropriately. My goal may certainly be to silence this speech, but that does not make me an arbitrator does it?
All you're doing here is acting in an entirely totalitarian manner, by expansively defining entire segments of human thought off-limits on the grounds that they're "offensive" - in your mind. So what? Your position right here is offending me, because it's an attempt to disenfrachise people like me who disagree with you. So by your own logic you should recuse yourself from this debate and never speak of your views ever again. Presumably you won't do that, which is how you can tell your position isn't coherent.
By the way, the left constantly promotes policies that are offensive and disenfranchising. Just look at how they treat straight white men. Not big fans, shall we say? Anyone can turn your position around and claim feminist ideas should be banned from discussion because they are offensive and disenfranchising towards men.
Nobody actually wants to talk about issues. Bring up anything specific and everyone just goes silent. It's boring, and a bit offensive. People with so little imagination do us all a disservice by expressing it so strongly.
And painting those you call "the left" with such a broad brush, and ignoring that there is great diversity of opinion within that artificial, amorphous group is "basically clubbing someone over the head" and refusing to engage with them, even though study after study shows that (at least within the US, and likely across much of the world) we have much more in common WRT the kind of society we want than we do differences.
Those that create conflict from those differences (as you appear to be trying to do) are, if the goal is to create a better society for everyone rather than just satisfying oneself that he/she is right and "they" are wrong, are taking entirely the wrong tack.
Instead, let's celebrate the stuff we have in common, use those more prevalent commonalities to humanize and bring those of us who disagree about the differences together in a positive mode, rather than a dismissive, adversarial one.
The people on the receiving end may well be on the equally amorphous right, or they may be more classical leftists who are more concerned with workers and unions than identity politics, it doesn't really matter. In the end cancel culture is not, in fact, a bipartisan thing - it is virtually always about the same small set of topics and the same people with the same views doing the cancelling.
It's a serious issue, which is why we are seeing more and more discussions of it. It would be great to celebrate that which we have in common, and I'd love to see more of that, but ultimately it's hard to celebrate differences when those differences are being used as justification for "cancellation", something which can have a very negative consequences for those concerned. The whole problem is people who don't respectfully disagree and use rhetoric comparing disagreement to physical violence as a justification.
His op-ed in politico from 2016 is a good introduction to the issues he tries to tackle:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-clinto...
There's a palpable lack of self awareness in the comment you're responding too because there is an implicit non-recognition of the very real concerns that immigration presents to people that are hurt by immigration. I'm one of the people that benefits from immigration, but I'm not blind to the fact that some people in the country do not benefit from immigration. Those people and current immigrants are my neighbors and future immigrants are my future neighbors. It's important to consider how immigration impacts more than just current immigrants like myself and future immigrants.
There are varied ways to address the issues from different points of view. Parties have switched from one view to the opposing view over time, so by proxy of this we know there isn’t a “right” way and a “wrong” way but rather opposing philosophies that stress one thing over another. Why does one work better now and why will a different one work better tomorrow?
It seems that your stance is based on the idea that a large group of people simply adopts one viewpoint or another arbitrarily, that those solutions have not changed over time, and that because of this we should treat them with equal merit. I believe this is wrong, for a number of different reasons.
First, it ignores the outcomes of the actual policies as well as the framework of thinking that it supports. Someone who has a "different take" whose outcome changes whether I or my friends can afford health care or not is not an "equal but opposite" philosophy.
To build on that, because it ignores the actual outcomes and treats all ideas as equal, it supports a framework of hyper-partisan thinking, the idea that ideology is about who you are loyal to. In this framework, your belief makes sense: just because we're loyal to different parties doesn't mean we can't be friends! But again, it ignores the very real implications of those beliefs.
Finally, it also concludes that solutions to these problems, and the people who are in charge of supporting them, cannot evolve and improve, only be renewed as a way to for members of a party to pledge loyalty. Bernie is not a perfect leftist, and has certainly had some shitty takes and policies; sometimes people get better (and sometimes they don't). As our understanding of the plight of the common people grows and adjusts to the new realities we are faced with, different solutions will evolve on the left, and that is good.
The wording here demonstrates deep disrespect for people whose ideas, experiences, conclusions and understanding of the world differs from your own.
What I meant to wrote was 3 separate points:
- Bernie is not a perfect leftist
To be clear: I don't hold Bernie to the standard of being a "perfect leftist," rather stating the obvious that he is not one. And while I would love a candidate that agreed more with my viewpoints than him, I don't think he's a bad person because he doesn't.
- Bernie has had some shitty takes and policies
I do believe that Bernie Sanders, the politician, has not always wielded his power in my best interest; for instance, voting for the "Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists" joint resolution that has been used as justification for our military presence in the middle east. I would, in a glib way, rate that vote and the opinions he gave during that time as a "shitty take." I don't think that disrespects him as a person.
- Sometimes people get better (and sometimes they don't)
Sometimes people evolve their politics and beliefs as they learn more and the material conditions which they exist in change, which is good. Sometimes they do not, and that's bad. I do not think that adopting strictly leftist beliefs - of which there are a cacophony of differing, conflicting ones - is inherently good. Rather the lack of evolution is bad.
What opinions about health care policy are people allowed to have, in your view?
What does this even mean?
I'm plucking this bit out because I don't think that's a good summary of his position. He still doesn't "want immigrants to take jobs from locals." He's concerned about corporations abusing immigrant labor to depress American wages. He's long voted for bills to protect immigrants, even while being wary of increasing low-skill immigration. He's trying to find a middle ground between labor and immigration, and that isn't easy.
For an in-depth look:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/2/25/21143931/b...
Warning: opinions follow
To reduce scope to something like welfare for illustrative purposes, there's actually pretty broad agreement from both sides that some people just need help through no fault of their own and that at some level, there should be some kind of program to provide that help. And there's similar agreement that people who don't have such a need should be prevented from intentionally gaming/milking a system (getting benefits without a legitimate need). The interesting parts come in two other scenarios: 1) someone who legitimately needs help and doesn't get it, and 2) someone who doesn't need help but does get it. Those are both wasteful and unjust and we'd all like to reduce those cases to as close to zero as possible. But the left and the right disagree about which case is more unjust. The right would like to focus on efficiency and self-sufficiency, so the greater injustice is fostering an environment where you can get assistance without deserving it (which perpetuates and/or deepens the dependence), and you're willing to concede that this means some people who need help won't get it. The left, on the other hand, would like to focus on covering everyone who needs help, and anyone slipping through the cracks is an injustice, but this means that you have to accept the inefficiency of allowing some people who don't need/deserve assistance to get it, and you just shrug and say that's the cost of providing a good safety net.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
For what it's worth I'm libertarian and lean towards having false positives for any of those three scenarios.
Obviously there is a lot of room for skepticism as to whether you think the approach works in practice, or if the approach is simply a front to enact changes that will nominally benefit the unempowered but in reality benefit the empowered. But I don't know of many who aren't in favor of something as vague as "helping people", and most genuinely believe they are doing so.
Nothing of this sort has by any means been proven.
I’m from a country that probably has one of the highest—if not the highest—proportion of children born outside of marriage. I my self is raised by a single mother, my sister has a son born outside of marriage, and so do many of my friends. This country is also one of the wealthiest in the world and has way less poverty then many countries where child rearing outside of marriage is less common.
In fact you could probably argue just as easily that actively supporting single parents has greater economic benefits then to disenfranchise them.
> While it’s well-established that married parents are typically better off financially than unmarried parents, there are also differences in financial well-being among unmarried parents. For example, a much larger share of solo parents are living in poverty compared with cohabiting parents (27% vs. 16%).3
Also the article you link to and quote is about unmarried couples vs. married couples, the source for these number is confusing to say the least, and focuses on the US where single parents don’t get that much welfare, which neither adds nor removes anything from my point that: single parenting is not by it self a good predictor of poverty.
A conservative movement genuinely interested in making sure children are raised in wedlock could endorse routine family planning and reproductive health services, rather than building an entire totalizing culture war out of opposition to them. Otherwise, it's hard to imagine a policy more antithetical to our founding principles than one that compels the reluctant unwed parents of unwanted children to marry.
These issues didn't seem to bother Ben Franklin too much. But: fair enough! A liberal.
I'd posit that it's not the benefits themselves that disincentivize such things, it's the rules surrounding how one accesses such benefits does so.
If our social programs didn't penalize such activities (through a variety of a restrictions on applying for and keeping such benefits) and we didn't make people jump through arbitrary and often degrading hoops to get them, all the while denigrating such folks as "lazy" or "greedy" or "worthless to society" I think that there wouldn't be such an issue to discuss.
What's more, at least in the US, there is a long tradition of blaming the poor for their poverty and assuming that it's their fault. Which makes it much more palatable to discriminate against those without means for many people.
But that's objectively false. There are many factors that impact poverty, some of which include specific legal and cultural incentives (both conscious and unconscious) which disadvantage certain people and advantage others.
I also think this is an example of how conservatives and progressives talk past each other. There's a difference between being in favor of divorce, and being in favor of recognizing that there are situations where divorce is a better option than staying married. Also, there's a difference between being in favor of raising children outside of marriage, and being in favor of an unmarried person or family raising an existing child that would otherwise not be raised by anyone.
Whether you believe we live in such a system seems like a matter of opinion and outlook.
In America, there has always been one side on the right side of history and one on the wrong, as far as health and happiness go. People and institutions switch sides, but the sides exist all the same. It comes down to how considerate you are of your neighbors, here and abroad. It's baffling that such a rich society continues to engage interpersonally with a scarcity mindset. Bootstraps are a myth; give until you can't and then ask for what you need. If we still then have racial issues, class issues, gender issues, religious issues, then the problem goes deeper than economics, and we'll need to face that with the same level of compassion.
We don’t want to have what they had in the old “second world” where the state could bend the will of the people because it held all the cards.
That’s not to deny that we can serve people better. Create access to capital, lessen predatory practices on innumerate consumers, incentivize women to enter more productive areas of the economy, etc.
How is this different than private power? Honestly, I've had to put up with far more arbitrary bs from my HMO than state or federal programs. With my state and the feds at least there is a clear statement of benefits, a clear procedure to appeal, and a solid attempt to deliver on promises.
How well does that compare to, say, your cable company? Or how well have big companies done respecting your privacy? In other words, lots of people get directly screwed by private companies, too.
I'm not trying to say that government programs are the ideal answer to everything. In the USA there is a serious need for reasonable debate, responsible budgets, and a commitment to good government.
There is plenty of potential for abuse with government over reach. But there is also plenty of abuse from government under-reach, too. Isn't it in everybody's interests to have a functioning government? One that that operates under good-faith intentions to follow it's mandate?
There are exceptions to this of course, such as government-sponsored monopolies (healthcare, ISPs, utilities). But a lot of that is regulatory capture IMO - we've ceded a lot of power to MegaCorp Inc. which I'm not comfortable with either.
As terrible as a lot of big private companies are, at least they can't waltz into any/every platform (e.g. G, FB, Twitter, etc) and demand everything they have on you like the feds can. No one holds a candle to the potential of govt tyranny, everyone is at the mercy of "the man".
At the end of the day, massive consolidation of power at the top levels of society is never healthy, whatever form it may take.
This in an amusing statement considering that many people consider Google and Facebook to be terrible big private companies.
And note, their power doesn't come from government-sponsored monopolies.
Also, calling utilities and ISPs government-sponsored utilities is grossly misleading; both are natural monopolies due to the capital costs that are involved.
Capital costs do not create monopolies, just an obstacle solved by raising capital. Government regulations create monopolies - there is no way to fix those.
People believing in the so-called natural monopolies lack fate in the entrepreneurial drive, creativity and innovation of the free individuals working hard in their own interest, for their own betterment.
Modern economics research shows that the efficient markets hypothesis is not true and definitely requires government regulation to operate in the way that Chicago School econ describes it. So that leaves Elections as the better balance mechanism by default.
This is a non-sequitor. The efficient market theorem can be untrue without elections necessarily being better at determining efficiency. I personally don’t believe in the efficient market (it’s why I’m an active trader). But elections, where ill-informed people vote on topics they barely have any knowledge about, risking nothing in the process, seem significantly worse at guaranteeing acceptable outcomes.
Can you go into more detail on how that could be for me? If the EMH is untrue, then there must be some other mechanism besides competition that checks the private sector, no? What would that be?
I'm implicitly lumping "regulation" as part of the Elections mechanism, btw, so I'm assuming you didn't mean regulation as the mechanism.
Meanwhile unregulated fields like software, computers and communication have enjoyed the fastest and most remarkable progress in modern history. Progress which benefits us all every day.
First of all, You seem to be confused because you are mistaking what happens in Russia, Venezuela and China for actual elections. Whatever happens in those places is certainly not what I meant by the term "elections."
Second, You point to "three" (or are those 3 things really the same thing?) successes in competition, each of which were aided by investment authorized by elected legislators. Then you point to one failure of elections and proceed to conclude that competition is the better of the two. It doesn't follow, I'm afraid.
As for Trump, yes, that was the elections mechanism failing. I never said it was perfect. But the Market competition mechanism fails more often, in my estimation. Neither is perfect, but competition seems to create much higher probability for imperfection, abuse, flaws, and suffering.
The effects of free market "failures" are comparatively laughable and always corrected by the free market itself sooner or later.
There is no contest which one is graver. To pretend otherwise is to ignore the reality and evidence all around us.
Meanwhile, corporations frequently do not have to compete, having either become a monopoly or having agreed upon "standards" without which they insist solvency in their given area would be impossible (as they rake in untold riches in profit). The only check on that power is indirectly through refusing to transact with them en masse. However, as long as their credit is good, they can continue to exist and operate with impunity.
In the end, the question is of the accumulation of which currency determines who is "good" enough to run your life: political clout or money.
Franklu, people who have to be nice to me tend to do better by me than people who just happen to have a lot of money.
Companies are controlled by the market, it's governments we need to worry about and find ways to control and regulate.
Companies are remarkably good at finding ways to control the market. That's why antitrust legislation is needed to protect consumers.
Every government intervention in the market will benefit established players and will hinder startups and thus the markets's self-regulating mechanisms.
There are many other cases where I'd be very uncomfortable trusting these so-called "self-regulatinf mechanisms", e.g. the abolition of slavery, child labour, and racial/sexual employment discrimination.
This is a recurring theme that I despise. People need to start to talk about the government in a democracy as "we". You are the government, the state is a collective you are part off and have power over. You are in fact dependent on others, that is the point of a society.
So when someone says, hey, when I joined this society, I was told its people upheld the right for all its members to equal opportunity? But my parents did not have the money that yours did? And that affected my opportunity? So what gives?
When you have the attitude of the government as a seperate entity, it becomes reality. The more you see the government as such, the more it is allowed to become a ruler over others, since that's how you depict it. When it should be the CEO that you, a member of the board, elected, and can booth out when you don't like what they're doing no more, and you also can join the government if you want to contribute more, etc.
Sorry to hijike your discussion about handling the homelessness crisis , but that's a sore point for me. I find it really weak of people to look for someone else to govern them, and I wish people took responsability for their government (in democracies), because they are its owner and fundamentally have power over it. But too many prefer to delegate and pretend they're powerless against the faceless man.
I take your point, but for an individual this is only true in a very abstract sense. The People may govern Themselves, but I do not govern myself in any meaningful way.
BTW, this idea came up recently on a different article and got some good discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24528467
The entire purpose of society, and of a state, is to stifle the motivations of the individual for some group. In most cases it's pretty mundane stuff you give up as an individual, basically 0 cost stuff for a much bigger benefit of working with other individuals in society. Or via listening to the state in regards to the rules and policies they put in place.
But it is foolish to say that they are one and the same.
I don't see where in what I said you got the impression I was saying that they are one and the same?
I'm saying that, in a working democracy, you are a part of the government, which is very different from seeing the government as a seperate entity you are subservient too.
> The entire purpose of society, and of a state, is to stifle the motivations of the individual for some group
The point of a democratic society is to create a friendly association with others. For it to be friendly, it kind of requires all participants to benefit and feel fairly treated. In turn, this often means that a democratic society will put a stronger emphasis on the individual than non-democratic alternatives. That is to say, the goal of a democratic society is to maximize everyone's rights at the individual level.
Now yes, that does mean that a democratic society is a group of people that assemble together in order to overpower individuals or other groups that would try to dominate over them through force. Maybe that's what you meant here, but it seems a bit of a sideway conversation. Since they do so in order to protect their own individual rights from being taken by force by others.
The entire purpose of a society is to harness the potential of the group in order to enrich each individual life within it.
Stow that scarcity mindset.
Notice I specifically said > for a much bigger benefit of working with other individuals in society.
So, you might want to re-evaluate your bias towards what I said.
This assumes that people are naturally and totally individualistic, which is untrue even at a biological level. People work together instinctually, and they also decide, rationally, to work together. Individual and collective motivations are often the same; and while collective motivations sometimes stifle individual motivations, the former often (if not more often) replaces a LACK of motivation. In fact, the appeal to engaging in collective action in order to fill in a hole of individual meaning (motivation) underpins some of humanity's strongest and most common institutions: military service, volunteer service, protest, religion, work. That is society: individuals working in concert, by each's determination.
>I'm making 0 moral judgements on whether the motivations of an individual are or are not valid.
You're making a moral judgment privileging individual motivation, separating it from collective motivation.
Your argument is simply wrong on its face. It tries to generalize a solipsistic perspective to the rest of humanity, to which it very clearly does not apply. Perhaps only in this thought are you truly as much an individual as you seem to think people must necessarily be.
I share the same argument David Graeber was making in Utopia of Rules, you should give it a read.
Read "The Selfish Gene".
And anyone motivated enough can engage even further in the process, become a candidate, influence others, etc.
I find so many people are just complainers, but they barely take anytime to even understand how the system works, I wouldn't be surprised if half the people don't even know what a congressman can do, can't do, and does. And even less surprised if most people didn't even bother reading about each candidate for more than 10 minutes.
I'm not American, but now live in America, and I've literally had to explain how laws are made in the US to many Americans. That's depressing. And it's not like I'm an expert on it, I just took a few hours reading through the wikipedia page and the usa.gov website. (p.s.: It's not better in my country Canada, people are similarly lacking in ownership and awareness, so I'm not trying to point fingers at Americans exclusively)
Yes, we can discuss the system and issues with representation, like being first past the post, and all, but even before that, I think there's just a lack of ownership by a lot of people who don't consider themselves a part of the government, when they are. The word itself means: "the people rule" and is defined as: "a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state". As a citizen of a democratic state, YOU ARE the government.
Meritocracy works (barely) in private corporation but is completely useless in politics.
Seems like you're concerned about what's mostly a hypothetical when done by the state today- but probably hundreds of millions of people in the US alone are being coerced to do things they don't want to under threat of losing the exact things you're worried about. And in a lot of cases, what's one big thing mitigating that coercion? The very social safety nets you're worried about!
There isn't just one Government in the US. What we have is a system of branches, each of which must agree that a law is acceptable. If just one branch disagrees then it can effect change.
Similarly we are not just one state. We're a federation and individual states can fight against federal laws that their constituents find unjust. Washington and Colorado did just that when they legalized marijuana. It's still illegal at the federal level, but the ATF has no jurisdiction within state lines so they can't do anything about manufacture and sale within state borders.
Consolidating that all under the same umbrella erases a lot of the very complexity that serves to protect you. And you can't accord that complexity to a corporation because shareholders and the board have a level of tyranny not found in our government.
We can elect legislators who are opposed to abuses like Guantanamo Bay and campaign on fixing it.
What can we or the private sector do about abuses in the private sector?
The private sector is not above the law. The problem is that the government is. This is why, while both can misbehave, I see governments as a much, much larger danger to the average citizen than corporations. And the history agrees with me.
>market misbehaving is punished by the market through the consumer.
Can you explain how the consumer punishes private sector entities engaged in human trafficking, for example? It seems there's plenty of evidence that deception and cutting corners is the most market competitive behavior that corporations can employ which allows them to offer the most appealing prices. Therefore market misbehavior is rewarded, not punished by consumers because the price signal is too reductionist to capture all of that.
>And the history agrees with me.
That is debate-able
Isn't it apparent, though, that this type of leverage is inevitable in any societal structure? Some party will have a level of power where it can coerce many others to basically do their bidding at threat of witholding some essential sustenance. In the private sector, witholding employment means poverty and the resulting wretched consequences to health and status.
The proposition that government should be the only one with that leverage is the lesser of many evils, because at least there is electoral recourse against a government that abuses it.
This is opposed to leaving that leverage with the private sector, where there is no recourse, other that not participating, which is exactly their leverage in the first place, as you will be left with no income and in poverty.
This is genuinely sad-funny considering the state of the US federal government overreach (independent of sitting president), policing, justice and implementation of secret courts and police forces.
In any case, welfare states handle this quite well with a justice system largely independent from the social executive flanked by mandatory legal aid. Which, if anything, has resulted in a power imbalance towards those receiving state benefits.
I don't understand how this would be a valid reason to not give a benefit. Even if that benefit comes with strings or can be taken away, isn't receiving that benefit for a period of time more helpful than never receiving it at all?
That's not an argument against state help & social services per se. It's an argument for being vigilant and ensuring the government serves the people more than it serves itself.
Perhaps. I personally don't buy the "self-made man" arguments. They feel too much like survivorship bias.
Sure, a tyrannical government could take away your benefits for having the wrong views. They could also just take away your property in the absence of benefits.
There are many cultural assumptions that are built into the comments here. Worth examining.
* "What, you’re against X? Sorry, come correct or lose your privilege to those benefits." Some countries use government to ensure every mom and baby-to-be has prenatal care and food. There is not a belief test there, just a pregnancy test. Could you give an example of the types of belief tests you are against?
I find the US emphasis on church charity rather than government services repugnant in particular because it often is used exactly for ideological coercion. Not all churches, but many, see the provision of services as a way to enforce/reward/punish certain beliefs and behaviors. I've always found that un-christ-like myself but hey I'm just a heretic. A government service that says, "hey, you're 16 and homeless so we will feed you dinner" seems much better and less coercive than a church that says, "you're 16 and homeless so we'll feed you dinner if you pray beforehand and we get to choose your pronouns".
* Many sibling commenters mention employers a lot. That's another cultural assumption that I find interesting. In the culture I was raised in, it was assumed that government help is rightfully directed primarily at the very young, the very old, and the very sick -- in general, people without employers and with fewer opportunities to 'just help themselves' or pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That is, after all, why we formed a bunch of these government agencies -- we as a people, as a community, felt bad seeing 87-year-old men starve to death in their apartments because they had limited mobility and no income, or watching 4-month-old babies refuse to get that corporate job they obviously should've that would've allowed mama who had a debilitating injury from birthing to afford formula for the kid. Ah, self-empowerment: works so well when it results in 4-year-olds becoming trash pickers to help their families, and 92-year-olds to sit by the road (if they even live that long) begging because it brings in a little cash! No. Some of these government programs were formed because there are times in a person's life where all the psychological empowerment and even job skills training classes you want aren't gonna help, but food and a place to live will.
To go back to discussions above this, I still engage a lot on Facebook for political argument purposes. It's boring just talking with people who agree with me (the people I live with, generally) so I do seek out other points of view on Facebook. It is interesting how some folks always slide an argument back to the point they want -- tried talking about Amy Coney Barrett's opinion in a Title IX case with a friend doing a PhD, and strangely enough she kept bringing it back to how universities shouldn't be policing "stuff that happens in bars". I just mention this example because campus adjudication of sexual assault cases and the relationship with Title IX and due process rights is, ugh, a totally different, complicated, legally interesting conversation than 'what happens in bars'. But we can't even have the conversation -- a conversation I feel I can contribute to in an interesting way because I've been faculty at a university and have dealt informally with harassment between students -- because it continually slides back to these fake talking points that dismiss all the important stuff! Is that social cooling or not?
Probably because the vast majority of Americans can only afford healthcare for those debilitating injuries by finding an employer who will sign them up for the employee health plan.
If the results of the latter were proven to result in generally a much happier and more cohesive society, would you be so confident and assured in your opposition and disdain for the approach?
But a whole lot of teen suicide and abortion is due to haters hating (I mean Christians being dogmatic) -- it's pretty well proven that coercive religious dogma is bad for mental health, as well as in the US divorce and abortion rates. The pressure to keep up appearances and lie about who you are and your actual life is not the bit that leads to a happy and cohesive society.
So many assumptions piled onto assumptions about people.
Spot on.
It's basically a preemptive strike before anyone gets the idea to point at cancel culture and the like.
How much would a white left-wing person be willing to debate with e.g. a conservative immigrant? Would they treat them as an equal, or even defer to their lived experience? Or would they simply find another, less conservative immigrant, who would not oppose their world-view, and choose this one to be the speaker for the minority?
In my experience, there is not much difference between left-wing and right-wing people in willingness to help oppressed people. Seems to me they mostly differ in style: a left-wing person would probably create a non-profit organization and also write about what the government should do, a right-wing person would probably work under the umbrella of some religious group and also write about how individuals should help themselves and each other. On each side, a few people would actually do something, more people would talk about how someone else should do something, and most wouldn't really care. I am not saying the sides are exactly balanced; I am just saying empathising with people (but also twisting their opinions to better fit your ideology) exists on both sides.
(By coincidence, today I saw a debate where a strongly left-wing person dismissed some complaints of a marginalized person as "anti-scientific", without actually addressing the substance of their argument, just because that person disagreed with some organization that has a mission to help this marginalized community. No more detais, because it happened in a private conversation, it's just a funny coincidence that first I read this, then I switch a browser tab and read about how empathetic left-wing people are. Some of them are, some of them are not.)
Rather, I understand leftist thought to be rooted in questioning hierarchy and power structures, which I believe leads to more readily seeking solidarity with those that are not as well off as they are.
> By coincidence, today I saw a debate where a strongly left-wing person dismissed some complaints of a marginalized person
This does sound like a funny happenstance. My original reply was about this same sort of funny coincidence in reverse; how I often see the left critiqued as being "intolerant" when I frequently see them lifting and amplifying the voices of those who are disenfranchised by the system that they materially benefit from.
> How much would a white left-wing person be willing to debate with e.g. a conservative immigrant?
First, debates are not typical discourse. In my experience, debates are meant to be a show of virtue. Whose virtues you're being weighed against will greatly determine your behavior or whether you even decide to participate at all. I think that Hacker News values sound, well written arguments, which is why I am here posting. :)
Therefore, I think that given the propensity toward identity politics (from both sides) and the difficulty in interrogating the root of the beliefs that immigrant without appearing to be questioning the validity of them, I (as a white leftist) would prefer not to debate them. So, yes, I would rather propose someone whose lived experience might be more similar to theirs - perhaps a left-leaning immigrant - specifically because I would be afraid of either appearing weak in the eyes of right-wing spectators by deferring to their lived experience, or seem like an asshole because I am questioning the validity of their experience. It would be a PR nightmare. :)
In a private, personal setting (i.e. not a debate) I think that talking to your hypothetical conservative immigrant would probably be a great opportunity for me to learn about their experience and explore the root of their beliefs. I hope I would get to share mine as well.
Yes. A political orientation is about - to put it bluntly - which parts of reality you focus on and which parts of reality you ignore. So, suppose we have a group of people who are e.g. simultaneously victims of racism and of high crime in their neighborhood. A left-wing person would be happy to help them fight racism, but would feel uncomfortable hearing about crime perpertated by members of the same minority against their neighbors. A right-wing person would be happy to help them fight crime, but would feel uncomfortable discussing structural racism.
Sometimes the existing structures are oppressive and should be torn down. Sometimes they are necessary for survival. Quite often, they are both at the same time.
Don't toe the line and echo approved orthodoxy? You're the enemy! This is extreme tribal behavior.
As a result, there is a chilling effect and a lot liberals no longer feel welcome on the left[1][2]. Certainly don't feel welcome to speak or think openly. This is incredibly regressive, damaging to liberalism and enlightenment values. Seriously, not being able to challenge your own side and engage in dialectic will send us back to the dark ages.
1. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-left-is-now-the-right
2. https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-left-is-now-the-right/comm...
"the left" isn't a discrete thinkspace. There is a political spectrum, which isn't linear. The individuals mentioned are still relatively leftist, regardless of whoever is critical or engaging in other disparaging acts. Implying there is 1 left-wing or 1 right-wing is tribal behavior.
I don't agree with JK Rowling's take on these issues. But I actually think she likely has made at least some effort to do this. Some of her open letters certainly mention her knowing trans people and sympathising with their experiences.
Although in general I think the gender debate is a prime example of neither side listening to the other. There is a group of people who aren't listening to trans people when they say that they have gender feelings which are important to them. But equally trans people aren't listening to other people when they say that their physical bodies are important to them.
It is really the same process as having any ingrained belief challenged, it is going to make that person uncomfortable because something they took on faith is being challenged. That doesn't mean it's not something that should happen.
Shaming is often more about making the shamer feel good than a rational calculation of persuasive power.
I feel like they are.
Specifically, if you believe that "feeling like" a gender makes you that gender, then it seems to me that logically you have to believe one of the following:
(1) That having the physiology associated with a given gender is not sufficient to count as a gender.
This invalidates the identity of people like me who don't experience the "gender feeling" that trans people (and some cis people) talk about, and therefore base their identity as a man/woman on their physicality.
OR
(2) That gender categories are "open" where for example either feeling like a man OR having "male" physiology makes you a man.
But that seems to make the whole concept of gender pointless because people with penises don't share anything in common with people who feel like men (that they don't also share with people who feel like women and people with vaginas) unless they happen to be people who fall into both categories. It also makes it impossible for someone express that they have one of those things but not the other because there is only one label "man/woman" to describe two distinct phenomena.
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If you have a suggestion for how someone like me who has male physiology but doesn't have a "feeling of being a man" (or any other gender) can represent themselves in a system where there is only a single gender identifier and making sub-distinctions is frowned upon (because "trans (wo)men are (wo)men") then I'm all ears.
This is called nonbinary, agender, or genderqueer. This is a fairly established situation. You may come across someone who uses nonstandard pronouns such as "they/them" or "zyr/zem" or something like that. There's even an LGBTQ flag for being nonbinary. (Q stands for queer/questioning as well). If you are assigned male at birth but don't identify as male or any other gender then you may be nonbinary or agender. If you're interested in learning more I recommend reaching out to a local LGBTQ community organization to be more educated about gender identity and to figure out if you might yourself be LGBTQ!
(Additionally on technicality, trans means "anything that isn't identifiying as one's assigned gender at birth". Being nonbinary is a subset of being trans. Society is most familiar with binary trans identity, which is when someone is assigned F/M at birth but identifies as M/F, however this is not the entire set of trans identity. You are free to be assigned M at birth but identify with no gender, and still be trans.)
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> If you're interested in learning more I recommend reaching out to a local LGBTQ community organisation to be more educated about gender identity and to figure out if you might yourself be LGBTQ!
I'm pretty familiar with the LGBTQ community in general, and I have spent a great deal of time over the last year or so reading up about and thinking about gender identity. My view is that the mainstream view in the LGBTQ community where one's gender identity (which label they use - man/woman/non-binary/etc) is assumed to correspond to "a feeling of gender" is quite naive. This is certainly true for some people, but there are also other reasons why people choose to use those labels including having certain physiologies or simply the fact that you were assigned the label and never bothered to change it. It seems to me that these other kinds of gender identity are equally valid and one way or another ought to find representation in whatever system of gender we settle one, but that a "gender feelings" focussed conception of gender doesn't provide this representation.
(one such system would be a system eschews having a single gender label at all and requires that we are more specific about which aspects of sex/gender we are talking about in situations where we need to make gendered distinctions)
You can identify as a masc nonbinary or AMAB nonbinary. These are distinctions that are pretty common to use in the LGBTQ community which is why I suggest not just reading up and thinking but actually going to a community and participating within it. Your local group may even be able to introduce you to other AMAB NB people that you can compare and contrast experiences with.
Caster's case has nothing to do with trans people, it's more that she has rare biology (intersex) but happened to be raised as a woman.
Since her rare biology gives her some of the same advantages as men (elevated testosterone) the question is whether it's more fair for her to compete with men or with women.
She can easily beat many women, so some women feel it's unfair for her to compete with them.
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1269382518362509313?s=...
And no, simply saying "I'm empathetic!" in a tweet doesn't make it true
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1269406094595588096
Defending an avowed transphobe doesn't come off as very empathetic:
https://twitter.com/Carter_AndrewJ/status/127078794525190553...
Nor does calling the person who said the following (Magdalen), "immensely brave:"
> You are fucking blackface actors. You aren't women. You are men who get sexual kicks from being treated like women. fuck you and your dirty fucking perversions. our oppression isn't a fetish you pathetic, sick, fuck.
Typically when I try to empathize with people, I don't turn around and compliment someone calling those people "pathetic" and "sick."
EDIT: I guess I got downvoted enough to be rate limited. I only allow small windows of HN time so I'm going to post my reply to the below comment as an edit. Sorry that's annoying but, eh.
Why are you talking about sides? Why are you talking about "trans people" being absolutely right, claiming moral highground, or dismissing viewpoints?
I'm discussing an individual whose words I can point to. JK Rowling. Who are you talking about?
You're engaging in a method of rhetoric that is wide open for abuse by fallacies such as strawman.
If JK Rowling had mad a serious attempt to understand transgenderism, she wouldn't give credence to the idea that it's a fetish.
My wider point though is that both sides seem to be failing to sufficiently take into the other side's perspective. The point about same-sex attraction in the second tweet you link is a good one IMO. I can't describe my sexuality without referring people's physiological attributes. Doesn't that make them socially relevant? A view on gender that completely eliminates the physical components of sex/gender is denying people's realities just as much as one that doesn't account for people's "feeling of gender".
Trans people are absolutely right that people like JK Rowling are treating them poorly. But they can't claim the moral high ground until they stop completely dismissing the viewpoints of anyone who tries to tell them that the physical aspects of sex/gender are important to them, and labelling such people as transphobic. That's not very empathetic either.
Trans person: I feel (this way).
a non-equivalent statement from an anti-transness-person: You are wrong to feel that way; your feeling is false and what you are doing is wrong.
An equivalent statement for the non-trans-person here would be: I feel (this other way).
This business about trans people "dismissing the viewpoints of anyone who tries to tell them that the physical aspects of sex/gender are important to them" is just bullshit. I've talked with and interacted with trans folks and really no one's gonna tell me that their experience growing up as a boy and transitioning into girlhood or womanhood is the same as my experience growing up as a girl. And none of them has ever said that my experience of my physical self is not important, or is transphobic. Like, what? Can you find me instances of this sort of behavior?
Ragging on "people who menstruate" instead of "woman" (pun intended) as Rowling does is not her saying "the physical aspects of sex/gender are important to me". Menstruation is not the definition of womanhood (you do know postmenopausal women exist, right?). If you want to talk about menstruation, talk about menstruation. Don't pretend it's equivalent to wearing nailpolish or getting catcalled or giving birth or trying to find pants with pockets that fit a cell phone. JK Rowling is trying to tell other people about how they should experience sex/gender, not just representing her experience. Beyond being not empathetic, it's intellectually lazy.
Trans man: I "feel like a man", and this makes me like you because "trans men are men".
Me (AMAB, uses label "man"): I don't "feel like a man". That's not what being a man means to me.
Trans man: Well that's what being a man means. It's transphobic to think anything else.
---
I feel like trans people are assuming that cis people have the same gender feelings that they do. And while some cis people do seem to have those feeling, many (like myself) don't. I'm not saying that trans feelings are wrong or that they don't feel like they say they do. I'm saying that the feelings they describe don't correspond to gender as I experience it. And thus that a model of gender that defines gender exclusively in those terms doesn't represent my experience.
Whenever I express the above viewpoint I get shut down and told that I'm transphobic. In other words: I am told that my experience of gender is invalid.
---
> If you want to talk about menstruation, talk about menstruation.
I kinda agree with this. But I feel like this ought to apply to aspects of gender as well as aspects of sex. If we should about "people who menstrate" rather than "women", shouldn't we also talk about "people who feel like women" and "people who present as women" rather than "women". Taking the "feeling" of being a man/woman as definitive is exclusive because not everyone who has other gendered traits has such feelings just as taking physiology as definitive is exclusive because not everyone who has other gendered traits has the same gendered physiology.
I mean... it is what being a man means to you, because that's what you "feel" being a man is.
You are a single cell in a culture. You can't decide for anyone other than yourself what it means to be, say, a Man, a (certain religion), a (I dunno, gamer?). These are identities and they're based on your feelings. Sometimes you'll bump into someone else that uses the same word to describe that identity. Say two "gamers" bump into eachother. Both would say "I am a gamer." One has never played Mario and the other has never played Halo. "You're not a gamer!" they say to eachother.
Of course, when we're talking about gender and sex, there's a lot more at stake, and a lot more historical and cultural tendrils to pick apart. Regardless, whatever it means to you to "be a man," is entirely on you. You don't get to decide for me what it means to "be a man," and therefore you don't get to decide for a trans man what it means either.
On that same note, my definition of what it is to "be a man" has no bearing whatsoever on your manliness or identity! You can feel safe in your identity regardless of what the rest of us are doing. What, are you not confident in your own identity? That's a separate issue, and it's not trans men's fault that you feel that way.
I don't know what trans men you've met, but this is laughably far from my near-universal experience of hearing them say things like "oh god what if the way I assert masculinity makes someone feel bad or invalidates someone else's feelings or experiences." I have no doubt people have said things akin to that (being trans is by no means an inoculation against horrifically bad takes) but basically every trans person I know explicitly has a model of gender that doesn't invalidate your experience of "I don't experience gender like that, but 'man' works well for me, not least because of my physical body."
People may point out that it could be good to pull on that thread and consider the possibility of being agender or otherwise non-binary, but no one I know would call you transphobic for critically engaging with your gender and coming to the conclusion "nope, still don't get anything new from considering this, 'man' it is". Quite the opposite in fact, as even attempting to do so should be a decent signal for empathy with trans people.
At the end of the day, the label is for you however that manifests; whether it's having a mental model of gender where you finally have a place instead of always being pushed to the side, or having a magic phrase that indicates to someone the broad strokes of how you'd prefer to be addressed, the label is only important insofar as it helps you.
>If we should [talk] about "people who menstruate" rather than "women"
Just to clarify, "people who menstruate" isn't woke code for cis women to make trans women more comfortable. It's explicitly inclusive of trans men since many do menstruate and strongly prefer not to be labeled women as a result of that.
This is what makes Rowling's take on "people who menstruate" as well as the strong chorus of "trans women are women" and much weaker echo of "trans men are men" in response to it that much more tone-deaf. Trans men were the people whose experiences Rowling aimed to invalidate, but as usual trans women became the public face of the issue.
>Taking the "feeling" of being a man/woman as definitive is exclusive because not everyone who has other gendered traits has such feelings just as taking physiology as definitive is exclusive because not everyone who has other gendered traits has the same gendered physiology.
For argument's sake, what if your subjective experience of being a man were just so ingrained in you that you never consciously engaged with it? That could manifest the same way ("i don't 'feel like a man', that isn't how being a man works for me"), but now would you have a place in the "feelings" model you've established as exclusionary.
It seems to me that the fundamental issue you describe comes down to the coexistence of "I'm a man because that's just what I am" and "I'm a man because I feel like a man", and the only conflict inherent to that comes when the former group feels pushed out by the latter. I personally fail to see any way that someone embracing masculinity, especially if it's something that's long been denied to them, invalidates the experience of a man who's comfortable enough being labeled a man even without subjective experience of his gender.
I have considered this quite extensively because this seems to be what most people assume my experience is like. But I'm pretty sure I really don't have such feelings. One of the key things that made me sure of this is seeing other (cis) men and women justify or explain things in terms of their gender. I have never felt like I wanted to do something because I'm a man. And I've always hated when someone describes me as man and implies that means anything more than I have a certain physiology, even if the implication is a positive one.
This is very different to for example my experience of sexuality. I'm heterosexual, and I can understand what it is like to be gay in reference to my own sexuality. I have feelings of attraction towards female people, and even though I don't experience such feelings towards male people, it's pretty easy for me to imagine what that would be like.
My experience of gender seems more like what I imagine asexual people's experience of sexuality must be like: something completely alien to them that they can only come to understand through others' descriptions and explanations.
---
> I personally fail to see any way that someone embracing masculinity, especially if it's something that's long been denied to them, invalidates the experience of a man who's comfortable enough being labeled a man even without subjective experience of his gender.
Because it implies that "being a man" has something to with masculinity. I am very much not masculine (I do have a masculine side, but so do even the girliest of cis women so that doesn't mean much - but if anything I'm more feminine). I am comfortable being labeled a man only so long as it doesn't come with an implication of masculinity, which in my lifetime thus far it largely hasn't (I was born in the early 90s). Now if I describe myself as a man people start making assumptions about how I feel inside (as you did in your comment!)
What I want is a label that I can use to describe my cluster of male physiological traits without implying anything about my feelings, behaviour or personality. I'm not hung up on that being "man", but I would like there to be some word to describe that aspect of myself and others.
---
> Just to clarify, "people who menstruate" isn't woke code for cis women to make trans women more comfortable
Sure, I get that. But "people who present as feminine" isn't code for "trans and cis women" either. It would include men (cis and trans) who present in a certain way, and exclude women (cis and trans) who don't. And the distinction can be important. For example, one of the arguments in the infamous "bathroom debate" is that trans women can be unsafe in men's bathroom. And I think this argument has a lot of merit: it's important that everyone is safe while they use the bathroom. However, the group of people who are at risk in men's bathrooms is not actually "trans women", but "people who are presenting as feminine": a trans woman who was presenting in a masculine way would be perfectly safe because nobody would suspect that they aren't a man, whereas a cis man presenting in a feminine way (say wearing a dress and makeup) would not be because there are prejudiced people who are violent towards males transgressing gender norms, and these people typically won't stop to check what someone's gender identity is before attacking.
I don't see how saying "women" when you mean "people presenting as female" is any less egregious than saying "women" when you mean "people who menstruate". I feel like we probably shouldn't use "women" in either situation, but my opinion on that is not super strong. What does really get to me is the hypocrisy of people who cry bloody murder when "women" is used in place of "people who menstruate" but will vigorously defend their right to use "women" in place of "people presenting as female".
---
> I have no doubt people have said things akin to that (being trans is by no means an inoculation against horrifically bad takes) but basically every trans person I know explicitly has a model of gender that doesn't invalidate your experience of "I don't experience gender like that, but 'man' works well for me, not least because of my physical body."
I think the conflict tends to arise when I'm not that interested in their gender feelings / label, or ask them to clarify what that means to them (because they don't correspond to anything in my own experience and thus aren't really very meaningful to me) but I am still interested in things like their hormone levels (because they still have an impact on perception and behaviour), and I think that trans people ought to acknowledge their physiologies whatever they may be, even if they don't like them. I personally don't see how that invalidates their experience. I'm not denying that they have the gender they say they have. I'm just saying that that doesn't mean much to me.
I'm all on board with a "whatever label works for you" model right up until people start arguing that we ought to organise society on the basis of those labels, or start basing our laws on them. Surely at that point we need to be working with labels which have a single objective meaning rather than labels which everyone interprets differently to each other.
But I still feel you're making up conflict when you have this charge that trans people are telling you how you need to experience yourself. It seems awfully self-centered.
Last, I have particular feelings about "people who menstruate" etc because I live with a physician who gets dinged on quality metrics when he can't perform a prostate check on a person without a prostate or a Pap smear on a person without a cervix. As a math person who is pretty literal, my opinion is that we should be clear about the salient characteristic. You want to do something anatomical? Be clear about it, and I'll tell you if I have the requisite anatomy. You want to shop for curtains for your male partner because women born women automatically have better interior decorating sense? Be clear about that, and I can demonstrate you're wrong. Tell me I'm wrong about a math proof or my perception of politics because hormones? I'll show you what female aggression looks like. I don't like folks telling me what I am or what I think because of my hormones, and your last sentences in the second to last paragraph indicate you might do that to me.
what i don't care about is how many genders an English department can create. I don't discriminate, but I also don't want to expend any energy understanding or empathizing .
Maybe avoid characterizing your would-be allies in terms of dumb right-wing tropes like "how many genders an English department can create" while you're at it.
Maybe people aren't forcing each other at gunpoint, but it's pretty close.
Furthermore, unless there's more context I've skimmed over (I assume you're referring to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24636899), it's not clear that Coinbase will suffer any negative consequences from this whatsoever aside from being shunned by activists, which I presume is a consequence they're okay with since they published a blog post explicitly alienating that group. The only folks being forced I see are the employees being told to pipe down or ship out.
(also, while it may not be substantive to this discussion, the belief that neutrality, especially explicit neutrality, is tacit endorsement of the status quo is neither extreme nor unreasonable)
This is a direct example of what you are denying, that people are somehow not being forced to participate in these politics. They are, and increasingly so, with very few companies taking such an active stance to combat it.
And yes, neutrality is specifically the absence of any single position. It cannot be an endorsement of anything, be definition. Redefining terms to be whatever is politically convenient to create strawman positions and drama is another tactic used by those who want to force politics into every situation.
Source? I have no idea what this is referring to.
Effective neutrality due to lack of will or resources is one thing. But a declaration of neutrality is a message to other actors that you will not intervene in their affairs. It is a rejection of the cultural norm that extremism (outside the company) should be tempered. Sounds pretty political to me, but maybe you and I are working with different definitions of politics.
I would like to know how many "right winger" did actively and honestly engaged with feminists texts. Not even with radical feminists texts, just with a mild moderate variety or with those who were radical back then and not anymore. Cause it seems to me that very little. Not that they have to, but they dont go that far in range as they pretend. They do read range where range is within what they like or where range is completely irrelevant to our lives.
It is also currently right wing that seeks to suppress actual fields of study on Universities.
It is also my experience is that many (not all) right people simply "know" the text is stupid without ever reading it. They also "know" that if movie pleases feminist crowd it is bad without seeing that movie.
And working in more conservative environment, I was careful not to say things that could be constructed as near-feminist, because that would lower my "trustworthiness" in other arenas too.
But the ideological subgroup specifically who throw around "listening to other viewpoints" a lot tend to be the kind who seriously engage only with view points comfortable to them. As in, there is talk about uncomfortable viewpoints, but their idea of uncomfortable viewpoint is someone telling them they are superior and they disagreeing cause they are more egalitarian. Which is not uncomfortable at all.
Listening to other viewpoints is like invoking Crocker's Rules. You can't invoke the rules on other people. Only yourself.
You just don't have the information to determine whether you're worth listening to. Because you will always think you're worth listening to.
Care to share your feelings on the far left push to suppress science and mathematics?
> And working in more conservative environment, I was careful not to say things that could be constructed as near-feminist, because that would lower my "trustworthiness" in other arenas too.
The opposite is certainly true today in corporate America and higher education. Making an argument for the existence of a biological basis for sex or denying that all whites are automatically racist is a no-go.
The ideas that the far left is trying to suppress are very much not conservative. It’s an assault on objectivity and rational thought.
If this were true, biology departments themselves would be a no-go. Every university I can name has a biology department. Is there any source for the claim that making such an argument is a no-go, or even any serious scholar (in any field) arguing that there is no biological basis for sex?
>It’s an assault on objectivity and rational thought.
If it were an assault on objectivity, then the scholars wouldn't be using 'objective' metaphysical models to argue for their positions. If they used 'non-objective' models, then the work would lack the normative force claimed. If it were an assault on rational thought, they wouldn't be crafting arguments at all. Would you care to link to some scholarly work which not only argues for the positions you criticize, but also adopts a model which denies objective or rational thought? Philosophically, rationality and objectivity are very tricky concepts. We should have debates on those just as we have debates on most other things.
Sadly this is a thing: https://twitter.com/RebeccaRHelm/status/1207834357639139328 https://twitter.com/ScienceVet2/status/1035246030500061184
It's a motte-and-bailey argument going from "a small percentage of people don't neatly fall into either the male or female category" to "the concept of biological sex is meaningless and the only relevant factor is a person's self-identification".
Except that's not what the links you posted say. In fact, the very first sentence of the second link says: "First, sex defined: We're talking physical sex here, not gender."[0]
What's more, the same poster says further down: "It is worth noting that I never talk about transgender in this thread. Intersex is not the same as transgender. You can be one without the other, or be both."
So that thread doesn't say anything close to what you think it says. Unless I misunderstood either the twitter thread or you. Which is always possible.
Would you mind expanding on your point? It might lead to an interesting discussion.
[0] https://twitter.com/ScienceVet2/status/1035246030500061184
> Sadly this is a thing:
Neither of the things your point to argue that.
They do argue that biological sex is not simple or binary, but that's very different from “there is no biological basis for sex”.
> It's a motte-and-bailey argument going from "a small percentage of people don't neatly fall into either the male or female category" to "the concept of biological sex is meaningless and the only relevant factor is a person's self-identification".
Except it's not; another thing neither of the sources you point to argues is that the various biological sex features don't matter: each of them matters; where they matter differs.
Unless, of course, by “matter” you mean specifically “provide an excuse to base socially ascribed gender on something other than gender identity”, in which case, sure, but it's hardly a motte-and-bailey argument, then.
It's not actually happening. I can imagine what you're thinking of as "suppression of science and mathematics" is pseudoscience.
I have come to realize that right wingers are brainwashed or people with mental problems or childhood traumas, like our ex president (Alvaro Uribe Velez), who was addicted to kill people with chainsaws, or military men that as part of their training are tortured [1], and are subject to psychological training that change the way they behave.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3RDT-n6t1s
Edit: I got a couple of downvotes but no one seems to really challenge my opinion, reinforcing my initial beliefs.
As a american center-rightist, I have come to realize that left wingers are brainwashed or people with mental problems or childhood traumas.
Like the millenial kids who grew up without father figure or a stable family.
Like college going students who have been brainwashed by leftists to seek state protection everywhere in terms of safe spaces.
I feel like they are blinded by ideology to believe that there cause is just and their opinions are morally justified and anyone even questioning their beliefs is morally wrong.
Grew out in a stable family, although very corrupt one, I remember handing money to judges and other officials as a teen, and smuggling goods through the Venezuelan border, about 10 members of my family were killed and military service is mandatory here.
> Like college going students who have been brainwashed by leftists to seek state protection everywhere in terms of safe spaces.
College has never been free in Colombia and I've never been in one, additionally constantly the government is trying to privatize primary and secondary education so the poor can no longer educate themselves, you develop your own opinion based on your environment.
All policies implemented by the right wing have had disastrous consequences and are done with malice.
Additionally the Colombian government seems to fight an endless imaginary war against drugs even though every single right wing politician has ties with drug cartels, like the president [1], or the vice president (her siblings were jailed in the US) [2] and her husband was the main partner of one of the most powerful cartel leader [3], or the Colombian ambassador of Uruguay who had a cocaine lab [4], or the father of the ex president Alvaro Uribe Velez who was the main partner if not the boss of Pablo Escobar [5].
1: https://colombiareports.com/we-got-a-president-and-we-got-fr...
2: https://elpais.com/internacional/2020-06-12/la-vicepresident...
3: https://www.insightcrime.org/investigations/invisible-drug-l...
4: https://es.euronews.com/2020/02/14/descubren-un-laboratorio-...
5: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relaciones_entre_la_familia_Ur... https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB131/
In that context, I'm not particularly interested in engaging with the idea that the travel ban is A Good Thing Actually. And I don't think I'd maintain a friendship with someone who thinks that it is. I do not consider this a character flaw.
I think there are a lot more people who think they do this than actually do this. Left-leaning spaces are some of the most homogenous around. I can’t tell you how many left-leaning people I know who were genuinely shocked and surprised that, when it came time to vote, “people of color” didn’t like Elizabeth Warren. Their perception of getting to know “immigrants from other countries” and “people who are racially minoritized” rested entirely on interacting with immigrants and minorities who travel in the same rarified elite circles as themselves and hold the same views. “Center people of color” during the primary became “f--k moderates” after the convention, without a hint of irony.
Of course I’m painting with a very broad brush! Obviously not all left-leaning people are like that. But I do think there is a lack of appreciation for the relationships right-leaning folks have with people who are different from themselves. One of the most racially integrated places I’ve ever been is rural Texas. It’s a function of economics and geography. Left-leaning cities are highly segregated—educated left leaning people generally don’t live and work alongside immigrants and racial minorities.
I also think that it's unfortunate it's so easy to mistake a critique like that as an attack of the left as a whole. Leftist policy should always have the goal of materially making peoples lives better. We should ruthlessly measure and criticize whether we are in fact succeeding in that, both by the numbers and by the lived experience of the people they effect.
The current form of discourse in America is so hyper-partisan as to make that sort of critique almost impossible to do in public, as it comes off as a show of weakness rather than an opportunity for evolution. It's painful.
The ivory tower leftists are now pushing a narrative of pervasive “white supremacy,” pitting whites versus non-whites. And again, the ivory tower folks are being tone deaf. The NYT recently ran an article where self-described “liberal pollsters” asked about the views of Latino people. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/opinion/biden-latino-vote...
> Progressives commonly categorize Latinos as people of color, no doubt partly because progressive Latinos see the group that way and encourage others to do so as well. Certainly, we both once took that perspective for granted. Yet in our survey, only one in four Hispanics saw the group as people of color.
> In contrast, the majority rejected this designation. They preferred to see Hispanics as a group integrating into the American mainstream, one not overly bound by racial constraints but instead able to get ahead through hard work.
What the article describes as the views of the overwhelming majority of Hispanics reflects my own views as an immigrant. By contrast, the approach taken by these ivory tower folks is in my opinion unworkable and threatens to blow up something that works about America: our ability to assimilate and lift up immigrant groups. If you look at the data, all immigrant groups are on a path to reaching economic parity with white people. Asians are already there, and Latinos achieve parity within a few generations: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/3/1567/5741707
Ivory tower leftists are leading these chants, amplifying people like Linda Sarsour who call assimilation “racist,” etc. And I think that ends in disaster. Nowadays, I have to keep an eye out to make sure my half-white daughter isn’t being exposed to this stuff. And frankly, I’m a pretty liberal person so this is distressing. I don’t like the direction Trump has gone by alienating immigrants. But there is a good chance that Nikki Hailey is the future of the GOP. Meanwhile, who comes after Biden? Elizabeth Warren, who talks about all of us non-white people as a progressive bloc, constantly assailed by white people? AOC? Ilhan Omar?
To be clear, I don't think that it's a right vs left thing. I think that social media incentivizes people to behave poorly. Ben Shapiro had an enlightening discussion with a founder of Vox about the nature of polarization [1], but that's not why he's famous or how he makes money. His audience wants to see him bash unprepared liberals, so that's what he's going to do. Even if he doesn't, some other pundit will simply take his place.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMOUiWCjkn4
As a former Mormon missionary, I couldn't disagree more. I didn't meet many people who were interested in the Mormon church, but I didn't consider them evil. If anything, it was my views on my religion and personal spirituality that evolved enormously over the course of the two years, far more than the 19 years previous or the many since. I learned a lot about myself and my worldview. Certainly a lot more than anyone changed their worldview by talking to me.
That wasn’t the subtext at all. Interesting that you think the shoe fits so well, though.
When looking at this and your other reply to me elsewhere in this thread, it does not feel like you're engaging me in good faith.
This is a load of gilded age nonsense. There's never been any point in history where people deliberately exposed themselves to uncomfortable truths about people they considered other as part of "growing up".
I'd really challenge you to think about when you think this was. Was it in the 80s while gay people were dying of aids while straight people ignored their plight?
The 70s when mainstream american society treated anti-war activists as terrorists?
The 50s and 60s when white people literally moved out of cities and into suburbs to get away from black people?
What you're experiencing isn't "people failing to communicate with people with diverse views," but the internet finally forcing people to coexist with social groups they could just ignore until now. You have to exist on the same site as people who have been deeply harmed by the systems that benefit you and you're scared of that anger and those people's unwillingness to accept your desire to stick your head in the sand like your parents could.
> "internet finally forcing people to coexist with social groups they could just ignore until now"
How so? The internet has made it much easier to isolate and block than ever before. That's exactly why there's so much division today.
> "you're scared of that anger and those people's unwillingness"
What are you talking about here?
In person or not, everyone has a social filter on who they interact with. Your wealth, race, gender, orientation, interests, and location all act as filters against who you'll interact with, let alone be friends with. If you go to Harvard, how much relative opportunity do you think that gives you to befriend someone who isn't a rich white person? Especially, ya know, when only white people (white men, even) could even go to Harvard.
These filters are more or less permeable by the culture and scope of your life, but if you think there's some magical moment in the past when white people by an large all had black friends or rich people all had poor friends, you're dreaming.
It's easier now to experience perspectives alien to you by a country mile. It's also easier for them to intrude into your life.
Somehow, it's the most privileged people are the most likely to call this intrusion an attack. To call people wanting to re-establish boundaries with them a violation of their 'right to free speech'. Funny that.
All those characteristics you mentioned are outward and secondary to the one that matters the most - the way you think. The original post said "varying opinions". Your beliefs, character and worldview are far more important than what you look like and you had to actually communicate with people to understand this. This built much better dialogue and interactions.
Now it takes a few taps to block millions based on assumptions and the most tenuous associations, as well as surface attributes like you mentioned. Someone merely liking a post you disagree with is enough to end a relationship. New perspectives being easier to experience also means they're easier to block, and the latter is the issue being discussed.
As far as "right to free speech" is concerned, I don't see what it has to do with this but regardless you also have a right to not participate in any discussion. Nobody is forcing you to talk, and nobody ever could.
My assertion is simple: people have always lived in bubbles (honestly this is so blatantly true it's hilarious anyone even tries to argue against it) and the internet has only strengthened those bubbles in so far as it has forced people to confront the edges of them more readily.
No one ever had to "block millions" until twitter existed. The concept was meaningless. Every day of anyone's life before the internet every single person was ignoring the lives of countless people who had no way to reach them, an effective but implicit block on literally everything uncomfortable in the world.
This is, quite literally, what the original poster was saying though. Nobody is arguing that bubbles never existed (again let's please avoid the extremes) but that they were much more permeable before.
Of course you don't interact with those you can't reach. Some barriers, physical or otherwise, will always exist. However people who did reach each other would interact much more freely because you didn't have any other way to know more about them in the first place. Now your social reputation precedes you, even if it's not created by you but rather an amalgamation of data points constructing some skewed halo, and it's used to stop interaction before it can ever start.
That's the fundamental issue raised in this thread. Do you not agree with this premise?
Also, extremes are useful tools for examining assumptions.
As for the rest, in so far as online interactions have different boundaries and background information levels, I think you have to work harder to demonstrate that these interactions aren't (current covid-world aside) in addition to rather than replacing in person interactions people largely had before. Until we're all walking around with google glass to tell us all about everyone we meet, you are still free to go talk to the person on the street corner about their life.
But even then, your social status has always proceeded you to some degree. Again, your race, visible evidence of your wealth (clothes, haircut, etc), visible elements of queerness or lack thereof, and visible gender, your language and speech patterns are all elements of social signalling that have always acted as barriers to communication between in and out groups of those people.
On the internet, some of these can be mitigated or erased. On the street, while dating, in the workplace they cannot. They are data points that tell someone a lot about you (as with social media, within some error bars) before you even interact.
Again, these are changes in the structure of the outer edges of our bubbles and do not argue for a change in the scope or degree of our bubbles on their own.
>the internet has only strengthened those bubbles
I’m having a hard time tracking whether you think things are better or worse now, unless you are asserting the contact hypothesis is wrong
I don't think this speaks specifically to whether or not "things are better/worse now," it's a criticism of a particular pop-psych trope angle of measuring it.
I think the contact hypothesis is correct. People interacting with people they're bigoted against will generally ease or counteract their bigotry.
I also think that people overestimate the degree to which contact happened in the past and mistake modern forms of 'bubble-friction' (for lack of a better term) being more visible than the silent, implicit kinds in the past for it being new.
Middle class and rich white people literally left north american inner cities to struggle on their own with reduced tax bases to escape having to interact with black people. They did this quietly, and they did it in a way that appeared individualistic and rational.
The effect was far more profound than any possible consequence of being blocked on twitter or yelled at on facebook, but it was very easy to ignore happening.
I think some of the work by people like Tristan Harris and Renee Diresta support this. The attention economy works in large part simultaneously on outrage and confirmation bias. To some of the parent comment points, not interacting in the real world may short-circuit the ability for us to confront different views while simultaneously acknowledging others humanity.
>white people literally left north american inner cities to struggle on their own with reduced tax bases to escape having to interact with black people.
White flight is a real thing, but I think the plight of these cities is much more complicated than to be distilled to a single feature like race. As an example, Detroit went from one of the wealthiest cities to bankrupt in a generation. White flight is part of this, as is corruption, as is poor economic diversification, and a host of other issues.
A few things are true about wealth distribution, it's empirically become more concentrated and also more localized to elite urban areas. When people from this urban elite start calling everyone else privileged and intolerant to the point that they don't deserve a voice.. it's not a great look.
You (rightly) acknowledged that you can be privileged in some areas but disadvantaged in others, but seem to take the stance in a previous statement that there is no progress, just "gilded age nonsense" because there are still marginalized groups.
We can acknowledge progress while still admitting there is a lot of work to be done. There's no reason to treat them as mutually exclusive. My worry is that those who take the alternate stance ironically end up alienating potential allies. Or, to butcher the old idiom, they fail to realize that expecting perfection can get in the way of progress.
I would certainly say that on social issues I do not believe there has been enough progress, but there absolutely has been a lot of progress.
On the specific issue of bubbles, I have argued for a complex view that the nature of the boundaries of people's social bubbles have changed. As I don't think there's a good way to measure this I take as a baseline that it may have largely stayed the same but the way we experience conflict over it has changed.
Social media I think does, however, represent an exponential growth in how much "outside perspective" people are exposed to, as well as the intrusiveness of those perspectives. All those other communication inventions required filtering perspectives through layers of privilege (media, basically).
On social media though I can post a tweet about my lunch and have someone from across the ocean tell me I deserve to die for who I am in the replies to it. No one in history has ever had to face that level of forced interaction on so mundane a social act until now.
And that's why we put up walls. To get back to where we were 20 years ago. Not because we can't handle "disagreement", but because when I'm eating lunch I don't want to be told I don't deserve to live.
I think where the disagreement may be is that the internet (defined as the applications, not as the infrastructure), and social media in particular, isn't optimized for open communication or sharing different viewpoints. It's optimized for capturing our attention. Unfortunately, the way it often does this is by hijacking our psychology; one way is by confirmation bias and another is by inducing outrage (which strengthens our pre-existing beliefs). The flow of information is not "free"; it's curated to the ends of the attention economy so even while there is a lot more availability of information, it's passing through some filters that may not be the most productive for society. In other words, it's designed to reinforce our pre-existing beliefs rather than challenge them.
Those filters become social media's own "layers of privileges" to a certain extent. I think the downside with those compared to previous media is that the new filters are much more difficult to interpret compared with, say, a newspaper's political leanings.
That most people only express things to people that they thing would be accepting of what they said. Even if they might not agree with it, they'll at least accept that it's okay to hold those opinions.
Once you cross the line into "Expressing this opinion will cause negative social consequences to me" then people start self-censoring.
https://fs.blog/2020/09/spiral-of-silence/
> In anonymous environments, the spiral of silence can end up reversing itself, making the most fringe views the loudest.
Now in 2020s Gay people are accepted in the mainstream society.
> The 70s when mainstream american society treated anti-war activists as terrorists?
Anti-war activists are no longer treated as terrorists.
> The 50s and 60s when white people literally moved out of cities and into suburbs to get away from black people?
Segregation has ended.
All of these positive changes have come by "You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions."
If the people were so rigid with their views as assume them to be then these positive changes would have never happened.
Ignoring that your statements are optimistic at best. Some gay people are accepted into mainstream society. Anti-war activists absolutely have recently still been considered terrorists. Hell, anti-RACISM activists are actively being called terrorists by the government right now which goes to the next thing, which is that segregation as a legal concept has ended but turning neighbourhoods white is still absolutely a thing.
You have revealed yourself too early. Disinformation requires more finesse.
At the same time that we are scoffing at the closed-mindedness of the past, in realms like politics, people were _better_ at working together across the aisle at some periods in History. Obviously, not the Civil War era, but for much of the early 20th century, as an example. Just because a lot of people are bad at something does not mean it isn't a laudable goal or practice.
Most of the people attacking other people online haven't been deeply harmed by anything at all. They're just parroting what they hear in their online echo chambers. The signal to noise ratio in the discussion of issues that really do affect people is moving to mostly noise. Most of the time it's mountains from molehills, just to virtue signal for attention. Nothing constructive is coming from it. In fact, I'd say it's dividing people more than ever.
How is that working for you?. This kind of forced one dimensional thinking is the issue rather than having discussions and building consensus around these very complex and sensitive topics.
They also were both high status individuals who lived almost exclusively in the world of academic disagreement. It's not that difficult to be open-minded when closed-mindedness has little physical consequences for you.
If you live in a town in Myanmar where some heated discussion on the internet can turn into an ethnic riot and end with you dead on the street, or you're a Chinese shop owner and some garbage on the internet ends with your store being destroyed you get a little bit more careful about the "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" attitude.
The shifting attitude towards offense isn't so much the result of technology as the article suggests, or changing culture in the upper strata of society, it's democratisation of discourse to people for whom discourse actually matters in the real world. I think this is why the change has been so pronounced in the US in particular. In the US, average people for the longest amount of time had no ability to speak at all, all discourse was 'free' because it was free from consequence for the people who spoke, in practical terms.
And yet it seems to me as an outside observer that it is precisely American academia that is obsessed with divisive ideologies. The shop owners seem to be way more pragmatic.
> The shifting attitude towards offense isn't so much the result of technology as the article suggests, or changing culture in the upper strata of society, it's democratisation of discourse to people for whom discourse actually matters in the real world. I think this is why the change has been so pronounced in the US in particular. In the US, average people for the longest amount of time had no ability to speak at all
Why did people in the US have no ability to speak? Or have less ability than those in some other country?
Or are you saying that social media took off because those in the US already felt free to speak and then a platform appeared?
because US public discourse has been, in the past, dominated by elites. Politics was largely the domain of the upper middle-class, politicians were largely homogenous demographically drawn from top-tier universities, the media recruited from similar institutions, and so on. So you have a significantly narrower spectrum in what is considered 'political debate' than what is actually present in the population, and the people who are doing the debating are largely shielded in their personal life from consequences because it's a sort of intellectual exercise and filling op-ed pages, not a matter of life and safety. That's what created the idea of 'free' debate, but rather it's insular debate. Culture in the US was predominantly created top-down.
Social media kind of blew this wide open in all directions. You see this take alot these days that Americans 'used to live in the same reality' and now don't, and it's the fault of liberals, conservatives, the media, postmodernism or whatever else. But really what's happening is that Americans never lived in the same reality, but finally middle America, and black lives matter, and metoo get to actually speak up. And that's going to cause much more heat than a bunch of harvard grads in a debate club, because now the people who actually have skin in the game are part of the discussion rather than just the subject of it.
From my relatively small sample of the Czech Twitter, the discourse there is dominated by about thirty journalists and white collar workers. No ghetto voices to be heard; people in ghettos have more urgent problems than to sit on the phone and crank out 60 status updates a day.
I think that this is why there has been such a push back by each of the demographics and movements that you listed. They each have a voice and can be more powerfully organized than ever before albeit in some cases a more superficial basis hence the rise of cancel culture.
Traditionally if you wanted to get a way from push back in your locale you moved. Now that is not an option since so much of your speech is tied to a identifiable account that follows you hence the social cooling.
I think this time of change is a phase of growing pains that might last generations that will see us wrestle with these issues for a long time.
i) The tendency to immaturity. (This is a social problem.)
ii) The tendency to loud stupidity and stubborn ignorance. Not all opinions need be heard and acknowledged. Reason is a habit that must be practised. (This is a cultural problem. At bottom, it is anti-intellectualism.)
iii) The very modern problem of "victimology discourse". Everyone has lived injustice because, frankly, people are exploitative and "the system" finds abuse to be profitable. But we cannot have free speech and productive exchanges if Victim Points overrule discussion.
In the end, the reflective person will disengage from the dungheap. This leaves only the dung.
This is a very rosy-colored view of a past that wasn't enjoyed by many people except for certain small subsets of relatively-well-off folks whose disagreements were around less directly consequential things (like tax policy) than "some of you don't deserve any rights."
And even then, even in my grandfather's old social circles... still a LOT of sorting going on.
Read "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" for a good discussion from the inside of how American religion has been dominated by sensitivity for decades.
This is almost certainly not true. Your idea of what is the norm is being driven by what is actually the exception because that’s what we see on the news (the news almost by definition shows things that are newsworthy and are out of the norm).
In other words, more than half the respondents consider expressing views beyond a certain consensus in an academic setting quite dangerous to their career trajectory."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/academics-...
I'm sure that's also true in the Church of Scientology and a lot of religious congregations. That is how people work. Creating spaces where robust discussion and dissent is respected and productive is actually hard work and requires good management (which Lord knows most academic departments don't have, since the Head Manager is just whoever got coerced into being chair this time).
Nowadays it seems that this role has been forgotten.
>Heterodox Academy is a group of 4,100+ educators, administrators, & graduate students who believe diverse viewpoints & open inquiry are critical to research & learning. [1]
Does anyone think that a person who joins a group focusing on promoting "diverse viewpoints" is going to have a representative view of sharing controversial opinions? This is a wildly biased population of people to be answering this question.
[1] - https://heterodoxacademy.org/
Actually, my notion of this is driven by seeing a dsignated "Safe Space" on a college campus, and a "Free Speech Zone" at the University of Houston.
Don't make assumptions about other people.
How many people do you see on average using it though? Are students in wheel chairs the norm of the campus?
Ala - how many people do you personally observe at the "safe space" - or do you even go there?
I make the safe guess that the University didn't spend money on signs and and allocate public space without there being a demand for it. It sure didn't look like an art installation.
how many people do you personally observe at the "safe space" - or do you even go there?
If by "go," you mean "attend," no I am not a student. If by "go," you mean "visit," I did quite frequently when I lived in Houston. But I didn't make a habit of sitting on a park bench with a clicker and monitoring the habits of other people. Can you tell me that it is never used? Rarely used? Never used? Do you even go there?
Though, in an attempt to perhaps please you:
I go to the most liberal University in my state because I was born in the town and got an academic full ride. We pul about 25,000 students in a town with a pop of less than 5,000.
Our safe space office was actually just "repurposed" as it was just about never used. In the beginning in helped spawn some friendly campus programs that meet every now and then as University programs do. Most students who sought the Uni official safe space office migrated to those. Thus, it's purpose was served, and now it's gone.
Hope this helps in your research.
Looking back at your comment: No, you weren't a student who would in any way be affected by the office, yet you still are commenting on it from the outside. Seems... unnecessary. I'm glad you're so concerned about the dispersal of University funds. Must be wanting to know how each penny will be benefitting your community in the way you see fit.
The free speech zone exists so that anti-women's-rights protesters can show pictures of fetuses to students.
The safe space area was made when we found out it was physically dangerous for the student communist and anarchist groups to peaceably assemble in the free speech zone.
During my time at UH, the greatest threat to free speech was posed by the conservative student population. I was physically threatened and harmed on many occasions in my 4 years there.
That makes sense. Whenever I walk into a building with a bathroom, I assume I can pee anywhere in the building.
That being said, I fully agree with the rest of your comment. This deficiency isn't new: Most people in any period of history have been unable to engage with ideas like adults, and there are a host of social technologies that prevent these infantile tendencies from blowing up society. Dramatic shifts in the way we live and engage with others (like those brought about by the Internet age) obsolete these safeguards, leaving this type of person vulnerable to a world of epistemological hazards until new tools and processes are created for them to follow by rote.
See how silly that sounds when you change the subject to something that we know is difficult. "Being an adult" is even more open ended. What does it mean, who defines it? Do you have to be "An Adult" to get elected to office and make rules that others have to follow? Is "An Adult" necessary to implement features on a website that dictate how people interact with each other?
I agree with your agreement statement. Infantile grownups in the past generally did not have a global audience in which they could wreak havoc with, and there issues tended to be local in context.
In what way does this sound silly? We could easily be talking about Dirac and Bohr both learning how to read, in which case "they're so smart, you couldn't possibly do anything they did" would be obvious nonsense. The point here is that exceptional people doing something doesn't imply a high bar, and
> "Being an adult" is even more open ended.
Well obviously. There's no objective test of what makes one an adult[1], so it's inherently an opinion. An adult _can_ do all of those things, though they probably shouldn't, and a big part of what makes the world shitty is down to people like this doing things and making decisions that they shouldn't be, including in the way they vote (it still boggles the mind that people think it makes sense to vote on the basis of a policy you haven't bothered to even _try_ to educate yourself on).
[1] Colloquially, obviously. The legal sense is defined fairly rigorously (though it doesn't mean quite the same thing as the colloquial sense)
The larger problem is an offended person can do a lot of damage. In extreme cases, offended people have SWATted their targets causing all sorts of physical damage and emotional distress.
Personally, I don't want to worry about getting SWATted because some nobody from my high-school disagreed with my Facebook post. So I'm not going to post anything on Facebook.
I think it's kind of like the difference between e-sports and real sports. Real sports and e-sports share their competitive nature, but real sports have the endorphins that balance that out with positivity. Online discussion can be antagonistic just like real discussion, but real discussion often has non-verbal cues, food, relaxing atmosphere, small talk, jokes, etc. that balance that out.
Not any more than in days past. People just don't deal with it well anymore.
Possibly because they missed out on three formerly common phrases when they were growing up: "Too bad," "Who Cares?" and "Get over it."
The amazing thing about those phrases is how many situations they don't work for. Berlin Wall? Who cares. 9/11? Get over it. Uighur detention? Too bad.
The solution is to not worry about them. If they don't like it, too bad. They're not worth knowing.
There are plenty of high-quality people and friendships to be made in the world. We don't need to cling to low-grade friendships just because they're people we already know.
In extreme cases, offended people have SWATted their targets causing all sorts of physical damage and emotional distress
You can't live your life worrying about what someone else "might" do.
The teacher can fundamentally change the course of my life by limiting my ability to take more advanced courses and/or what colleges I can get into. They can humiliate me in front of my peers. They could simply make it impossible for me to learn and engage with material that could be important to my future success.
The fact that a female student has the ability to speak out about being abused _does_ upset that power imbalance, but it would be a mistake to claim that it gives her _more_ power than the teacher.
Either way, power should be wielded with good judgement, and there are certainly consequences on both for using it (and abusing it).
Each of these have different interests, a different shared background with you, and are used to different communication modes and different contexts. The idea that you should always talk to everyone at the same time and show them a single monolithic self is just silly. Life doesn't work like that and being a politician is not a job I signed up for.
Since it's used for jobs, housing, loans etc. everyone becomes risk-averse and artificially nice. And more and more alike externally.
We're not there yet but excessive surveillance is definitely worth talking about.
You mentioned Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia, they were both well versed in law and justice, so it makes sense even if their opinions are different, they can respect each other.
Why have 100+ people? Why not have a small group of high-quality friends, instead of a large pool of low-quality friends?
Once I realized that, it was easier to just delete facebook, and keep in touch with my close friends and people that are in similar studies to myself by using group chat messages, emails or just face to face (not so much this option in 2020)
You can and should. Although at a certain point the benefit of being connected to those people via social media as opposed to say, a group chat via text message or an app like Discord/Slack, diminishes greatly. I think that's the paradox of social media: the only thing it does well that alternatives don't is connecting you to lots and lots of people, many of whom you barely or don't know at all, but the quality of the experience degrades with the number of people you are connected to and the weakness of your connection to them.
There's no need to doubt this. It's been well documented in books and newspapers for decades.
Nah. Not everyone has the luxury that you have, of just throwing away their friends like that, even if it is "their" fault.
Frankly, I personally don't care much about politics at all. It is a hobby of mine. But I don't truly care about it.
Why would I give up a friend, to stand up for ideas that I don't really care much about at all?
For some sort of worthless "principle"? No thanks. Feel free to keep your principles if that's what you care about. I don't really value those, though.
I don't think that there is anything at all, in modern day politics that makes that much of a difference.
Individual circumstances and relationships matter much much more than basically all politics in the modern day.
But even if we are discussing things that pass this very high bar of where it matters (So as an actual real life world world, or civil war, and before you say it, the 2020 election does not count as a "civil war" lol), I would still argue that an individual person's ability to effect those politics is very small.
So, for example, even if that other friend was on the "wrong" side of whatever this "very important political topic" is, that person's actual ability to have an effect on that political topic, is so small that I would care more about that person, than their stance on this issue.
That's a rather simplified world view. Let's make an example: I have a bunch of friends who are deeply interested in medicine - a discussion about cancer, what it is, treatment possibilities etc. are a very appropriate topic. I also have a friend who's just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Having that discussion in front of her would be utterly insensitive.
Likewise, it's kind of insensitive to perma-gloat about your new great relationship in front of somebody who just had a divorce.
What topics we can deal with depends on our lives and what's currently going on. Paying attention to those circumstances in other people's lives is the kind thing to do, and has nothing to do with "being afraid of offending oversensitive people"
Remember that guy who gave you advice? He suggest to seek a broad range of opinions. You were in control when you sought out those opinions. Facebook takes that control away - you will see the opinions it considers appropriate for your stream, when it considers them appropriate.
And sure, be who you are. But that "adult" thing also includes respecting other people's boundaries, and social media makes that almost impossible.
Right and wrong. I don't think a ton of young people in the 60s were hanging around with people who voted for Nixon. But its true that in a world where (all the white people) go to the same bar, there's a social pressure to meld and focus on common understanding.
The divergence between the 2 ends of the wedge issues is as large right now as it was in the 1800s. The reason we are not literally having skirmishes across state lines is because we are more geographically mixed now (cities vs rural).
Its not a maturity thing anymore - its that we're actual enemies of each other, and not just at the wedge issues anymore. We have similarities like "shops at Target" and "wants their family to do well" but that doesn't prevent open conflict. Ideologically we are actually, really divided, and fundamentalism is the coin of the realm.
Thing is, I /know/ for a fact that most people are not this stupid. But I also understand that these days it's every man, woman and child for themselves, so I can sympathize with the innate need to blend in.
Past dictators and totalitarian regimes from the history books, who wanted people to have zero ability to think for themselves could honestly look at this situation we're in right now, and feel so much pride that they might even blush a little bit; meanwhile Carl Sagan is turning over in his fucking graves.
What if your opinion is proven to be wrong but you are just not respecting the fact. Does it make sense to respect someone's opinion just because it is an opinion in such a case?
Everyone is not perfect. It is maddening when person with so many flows can't be respectful about another person minor inconveniences.
We moderate ourselves differently at the bar, with our boss, with our wife's aunt. Maybe you don't drag contentious politics to your inlaw's dinner chat or sex anecdotes into work conversations. The OP's point is about applying this moderation across the board, because on FB everything is. This context breeds a culture of banality.
This website is discussing a broader and scarier implication, but the what the OP is describing is already at full (I hope!) maturity.
From my experience, young people are better at it than adults, too.
Every newborn is like an angel. But they quickly learn and follow parents footsteps. Like infinite purgatory. Some break through, acknowledging that conflicting view can be right. That's an ideal. Sadly a lot of people would die earlier than achieve it.
I doubt there are any more hate groups now than there ever were; the difference is, these days, people are more willing to call them out for being what they are.
I'm proud you could come up with one guy who was saintly. For the rest of us non-saintly people, it's pretty tough to maintain and tend friendships with people who think we're bad, immoral, subhuman, or otherwise less than. Just makes conversation hard to keep up!
The person you responded to asked how many. The answer is that not many. And it is not like having black friends meant you won't be racist. Nor having wife or mom you like prevents mysoginy. Personal relationships have part only up to the point.
That being said, some nazi members had a Jew they personally liked or protected. It dis mot stopped genocide.
And I think _you're_ painting a picture wherein "people who are amplifying minority perspectives in order to help society be more inclusive" are in fact nefariously scheming to control a cultural narrative for...reasons?
There is certainly a line beyond which "Excessive Political Correctness" is unreasonable, unhelpful, unproductive, and disconnected from actual people's experiences. But the latter of these examples, at least, strikes me as a perfectly reasonable piece of feedback. I don't personally find the former to be offensive, but at the same time - I have no reason to disagree with the person making that claim. If they're offended by it, that is a _fact_. It's up to me whether I choose to act on that fact. Personally, I don't consider the words "idiot" or "sexy" to be important enough to insist upon using them, when others have told me that the usage hurts them.
Say that someone is intentionally misrepresenting the situation, and is trying to pressure you into stopping using a particular word even though no-one is truly hurt or impacted by it. What's the failure case if you listen to them? You stop using a word. Big whoop. What's the failure case if you _don't_ listen to them? You continue to hurt and offend people. This seems both more likely and more impactful than the other failure case - so, to me, the choice is clear.
At some point there is a line beyond which if someone is "offended", the problem is with them and them alone. I'd argue policing words like "idiot" (esp. when not directed at someone as an insult) is squarely on the wrong side.
Strong disagree. The same ideas and concepts can be discussed, the same conversations can be had - just with tweaked vocabulary.
Now, if you're talking about not expressing a particular attitude because it might offend someone, but you still stand by the position (regardless of its phrasing) - well, that's a different situation. Any sufficiently important position is going to offend someone - just make sure that you're offending the right people.
> At some point there is a line beyond which if someone is "offended", the problem is with them and them alone. I'd argue policing words like "idiot" (esp. when not directed at someone as an insult) is squarely on the wrong side.
That's fair! I disagree, but I'm not going to say that you're wrong - just that my line is drawn elsewhere. I have not found my life to be markedly impacted by consciously avoiding the twenty-or-so words/phrases that various folks have told me that they find offensive. I can still express the same ideas - I just know that I'm doing it in a way that doesn't distract from my message. If your experience is different - if you find that those words are fundamental to your message, and/or that having the freedom to use precisely the words that you want is more important to you than knowing that those words may hurt someone - that's your prerogative.
> knowing that those words may hurt someone
Some people aren't really hurt but like to erase your message by depicting your expression as hurtful. Maybe they just don't like you, it would be another reason. Your naive line of thinking draws in people that might want to take advantage of you. I don't think it could be a universal rule for the internet.
I hear this fear a lot, and have never seen any evidence of it whatsoever. Not saying it doesn't exist - just that I haven't experienced it. The only people who've ever mentioned to me that my word-choices were harmful did so with an intention to educate and reduce-harm-to-themselves-or-others, not to undermine or silence me.
Never experienced that yourself? Babies do so very commonly when they cry. My understanding is that adults get out of it to a degree.
I guess the vast majority of people do so with honest intend and some don't. If it is about definitions and wording on hot button issues, I think the latter group to be disproportionally large.
And I disagree; and based on that fundamental disagreement, we're never going to reach agreement on the derived conclusion. Oh well.
Isn't the aim to have a robust and productive discourse? That means I get to say, "Hey, I don't think this is the right context for the descriptor 'sexy'" and you get to say, "Well, I think it is because (reasons)..." In some ways I sort of agree with you that "At some point there is a line beyond which if someone is "offended", the problem is with them and them alone." If you are "offended" because I say I don't like you using the word "idiot", that's your problem, is it not?
The point is to talk about whether "idiot" is accurate and well-suited to the situation, rather than shifting the conversation immediately to your hurt feelings at having your wording critiqued.
Well, loosely speaking - if it's a truly "newly offensive word", then the general consequence is that someone will politely take you aside and explain that the reasons why so-and-so a word is not great to use in public, explain the reasons why, and suggest alternatives. If you continue to use it regardless, then you are intentionally signalling that your freedom of vocabulary is more important than showing respect to others - which is a position you are entitled to take, and others are entitled to judge accordingly.
"Public dunks" and vicious whispering (without an attempt to actually educate) don't tend to happen (in my, admittedly anecdotal, experience) for truly "newly offensive words", but rather for those that have already spread far and wide enough that there's truly no excuse for ignorance.
> What if you used the word but had no idea it was offensive?
See above. If you find yourself moving in circles where you fear that you'll be judged and condemned rather than advised, I suggest you re-evaluate whether those circles are truly worth it.
> And how do we police that in a world where more and more things are offensive?
Not sure what you're referring to "policing" (the usage itself, or the consequences _of_ the usage), so this may be inaccurate, but - the former happens naturally through social dynamics, and I don't see why the latter needs policing at all? If people are taking disproportionate damaging action based on speech that is perceived to be offensive, that's an offence like any other. If the consequences are "people thinking that you're a bit of a racist/sexist/whatever", then...why does that need policing.
---
I suspect I come across as naïve for believing that "the Social Justice crowd" are well-intentioned, and that slip-ups will be gently corrected rather than leading to immediate castigation and ostracism. Conversely, to me, the concern that "if I don't keep up with the seventeen new daily offensive terms, I will be shunned forever!" seems like an over-reaction when most "SJWs" treat not-obviously-deliberate-offensive speech as an opportunity to educate, not attack. I suspect, as always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Our outlooks are products of our environments and experiences - and I've been lucky enough to be surrounded by folks who communicate.
Pointing out extreme cases doesn't make anything in the original statement untrue. It just means those are extraordinary cases. The world is not absolute.
It's impossible to bridge that gap if the other side sees me as an animal, or a monster, or an enemy agent actively working to destroy the country, if not the world
Do don't. You try, and if it doesn't work, you move on. There are seven billion other people in the world to be friends with.
It's the same dynamic, even though Southern Baptists are more mainstream.
Note the keeping secret part - it all stands on gay knowing he is not even in position to say I am gay without there being price.
Some of my friends have done things that my religion considers murder, adultery and sexual abuse.
My life is better for their friendship. Hopefully they appreciate me as well.
Right now is a great time to delete your accounts. The only better time is yesterday.
In hindsight, though. I couldn't be more glad for the push. For at least a few years, I had actively unfollowed a good majority of friends from my feed because watching their gyrations (posing, fighting, echoing, ...) was making me lose respect for a lot of people. I don't need their mental hygiene and low-effort politics rubbed in my face and I'm happier not seeing it.
Looking back, one thing I did conclude was that the death of email was one of the few things that made Facebook valuable. I had email contact for pretty much every person I was "friends" with on FB, but many of those addresses have expired, or they are so flooded with spam that when you message someone, they don't see it at all or not for +a week or so. I'm like that myself - I only look at my personal email once a week, on Friday night.
Also, "social cooling" is an absolutely terrible name for the situation described in the linked site. They should have called it "Socially Mandated Fronting' or something instead of trying to make an awkward and not very meaningful global climate change analogy.
The positions on climate change range from "existential threat to all life on the planet within 20 years and our way of life" to "mass hysteria founded by fault-ridden scientific evidence whose solutions are an existential threat to the global economy and our way of life". These positions in particular are held by a significant percentage of the population of the Western world, and most people cluster near one of these two extremes. In other words, it is an extremely polarizing issue that, for many, colors how they perceive other people, should they discover their positions.
The creators of this website suggest that social media and data-mining are forcing people to self-censor and not freely express themselves, but then proceed to frame the contentious political issue of climate change as a believer/denialist modality. The authors make it clear that they don't want people to have a nuanced opinion on climate change, they want them to conform to the "unquestionable truth".
But it is this form of rigid thinking that causes people to self-censor, not the intangible specter of "big-data" and "the algorithm". If you were employed by someone who made it clear that they are only interested in hiring people who were devout Christian, you wouldn't openly share your atheist views publicly. Western society as a whole is selecting more and more topics, like climate change, where to be on the record holding a conflicting opinion is disastrous for your relationships with friends, family, and employers. This fact isn't a fault of the technology, though the technology might be the reason society is becoming rapidly intolerant of dissent.
Conflict and social guardedness like this is guaranteed to arise when we have a political landscape that is so divided and thinks everything is on the line.
Agreed.
I thought it was going to be about "evaporative cooling", how bad behaviour drives thoughtful people out of a group, producing a feedback cycle where bad behaviour is further amplified.
Which is tangentially related to the topic of the link, but different enough to be actively misleading. Unfortunate.
Since getting off social media, I’ve tried using email to connect with friends and it has been a good experience.
Second after SMS.
Most non-tech people I know have hundreds, if not thousands of unread messages in their inboxes and will probably miss some unexpected ones.
The two aren't completely inseparable. Social media and the modern internet drive the kind of digital puritanism you are describing, and social media and the modern internet are largely based on monetization through advertising, which is driving the social cooling the website is describing. But the two are different phenomena, and I find the one you are describing much more relevant and terrifying than algorithms tracking my clicks to curate my advertisements and Instagram feed.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/institute-for-precar...
I think this "social cooling" is related to this generalized feeling of "precarity," the feeling that your place in society can be suspended or deleted in an instant. Whether the agent of this deletion is a state actor (China), a corporation acting on behalf of a state or advertiser (YouTube/Facebook/Twitter), or just ordinary people not acting on any agenda but just carrying forward the anxiety they experience internally. I don't find the latter particularly scarier than the first two since it doesn't carry as much of a threat with it. I certainly didn't experience it as such; but just a minor annoyance and general dissatisfaction with Facebook as a product.
I find it ironic that so many took my top-level comment to mean something was wrong with my social universe; as if, instead of the obvious solution of eschewing Facebook, my solution should be to separate from the people in my life and find better people who I could be on Facebook with. The assumption that it's healthy or even possible to "cancel" people out of your life for not passing some arbitrary standard of behavior is ludicrous to me (and, I would think, to any sane person with family ties, work relationships, etc.). Other people are messy, unpredictable and sometimes awful, but we do need them, and they need us. I think they have internalized this experience of precarity and turned it into a weapon they can wield against others, like an abused person becoming an abuser.
I can see a lot of the parallels there. Precarity and "social cooling" are two very similar perspectives on the consequences of surveillance capitalism. It's still difficult to sell the idea that there is a systemic underpinning for feelings and experiences that, for most people, will only be interpreted as exclusively personal.
The reason really was politics. I've never learned anything new from these posts, they tend to just be the more bombastic restatements of things that everyone already knows about. I think they're a form of social signaling or posturing (people want to establish themselves as the most for or against... whatever their in-group is for or agains).
There's a funny onion article I've always enjoyed, "I don't like the person you become when you're on the Jumbotron".
https://sports.theonion.com/i-dont-like-the-person-you-becom...
There are people I am friends with, but I wouldn't want to be around when they're drunk. I feel the same way about some people on social media. The problem is, they tend to be the ones who dominate the platform. And it's new, so we're not really aware of the dangers - but I actually do think it may have a lot in common with alcohol addiction.
This is called "context collapse"
https://www.rewire.org/context-collapse-online/
https://fanlore.org/wiki/Context_Collapse
You might know what to say and how to say it in each context, but this becomes impossible when the contexts are all collapsed into one.
If you really don't get value out of a platform then it's definitely a good thing to withdraw, but personally... I find there are plenty of interesting things I can talk/post about without flipping any major rage behavior. And I have lefty, liberal, and conservative friends, religious and anti-religious friends, friends who are interested in high/intellectual culture and friends who are not.
I do sometimes offend people. Anything that prompts people to evaluate themselves or their models of the world or their particular value-set runs that risk. Sometimes I have things to say that are likely to do that. Like, for example, the suggestion that maybe a personal capacity for diplomacy has as much to do with the ability to hold wide-ranging conversations as much as the foibles of platforms or people do.
Some topics are especially difficult, but there sure seem to be approaches that minimize the heat-to-light ratio in discussions.
It allowed you to define different views and audiences for your profile from your friend list.
I loved it, though building the lists was awful awful.
Now its even harder to edit the lists, and they hidden three layers deep and you can only view them on the web browser.
They should bring them back.
All the obvious "blue check-mark" people have zero insight at best. There is a whole weird world of small follower count people on there. Small communities. People with unique ideas. People that will actually respond to replies.
Again, I don't think it an addiction you should necessarily cultivate, but there is value to be had.
And character limits.
The people designing Google Groups were clearly on a mission to fix social media. Their bosses had a different mission: to force all Google services into a single account, unified around some "Facebook killer" that was just going to magically work because, y'know, it's Google.
These differing goals came to a head with the "true names" debacle, which Groups never recovered from. But Google did get its One True Account out of it, which is all they really wanted.
It was becoming a game of technological whack-a-mole on Google's back end to manage account information across apps. For example, was a user logged into Gmail also logged into YouTube? Were they logged in as the same person? How do resources get unified across different apps, since that's behavior users assume should work? What applications had authority to act on a user's behalf, in what contexts, And can we provide a better way to support that functionality than requiring a user to give their whole password to a third-party system? And when an account had to be banned for being abusive, what precisely got banned? previous to account unification, it was a shotgun depending on who did the banning and in what context.
True names was, in my opinion, a misstep. The account unification goal was a great idea.
Online we're all on teams. If anywhere in your post history you indicate your on a different team then we need to say mean things to each other.
In real life I have very liberal , very conservative and somewhat indifferent friends. I've also dated a variety of folks with different political leanings. I've largely stepped back from social media due to this. Why am I going to get into arguments with people I don't even know ?
If you want to connect with people, I suggest meet up groups. It's very easy to make friends you can actually hang out with. I would say to prioritize doing things you want to do. Like I'm heavily into tech talks , so I attended a ton of those.
I'm fairly optimistic next year the vaccine will be out and things will be somewhat normal.
social pressure predates humans. it's pervasive and our teenage years (especially) are spent coping with/negotiating that. the difference with facebook is that it's potentially unbounded in reach and visibility (in nearly all cases it's not, but every once in a while, something blows completely out of its social circle). as with many modern phenomena, the risk-aversion this induces is out of proportion with the actual risks because of that potential (but not actual) reach and visibility, amplified by memetic social networks that trade in novel (whether true or false) information. in short, the worry over the effects of offense are greater than the potential effects themselves.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24629098
I don't bring my friends to work with me, except once in a very great while about ADA topics. I don't need my work life to be affected by the activities of my social circles.
I wasn't getting much out of it anyway, it was easier not to play (leave and say I didn't have one).
Also part of that agreement, when I comment on their post.
That's where most problems arise for me. I typically unfriend people when they're offended when I question their post.
Yes, that makes me a 'lurker', which is fine with me, though I do use Facebook messenger to chat with some people as well, which is nice.
Killer feature
FB messenger censored the private message and refused to send it, claiming it was against “community standards”.
These sorts of logged-forever, censored platforms are absolutely chilling speech, person-to-person, even in DMs, and you wouldn’t even know when it happens to messages sent to you.
https://twitter.com/atomly/status/1309632274908946434
> that's my only way to keep in touch with them
That means that you can’t communicate with them, even in DM, in a way that’s not logged for and filtered by a remote party whose interests are not your own. It’s only a matter of time until this is abused by the state.
https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/
Nowadays this would be very difficult because the mere fact of being around "bad" people ("bad" depends on the context and might be something relatively innocent) would also brand you as "bad" regardless of any good intentions you might have.
What ends up happening is that "bad" people are stuck in their own echo-chamber surrounded by like-minded people and anyone outside of the group wouldn't dare to engage with them (and provide counter-arguments) because of consequences for their own career & social circle (as their own friends would distance themselves from him for the same reasons).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGTQ0Wj6yIg
We should be very wary of rhetoric that depends on changing definitions of terms without providing precise definitions (see also "racism"). Put differently, everyone's ideas should be criticized on their own terms, but you oughtn't be taken seriously if you don't even define your own terms (and defining them in terms of other poorly defined terms--e.g., "'anti-racism' opposing racism"--doesn't count).
If you can be convinced that the status quo is oppressive to racial minorities, then it serves to perpetuate white supremacy.
I don't follow your first point, since it seems clear to me that people of color, jewish people, and homosexuals are able to hold white supremacist viewpoints.
This is assuming white privilege is the same as white supremacy, when the term white supremacy has been used for KKK and neo-nazis groups, not mainstream white society since after the civil rights era.
It also assumes that most whites and only whites benefit from white privilege, otherwise it's not so white, and may be more a combination of class, culture and/or historical consequences. Also the fact that white people are still a majority in countries like the US, where a majority in any country likely has similar privileges just by being the majority. One last assumption (in America) is that white culture is a certain way, when in reality the US is primarily an English dominated culture historically, whereas Europe has a lot of cultural variation.
A related issue is that white supremacy is sometimes extended to considering an entire economic system as racist, just because history went a certain way. But there's nothing about an economic system that says any one particular group need benefit more than another.
I also agree that white privilege interacts with class, culture and historical consequences, this was well put.
If, hypothetically, an economic system admits little class mobility, and if classes are racially biased, then the effect of that economic system is to maintain a racial caste system. What are your thoughts on this? I'd also point that the justice system works similarly. There are few explicit racial biases, but what is the effect of this system? It actively maintains a racial hierarchy. Does that make it racist?
Crony capitalism creates positive feedback loops where the friends of rich people benefit more than strangers to rich people.
I doesn't take a lot of analysis to see how that can re-enforce the dominance of one race in a society if there's any small amount of inequality to start(1) and people of a given race are mostly associating with others of the same race, since the positive feedback loops in capitalism are significant.
(1) And "small amount of inequality" isn't a fair assumption for the US, where one race started out owning people of the other race.
This isn't racial discrimination or racism or white supremacy, and yielding equal outcomes among racial groups isn't innately desirable. If we assume that all races would be equal today were it not for historical discrimination (quite an assumption given that significant disparities predated first contact between different racial groups and thus racism between them), and we want to correct for that historical discrimination then we can talk about it, but that's fundamentally different than "racism is rampant today" or "we've made little progress since abolition" or "we live in a white supremacist ethnostate" or any of the other left-wing claims.
Definitionally, "a system that gives white people a structural advantage based on what color they were born" is a system of white supremacy, even if the system could be tilted to be a black supremacy or hispanic supremacy system if the initial conditions were different.
There's what the system could do (in another historical timeline) vs. what it is doing.
Yes, but that's not our system. Our system doesn't give structural advantages based on race (at least we can hardly measure the extent of any such advantages). It does give structural advantages based on class (and many other variables) which correlates with race; however, correlation and causation are famously different. We don't have a white supremacist system or any kind of racist system, although some are advocating for a racist system so that we can eliminate disparities.
> There's what the system could do (in another historical timeline) vs. what it is doing.
No one is suggesting an alternate historical timeline; I'm arguing that our system today isn't racist, but that it's very nearly colorblind; however, disparities can result in a perfectly colorblind system because the initial racial distributions were not uniform.
EDIT: Downvoters, do you believe correlation and causation are the same thing in general or only when applied to racial disparities?
That's about class, not race, ethnicity or whatever other grouping you prefer. White billionaires hang out with black billionaires, not with white hobos.
I'm pretty sure that, to a 90%-10% ratio, they hang out with white millionaires, not either of the groups you described.
There are a couple of dynamics at play here:
* The distinction between de jure and de facto discrimination. No one disputes that a country can be racially oppressive via de facto discrimination as our country has been in the past.
* Whether any kind of discrimination is a necessary condition for a system to be called "oppressive". Of course a system is oppressive if it discriminates at all, even if the discrimination is only de facto. This is a completely uncontroversial opinion--virtually everyone believes this, so I don't think this is the position that the left is espousing (especially given that prominent left-wing voices like Kendi are pretty explicit that this isn't what they're talking about). Moreover, if leftists are taking the uncontroversial interpretation, then it doesn't make sense to call anyone else a "white supremacist" because at worst they are opposed to discrimination to the extent that they are aware that it exists (and no, pointing to disparities does not constitute compelling evidence of discrimination).
So presumably leftists believe we live under "white supremacy" because there are disparities at all, irrespective of whether those disparities are attributable to racial discrimination. More likely, it seems to me that leftists are conflating "there was a lot of historical discrimination that created different wealth, crime, marriage/family, etc distributions that the present system acts upon" with "the system today is racist and we've made little progress since the legalization of slavery".
If the latter were true then we would indeed be under a 'white supremacist' system, but thankfully it's obviously fallacious. There are certainly still some vestiges of racism that we should continue to work to remove, but we've progressed tremendously--our system is mostly colorblind, everyone of consequence everywhere is in favor of making the system more colorblind (save apparently progressives and a handful of thoroughly marginalized actual white supremacists); however, a perfectly egalitarian (i.e., non-racist) system isn't going to yield equal outcomes.
That said, if we want to address historical racism, then let's talk about it as such and not give the impression that we're solving for extant racism (or that extant racism is a primary driver in various disparities). This is unnecessarily dishonest and divisive. Let's talk about reparations instead of advocating for a racialized society and system (in contrast to a colorblind society and system). Let's dispense with viewpoints of racial primacy and essentialism. Let's dispense with DiAngelo's "whites are inherently racist" (not paraphrasing) and Kendi's "anti-racism requires eternal discrimination" (paraphrasing). All of this is nonsense and a distraction if our goal is to address historical discrimination or decrease injustice or even close racial gaps (defunding police or antagonizing whites are not likely to improve yields for minorities).
> I don't follow your first point, since it seems clear to me that people of color, jewish people, and homosexuals are able to hold white supremacist viewpoints.
My point didn't depend on the ability or inability of people with those identities to hold white supremacist viewpoints; it was literally parenthetical. I only brought it up because there's a lot of overlap between the people who make broad claims of white supremacy and the people who advocate that whites "shut up and listen" to people with these identities such that, you know, they might shut up and listen before writing these people off as white supremacists.
You raise the point that leftists don't differentiate between a system that discriminates based on race and a system that discriminates on factors correlated with race. I would argue that the effects of those two systems are quite similar. Would you agree that, regardless of the intention, both of these systems have the effect of racial oppression?
I can't defend DiAngelo or Kendi because I'm ignorant of what they have to say.
No doubt, and everyone agrees that this should be fixed to the extent that there is discrimination. It's unclear exactly how to fix this discrimination except to continue to promote a color-blind society (which has been the winning strategy thus far and while it hasn't completely resolved the problem, it's significantly curbed it in a relatively short amount of time).
> If you do agree with either of these points, then we would agree that the justice system is oppressive.
Yes. But no one is arguing that we shouldn't change the justice system; there's disagreement about the extent to which it's oppressive with the left arguing that it's "literally slavery" and moderates arguing that it's a problem that needs to be addressed but not a significant driver of the disparities that the left cites and the right arguing that it's an insignificant problem relative to black-on-black crime.
> ou raise the point that leftists don't differentiate between a system that discriminates based on race and a system that discriminates on factors correlated with race. I would argue that the effects of those two systems are quite similar. Would you agree that, regardless of the intention, both of these systems have the effect of racial oppression?
Yes, by definition, something that correlates with some underlying cause else has similar effects.
A good analogy would be the disparate outcomes of the criminal justice system with respect to men and women. As with blacks, the criminal justice system discriminates against men to some extent. However, it more significantly discriminates against violent behavior, which correlates with male gender to the effect that men are disproportionately likely to go to prison, their sentences are disproportionately harsh, etc.
A moderate would say that we should address the discrimination problem, but not try to discriminate against women in order to address the remainder of the gap which is attributable to the correlate: violent behavior.
An ideologically consistent leftist would argue that correlates should be treated as causes in the name of erasing disparities; however, (mysteriously) there are no nation-wide progressive efforts to close this gap. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine why progressives are comfortable discriminating against some groups but not others.
EDIT: Even though they have similar results, as with all correlations, the danger of treating correlations as a causation is that you end up treating the symptom and not the problem, and often this just exacerbates the symptom. Eliminating standardized testing in the college admissions process is very likely to result in more discrimination against blacks, but addressing our growing wealth inequality problem will benefit people of all races (and given that blacks are more likely to be poor than whites, it will benefit them disproportionately). Further, this allows us to dispense with the deliberately confusing, divisive "white supremacy", "white fragility", "racism" rhetoric that is in all likelihood only creating more racists.
EDIT2: While we may not disagree, I feel like this conversation is a lot more productive than most race conversations. Thanks for being a good faith participant, sincerely.
Edit: I did see some confederate flags being flown in middle of nowhere Mississippi, but I honestly believe they're not flown as a symbol of hatred (at least not always) as some people had banners next to their flags saying things like "Pride not hate", or the rainbow flag, or other phrases trying to distance themselves from the negative connotations of the flag.
If you go to certain left wing rallies, they WILL show up. I have seen real live nazis screaming at my friends at an anti-ICE rally.
The problem with these guys is they do have a narrative that is appealing to a certain set of people about nationalism and certain ethnic enemies that care creating the problems. The idea is to prevent their growth and flourishing because if you see them get very common, we are in deep trouble... though given the debate tonight with the president signaling "Stand Back. Stand By." to the Proud Boys, I sense a creeping darkness.
I'm not from around there, and it isn't my business to defend nor condemn it. I do think taking it as ipso facto evidence of white supremacy is a Yankee mistake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jim_Crow_law_examples_...
https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/the-facts-on-white-nationa...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/18/white-national...
But people self identifying as such are extremely rare.
It's very hard to support with a straight face that the acceptance of the confederate flag in the south does not have racial overtones.
So if that's your measure, white supremacy is not doing well at all.
As far as I understand it, "white supremacy" for those that desire it is the idealized end result of "white power." Much of the rhetoric from President Trump is to rally support for white power. [1]
Given the most common disagreement in the US is between those who advocate for or oppose President Trump, it makes sense that his followers would be deemed "white supremacists"
I believe the broad awakening among many white people in the US currently is the ambient benefits of invisible white power.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6iSgqFahoM
It's of course possible they still are. But it makes this whole discourse pretty weird.
But the Proud Boys absolutely are at the very least adjacent. With a decent dash of misogyny thrown in.
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/grou...
I do think that white supremacy, fascism and nazism was really a lot more fringe even only 10 years ago, it wasn't just under-reported.
I believe the person grandparent is referring to's rise to power was one more symptom in what's been happening, and not a cause in any way. Of course, these things tend to enter a sort of feedback loop. If you'll allow me a parallel with the rise of antisemitism in Europe in the early half of the last century: It was not Nazism that emboldened and bolstered antisemitic feelings across Europe. Nazism was a symptom of the established and pretty mainstream antisemitic current in western society at the time. Even the US was not immune to hating on the Jew.
This rise in far-right political strength is most likely associated with a backlash against the (mostly? totally?) left-wing push for inclusivity and rapid social progressivism. In a way, among those that wouldn't identify themselves as far-right but do manifest ideals associated with the far-right of today, I can identify a certain undercurrent of "we're going too far, we're making too many changes, we need to slow down". Of course, things like "cancel culture", Spotify's staff wanting complete creative control over a 'controversial' podcast, etc., as well as the social bubbles we isolate ourselves in on our chosen social media platforms do not help at all with empathy or viewing others' viewpoints, which greatly exacerbates the issue.
In a way your comment which, if I read it correctly, implies "surely you don't think that the rise of nationalism could lead to wars" kind of proves my point. It totally could, and I'd add fairly easily. The peace we have is not as solid as it may seem, especially with dwindling resources and the rise of new superpowers in the East.
That may be true, but far-left movements are certainly gaining speed as well. And I'm talking about real actual 'cease the means of production'-communists. Politics is certainly getting more polarised.
Ceasing it is merely a consequence of botching the seizing (and the understanding of where that means fit in a post-Industrial-Revolution ecosystem of interlocked systems). ;)
And full agreement; this is a language cobbled together by a chunk of land getting conquered and re-conquered so many times that the locals gave up trying to speak the language of the New King and made up their own from their favorite words in the aggressor cultures and the language they spoke amongst themselves.
1) It begs the question of whether social cooling should be considered a universal ill. After all, white supremacy is bad, and consequences for publicly embracing it are useful.
2) It begs the question of whether the impact of digitally-originated social cooling is particularly relevant if one thought-leader can upend it.
This depends on how your aggregation function is weighted.
If your measure is "how many people in the US are white supremacists?" then, yes, it's definitely a minority view (though still more widely held than it should be!).
But if you scale it by each person's power/wealth, you get a very different view. If your question is "what is the total power held by white supremacists?" you'll end up with a larger number.
And if you really want to get an accurate measure where you treat each person's white supremacy value as a number that ranges smoothly from positive (actual white supremacist) to zero (not interested in putting effort into race relations one way or another) to negative (anti-white supremacist), your function may produce a number that explains a hell of a lot of US history.
I very much doubt so. The richest people in the US are whites (e.g. Besos, Gates, Buffet), but not suprematists. If you have data which proves otherwise, please share.
And what of the Kochs and Waltons?
Either way, you're only thinking about the 0.01%. But consider the many many more people in the 1%. Big fish in small pond types that are part of the Old Boy's Club in your local area. People that wouldn't call themselves white supremacists or even racist, but also wouldn't really want Black folks joining their country club.
If you don't think deep-seated racism is profoundly prevalent across large areas of the US, you are probably just in the position of having enough privilege to be oblivious to it. I grew up in the South, and it is everywhere. You just have to scratch the surface a bit to see it.
Or you are biased to see it everywhere.
Maybe it's true, maybe it's false, but the burden of proof on those who make statements about white supremacists, and I did not see any evidence supporting these statements.
Why would I be?
> but the burden of proof on those who make statements about white supremacists
In a nation where it was legal to own black people for most of its existence and less than 40 years since the last lynching, you think the burden of proof is on me to show that white supremacy is a problem?
But, sure, here you go then:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:White_supremacy_in_th...
I don't know. Maybe you watched a movie about white supremacists when you were a child and it stick to your mind. People tend to have biases and see what they want to see. Some people see white supremacists everywhere. Otheres constantly see examples of inter-racial love and friendship.
> In a nation where it was legal to own black people for most of its existence and less than 40 years since the last lynching, you think the burden of proof is on me to show that white supremacy is a problem?
Maybe it is a problem, maybe it is not a problem.
The original statement was not about that. Quoting:
> But if you scale it by each person's power/wealth, you get a very different view. If your question is "what is the total power held by white supremacists?" you'll end up with a larger number.
This is the statement I'm contensting. Because it is unsubstantiated.
Well, I:
* Lived near a sundown town.
* Watched one of my closest friends get recruited by an associate of David Duke and slowly get indoctrinated into white supremacy.
* Had a white kid in high school proudly tell me about the time they "beat the shit out of that nigger" just because they didn't like the way he looked at them.
* Watched half a schoolbus full of elementary school kids joke about "porch monkeys".
* Grew up in a city named after one plantation in a neighborhood named after another one.
But, sure, yeah, I must be imagining it all.
> Because it is unsubstantiated.
I provided a link to lots of articles about white supremacy in the US. It is you who have provided no counter-evidence.
No, I'm not saying you are imagining. I suspect (not state) that you are biased, and describe the issue larger than what it is.
> I provided a link to lots of articles about white supremacy in the US. It is you who have provided no counter-evidence.
And I can give you a link to Google, when you can find anything.
You just provided a link with the list of white supremacist organisations. Nobody denies these organisation exists.
But there is no proof that "white supremacists" have significant power. They look like small marginal groups with no money and no real power. Like religious sects.
https://www.businessinsider.com/rick-santorum-trump-right-wi...
As with so many gigantic institutions, the US government is not uniformly supportive of or disruptive of white supremacy, over time or within an era.
Last week it was uncovered that mass hysterectomies had taken place at an ICE facility in Georgia without the informed consent of patients - this falls under the UN's definition of genocide.
This policy shift towards targeting exclusively Latinos came under the Trump administration calling Mexican immigrants "rapists" who bring crime and drugs. Melania Trump is a white immigrant who was granted the exclusive EB-1 green card for "extraordinary abilities".
I find it nearly impossible in these circumstances to come to the conclusion that the state is not explicitly catering to white supremacist ideology...and immigration policy is only the tip of the iceberg.
WTF!?! Source, please ?
"embrace" by the definition "openly supporting white supremacy"? Or "dared to suggest there where two sides at fault in Charlottesville"?
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/trump-w...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Miller_(political_advi...
Well obviously, the definition expanded:
https://i.imgur.com/gW9sQoM.jpg
As far as I can tell the number of people who are part of the KKK hasn't gone up any appreciable amount.
In fact, calling perfectly normal and valuable things "white supremacy" and then deplaforming "white supremacists" is an excellent example of this social cooling.
According to this list since I believe people can bootstrap themselves I must be a white supremacist. Except I highly doubt the KKK are fond of mestizo people, I even doubt they even like "white" Hispanics at all. I know people who have been homeless and now make more money than I do, living on cars or purely on the streets, minorities included.
As a minority I am astounded at all the bikeshedding people are doing to fight racism, worse yet finding racism where there is none like git branches.
Edit: Also, just because someone supported Trump and is white and voted for him doesn't automatically make that person a racist. This kind of prejudice rising up today is very worrisome and way too topical in a discussion about social cooling.
[citation needed]
I can keep going if you want me to.
Later, it was shared with the inaccurate description of being a list of negative aspects of white culture.
It's kind of funny really; the pedigree of that list being considered a list of negative things is white people making assumptions about the intent of a list assembled of things white people self-attributed to white culture.
Regarding the previous "iceberg" image---that's a lot of words to go looking through to try and pick out the items you're describing as 'perfectly normal and valuable things.' Can you highlight which ones you were referring to? Assuming good intent, I assume you didn't mean "Racial profiling" or "Fearing people of color."
The result is the same, the subconscious associations between "white" and "whiteness" and those traits has been strengthened. The meaning of words comes from what people think about when they hear it. By increasing the amount of things people associate with the word "white" the definition is expanded.
No negative connotations have been assigned by the document. But "white" and especially "whiteness" has very negative connotations. I've never come across any text or material suggesting "whiteness" is a good thing. Its always stuff like this: https://news.csusm.edu/ask-the-expert-the-problem-with-white... (That alone is already pretty fucked up when you think about it for more than a second) Furthermore, the meaning of words comes from what people think about when they hear it. But "white supremacy" has extremely negative connotations, and so all those normal things get tarred by association with imagery of the Nazis and the KKK.
>Regarding the previous "iceberg" image---that's a lot of words to go looking through to try and pick out the items you're describing as 'perfectly normal and valuable things.' Can you highlight which ones you were referring to? Assuming good intent, I assume you didn't mean "Racial profiling" or "Fearing people of color."
Of course not, those are the actually bad things that are used to tar the "perfectly normal and valuable things". If the iceberg picture only contained good things, it would associate positive valence with the term "white supremacy" rather than associating negative valence with the normal things as the picture was designed to do.
To take specific examples, "Calling the police on black people". This is a perfectly normal thing to do if your being robbed or harassed and the perpetrator happens to be black. Doing so does not mean your promoting white supremacy. Now if you're doing it because they're black, thats a bad thing, but the image makes no destination, so the normal thing is tarred by the bad thing. There are also some supper egregious ones, things like "White parents" and "there's only one human race/We're all one big human family". These are actually anti-racist perspectives that are now being associated with one of the most racist and destructive ideologies in history. Another one is "All Lives Matter", this is an explicitly egalitarian message that is now viewed as racist by association.
I can keep going through the list but then my arguments would turn into a gish-gallop.
This kind of rhetorical tarring has been going on for so long that certain kinds of explicit institutional racism is now viewed as not racist (affirmative action), and explicitly anti-racist and unifying statements "All lives matter/there's only one human race" are viewed as racist.
As for the reason it isn't really a retort to "black lives matter", that's been explained better by Chris Straub than I ever could.
https://chainsawsuit.com/comic/2016/07/07/all-houses-matter-...
Not unlike the battle standard of northern Virginia, symbols pick up racist connotation when racists keep using them.
To extend the house analogy, there aren't 2 houses, there are 7 billion and you're saying we should focus our attention on the black ones rather than the ones that are on fire because they are more likely to be black.
Unfortunately, you can't quite capture that logic with a catchy jingle like BLM, so your left saying ALM and crossing your fingers hoping racial tensions don't escalate.
Now you can make the argument that 99% of people don't give a shit, and only care about themselves. But that leads you more down the path of effective alturism than BLM, again because the former doesn't ignore the other factors of variation.
For those who genuinely care about the state of the world, and have identified issues that in their judgement that are more pressing, or those who do care but are currently busy keeping their own heads above the water for whatever reason, the accusations that they believe the current situation is acceptable are at best tone deaf and at worst downright insulting.
To fix what? Police brutality? I don't think so. Here's some stuff that was tried and worked. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2015/05/18/10-citi...
Political reform? How many people protesting actually voted in their municipal and state elections?
Even if that were the case, it would be a pretty solid argument to focus on more tractable problems rather than whatever the past few months have been.
Saying "Other options have been tried and failed." Is BS post-hoc justification. This round of BLM started because of 1 egregious viral video in a country of 300,000,000 when a whole bunch of young people had nothing better to do. When your dealing with complex systems like police-community interactions, you will never be able to completely eliminate egregious incidents, even if you can reduce the incident rate by 90%. Any kind of legitimate attempt to improve the situation will necessarily involve something resembling multiple A/B tests carried out over multiple areas and multiple years to understand the relationship between policy, environment, culture, and policing outcomes. This will necessarily take time, it will be extremely expensive, and the gains will be marginal. That's just how things work when your dealing with massive complex systems and rare events.
Quite a few of the protesters have documented why they're out in the street. If anyone is having difficulty understanding the situation, I recommend reading what they've said.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-i-protest-george-floyd-pr...
For me personally, it was very educational to bear witness to people protesting police brutality being met with more police brutality---not justified force escalation, but attempts to bait protesters into breaking laws to justify arrests, antagonize nonviolent protests hoping for violent ones, and straight up lying about the situation on the ground. The last part I find insulting, because it's not like the video cameras aren't there. They know the video cameras are there. They believe the system will protect them from violating their own protocols and the law, and so far, it does.
Which is why people continue to protest.
Which finally ties us back to my orignial claim, which is that "white supremacy" is on the rise, and thats because people who care more about themselves or non-racial issues than racial issues have been reclassified as "white supremacists".
Yesterday, there was a documentary movie on German's private TV station Pro7 about Nazis. An actual Nazi confirmed live on camera: yes, deplatforming Nazis (and that includes them losing jobs, family, friends) works and is a huge source of pain for the movement because many people don't hold up to that pressure and leave.
Just imagine how big the rallies would be if there was no social pressure on not being Nazi would no longer be there... at the moment many attendees either don't give a f..k about how they are perceived, or they relish on that being accepted in their social circles.
The problem is when governments go against legitimate opposition and abuse social pressure.
>The problem is when governments go against legitimate opposition and abuse social pressure.
Legitimate according to who? Isn't any opposition to a government illegitimate opposition? Or exclusively legitimate, depending on how you feel about the concept of government itself.
I've been self-censoring for more than a decade now. I really like how the information is presented in this SocialCooling site.
As you have pointed out, the effects are good if they lower the voices you disagree with, and raise the ones that represent your views. My advice to everyone reading HN is to pick the winning side, and conform to it. Fortunately for us, picking the winners isn't hard.
> I've been self-censoring for more than a decade now
Good! I recommend it. It's a basic skill that is useful when living in a society with other human beings whose situation (social power, emotional state, world view) we must account for. We have entire empathic neurological systems to support that behavior.
> My advice to everyone reading HN is to pick the winning side, and conform to it.
My advice is never pick the Nazis.
The original quote which you're abusing begins "first they came for the Communists".
These were Communists in the era of Josef Stalin, to be clear. Mass-murdering totalitarians, exactly the sort of people you wouldn't want taking over your country.
It appears you missed both the lesson of Herr Niemoller, and a key part of the history of the rise of Nazism in Weimar Germany.
Pity.
In modern Germany, it's still illegal to explicitly disseminate means of propaganda of unconstitutional organizations. Is this wrong? I think I'll defer to the modern Germans on that question.
There's also difference of degree. Deplatforming Nazis (which is how parent post bastardized the quote initially) is not the same as incarcerating them. I was playing off the bastardization.
If you want to continue to defend platforming Nazis, be my guest, but I don't have to discuss it with you.
I, too, have negative interest in continuing to speak to an unpleasant person who makes unsupported assumptions about my views on a topic I never addressed.
How many websites have multiple translations available and put effort into accessibility proportional to the amount of the population that could be helped by it? It's not anywhere near 100%.
For example, SaaS companies aren't going to create white supremacist technology, but they will sell to white supremacists.
But you bring up a good point: my online comments are likely to be matched and monetized against me as much as they possibly can - by superintelligences, to boot - iow, in ways we are incapable of imagining, given that we are not AI. And it's no doubt already happening a lot.
I have one username for posting, one for applying for Y-combinator jobs.
Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14585882
edit:
The author also replied to some comments in that thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=socialcooling
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23851745
Yes, I’m using a strong word. Evil actually means something in this context though.
Real Names is a way to lock your social behavior to your persona, and then to sell that data in real time to the highest bidder.
Forums such as this one allow me to use my real name if I want to, but because they don’t require this, they have no way of algorithmically associating Alex Young the person with alex_young the account.
The solution to privacy issues is not to make everyone anonymous. (Nobody ever actually puts it that way, but a lot of people suggest solutions that basically amount to the same thing.) Under-identification is as much of a problem as over-identification. Reputation and social pressure also prevent a lot of bad behavior. For that to happen, we still need people's identity to have some continuity ... and that's where pseudonyms come in. Go look at the examples in the OP. Practically all of them involve some kind of "leakage" from one part of a person's life to another. This is the same problem that has existed since before computers, with people having safe persistent identities within one community until they're "outed" to the broader one. If people had more control over the different parts of their identity, to connect them or not as they see fit, these things couldn't happen. Better technical and social support for pseudonyms might not be a panacea, but it would certainly go a long way.
Your friends aren't anonymous on facebook. Yes, anonymous facebook accounts are possible, but the damage is done by verified users. Anonymity is NOT the problem people think it is.
Hard problem for sure, and curious to hear how others think about the issue of minimizing trolling while maximizing privacy.
Netflix Trailer https://youtu.be/R32qWdOWrTo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)
Are we as individuals hopelessly trapped in a social fabric that leads to the kinds of bad outcomes based on abuse of data that the author describes?
Assuming we can escape, is our only way out of this fabric to shred it from within? What of the benefits that we shred in our zeal? Is it mistaken to even claim their are benefits to be weighed against the drawbacks, because the drawbacks are so bad?
Perhaps it is a naive question. Is there a way we can reduce the bad outcomes by making those that cause them irrelevant, rather than counter-engaging them directly?
Yes and no. The trap you speak of is merely a frame designed to bind you. The simplest (yet effective) one is a false dichotomy: you're given a choice between similarly bad options A1 and A9, brushing under the rug options B and C. In a more advanced variety the compromise "A4" is setup first and the false dichotomy A1:A9 is built around it as two herding gate poles. A step up from there is a vicious attack on options B and C and any person who dares to bring them up.
Disposing of frames in your own mind is relatively easy assuming you can talk with a few smart people without fear of reprisal. Just keep an open mind about it - remember your goal is to break out of the frame, not to inflict your version of truth upon the unsuspecting universe (the urge itself, if you have it, needs to be confronted).
As to direct counteraction - that's just one of the frames you're stuck in. You assume that you either counter them, or you acquiesce to them, or hide from them. Did you notice that all three choices make things worse? That's a sure sign you're in a frame. The "cause them irrelevant" part is kind of right, except that it's the consequence, not the method.
Break the frame, you will see a lot more options.
Same idea, but from another angle. It's well known that you can say a lot in a small group, but very little in a large group, because it's a lot more likely that someone in a 1,000 person conference will be offended by your words. With internet and social networks, you have to assume that you're always talking to the entire western world, and there's a nearly 100% chance that some angry activists will be offended, so you always have to calibrate your talking points to the most boring mainstream viewpoint.
The real risk is that the ultimate popular reaction to these systems will not be civil.
"A simple way to forecast the future is to look at what rich people have today [but didn't have 10 years ago]; middle-income people will have something equivalent in 10 years, and poor people will have it in an additional decade."
Indeed the Varian rule was coined by the FT journalist McAfee as you mentioned (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varian_Rule), though as a counter example, presidents don't really count. Politicians can be wealthy but, like criminals, they're never rich.
[citation needed]
One of the opportunities for comparison that this site only barely touches on is the fact that, like climate change, the companies responsible for this global phenomenon both know it's happening and are likely actively working to avoid talking about it. This happened with Exxon, BP, ConocoPhilips, you name it; it's now happening with Facebook, Google, etc.
This undoubtedly happens because any change for the good of folks would undermine these powerful corporations' bottom lines.
What can we learn from our failure to hold fossil fuel corporations accountable that can be translated here?
I'm very concerned about this issue, but also somewhat lost for clever ideas. Back in the day, small communities were healthier, but I don't know enough about them to know how to really help.
Perhaps I'll start going to church, god help me.
This is a really hard problem to solve, and would require those in power to help enlighten the people of this problem. At the same time, those in power are the one that benefit the most of the current trend of less and less privacy, so we can't really rely on them for educating people on this.
The difficulty is that unless you make these kind of platforms illegal, people who engage with them in ways that enhance their reputations will have an advantage over those who choose not engage with them. And most people will always choose to use them, not only because they're convenient, but because people love an opportunity to enhance their own image in public.
For these reasons, I think it won't be possible to convince most people to exercise their right to privacy. What we should do instead is try to make society as tolerant as possible, so that there is no penalty for how you present yourself online. Urging people to exercise more privacy in fact has the opposite effect, because we hear fewer diverse viewpoints, and those who exercise their privacy come under greater suspicion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_out
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50040/50040-h/50040-h.html#c...
If you think that this sort of system could never be applied to you then you're sorely mistaken.
Hah, I remember when people were passing around an href that was a google query stuffed with things like "how do I make a bomb" and "best ways to steal uranium." The idea was to negate the NSA or whoever's ability to get useful information from spying on obvious searches like that because suddenly everyone is on that list.
Another fun game, if you hear a friend say "hey siri," "ok google," or "alexa," immediately shout "how do I hide a body?!"
to my astonishment quite a few were convinced this is exactly what happens. TF?
They probably won't break down your door for commenting on Assange though. They'll have some other pretense, an anonymous tip about drugs maybe.
I mean, Assange basically had 2 nukes, one with Clinton's name on it and one with Trump's name on it and released only the Clinton one because he had personal beef with her. This likely resulted in Trump's election.
Until that election, I was a Wikileaks fan. Now, I think Assange can go f* himself in prison for the rest of his life. What he did is almost unforgivable.
https://theintercept.com/2017/11/15/wikileaks-julian-assange...
What are you talking about? There's no source that Assange or WL had any information on Trump, which they held back.
Your cited article only writes about the twitter DMs, in which the WL account asked Trump Jr. to leak his fathers tax returns. It doesn't mean they ever posessed them.
The same Russian hackers who actually hacked both the DNC and RNC, but notably (and impactfully) did not release the RNC data.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2016/12/10/report-russi...
Trump is about to get four more years. If you have dirt on him, there's no better time than now to make it public.
> There is a widely held belief that because math is involved, algorithms are automatically neutral.
> This widespread misconception allows bias to go unchecked, and allows companies and organizations to avoid responsibility by hiding behind algorithms.
I think the wording of this casts a shadow on what mathematics is. Opaque accounting or opaque algorithms, it doesn't matter what the underlying hidden components are. But the belief that the words "algorithms" or ever "smart" would hide things says more to me about people in management than it says about people who discover algorithms.
Mathematics can of course be weaponised, but a bigger problem is ignorance towards mathematics. After all, many things can be weaponised. I think the text on Tijmen Schep's websites have a good message, but I do think one should slow down when it comes to compassion fatigue. One way that I use to do this is to ask questions about concrete resources: What are things we need? What are the things we want? And are we progressing to improve people's living conditions?
For the most part, the answer to the last question is yes. It's important to realise this. There is a good book written about our progress as a society by I think an Estonian author, or another Eastern country. I wonder what it is called again.
Certain communities retain pseudonymous, such as a good portion of Hacker News and Reddit. Although, I see many people posting more and more revealing information on Reddit these days, as it leans towards becoming like Twitter and Facebook.
Beyond that, a lot of this reminds me of Jeremy Bentham's philosophical exploration of the panopticon and surveillance and sousveillance architecture. Observability asymmetry is and of itself power.
Everything we do online's being processed and potentially stored, and while we may know what's considered wrong right now, we don't know what will be wrong in the future. Without knowing the rules it's very hard to play by them. Unfortunately, not playing the game isn't an option in the modern world, so we really do need strong privacy laws to protect us
I agree that we need strong privacy laws to protect us, but the way I see it, not playing the game is quickly becoming the new "game." Generation Z and later have hewn far more sophisticated and ubiquitous barriers to digital intimacy, mostly as a survival mechanism in direct response to this. They eschew the "real-name only" approach to socialization as the farce that it is, and generally have purpose built social identities which are compartmentalized towards a particular pursuit or interest. The "real-name" identity is a sanitized "calling card" which contains the bare minimum -- any truly deep interaction is compartmentalized into an anonymous identity. In a way, it resembles the fora culture of old.
To these next generations, I say: good on you for creatively determining your own workarounds, defenses and immunities to this social poison of sousveillance. And this of course is the natural reaction to this kind of hubristic sousveillance -- people will simply figure a way around it. They will evolve new languages, new secret societies, new everything. If you take away their cryptography, they will evolve their skills at steganography. Human brains are remarkably adept at attaining freedom.
Oil is a finite resource with a hard limit. Social data isn't even quantifiable really, as new dimensions of metrics can be gathered from all users. A better comparison - albeit more complex - is mining & discovering user data vs mining and discovering all resources on earth...
The analogue is almost there, but falls apart in some places... like all analogues I suppose...
a) The article claims data misuse is still just in the process of barely gaining attention and also that b) people are already aware of how their data is misused and are adapting by self-censoring etc.
I also feel like there is a conflation between a) conformity enforced by a loud hyper-online minority and b) conformity due to data mining and automated reputation calculations.
I think most people are totally unaware of anything connected to data use, they just "use the apps like a normal person", anything beyond that is an unknown unknown to them. They may have a vague idea of ad personalization, but don't think much about issues like that. They just see the text box and they enter their thoughts and messages and click things they like.
10 years ago people used to say online comments are nasty because people are anonymous and can hide their identity. It turns out lots of people are more than willing to write vile and nasty comments on Facebook with their full names attached, with their family photos public etc. And they aren't fake profiles, because I know some of them.
Simply sitting behind a keyboard makes us less inhibited, it's not about the actual anonymity. Our lizard brains cannot comprehend that we are being watched by unknown people from the future whenever we post something, the brain thinks we're sitting in the comfort of our room with nobody around.
Also, conformity is there in the physical world as well, and saying the wrong things will spread rumors etc. Now, for sure, having no permanent record of everything does make forgetting or relativizing other people's memories easier so there is a fade-away effect.
Even worse, so many high-end jobs today only exist, because the data of the people needs to be processed.
If anyone has a good idea, how to stay out of that business and still prosper, please let me know.
They are right, but the "social score" thing is nothing new. I think we just are winding up a pretty freewheeling time of self-expression that probably started with the Beats (not the BeatLES, although there was a fair bit of overlap).
If anyone is familiar with the way society operated in the Edwardian and Victorian times, you know that some folks would commit suicide, if their "social score" went south. The main difference, is then, it applied to the "upper crust," and these days, we all get to enjoy the mixtape.
That's one reason why I decided to delete all my anonymous accounts, and establish a "personal brand." It may not mean much to other folks, but I try to make sure that all of my exposed interactions stay "on-brand." It's an exercise that I learned from Marketing departments, and seems to work.
The worst that happens, is that a bunch of y'all think I'm a "stuffed shirt" (I'm not, but that's OK).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemianism
I think the key points are:
- Data allows the projection of stereotypes on everything you might be involved.
- Rating systems create unwanted incentives.
I don't think social credit systems are crazy, but they are extremely dangerous and easy to get wrong. Their memory should be limited, and their use should be controlled, opt-in, show-to-see, or whatever might be relevant.
That will get us to the point where your personality quirks, likes and dislikes, gender expression and sexual orientation, etc., have no impact on your career prospects, social integration prospects, and your ability to participate in society in general.
Retreating back into the privacy bubble is not an option. We need to go in the opposite direction, and put it all out there. When being completely naked, completely transparent becomes the new normal, compassion and empathy will well up in society to an extent never before experienced. We will all see that the emperor of social pretense and conformity never had any clothes, and this will be a watershed moment in how people relate to each other.
I also agree reverting back into traditional notions of privacy is not an option. The only options for someone worried about the implications of mass-surveillance on their livelihood will be either to remove themselves from society altogether, or to migrate to other mass-surveilling societies where their lot there is easier to bear.
This is better expressed as saying when your behavior is reduced to metrics, you distort your behavior to match those metrics. An extension of Goodhart's law [1] to social behavior, as we become more capable of deriving metrics to assess social behavior.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law -- "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes" or "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
The first kind were actual Nazis, actual white supremacists, people who were or had been converted to fascist and racialist ideology.
The second were trolls who didn't necessarily believe any of it but liked the fact that it rattled people. A lot of these were adolescents doing the Information Age equivalent of throwing toilet paper over houses. But some of them were people who saw being maximally offensive as a way to push back, if even subconsciously, against a rising tide of conformism. These were more like the musicians and artists from the 60s onward who played with "Satanic" imagery to challenge a conformist culture. Satan no longer shocks, so they had to bust out Hitler.
The trouble is that this type of protest doesn't work anymore and is counterproductive.
In the old days there was a thing called "pop culture" and if you made something challenging or offensive that got popular people would be forced to deal with it. There is no pop culture anymore. There are a million little bubbles. When you make offensive memes the culture doesn't care. Everyone just retreats into their bubbles and clicks "don't show me content like this" and if you keep becoming more and more offensive in an attempt to shock your way in the platform will just ban you. Unlike the days when books and music were physical artifacts, removal of content from a platform is instantaneous.
At the same time the offensiveness pushes those who are genuinely (and sometimes for good reason!) offended by it away from more open areas and into walled gardens. You're actually helping the walled gardens by doing this.
The only solution I see to the problem this site is describing is the abandonment of the public Internet, including the read/write public web, in favor of small peer to peer or privately hosted communities with gates. Of course you also have to encrypt absolutely everything.
Are the problems that decisions are getting made and actions taken on the basis of what we do or that unjust decisions are being made?
Do you see the genie being put back in the bottle? The information exists and the challenge is finding the right ways to use the data justly rather than try to suppress it. We have been doing this in meat space for time immemorial.
With that said there's definitely a problem with how some of this data is used (ex: deliberately designing apps to be addictive). I'm just not a fan of blanket statements for / against data collection. There's a balance to be had.
Young Pioneer examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24440206
am American.
If you're paying attention you know that you might want to skip the "vocational bootcamp" when you need to do business in China some day. Because you might not graduate!
Let's just skip to the end: Every rebuttal I have to whatever lecture you want to give me could be construed as a whataboutism and could also be construed as simply true. There are various groups of people that would get re-routed outside of the respected due process paths in the US for things they said too. We also consider those problems. Its just not a different enough user experience for me to single out China.
As transparency has its own advantages (it leads to high-trust society), perhaps should rather support freedom of speech as a fundamental societal value. If i believed that expressing myself would not lead to losing job, losing housing and being shunned by friends, why would i self-censor in my self-expression?
> People are changing their behavior to get better scores.
> Social Cooling is a name for the long-term negative side effects of living in a reputation economy
There are plenty of times I don't post something because even though I strongly believe in the idea I know "the crowd" does not so it will just get downvoted.
How something could be well utilized, versus how it is utilized, may be two different things.
There's an obvious conflict of interest in reducing another user's karma risks their ability to also downvote. (Of course, just because it's imperfect doesn't mean it's a bad system.) If this is the intended usage then perhaps it would be fair to expand downvoting rights to other users?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCL_Group
Wow.
My social cooling has come much more from the (I believe) well-founded fear of consequences from individuals using my social expressions against me.
15+ years ago when I started my career, I would talk about anything and everything with my colleagues. Politics, sex, dating, etc. I would argue on big email lists about fairly hot button topics. I wasn't afraid of any of these things having any consequences for me. My colleagues knew who I was hooking up with and I knew who they were hooking up with. I knew my colleagues' life stories. I knew who owned guns. Who was gay. Who fucked the hotel receptionist.
Things weren't great for some. A woman on the team would leave the room and the guys would talk about how they would have sex with her. A director of the company had a junior person vacate his hotel room since he was in that hotel and needed a room to enjoy two identical twin prostitutes he had found in that hotel's bar.
But now I've definitely been "socially cooled." I don't talk with my colleagues about anything other than the blandest topics. I go to work and only talk to them about work and the weather. I don't know whether this is better or worse, you'd have to also take into account the woman who isn't having her teammates discussing her oral sex skills the minute she leaves the room. But this is the new world.
I am personally a bit disturbed that Internet seems to polarize people views. I think this may be partly due to social media algorithms. Ie content that you react strongly emotionally to on social media are promoted to get user attention/increase advertising revenue.
Sadly, climate change has now become politicized, and it would be a shame if the same happened here.
I'm nearing 1k karma I'll likely cycle this account soon.
Any other steps you've taken ?
I rotate the usernames because you are constantly leaking information, whether it's interests you express, patterns of speech etc.
it's not well researched because it doesn't need to be, but it grazes past just-interesting-enough ideas to be plausible to a large percentage of visitors. just enough effort went into it to be effective, but no more (which is the right balance to hit).
as a piece of marketing, i'd give them a thumbs up. as a piece of social media fodder (ironically), claws up! as elucidating content, thumbs down.
Per the Hawthorne effect, you modify your behaviour in response to the awareness of being observed.
(The placebo effect describes an change based on an inert intervention regardless of observation.)
I feel like the Venn diagram between climate change deniers and the "I have nothing to hide" crowd who doesn't care about privacy has a very large overlap.
It seems like very much the opposite to me. There is no chilling effect. It's exactly the reverse.
Suddently, dissenting with the idea makes you feel like a denier. Either clever or mean.
Perfect enforcement of rules is rarely a goal of policy. It just sets expectations for behavior, and when violation of policy becomes known remedial and/or punitive measures can be taken.
Should we roll back those laws? Fraud is fine as long as the party defrauded can't find out?
I think you're putting words into my mouth.
Anyway, what's extra difficult is that when using data to build an ML model, you can actually throw away the data afterwards, like source code after compiling a program.
[1] https://owlmail.io
https://solidproject.org/
I've trained myself to always check the privacy setting of any post on Facebook before revealing my true views, knowing it sometimes shows my posts to family and left-wing friends, who have in the past demanded explanations.
You have this "watching over your shoulder online" feeling constantly if you try to maintain a bipartisan friends list.
This website captures an element of that very well.
I am, at least in my little personal corner, much more concerned at the moment with the actions of fellow citizens than with large corporations or whatever. For now.
Response to "that's an unreasonable amount of work, it should be easier". Do you think privacy would be better protected if all the data about everyone was in one central location?
My personal view that whilst this subtle problem is our long term concern we have a more immediate risk that could cause serious social challenges - which is driven by similar issues as highlighted here.
Polarisation of Views; modern social media and associated algorithms are creating intense echo chambers which are creating more and more extreme polarisation. This is most obvious in politics - in the US the political rifts and clear and obvious. The same is true in the UK. My worry is the result of this is that the ruling party have strong leeway to suppress the others and eventually "win".
Case in point in the UK; new guidance for schools says that they should not share material published by groups that have at any point had anti-capitalist views. Critics immediately pointed out that this excludes the non-ruling party (who have socialist-leaning views).
Case in point two; the supreme court in the US (which is a game to see who can skew its political leanings the most).
This terrifies me; with deeply polarised societal groups it will create battlegrounds which must be won politically & ultimately we all lose. Ultimately it is the social media algorithms that drive this - the power they wield is scary!
From wikipedia: "I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispositif
I mean in many ways people using post-modernism as a foundation for their "Theory" sort of make his point about discipline and punishment. I think his ideas there are pretty straight on and prophetic of what this article is talking about. Cancel-culture, call outs, etc. are creating a cold culture of obedience and conformity and of course we are seeing these things seep into social institutions like schools and younger and younger ages.
I'd agree that a lot of what he thinks about "knowledge" and "power" and are pretty wrong and dangerous. His ideas on "Bio-power" and other criticisms of science and liberalism in general are trash. The idea that everything is about "power" and "power relations" is garbage. People have taken these bad ideas too far IMO.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23622865
They claim you can ask. Then dang backpedals.
Please tell me what I can DO about it, other than share sites like this while this happens.
I mean, this is HN after all, where the majority of users work in tech.
All these kinds of posts, in addition to recent stories of techies' in-fighting (parents vs. single techies, want the same bay area pay for moving to the Midwest, etc. etc.), really has gradually opened my eyes to what SV is all about.
That is to say, sometimes when I'm not particularly engaged with whatever else I should be doing on the computer, HN becomes my primary "addiction" and I find myself opening tabs and scrolling through content without particularly intending to
Be the change you expect from the world! Start building sites like this!
It's a strange thing to say I won't know if my message is effective or not without tracking, since we're currently discussing it on Hackernews ;-D
There's another (also brilliant site) linked at the bottom of the original article: https://www.mathwashing.com/
And here's the funny part - you assumed the author won't know, and that's precisely what he's talking about at mathwashing.com - these "algorithms" that are as faulty as people who come up with them.
I doubt you actually read the whole thing with full attention. The message got through to the people it was supposed to get through. I applaud the effort to go without all the tracking nonsense. And whenever I see tracking crap like medium.com uses, I feed it bad data on purpose. It's better to stand true to your message and create a cookieless / trackless site whose purpose is to convey the message rather than use this shitty argument about authors knowing whether they are reaching out to their audience. Precisely because of that thinking we've broken internet where in order to read 512 bytes of text I've to block 50 megabytes of tracking bloatware.
It happened to me several times that I had great conversations with investors or prospective employers but then from one day to the next they appeared to back off for no particular reason. I hold very contrarian political views so I'm not sure if it has something to do with this.
> “Social Cooling is a name for the long-term negative side effects of living in a reputation economy”
This has almost nothing to do with big data or data-driven features of consumer products. The same reputation surveillance has existed for many decades preceding measurement of internet and mobile device behavior.
Ahh, isralites! @lways has been
But I support free speech and free expression whether it comes from left or from the right.
I lived too long in a country where only one opinion is allowed, and those who speak differently get problems, like get fired. It is not that bad in the US (yet?), of course.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24629941.
> But I support free speech and free expression whether it comes from left or from the right.
Free speech doesn't mean I have to respect you. It means that when you start raving about the earth being flat or whatever, I can't shut you up. I can walk away, I can say "You're an idiot", and I can say "Guys, this dude is a flat Earther. Let's make fun of the moron", and then we can all say, "Hahaha! You're a moron! Neener neener" and so on and so forth. And you can do that to me.
I can even say "This guy is a flat Earther, don't buy his bread" and others can repeat it. That's freedom.
And if I do that I will, in practice, chill your speech because maybe you care about selling your bread more than you do about peddling flat Earthism. But that's what positive rights sometimes do.
And as someone with a strong view of individual freedom, I'd rather that chilling effect than any restriction on who I can speak out against.
Nobody seriously cares about respect as much as about their freedom.
> I can say "Guys, this dude is a flat Earther. Let's make fun of the moron"
The sad fact is that you seem to only support freedom of express progressive ideas.
Consider someone saying "Guys, this dude is gay. Let's make fun of the moron". I guess you won't support freedom of speech for that person.
> Consider someone saying "Guys, this dude is gay. Let's make fun of the moron". I guess you won't support freedom speech for that person.
Oh dude, I support that like nothing else, but I will use my freedom of speech to absolutely shun that individual. I absolutely encourage you to admit to any homophobia, etc. That way I know to shun you and to ask my friends to shun you. It is my freedom of speech and expression that permits me to do that. Free individuals must have the liberty to freely associate. And from the liberty to freely associate comes the liberty to choose to not associate.
And if you want to speak up and ask for me to be shunned, I encourage you to do that. Because I believe in a freedom of speech and expression that is almost absolute.
You will never find me making laws that say that expressing homophobia or racist opinions or whatever must be outlawed. Say it loud, say it proud, you have the right.
Note in the authoritarian totalitarian states there are no laws against free speech. And usually it is not government actors how punish you for expressing dissenting opinions, it is often mob and your employer. These states are not free.
So to some degree SV is not a free place, even if it there are no laws prohibiting free expression.
And you use this stance to claim you're advocating for freedom without seeing the inherent contradiction.
Of course not. How did you get that from my comment?
But bullying, eg doxxing, petitioning to get fired, calling mob to intimidate etc, that's not exactly freedom of speech.
Yes it is. It's the best way to fight back against speech you disagree with.
While nearly 100 years old, I think Justice Brandeis had it nailed[0]: "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitney_v._California
I only wish you not to get into the place and time where you are in the opposition to the aggressive majority. It's quite uncomfortable.
How am I driving? Let renewiltord@protonmail.com know!
I will describe a sequence of events. You tell me which acts of speech you want to proscribe and which ones you want to permit.
1. Person A says "I don't like people whose name starts with R. They are disgusting and ugly"
2. Person B says "That's bigoted"
3. Person B tells Person C "A is bigoted because he hates people whose name starts with R"
4. Person C says "That's horrible. We should boycott any business that A is employed at"
5. Person B says "You are right. I will tell everyone"
6. Person A says "This is not fair. I have a right to being employed despite these opinions of mine"
7. Person B says "That's right. And I have a right to not use your employer's services unless you are fired"
8. Person D, overhearing this, finds a big soap box "Everyone! A is bigoted! He hates people whose name starts with R! Join me in boycotting his employer until they fire him"
9. Person E says "If he is fired, I will stop using the product. I'm going to tell everyone about this boycott campaign"
10. Person F says "If he is fired, I will hire him. My company has a lot of R-haters and we get along fine"
Tell me which of these things you will proscribe and which of these things you will permit. I, because I believe in the freedom of speech and association, would permit all of these. In SV, all of these are permissible.
So let's hear what you will do. Name the numbers. That will do.
And if you want to offer more examples to narrow the scope of my belief, please do.
Now you get into a can of worms because it's a reasonable and rationally-defendable point of view that we're dealing with that probably has a 50-50 split in terms of public support. It's an opinion that needs to be discussed rationally without the conversation and people's lives devolving into ugliness.
Right now, people are censoring themselves for fear of repercussions that are very real because we've allowed a very vocal minority (on both sides?) to dominate and force consequences without a demonstrable majority in public-support. As long as there is an "aura" of majority-agreement on a touchy topic, dissent becomes dangerous. And it's self-reinforcing because you don't see any dissenting opinions on it so everyone thinks there is majority-support and dissents even less, causing a landslide.
If it helps, let's even say Person A says "I like gay people and minorities. They should be treated just as well as heterosexual people and majorities." and then retain the rest mutatis mutandis. My position does not change.
Would you still support this model of justice if your mob was the smaller one and you got "cancelled" for expressing your "progressive" ideas? Or would you start calling for things like "proportional response", "due process", "free speech that leads to unemployment is not free" and such?
Read my post history. I am consistent on this matter.
* On the matter of W.H.Auden refusing to publish with a publisher who refused to publish Ezra Pound. Here I believed this was perfect reactions on every side. The publisher did not like Ezra Pound because Pound is a fascist sympathizer. Auden felt that this deplatforming and so told the publisher he would no longer be publishing with them. The publisher changed his mind because he wanted Auden to publish with him. All civil, all consistent with free association.
* The NYT insisted on publishing Scott Alexander's real name. He didn't like this and pulled Slate Star Codex. My reaction was that this is bad on the NYT's part and I would prefer not to subscribe to them. Not that they should be legally censured. Simply that we as free people should exercise this and free ourselves from them.
* When David Shor was fired from Civis, I thought that was a mistake. So 'cancel culture' ate itself there. But that's fine. I will simply choose not to associate myself with Civis.
My point is that mob justice is not justice. Taking (in)action yourself is well and good, but the farther you want to spread it around the more rigorous your processes and standards should be.
Freedom is fragile. I won't give one inch here because they will shatter it and remake freedom of expression in a stilted image if I give them the chance.
If freedom is used to unjust ends, then the problem lies with the path there not the freedom itself.
I suggest self-restraint and holding yourself to a higher standard before passing around harmful judgements. The farther you cast your accusations, the higher the standard. Who are "they" here?
- Children need protection. They are eating children.
- Who are "they" here?
- Children eaters. So by definition that's what they'll do. It isn't a judgment. It is definitionally correct.
Cf
- Freedom is fragile. I won't give one inch here because they will shatter it.
- Who are "they" here?
- People who don't like freedom. So by definition that's what they'll do. It isn't a judgment. It is definitionally correct.
One could argue this is one or two people expressing their freedom of speech, and using technology to do so, but another might argue that since it's not a genuine sentiment of real people in each instance, it might not be called free speech.
I think introducing the fact that online, you can't punch someone in the face and face the consequences is meaningful. I don't advocate violence, but I mean there is no way to know you are engaging with genuine people who are willing to participate in the speech.
I don't have as solution either, a bunch of ideas, and no reason to execute them, and it's also a nightmarish hellscape that I don't really want to wade into :)
Maybe when we all have GPT-3 with hecka more params, no one can propaganda-war us because we will be immune because of constant ongoing prop-war.
I don't really know, but I think I bias towards making everyone so powerful that it's hard to get more powerful.
I think my real point is: stop trying to make online discourse like in-person discourse, or, double down and expect the same “proof of work” that being physically present requires.
On top of that, there are limits to the extent and volume of any in-person communication that simply isn’t reproducible online without massive artificial constraints.
I think we need to revisit things we consider valid in person and not try to conflate them to be the same once we are online at a massive scale as a literal species. People forget that there were only millions of people online in the 90s, and there are billions now, this is a new era, and it requires new thinking and new unified action, but that’s really not possible when large swaths of humanity are tribal, nationalistic, scared, hungry, poor, angry, and manipulated.
I almost feel like arguing about free speech online is putting the cart before the horse.
It depends on definition of "permit".
From legal point of view, all of these things should be legal (except maybe A).
But some items from that list I consider immoral. Like gathering a mob to attack someone with the opposite point of view, is immoral.
By the way, there's a big difference between
> I don't like people whose name starts with R. They are disgusting and ugly
and
> I will vote for Trump.
Barely anyone in SV says they consider some group of people ugly. You have invented this unrealistic example.
And, I always will support those who are bullied regardless of their beliefs. Like when mob attacks a nazi, I'll try to protect that nazi. Of course when mob attacks radical lefts like antifa, my support goes to antifa.
Mob is always wrong regardless of its declared intentions.
In this case, if you have, in my example, Person A change his view to be "I will vote for Trump" and retain the rest mutatis mutandis then I'll gladly retain my view that I want all of that to be allowed.
In fact, I think we might be on precisely opposite sides in the fight for liberty if you want to stop people from having opinions just because they are not the only people to have that opinion. One person is free to state an opinion. Any n people are free to associate. Any n people are free to state the opinion together.
And you're going to have to clarify what a 'mob' is and what an 'attack' is. If five thousand people say "I won't buy this product unless you fire that guy", I think that's an okay 'mob' and an okay 'attack' because those five thousand people have the freedom to associate with each other and the freedom to choose not to associate with 'that guy'. It is morally wrong (repugnant, even) to force them to buy the product when they don't want to. If a single person hurts you for saying anything then that's a non-okay 'mob' and a non-okay 'attack'.
It's right to n people to gather together and march in their support for Biden for example.
It is not OK (morally) to n people to gather togeher and ask a company to fire an employer for Biden support.
I think the different is in positive vs negative, constructive vs destructive.
"Buy from NNN because they support gay marriage" is positive and constructive.
"Ruin a career of John Smith because of his political views" is negative and destructive.
Of course it is not black and white. Like if you know for sure that company MMM knowingly uses slave labor, it would be right to boycott the company. And I don't know where to draw the line.
> what an 'attack' is
Something which leads to big loss for those who is attacked (ruined career, ruined personal life, loss of money, loss of business).
> Something which leads to big loss for those who is attacked (ruined career, ruined personal life, loss of money, loss of business).
Yeah, definitely on opposite sides. It's not my responsibility to keep your business alive. If I tell people things and they decide they don't want your product, then that's life. Information wants to be free. I'm not going to go ask anyone to suppress that Facebook targets ads because that causes loss of business to Facebook. That is totally insufficient.
I'm sorry, but I'm not friend of yours.
If we met in real life (like in the office), you would probably do a lot to hurt me for my views. (Because you have legal rights to do so, because it's not your responsibility to keep me alive, and because information should be free.)
But I would never do that to you.
That's the difference between us.
Come on, think. Society doesn't seem very "cool" at all the last ten years. Color revolutions in Latin America and MEA. HK. US v China. ISIS, Bataclan, Charlie Hebdo. Twitter Mobs, Me too, Times up, incels. Antifu, Proud Boys. Snowden, Assange, Alex Jones, Qanon, Disclosure.
I'd say that Big brother's technical panopticon has increased "heat" in society. Either that, or it's had no effect, or if it has cooled things down, thank you to the eternal watchers for keeping all the crazies in check.
I think everybody just needs to adjust to this new normal, and be okay with there not really being any privacy. Privacy anyway is probably an industrial revolution invention, because village life was way less private with gossip and smallness.
If you think "privacy" is your natural state, you're wrong and I'm not sorry. If anything privacy is an "invention" of tech companies to sell you it, while selling the watchers not-it. Or a sort of a sci-fi mass delusion born of the isolating power of tech and the frontier thrill of having your own megaphone to the world. All the little nasties out there in userland plotting, ever plotting on the next dangerous idea they will unleash gloriously on the world. How did that ever seem like a good idea? In a village you would be a trouble maker, and rightly condemned to the stocks for quarrelling, upsetting the serenity and maybe witchcraft. You never had privacy, and thinking you did, as if it was some sort of "shield" to mean now you can stir the pot and speak without filters, everything be damned, with impunity, what the hell kind of good idea was that ever going to be?
All these idiots, thinking privacy affords them freedom from consideration. No. The tech revolution, simply means you have stepped into a world with greater responsibility, because you can have far reaching effects. So instead of being babies, and demanding a return to zero consequence actions, start getting woke to the ripples your events have in the world, and act with consideration, now for the whole world.
That's the blessing. A great power and connectedness and all you privacy morons want to squander it on speaking whatever you like, consequences imagined away by a fantasy of a pre-surveillance utopia that never existed, and even if it did.... You don't get to be free of your karma for what you've done.
Don't be like the village crazy. You speak now to the world. Privacy doesn't absolve you of any responsibility, and surveyed or not, you should consider your actions online. Not just from the demented "privacy-conscious" perspective of self preservation, but from the global perspective of other people because you live in a connected world. Don't blame people listening. Blame your tongue. And fix it. Speak consciously.
The very same tools that can enable your utopia can also very quickly turn into a dystopia. As you say, they are a powerful magnifier, transforming this world into a global village where every action has far-reaching unpredictable consequences. This means that we should be incredibly cautious when deploying these tools as they give great power to users and an even greater power to their makers.
Speaking consciously on WeChat means being conscious of all the consequences of your actions including with regard to your relationship as an individual to the state. I'm very happy to adopt that consciously, and have tried to be aware of these things and I have no problem with that at all.
Just like I'm not going to say something to hurt the feelings of and make trouble for the family that's invited me to have dinner at their house, I'm not going to say things to hurt the feelings of a whole people, and double so when I'm a guest. And I'll try considering the unique culture of a place and how appropriate types of criticism, before opening my mouth. And triple so when I'm a guest with a megaphone.
Would you?
I consider doing it in a less considerate way is not very empathetic but also it's not good for me. It's self-destructive so I think people adopting this attitude under some misguided sort of heroic mythology are, stupid.
I'm okay speaking in more critical terms about countries where open criticism of their systems is culture. But even then there are lines. Assange, Snowden, went too far. To me, ignoring for a second the possibility they are limited hangout psyops, they are stupid men. Useful idiots, whose idealism, whether initially designed or not, had been co-opted by the states they posture at critiquing.
And then other countries are a different set of sensitivities again. Being conscious of that is good for everyone i think.
But the unexpected benefit of this for me was I actually got a deeper understanding of different places unique ways and thinking, precisely because I deliberately withheld judgement and tried to look at things from multiple perspectives, not just from my inherited Western biases, which I consciously tried to be aware of and see more than.
So you're judging WeChat but what gives you the right?
I don't think it's very empathetic for people to say, well Western culture do it this way therefore we should impose our cultural values on others.
But... these sort of one-sided culture v culture attacks open you up to a whole lot of interesting counter criticism such as: the credit score, "stasi files", and criminal history checks you have in Western countries basically equate to the social credit system in China, when you think about job opportunities, freedom of movement, access to capital, freedom from harassment and intimidation.
For me, I admire the Chinese transparency about what it is and technological efficiency. I believe such openness makes it easier for people to deal with and is the way forward long term. Whereas the covert harassment and secret tracking and "free press" propaganda in the West, under the guise of a "free and open society" I believe tips the scales of power less in the individual's favor, engages in needless deception, and is a more abusive aspect of the state-individual relationship than I think works.
I don't understand what people find so difficult about the level of consideration that is just like, I don't have all the answers, I'm not perfect, who am I to judge others? but I think in the West it harkens back to some sort of anti authoritarian distrust of the state.
Did you mean deploying the communications tools? That's an interesting if Luddite take: We should fold back to isolation because we're not ready. In essence I agree, to a degree, but I think that siloing is already handled and taken care of by various state and regional level blocks to some extent.
If you meant or were trying to confuse it deliberately with the survey tools then they are not what makes the world a village. They just enhance the watchers.
I agree we need to watch for dystopias and avoid them, but are you really so sure that China is, or is becoming one, while being so sure the West is not?
I think we need to watch, and learn from both places. Neither is a dystopia right now. But neither is perfect either. What's important is to learn, improve, and not think you've already achieved the pinnacle of civilization, nor take it for granted that you'll get there. You have to keep learning from what others are doing and inventing improvements. I just don't think framing the debate as privacy versus almost everything else is a very useful way forward.
I'm with Zuckerberg on this one even though it's kind of hackneyed. The world really should get more open and connected and I think eventually the relationship between people and their states should become closer. In my intimate relationships I get privacy by what I choose not to disclose. In my relationship with states I get privacy by what I choose to only think or feel. There's still a lot there... I think with the externalization of minds onto devices people are forgetting the power of their own brain and their own emotions.
What might be scary for me is if the entire world has one standard of acceptable ideas and acceptable behavior. I might feel restricted in that case because there'd be no country I could go to that was more conducive... so I think that any world government has to be widely tolerant of many things. But then again maybe I'm wrong and if I was in that situation I'd probably just make the best of it and think well what can I still enjoy and how can I adopt myself to fit in with where I'm at. But I think the reality is that when world Government comes it will be something that is tolerant of regional differences because that will be how a world government has to be introduced that's the only sort of way it's possible.
First, yes the difference between survey tools and communication tools is always confusing for me in the privacy debate. But ultimately, they are deeply linked [2] with many cases that fall in between. In particular, the surveillance of communication tools is incredibly pervasive.
> double so when I'm a guest
Yes, when I was in China, I was more careful to approach discussions with an open mind and cautiousness for the legal repercussions. However, I'm not talking about being a guest, I'm talking about either being a citizen or an outsider. In both cases I think it's very important to think critically and express the potentially resulting criticism. (More below)
> So you're judging WeChat but what gives you the right?
Certainly not the CCP, lol. But seriously, more than WeChat/Tencent, which is just another interesting tech company, I'm judging the state control over it. And more than judging (but which I'm also doing), I'm formulating criticism based on observations of harm to people (I consider it evident that shutting up would be immoral) and (but this is our main point of disagreement) mind control by the state.
> Assange, Snowden, went too far.
It seems your threshold might be the word of law, but in that case they exposed illicit state actions. In any case, they did go far. To say they were co-opted is only partly true if not outright false: thanks to them, a significant portion of the population is defending itself and pushing for more scrutiny and changes.
> And then other countries are a different set of sensitivities again. Being conscious of that is good for everyone i think.
States and governments do not have sensitivities. You can not hurt their feelings.
> these sort of one-sided culture v culture attacks open you up to a whole lot of interesting counter criticism such as: the credit score, "stasi files", and criminal history checks
I'm using the nazi culture as an experience that enables me to construct criticism of other cultures. Whenever I see something that looks like it, I'm indeed judging it very much.
And yes, credit scores and criminal problems have their own problems, thank you for helpful criticism/judging/insert the word you prefer. You absolutely have the "right" to say it thanks to the millions of people who fought for freedom against kings, tyrannies, authoritarian states and even normal governments. But beyond what the current laws say, the fact that you have functioning brain is enough to justify judging. How and when you express that judgement should reflect the potential negative and positive consequences of that. Here I think that in the long term, censorship has more negative effects than offending, and call me insensitive, but I think that people (including myself) should really get better at receiving criticism and society would be overall better for it.
> Did you mean deploying the communications tools? That's an interesting if Luddite take: We should fold back to isolation because we're not ready. In essence I agree, to a degree, but I think that siloing is already handled and taken care of by various state and regional level blocks to some extent.
Yes, these tools, and I did not say "fold back to isolation", but to be cautious when expanding the existing relative isolation, because we can not foresee all the consequences of doing that. See the increase in mental health problems linked to the use of social networks for example. This, other issues like [1] and higher-level thinking like this very good talk on surveillance capitalism [2] makes me think that no, this is not "already handled and taken care of".
> you really so sure that China is, or is becoming one, while being so sure the West is not?
Nope, absolutely not. We need to watch both and the West has its fair share of issues, see [2] for one of the many examples. However, I do think that China is closer : more outright lies from the government, concentration camps for Uiguhrs and muslims, press controlled and manipulated by the state, systemic censorship, disappearing journalists and whistle-blowers, etc. You can find examples of this in the US (except for concentration camps I guess), but they will be rarer and more subtle, mostly because the system was designed to distribute power more evenly and minimize potential for harm. Which beautifully comes back to my first point: giving more power/communication tools to individuals should not be taken lightly.
> For me, I admire the Chinese transparency about what it is and technological efficiency. I believe such openness makes it easier for people to deal with and is the way forward long term. Whereas the covert harassment and secret tracking and "free press" propaganda in the West, under the guise of a "free and open society" I believe tips the scales of power less in the individual's favor, engages in needless deception, and is a more abusive aspect of the state-individual relationship than I think works.
I really see that point and myself I can not help but admire some of these aspects of China. However, systematic censorship of alternative views is one of the many other things China is not open about. The reason tracking is "secret" in the west is precisely because the individuals have more power, so saying it tips the scale doesn't really make sense. And because we have more power, we can work towards abolishing it. So if we think it's bad, we should. You aren't explaining why surveillance is good (see [2] on why it's bad), but you are essentially saying we should embrace it and it's not a big deal if we impose it on everyone.
> In my relationship with states I get privacy by what I choose to only think or feel. [..] What might be scary for me is if the entire world has one standard of acceptable ideas and acceptable behavior. I might feel restricted in that case because there'd be no country I could go to that was more conducive... so I think that any world government has to be widely tolerant of many things.
I encourage you to watch the german movie The Lives of Others (2006) for a closer look at what privacy and surveillance mean in an authoritarian state. You can not "change countries": there was a wall in Berlin where people were shot on sight. You start by arguing for more respect and consciousness towards different cultures and ended by saying that it's okay for states to choose what you think and discriminate for thinking differently, because that is what the sentence "In my relationship with states I get privacy by what I choose to only think or feel" means. Restricting speech restricts what you can hear which restricts what you can think.
[1] https://medium.com/@monteiro/designs-lost-generation-ac72895... > "Bobbi Duncan was “accidentally” outed by Facebook when she was a college freshman. When Bobbi got to college she joined a queer organization with a Facebook group page. When the chorus director added her to the group, a notification that she’d joined The Queer Chorus at UT-Austin was added to her feed. Where her parents saw it. Bobbi had very meticulously made her way through Facebook’s byzantine privacy settings to make sure nothing about her sexuality was visible to her parents. But unbeknownst to her (and the vast majority of their users), Facebook, which moves fast, had made a decision that group privacy settings should override personal privacy settings. Bobbi was disowned by her parents and later attempted suicide. They broke things." I recommend the entire article, it's completely opposite to your point of view and makes a good case in favor of individual discernment followed by actions.
[2] The Rise of Surveillance Capitalism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s4Y-uZG5zk
[3] Documentary on Uiguhrs "thought transformation camps" https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/087898-000-A/china-uyghurs-in-...
My parents are from the Soviet Union, so that example comes to mind most readily. Obviously speech was heavily restricted and policed in that time and place; a relative was briefly thrown in jail for handing out pro-democracy leaflets in the late 80s. My wife's family is from China, another country with a history of policing speech. There is a wonderful book called "The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution" which talks about the negative consequences of seemingly innocuous speech during the Cultural Revolution.
Lest people think I only have examples from overseas, when I was growing up here, I found that criticizing religion, even lightly, was problematic. Organized religion was something of a sacred cow until perhaps the early 2000s. I have gay friends, and coming to their support in the late 90s and early 2000s was difficult, with the majority of opposition coming from the religious community.
After 2001, criticizing the war on terror lead many public figures to be deplatformed (or canceled in modern terms). An example of this is the MSNBC host Phil Donahue [1]. Some of you may be old enough to remember the "support the troops not the war" slogan to try to get around these issues, with mixed success.
Maybe folks who are older than me can compare the attitudes now with other historical periods, but I don’t believe it’s more difficult now to vocalize an unpopular opinion than it used to be.
[1]: https://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/21/phil_donahue_on_his_2...
Now, you have the power of being an unrestricted asshole to a larger audience than ever before. This, unsurprisingly, has even more consequences. In addition, this audience is more diverse than ever, with different opinions, backgrounds, upbringings, preferences, etc. Yes, just as always, there are people who are offended.
And just as always, you have to know your audience. Just like in the past, you wouldn't go to the local aristocrat and talk shit to them, you should know better than to go on Twitter and talk shit. Find your friend group, and say what you want with them. Like you always could. If you can't, find different friends.
People really underestimate how much power is given to them to have a near infinite audience on social media. But that power goes both ways.
i didn't say anything about being an "unrestricted asshole", racist, insulting or attacking anyone deliberately. i simply stated that if you're not in line with the PC terms dejour of the week, you run the risk of being ostracized. you're not a snowflake if someone attacks you and you defend yourself. you have every right to.
however when someone calls you sir, cause you know you're a guy, and you jump down their throat cause they aren't recognizing your non-binary lifestyle of feeling like a girl that day, that's being a dumb ass and an example of how the world is today.
> you're not a snowflake if someone attacks you and you defend yourself. you have every right to.
I guess that is exactly what people do and you act shocked.
So yes, when you speak, you have to speak according to the societal norms present at the time. Like we always have had to.
The difference being is that your audience is near infinite and it is near impossible to please everyone, unless you speak in a very deliberate and neutral manner.
Based on your tone and the implication of how you wrote out
> however when someone calls you sir, cause you know you're a guy, and you jump down their throat cause they aren't recognizing your non-binary lifestyle of feeling like a girl that day, that's being a dumb ass and an example of how the world is today.
I assume you don't speak in a deliberately neutral manner and your manner of writing is inflammatory, so you piss people off.
I might be jumping to conclusions here but so many comments I've read on HN that were asking "why is this getting downvoted? echo chamber, PC blahblah". No, the reality is they just come off as an asshole due to their style of writing posts. (exactly like your post that I'm replying to right now)
(It's linked at the bottom of this one, but I'm sure a lot of people don't get that far)
Every company has a predictive algorithm to use on students. Every startup that's stepping into the space is pushing the data and data scientists.
But they all have the same-old, usually decades old, baked in biases. AND they're not doing anything to address it!
Just because it's math doesn't mean it's not biased. I hate it more than anything professionally, right now.
When a model produces an unpalatable result, that doesn't mean it is biased. All these algorithmic fairness people are saying, once you peel back the layers of rhetorical obfuscation, is that we should make ML models lie. Lying helps nobody in the long run.
Absolutely, but there is no admission, from what I can tell, from ML or predictive [buzzword here] companies that bias is a thing, or even could be a thing in their systems.
>All these algorithmic fairness people are saying, once you peel back the layers of rhetorical obfuscation, is that we should make ML models lie. Lying helps nobody in the long run.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but that is not at all what I am saying as an 'algorithmic fairness' person. I am saying that we need to ensure there are strict oversights and controls on the building/execution of algorithms when making substantive decisions about human people.
For example: It's okay if an algorithm predicting student success says that all the minority students on my campus are at a higher risk of dropping out. That is a data point. Historically, minority students drop out at a higher rate. Sure. Not great, but it is factually true.
What is not okay is for the 'predictive analytics' company to sell their product in conjunction with a 'tracking' product that limits minority students' access to selective admissions programs simply because they are selective, more difficult, and, historically, have a higher percent of minority students who drop out.
I guess what I'm saying is that ML models shouldn't lie. But they also shouldn't be seen as the truth above all truths. Because they're not. They're just data, interpreted through the lens of whoever built the models.
Every human carries a bias, everyone. It's how we define ourselves as 'self' and others as 'other' at a basic level.
Therefore, everything we build, especially when it's meant to be intuitive, may carry those biases forward.
I'm only saying we need to be aware of that, acknowledge it, and ensure there are appropriate controls and oversight to ensure the biases aren't exasperated inappropriately.
The problem with these ML models is that they are directly connected to a response, and because they use statistics and math they are simplistically perceived as truth. They're not truth, they're are nothing more than models. The truth can fit a plethora of models. Ignoring human bias while training ML models, and then just saying that the model is truth is exactly the problem.
Thank you for demonstrating the issue so vividly.
Please try to elevate the debate. See [1]. You're at DH0 right now.
> They're not truth, they're are nothing more than models. The truth can fit a plethora of models.
Models receive past data and emit predictions. We can then see how well those predictions match future data. We call one model "better" than another model when that first models' predictions more closely match future data than the second model's. Not all models are equivalent. The ML fairness people want to make model predictions less accurate because they don't like what the predictions say. Prioritizing truth over pleasantness isn't juvenile: it's the opposite. The mark of maturity is the willingness to accept an unpleasant reality instead of denying it.
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
Every choice we make is a moral choice. Once we're done modelling and use that model then we make a moral choice.
For example, If you believe that lowering the debt default rates is more important than the fairness to an individual.
Then you make a moral choice. Of you believe it is OK to not give loans to Blacks because there's a largish amount of Blacks defaulting on their loans thats a moral choice.
Further more, Enscribnng truth to models is just an age old human fallacy. The truth can somewhat fit plenty of models. None of the models are truth.
The inputs and assumptions made by the people selecting the math is the 'morally wrong' part.
Bias is real, like it or not. Your worldview, as a data scientist or programmer or whatever, impacts what you select as important factors in 'algorithm a'. Algorithm a then selects those factors for other people in the system, baking in your biases, but screening them behind math.
In all human history, efforts to hold back the tide of technological progress have never worked. Instead of adopting a Luddite fear of data and math, we should use both for all useful ends as soon as possible.
The example about cancer doctors in TFA is perfect. "more deaths = worse doctor" is a poor metric, because advanced cases have higher deaths in general, leading to a disincentive to try to help people with advanced forms of cancer. That's a terribly perverse incentive, and one that should be avoided.
Fundamentally, a lot of this stuff comes down to a lack of nuance in metrics, leading to some nasty effects down wind.
This really isn't all that different than what is happening elsewhere across the world today. Your Uber rider score represents your "social credit" for that service. Your Airbnb guest reviews impact if you will be allowed to rent a room. Each platform is putting social credit in place via crowd-sourced "trust"
EDIT: I don't mean to minimize China's human rights violations, but to posture that independently of central control many companies are implementing their own versions of these systems, which can have _some_ of the same effects in terms of losing access to services. Obviously one's Uber scores won't put you in jail / detainment camp and I was not intended to imply such.
The Chinese surveillance state is incredibly more massive and pervasive, the list of infractions includes incredibly more minor actions (and include political speech that is in anyway dissident), the consequences of a low score are so much more dire (unable to fly, travel, live in certain places, etc).
... and even degree of monopoly on violence. Uber can do quite a bit of damage to a person by choosing to refuse service if someone needs to urgently be somewhere (or away from somewhere). Airbnb is controlling access to safe shelter. If Amazon grocery stores took off, having a bad Amazon account could deny a person access to food.
I don't think it would take more than a handful of gig-economy service corporations unifying under one umbrella of data-sharing for the average American to start experiencing something a bit similar to the Chinese experience of social score. For now, there's no incentive for them to do so.
If you have an Uber or Airbnb score low enough to get banned from the platform, you're the problem and you'd have a very hard time arguing otherwise once you start revealing the reviews people have left you.
You're probably vomiting in Uber cars every weekend when you get blackout drunk and destroying property on Airbnb.
Maybe other people should know these things about you before they accidentally do business with you. Of course, once I think of actual implementation of such a thing, I only encounter showstoppers and ay, there's the rub. But the goal doesn't seem categorically wrong.
Though I also admit the inability to have a practical implementation that works is a good reason to condemn anything. I'm just radicalized by horrible ex-tenants and like to smile as I ponder the utopia where trashing my place echoes in their lives forever.
https://thepointsguy.com/news/uber-vomit-fraud-scam/
And what if Uber is your government-provided method of transportation for health care?
https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/uber-healths-non-...
It's like... If anyone's been to Disney World, they're familiar with what an all-encompassing experience that is. Now imagine Disney World ran 75% of Florida. And could bar you from the premises for violating its rules...
For example, imagine if you couldn't buy plane tickets because you didn't sit through enough critical race theory white-guilty training.
they can restrict access, but not control it, because Airbnb doesn't have a monopoly on safe shelter.
The charity of others isn't enough to fly you around the world and give you beachfront property and iPhone. They'll want something in return so long as they have other aspirations beyond serving you.
For instance, imagine you are an airline. You have an issue to do with deportation critics disrupting flights when people are being forcibly deported on them. This happens fairly infrequently but costs you quite a lot of money every time this happens. So, 'logically', you decide to determine who is most likely to disrupt a flight and so through discriminatory thinking somebody decides that those with left-wing political leanings are more likely to disrupt a flight. They purchase this information on political leanings for each of their passengers and pass this cost onto those who fit the profile, entirely on the basis of their political beliefs.
And if they don't do this directly, they will do it by proxy in the same way that the insurance industry has been using proxies for race. https://www.forbes.com/sites/advisor/2020/07/23/insurance-re...
It's a sort of insurance-ification of all pricing and permission which this kind of technology is increasingly enabling.
In the US you mean.