And yet, perhaps especially in online 'shaming' or targeted critique, the shamer is (presumably) unable to discern that they are really tilting at an imaginary person they have constructed themselves from rather scant information.

Not that it's a new behavioural feature, of course - propagandists and demagogues have relied on this sort of propensity forever. Maybe it's the capacity of internet media to 'present' a person by tiny amounts of information that brings it out.

By 'tiny' we could be talking about a single bit, btw - I've seen plenty of reactions apparently to individuals fully formed in the reactor's mind, despite that their information consists only in the fact that someone clicked 'downvote' rather than 'upvote'!

In a way, I guess dogpiling on someone like that is probably a lot easier when you know nothing about them except the thing you're reacting to.

Issues arise when this projected individual differs substantially to the actual. On a one to one face to face basis, one typically rapidly readjusts one's model of another rapidly, as it's free floating and has no broader corpus to fall back on. This varies when you deal with someone famous (large corpus, many precepts) or intimate (seemingly large corpus, actually selection bias and neurosis), and the model usually becomes less accurate.

Where it gets interesting is herd interactions, either on or offline. Lynch mobs, trial by media, witch burning, Internet hate machine, war - all arise from inaccurate models of the minds of others, which are reinforced through perceived (abiline!) collective consensus.

Long story short, there's no good and evil, most narrative is self constructed, this is as old as man.

   all arise from inaccurate models of the minds of others

Were humans not capable of and in the habit of treating assumptions as axioms, we could not function nor develop beyond an infantile inquisitive state, as we rely on inductive learning to link the symbols through which we interpret reality - so one can only work with this particular axiom (or assumption? Hah.) to effect change.

The Internet is damoclean in nature - at first flush it presents a divisive frontier of information, which leads to the behaviours we see today - but prolonged exposure could result in a general improvement in the models individuals and cultures carry, assuming auto-innoculation doesn't happen too quickly. It'll be interesting to watch pan out.

   prolonged exposure could result in a general improvement 

Progress doesn't always look like progress at the time. In fact, it rarely does - what we usually see and call progress is actually entrenchment.

And cultural relativism is a marvelous excuse for the evil of man.

Cultural absolutism: us good, them evil.

Cultural relativism: under these social circumstances, those moral preferences are likely to emerge.

Clearly, the former is easier to handle than the latter, which has advantages in some situations.

>Cultural relativism: under these social circumstances, those moral preferences are likely to emerge.

This strikes me as the fallacy of the excluded middle.

Many people believe one culture is better than another without necessarily believing one is entirely good/without fault and the other is entirely bad.

The problem with cultural relativism as I understand it is that it denies me the right to make any judgement. I mean, you phrased as opposing "they're bad" but in practice it opposes "they're worse"

    fallacy of the excluded middle.

   it denies me the right to make any judgement.

The academic community on twitter is very active and the content is very good, so I go to twitter to keep up with the latest cogneuro trends. This having been said, I'm now clearly in a professional environment, so I think about what I'm writing.

I walk through twitter in the same way I walk through the ghetto: mouth shut and head on a swivel. I'm not going to start disseminating my political opinions as if the average twit gave a damn.

   The academic community on twitter is very active and the content is very good, so I go to twitter to keep up with the latest cogneuro trends.

I wonder if I'm the only one ...

Yesterday a certain horse was confirmed for a certain race (Smad Place in the King George chase at Kempton on December 26th). I picked up the information on Twitter and was able to place a bet immediately at 14/1. The price on Smad Place in this race is now 10/1, 9/1 in places. It was quickly adjusted down by most bookmakers within 10 minutes of the announcement.

Twitter really is a valuable medium to me. I want to hear about things 5 seconds after they've been announced!

If betting with a bookmaker you can take the current odds or the Starting Price (SP). If you take the current odds, you're locked in to that price, regardless of which way the price moves. If you're taking the current price, you need to be quite sure the SP is likely to be shorter. The SP, as the name implies, is basically the price of the horse when the race starts.

One can also place a bet on the Tote (totaliser), which is common in many parts of the world and often government owned/run. For example, Hong Kong, the jurisdiction with the biggest gambling turnover on horse racing, only legally allows bets on the Tote. This is a form of parimutuel betting. All bets go into a pool, the winning dividend is the amount available in the pool, divided by the total number of bets on the winner (less the operator's commission). Therefore, the price will fluctuate with the number of bets placed and the monetary volume.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parimutuel_betting

The idea of "The adult version of high school" for situations that involve bullies, ingroup/outgroup and pettiness etc... is silly because it assumes that those things are only relegated to children.

Case in point: The G20 in Australia[1]. All the cool kids sit with Obama, Putin ate lunch alone and was on the outside of the class photo. If the highest level of political diplomacy is also "the adult version of high school"...well then I guess the whole thing is just high school.

[1]http://www.pbs.org/video/2365401766/ time:50:08

Maybe on 7th grade of our system (when we were 13-14).

It looks like that's the mental age of SJW's.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9085680

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9039274

When that happens, we might see a countervailing trend wherein the internet largely turns against that type of behavior—likely via way of directing outrage and shaming towards those who engage in outrage and shaming.

Ideally, the dynamic would be kind of like a snake eating its tail.

I am actually torn about this. On the one hand, I understand and value that anonymity (at least, superficially) is big part of what makes the internet great. But on the other hand, I can't help but believe that we'll be in a completely better society if people didn't have a space to vent their rage in some sort of wide-reaching, public arena. Leaving their only recourse for dealing with such rage to be actual manifested "rage/hate/racism/sexism/other-ism", which is pretty darn easy to point out concretely, and to ostracize.

The use of real names on Twitter, Facebook etc doesn't actually stop this, though I presume it moderates it somewhat. (The "secret sympathizers" may be less likely to join the mob.)

I'm not so sure everyone would shut up. Some people are bold wrt their opinions. We might even create more such people..

Then people would eventually ignore the mere threat of repercussions. Now, we'd actually have to attack them, to make the repercussions real - and this is where it starts...

http://gawker.com/justine-sacco-is-good-at-her-job-and-how-i...

That's Gawker for you. They never care for the people they write about, they only care for the clicks. Just like when they outed the CFO of Condé Nast: http://www.salon.com/2015/07/17/gawker_drags_media_coverage_...

And who could forget the time when they filed the sexual assault of a guy under "first world problem": https://archive.is/f0ZbV (archive link because no traffic for Gawker).

Shaming someone attempts to make them feel bad about their actions. Attempting to get someone fired, and spamming them with threats is not shaming...

You could pay me to use social media, but considering the potential reputational costs I'd have to be paid a lot.

To his immense credit, he doesn't go around defending specific instances of hate mobbing, but his reluctance to fully commit to opposing the technique hampers whatever it is he's attempting to accomplish.

The same can be seen in religious forums, atheists, etc. Try to post in a religious stackexchange - with the notable exception of judaism.stackexchange.com your post is likely to be censoredor heavily modified if it's too critical or raises inconvenient issues.

At least, sites like quora and stackexchange have rules that tend to promote a clean end result, with quality answers. On social sites like facebook, however, things usually devolve into over 90% "bad" argumentation as defined by paul graham.

I think there is some internet study that anger and outrage motivates people to respond more than good things.

On Twitter, where people shout into the void and most people in the mob don't have a reputation to carefully manage, you can attract even more angry crap.

On YouTube it's the same principle - comments are public so the angry confrontations with low wuality argumentation are more likely.

The design of the site makes a huge difference. Which is why libertarians are just wrong, there is no "free market", every game has rules. You hear that libertarians? I am waiting for you on this thread!! :-P

"Free-market" doesn't imply "no rules".

Oh, we hear you. We, or at least I, am just not quite able to parse what you're saying.

Are you implying that Youtube is supposed to enforce some sort of "free-market" on the comments? Or are you baiting for some sort of "mob shouting" reply that you reference in your post? Do care to elaborate, as we Libertarians (and anarcho-capitalists), are listening.

Its cases such as this one that remind me personally that you cannot trust a mob, a crowd can be as banal and base as any wild animal, and groups need guidance to be of benefit to the individual cells which form the whole. There are no guarantees with the mob - strength, unity, enterprise - these must all be applied towards the effort to prevent the mob from consuming itself. Humans are cannibalistic - if not digestively, at least figuratively - and we form whatever cultures we can select from the infinite void in order to undo this cannibalistic urge. But yet, still it persists.

The problem is people on Twitter putting their real name out and expecting no consequences for their actions everytime they tweet something.

Twitter is open AND people chose to reveal their true identity ... what could go wrong ?

Twitter is a wonderful tool for businesses to create channels. If you have something to sell yes you should absolutely be on Twitter, if not, at least stay anonymous while going on rants or when saying questionable things. She should have.

The same occurs on these very boards. Everything looks copacetic when you're an insider.

1. Anonymity

2. Mixing of cultures that rarely (if ever) meet in the real world

3. Loss of nuances when speech is converted to text

4. Loss of context due to text constraints (can't write many complete, complex thoughts in 140 characters)

5. Less potential for physical consequences

But the way twitter works, one of your followers can retell the "joke" to all their friends, and they can tell it to all their friends. The system breaks down when they're not sharing something they agree with, but something they think is so harmful that no-one (except all their followers) should ever have to see it.

If the joke is "problematic", I'm not sure why sharing it isn't also problematic.

Maybe a 140 character broadcast system is a good medium for a nuanced analysis of when jokes are funny (and a circuit breaker in a sometimes uncomfortable discussion) or so harmful that they can't be justified, and where the line is.

She was terribly wronged but no one else keeps bringing her up except him, for obvious financial gain.

If he has something new to say then great, but cherry picking ridiculous tweets out of thousands of them, many of them complete trolls, only gives voice to an obviously ignorant minority.

It’s just a set of people who a. had a bad day; b. disagree; c. have arguments, or agree with people who do, and resent the fact that those arguments were openly dismissed.

“Troll” was an expression used by feminists (Ellison) 20 years ago, when they switched from presence-based meetings to on-line forum. They were confronted to dissent for the first time, didn’t know what to do with it. And roll all dissent into a intentionally de-humanised collective, where counter-arguments were gladly mixed with abuse to discredit them.

That kind of conflation became so prevalent, that is –ironically– also what drove people to miss Sacco’s cynicism.

I am not trivialising threats, just arguing that putting them in context would help solve the issue — a lot more than putting thousands of teenagers in jail just because they didn’t mesure the consequence of their anger.

The way I remember it, trolling started out on usenet as a way to, well, here's probably the best example : https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.arts.startrek.te...

I know: That got very real very fast, didn’t it? De-humanising your dissenters can have such strangely overwhelming consequences. I mean, just look at every conversation the original article quotes: death-threats are hardly the worst. That’s why when someone claims (proudly) to have invented the key-word for empowering something like that, I pay attention. I couldn’t find the reference where she did, though.