> But I think the shift to use of shame for society regulation is a positive development. I'd much rather be downvoted on HN or called names on Twitter than beaten up or deprived of freedom.

It's easy to require due process prior to anyone being deprived of freedom, and we generally see this as a positive development, compared to the alternative. Using "shame" (aka witch hunts, cyber bullying and the like) to punish unwelcome views is the opposite of due process.

It's not easy at all. Even in a democratic country with highly functional legal system like the US due process is not available to many (e.g. George Floyd).

Also my idea of shame doesn't include death threats let alone more extreme things like swatting.

It's the impulse that's lead to more shaming that's also pushing to make the police come and arrest you for saying offensive things- at least, this is already the case in europe.

And why not swat someone? If you're going to go after their livelihood and try to stop them from ever having a job again, you're half killing them anyway. People murder each other for less. Be honest and just have their dog shot already ;)

It is certainly no positive development. Shame requires a central authority or is based on the minimal consensus of the majority of society. I wouldn't recommend it. To regulate society, we have laws. Far better and objective system. Doesn't protect you from social prosecution which is restricted to people with a public or know persona on Twitter as it seems. There are also pretty shameless people.

does it include losing your job for wrongthink?

You are pretty far from the mark here... A study as far back as 2002 recognised the US as an oligarchy — i.e. not a democracy. And to call their legal/judicial systems or process “highly functional” is also pretty laughable.

George Floyd shouldn’t have come into the line of fire of these systems, he was an innocent man. The fact that it was and is so difficult to prosecute the responsible officer shows how dysfunctional the system is.

Using shame as a system of justice relies on emotional charge at the point of infraction. I would argue that’s how mob justice starts, not how we end injustice.

Re the US: I only meant that comparatively. Most of the people in the world can only dream of living under a system as good as yours. And for us violent regulation of expression is the norm.

I hear you. The shame-based system is prone to be unjust. TBH, I also think the people pioneering it are wrong about most things. I guess what I'm trying to say is that any violent regulation of expression is unjust, so even if shame-justice is on point 10% of the time it's still an improvement. And in the cases when it's wrong the consequences are less severe.

I had - without questioning it - assumed you were commenting from a Western Democracy yourself. It is beautifully eye-opening to be confronted with my own bias so starkly. In fact, I am British, and I think our system has many of the same issues as that of the US. Of course we have our own issues, mostly stemming from what I perceive as a delicate sensibility which is pervasive in British society, and is the subject of decades of jokes at our expense.

I wrote, and rewrote the rest of this comment 3 times, before I gave up, and started from the top of the thread again. Now I have decided to stop exhausting myself over what might be acceptable to an indefinable demographic (HN commenters reading this individual thread) for me to say.

But over here, we're not moving from the government hurting you for your speech to people shaming you. We moving from less hurt/shame in total to more shame in total. If the 2nd amendment didn't exist, the us would also have more government punishments for speech now than it did before- because that's what the people shaming want.

Sorry, actually meant 1st. But 2nd applies, too.

Regulating speech via social means is strongly preferable to regulating speech via legal means, in my opinion.

strongly disagree; it is mostly universally agreed that regulating crime via society means (i.e. lynch mobs) is bad; same applies to speech, I believe

If somebody is saying hurtful things, what's the due process to address that? Before the digital age, didn't we always manage that kind of thing through a type of social contract?

> I'd much rather be downvoted on HN or called names on Twitter than beaten up or deprived of freedom.

This blog post is literally about someone fearing that it'll escalate to "beaten up" or "fired" if their name is published.

Yeah, my comment was only in reference to this subthread.

How about you and your partner being fired from your job because your 13 year old wrote 1 year ago in Instagram : "Guacamole nigga penis". Is that shame treatment good enough or you prefer it more severe?

Well as far as our rational, atheist and activists who believe in 'science' go something more severe is absolutely required to clean earth off these scums.

An important bit is that it must be restricted to US sensibilities without any regard to other cultures. The woke are the true patriots here.

It's not simply being called names (though that can cause some level of psychological distress). The big concern is economic consequences. People are losing their jobs, losing access to the platforms their customers are using, being canceled by payment services, etc.

There's also some level of physical safety concerns as well, but (as of yet) that's not as big of a concern.

Maybe it is like police and tasers?

In theory, tasers are good because they can substitute shooting.

In practice, you had 5 shootings, and now you have 4 shootings and 200 taser uses

I get the overall point you're trying to make, but for the person who was going to be that #5 shooting and gets to live instead, that's a positive outcome for that person at least.

Overall there's certainly a larger discussion about the use of force, and maybe tasers contribute to that in some negative ways, but most of the time they're used everybody gets to live at the end of the day.

You shoot 200 people with tasers, a few are going to die.

You get 200 people fired from their jobs and make it hard for them to get employment elsewhere, a few are going to kill themselves. (Or see if they can get revenge first.)

We're arguing over made up numbers here.

The problem is that cops in the US are shooting way too often. Less lethal weapons just give them more opportunities to shoot.

Go look up real numbers. Amount of unarmed black men shot year by year and up-to the riots. Look it up. And you're right the number is historic...ly low under Trump and was literally spiraling down to Zero before the riots, you could count the on your fingers and have one to spare.

As with my other comment, you'd have to actually come up with real numbers to have that kind of a discussion.

Luckily, one can never lead to the other.

It's irrelevant whether one thing can lead to the other. What's important is how often it does. If there's significantly less violence, it's a win.

I guess it could be a bit difficult to see from the US where you had the first amendment forever. But the rest of the world is not like that.

The claim that cancel cultures appearance is single handedly responsible for a drop in violence that was entirely the fault of a more permissive attitude towards open debate seems quite a stretch to put it as politely as possible.

Are you implying it's a claim I've made? Because it isn't.

On the contrary, my claim is that if you take the world as a whole there has never been more permissive attitude towards open debate than today. But even in the so-called free world... Compare the treatment of JK Rowling got to the treatment MLK got.

> But I think the shift to use of shame for society regulation is a positive development

> If there's significantly less violence, it's a win.

Don't try and back away from your claims once you've made them.

And taking this debate from the point of view of the world as a whole is disingenuous, don't try to latch the damage done by one onto the overall good done by others and claim a net good for the first who caused the damage.

Also we aren't comparing now to the 1960s; yes now looks fabulous compared to then as does it compared to the purges in the USSR but we arent comparing those; we're discussing the recent devolution in free expression as pointed out in the blog this post is about.

> violence that was entirely the fault of a more permissive attitude towards open debate

Where did I say anything that can even remotely be interpreted this way?

Whether you think it's appropriate or not, I wasn't referring to the blog post. I also don't think it's what the blog post is about: Scott is worried about his patients knowing his political views interfering with his work as well as death threats, none of which has anything to do with shame.

Where I live cancel culture coexists with violent regulation of expression. I'm not sufficiently familiar with the US history but I doubt that whatever golden age you have in mind was sufficiently long even if it existed. Larry Flint was shot in '78 so that leaves 30 years max if that.

You claimed these new shaming tactics lead to less violence as I have quoted above. Shaming tactics are the diametric opposite of debate, it is fundamentally zero sum; you support them, you oppose the other and you equated their growth with a reduction in violence; again I have quoted this.

Now perhaps I overshot the gun and we could state that your interpretation of shamming tactics was something else but right now they have a very public face so you'll have to specify if you mean something else.

This blog post is a symptom of the lean towards shaming tactics over debate; the problem has evolved to the point that scott has to worry about his career being destroyed because of it.

And re times, how about the 2000s then? we built and debated online without the need to destroy one another's lives because of the POV we took on a political argument.

Bruises heal and prisons have limited terms. Twitter lasts forever.

> I'd much rather be downvoted on HN

Would you also like being hellbanned on HN?