Maybe the real rot of social media is how it erases in peoples' minds the idea that anything could have happened without social media. Here's a quote from the end of No Country for Old Men, because why not it's a great book & film:
What you got ain’t nothing new. This country is hard on people. You can’t stop what’s comin’. Ain’t all waitin’ on you. That’s vanity.
You are missing an important point though: with machine learning, you can make sure all social media will be optimized naturally to put the maximum amount of people's hair on fire, all the time.
Outrage create clicks, replies, and with recommendations engines it's served to your eyeballs as often as possible.
Whatever manual interventions we had to make use of outrage before are like kids' play compared to the systems which automate this nowadays.
I think you need to cite evidence for that view. There's a long history of terrible violence based on manipulation of religious animosity that predates the Internet. The Reformation movement in Germany triggered religious conflicts--incited by various secular powers--that lasted around 130 years and did not burn out until the end of the 30 Years War. Something like half the population of Germany died in that conflict. [1] That's just one example.
For example there are far greater amount of information flowing through Instant Messenger that is not accounted for.
I have now come to the conclusion it wasn't Social Media or Internet that divided the world. They act as an amplifier or solidify the viewer views. Simply because they spent more time on these media than ever before. So in reality, Social Media isn't really to blame, but it is currently a good use for politicians and other Press to target.
My new question for myself is, Before the amplifier or solidifier comes in, How did one get their view in the first place? What shapes it?
This is my annual reminder to anyone who thinks politics has become uncivilized that Aaron Burr (a founding father) killed Alexander Hamilton (another founding father). Makes twitter jabs seem quaint.
The analogy is like people complaining about A-Bombs and someone replying "300yrs ago people killed each other with swords. The world hasn't changed. People always killed other people".
In both cases the scale has changed by many orders of magnitude
When "the press" publishes something, you know it's "the media", since you're reading it in the paper.
On Twitter, the message presents itself as coming from "regular people, like you and me".
What I mean is that maybe people may have some kind of skepticism when reading a paper, such as I they know that this paper has rather this kind of views whereas that other paper will have that other kind. And also, this was written by some journalist and approved by the paper's editor, so it could very well be a fringe opinion since only few people were implicated. We don't know that this opinion is shared by many people. Contrast this with Twitter, where it appears that "a lot of different people" seem to be holding this or that opinion. People who aren't overtly belonging to the same group or organization. Which means the opinion isn't just some random group making things up, there must actually be something to it.
I'm not saying this works every time and "despicable rumors or partisan rhetoric" in the press never worked. I'm sure they did. But I think it worked on fewer people, and in order for those rumors to take hold in society they would have to spread through the people, not through newspapers, which must have been slower at the time.
Or the newspapers would have to be very convincing in order to influence many people directly, just writing a 140 character blurb wouldn't have done it.
Given e.g. the propensity for politicians to emphasise their "salt of the land, common folk" attributes whilst hiding their gold-plated toilets, etc., I suspect it's not inconsequential.
Propaganda undermines trust and it is actually far easier now to identify untruthful and biased news compared to the past. So a regression would be costly.
With social media, there are no signs of stopping, it’s an endless stream of addictive outrage and one sided opinion.
That in my view is what’s new and worse about it and it’s only likely to get more integrated with us.
Imagine when you have a brain implant like Elon and Co are working on ? You won’t even have the luxury to put your phone in your pocket.
The Vietnam-era "culture war" did not, however. It continued for quite some time. Just like the Civil Rights era and McCarthyism beore it, both of which came with their share of lynch mobs, and sometimes literal rather than metaphorical ones.
>That in my view is what’s new and worse about it and it’s only likely to get more integrated with us.
Absolutely we should work to reduce this kind of behavior, but it is in no way something "new". Dragging people on Twitter is a significant improvement from dragging them in front of Congress on national TV, which is an improvement from dragging them... behind cars.
> [dralley] The Vietnam-era "culture war" did not, however. It continued for quite some time.
Evidence (anecdotal) in support: Jane Fonda is STILL referred to as “Hanoi Jane”; I think I've seen it used even more recently than, e.g, [1]. This is from 1972, i.e. almost fifty years ago. OK, half that time the Internet has been available, and half of that in turn, “social media”. But for the first ~twenty-five years of that, they weren't.
[1]: https://time.com/5116479/jane-fonda-hanoi-jane-nickname/
The new part is that social media arguably accelerates it. One wacko trying to burn the witches in a village full of level heads couldn't accomplish anything. Now they can band together nationally.
Social Media is more of an accidental paper-clip-optimizer national encouragement.
The things that divide people are slow and many. The creep along slowly until at some point the differences are so great people believe those differences are worthy of death.
In 2020, we no longer use the draft. What's our excuse for being so polarized?
Besides, it's not just an American phenomenon. 68/69 were full of upheaval in the West as the postwar culture clash came to a head.
Hmm, why I am still saying tweets about BLM being violent and is aiming to disrupt social stability? I am stilling seeing a lot of people dont believe Covid19, and they also call it China Virus, and some are even attacking Asian people.
In a nutshell, several generations of American children were taught, systematically, to ignore social signals that conflicted with their self-image, and were thus deprived of a very critical part of their childhood: in where they learn to moderate their behavior in order to get along with other people.
Self-esteem education was based on the (correct!) observation that people with high self-esteem are healthier and more successful.
Given my extensive experience with educators, I am not in any way surprised that the conclusion they reached was that high self-esteem must cause health and success, rather than health and success resulting in high self-esteem. Educators seem to have this anti-Newtonian view on the world, in which reactions cause actions. But I digress.
I was subjected to this as a child, and it took something on the order of a decade of living abroad -- mostly in Japan, a country which, lacking any concept of "self", offers no affordance for "self-esteem" -- to fully realize the sheer horror of what I had been steeped in as a child.
As to why this has come to a head since the advent of social media, well, we're at the point where an entire generation which socializes primarily through virtual means has come of age.
When your social interactions are driven by proximity -- e.g., you are limited to people that physically exist near you -- then you are forced to learn some degree of moderation. Because if you can't get along with others, you find yourself rather in deficit of friends.
But now, it doesn't matter how crazy you are. If you worship Mao or Hitler or Stalin or whatever, there is a community for people like you.
No amount of ostracism will remedy this. That worked when your ability to make friendships had real, physical constraints. In the fully-connected schizophrenic hivemind world of 2020, casting people out of your tribe will, at best, only deprive them of a moderating influence.
Still not sure where this goes, but I am fairly certain it's got at least thirty-one flavors of ugly.
Self esteem devoid of any underlying achievement is hollow. In the end you're basically manufacturing narcissists, with a fragile falsely inflated self image covering a chasm of insecurity.
For starters, the "movement" is definitely aware of your dichotomy. The terms of art are contingent and non-contingent. It considers contingent self-esteem to be fragile because real lives contain setbacks. Its position is basically Stoicism: prefer an inner well-being, unperturbed by circumstances. Don't get overwhelmed by the ups and downs. It also contains echoes of Christianity: inherent dignity of all life, unconditional acceptance and love of all God's creatures.
Narcissism is in your relationship to how people perceive you... that would be squarely in the "contingent" category.
We might argue that of course a highly successful person feels inadequate; if he could be satisfied at all he would have been satisfied many achievements ago, and stopped there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-esteem#Contingent_vs._non...
Let me throw out the possibility that what the psychologists are saying, and the nth-hand version that teachers pick up and teach to the kids, may differ on key details. I don't think it's even rare for high-minded ideas to be garbled by the time they trickle down into classrooms. Feynman had amusing/dismaying stories about what made it into science textbooks, for example (and textbooks are theoretically written by the experts): https://rangevoting.org/FeynTexts.html
The psychology and underlaying theory looks sound, and is indeed very aligned with the Stoic approach. Problem is that the classroom implementation ended up almost a full 180 degrees out of phase.
The discussion of narcissism on that page is a bit different to the one I'd been working with (which was based on a lot of reading about cluster-B personality disorders including Narcissistic Personality Disorder) which might explain the discrepancy. But then, I'm not a professional so I'm happy to be corrected. (Edit: Of course as a professional I'm even more happy to be corrected, that's how you become less wrong!)
Edit: I was basing my understanding of "what psychologists are actually saying" on a bunch of kids books we have which have a page at the back written by psychologists (I haven't checked their credentials) which lines up with my 'unfounded optimism' definition of 'good self esteem'. I know there are other interpretations once you get to legitimate psychology and stoicism actually seems fairly effective.
Precisely.
At the same time, I think that social connections divorced from physical reality -- as is on the Internet -- compound this to the nth degree.
I can pretend to be an amazing dancer or boxer or chef on Facebook, but it's a very different thing when I need to demonstrate those skills as part of a community that actually Does That Thing.
To provide an example, I recall a few years back, at a dance social, meeting some kid from the Air Force that was an excellent case-study. He showed up, started dancing with partners, and it was obvious from the first (music) sentence in the first song that he simply did not know how to dance.
At all.
Like, when experienced dancers come from other styles, you can tell that they know how to dance. Maybe not this specific style, but they've got fundamentals. Ballerinas are particularly graceful, Latin dancers have a really specific flavor, ballroom people have really great structure, etc.
This dude was not a dancer.
Now, this is okay! The first rule of social dancing is that you want to welcome new dancers. But he was rude to every person that tried to help him out with picking up the basics, insisting that he was already a great dancer and that he didn't need the help.
Falsely inflated self-image, meet room full of follows that aren't interested in having their feet crushed.
Don't know what happened to him after that, but imagine if his bubble had never faced critique -- and this was from a community that bent over backwards to be nice to newcomers.
Like, is your mom or grandma a good cook? How many Michelin stars would her kitchen get? :)
Not saying this person wasn't a prick, just that dancing is hard to get an idea of how good you are at without already accepting that you suck at it while being repeatedly told how you are a good dancer (and if you are simply willing to let go on a dance floor as a male, you were likely to be termed a good dancer in my youth).
Can confirm. My strategy for single dancing was quite literally "do arbitrarily chosen motions in rhythm to the music with a straight face", and even when I chose motions I thought were silly (like pantomiming scooping ingredients into a bowl and stirring them), I never got the impression that anyone thought it was silly, and I started getting lots of people telling me that I'm a good or even a really good dancer.
My experience is that, if you move a lot, do it with an approximately correct rhythm, and do it with energy and enthusiasm, and you don't actually bump into people or fall over, then people will be pleased. It is possible that I've developed actual skill, but I think the above is most of it.
It does not translate into being good at dancing with a partner, except by implying basic proficiency with movement and rhythm.
The second rule (which, really, overlaps a lot with the first rule) of social dancing is that you don’t, ever, offer unsolicited coaching in the context of social dance. And part of that is because almost no one is in the mental place in that context to take it well.
I suppose you could use "whether someone attended the 'lesson' period" as a sign of whether they will take coaching well.
I see it as pretty similar to how some people see removal of spanking your kids as being coddling, versus making sure your kids are wearing pads when they're learning to rollerblade, versus wearing a helmet everywhere.
I used to obsess about things like this and then someone pointed out to me, "You'll never, ever get it right. You will word something some way, attempting to be gentle, and they will still be offended. You will NEVER win. So the only thing you can do is be sincere, without intention to harm, and you can sleep soundly knowing that how someone CHOSE to receive what you said is their own business, not yours."
Obviously we have a responsibility for the message we send. But how it is ultimately received is not up to us, and attempts to micro-manage language, like the above, will never result in the intended outcome.
Another thing that I am not a fan of is when people ask to always mention that it's only one's opinion.
Well duh, unless obviously supported by verifiable evidence, it is only my opinion. In my opinion!
Well I mean yes, it has... but we're discussing it because we're considering the option that maybe there's another way, right?
Same with "it's just an opinion". Well, yes, that's kinda the point. Let's discuss the idea, not where in my head it came from.
You're correct that ultimately, I'm not responsible for how someone takes things that I say when I'm being sincere... but I'm still one of the people that lives with the outcome. Might as well try for positives.
Personally? I do get pretty solid results with these kinds of micro-adjustments. Or, rather, since these are toy examples, what these kinds of micro-adjustments do when they're applied in larger situations. One mechanism for this is that I'm making an internal choice in how I'm thinking and framing something in my own mind, and that "vibe" impacts body language, conversational flow, attentiveness, how I understand and receive what they're saying, etc.
I find that the starkest and simplest is whether I start sentences with "I", "you", or neither. Flat statements have one impact. You don't sound like you've had much experience with these variations and their impacts. Am I putting the conversational pivot in myself, in your self, or between/outside of us? How do you find yourself responding to the various options?
Lol... I have had tons. In more than one language. My point was, that despite your best efforts, you will still offend someone eventually and that that's the point at which you can't take responsibility for how they feel.
For a time I did competitive speech and one of the precepts I operated on (and still do to this day) is "know your audience". It's always beneficial to frame your message to the intended recipients.
But what happens when an unintended recipient receives it?
Or, due to local differences (and this specifically happened to me), the use of a word was received differently than you intended - than it was elsewhere in the same language?
There's only so much control you have. Thus, what you truly control is your intentions, and people must make an effort to expect you are acting in good faith. So much of good communication simply comes down to that simple point. An expectation of good faith.
I expect that in the modern world this is where much of the breakdown in communication is coming from, really: everyone seems to be expecting "HAHA GOTCHA!" rather than a good faith conversation, and more worryingly, are more recently probably right.
"[when] there's an assumption of competency, the faults born of ignorance are seen as faults born of malice."
And/or what's being sought is conflict, not conversation.
> Lol... I have had tons.
Yeah ;) Notice that that paragraph has an "I"-statement, a "You"-statement, and a neither?
I don't like the idea of conflating "bullying" and "criticism". They're very different things. Even harsh criticism isn't really the same thing as bullying in my mind (Although it can be a part of bullying).
This part of human life fascinates me, where one person may assume the other posted something to show how smart they were, but the person who posted actually did so because they had an aha moment in their head and felt so excited to share it. The differing, sometimes even opposite, perspective on the person's intention.
Perhaps a bit too generous but you're right, the statement didn't make alot of sense without that moderating context. I certainly would see what NumFOCUS did here as bullying.
> Code of Conducts can be a useful tool, when thoughtfully created and thoughtfully enforced, to address sexism, racism, and harassment, all of which have been problems at tech conferences. Given the diversity issues in the tech industry, it is important that we continue the work of making conferences more inclusive, particularly to those from marginalized backgrounds
> In particular, I was concerned that if only partial information became available, the anti-CoC crowd might jump on this as an example of problems with codes of conduct more generally, or might point at this as part of “cancel culture” (a concept I vehemently disagree with, since what is referred to as “cancellation” is often just “facing consequences”)
You wouldn't advocate scrapping the entire criminal justice system, just because one innocent person was convicted. A little more nuance is useful here as well.
Every community has its set of guidelines, either explicit of implicit, intended to foster the community's purpose. If I go to my neighbor's party and behave like a jerk, and insult the other guests, there's a very good chance that I won't be invited back. If I start posting "dank memes" continuously on HN, I'm eventually going to find myself banned. As the author himself said, what is referred to as “cancellation” is often just “facing consequences”.
In this case, I have no idea why the committee came down hard on the author. I saw the relevant portions of his talk, and didn't hear anything rude or objectionable. I think the committee got it wrong in this instance, but that doesn't mean everyone in future should be allowed to be a jerk, and not face any consequences.
I've seen positive outcomes from the criminal justice system. I have literally never seen a CoC lead to a better dispute-handling process than the absence of a CoC.
> Every community has its set of guidelines, either explicit of implicit, intended to foster the community's purpose. If I go to my neighbor's party and behave like a jerk, and insult the other guests, there's a very good chance that I won't be invited back.
Sure - but it will be clear who's responsible for that decision. Most likely someone will tell you to your face what you did wrong and give you a chance to defend yourself.
> In this case, I have no idea why the committee came down hard on the author. I saw the relevant portions of his talk, and didn't hear anything rude or objectionable. I think the committee got it wrong in this instance, but that doesn't mean everyone in future should be allowed to be a jerk, and not face any consequences.
You don't need a CoC to exclude jerks. You need a moderator (not a committee; a clearly accountable individual, who will bear ultimate responsibility even for those parts of the job that they delegate) who will apply good judgement in a visible way. Not only must justice be done; it must also be seen to be done.
Based on what I've seen of them in action a CoC is not only useless, it should be a red flag that the organisers have not thought seriously about their dispute resolution process.
while that's very evident in this case this is actually what CoCs or written rules in general are for. Of course when you don't have a committee or a CoC however is in charge can still treat people arbitrarily, in fact much more so than when you actually have agreed on conduct and have a process to resolve things.
There's a good piece called the Tyranny of Structurelessness about radical feminist movements, where wanting to ditch all formal rules actually lead to even worse informal treatment, because officially leaders don't even exist, so there's nobody to blame.
You can look at this case also another way, at least there is an actual committee the author can blame and a CoC that he can argue he wasn't treated fairly by.
> There's a good piece called the Tyranny of Structurelessness about radical feminist movements, where wanting to ditch all formal rules actually lead to even worse informal treatment, because officially leaders don't even exist, so there's nobody to blame.
I actually think it's the opposite: codes and committees make the structurelessness worse. The code creates the illusion that the rules are impartial and their application is a detail. The (usually secret) committee diffuses responsibility so that no-one's actually accountable for their decisions. It gives the veneer of process and objectivity when actually there's nothing of the sort.
Formalising the process - who makes the decisions, on what grounds, with what oversight - is important. Formalising the code without a good process is putting the cart before the horse.
That's from 1970: "The basic problems didn't appear until individual rap groups exhausted the virtues of consciousness-raising and decided they wanted to do something more specific. At this point they usually foundered because most groups were unwilling to change their structure when they changed their tasks."
That's not just a problem with feminist groups. It's made other protest groups ineffective. Most notably, Occupy Wall Street. They got national attention, but then had no process for deciding what they wanted and pushing for it. The Portland protestors ran into that, too.
"Rules for Radicals", by Saul Alinsky: RULE 11: “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.”
Black Lives Matter is hitting this now. This is the agenda of Black Lives Matter.[1] "Page Not Found". The "Toolkit for Social Media", though, is available. The result has been way too much focus on PR, statues, and renaming stuff. Not enough about how to stop cops from killing people. (There's a straightforward solution: have the FBI investigate all killings by cops, immediately. There are about 1000 a year. The FBI has the authority to do this under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but does so only about once a year. They usually wait until the local authorities haven't done much, and by then the case is cold. Requiring an investigation by an outside agency is a basic first step. This doesn't require new legislation; that battle was won over half a century ago. So that's something to push for.)
What goes wrong when your group doesn't focus is that eventually you either fail, or end up with a Strong Leader, which creates the usual problems. These are the usual failure modes of revolutions.
Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation LLC, the organization you link, isn't the central organization of the movement, and certainly isn't the central policy organization of the movement. That's the Movement For Black Lives (M4BL). Here's their platform page: https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/
[1] https://breatheact.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/The-BREATH...
Yes, actually, I WOULD. At the very least, I would consider whether that system needs deep structural reform to prevent it from happening again.
Punishing someone wrongly is one of the absolute worst offenses a group can make against an individual.
It is the worst form of failure of a justice system. But in case of COC I would need to compare the previous situation, which was more peaceful and tolerant with fewer casualties.
Sure, but following Blackstone's ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio if one innocent person is convicted we should probably look at if things need changing.
on edit: I see a couple others made the same point.
The entire western criminal justice system is FOUNDED on the idea that it should let guilty go free if that avoids convicting the innocent. Criminal justice system which convicts innocent people is by its own foundational definition something that needs to be scrapped and reworked.
For my own project I was considering to include a code of conduct. But currently decided against it because I do not think the purpose of a code of conduct should be written down as potential punishments as consequences.
A lot of people have a variety of backgrounds, a variety of perspectives and values that thet have been taught. If someone isn't even aware of what they did to offend another member, how is that someone supposed to learn from it if they are just punished for it?
I want to create a culture of welcoming, and a safe space for everyone. Not a dystopian regime that punishes first and acknowledges their mistakes later. We've got a broken justice system already, and I think it is built in the opposite manner of what we're trying to achieve.
If you punish and exclude as consequences, the logical conclusion is alienation and isolation.
I believe that it would be a good thing if you could write it down, but you can't, or you'll spend your time writing down what is and isn't allowed. What's bad about the CoCs of today is that they are vague and are built for selective enforcement. There's no definition of "kind" that includes "don't say other people are wrong", but the people who love to wield power will simply read into it whatever they please and hang you with it. At the same time, they will say that much worse acts aren't "unkind" because the target deserved it.
Don't do a CoC, just kick out people who are actually assholes. You don't need a CoC to do that, and somebody who is an asshole won't stop being an asshole because you've written that they can't contribute if they are.
I consider CoCs harmful and they're a negative indicator for projects to me. Not because I'm not kind, but because it hints that the maintainers are easily swayed by outside forces and will bend to pressure.
The cause, frankly, comes from severe psychological trauma that breaks sensible thinking [1]. But, it's no excuse.
The solution? I believe it requires making people more moral, thus making them more just. How to do that is, effectively, something I believe is beyond the scope of my understanding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_justice https://savethekidsgroup.org/defining-transformative-justice...
You’re right that this is madness. This PC nonsense needs to end. Not everyone can simultaneously be correct
Aren't you just buying into the clickbait/hype here and adding to it? How many people is it really? How many people take this as seriously as media stories make it sound?
I think you're assuming a very loud vocal minority represents the opinions of everyone.
The problem to me is a single digit number of people can have an opinion that they find something is offensive (which is always going to happen when enough people are looking at it), and the news + social media + internet comments magnify and compound this with stories like "you'll never believe what people want to cancel next!!!" and comments like "omg these people are so stupid I hate cancel culture!!!".
Also see:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
"According to the 1% rule, about 1% of Internet users are responsible for creating content, while 99% are merely consumers of that content. For example, for every person who posts on a forum, generally about 99 other people view that forum but do not post. "
Cancel culture has to stop.
Aren't there already laws about harassing people?
I think the news should be more responsible by not reporting that someone was offended by something unless it has serious objective merit because it just gets everyone riled up on non-issues for no good reason.
Aside from that, "cancel culture" feels quite a vague topic that would be hard to police in any way because you aren't talking about specific people or specific ideas.
According to the media, Damore called women "neurotic" and said they were "biologically unfit to be software engineers". Nothing close whatsoever to what was actually said (1).
Meanwhile there are university professors willing to defend the memo (2). For example, "For what it’s worth, I think that almost all of the Google memo’s empirical claims are scientifically accurate. Moreover, they are stated quite carefully and dispassionately. Its key claims about sex differences are especially well-supported by large volumes of research across species, cultures, and history." (Geoffrey Miller, evolutionary psychology professor at University of New Mexico)
(1) https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586/Googles-I...
(2) https://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists...
A good, frustrating point. A large proportion of complaints of cancel culture are coupled with implications of frustration that they feel they can't say unpleasant things that they would have gotten away with previously. Or people complaining about direct efforts to change social norms that they don't agree with, claiming that due to a status quo bias, change is cancellation and therefore baseless.
As with most ideologies, discussing the definition is a fairly pointless task because its subjective and ill-defined, especially by those who feel passionately about it. The term is pointless. What happened in this case sounds bad, at a glance. Let's not generalize it to other things. It'll get nowhere. Whether or not one believes something is a part of cancel culture has no bearing on whether a particular idea to squash something is good or not.
Yeah, that's how I feel. Arguing or getting outraged about ill-defined things that can't be attributed to specific people doesn't seem productive because there's no way to resolve it or learn anything.
Some people exist that get offended by some things other people aren't offended by. So what?
It's just noise.
You have your usual bucket of nutcases, who get offended by everything, and everything is sexist (airconditioning), racist (milk) or *-phobic.
But then you have cases, where a mere accusation of anything even without proof) can destroy peoples lives, eg:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_case
You also have (somewhat) mainstream media spreading such fake news:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_on_Campus
You also have individuals, eg. Johnny Depp getting acused by Amber Heard, losing his upcoming acting roles, and after a time (and 87 cctv videos), she's found to be the crazy/violent one.
You have people like Pewdiepie getting accused of being a racist many times:
https://www.vox.com/2018/12/13/18136253/pewdiepie-vs-tseries...
Pewdiepie has a special 'power', that he gets more views than Vox does, so he can atleast present his side of the story ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjCsOmDmjEU ).
Some people don't have that media presence, but the media atleast scewed up enough, so they're no settling multimillion dollar lawsuits (Nick Sandmann, the 'smirking guy').
Now imagine, you're not a famous person, and you're not in a position of being able to sue CNN. Just one mere accusation (whout proof, without anything), can totally destroy your life, and you have no way to fight back. No police report, no judge, no jury, just one "he said, she said", one complaint, and there's nothing you can do... you lose your job, maybe even your carreer, you might get thrown out of your college, or worse. The accuser can lie to the media, say you said something -ist, or -phobic, and there's literally nothing you can do.
Now combine the "nutcases" with accusations, and your code using master/slave terminology is racist (as a slav, i have no idea why 'slave' is considered racist), boy/girl in character selection screen and never after is transphobic, and i have no idea what "not implementing all the pronouns" is.
Now, we have two options... either we become sensitive to everytihing, and destroy normal human relations and comedy (although, we've gone most of the way there, because of so many protected groups and actions, not allowed to be joked about, the only group you can target your jokes at are white men (with movies like 40 days and 40 nights, where a rape of a man is a comedic high point, and many other examples)), or we can just grow up, not get offended by something someone somewhere said or did (especially if it was a joke), and not "cancel" people because of that.
In addition to all of the things you're pointing out, there's also people genuinely trying to change things for the better with good reasoning.
> Now, we have two options... either we become sensitive to everytihing, and destroy normal human relations and comedy (although, we've gone most of the way there, because of so many protected groups and actions, not allowed to be joked about, the only group you can target your jokes at are white men (with movies like 40 days and 40 nights, where a rape of a man is a comedic high point, and many other examples)), or we can just grow up, not get offended by something someone somewhere said or did (especially if it was a joke), and not "cancel" people because of that.
No, it's really fine for us to say that certain things are not acceptable. It's ok to make fun of something. It's generally not ok to joke that, say, a race is intrinsically inferior to another, or that women are sexual objects, or that white dudes are just there to earn money or whatever antagonism floats your boat. It's shouldn't be illegal to make such jokes, but it should be shamed out of the mainstream.
You being triggered by other people being triggered is the height of irony.
I support all jokes, if they're funny (if not, nobody is going to watch that comedian, and the market will regulate itself). You say that we should shame the jokes you personally don't like out of the mainstream, but leave the ones you don't mind. "you slav you lose" is a joke.... slavs are also always shown as stereotypical people in tracksuits, drunk and killing people... mostly eachother... and yes, i know it's a stereotype, but as a slav, it's not far from truth (we're looking at caricatures here), and videos on youtube joking out of that are well.. funny (to me personally, and the like/dislike ratio shows that others find them funny too). Should we shame those jokes? Should we shame people laughing at those jokes? Should we shame slavs laughing at funny stereotipical representatives of our own people? Now replace slavs with some other group of people, and you get called a bunch of "-ist"s, "anti-"s, etc.
So, we either kill comedy for all ( https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/70390/a_politically... ), or we let people joke out of everything and not be sensitive about it (this is the option i prefer... especially since we live in a time, where just showing a picture of a religious figure can get you beheaded in france).
Maybe people are objecting to a tiny % of critical theorists trying to seize control of acceptable language with no mandate.
The problem with that tiny % is, that they are loud, and that we give them attention. And by we, i include everyone, from a reddit upvter to mainstream media.
It's 2020, milk is racist, rice is racist, syrup is racist,... and all that because of a few loud people powered by the media, grabbing views from the offended few and utraged many.
What I see is an ever-shifting goalpost of harmless aphorisms that are newly considered 'offensive' by a bunch of upper-class people. What does that do for George Floyd's family, exactly? Did it prevent Jacob Blake from being shot in the back a few months later?
If you want to embrace critical theory, you should include the critical theorists in the analysis -- what's their power incentive? What do they stand to gain? Let's not just assume they're saints but everyone else needs an inquisition.
I mean, I think Bill Cosby has been cancelled. Colin Kaepernick was for kneeling. And the lady who called the police on the black man in central park. Some of those may be unjustified. Is this really the biggest problem in society?
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/10/us/usc-chinese-professor-raci...
SDG&E Worker Fired Over Alleged Racist Gesture Says He Was Cracking Knuckles
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...
Professors mobbed, stripped of teaching positions and residential life functions after suggesting students should establish their own social norms rather than having them enforced by administration
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/the-per...
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/08/professor-sus...
He put on a performance that turned out was racist or sexist or something. Think les miserable - we were always doing stuff like that, so the stories were very varied.
Bam, he was gone. Even the students in the group that should have been offended were like, he's great. But there was a very very vocal very small set of more activist parents (white BTW!) with one or two students who were after him. Reminds me of the (white again) liberals in Portland or Seattle going after the police chief to cut her pay etc (black women).
I was like, who cares what two parents and their kids think. But they got in the paper talking about the racist (I think?) environment he created / messages being sent / cultural appropriation etc. This is theatre - people dress up as different characters so no question an identity politics issue was there most likely.
And yes - he was gone the next year after something like 12 years of building up this amazing program. His performances were sold out for multiple showings (literally everyone in school, every parent, every relative, randos went). The shows were major. All the context was overlooked (this guy was so formal he was never crude / rude or insulting). He'd spent all these extra hours doing all these things to bring different groups together - through music and more (he was an immigrant).
Two to three people, a scared / sensitive admin team, and boom, thousands of folks the worse for his going.
Everyone is worse for this. A lot of the categories of offense are extremely broad or very subtle and penalties are very severe.
I wonder how true this is now? Even if we don't count social media as "content" (and some of it certainly is) most web content is participatory in some way and I'd wager a decent percentage of web users (if not internet users) are now contributing.
It takes a level of maturity that most people never reach to handle real diversity of opinions. This is why universities used to be small places with only highly interested intellectuals trained to handle that diversity. And even they weren't great at it. Modern universities are a joke, and they are better than most organizations.
Which time period, and where? Universities used to be more exclusive, but I somehow doubt that exclusivity was for "intellectuals trained to handle that diversity" and not just "well-connected people".
Pro tip: If you can't figure out that Jeremy freaking Howard is a good person that you are lucky to have around, the problem is you.
I realize there are exceptions. I think "Social Media" is what would happen if we gave every dog on the planet a microphone to bark at every other dog in the world. It would quickly devolve into constant and senseless barking. This is what its come to.
Here, the norms were surprising (a back-and-forth between two presentations is a perennial seat-filler at tech conferences) and poorly communicated. That's a problem. But "banning criticism" isn't necessarily a problem.
We have a shade of that norm here, in Show HN posts. Restricting criticism on generic HN posts would be stifling and unproductive, but in spaces where we ask community members to be vulnerable and where part of the point is to allow the community to be encouraging, it makes total sense.
I think preventing attendees from criticizing people ("Joe Schmoe is dumb") is perfectly fine, but that's clearly not what happened here.
What I reject is the idea that all spaces are somehow required to make space for criticism. There are spaces where that rule doesn't make sense.
We're unlikely to find people to argue that the conference handled this well, or that the author did anything wrong.
However I agree with you in as much as, if some folks who think its a good idea all get together and communicate it clearly, there's nothing wrong with that. I probably wouldn't go, but there's a lot of conferences in the world I don't "get" and have no desire to go to, and that's ok.
I've also seen someone asked to cover up a company T with an IMO utterly innocuous joke on it (at a different event).
But, yeah, if you want to run a conference with a CoC that basically says we'll ask you to leave if anyone is offended by you for any reason, just please let me know so I can choose not to attend.
There are spaces where it doesn't make sense - for you -. Any forum where criticism is not acceptable should be classified as advertising or possibly propaganda.
You can exchange ideas without making judgements on other ideas. Like, let your ideas speak for themselves, marketplace of ideas etc, or even make comparisons without saying your ideas are _better or worse_ than other ideas.
I'm sure you wouldn't run out of useful and engaging conference content even with some hypothetical arbitrary rules like "don't say idea X is bad", "don't say person X is wrong about idea Y", like, at worst you'd have to make some minor edits to your slides and reword things to be less personal, unless your entire gimmick is that your presentation is a callout post.
“Joe is dumb” .. “Joe is wrong” .. “Joe is wrong about X” .. “Why I think Joe is wrong about X”
...anything but the final one feels unduly confrontational. That’s how I felt, reading your comment.
...I think [and am willing to be proven wrong.]
It is, and should be, OK to actually strongly state a position you hold, especially if you can back it up, and especially if the person you are responding to is going to take your criticism well (which the author did know).
"Joe is an idiot" is very different from "Joe is wrong" especially when Joe is definitively and demonstrably wrong (which he was in this case, the author demonstrated clearly and succinctly how to do something Joel said was difficult to do).
Adults are (or should be) also capable of determining when a talk is a string of personal attacks, or a mature but critical response (critical meaning evaluation, not negative). If every other phrase was "Joel has his head in his ass" then NumFOCUS would have certainly had a case; that wasn't the case here.
I'd buy that there are subcultures where prefixing "I think..." is a gesture of respect. But the CoC's I'm familiar with generality don't demand that the speaker aligns with a specific culture. Often they encourage accepting multiple cultures.
Indeed, I'll go as far as saying that a big part of conferences is encouraging different subcultures to listen to each other.
None of it is rude, bullying, or any kind of -ism, or anything that needs to be fixed. It is in fact confrontation, which is a fine thing. And whether it needs to be so "unduly" direct or not should simply shape the reader/listeners opinion of the writer/speaker.
It shapes my opinions when I see/hear/read so many people who conflate directness or disagreement with bullying. If you cannot stand criticism, your really ought not try to say anything.
But, the example you give is one that criticizes Joe Schmoe, not X. How about just "X is wrong", and leave Joe out of it so that the discourse is about the rightness or wrongness of X.
It is a horrible mistake to bring people in and give them attributes they don't have (eg, "Joe Schmoe is an idiot who is wrong about X" is objectionable). It is good practice to reference where mistaken claims are being made (as in this case "Joe Schmoe said X and that is wrong" is helpful to the listeners).
I am very doubtful that Joel Grus' identity is so tied to his jupyter-scepticism that this talk represents a personal attack. It is completely routine debate and possibly quite fun for all involved.
Also, if Joe Schmoe and Alice Shclalice have different, but aligned, support of X, it can be useful to your audience to identify different parts of your criticism as "this is how I disagree with Joe" and "this is how I disagree with Alice".
I think you may have accidentally encountered a slippery slope.
So whoever pushes their opinion first wins, since they would not be able to be criticized by that logic.
I don't think it makes sense to ban criticism everywhere, or even most places.
I mean to say, communities that seek to institute blanket no-criticism policies, in practice tend to end up criticizing those outside of the community and allow any beliefs or statements of people inside the community to go unchallenged and unexamined.
In other words, it just leads to more tribalism and in-group vs. out-group bias.
I don't have any hard data to back this up, just my subjective perception (criticize away!).
Surely though, you recognize that this statement (and most of the rest of your comment) is perhaps a little ironic?
> We're literally tearing ourselves apart ... Anyone can be an enemy or dislike you ... Everyone is so hostile and eager to end other people.
* Civil rights era * McCarthyism * Vietnam-era culture wars
None of this is anything particularly new
What does this particular incident have to do with social media? This was a presentation at a conference, and the "canceling" was convicting the presenter of a Code of Conduct violation on what look like egregiously inadequate grounds. They didn't block his Twitter feed or spam his Facebook page.
Basically not much difference functionally than the rest of human history? Seems the latter half of the 20th century lulled some people into a false sense of security.
It is sad what happened to you, and/but these are two different things.
Bullying is being applied but a mindless person/group who don't understand what-is-what and are just being mean because they don't know better/they haven't been taught better. Kinda like a kid acting like an ass, just because its parents/teachers never taught them better.
Criticism is a process applied by people with knowledge on the matter that are trying to improve you/something (like a parent who will criticize/assess/judge the actions of their kids to make them become better/greater humans)(great in the meaning of greatness/richness/betterment, not Alexander the 'Great').
"Bullying" usually refers to actual criminal activities by children. Such as stealing objects, harassing, hitting, beating etc. Which happened to me.
Criticism is something completely different.
What is destroying society is anger, emotion, and tribalism. Our best hope of saving it is deliberation, consideration, and the dreary slog of rational understanding debate. Strong views expressed dispassionately and all that.
There is a time and a place to coddle people. There is _also_ a time and a place for people's whose ideas are garbage to be declared as such and thrown into the bin.
There was a time when people could discuss ideas without having those ideas be internalized within an individual. It is entire possible to attack an idea or way of thinking to break it down and see how it works without involving a single person.
If you want to have constructive dialog about these kinds of things, people being "offended" will only shut down conversation instead of fostering it. Thicken up your skin, decouple yourself from these ideas, and talk about them like adults.
Being able to whip a Twitter frenzy of many thousands of people into a scarlet-letter stamping mob doesn't sound very "weak" to me. At the end of the day, what this really is is a power struggle, and understanding why many feel the need to engage so passionately in this power struggle will get you closer to the heart of the issue IMO.
As someone who was bullied growing up, when I discovered that I could ignore those people, it was a powerful moment in my life. I suddenly had total control over them because they couldn't control me. My ability to ignore them and to not respond to them in kind was a new kind of power. They couldn't get what they wanted, so they eventually found new people to mess with.
When we lash out at people, when we "whip up a Twitter frenzy", that is not resilience or strength. That is being blown around by whatever wind happens to be hitting you at the time. When your self-worth or mental state can be disrupted by someone who said something that offends you, then you will perpetually be the victim and the only way you "win" is when others do exactly like you want them to do whenever you are around. That's not strength—that's manipulation.
Individual people and groups of people get to decide for themselves what these times and places are, even if you think their decisions are wrong. It seems odd to demand this be done to your liking in the interests of 'adulthood'.
My writing style and sharp criticisms of damn near everything hasn’t changed much, except perhaps knowing I’m going to be downvoted makes my wording more bitter. I suspect it is the HN crowd which has changed, and has an axe to grind. I will not be allowed to hold certain opinions anymore without being punished.
A lot of us go to places like HN, Ars, TechCrunch because they’re something of a refuge from intractable boring political dilemmas. Solving technical problems, old war stories, discussing software and language features, sharing historical curiosities: those sorts of things earn karma.
That’s not to say politics is unwelcome here, but these threads make it so much easier to accidentally offend another. I’m highly involved in a US political party, but I rarely bring it up here because it’s unproductive. That said, go vote!
Fwiw my most upvoted comments are typically my lowest effort comments. Typically either low effort "me too" type confirmations or sarcastic quips that happened to be in favor of whoever was browsing the thread. [What I beleive to be] my more productive, thoughtful, on topic comments tend to mostly get ignored. This has been the case everytime I've tried to use this site. I beleive the the best way to get karma is a mix of proper timing / estimating what the popular opinion / point / etc. will be in a given thread. There are also certain topics and subjects that no matter how well you approach them will typically get you trashed.
I think people have a tendency to confuse productive comments with long comments, which isn't helpful either. I find I am most convincing to other people when I speak three to five sentences. If people truly wanted the essay format, they would have actually read the OP!
The moods and necessity for sugar coating everything has only gotten worse - exponentially so, if you ask me - in the last decade.
Karma is a reflection of that. I don't care about fake internet points.
This kind of comment was not surprising to find in your history's first page.
Did you have something of substance to add?
Give it a go!
Political correctness is killing this country, inside out.
The media and big-tech are now the big brothers. The network did not bring people together, it drove us apart.
Even this post will be downvoted, because it does not sound "kind and nice", because it complained about big-media-tech's censorship, thus it must be censored at HN
And HN is pretty friendly to discussion of big-media-tech censorship in general. It's when a post veers too far into conspiracy or persecution territory that downvotes flow in.
As long as you blame the "correct" people. You can blame politicians, rich executives, Russia, China and you will be lauded here.
You blame the hypocrisy of certain social movements, FAANG employees, Nordic countries, in general anything that can impact the POV of the average HN user and you will be downvoted swiftly. Most websites, this included, do not work to amplify the spectrum of opinions presented but to concentrate it in a tiny, fiercely regulated window. In that sense, old forums, usenet and even the daily mail comment section were more egalitarian.
I must say I am too curious not to ask, this quite cryptic. What would you say is driving us apart?
People write paragraphs, someone takes an issue with a word or a sentence, and writes a divergent post on just that word/sentence. Then that post gets the same treatment by another participant.. again and again, in multiplying ways. Take a submission 3 threads removed from the originating post and see what relation exists among the ideas. I lurk and observe this in online discourse with some bemusement.
It’s not how to speak at work or with friends. There are convergent and divergent modes of discourse, to be sure, but look here at HN, or Twitter, and see how the dialogue cuts on words and sentences. It’s the divergent discourse without any of the convergent discourse.
That said, one surprisingly important influence seems to be the rise of image posts + eternal scrolling. It's the ideal method for delivering a continuous stream of entertaining "the other side is bad" outrage content.
IIRC Linus had a public mea culpa and took some time off to reflect on his communication style.
That has NEVER happened before and is clearly a tragedy of epic proportions.
There's a reason we (the tech community) used to be and generally do lean libertarian. It's because we had to think ahead as we program, develop, we used to be innovators. We had to accepted people like Richard Stallman or Steve Jobs for that matter, because despite their faults, they contributed and drove things to a new level.
There may have been more of a "frat" style attitude, maybe. But from my experience the "old guard" was more nerds who didn't know how to communicate well. Often this was off putting, there were inappropriate jokes, etc. That definitely needed to be redressed.
HOWEVER, the solution has been not been merely education and punishing those who are abusive, but a propaganda and indoctrination campaign. I've witnessed men being forced to apologize to an audience of their peers, literally saying "I am sorry for being a white male of privilege." I've seen this at University and now it's coming to corporations.
I've been in meeting and trainings where I've been ordered to only target minorities during hiring. When asked, "why are we not recruiting from the ACM or IEEE clubs?" I was told, diversity is a more important target, everyone graduating will have roughly the same skill level anyway. These are the now corporate entities running NumFOCUS.
The reality is now everyone wants a "safe space". Which is not a "safe space" for discussion, but a "safe space" from feeling uncomfortable.
Today, we're more concerned about the petty politics than building a future. For looking the most "diverse" or "inclusive". The sacrifice has been a robust society or organization. We can't have differing opinions without being excommunicated.
I'm done being silent.
I want to build a future I'm proud of and this isn't it.
I wrote about it in my blog post titled "On Committing Suicide"[1], titled as such because saying any of this can get me fired. It can get me banned on social media. It's eventually going to kill the United States. In the words of John Adams,
> Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty. When clear prospects are opened before vanity, pride, avarice, or ambition, for their easy gratification, it is hard for the most considerate philosophers and the most conscientious moralists to resist the temptation. Individuals have conquered themselves. Nations and large bodies of men, never. - John Adams, 2nd President of the United States
Just wanted to be positive in a thread where there seems to be lots of negative.
>Everyone is so hostile and eager to end other people.
Couple centuries ago disagreement could easily end up as a duel resulting in a death and losing a political fight may have had more severe consequences than just losing an elected office. These days usually only ego is damaged. And even that - in the current environment criticism is equaled with harassment (so egos are safe and happily growing large and larger...) Thus as a result in particular proliferation of alternative facts, etc. Kind of multiverse of quantum mechanics.
It still is.
The working class footsoldiers aren't engaging in debates/arguments/discussions, they are being deployed as weapons, largely of intimidation, whose purpose isn't to convince others of what is true or right to believe, but what is safe to express. They may be relaying slogans, but its not about debate or discussion, and there is essentially no engagement.
how's skin color relevant here?
I will cancel any service that protects or promotes xenophobic views. If history has teach anything is that "tearing ourselves apart" damages everybody in society. If your company promotes xenophobia, if your company promotes behaviors of users that damage society, I will stop paying for your services and look for an alternative.
To denounce fair criticism as "Cancel culture" misses the point. I do not need to pay for your private company service if I disagree with your views.
The moral think to do, the right thing to do, is to not fund the people that seeking to increase economic profits are tearing our society apart.
> diversity of opinions
What make your country great is the diversity of cultures and people. And that is what many are attacking, believing that only "one culture", "one religion" should be allowed in the USA. My money should not go to fund that ideology, you may have your opinion, but I do not have to pay to spread it.
Social media has rotted us from within and from all sides. Left, right, it doesn't matter. Everyone is so hostile and eager to end other people.
This is madness.
Yes, I did read the article. We're cancelling people over criticism. Somebody needs to hide Linus.
I don't like criticism. I was bullied a lot as a kid. But I thought part of what made us American was our rich, diversity of opinions and our grit to withstand challenge. We're supposed to work together and see past the differences.