I don’t think so. I think some of the healthiest debate for example takes place on 4chan where there is very little moderation and even less civility. People express themselves in different ways. In the same thread you’ll find scat gifs and schizo posting next to thoughtfully written and well articulated points. Some will engage in the dialogue, some will troll, it’s up to the reader to choose what to look at and how to process the information.
Plus, I think civility is an extension of morality and western society no longer has a unified coherent moral framework. What is civilised behaviour to someone can be outrageous to someone else and so on.
Western society does have a unified moral framework. Theft, murder, rape, adultery, ect, ect, ect, all end badly. You know the list.
The problem is we tied society to consciousness and left moral simplicity behind. There is an explosion of ways to think and be conscious of life and the old rules were setup for a time when doing anything had such a massive cost, simpler moral rules sufficed.
There's many many ways to walk a basically moral path and people are discovering what hairs you can split and hold, and which appear to work temporarily but then collapse back into the old rules.
4chan appears less civil, but there's rules you can't break there and certain immoral acts will anger the beehive.
> Western society does have a unified moral framework. Theft, murder, rape, adultery, ect, ect, ect, all end badly. You know the list.
No. No we do not.
Theft has been de-facto de-criminalised in several US states and a few major European cities. It os common to see hordes barging into stores and stealing whatever they please. Attempts to raise concerns about this behaviour are met with complaints about “targeting marginalised groups” and more calls to defund the police.
Murder, like the murder of Daria Dugina in what is most likely a state sponsored act of terrorism, is actively cheered by many people. Just go read some comment sections on reddit to see. And it’s on the streets too. This point I can also extend with the abortion question. Clearly there is no consensus on what murder is.
Rape doesn’t work either because we no longer have a unified definition of it. If you ask a lefty zoomer what rape is they’ll tell you something really different from what a middle aged men in a conservative area will say.
Adultery - are you serious? Just look up the sleazy videos of that coked up chick running finland and see just how accepting most people are of her adultery.
I don’t know the list because there isn’t one. Maybe there was in the past, but it sure seems it went away.
Oh you mean a moral framework that is perfectly and immediately acted upon to ensure a utopian society? The 'devil' is always going to exist.
Sexual sin: Bill clinton sank on a bj, anthony weiner went out on a weiner shot, berlisconi spent years in prison for all kinds of prostitution and sexual scandals. Epstein got epstein'd, harvey weinstein got weinstein'd, #metoo sank many people, twitter cancelled director's careers. That guy on the Expanse got written out cause of a sex scandal.
It's basically the norm, that someone's sexual immorality causes them suffering eventually and usually in the act too.
I don't really care how politics defines morality. Morality is not decided by politics in the end, you eventually cash out your chips in the faithful rules, no matter your politics.
Your description is of somebody getting their morality from politics. It's not gonna end well, cause politics not the start or the end of morality, it's just commentary in the middle somewhere.
"That coked up finnish chick" is going to fall too. There's no special exemptions, you have to repent or bite the bullet at some point. I'm not defending the perception of sinners, sinning freely, as proof there's 'no unified morality'. You already know there is a unified morality, because you disapprove of that sinful stuff anyway.
I am having genuine trouble understanding your comment.
So, what my comment did ( or tried to do ) was provide example of large groups of people being morally ok with murder, theft, etc.
At least in the case of the Bill Clinton / metoo example, you seem to present a large group of people that, broadly speaking, are again sexual impropriety.
But, this goes to prove my point no? It’s a variation of this:
> If you ask a lefty zoomer what rape is they’ll tell you something really different from what a middle aged men in a conservative area
A large group of people saw the metoo movement as a legitimate protest against sexual abuse while another large group saw it as attention seeking and complaints against normal or not particularly bad behaviour.
This is the sort of thing I mean when I saw the west no longer has a unified sense of morality. Large segment of the population look at the same thing and reach vastly different conclusions.
Think of machine learning. To me it seems there’s two ( or maybe more ) version of a classifier running, producing different labels for the same input. Not all of the time obviously but sufficiently to be a problem. If there was a website where you could upload an image and the server replied with what it sees in the image, but the answer would be different depending on what machine in the cluster the image detection takes place on, would you call that a functional system?
> I don't really care how politics defines morality. Morality is not decided by politics in the end, you eventually cash out your chips in the faithful rules, no matter your politics.
Your description is of somebody getting their morality from politics. It's not gonna end well, cause politics not the start or the end of morality, it's just commentary in the middle somewhere.
I really didn’t understand this part but I agree morally and politics are different.
The christian view of morality is that the devil exists and he tempts us to do sinful things. People make the choice to do sinful things all the time. You've listed some examples of sins (and crimes) that people commit. I listed some examples of some sins that have been committed, like bill clinton et al, and then then in the world (earthly non-heaven place we live in) you can see these acts of sin lead to negative repercussions for the people involved.
You can see bill clinton, weintsein, ect suffer jail, career demotion, prosecution for various crimes, financial losses and relationships destroyed, ect. There's a long list of negative repercussions for committing sinful acts.
Now the larger point I am trying to make is that everybody is subject - by choice or not - to the fact that breaking these instinctual, moral, or explicitly faithful/religious rules has negative outcomes for their lives. Some political groups may see this choice or fateful reality as something that can be blamed on others, governed away or otherwise solved somehow, but it never works. They act or speak as if they want a free lunch, to act immorally, to sin and get away with it with no repercussions. At the end of the day, at the end of all their sinning, people have to face up to the negative things they've done and eat the consequences. The comment I made about "utopian and perfect enforcement of morality being unrealistic" was to suggest that immorality is resolved across time and not as soon as the immorality is exposed.
> Large segment of the population look at the same thing and reach vastly different conclusions.
The point I was trying to rummage towards earlier in short form, was that people sin and it catches up to them. The group of people who "reach vastly different conclusions" are often times, sinners sinning. The sinful action or evil in some cases should be turned away from. Studying sin and examining evil in detail often breeds more of it and it is better to turn away from it.
There's a second point to make here, which is that there are many many different branches of christianity, different views on islam and judiasm. In Christianity in particular there are many many denominations that share varied niche views. I was trying to make the point that since we left the christian era of 0ad-2000ad there has been an explosion of interpretations of moral theology and people have found many different ways to split the hair on how morality should be conveyed. This can account for some of the "disagreement about morality" and "disunity" you are seeing.
The example of 4Chan though sharing some distasteful social norms, still has an interpretation of morality that refuses horrific kinds of pornography and still has social norms about how people treat telling the truth and a rejection of bot-spam fakery and a whole bunch of other moral norms imported from society at large. The moral rules on 4chan can be seen as an offshoot of this conscious explosion of moral interpretation going on. Not my favourite example of a moral website or community. Though it does have moral rule at it's base.
The thing is, that most religions and faiths, if not all of them, share basic theology similarities. They share the idea that rape, murder, theft, ect are wrong. There is a unified core about peacefully loving one another. This concept has once been described as: everyone is worshipping the same God, like it were an elephant. One faith can see the trunk and tusks of the elephant, the other faith can see the tail and legs, and they all see different parts of the same elephant and no one faith sees the whole thing. That is a useful metaphor for the idea and truth that there is a core similarity and unity in the moral truth we all live in.
>Think of machine learning. To me it seems there’s two ( or maybe more ) version of a classifier running, producing different labels for the same input. Not all of the time obviously but sufficiently to be a problem. If there was a webs...
This is a long-running problem for HN, where civility is valued above integrity, incentivizing drive-by trolling because instigators are given the benefit of the doubt.
There's evidence that uncivil responses to abusive incursions are better for the long-term health of a community.
8 comments
[ 0.96 ms ] story [ 25.0 ms ] threadPlus, I think civility is an extension of morality and western society no longer has a unified coherent moral framework. What is civilised behaviour to someone can be outrageous to someone else and so on.
The problem is we tied society to consciousness and left moral simplicity behind. There is an explosion of ways to think and be conscious of life and the old rules were setup for a time when doing anything had such a massive cost, simpler moral rules sufficed.
There's many many ways to walk a basically moral path and people are discovering what hairs you can split and hold, and which appear to work temporarily but then collapse back into the old rules.
4chan appears less civil, but there's rules you can't break there and certain immoral acts will anger the beehive.
No. No we do not.
Theft has been de-facto de-criminalised in several US states and a few major European cities. It os common to see hordes barging into stores and stealing whatever they please. Attempts to raise concerns about this behaviour are met with complaints about “targeting marginalised groups” and more calls to defund the police.
Murder, like the murder of Daria Dugina in what is most likely a state sponsored act of terrorism, is actively cheered by many people. Just go read some comment sections on reddit to see. And it’s on the streets too. This point I can also extend with the abortion question. Clearly there is no consensus on what murder is.
Rape doesn’t work either because we no longer have a unified definition of it. If you ask a lefty zoomer what rape is they’ll tell you something really different from what a middle aged men in a conservative area will say.
Adultery - are you serious? Just look up the sleazy videos of that coked up chick running finland and see just how accepting most people are of her adultery.
I don’t know the list because there isn’t one. Maybe there was in the past, but it sure seems it went away.
Sexual sin: Bill clinton sank on a bj, anthony weiner went out on a weiner shot, berlisconi spent years in prison for all kinds of prostitution and sexual scandals. Epstein got epstein'd, harvey weinstein got weinstein'd, #metoo sank many people, twitter cancelled director's careers. That guy on the Expanse got written out cause of a sex scandal.
It's basically the norm, that someone's sexual immorality causes them suffering eventually and usually in the act too.
I don't really care how politics defines morality. Morality is not decided by politics in the end, you eventually cash out your chips in the faithful rules, no matter your politics.
Your description is of somebody getting their morality from politics. It's not gonna end well, cause politics not the start or the end of morality, it's just commentary in the middle somewhere.
"That coked up finnish chick" is going to fall too. There's no special exemptions, you have to repent or bite the bullet at some point. I'm not defending the perception of sinners, sinning freely, as proof there's 'no unified morality'. You already know there is a unified morality, because you disapprove of that sinful stuff anyway.
So, what my comment did ( or tried to do ) was provide example of large groups of people being morally ok with murder, theft, etc.
At least in the case of the Bill Clinton / metoo example, you seem to present a large group of people that, broadly speaking, are again sexual impropriety.
But, this goes to prove my point no? It’s a variation of this:
> If you ask a lefty zoomer what rape is they’ll tell you something really different from what a middle aged men in a conservative area
A large group of people saw the metoo movement as a legitimate protest against sexual abuse while another large group saw it as attention seeking and complaints against normal or not particularly bad behaviour.
This is the sort of thing I mean when I saw the west no longer has a unified sense of morality. Large segment of the population look at the same thing and reach vastly different conclusions.
Think of machine learning. To me it seems there’s two ( or maybe more ) version of a classifier running, producing different labels for the same input. Not all of the time obviously but sufficiently to be a problem. If there was a website where you could upload an image and the server replied with what it sees in the image, but the answer would be different depending on what machine in the cluster the image detection takes place on, would you call that a functional system?
> I don't really care how politics defines morality. Morality is not decided by politics in the end, you eventually cash out your chips in the faithful rules, no matter your politics. Your description is of somebody getting their morality from politics. It's not gonna end well, cause politics not the start or the end of morality, it's just commentary in the middle somewhere.
I really didn’t understand this part but I agree morally and politics are different.
You can see bill clinton, weintsein, ect suffer jail, career demotion, prosecution for various crimes, financial losses and relationships destroyed, ect. There's a long list of negative repercussions for committing sinful acts.
Now the larger point I am trying to make is that everybody is subject - by choice or not - to the fact that breaking these instinctual, moral, or explicitly faithful/religious rules has negative outcomes for their lives. Some political groups may see this choice or fateful reality as something that can be blamed on others, governed away or otherwise solved somehow, but it never works. They act or speak as if they want a free lunch, to act immorally, to sin and get away with it with no repercussions. At the end of the day, at the end of all their sinning, people have to face up to the negative things they've done and eat the consequences. The comment I made about "utopian and perfect enforcement of morality being unrealistic" was to suggest that immorality is resolved across time and not as soon as the immorality is exposed.
> Large segment of the population look at the same thing and reach vastly different conclusions.
The point I was trying to rummage towards earlier in short form, was that people sin and it catches up to them. The group of people who "reach vastly different conclusions" are often times, sinners sinning. The sinful action or evil in some cases should be turned away from. Studying sin and examining evil in detail often breeds more of it and it is better to turn away from it.
There's a second point to make here, which is that there are many many different branches of christianity, different views on islam and judiasm. In Christianity in particular there are many many denominations that share varied niche views. I was trying to make the point that since we left the christian era of 0ad-2000ad there has been an explosion of interpretations of moral theology and people have found many different ways to split the hair on how morality should be conveyed. This can account for some of the "disagreement about morality" and "disunity" you are seeing.
The example of 4Chan though sharing some distasteful social norms, still has an interpretation of morality that refuses horrific kinds of pornography and still has social norms about how people treat telling the truth and a rejection of bot-spam fakery and a whole bunch of other moral norms imported from society at large. The moral rules on 4chan can be seen as an offshoot of this conscious explosion of moral interpretation going on. Not my favourite example of a moral website or community. Though it does have moral rule at it's base.
The thing is, that most religions and faiths, if not all of them, share basic theology similarities. They share the idea that rape, murder, theft, ect are wrong. There is a unified core about peacefully loving one another. This concept has once been described as: everyone is worshipping the same God, like it were an elephant. One faith can see the trunk and tusks of the elephant, the other faith can see the tail and legs, and they all see different parts of the same elephant and no one faith sees the whole thing. That is a useful metaphor for the idea and truth that there is a core similarity and unity in the moral truth we all live in.
>Think of machine learning. To me it seems there’s two ( or maybe more ) version of a classifier running, producing different labels for the same input. Not all of the time obviously but sufficiently to be a problem. If there was a webs...
There's evidence that uncivil responses to abusive incursions are better for the long-term health of a community.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.03697.pdf
You can be just as forceful with civil language as you can with uncivil language.