I think the most dangerous people in the world are self-righteous idealists who wants to do good. They often end up causing lots of harm. Although, I do see that idealism can be good in some situations.
It seems like an individually game-theoretic optimization to the online shaming problem is to abstain from discussing any controversial or potentially controversial issue, offline or offline, at any time, for any reason.
Talk to anyone who's lived in a totalitarian, Stalinist regime, or read things like Nineteen Eighty Four and you'll find this is a very unhealthy thing to do, mentally and emotionally. It's also strictly impossible, for things that are safe today become unsafe tomorrow, because this is more about power and broken people than anything rational.
Its also dyscivic. Much, much uglier things will happen if you cede to one faction the public sphere, the "soap box" in the sequence of "soap box, ballet box, bullet box".
People are starting to realize social media is not that friendly. Every statement made in public gets recorded and attached to your real identity forever. Kids who say stupid shit get that held against them forever from employers, associates or even random stalkers. All for the need of some targeted advertising. Hopefully, the generation coming after that would learn and be more privacy-aware.
South Korea, as I understand it, has this principle of ensuring that the author of anything Internet can be personally identified.
This kind of accountability might help even the odds between what is otherwise a named individual vs. an anonymous mob. I honestly don't know if it's a good idea or not, though.
That makes it very hard for some minority groups to talk freely. Trans people are a big example but even gays can be at risk. And then there are whistle blowers.
And speaking of "minority groups", at least on the net, what about conservatives?
Echoing my other comment about the totalitarian and most especially Stalinist nature of this arena, Brendan Eich was purged from Mozilla for holding the same position on gay marriage as Obama, "CEO" of the entire nation, officially did until May 9th, 2012, although in fairness to Obama, he said he changed his mind as opposed to always being at war with Eastasia.
The Left has captured a whole bunch of fields like science where "No Irish or (open) Conservatives" applies, so to still be able to engage in the public sphere anonymity is required.
And fortunately anonymity is enshrined in our lowercase and uppercase c/Constitutional order, e.g. The Federalist Papers. Compare to South Korea where they're still in a not quite hot but definitely not cold war with their northern Communist neighbor; I don't believe they can afford some of the civil liberties we enjoy.
> And speaking of "minority groups", at least on the net, what about conservatives?
Conservatives aren't an underrepresented or disempowered group (the relevant sense of "minority"), even on the net.
They are a group with disproportionate power (rooted in disproportionate economic power, extending to political and social domains), many of whose members have, or effect for propaganda purposes, an (unjustified) sense of persecution.
Society does coalesce into like-minded groups, usually with different ideological trends than the larger society as a whole. Either we can try to analyze treatment of X in subgroup Y, for any X, or we've set ourselves up for dead end reasoning with the outcomes predetermined. That doesn't mean X1 is the same as X2 on any axis. The strong point found in a slight rework of the grandparent's point is that for a large number of communities on the internet conservatives are the minority group. The bifurcation along the left-right axis is one, if not the most, visible splits on the internet that websites fall on one side of.
Also, persecution complexes are not unique to the empowered, it's just a fools errand (and asking for a flame war) to try and engage in well intentioned discussion to untangle actual persecution from perceived persecution among dis-empowered groups.
> Regardless, silencing or demonizing any group is wrong.
I find this blanket generalization hard to accept.
There's a group of parents who try to cure their children's autism by making them drink diluted chlorine bleach and giving them enemas of the same stuff. They get their advice from a couple who make money from the sale of books, supplements and services related to this horribly misguided and abusive practice. Would it be wrong to try to silence the perpetrators?
Under what principle would you allow silencing, removing the ability of these people to speak, that includes them but not your favored tiny or not so tiny groups?
I find it disconcerting that many self-identifying 'liberal' groups advocate for the anti-liberal restrictions of speech codes. If you are not for free expression, everybody's, not just the ones you agree with or approve of, then you do not hold liberal views and are not a liberal.
That's because these people were never liberals. After they "used up" the word progressive, they stole liberal from the "classical liberals", somewhat akin to today's libertarians ... and now they've pretty much used up "liberal", and many are recycling the word progressive.
>There's a group of parents who try to cure their children's autism by making them drink diluted chlorine bleach and giving them enemas of the same stuff.
That's a crime. Full stop. Those parents should be charged to the fullest extent of the law.
>They get their advice from a couple who make money from the sale of books, supplements and services related to this horribly misguided and abusive practice. Would it be wrong to try to silence the perpetrators?
YES IT WOULD! (I wish I could make this larger, bold, blinking, and shouting.) Writing that one should do something stupid and dangerous is not a crime, otherwise half of the clickbait articles on the web would result in jail time for the posters.
Thoughts, in and of themselves, don't MAKE people do anything. The person hearing them always has a choice.
Now if you want to make it illegal to SELL their supplies because they're a risk to public health then go right ahead. A restriction on commerce is not a restriction on speech. We criminalize representing oneself as a doctor if you're not. What you're not allowed to do is shut someone up if you don't like what they're saying.
Sorry for my lack of clarity. I'm using "Stalinist" as shorthand for constantly changing party lines, which Stalin was infamous for, e.g. the public about face of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, obviously reversed on 22 June 1941, the day when Communists e.g. joined the French resistance, stopped sabotaging US rearmament, etc.
As for "cutting down trees in Kolyma" ... well, a few minutes with Google just now indicates he's become an unperson on the web, something else Stalin was notorious for doing. While I doubt Eich's been reduced to hard labor in a rural region unless he just wanted to get away from it all, who denies his career is effectively over? Unless, of course, he's doing things anonymously?
No. He exercised his free speech, others exercised their freedom of association. People didn't like that, necessarily, but that's life. Calling it Stalinist is just a way to demonize your opponents.
> The Left has captured a whole bunch of fields like science
Wrong. What happened was that the GOP decided that the science in some issues is contrary to their party line, and began to deny it. There is no "Liberal Science", "Conservative Science", "Jewish Science", or "German Science", just science backed by evidence and non-evidence-based denials thereof.
Just because the news media gives you time doesn't mean you have a valid argument; just because you have a vested interest in something being wrong doesn't make it wrong.
It appears you missed my point about the Left capturing fields, it refers to this sort of thing: https://www.google.com/search?q=no+irish As in I wouldn't try to become a scientist today, vs. back in the '80s, I'd have to avoid fields captured by the Left's Gleichschaltung.
In that sense, there was a "German Science", more specifically Deutsche Physik, in that no Jews were allowed to participate.
And no need to go off in partisan weeds, let alone imply there's much overlap between conservatives and Republicans.
Scientists don't care if you're left or right as long as you do good work. The fact party-line GOP dogma prevents scientists from doing good work in some fields is not science's problem, and does not represent scientists ousting conservatives from science.
James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, would beg to differ.
You're also ignoring what it takes to get to the point of being able to do good work (ugrad -> grad -> postdoc -> (in the academic track) professor -> tenure), and that the funding for such work is governed by politics, not "science". ClimateGate showed us how bad that can get.
As for the GOP, they're irrelevant to this discussion, except for the obvious fact they live rent free in your brain.
Climategate is not a real scandal and your mention of it just proves that you have bought in to the GOP's anti-science narrative. Your further accusation that I let the GOP get to me is just insults without basis. You have proved that you have no idea what you're talking about and have no interest in a rational discussion.
You aren't going to get very far telling that to anyone who's read the emails in it (their provenance confirmed by the authors), and the diary of the programmer who tried and failed to get their code and data repeating what it had previously done and what that process also revealed, like "hide the decline".
Your under the impression that I'm following a party line, as, opposed to, you know, being something of a scientist myself (MIT Class of '83, degree unfinished due to $$$; heck, I'm even old enough to remember when anthropogenic global cooling was the "scientific consensus"). I actually study original sources before making judgments like this, such as the 1982 TTAPS Nuclear Winter paper in Science (the AAAS journal); I don't need a political party I loathe at the national level to tell me what to think, thus you utterly fail in your attempt to DISQUALIFY me by guilt by association, which your side also labels as McCarthyism.
And ClimateGate was a dump of emails and data from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England. I was unaware the GOP's tentacles reached all the way across the Atlantic!
> I was unaware the GOP's tentacles reached all the way across the Atlantic!
Not what I claimed, and you're being dishonest. The scandal was created by the GOP. The word was created by the GOP. The fact you're using the word proves you're influenced by the GOP, something you try to hide, for some reason.
> You aren't going to get very far telling that to anyone who's read the emails in it (their provenance confirmed by the authors), and the diary of the programmer who tried and failed to get their code and data repeating what it had previously done and what that process also revealed, like "hide the decline".
You read but failed to comprehend. Your failure to comprehend was political in nature, and it aligns perfectly with what the GOP's narrative is. You even use their term. Do you really expect me to be so stupid to believe that was a coincidence?
You misunderstand basic time averaging and the problems of proxies in precisely the way the GOP does and you really expect me to believe that was a coincidence?
"You misunderstand basic time averaging and the problems of proxies"
Nope, the actual data is the one thing I haven't looked at. Because my studies of science haven't sufficiently educated me in that area and I know I'm not qualified (ask me to, say, visualize a molecule in 3D, that's another thing). But I am qualified to understand a programmer's tribulations, having been paid good money to do "software archaeology", and most certainly am qualified to interpret overt conspiracies to keep people from being published, or to get their community to shun a journal that did publish a paper with thoughtcrime.
I have no idea who came up with the name ClimateGate, but seeing as how I was political aware when the Watergate break in happened, and followed the drama to the bitter end, I know that [Fill in the blank]Gate is an automatic, if not the default US naming scheme for scandals. If that makes me influenced by the GOP, by Richard Milhous Nixon no less, so be it!
And again you demonstrate how the GOP lives rent free in your brain, for you cannot even conceive of someone saying what I do from first principles vs. "just regurgitating GOP talking points" and lying about it all.
> and most certainly am qualified to interpret overt conspiracies to keep people from being published, or to get their community to shun a journal that did publish a paper with thoughtcrime.
Then you've misinterpreted this, and have done so in precisely the same way the GOP did, even using their word.
> I have no idea who came up with the name ClimateGate
You're either lying or dense.
> for you cannot even conceive of someone saying what I do from first principles vs. "just regurgitating GOP talking points" and lying about it all.
No, I just refuse to believe that someone would independently reinvent everything the GOP has come up with entirely on their own, and then parade their conclusions around using all the same talking points and words, without being influenced by the GOP.
It's like someone claiming they independently wrote Hamlet. Word for word. Without having read Shakespeare. It just beggars belief.
In the example she made fun of 1)black people 2) AIDS 3) White people. And possible offended all religious people in the world. What can possible go wrong? :P
Altruistic punishment is a psychological phenomenon that yields status benefit and opportunities for bonding. This powers gossip which is enabled by networks.
Exposing what people do can limit some impacts. Real justice requires charges and opportunities for refutation and representation. Competing networks including anti gossip gossip can to some degree deflect the problem or turn it on itself.
35 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 79.8 ms ] threadIts also dyscivic. Much, much uglier things will happen if you cede to one faction the public sphere, the "soap box" in the sequence of "soap box, ballet box, bullet box".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-22083032
This kind of accountability might help even the odds between what is otherwise a named individual vs. an anonymous mob. I honestly don't know if it's a good idea or not, though.
Echoing my other comment about the totalitarian and most especially Stalinist nature of this arena, Brendan Eich was purged from Mozilla for holding the same position on gay marriage as Obama, "CEO" of the entire nation, officially did until May 9th, 2012, although in fairness to Obama, he said he changed his mind as opposed to always being at war with Eastasia.
The Left has captured a whole bunch of fields like science where "No Irish or (open) Conservatives" applies, so to still be able to engage in the public sphere anonymity is required.
And fortunately anonymity is enshrined in our lowercase and uppercase c/Constitutional order, e.g. The Federalist Papers. Compare to South Korea where they're still in a not quite hot but definitely not cold war with their northern Communist neighbor; I don't believe they can afford some of the civil liberties we enjoy.
Conservatives aren't an underrepresented or disempowered group (the relevant sense of "minority"), even on the net.
They are a group with disproportionate power (rooted in disproportionate economic power, extending to political and social domains), many of whose members have, or effect for propaganda purposes, an (unjustified) sense of persecution.
Society does coalesce into like-minded groups, usually with different ideological trends than the larger society as a whole. Either we can try to analyze treatment of X in subgroup Y, for any X, or we've set ourselves up for dead end reasoning with the outcomes predetermined. That doesn't mean X1 is the same as X2 on any axis. The strong point found in a slight rework of the grandparent's point is that for a large number of communities on the internet conservatives are the minority group. The bifurcation along the left-right axis is one, if not the most, visible splits on the internet that websites fall on one side of.
Also, persecution complexes are not unique to the empowered, it's just a fools errand (and asking for a flame war) to try and engage in well intentioned discussion to untangle actual persecution from perceived persecution among dis-empowered groups.
Regardless, silencing or demonizing any group is wrong.
I find this blanket generalization hard to accept.
There's a group of parents who try to cure their children's autism by making them drink diluted chlorine bleach and giving them enemas of the same stuff. They get their advice from a couple who make money from the sale of books, supplements and services related to this horribly misguided and abusive practice. Would it be wrong to try to silence the perpetrators?
That's a crime. Full stop. Those parents should be charged to the fullest extent of the law.
>They get their advice from a couple who make money from the sale of books, supplements and services related to this horribly misguided and abusive practice. Would it be wrong to try to silence the perpetrators?
YES IT WOULD! (I wish I could make this larger, bold, blinking, and shouting.) Writing that one should do something stupid and dangerous is not a crime, otherwise half of the clickbait articles on the web would result in jail time for the posters.
Thoughts, in and of themselves, don't MAKE people do anything. The person hearing them always has a choice.
Now if you want to make it illegal to SELL their supplies because they're a risk to public health then go right ahead. A restriction on commerce is not a restriction on speech. We criminalize representing oneself as a doctor if you're not. What you're not allowed to do is shut someone up if you don't like what they're saying.
As for "cutting down trees in Kolyma" ... well, a few minutes with Google just now indicates he's become an unperson on the web, something else Stalin was notorious for doing. While I doubt Eich's been reduced to hard labor in a rural region unless he just wanted to get away from it all, who denies his career is effectively over? Unless, of course, he's doing things anonymously?
No. He exercised his free speech, others exercised their freedom of association. People didn't like that, necessarily, but that's life. Calling it Stalinist is just a way to demonize your opponents.
> The Left has captured a whole bunch of fields like science
Wrong. What happened was that the GOP decided that the science in some issues is contrary to their party line, and began to deny it. There is no "Liberal Science", "Conservative Science", "Jewish Science", or "German Science", just science backed by evidence and non-evidence-based denials thereof.
Just because the news media gives you time doesn't mean you have a valid argument; just because you have a vested interest in something being wrong doesn't make it wrong.
In that sense, there was a "German Science", more specifically Deutsche Physik, in that no Jews were allowed to participate.
And no need to go off in partisan weeds, let alone imply there's much overlap between conservatives and Republicans.
You're also ignoring what it takes to get to the point of being able to do good work (ugrad -> grad -> postdoc -> (in the academic track) professor -> tenure), and that the funding for such work is governed by politics, not "science". ClimateGate showed us how bad that can get.
As for the GOP, they're irrelevant to this discussion, except for the obvious fact they live rent free in your brain.
You aren't going to get very far telling that to anyone who's read the emails in it (their provenance confirmed by the authors), and the diary of the programmer who tried and failed to get their code and data repeating what it had previously done and what that process also revealed, like "hide the decline".
Your under the impression that I'm following a party line, as, opposed to, you know, being something of a scientist myself (MIT Class of '83, degree unfinished due to $$$; heck, I'm even old enough to remember when anthropogenic global cooling was the "scientific consensus"). I actually study original sources before making judgments like this, such as the 1982 TTAPS Nuclear Winter paper in Science (the AAAS journal); I don't need a political party I loathe at the national level to tell me what to think, thus you utterly fail in your attempt to DISQUALIFY me by guilt by association, which your side also labels as McCarthyism.
And ClimateGate was a dump of emails and data from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England. I was unaware the GOP's tentacles reached all the way across the Atlantic!
Not what I claimed, and you're being dishonest. The scandal was created by the GOP. The word was created by the GOP. The fact you're using the word proves you're influenced by the GOP, something you try to hide, for some reason.
> You aren't going to get very far telling that to anyone who's read the emails in it (their provenance confirmed by the authors), and the diary of the programmer who tried and failed to get their code and data repeating what it had previously done and what that process also revealed, like "hide the decline".
You read but failed to comprehend. Your failure to comprehend was political in nature, and it aligns perfectly with what the GOP's narrative is. You even use their term. Do you really expect me to be so stupid to believe that was a coincidence?
You misunderstand basic time averaging and the problems of proxies in precisely the way the GOP does and you really expect me to believe that was a coincidence?
http://www.factcheck.org/2009/12/climategate/
The decline relates to tree rings, not temperature. Of course, you'd only know that if you used a source not from the GOP:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Mikes-Nature-trick-hide-the-...
> I'm even old enough to remember when anthropogenic global cooling was the "scientific consensus"
Oh look, something else I hear from GOP supporters.
> your attempt to DISQUALIFY me by guilt by association
Wrong. I'm just calling you on your lies; specifically, your lie that you're not just regurgitating GOP talking points.
Nope, the actual data is the one thing I haven't looked at. Because my studies of science haven't sufficiently educated me in that area and I know I'm not qualified (ask me to, say, visualize a molecule in 3D, that's another thing). But I am qualified to understand a programmer's tribulations, having been paid good money to do "software archaeology", and most certainly am qualified to interpret overt conspiracies to keep people from being published, or to get their community to shun a journal that did publish a paper with thoughtcrime.
I have no idea who came up with the name ClimateGate, but seeing as how I was political aware when the Watergate break in happened, and followed the drama to the bitter end, I know that [Fill in the blank]Gate is an automatic, if not the default US naming scheme for scandals. If that makes me influenced by the GOP, by Richard Milhous Nixon no less, so be it!
And again you demonstrate how the GOP lives rent free in your brain, for you cannot even conceive of someone saying what I do from first principles vs. "just regurgitating GOP talking points" and lying about it all.
Then you've misinterpreted this, and have done so in precisely the same way the GOP did, even using their word.
> I have no idea who came up with the name ClimateGate
You're either lying or dense.
> for you cannot even conceive of someone saying what I do from first principles vs. "just regurgitating GOP talking points" and lying about it all.
No, I just refuse to believe that someone would independently reinvent everything the GOP has come up with entirely on their own, and then parade their conclusions around using all the same talking points and words, without being influenced by the GOP.
It's like someone claiming they independently wrote Hamlet. Word for word. Without having read Shakespeare. It just beggars belief.
> (the title of Amanda Marcotte’s hit-piece
> My photo was on the front page of Salon, {Arthur Chu}
> not once but twice on ‘Dr. Nerdlove,’ {Harris O'Malley}
See also XBOXLive, where people feel free to be thoroughly toxic even though their online identities are tied to an offline identity.
Or Facebook, where racists are happily racist under their real names. http://www.salon.com/2014/12/10/whats_up_with_the_rag_head_w...
Exposing what people do can limit some impacts. Real justice requires charges and opportunities for refutation and representation. Competing networks including anti gossip gossip can to some degree deflect the problem or turn it on itself.