I think one of the biggest misconceptions that highly educated people have is to think that they are immune to the effects of an angry/unruly mob. As participant or as victim.
I think one of the biggest misconceptions that anti-mob people have is that there is no cost to letting people go un-shunned.
There is much hand-wringing over the handful of people wrongly shunned, but many of the wringers give no thought at all to the victims who are forced out of their careers, families, and communities every day because the people around them refuse to consider the possibility that there is a wolf in their midst.
Nieces absent from Thanksgiving while their uncle sits at the table. Talented women leaving tech while their spiteful coworkers are promoted.
Should we allow abusers to hold power because there’s a shadow of a doubt that they might be innocent, thereby sending their victims to start over in a new city?
Outside of the court system, shouldn’t we try to hit a 1:1 ratio of wrongful excommunications to failures to excommunicate?
Or should it be 1:1,000,000 like the courts do? A million unpunished rapes for every wrongful conviction? A million women pushed out of their rightful career path for everyone one man who was wrongfully fired?
When the information doesn’t exist to make perfect decisions, how do we decide who takes up the burden of our mistakes?
I'll admit that I'm fairly sketched out in general at the suggestion of extra-legal measures of justice in a civilized society. I think the potential for harm far outweighs the good that might be done and that your goal of a 1:1 ratio sounds a lot like "eye for an eye". It's about as counter to societal progress an idea as I can think up.
And I say all that as someone who saw the Surrogate Court system abused to steal away all of the lifetime wealth honestly earned by my mother.
> I think one of the biggest misconceptions that anti-mob people have is that there is no cost to letting people go un-shamed.
You're conflating "shaming" and "mobbing". Mobbing includes shaming, but it also includes violence, threats, harassment, or the facilitation thereof. We should oppose mobbing, but shaming serves a useful social function and you can be "anti-mob" and "pro-shaming"; however, the anti-mob group probably does oppose the new trend in slandering overtly innocent people and then mobbing (including shaming) them on the basis of the slander.
I think it's safe to say that the costs of vigilantly mob justice is far higher than any benefit it might have. You usually end up with situations like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare
It's also impossible to have the full context of a story from the information available in a shame storm (often the other half of the story from the shame-ey is missing or not believed). The severity of the "punishment" that is doled out based on extremely thin "facts" is terrifying and not something a just society should encourage.
That is because highly-intelligent people realize that some things may be true which are not palatable or acceptable to the masses, and vocalizing any of these brings on much consternation in the twitterverse, even if it's a simple rational observation
There is much hand-wringing over the handful of people wrongly shunned, but many of the wringers give no thought at all to the victims who are forced out of their careers, families, and communities every day because the people around them refuse to consider the possibility that there is a wolf in their midst.
Nieces absent from Thanksgiving while their uncle sits at the table. Talented women leaving tech while their spiteful coworkers are promoted.
Should we allow abusers to hold power because there’s a shadow of a doubt that they might be innocent, thereby sending their victims to start over in a new city?
Outside of the court system, shouldn’t we try to hit a 1:1 ratio of wrongful excommunications to failures to excommunicate?
Or should it be 1:1,000,000 like the courts do? A million unpunished rapes for every wrongful conviction? A million women pushed out of their rightful career path for everyone one man who was wrongfully fired?
When the information doesn’t exist to make perfect decisions, how do we decide who takes up the burden of our mistakes?