[aanet]

This is perhaps the best articulation on the rise of certain cantankerous people... in social media / politics / <everywhere>

The metaphor of the game is a good one for general understanding (though the Signaling / Counters-signaling paper is a TIL for me)

I was hoping that there would be a "solution" of sorts to tackle / handle this issue of when EVERYBODY seems to use this strategy, but perhaps there isn't one...?

(My own way of dealing with this is to, uh, not read / watch any news / social media... but such ways are quite brittle, of course)

[stinkbeetle]

Shame has always been used to establish and maintain social structures and norms.

Is there some sudden rise of it? All my life I've been told by politicians and media corporations and others that I should be ashamed of various things that I think and do and am, as a poorly veiled effort to gain power by controlling people. And before my generation it had been going on a long time, with women wanting independence, black people wanting equal rights, men not wishing to be drafted to wars, gay rights, etc. I think shame and shaming has been a constant, and doesn't arise come from politics or media but human nature.

And I think most upheavals of the status quo have had to overcome this shame barrier. Shaming is probably a very effective psychological tool to conserve social order, but if it's abused or if people want change enough, eventually the lid will pop, and then when there is some critical mass moving away they actually bond together and take pride in being shameless and offending the people trying to shame them, and even might go to exaggerated lengths to do these "shameful" things and rile people up.

So I don't think it is that people or the politicians they vote for just decided they would use it as a strategy. I think it's actually that shame (which they see as coming from an "outgroup") is no longer a viable strategy.

[anal_reactor]

For shame to work we need the whole society to agree that certain behaviors are shameful, otherwise the shamed person can simply change their social circle. In homogeneous societies, like Japan, this still works, at least for Japanese people. But in diverse societies, like most western democracies, you can always find a social circle that will accept you.

[ryandv]

Bang on the money. This trend is really just a recognition that compassion, empathy, shame, etc. have been weaponized in service of sociopathic attempts to control people and society.

Too often shaming or labelling viewpoints you disagree with as "hateful" without further elaboration is really just a thin veneer over the absence of any actual position. Intellectual laziness masked with the paper tiger of loaded words and language.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...

[lovich]

> I was hoping that there would be a "solution" of sorts to tackle / handle this issue of when EVERYBODY seems to use this strategy, but perhaps there isn't one...?

It’s called government regulation. There’s whole fields of research on how to solve an arbitrarily complicated Prisoner’s Dilemma. A lot of people are allergic to the idea because they don’t want to have limits on their behavior, only on others or on no one at all.

So we get everyone picking the bad square in the Dilemma

[johnnyanmac]

>A lot of people are allergic to the idea because they don’t want to have limits on their behavior, only on others or on no one at all.

So are we doomed? if we don't vote in people who can properly regulate this, it seems the dilemma continues. But how does one convince an entire society to stop being so selfish and myopic?

[lovich]

If you want everyone to be able to do what they want without limit, and enough people are choosing a route to destruction, then yes we are doomed.

I have no idea how to convince anyone anymore. Even people who claim to care about things beyond themself immediately round up the wagons the second they have a limitation imposed. Already in this thread there’s someone mocking government regulation with a strawman argument. I’d just find some people you can make a community with and hole up.

The Curtis Yavins, Thiels, and Musks of the world appear to have willed their post democracy state into existence without how much anti democratic sentiment they pull. Gonna have to figure out what their “post constitutional” world is going to look like before anyone has any idea what a good oath forward will be

[collingreen]

The path -> oath typo at the end of your post is apropos in a world sliding fast into full on techno feudalism.

[pjc50]

The problem is now coming from the top: Trump is the ultimate victory of shamelessness. It evolved like antibiotic resistant MRSA. Which is why demanding a government solution is meaningless.

[potato3732842]

You're peddling government as a silver bullet. It's not. You're no less ignorant (a much milder word than I want to use) than the people who think various flavors of near-anarchy can magically work fine.

Some people are allergic to your knee jerk silver bullet solution because often times it comes with downsides that are on comparable orders to the original problem, same as every other silver bullet being peddled by every other ideologue.

Shit is complicated and care needs to be taken.

[lovich]

I don't believe I called it a silver bullet. I believe I called it a solution to a specific situation the person I was replying to. You are no less ignorant(also a much milder word than I want to use for yourself) than anyone else who hears "government" and then goes on a tirade about how "gubment bad".

Shit is complicated. That's why leaving it to the random chance of whatever happens in the market happens tends to lead to sub optimal outcomes unless the only metric you care about is efficiency.

I find it comical that you end your post with "care needs to be taken" in response to me calling for government regulation, when government regulation is literally an organization making sure that care is taken.

You can argue on any specific policy points easily, but notice I didn't suggest a concrete action yet, and you still were ready to argue against it because the government was mentioned

[b_e_n_t_o_n]

Government regulation of shameful behaviour? That's worked out wonderfully in the past.

[ajuc]

Yes, it did. Despite all its shortcomings the invention of law has had a pretty obvious positive impact on our civilization.

Instinctive dismissal of government regulation like it could never solve any problem is a bias. Pretty common in tech circles, but still.

[lovich]

European governments have regulations for anti social behaviors that curb some excesses and they haven’t collapsed. So I would agree, they have worked in the past

[roenxi]

Haven't most European governments in the last century or so collapsed? Eastern Europe regulated anti-social behaviorsandin a pretty extreme way and the superstructure collapsed directly, but Western Europe as it exists now is what emerged out of the ashes of the last collapse in the 1930s.

I don't think there are many broad lessons to learn beyond aiming for peace and liberty, but "European governments didn't collapse" is hardly a powerful argument. The area is notorious for collapse, it is still in living memory when large chunks of Europe fell apart, sometimes quite comfortably so. It could easily happen again.

[samdoesnothing]

Governments once banned interracial relationships and marriage, homosexuality, women working outside the home, divorce, birth control, dancing, drinking etc, on account of contributing to anti-social behaviour. It's true that they haven't collapsed, but I don't think that's because those things were once banned.

[lovich]

If your point is that what was acceptable in the past is now distasteful, then respectfully I do not care.

The fact that the government cannot create a regulation that works for everyone, everywhere, all at once across time and space is not a winning argument for me since that limitation applies to all actors. We go through cycles where we either change what society generally considers "ok" or we discover that something we thought was ok was actually a great evil after some forerunners on moral thought convince enough people of the righteousness of their belief.

That doesn't make regulating bad behavior not ok.

[samdoesnothing]

I think you meant the opposite - that what was distasteful in the past is no longer distasteful today.

I think we realised as society that regulating most behaviour, no matter how distasteful we find it, is not a great idea for various reasons - 1. it's subjective, 2. people get tired of prudish cultures and act out in various ways, 3. you end up on the wrong side of history. As a society we're becoming a lot more liberal about letting people do their own thing, as long as they aren't actually hurting others. Playing music out loud is not hurting others, neither is wearing a bikini at the beach, etc.

Of course there are always the hall monitors that want to control other peoples behaviour and they often use the excuse that they're regulating bad behaviour for the sake of society. Thankfully it seems like we are beginning to reject those people and push them out of power.

[b_e_n_t_o_n]

Give us some examples.

[lovich]

Hacker news told me to stop posting so fast (i.e. i pissed people off enough to flag) but belatedly,

the UK has A.S.B.O.s, Germany has many laws and regulations against speech and being part of extremist groups. Both countries seem to be doing fine compared to the global competition

[haskellshill]

And those are supposed to be good things? Don't make me laugh. The only good anti-antisocial-behavior regulations I've seen are those of China

[llllm]

That means you have been shadow banned, you’ll need a new account.

[ajuc]

Why bother with these commie Europeans, let's start with US, shall we? Ever tried to walk naked in the middle of your city?

What is the reason it's not allowed?

[collingreen]

No, u

[mmaunder]

A return to formality is the antidote, I’m afraid. As austere and priggish as it may seem. You may see brands and influencers emerging that gain traction with a kind of 1950s post WWII flavor of seriousness and formality. I’m not suggesting social conservatives. More the presentation and packaging of ideas and their purveyors. Formal instead of slovenly, polite vs obnoxious, eloquent vs simplistic, cultured vs vulgar, intellect vs spectacle.

[PessimalDecimal]

The US isn't that society anymore. My brief trips to Japan and Switzerland suggests they may still be in some ways. But the US is fundamentally demotic and geared towards the lowest common denominator in nearly all aspects of life. Any attempt to reverse that will be a long and slow process, likely doomed to failure.

[achierius]

All ideology. No real substance, just the "facade" of seriousness, detached from any underlying reality thereof. Wouldn't that be even sillier than what we have today?

[potato3732842]

>This is perhaps the best articulation on the rise of certain cantankerous people... in social media / politics / <everywhere>

It's a comforting one but I think it's also a crappy and wrong one. Take a few steps further back and it looks like the pendulum is simply swinging.

It was over the past 10-20yr very fashionable to invest (or waste, depending on your take) a lot of resources softening up what we have to say and how we say it in order to avoid unnecessarily offending people, avoid imprecision, avoid edge cases of meaning and head off nitpickers and detractors who we'd never agree with.

Now, a more "I'll say more or less what I mean with no shits given about edge cases, I'll handle offense after the fact if it's a problem and the haters can go f themselves because I was never going to appease them anyway" style of communication is taking off because it offers a competitive advantage of less resource investment for message delivered.

[ryandv]

Keen observation. Canadian white progressives have a pathological inability to state anything directly, take definitive stances on anything, or refrain from ambiguity and equivocation in their speech. You end up with so much noise in the signal from all the hedging, mea culpas, and beating around the bush that it becomes impossible to take them at their word.

All the communications overhead comes from this neurotic desire to sanitize speech of all possible offense, all possible negative implication, and indeed all humanity. The end result is vapid corpo doublespeak, which says... absolutely nothing at all.

The information content of the language of a culture that can be offended by everything tends towards nothing.

[overfeed]

> I was hoping that there would be a "solution" of sorts to tackle / handle this issue of when EVERYBODY seems to use this strategy, but perhaps there isn't one...?

We're overdue for a major war, which will be reset on how we treat other humans by the end of it. Humans killing humans on an industrial scale between near-peers is followed by periods where people realize that maybe being dicks to each other isn't the ideal state. More cantankerous politicians being elected only increases the odds of war breaking out due to diplomatic failures.

[3D30497420]

I'm not sure history bears out that major wars lead to peace. WW1 led pretty directly into WW2, and after WW2 there were plenty of conflicts by major powers. That major powers didn't start WW3 (to date) probably has more to do with the potential consequences threatened by nuclear war than an increase in human aversion to widespread industrial war.

There's probably an argument for European countries specifically not wanting to return to the near-constant warfare across its history. But I'm not sure that holds for US v USSR (which came perilously close to open warfare several times), or conflicts elsewhere.

[snapcaster]

What are you talking about? can you point to a single instance of this happening? 20th century seems to contradict you pretty hard

[overfeed]

Germany (WWII), Japan (WWII), and US (Vietnam war) all had pacifist movements spring up in the aftermath of conflict. See also the aftermath of the regimes of Franco, Mussolini,and Ceausescu for domestic resets, just from the 20th century.

All in the 20th century. I attribute the fact that the US and Russia didn't head into a hot war post-WWII to the clear-headedness of witnessing WWII.