People crave sense in the world around them, especially when it comes to the bad things that happen to them. When no sense is forthcoming, they will make their own sense of it, and the natural impulse is to assume that one was singled out for some reason, good or bad.
Does this help people behave better? Usually not. We aren't in one another's heads, which makes trying to reconstruct another person's thought processes a process only slightly more reliable than a shot in the dark. The usual outcome is a poor match between the victim's hypothesis and the perpetrator's actual thoughts, and when that happens, it's all too easily dismissed. End result: nothing changes.
You have completely misunderstood my question. I think there is no value in this thought experiment that ponders "What if Dave Winer had been named Delores instead?" HN is not the genuine community I originally joined where respectful discussion occurred.
I am female. I think the community is less assholish than it used to be to women, though there is room for improvement. However, it is overall a lot more assholish. I participate less than I used to, in part because of things unrelated to HN but in part because of the degradation. This thought experiment does nothing constructive.
People crave sense in the world around them, especially when it comes to the bad things that happen to them. When no sense is forthcoming, they will make their own sense of it, and the natural impulse is to assume that one was singled out for some reason, good or bad.
Does this help people behave better? Usually not. We aren't in one another's heads, which makes trying to reconstruct another person's thought processes a process only slightly more reliable than a shot in the dark. The usual outcome is a poor match between the victim's hypothesis and the perpetrator's actual thoughts, and when that happens, it's all too easily dismissed. End result: nothing changes.