That's an interesting theory, although I doubt that 19th century US farmers, among the most self-sufficient people in history, were lacking in religion, superstition, or conspiracies.
They were self-sufficient in the sense that there was no one coming to help in case of emergency. That doesn't mean they ever felt secure. Entire families regularly died for one or more of dozens of causes: starvation, freezing weather, tornadoes, human sickness, livestock sickness, crop failure, drought, dangerous animals, Indian attack, crime, etc. Some of them might have pretended at a "control over their lives", but few modern Americans would trade places with them.
In fairness, it is trivial to point to any number of counter-examples throughout history if you just want to dismiss the observation. Hedges is a journalist and was referring to the changes he saw in the squeezed middle and lower classes through his career, and probably wasn't making a sweeping historic claim.
I mentioned it as contrast to the parent comment who simply concluded people are incapable of rational thought, and meant to suggest there are mediating influences.
I'm not and I'm willing to give it a chance. I'm just not seeing a strong correlation.
What I do see people doing when they lack control is to attempt to gain control. Put together a group, grab some of that sweet power through mass. The more ambitious ones fight their way up the power structure. Special bonus points if you can take over an existing seat of power.
> What I do see people doing when they lack control is to attempt to gain control.
One way in which people gain (the feeling of) control is to imagine the world differently (superstition, conspiracy, religion) in a way that makes them virtuous or special and others not (i.e. essentially Nietzsche's idea of ressentiment). If you haven't the power to take part in a real struggle, this is not so surprising to me.
Perhaps the temptation is to choose philosophies that have the appearance of power. Sticking pins in a voodoo doll of your boss, Mr. Scrooge for example.
Some acquaintances of mine did that at their job once and it worked a charm. The boss was permanently off on sick leave within a month. Maybe there's something to it.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Farmers through all of history and to this day are absolutely never self-sufficient. They are at the mercy of 'the gods', aka the weather, at all times. One bad flood, one freeze, one week of ill-timed rain, and they are destitute. That's the perfect environment to breed superstition.
>"Hateful" Reddit or FB communities also don't allow "free speech". The moderators will ban people who go against the grain.
Which is fine I think, but why have Reddit or FB do the censoring (aside from things that are outright illegal). I don't much care if a bunch of Nazis or tankies are busy planning world domination on Reddit while sharing recipes. Why do you care?
And when you ban misinformation on your platform, that "anti-vaxxer" instead goes to 8chan where by your argument might inspire them to shoot people up.
But you want Reddit to literally adopt 8chan's moderation policy, meaning that Reddit now will become the place that inspires mass shooters instead of 8chan (which by the way, is no longer a place that inspires mass shootings, since it was killed by Cloudfare after the last one, and replaced with the impotent and unpopular 8kun).
>Reddit now will become the place that inspires mass shooters instead of 8chan
I can guarantee that there are plenty of evil doings on Reddit and Facebook.
One argument, and a more honest one, that people can make is that (a) social media is toxic and (b) it should be made illegal generally. Bingo bango, no mass shootings I guess.
>But you want Reddit to literally adopt 8chan's moderation policy,
I want reddit to adopt the public square's policy of allowing any content that isn't illegal, which also happens to be pretty much synonymous with 8chan's policy.
Do you consider the town square (which has the policy of allowing content that is not illegal) a center of inspiration for mass shootings? Could it be that the public square is not viewed as a place for inspiration of mass shooting, have anything to do with integration of many ideas and the fact that someone bringing bad ideas might actually be challenged in an environment where they are exposed to the general ideas of the community rather than an echo chamber of fellow nazis or whatever?
The nazi hall may have the same moderation policy as the town square, that doesn't mean I expect the same inspirations to come out of the nazi hall. The issue with the nazi hall is the powder-keg full of people reinforcing bad ideas, whereas a nazi in a more "normal" place like the public square might have some chance of being shamed or convinced their anti-social ideas are undesirable (despite the nazi hall and public square having same moderation policy). I don't want to shove more people into the nazi hall by banning them from the public square (especially when they're only being banned from the square because they have unconventional views on vaccines.)
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In the censor's world, the people with undesirable ideas in the public square are kicked into 8chan where instead of their ideas being challenged they all end up in a self reinforcing chamber. The proportional amount of people wanting a mass shooting may be tenfold that in the public square, leading to more compressed exposure including by other people who were originally just anti-vax or whatever.
And the people running the public square turn around and say "see, 8chan allows any ideas, and that's what happens when you do that!"
"Do you consider the town square a centre of inspiration for mass shootings"
Before the internet, yes, definitely. Maybe not mass shootings specifically because that seems to be a recent fashion trend after Columbine,
but violent extremism in general. How do you think Hitler managed to secure over 40 percent of the democratic vote in the early 1930s? How did Osama Bin Laden recruit extremists who were willing to put a bomb into the WTC basement? Propaganda, speech.
This idea that unfettered speech in the public town square, even if it isn't directly inciting violence, can't lead to pathological outcomes just doesn't hold up.
This isn't even an argument for government censorship. It's merely me recognizing that these type of outcomes can come about.
Nowadays almost all extremist speech is online, because that's where there is distribution and anonymity, so the analogy breaks down.
"where they are exposed to the general ideas of the community rather than an echo chamber"
This isn't a bad argument, but you have to balance it off with the knowledge that ideas are highly, highly contagious. On balance, I think giving such ideas distribution to a billion eyes is far more harmful than pushing a fringe into echo chambers which already existed before social media censorship began anyway (such as the Stormfront forum).
Moreover you have to recognize that these isolated echo chambers would naturally self-segregate on Reddit if given free reign, and so in practice you haven't changed anything aside from giving these ideas more distribution. It's not like /r/88 or whatever would be interacting with the rest of Reddit thus helping their members deradicalize.
I appreciate your honesty in believing the public square is a center of inspiration for mass shootings.
I believe quite the opposite. It has been a place for the public to plan self defense, both to organize themselves in defense from natural disaster, hostile forces, wildfires, and anyone who seeks to do them harm. It is a place for the public to engage in the marketplace of ideas and inspirations, which ultimately leads to the saving of lives, prosperity, security, and bonding of the populace. Harmful ideas can be shamed and those espousing bad ideas have a chance of learning the holes in their ideas. The mass shooter espousing violent ideas in the public square is as likely to have alerted his neighbor to be alert for any evidence of crime, as he is to convince the general populace of his nutjob ideas.
I don't buy your hypothesis that Hitler came to power because of free speech, and quite frankly it is laughable to think banning Hitler from Reddit (were it to exist in his day) would have any effect whatsoever. You seem quite ignorant of the factors precipitating Naziism, including the economic situation of Germany at that time. It's also worth noting that Hitler was quick to stifle certain speech that went against his ideas, meaning he found free speech at odds or even dangerous to Naziism.
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>How did Osama Bin Laden recruit extremists who were willing to put a bomb into the WTC basement? Propaganda, speech.
Bin Laden attempted to blow up the WTC basement with bombs, not free speech. Bin Laden lived in Muslim nations with more limited speech regulations than Reddit.
>Moreover you have to recognize that these isolated echo chambers would naturally self-segregate on Reddit if given free reign, and so in practice you haven't changed anything aside from giving these ideas more distribution. It's not like /r/88 or whatever would be interacting with the rest of Reddit thus helping their members deradicalize.
Some may, some may not. I've stopped using reddit because I was banned because I simply said things like I didn't believe forcefully shutting down a restaurant is an appropriate way to deal with coronavirus. Now maybe that is a very wrong and bad idea, but I'm willing to debate with others on it and learn their perspectives. Instead these communities said fuck you, you're banned, and now you have to go to some echo-chamber where everyone agrees with it. I'm not interested in an echo chamber, I'm interested in engaging with others so my bad ideas can be brought to light and shown to be bad, or my good ideas can be integrated. Your argument sounds more like one against having subreddits.
Hitler convinced almost half the country to vote for him because of speech that drummed up resentments stemming from the Versailles Treaty and the depression, channeling and anthropomorphizing those resentments towards Jews, the lugenpresse, the military establishment, and so on. So you've missed my point, which is that town square offline speech can directly cause pathological outcomes when it is weaponized by bad faith actors.
The belief that sunlight is the best disinfectant is nothing more than empty sloganeering and it flies in the face of everything we know about social contagion and the willingness of humans to be led astray by tribal hatred.
Town square offline speech didn't lead specifically to mass shootings historically only because this particular medium of terrorism is a modern fashion trend, so it follows that it's a phenomenon that's going to be motivated online more than offline in the modern context.
You're trying to draw analogies between modern technology and the old town square. You should stop doing that because instant distribution to a billion people isn't the same thing as a speech to a thousand.
I provided examples of speech in the old town square leading to pathological outcomes, but we are in a very different regime now and analogizing too much isn't helpful.
So who should decide what moderation policies we have for the public? The general populace, who as you say would elect literally Hitler, or the government itself of which Hitler was once a part and used these very moderation mechanisms to suppress the Jews? The tyranny of a minority of special moderators like perhaps a nominally communist censor committee may have? We allow Naziist speech to exist precisely because we don't want the government or the tyranny of the majority or minority choosing what political speech is allowed, such as outlawing speech that doesn't promote Naziism.
>You're trying to draw analogies between modern technology and the old town square.
No I'm trying to find out how you want to apply moderation strategies to "reduce the likelihood" (my apologies if I misquoted your deleted comment) of democratic election of those who some censors decide have the wrong political views or speech.
>You should stop doing that because instant distribution to a billion people isn't the same thing as a speech to a thousand.
Are you also one of those that thinks the first amendment doesn't apply to the internet because the founders never imagined something that distributes so much faster than the printing press could exist? I know this is a straw man but I can't help but think this is where this is leading.
>And your argument is that if the venues hosting Hitler's speeches had Reddit's moderation policies then Hitler would not have been elected?
The fact that you didn't answer this question (well you did, but you deleted it) really is an damning answer of itself.
> So who should decide what moderation policies we have for the public?
There's three possibilities:
(1) No moderation at all, beyond what's illegal.
(2) Private voluntary self-regulation.
(3) Government censorship.
In my opinion, (2) is the lesser evil, which isn't to say that it doesn't have its own pitfalls. (1) is infeasible due to the 8chan experience, and our understanding of social contagion and human tribalism. (3) has a much bigger slippery slope risk.
> The fact that you didn't answer this question
I deleted my answer because these analogies are too tenuous. You're trying to compare modern social media with how information spread 90 years ago. How can I map "Reddit's moderation policies" onto 1920s beer halls and Der Sturmer and newspapers? You can't do it. We're in a new regime and we need to reason about this new regime from first principles.
We're in agreement, although I might add (2) is essentially the same as the censorship policy in the Weimar Republic under which Hitler was elected, where public censorship was nominally and constitutionally illegal [1] (except in narrow circumstances, such as anti-Semetic expression) and any censorship essentially relegated to private and/or voluntary regulation
> How can I map "Reddit's moderation policies" onto 1920s beer halls and Der Sturmer and newspapers?
The same way the first amendment is applied to both beer halls and the internet. There's not a single rule in Reddit's content policy that cannot be applied to a beer hall [0]. If you fail to find a way to apply these rules you're either not putting in any effort or you're a lot dumber than you sound (methinks the former).
Given that what you advocate for is virtually identical to that under the Weimar Republic, I assert your chosen policies would have little to no effect on the election of Hitler.
"My understanding is that pre-Nazi Germany had hate speech laws, and it didn't seem to work there?"
I abandoned my views on this question for a few reasons:
- The Weimar Republic laws either weren't effective at preventing distribution or they weren't actually enforced. The continued circulation of Der Sturmer is evidence of this. The judiciary was known to be heavily biased in favor of the far-right, where less than 10% of far-right political killers were convicted and the majority of far-left political killers were convicted.
- Online censorship is far less likely to create martyrs than the visual/emotional imagery of imprisoning people.
- Online censorship is far more effective at preventing distribution.
- Failing to censor online leads to automatic mass-distribution due to the consolidation of eyeballs in a small number of venues. Failing to censor offline does not. There is less scale to be had offline.
- Online censorship that we're talking about is private and voluntary. It is not in the same category as government censorship as far as downside risk is concerned.
> Given that what you advocate for is virtually identical
It is not "virtually identical". As I've said, the context is extremely different. You can't draw an analogy as much as you keep trying.
>I know that the Weimar Republic had censorship laws. I made almost the same argument that you are making just 2 months ago:
What? The anti-semetic expressions crime thing is a fact, not an argument (I am against censorship laws!). I was honestly completely knocked cold fthat you came to the conclusion I was making your argument. The takeaway isn't that hate speech laws work, it's that they don't. I'm pro hate speech and anti-censorship. I don't like it, but I'm pro allowing it. I'm making your counter argument. In fact you seem to be listing many of the reasons why hate speech laws don't prevent Naziism.
>I abandoned my views on this question for a few reasons:
I'm surprised you chose not to learn from your responses and realize the folly of restricting "hate speech." It doesn't seem you abandoned anything, it seems you double downed.
>It is not "virtually identical". As I've said, the context is extremely different. You can't draw an analogy as much as you keep trying.
You can bury your head in the sand if you like, but no matter how hard as you keep trying to think they aren't virtually identical, they still will be. What you advocate is extremely similar and you are oblivious and disconnected to the reality of the similarity between our current censorship laws and those of the Weimar Republic. I'm not drawing an analogy, I'm saying you are literally advocating for the policy of the Weimar Republic under which Hitler was elected, with only the slightest of differences (their laws were ever so slightly more restricted due to some spottily enforced hate speech laws). The Weimar's Republic policy was literally free speech, sans some poorly enforced hate speech laws, plus private and/or voluntary censorship, which is your option (2). In fact your precise option (2) was free speech + private/voluntary regulation, but you admitted that Weimar's hate speech laws were essentially useless.
The internet is just another media of communication. That's it. You said yourself hitler reached over half of voters with his speech. That's probably a greater voter penetration than even what reddit reaches. You make some arguments why hate speech laws weren't very effective at the speeches but then you think they will be even more effective at something with even lower voter distribution than these speeches that you say went to more than half of voters.
>Having said that, it's true that for some people no amount of reasoning or persuasion will work
Some people are their own soothsayer. Have fun in your censored future insulated from reality and the opinion of others, left to the discretion of whatever "private" entity believes is allowed truths.
"I was honestly completely knocked cold fthat you came to the conclusion I was making your argument. The takeaway isn't that hate speech laws work, it's that they don't."
You've misunderstood. I was previously arguing that they don't work, not that they do work. Read the old post of mine that I linked.
"What you advocate is extremely similar and you are oblivious and disconnected to the reality of the similarity between our current censorship laws and those of the Weimar Republic."
I outlined the reasons why these are different situations which you haven't addressed in your reply.
Heck, I view it all as 'misinformation', and I certainly don't need some cubicle drone at youtube to decide for me.
Certainly the average person is smart enough to understand the statistics of the thing, after all that's something of the point of epidemiology.
There should be enough data points by now to tell me a few things.
. What is the real value of a cloth mask worn inside in a crowd with strangers? What is the value of a properly fitted N95 mask? Give it to me as an odds calculation.
. Just what percentage of covid is picked up in bars? grocery stores? schools? at home? Our local health department is notably mum about that preferring only to hand out the county-wide ages and that's it.
.Actual strong data on value of vaccine in terms of infection and symptoms. 1st, 2nd, 3rd dose. How long are these valuable? How long will they remain so due to mutations? Odds.
.Actual data on nasty side effects of vaccine including odds.
.Fairly presented value of home remedies, anti-virals, etc.
.etc.
You can twizzle out some of this, but rarely. Cut down to the essentials, it wouldn't take up a single sheet of paper. Post that sheet of paper whenever anyone feels the need to opine.
Instead I'm treated to shaming and scolding and peoples' fear about their precious bodily fluids and I'm sick of everyone. Somehow this has become a proxy for the 2016/2020 elections complete with all the religious overtones. Please stop.
While I see that funding will tend to constrict the research around the desires of the funders, it's worth considering that 'science' has also expanded into areas that don't deserve the title.
The softer disciplines are particularly susceptible to the style of the day but lust after the cloak of correctness (and status) that hard sciences wear.
I can honestly say that when I went to college people were essentially apolitical. I don't remember anything you might view as a campus protest and the biggest fuss on the main mall were students arguing with a rather obnoxious Pentecostal preacher who showed up every year.
I think you'll find if you spend time on universities today, they are essentially apolitical. And I strongly suspect that if you looked for articles written when you attended school, you'd find people complaining in various directions.
The difference is whether you are just going to class or getting your news through articles filtered through social media and link aggregators.
>I think you'll find if you spend time on universities today, they are essentially apolitical.
An interesting experiment would be to compare English Department reading lists in the 1970's vs. now.
My bet is that you'd see quite a difference.
It's not that the College Marxist Club had it's meetings in the basement at any particular time, but that politicization and social movements of the day have been normalized into daily life.
I will stick to my guns in saying that there were 0 (zero) demonstrations of a political nature during my stay. For all I know, it was a low point in such activities (which likely gives me a short temper on the modern world). Frank Zappa played there every year though.
...hah, now that's an interesting angle I hadn't thought of. I went hunting for reading lists for the graduate students. A course on the '19th century English novel' has, wait for it, 7 female authors and 2 male. And one of the two men wrote 'Portrait of a Lady'. That's a pretty interesting way to shift the conversation.
> ...hah, now that's an interesting angle I hadn't thought of. I went hunting for reading lists for the graduate students. A course on the '19th century English novel' has, wait for it, 7 female authors and 2 male. And one of the two men wrote 'Portrait of a Lady'. That's a pretty interesting way to shift the conversation.
Do you find yourself being just as concerned when the reading list is 7 male authors and 2 female authors? Or only in this direction?
If this counts as political, then boy howdy were curricula in the humanities political in the 1970s when there was basically zero time spent on the voices of women.
>Do you find yourself being just as concerned when the reading list is 7 male authors and 2 female authors? Or only in this direction?
Not at all, it just stuck out at me while I was browsing through their program. Women represent barely a blip in the world of the 19th C. novel, you might as well teach military history as a series of female leaders. Novels of that era represent a core teaching (or should) in English departments, not an opportunity to boost underserved demographics. Save that for a specialty class.
I don't give a damn about fairness so much as teaching the truth, and the truth includes relative values of things.
It is a graduate class, well past any level where you'd expect reading lists to be a representative slice of anything. I'd generally expect a graduate class on "the 19th century novel" to be roughly built around whatever books the PhD student or professor teaching the class personally loves and knows very deeply.
And military history should involve the voices of women. There is more to the subject than just who marched where and who gave orders when.
> An alarming 25.5 percent of survey respondents said it would be appropriate to “create an obstruction, such that a campus speaker endorsing this idea could not address an audience.” This authoritarian view was held by about 19 percent of self-identifying liberals, 3 percent of moderates, and 3 percent of conservatives.
> Among students who self-identify as liberals, some 10 percent said they hear “disrespectful, inappropriate, or offensive comments” about foreign students at least several times a semester, 14 percent said they hear disparaging comments about Muslims, 20 percent said they hear such comments about African Americans, 20 percent said they hear such comments about Christians, 21 percent said they hear such comments about LGBTQ individuals, and 57 percent said they hear such comments about conservatives. Among moderates, 68 percent said that they hear “disrespectful, inappropriate, or offensive comments” about conservatives at least several times a semester.
> Roughly 92 percent of conservatives said they would be friends with a liberal, and just 3 percent said that they would not have a liberal friend. Among liberals, however, almost a quarter said they would not have a conservative friend.
> In Compromising Scholarship, a 2011 book by sociologist George Yancey, some 30% of sociologists acknowledged that they would be less likely to hire a job applicant if they knew he was a Republican. Yancey further discovered that 15% of political scientists and 24% of philosophy professors would discriminate against Republican job applicants, and at least 30% of professors in all disciplines surveyed would discriminate against members of the NRA.
> Other research suggests that liberal professors sometimes act on these biases. Stanley Rothman and Robert Lichter found in 2009's The Politically Correct University that socially conservative professors tend to work at lower-ranked institutions than their publication records would suggest. More recently, a 2016 study of elite law schools in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy found that libertarian and conservative professors publish more than their peers, which suggests that right-leaning law professors must outshine liberals to reach the summits of their profession.
> These findings are especially striking given that other research shows it is more difficult for scholars to publish work that reflects conservative interests and perspectives. A 1985 study in the American Psychologist, for example, assessed the outcomes of research proposals submitted to human subject committees... The study found that the proposals on reverse discrimination were the hardest to get approved, often because their research designs were scrutinized more thoroughly. In some cases, though, the reviewers raised explicitly political concerns.
You know, I don't doubt that Amazon is a bunch of bastards, but I can't say that any company I have worked for ever did much for employee tragic circumstances. They were just more polite about it.
Generally, I'd say that anti-carrier strike group tactics involve simply (well, maybe not so simple) overwhelming the defenses. Quantity can work as well as quality.
You might look into Russian missile work. Of course, as a land power (and not as invested in trade as China), their answers are different.
What I'd like is something identical to Facebook (preferably hosted in a box on my desk) that I invite all my friends to, and they have the ability to invite people to. 2nd gen is probably far enough.
Anyone cuts up rough, I go by their house and make them miserable.
You lose out on the network effect with this solution.
If someone gets to pick who's allowed onto a network, then they won't bother using it. Maybe your friends will join since they are allowed to add _their_ friends, but those friends of friends wouldn't bother because most of their friends can't join, meaning your friends won't bother either unless they really want to talk to you specifically.
It would work for groups where most people know each other, but there are already options for that that allow users to be in groups that aren't all owned by the same person e.g. Discord, Signal, Facebook.
A total user base of 50 or so would be fine. The trick is to find a group where everyone (mostly) wants to interact. An extended family could probably work.
Hey, at least they're not requiring a chip implant.
Of course the phone OS people are going to do this. Judging from a few years of Live PD, every single person getting pulled over never ever has a valid ID, but always always has a cell phone that they clutch like their life depended on it.
Anything in the article is just a detail that is being hashed out.
Honestly, you can't buy this kind of PR. Do a dozen more, number and sign them on the back, profit.