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What if I don't believe in trying to control people at such a low level? What if I think people should be allowed to be as ranty as they want without having to

What if I don't believe in trying to control people at such a low level? What if I think people should be allowed to be as ranty as they want without having to worry about being "disincentivized"?

TeMPOraL 9y ago
Then I'd like to talk with you, see if you have an alternative way of keeping the society from self-destructing.
- hnuser1234 9y ago
  So we've got desires to identify with groups, and we've got desires to share criticisms of groups, and we struggle to find a balance. If we never criticize, we stagnate, if we never identify, we "self-destruct". We can come up with a "quick solution" as the notion of keeping more of our criticisms to ourselves, but that's certainly not a goal you want to pursue overzealously. You need to be able to share criticisms. We can tell people it's not attractive to be ranty, but I'm not very comfortable going further than that, at the risk of wandering into thought policing. Look at some modern political opinion, I'm sure you've seen it as much as me. Ranting is cool. Calling everything under the sun "problematic". The tricky thing is it's not always wrong. There's surely a nearly infinite list of "problems" one could identify, and some of them are truly important. But we just need to turn down the heat on the criticism for just a second. But you can't just ask bipartisans to listen to each other more. We need to make it less cool to be blindly partisan. We need to increase the value of being able to identify with anyone. And we need to make it really uncool to judge hundreds of millions of people you've never met with deep assumptions. I don't know, it's an interesting problem and I haven't thought of it this way very much. All I'm sure of is that this growing lack of interest in protecting free speech is about the only topic in modern politics that I give a shit about.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    > We can tell people it's not attractive to be ranty, but I'm not very comfortable going further than that, at the risk of wandering into thought policing. I don't want to see it going much further than that either. I was thinking more along the lines of making it so being thoughtful is "sexy" and being ranty isn't, the way today owning a car is "sexy" and smoking isn't. Free speech has its positive and negative consequences on stability and happiness; I do not want to fight free speech, I'm looking for ways to reduce the negative consequences. I'll protect your (and mine) right to rant about whatever you want, but I sure as hell would like the general policy discussion to involve less rants and more thoughtful cooperation.
    - Rescis 9y ago
      > Free speech has its positive and negative consequences on stability and happiness; I do not want to fight free speech, I'm looking for ways to reduce the negative consequences. I'll protect your (and mine) right to rant about whatever you want, but I sure as hell would like the general policy discussion to involve less rants and more thoughtful cooperation. I agree that free speech is an essential aspect of what makes us humans, and that it comes with both many positive and negatives. In implementation of a plan to mitigate the negatives though, I much more support a private entity such as Reddit censoring whatever they wish, as if people believe it becomes to harsh they can simply leave. I'm paranoid that allowing an entity like the government (where constituents can't easily just leave) to get involved with it is good, as it allows for many conflicts of interest. These conflicts could be instances where the ruling party or minority parties push to label an opposing belief as more divisive, or where the ruling majority seeks to 'disincentivize' a minority or outside belief/religion by saying it is offensive to what they deem our values. I feel like we should push for the civilization of speech to be a societal change, not a policy based change. On a slightly different note, people have been saying that language and civil discourse have been going to hell for a very long time. George Orwell rather famously wrote an essay titled "Politics and the English Language" in the early-mid 20th century, wherein he detailed how society was moving towards using unclear and imprecise language to pander to the many without being forced to use falsifiable statements. Anthony Burgess wrote "A Clockwork Orange" in the 1960's where he highlights the main characters savagery in part by highlighting their usage of 'barbaric' dialect. William Langland wrote that “There is not a single modern schoolboy who can compose verses or write a decent letter.” in 1386. While civil and educated discourse is an important issue, people have been saying it will lead to the downfall of society for a very long time, but in many cases it is just changing and the entrenched powers dislike having to cope with that change.
- smsm42 9y ago
  I do. I propose we do exactly what we've been doing for the last 10000 years when human society didn't self-destruct. Do you have any other proposal that has a similar or better track record?
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Human societies self-destructed plenty of times over the past 10 000 years.
  - spiralx 9y ago
    Those 10,000 years have involved very, very little in the way of free speech for most people - I don't think going back to the days of lèse-majesté and the Inquisition is what you had in mind, even though those institutions certainly provided stability in a sense.
saurik 9y ago
Facebook and YouTube already do stuff like this: "too many people are just having fun clicking like on funny images instead of typing long comments, so let's increase the newsfeed and recommendation penetration of posts and videos with more comments... oh, shit, but now we are promoting flame wars as the best way to get more comments is to troll people".
- hnuser1234 9y ago
  While my policy might seem similar to theirs, were I in their shoes, I wouldn't be trying to promote content just for generating comments. Number of comments isn't a particularly useful measure for anything other than.. measuring how much discussion the content creates, it's no indication about the quality of that discussion.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

What if I don't believe in trying to control people at such a low level? What if I think people should be allowed to be as ranty as they want without having to worry about being "disincentivized"?

TeMPOraL 9y ago

Then I'd like to talk with you, see if you have an alternative way of keeping the society from self-destructing.

hnuser1234 9y ago
So we've got desires to identify with groups, and we've got desires to share criticisms of groups, and we struggle to find a balance. If we never criticize, we stagnate, if we never identify, we "self-destruct". We can come up with a "quick solution" as the notion of keeping more of our criticisms to ourselves, but that's certainly not a goal you want to pursue overzealously. You need to be able to share criticisms. We can tell people it's not attractive to be ranty, but I'm not very comfortable going further than that, at the risk of wandering into thought policing. Look at some modern political opinion, I'm sure you've seen it as much as me. Ranting is cool. Calling everything under the sun "problematic". The tricky thing is it's not always wrong. There's surely a nearly infinite list of "problems" one could identify, and some of them are truly important. But we just need to turn down the heat on the criticism for just a second. But you can't just ask bipartisans to listen to each other more. We need to make it less cool to be blindly partisan. We need to increase the value of being able to identify with anyone. And we need to make it really uncool to judge hundreds of millions of people you've never met with deep assumptions. I don't know, it's an interesting problem and I haven't thought of it this way very much. All I'm sure of is that this growing lack of interest in protecting free speech is about the only topic in modern politics that I give a shit about.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > We can tell people it's not attractive to be ranty, but I'm not very comfortable going further than that, at the risk of wandering into thought policing. I don't want to see it going much further than that either. I was thinking more along the lines of making it so being thoughtful is "sexy" and being ranty isn't, the way today owning a car is "sexy" and smoking isn't. Free speech has its positive and negative consequences on stability and happiness; I do not want to fight free speech, I'm looking for ways to reduce the negative consequences. I'll protect your (and mine) right to rant about whatever you want, but I sure as hell would like the general policy discussion to involve less rants and more thoughtful cooperation.
  - Rescis 9y ago
    > Free speech has its positive and negative consequences on stability and happiness; I do not want to fight free speech, I'm looking for ways to reduce the negative consequences. I'll protect your (and mine) right to rant about whatever you want, but I sure as hell would like the general policy discussion to involve less rants and more thoughtful cooperation. I agree that free speech is an essential aspect of what makes us humans, and that it comes with both many positive and negatives. In implementation of a plan to mitigate the negatives though, I much more support a private entity such as Reddit censoring whatever they wish, as if people believe it becomes to harsh they can simply leave. I'm paranoid that allowing an entity like the government (where constituents can't easily just leave) to get involved with it is good, as it allows for many conflicts of interest. These conflicts could be instances where the ruling party or minority parties push to label an opposing belief as more divisive, or where the ruling majority seeks to 'disincentivize' a minority or outside belief/religion by saying it is offensive to what they deem our values. I feel like we should push for the civilization of speech to be a societal change, not a policy based change. On a slightly different note, people have been saying that language and civil discourse have been going to hell for a very long time. George Orwell rather famously wrote an essay titled "Politics and the English Language" in the early-mid 20th century, wherein he detailed how society was moving towards using unclear and imprecise language to pander to the many without being forced to use falsifiable statements. Anthony Burgess wrote "A Clockwork Orange" in the 1960's where he highlights the main characters savagery in part by highlighting their usage of 'barbaric' dialect. William Langland wrote that “There is not a single modern schoolboy who can compose verses or write a decent letter.” in 1386. While civil and educated discourse is an important issue, people have been saying it will lead to the downfall of society for a very long time, but in many cases it is just changing and the entrenched powers dislike having to cope with that change.
smsm42 9y ago
I do. I propose we do exactly what we've been doing for the last 10000 years when human society didn't self-destruct. Do you have any other proposal that has a similar or better track record?
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Human societies self-destructed plenty of times over the past 10 000 years.
- spiralx 9y ago
  Those 10,000 years have involved very, very little in the way of free speech for most people - I don't think going back to the days of lèse-majesté and the Inquisition is what you had in mind, even though those institutions certainly provided stability in a sense.

saurik 9y ago

Facebook and YouTube already do stuff like this: "too many people are just having fun clicking like on funny images instead of typing long comments, so let's increase the newsfeed and recommendation penetration of posts and videos with more comments... oh, shit, but now we are promoting flame wars as the best way to get more comments is to troll people".

hnuser1234 9y ago
While my policy might seem similar to theirs, were I in their shoes, I wouldn't be trying to promote content just for generating comments. Number of comments isn't a particularly useful measure for anything other than.. measuring how much discussion the content creates, it's no indication about the quality of that discussion.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]