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In the circumstances you've described, I feel as though anonymity is just a work-around for a larger flaw of mankind. The underlying issue is that humans tend t

In the circumstances you've described, I feel as though anonymity is just a work-around for a larger flaw of mankind. The underlying issue is that humans tend to lack empathy, are too judgemental and just generally overly critical of others. It's 2018, but we're still quick to grab the pitchforks and torch the place - metaphorically speaking.

whatshisface 8y ago
Changing the environment is a whole lot easier than changing human nature. "Hanging them by a word," goes back as far as recorded political history. If a plan for a better society involves replacing the people that live in it with better people, it probably won't work.
smudgymcscmudge 8y ago
“Humans lack empathy”. Compared to what?
- ivm 8y ago
  Compared to a perfect society where we always try to understand others before acting towards them.
- drewmol 8y ago
  Other humans I suppose. If most humans espoused more empathy it would be a global benifit.
  - everdrive 8y ago
    I don't think that's quite so self-evident. People who are high in empathy have their own blind spots. It can be difficult to understand what the best government policy might be when your head is stuck full of other people's feelings. Being able to separate yourself from the personal and emotional world of high-empathy can often allow for something closer than would be possible otherwise. The high-fidelity emotions one with an abundance of empathy is burdened with can prevent them from moving past ad-hoc cases, or shut their mind to arguments that don't support an aggrieved group's emotions. On a personal level, it's not even the case necessarily that people with greater empathy are kinder people. It's sometimes the case that they are simply better armed to harm you than someone who can't tell from your body language if their attack wounded you -- if it made you upset.
    - drewmol 8y ago
      I agree that overly emotion based decision making can lead to stagnation. I often perceive the close mindedness you mention to be a problem with the allocation of empathy. It takes a lot of emotional maturity and measure to empathise with the bad guys as well.
      - ksdale 8y ago
        This is an underappreciated point. In a sense, it's only empathy for the "bad" guys that matters. Everyone treats the "good" guys well, regardless of empathy. Empathy is exactly what allows you to treat the bad guys like the good guys, in the sense of according them basic decency and good faith. If you only give empathy to those who "deserve" it, you're basically doing the same thing as people who have no empathy and just treat people well or badly based on arbitrary tribal markers.
      - everdrive 8y ago
        Given this line of argument, I'm too used to seeing empathy poorly allocated. And would agree with your initial point.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
People are unlikely to fix that any time soon so we'd better keep that workaround as long as possible. Just look how fast racist attacks come after a news or political event. Or the succession of attacks on the innocent because some thug mistook paediatrician for paedophile. In older days if you escaped the actual pitchforks you could move 20 miles away and start over. Now every moment of teen foolishness, those naive political beliefs at university, and that joint you smoked but "did not inhale" are either photographed or documented in perpetuity against your real name. That seems a massively foolish gift to everyone with a pitchfork, or looking to spend an amusing hour assembling a lynch mob, or even a short sighted potential employer. God help you if you want to run for office 30 years after your foolish teen excesses.
- throwaway8879 8y ago
  In a way, I suppose the only true freedom other than ceasing to exist is to have the ability to move. Having finite/scarce resources makes that almost impossible these days. Not much land to just exile yourself to. I hope we get to the point where a person can get into their hyperdrive vehicle and go find solitude in an uninhabited planet somewhere.
  - frenchy 8y ago
    An exile to a lonely, uninhabited planet seems like a terrible punishment for most people. Fixing our judgmentalism and lack of grace is a much nicer solution, if possible.
    - pjmorris 8y ago
      One of the things that struck me in reading 'A History of the American People' by Paul Johnson was how often conflicts - resource, political, religious - were 'resolved' by one of the groups move into a lonely, uninhabited region, where they could arrange things to their liking. One of the things that strikes me in reading the news is how the conflicts are roughly the same as they were in Genesis and Exodus. My current take is that it is easier to find new land than it is to change human nature. I'm not saying it's not worthwhile to focus on changing judgmentalism and lack of grace in oneself. But I am skeptical of our species' ability to do it en masse.
throwaway8879 8y ago
2018 isn't that far from ~200k years ago. People have always grabbed pitchforks and it is unreasonable to expect them not to. Only the comforts of civilized living gives us enough room to think about morality and act on it. If these comforts disappeared, it would take humanity less than a generation to go back to a time when people paid money to buy the best seat at a public torture/execution.
thomastjeffery 8y ago
That issue is nearly impossible to solve, because of the scale. You are talking about a significant change in each individual of a significant portion of the population of humanity. Anonymity and privacy, on the other hand, are scalable solutions.
mindslight 8y ago
Empathy, which is effectively modeling another person, requires effort which is proportional to how different they are from you. Furthermore, to be willing to expend that effort requires a belief of good faith. Empathy is not, and could never possibly be, "Internet scale".
coldtea 8y ago
>In the circumstances you've described, I feel as though anonymity is just a work-around for a larger flaw of mankind. The underlying issue is that humans tend to lack empathy, are too judgemental and just generally overly critical of others. Yes, but evolutionary flaws of mankind can't be wished away (and even if they could, they might have other side-benefits that we'd loose, as they co-evolved in very complex mechanisms. Perhaps having too much empathy can make you easy to be wiped out). Anonymity, however, can be achieved with technical means.
kzrdude 8y ago
Multiple things are happening, and while we have more mob rule and witch hunts on social media, I think empathy is also being curated more than before. Empathy for those that are not close to you, to be specific.
class4behavior 8y ago
(Pseudo-)anonymity is a psychological need and by no means merely a remedy for a flaw of ours.
MisterTea 8y ago
That's because we don't have equality. If everyone were living in a singular utopia then we'd all be pretty cool with each other. But we're not. We're always looking at what the other guy's got. And we want it.

whatshisface 8y ago

Changing the environment is a whole lot easier than changing human nature. "Hanging them by a word," goes back as far as recorded political history. If a plan for a better society involves replacing the people that live in it with better people, it probably won't work.

smudgymcscmudge 8y ago

“Humans lack empathy”. Compared to what?

ivm 8y ago
Compared to a perfect society where we always try to understand others before acting towards them.
drewmol 8y ago
Other humans I suppose. If most humans espoused more empathy it would be a global benifit.
- everdrive 8y ago
  I don't think that's quite so self-evident. People who are high in empathy have their own blind spots. It can be difficult to understand what the best government policy might be when your head is stuck full of other people's feelings. Being able to separate yourself from the personal and emotional world of high-empathy can often allow for something closer than would be possible otherwise. The high-fidelity emotions one with an abundance of empathy is burdened with can prevent them from moving past ad-hoc cases, or shut their mind to arguments that don't support an aggrieved group's emotions. On a personal level, it's not even the case necessarily that people with greater empathy are kinder people. It's sometimes the case that they are simply better armed to harm you than someone who can't tell from your body language if their attack wounded you -- if it made you upset.
  - drewmol 8y ago
    I agree that overly emotion based decision making can lead to stagnation. I often perceive the close mindedness you mention to be a problem with the allocation of empathy. It takes a lot of emotional maturity and measure to empathise with the bad guys as well.
    - ksdale 8y ago
      This is an underappreciated point. In a sense, it's only empathy for the "bad" guys that matters. Everyone treats the "good" guys well, regardless of empathy. Empathy is exactly what allows you to treat the bad guys like the good guys, in the sense of according them basic decency and good faith. If you only give empathy to those who "deserve" it, you're basically doing the same thing as people who have no empathy and just treat people well or badly based on arbitrary tribal markers.
    - everdrive 8y ago
      Given this line of argument, I'm too used to seeing empathy poorly allocated. And would agree with your initial point.

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

People are unlikely to fix that any time soon so we'd better keep that workaround as long as possible. Just look how fast racist attacks come after a news or political event. Or the succession of attacks on the innocent because some thug mistook paediatrician for paedophile. In older days if you escaped the actual pitchforks you could move 20 miles away and start over. Now every moment of teen foolishness, those naive political beliefs at university, and that joint you smoked but "did not inhale" are either photographed or documented in perpetuity against your real name. That seems a massively foolish gift to everyone with a pitchfork, or looking to spend an amusing hour assembling a lynch mob, or even a short sighted potential employer. God help you if you want to run for office 30 years after your foolish teen excesses.

throwaway8879 8y ago
In a way, I suppose the only true freedom other than ceasing to exist is to have the ability to move. Having finite/scarce resources makes that almost impossible these days. Not much land to just exile yourself to. I hope we get to the point where a person can get into their hyperdrive vehicle and go find solitude in an uninhabited planet somewhere.
- frenchy 8y ago
  An exile to a lonely, uninhabited planet seems like a terrible punishment for most people. Fixing our judgmentalism and lack of grace is a much nicer solution, if possible.
  - pjmorris 8y ago
    One of the things that struck me in reading 'A History of the American People' by Paul Johnson was how often conflicts - resource, political, religious - were 'resolved' by one of the groups move into a lonely, uninhabited region, where they could arrange things to their liking. One of the things that strikes me in reading the news is how the conflicts are roughly the same as they were in Genesis and Exodus. My current take is that it is easier to find new land than it is to change human nature. I'm not saying it's not worthwhile to focus on changing judgmentalism and lack of grace in oneself. But I am skeptical of our species' ability to do it en masse.

throwaway8879 8y ago

2018 isn't that far from ~200k years ago. People have always grabbed pitchforks and it is unreasonable to expect them not to. Only the comforts of civilized living gives us enough room to think about morality and act on it. If these comforts disappeared, it would take humanity less than a generation to go back to a time when people paid money to buy the best seat at a public torture/execution.

thomastjeffery 8y ago

That issue is nearly impossible to solve, because of the scale. You are talking about a significant change in each individual of a significant portion of the population of humanity. Anonymity and privacy, on the other hand, are scalable solutions.

mindslight 8y ago

Empathy, which is effectively modeling another person, requires effort which is proportional to how different they are from you. Furthermore, to be willing to expend that effort requires a belief of good faith. Empathy is not, and could never possibly be, "Internet scale".

coldtea 8y ago

>In the circumstances you've described, I feel as though anonymity is just a work-around for a larger flaw of mankind. The underlying issue is that humans tend to lack empathy, are too judgemental and just generally overly critical of others. Yes, but evolutionary flaws of mankind can't be wished away (and even if they could, they might have other side-benefits that we'd loose, as they co-evolved in very complex mechanisms. Perhaps having too much empathy can make you easy to be wiped out). Anonymity, however, can be achieved with technical means.

kzrdude 8y ago

Multiple things are happening, and while we have more mob rule and witch hunts on social media, I think empathy is also being curated more than before. Empathy for those that are not close to you, to be specific.

class4behavior 8y ago

(Pseudo-)anonymity is a psychological need and by no means merely a remedy for a flaw of ours.

MisterTea 8y ago

That's because we don't have equality. If everyone were living in a singular utopia then we'd all be pretty cool with each other. But we're not. We're always looking at what the other guy's got. And we want it.