4 ms·

I believe these tendencies exist because of a strong emotional attachment to personal identity. If you engineered a social system where people devalued personal

I believe these tendencies exist because of a strong emotional attachment to personal identity. If you engineered a social system where people devalued personal identity, then I doubt these problems would be so invasive.

nostrademons 8y ago
That would be 4chan, and it seems to have the opposite effect.
- Memosyne 8y ago
  4chan (and other such networking media) attract individuals who have developed in an existing social environment. My understanding was that jerf wanted us to engineer a new type of social structure that could be taught to children during their formative years of development.
  - jf- 8y ago
    You want to teach them that they don’t have identities?
    - nostrademons 8y ago
      It's not as crazy as it sounds. PG wrote an essay about this once [1], and many East Asian cultures have much weaker conceptions of personal identities (separate from a family or larger society) than American and Western European culture does. The challenge is that this is not an evolutionarily-stable-strategy from a game theoretic perception. When a person from a culture with a weak conception of personal identity meets a person from a culture with a strong conception of personal identity, the former tends to subordinate their desires to the latter, because that's what it means to have a weak conception of identity. As a result, the sphere of public discourse gets dominated by all those individuals with strong identities, even if the majority of people on earth do not have one. (Growing up half-Asian, this was a major source of angst for me, and still something I struggle with.) [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
      - jf- 8y ago
        I think it likely you’d just be replacing one set of neuroses with another. I’m not even sure what “keeping your identity small” entails, other than assigning more of your merits/demerits to extrinsic factors, or in the Asian case to family or national affiliation. I’m not sure that either of those would help in the case of the online mass bullying that we’re discussing here. Regarding the essay, I think PG was more right when he said politics and religion were topics which could not be decided upon, so everyone just lets loose. That echoes what Nietzsche said about modern (moral) debate being meaningless, because there are no objective grounds on which to judge anything, so people just shout at each other impotently. It’s an old one but a good one.
      - aswanson 8y ago
        Do you think this weaker conception of personal identity is one of the causes of lower crime rates in Asian nations? It would seem an ethos more invested in the whole would exhibit this, along with a lower level of materialism in general.
        nostrademons 8y ago
        Dunno. It seems plausible to me, but there are a lot of potentially conflating factors.
- tomatotomato37 8y ago
  Granted a large part of that is due to the Laissez-faire/incompetent moderation of the site Actually I'm surprised there hasn't been an anonymous website with strict rules and actually decent moderation; every single spin-off of the site also takes a freeform approach to everything
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    A site where everybody is invited to submit content anonymously but it's heavily censored & moderated becomes a mouthpiece for the moderators. It's basically Yelp, or the Op-Ed section of a newspaper.
    - fromthestart 8y ago
      Or Reddit.
      - tomatotomato37 8y ago
        Interesting comparisons, but I would have to say those places still have a sense of identity, even if it's one cooked up 30 seconds ago with a 10minuteemail address. I'm more curious about a site with the "enforced" lack of identity present on those imageboards, except with the ruleset of Twitter or Facebook.
- Izkata 8y ago
  How so? Channers are all anonymous, so there isn't a public persona to shame in the first place.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    Rather, 4channers are very adept at heaping shame on other people. They might avoid the return fire by virtue of being anonymous, but it doesn't actually solve the problem of shame storms, just turns it into asymmetric warfare.

nostrademons 8y ago

That would be 4chan, and it seems to have the opposite effect.

Memosyne 8y ago
4chan (and other such networking media) attract individuals who have developed in an existing social environment. My understanding was that jerf wanted us to engineer a new type of social structure that could be taught to children during their formative years of development.
- jf- 8y ago
  You want to teach them that they don’t have identities?
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    It's not as crazy as it sounds. PG wrote an essay about this once [1], and many East Asian cultures have much weaker conceptions of personal identities (separate from a family or larger society) than American and Western European culture does. The challenge is that this is not an evolutionarily-stable-strategy from a game theoretic perception. When a person from a culture with a weak conception of personal identity meets a person from a culture with a strong conception of personal identity, the former tends to subordinate their desires to the latter, because that's what it means to have a weak conception of identity. As a result, the sphere of public discourse gets dominated by all those individuals with strong identities, even if the majority of people on earth do not have one. (Growing up half-Asian, this was a major source of angst for me, and still something I struggle with.) [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
    - jf- 8y ago
      I think it likely you’d just be replacing one set of neuroses with another. I’m not even sure what “keeping your identity small” entails, other than assigning more of your merits/demerits to extrinsic factors, or in the Asian case to family or national affiliation. I’m not sure that either of those would help in the case of the online mass bullying that we’re discussing here. Regarding the essay, I think PG was more right when he said politics and religion were topics which could not be decided upon, so everyone just lets loose. That echoes what Nietzsche said about modern (moral) debate being meaningless, because there are no objective grounds on which to judge anything, so people just shout at each other impotently. It’s an old one but a good one.
    - aswanson 8y ago
      Do you think this weaker conception of personal identity is one of the causes of lower crime rates in Asian nations? It would seem an ethos more invested in the whole would exhibit this, along with a lower level of materialism in general.
      - nostrademons 8y ago
        Dunno. It seems plausible to me, but there are a lot of potentially conflating factors.
tomatotomato37 8y ago
Granted a large part of that is due to the Laissez-faire/incompetent moderation of the site Actually I'm surprised there hasn't been an anonymous website with strict rules and actually decent moderation; every single spin-off of the site also takes a freeform approach to everything
- nostrademons 8y ago
  A site where everybody is invited to submit content anonymously but it's heavily censored & moderated becomes a mouthpiece for the moderators. It's basically Yelp, or the Op-Ed section of a newspaper.
  - fromthestart 8y ago
    Or Reddit.
    - tomatotomato37 8y ago
      Interesting comparisons, but I would have to say those places still have a sense of identity, even if it's one cooked up 30 seconds ago with a 10minuteemail address. I'm more curious about a site with the "enforced" lack of identity present on those imageboards, except with the ruleset of Twitter or Facebook.
Izkata 8y ago
How so? Channers are all anonymous, so there isn't a public persona to shame in the first place.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  Rather, 4channers are very adept at heaping shame on other people. They might avoid the return fire by virtue of being anonymous, but it doesn't actually solve the problem of shame storms, just turns it into asymmetric warfare.