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Man, I hate this take. I get where it's coming from. In times of significant stress, it's important that we all pull together and do work to benefit society as

Man, I hate this take. I get where it's coming from. In times of significant stress, it's important that we all pull together and do work to benefit society as a whole. And part of the way we incentivize that is by calling out people who don't do their part. I get it. But we are already inundated by outrage journalism, cancel culture, and public shaming. The last thing we need is more of that. We've already got enough things to be stressed, worried, anxious, and angry about. The vast majority of people will respect the good advice coming from leadership, and those people are the ones who deserve our attention, in a positive way. Look at this like engineering. With a large enough system, you are always going to have some components that fail. When your network has a million machines, you don't get upset when a server goes down, you just engineer some tolerance into your network, define processes to handle them, and go on with your life. I have been constantly gratified by how many people are doing the right thing and those are the people that I want to focus my own attention on. I think we will all get through this with a little more sanity and emotional health if we can take a break from the perennial game of torches and pitchforks for a while.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
saiya-jin 7y ago
Man, I can tell you the amount of ignorance still prevalent out there. Not in some bushwhack undeveloped middle of nowhere, but in the biggest cities in Switzerland. So many people just don't give a nanofraction of a fuck. If you ignore those, things will get worse, much much much worse than they should. Just a look at China now, and then on Italy. Seriously, what.the.fuck
josephorjoe 7y ago
In my (normally very busy) neighborhood in nyc, I'd say this week vehicle traffic is down like 70-80% and pedestrian traffic had been down 50-60% earlier in the week and yesterday and today is looking more like 80-90% reduced -- and actually today vehicle traffic seems like it is almost gone. Just delivery and sanitation vehicles. People seem to be taking it seriously here, but I'm sure there are plenty of places where people are not.
CydeWeys 7y ago
What does "cancel culture" have to do with containment measures taken in response to a global pandemic?
- mistermann 7y ago
  I posted above the speculative concept of crisis fatigue, which may lead to decreased harmony in a society.
- s1artibartfast 7y ago
  I think the applicable concept concept is that cancle culture is ineffective at changing minds and a more compassionate approach is more appropriate in both the short and long run. Hate and shame feeds reactionary behavior and is counter productive. If you disagree with someone, empathize with them as a human being and explain how their behavior is hurting others
  - IAmEveryone 7y ago
    Hate and shame are evolutionary mechanisms to get people to follow group norms. As long as they hurt (something you seem to accept), people will try to avoid them. It’s also worth noting that these are mild measures compared to the other stick societies like to use, criminal law. If people felt confident that rapists were prosecuted not just in cases where their victims number in the dozens (Weinstein, Crosby), they wouldn’t feel the need to use social and economic pressure. It's also nothing new: "In Ancient Greece the Athenians had a procedure known as "ostracism" in which all citizens could write a person's name on a shard of broken pottery (called ostraka) and place it in a large container in a public place. If an individual's name was written a sufficient number of times, he was "ostracized"—banished from the city for ten years. This was normally practiced against individuals who had behaved in some way that offended the community." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_(person) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_(person)
    - munificent 7y ago
      Yes, but those mechanisms evolved when shaming meant doing so in person to someone in front of a dozen other people in a hunter-gatherer society. That same mechanism amplified by social media is no longer as adaptive. It's natural and fairly reasonable to snap at someone if they are rude to you. But if you jam a bullhorn in their face and yell into that, it's no longer appropriate. The emotion and impulse are the same, but the technology changes the manifestation of them.
circlefavshape 7y ago
I am absolutely sick to death of outrage culture, and I thoroughly agree - in fact I think the outrage probably encourages the bravado of people who are engaging in risky behaviour atm
- mistermann 7y ago
  Crisis fatigue. The boy who cried wolf syndrome. I think it plays a part, I would love to know for sure. Such things are often impossible to know, but it's not impossible to realize that there are things that are unknown. Although, it seems like this is quite difficult for most people...uncertainty seems to make the human mind behave erratically. Regardless, if true, we made our bed, now we get to sleep in it. As you sow, so shall you reap.
- aalleavitch 7y ago
  A great way to get rid of outrage culture, btw, would be to get rid of all the systems generating the outrage.
  - Veen 7y ago
    That assumes outrage is motivated primarily by flawed systems and not the psychological and social benefits that accrue to those who express the most outrage. It may also be true that outrage is not the best way to solve systemic problems.
    - tosser0001 7y ago
      I think in some cases though there are systems that funnel people into places that seem designed to evoke engagement and often the engagement triggers outrage. I wish Jack Dorsey at Twitter would take a look at the absolute shit-show that is "Trends for You" in the Explore section. It's nothing but the most outraged people trying to whip everyone into a frenzy. I try to resist going in there, but every once in a while can't help but be sucked in and almost always regret it.
      - 7y ago
dionidium 7y ago
> But we are already inundated by outrage journalism, cancel culture, and public shaming. The last thing we need is more of that. The problem with "outrage culture" isn't the outrage; it's the target of the outrage. This is real stuff, consequential, non-trivial. It's good to be outraged when people behave outrageously. It's not so good when what you're trying to do is get a stranger fired for a tweet you could easily have ignored. This isn't that.
- mistermann 7y ago
  It may be good - the outcome determines if it is good. We do not know the outcome because it lies in the future, but the human mind provides the host such a high resolution image of it that it can easily be mistaken for actual reality if one isn't disciplined.
  - dionidium 7y ago
    > It may be good - the outcome determines if it is good. I'm not strongly committed to the argument that it's good. A better word might be "appropriate" or "justified." The point is that this kind of outrage is very different from what we normally call "outrage culture." The implication in a phrase like "outrage culture" isn't that outrage is an invalid human emotion; it's that it's not being tuned/targeted correctly.
    - mistermann 7y ago
      That's fair enough, I was simply improving your comment. I have a theory that cultures that value (and I mean truly value) clean, rational thinking, will be superior in not only reacting to these sorts of crises, but preventing them in the first place. If one looks very carefully at the nature of most of the discussions taking place in the memeplex on covid-19 and a variety of other hot button topics, one thing you will notice is that there is a breathtaking amount of not just confusion, but delusion. People's internal mental models of the world do not match observable reality - it's been this way for a very long time (well, it's always been this way technically, and always will, to a degree), and it seems to me that it's getting worse at an increasing rate. I think this is a material problem, I believe it can be observed (manually, and perhaps somehow algorithmically - we have petabytes of data to mine), and I believe something can be done about it. But first, people have to be willing to look.
point78 7y ago
Probably the only time it's appropriate for outrage culture and to focus on the negative is exactly right now. Shame and tell everyone whenever possible to stay the fuck inside because those are going to be the people that make you stay in lockdown for 6 months instead of 2. Otherwise this will be 10x worse in the US
- guenthert 7y ago
  No, it won't. If people mingle and fail to "flatten the curve", the whole mess will be over sooner, albeit with more dead old people. If you believe you can starve the virus of hosts, you're delusional.
  - romants 7y ago
    What about China and South Korea? It's possible, but people do need to be more responsible
    - vonmoltke 7y ago
      I think it is dangerously premature to call anything in China or Korea "over".
      - romants 7y ago
        Definitely, no one is calling the situation over, but it is wildly different from Europe
    - vkou 7y ago
      They are both still under lockdown.
  - bananabreakfast 7y ago
    Old people are not the only ones dying.
    - 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
shadowgovt 7y ago
Yeah, but people aren't machines. We will absolutely get upset when our loved ones die because a minority of fools decided their party was more important than our familys' continued survival. Analogy to some stupid servers is the worst way to analyze this situation. Mandatory breakup of large groups is actually the lighter of the tools the government could use here. Intentionally endangering other people's lives is usually punished by jail, and even unintentional but reckless endangerment can be fine- or jail-worthy. Wash your hands and stay away from each other, people.
- codyb 7y ago
  The problem is jail is just about the worst place you could put someone potentially infected.
monadic2 7y ago
> But we are already inundated by outrage journalism, cancel culture, and public shaming. The last thing we need is more of that. Where does this fear mongering come from? I’m absolutely sick of people dropping this bullshit without anything to show people what they’re referring to. It’s certainly harmful to society and coordinating anything but the first attempted response.
Leigh3oi 7y ago
Unfortunately, a lot of people haven't learned the lesson they were supposed to learn from "The boy who cried 'wolf'".
nerdponx 7y ago
This is a really naive take in my opinion. Edit: it's naive at best. Sounds more like you don't want to accept that bad shit is happening in the world. This has absolutely fuck-all to do with cancel culture and everything to do with selfish people spreading a dangerous disease. You can make the same argument about seatbelts. The majority of people wear seatbelts because they've been asked to and they understand the danger of not wearing a seatbelt, for both themselves and their fellow passengers. But some fraction of people simply don't care, and well-intentioned people even have a tendency to say "oh just this one time." And that's why we need enforcement. Look at this like engineering. With a large enough system, you are always going to have some components that fail. When your network has a million machines, you don't get upset when a server goes down, you just engineer some tolerance into your network, define processes to handle them, and go on with your life. Human life is not redundant. Moreover unless you're able to outright deny people medical care for their negligence (which we can't do), unnecessary Coronavirus cases put more burden on everyone. Just like seatbelts -- even if you don't personally care if you get severely injured in a car accident, the EMTs don't have the ability to just leave your selfish ass dying on the side of the road, even if you want them to. You just wasted a lot of other people's time, energy, and money as a result of your carelessness. If you can take simple measures to prevent components from failing, you should, especially when component failure is an expensive and intrusive proposition, even if it doesn't mean the total failure of the system. Not to mention the fact that humans are notoriously bad at making rational utility-maximizing decisions. People often only come to regret their actions only after they've been forced to face serious consequences for their actions. Yes, this is slightly paternalistic, but it's yet another argument in favor of enforcing quarantine-like laws with actual penalties.
- munificent 7y ago
  > Sounds more like you don't want to accept that bad shit is happening in the world. What you accept and what you choose to spend your precious finite attention on are not the same thing. If anything, what I suggest is the opposite of what you're saying. I do accept that some small fraction of people will do dumb shit, as they have through time immemorial. And, because I accept that, I feel no need to waste my time and emotional energy reading about it on social media and getting all outraged about it. > And that's why we need enforcement. Sure, but what we don't need is every social media site plastering pictures of people not wearing seatbelts with headlines like "Look at this horrid fucker not wearing their seatbelt! How can they be so thoughtless?!" > Moreover unless you're able to outright deny people medical care for their negligence (which we can't do), unnecessary Coronavirus cases put more burden on everyone. I fully understand the implications of non-compliance with social distancing measures. I don't agree with people who aren't doing it. What I am saying is that it is not beneficial to crowd social media with stories of those people. After you read a Reddit thread about some selfish assholes partying up in Miami... then what? What is the action? I'm not going to personally fly to Miami and scold them. Me consuming that story has added nothing of value to my life, nor has it materially addressed the problem in any way. All it does us make me feel angry and shitty. I've got enough bad feelings floating around because of, you know, the global pandemic. I don't need impotent manufactured outrage on top of that. What I and others need to get through the day are reminders of all of the good that people are doing. And those same reminders are also a good way to encourage people to do what they're supposed to do. Do you want to live in a world where we teach people who to be by giving them heroes to aspire to, or by having the threat of public shaming and punishment looming over them 24/7?
iron0013 7y ago
Nobody's inundated by cancel culture except the reactionaries that obsessively make it their straw man.
fzeroracer 7y ago
No amount of complaints about 'cancel culture' or what not is gonna stop me from shaming people very loudly for not washing their hands. Wash your damn hands.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

saiya-jin 7y ago

Man, I can tell you the amount of ignorance still prevalent out there. Not in some bushwhack undeveloped middle of nowhere, but in the biggest cities in Switzerland. So many people just don't give a nanofraction of a fuck. If you ignore those, things will get worse, much much much worse than they should. Just a look at China now, and then on Italy. Seriously, what.the.fuck

josephorjoe 7y ago

In my (normally very busy) neighborhood in nyc, I'd say this week vehicle traffic is down like 70-80% and pedestrian traffic had been down 50-60% earlier in the week and yesterday and today is looking more like 80-90% reduced -- and actually today vehicle traffic seems like it is almost gone. Just delivery and sanitation vehicles. People seem to be taking it seriously here, but I'm sure there are plenty of places where people are not.

CydeWeys 7y ago

What does "cancel culture" have to do with containment measures taken in response to a global pandemic?

mistermann 7y ago
I posted above the speculative concept of crisis fatigue, which may lead to decreased harmony in a society.
s1artibartfast 7y ago
I think the applicable concept concept is that cancle culture is ineffective at changing minds and a more compassionate approach is more appropriate in both the short and long run. Hate and shame feeds reactionary behavior and is counter productive. If you disagree with someone, empathize with them as a human being and explain how their behavior is hurting others
- IAmEveryone 7y ago
  Hate and shame are evolutionary mechanisms to get people to follow group norms. As long as they hurt (something you seem to accept), people will try to avoid them. It’s also worth noting that these are mild measures compared to the other stick societies like to use, criminal law. If people felt confident that rapists were prosecuted not just in cases where their victims number in the dozens (Weinstein, Crosby), they wouldn’t feel the need to use social and economic pressure. It's also nothing new: "In Ancient Greece the Athenians had a procedure known as "ostracism" in which all citizens could write a person's name on a shard of broken pottery (called ostraka) and place it in a large container in a public place. If an individual's name was written a sufficient number of times, he was "ostracized"—banished from the city for ten years. This was normally practiced against individuals who had behaved in some way that offended the community." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_(person) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_(person)
  - munificent 7y ago
    Yes, but those mechanisms evolved when shaming meant doing so in person to someone in front of a dozen other people in a hunter-gatherer society. That same mechanism amplified by social media is no longer as adaptive. It's natural and fairly reasonable to snap at someone if they are rude to you. But if you jam a bullhorn in their face and yell into that, it's no longer appropriate. The emotion and impulse are the same, but the technology changes the manifestation of them.

circlefavshape 7y ago

I am absolutely sick to death of outrage culture, and I thoroughly agree - in fact I think the outrage probably encourages the bravado of people who are engaging in risky behaviour atm

mistermann 7y ago
Crisis fatigue. The boy who cried wolf syndrome. I think it plays a part, I would love to know for sure. Such things are often impossible to know, but it's not impossible to realize that there are things that are unknown. Although, it seems like this is quite difficult for most people...uncertainty seems to make the human mind behave erratically. Regardless, if true, we made our bed, now we get to sleep in it. As you sow, so shall you reap.
aalleavitch 7y ago
A great way to get rid of outrage culture, btw, would be to get rid of all the systems generating the outrage.
- Veen 7y ago
  That assumes outrage is motivated primarily by flawed systems and not the psychological and social benefits that accrue to those who express the most outrage. It may also be true that outrage is not the best way to solve systemic problems.
  - tosser0001 7y ago
    I think in some cases though there are systems that funnel people into places that seem designed to evoke engagement and often the engagement triggers outrage. I wish Jack Dorsey at Twitter would take a look at the absolute shit-show that is "Trends for You" in the Explore section. It's nothing but the most outraged people trying to whip everyone into a frenzy. I try to resist going in there, but every once in a while can't help but be sucked in and almost always regret it.
    - 7y ago

dionidium 7y ago

> But we are already inundated by outrage journalism, cancel culture, and public shaming. The last thing we need is more of that. The problem with "outrage culture" isn't the outrage; it's the target of the outrage. This is real stuff, consequential, non-trivial. It's good to be outraged when people behave outrageously. It's not so good when what you're trying to do is get a stranger fired for a tweet you could easily have ignored. This isn't that.

mistermann 7y ago
It may be good - the outcome determines if it is good. We do not know the outcome because it lies in the future, but the human mind provides the host such a high resolution image of it that it can easily be mistaken for actual reality if one isn't disciplined.
- dionidium 7y ago
  > It may be good - the outcome determines if it is good. I'm not strongly committed to the argument that it's good. A better word might be "appropriate" or "justified." The point is that this kind of outrage is very different from what we normally call "outrage culture." The implication in a phrase like "outrage culture" isn't that outrage is an invalid human emotion; it's that it's not being tuned/targeted correctly.
  - mistermann 7y ago
    That's fair enough, I was simply improving your comment. I have a theory that cultures that value (and I mean truly value) clean, rational thinking, will be superior in not only reacting to these sorts of crises, but preventing them in the first place. If one looks very carefully at the nature of most of the discussions taking place in the memeplex on covid-19 and a variety of other hot button topics, one thing you will notice is that there is a breathtaking amount of not just confusion, but delusion. People's internal mental models of the world do not match observable reality - it's been this way for a very long time (well, it's always been this way technically, and always will, to a degree), and it seems to me that it's getting worse at an increasing rate. I think this is a material problem, I believe it can be observed (manually, and perhaps somehow algorithmically - we have petabytes of data to mine), and I believe something can be done about it. But first, people have to be willing to look.

point78 7y ago

Probably the only time it's appropriate for outrage culture and to focus on the negative is exactly right now. Shame and tell everyone whenever possible to stay the fuck inside because those are going to be the people that make you stay in lockdown for 6 months instead of 2. Otherwise this will be 10x worse in the US

guenthert 7y ago
No, it won't. If people mingle and fail to "flatten the curve", the whole mess will be over sooner, albeit with more dead old people. If you believe you can starve the virus of hosts, you're delusional.
- romants 7y ago
  What about China and South Korea? It's possible, but people do need to be more responsible
  - vonmoltke 7y ago
    I think it is dangerously premature to call anything in China or Korea "over".
    - romants 7y ago
      Definitely, no one is calling the situation over, but it is wildly different from Europe
  - vkou 7y ago
    They are both still under lockdown.
- bananabreakfast 7y ago
  Old people are not the only ones dying.
  - 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

shadowgovt 7y ago

Yeah, but people aren't machines. We will absolutely get upset when our loved ones die because a minority of fools decided their party was more important than our familys' continued survival. Analogy to some stupid servers is the worst way to analyze this situation. Mandatory breakup of large groups is actually the lighter of the tools the government could use here. Intentionally endangering other people's lives is usually punished by jail, and even unintentional but reckless endangerment can be fine- or jail-worthy. Wash your hands and stay away from each other, people.

codyb 7y ago
The problem is jail is just about the worst place you could put someone potentially infected.

monadic2 7y ago

> But we are already inundated by outrage journalism, cancel culture, and public shaming. The last thing we need is more of that. Where does this fear mongering come from? I’m absolutely sick of people dropping this bullshit without anything to show people what they’re referring to. It’s certainly harmful to society and coordinating anything but the first attempted response.

Leigh3oi 7y ago

Unfortunately, a lot of people haven't learned the lesson they were supposed to learn from "The boy who cried 'wolf'".

nerdponx 7y ago

This is a really naive take in my opinion. Edit: it's naive at best. Sounds more like you don't want to accept that bad shit is happening in the world. This has absolutely fuck-all to do with cancel culture and everything to do with selfish people spreading a dangerous disease. You can make the same argument about seatbelts. The majority of people wear seatbelts because they've been asked to and they understand the danger of not wearing a seatbelt, for both themselves and their fellow passengers. But some fraction of people simply don't care, and well-intentioned people even have a tendency to say "oh just this one time." And that's why we need enforcement. Look at this like engineering. With a large enough system, you are always going to have some components that fail. When your network has a million machines, you don't get upset when a server goes down, you just engineer some tolerance into your network, define processes to handle them, and go on with your life. Human life is not redundant. Moreover unless you're able to outright deny people medical care for their negligence (which we can't do), unnecessary Coronavirus cases put more burden on everyone. Just like seatbelts -- even if you don't personally care if you get severely injured in a car accident, the EMTs don't have the ability to just leave your selfish ass dying on the side of the road, even if you want them to. You just wasted a lot of other people's time, energy, and money as a result of your carelessness. If you can take simple measures to prevent components from failing, you should, especially when component failure is an expensive and intrusive proposition, even if it doesn't mean the total failure of the system. Not to mention the fact that humans are notoriously bad at making rational utility-maximizing decisions. People often only come to regret their actions only after they've been forced to face serious consequences for their actions. Yes, this is slightly paternalistic, but it's yet another argument in favor of enforcing quarantine-like laws with actual penalties.

munificent 7y ago
> Sounds more like you don't want to accept that bad shit is happening in the world. What you accept and what you choose to spend your precious finite attention on are not the same thing. If anything, what I suggest is the opposite of what you're saying. I do accept that some small fraction of people will do dumb shit, as they have through time immemorial. And, because I accept that, I feel no need to waste my time and emotional energy reading about it on social media and getting all outraged about it. > And that's why we need enforcement. Sure, but what we don't need is every social media site plastering pictures of people not wearing seatbelts with headlines like "Look at this horrid fucker not wearing their seatbelt! How can they be so thoughtless?!" > Moreover unless you're able to outright deny people medical care for their negligence (which we can't do), unnecessary Coronavirus cases put more burden on everyone. I fully understand the implications of non-compliance with social distancing measures. I don't agree with people who aren't doing it. What I am saying is that it is not beneficial to crowd social media with stories of those people. After you read a Reddit thread about some selfish assholes partying up in Miami... then what? What is the action? I'm not going to personally fly to Miami and scold them. Me consuming that story has added nothing of value to my life, nor has it materially addressed the problem in any way. All it does us make me feel angry and shitty. I've got enough bad feelings floating around because of, you know, the global pandemic. I don't need impotent manufactured outrage on top of that. What I and others need to get through the day are reminders of all of the good that people are doing. And those same reminders are also a good way to encourage people to do what they're supposed to do. Do you want to live in a world where we teach people who to be by giving them heroes to aspire to, or by having the threat of public shaming and punishment looming over them 24/7?

iron0013 7y ago

Nobody's inundated by cancel culture except the reactionaries that obsessively make it their straw man.

fzeroracer 7y ago

No amount of complaints about 'cancel culture' or what not is gonna stop me from shaming people very loudly for not washing their hands. Wash your damn hands.