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Kids roll their eyes at the utopian idealism that is anti-bullying programs. They're going to do whatever they want anyhow. And, in order to ensure they get the

Kids roll their eyes at the utopian idealism that is anti-bullying programs. They're going to do whatever they want anyhow. And, in order to ensure they get the best lot in life, they're going to claw, scratch, bite, and step-on each other to be sure they end up at the top of the mud hill. That's human nature. You can't put human nature in a box and wish it away. They'll always find an outlet to establish rank.

f6v 6y ago
Is it human nature to kill, steal or rape? Yet we don’t allow that in the society.
- hntrader 6y ago
  Yes, that is human nature if we look at anthropological studies. We punish it which creates a disincentive. There isn't any explicit anti-murder training we need to go through that's premised on a flawed understanding of human nature. We've also made it so murder doesn't confer status in our society, which is the opposite case to bullying as per the findings. And that's rather unique to modern society, murder didn't always confer lower status.
  - Rapzid 6y ago
    Here Is Something You Can't Understand
  - viraptor 6y ago
    > Yes, that is human nature if we look at anthropological studies. That feels like "[citation needed]". What do you mean by "is human nature"? Very small minority would participate in murder, stealing, or rape, even if we created no disincentive for them.
    - hntrader 6y ago
      It's not accurate that only a very small minority would participate, the murder rate can go as high as 40-60 percent (e.g Waorani, among others). This is what can happen when there's no Leviathan that disincentives murder and when murder is status conferring instead of status reducing. It's also part of the nature of our close relatives, the chimpanzee. See "lethal raiding".
      - viraptor 6y ago
        > (e.g Waorani, among others) ... when murder is status conferring instead of status reducing. This describes a given culture, including upbringing. It does not describe human nature. (or specifically doesn't prove they are aligned) We've got examples from other extremes too, like pacifism in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori
        DoreenMichele 6y ago
        Rape is shockingly common and cultures are human made things, so they express human nature or some variation of it. Picking which cultures you like as examples of "human nature" and excluding others isn't really a sound tactic of argumentation.
        viraptor 6y ago
        It's not picking cultures I like. It's a counterexample - describing specific culture doing/avoiding X to an extreme level does not prove or disprove X being or not "in human nature".
        DoreenMichele 6y ago
        This is from your previous comment: Very small minority would participate in murder, stealing, or rape, even if we created no disincentive for them. I have seen articles that say that if you ask a room full of women if they have been raped, you may get as much as half the hands go up. If you ask them if they ever said "no" to sex and ended up having sex anyway, up to 90 percent of the hands go up. In most countries, the definition of rape hinges on the detail of consent and is presumed to be only something a man can do to a woman (though some laws are being updated). If you accept that forcible sodomy by a man against another man is also rape, prison rapes are quite common. Human trafficking exists and every single instance of sexual intercourse with someone being trafficked against their will is typically referred to in articles on the topic as rape. Then there is statutory rape, where someone is deemed to be too young to reasonably give their consent, so it doesn't count if she said "yes" to it. Then there is date rape, which typically involves alcohol, a culture clash between people with different expectations for what would happen and tragic misunderstanding. Sometimes the guys will tell you that they didn't think they forced her. It's news to them that she felt forced into sex when someone shows up to accuse them of rape and drag them in front of a college review board or charge them with a crime. A lot of people think rape is about physical violence. It's not. Most rapes don't involve beating the hell out of the victim. It's a complicated topic, but rape is far from uncommon. I don't know where you get your ideas about human nature from but they don't seem to fit with anything I know about human nature and I'm some idiot with pie-in-the-sky ideals prone to assuming people are just going to be nice because that's just the right thing to do and that, sadly, is often not the case. At all.
    - airhead969 6y ago
      Murder is generally unacceptable, unless you're high status like Snoop or OJ. However theft and rape are still allowed if one is of high-enough status and doesn't get caught: Wall St., billionaires, Jimmy Saville, or Trump.
      - mnouquet 6y ago
        > Murder is generally unacceptable, ... Yet, we give Nobel prizes to murderers.
  - airhead969 6y ago
    Definitely. The myth of the noble savage. Modern cities are much safer than ancient communities, tribal or agrarian. An interesting book: The Better Angels of Our Nature by Pinker
  - mnouquet 6y ago
    > Yes, that is human nature if we look at anthropological studies. We punish it which creates a disincentive. Only in some case, in other case, we justify it by naming it something else, like taxes, prison/capital punishment, national interest.
- jcelerier 6y ago
  Yet it happens daily
- pawelmurias 6y ago
  It's not for most people. Some cultures heavily encourage being a dick but we have builtin inhibitions.
viraptor 6y ago
I'm not sure if they consider it at that level. At primary/secondary school it's pretty clear - you may get told off for bullying if anyone learns about it, may have some uncomfortable conversations. But you'll still be in the same class with the same people the next day. Unless you do something so drastic you get expelled. I've not heard of many teens (I'm sure there's a few) actively thinking of / planning bullying. Most of it is on a "why not, that's what I want to do now" level. The ones I've seen were actually kids on the very bottom of any hierarchy just acting out, not trying to achieve anything.
- eurasiantiger 6y ago
  https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/three_teenagers_on_trial_for_murder_in_helsinki/11795851 https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/three_teenagers_on_trial_... https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/police_complete_investigation_into_teenagers_suspected_of_murder/11758203 https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/police_complete_investiga...
  - viraptor 6y ago
    Yes, we can find specific cases for a lot of things. The question what's the usual behaviour/motivation still stands.
nathias 6y ago
that's human nature for psychopaths, the rest of us don't have to put up with them if we don't want to...
- konschubert 6y ago
  Luckily School isn't Life. http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
ACow_Adonis 6y ago
my first highschool was a private single sex catholic school: the bullying problem there was intense. there was a lot of emphasis on rugby and football and other team sports, we were all made to wear uniforms and ties, go to chapel, make the school look good. There was a consistent problem with interpersonal violence, big trouble makers were often the football players though we also had clearly troubled individuals. For the last two years of my schooling I swapped to a coed public (yet highest scoring) special college literally just down the road. suddenly there was no bullying problem. I mean, compared to the other school it was practically zero. there was no uniform, kids could smoke outside if they wanted, you could not turn up to class, you were free to leave the grounds when you wanted. you could eat and drink when and where you wanted, and teachers were called by their first names. I couldn't even tell you if we had sports teams because no one cared, I literally don't remember. whatever the difference, it's either not human nature, or it can be overcome. I've lived it, so I know it's true.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- andi999 6y ago
  Probably if attendance was not a requirement, the most disagreeable persons left the compound. This is a solution of course (which sounds less harsh than expulsion)
  - ACow_Adonis 6y ago
    could have had a part in it, I'll fully admit. I know it lessened the tension in many of us, not just the trouble makers. I wasn't a bully, but also to advantage of not turning up to assume classes. honestly though, I can't speak highly enough of it, it was just what I needed after the first school. i hope that was that a deliberately joking use of the word 'compound' to refer to a school? (though probably how I felt about my first school emotionally). we had very few expulsions at the first school during my time there. but I can remember several instances of kids bullied until they had to leave. honestly it all seems so unjust and barbaric looking back.
konschubert 6y ago
With that logic, grown ups should be chewing each other's faces off in the street all the time. They don't. So clearly there is something (morale, social pressure, threat of punishment) that prevents them from doing it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  With that logic, grown ups should be chewing each other's faces off in the street all the time. Adults can be plenty cruel. It's just typically done with more subtlety, sophistication and plausible deniability than is employed by teens.
  - cobraetor 6y ago
    Yes, it can be done at various levels of subtlety as well as at group levels. Why else would we have such words describing adult behavior as "workplace bullying", "online harassment", "domestic violence", "culture wars", "race hustling", etc.?
- Ekaros 6y ago
  Have you ever seen how people treat customer service? Too bad we can't punish them for such uncivil performance. Maybe we should go back to putting them on stocks and streaming it to world. Even with some sort of nice remote online interaction...
  - oarsinsync 6y ago
    Have you ever seen how people get people in customer service departments to treat other people? I'm absolutely not saying the abuse given to customer service people get is justified, but it's not unprovoked either. Turns out when you codify bad behaviour, you get bad responses to that behaviour. What's the justification for codifying that bad behaviour in the first place?
- 6y ago
ymbeld 6y ago
We should just retire sociology. It’s all just human nature, and what that means is just obvious to everybody.
- ymbeld 6y ago
  Presumably people agree that we should “retire sociology” considering that I was being sarcastic.
choeger 6y ago
I call bullshit. Teenagers aren't complete in their development yet. That's why you can, and should, train and teach them. Teaching empathy is of course difficult and don't forget that the bullied peers are also teenagers that might behave "weirdly" (no victim blaming intended). But the whole thing still needs to be taught as it is a horrible thing that exists in reality. Compare this to drugs, STD, or plain old reckless behavior. You tell your teenagers not to take pills, use condoms, and not dive headfirst into unknown waters, right? Not everyone does this successfully, but there is no reason not to talk about it, just because your teenager will Roll their eyes. If that's any criterion, most parents would probably not talk to their kids at all between 12 and 20...
- jkhdigital 6y ago
  I think the real disagreement here is about how to effectively socialize children, not about whether they can be socialized at all. Hyperbolic arguments aside, we can agree that humans can be socialized to behave as good members of a community, but humans who are not socialized will frequently behave like animals.
  - airhead969 6y ago
    Yes. Effectively socialize. The other issue is that humans are always going to be human, and seek will-to-power to advance their status to promote their genes and improve their lot in life. There's no undoing or wishing away human nature, only mild adjustments with nurture that we must keep trying to do with pragmatism.
- lr4444lr 6y ago
  He didn't say not to do anything. He said the (current) programs were pretending realities didn't exist, or that they could be scolded away. This is basically why the "Just Say No" anti-drug campaign failed.
  - airhead969 6y ago
    Nancy, the 40th and first woman POTUS. ;) By being celebrities in their own bubbles, archaically-simplistic, and close-minded, the Reagans couldn't grasp reality or have empathy for anyone else. HIV/AIDS, final destruction of mental healthcare systems, War on Drugs, CIA crack epidemic-Iran Contra, and many more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan_administration_scandals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan_administration_scandals
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
First, "human nature" is a logical fallacy straight away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy Second, in many existing societies outside of the US school bullying is extremely uncommon.
- fallingknife 6y ago
  There are rules of human behavior just as there are rules of dog behavior. To state otherwise is ridiculous.
  - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
    I never stated otherwise. The (well known) logical fallacy is in arbitrarily picking one behavior instead of another and labeling it "human nature" and claiming it's inevitable.
airhead969 6y ago
This is a good discussion. I hope we can dive into the nuances of what ways work to raise cooler kids, esp. becoming more messianic / moral courage: making peace, defending the weak, calling-out infliction of suffering, and setting better examples for their peers.

f6v 6y ago

Is it human nature to kill, steal or rape? Yet we don’t allow that in the society.

hntrader 6y ago
Yes, that is human nature if we look at anthropological studies. We punish it which creates a disincentive. There isn't any explicit anti-murder training we need to go through that's premised on a flawed understanding of human nature. We've also made it so murder doesn't confer status in our society, which is the opposite case to bullying as per the findings. And that's rather unique to modern society, murder didn't always confer lower status.
- Rapzid 6y ago
  Here Is Something You Can't Understand
- viraptor 6y ago
  > Yes, that is human nature if we look at anthropological studies. That feels like "[citation needed]". What do you mean by "is human nature"? Very small minority would participate in murder, stealing, or rape, even if we created no disincentive for them.
  - hntrader 6y ago
    It's not accurate that only a very small minority would participate, the murder rate can go as high as 40-60 percent (e.g Waorani, among others). This is what can happen when there's no Leviathan that disincentives murder and when murder is status conferring instead of status reducing. It's also part of the nature of our close relatives, the chimpanzee. See "lethal raiding".
    - viraptor 6y ago
      > (e.g Waorani, among others) ... when murder is status conferring instead of status reducing. This describes a given culture, including upbringing. It does not describe human nature. (or specifically doesn't prove they are aligned) We've got examples from other extremes too, like pacifism in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori
      - DoreenMichele 6y ago
        Rape is shockingly common and cultures are human made things, so they express human nature or some variation of it. Picking which cultures you like as examples of "human nature" and excluding others isn't really a sound tactic of argumentation.
        viraptor 6y ago
        It's not picking cultures I like. It's a counterexample - describing specific culture doing/avoiding X to an extreme level does not prove or disprove X being or not "in human nature".
        DoreenMichele 6y ago
        This is from your previous comment: Very small minority would participate in murder, stealing, or rape, even if we created no disincentive for them. I have seen articles that say that if you ask a room full of women if they have been raped, you may get as much as half the hands go up. If you ask them if they ever said "no" to sex and ended up having sex anyway, up to 90 percent of the hands go up. In most countries, the definition of rape hinges on the detail of consent and is presumed to be only something a man can do to a woman (though some laws are being updated). If you accept that forcible sodomy by a man against another man is also rape, prison rapes are quite common. Human trafficking exists and every single instance of sexual intercourse with someone being trafficked against their will is typically referred to in articles on the topic as rape. Then there is statutory rape, where someone is deemed to be too young to reasonably give their consent, so it doesn't count if she said "yes" to it. Then there is date rape, which typically involves alcohol, a culture clash between people with different expectations for what would happen and tragic misunderstanding. Sometimes the guys will tell you that they didn't think they forced her. It's news to them that she felt forced into sex when someone shows up to accuse them of rape and drag them in front of a college review board or charge them with a crime. A lot of people think rape is about physical violence. It's not. Most rapes don't involve beating the hell out of the victim. It's a complicated topic, but rape is far from uncommon. I don't know where you get your ideas about human nature from but they don't seem to fit with anything I know about human nature and I'm some idiot with pie-in-the-sky ideals prone to assuming people are just going to be nice because that's just the right thing to do and that, sadly, is often not the case. At all.
  - airhead969 6y ago
    Murder is generally unacceptable, unless you're high status like Snoop or OJ. However theft and rape are still allowed if one is of high-enough status and doesn't get caught: Wall St., billionaires, Jimmy Saville, or Trump.
    - mnouquet 6y ago
      > Murder is generally unacceptable, ... Yet, we give Nobel prizes to murderers.
- airhead969 6y ago
  Definitely. The myth of the noble savage. Modern cities are much safer than ancient communities, tribal or agrarian. An interesting book: The Better Angels of Our Nature by Pinker
- mnouquet 6y ago
  > Yes, that is human nature if we look at anthropological studies. We punish it which creates a disincentive. Only in some case, in other case, we justify it by naming it something else, like taxes, prison/capital punishment, national interest.
jcelerier 6y ago
Yet it happens daily
pawelmurias 6y ago
It's not for most people. Some cultures heavily encourage being a dick but we have builtin inhibitions.

viraptor 6y ago

I'm not sure if they consider it at that level. At primary/secondary school it's pretty clear - you may get told off for bullying if anyone learns about it, may have some uncomfortable conversations. But you'll still be in the same class with the same people the next day. Unless you do something so drastic you get expelled. I've not heard of many teens (I'm sure there's a few) actively thinking of / planning bullying. Most of it is on a "why not, that's what I want to do now" level. The ones I've seen were actually kids on the very bottom of any hierarchy just acting out, not trying to achieve anything.

eurasiantiger 6y ago
https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/three_teenagers_on_trial_for_murder_in_helsinki/11795851 https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/three_teenagers_on_trial_... https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/police_complete_investigation_into_teenagers_suspected_of_murder/11758203 https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/police_complete_investiga...
- viraptor 6y ago
  Yes, we can find specific cases for a lot of things. The question what's the usual behaviour/motivation still stands.

nathias 6y ago

that's human nature for psychopaths, the rest of us don't have to put up with them if we don't want to...

konschubert 6y ago
Luckily School isn't Life. http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

ACow_Adonis 6y ago

my first highschool was a private single sex catholic school: the bullying problem there was intense. there was a lot of emphasis on rugby and football and other team sports, we were all made to wear uniforms and ties, go to chapel, make the school look good. There was a consistent problem with interpersonal violence, big trouble makers were often the football players though we also had clearly troubled individuals. For the last two years of my schooling I swapped to a coed public (yet highest scoring) special college literally just down the road. suddenly there was no bullying problem. I mean, compared to the other school it was practically zero. there was no uniform, kids could smoke outside if they wanted, you could not turn up to class, you were free to leave the grounds when you wanted. you could eat and drink when and where you wanted, and teachers were called by their first names. I couldn't even tell you if we had sports teams because no one cared, I literally don't remember. whatever the difference, it's either not human nature, or it can be overcome. I've lived it, so I know it's true.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
andi999 6y ago
Probably if attendance was not a requirement, the most disagreeable persons left the compound. This is a solution of course (which sounds less harsh than expulsion)
- ACow_Adonis 6y ago
  could have had a part in it, I'll fully admit. I know it lessened the tension in many of us, not just the trouble makers. I wasn't a bully, but also to advantage of not turning up to assume classes. honestly though, I can't speak highly enough of it, it was just what I needed after the first school. i hope that was that a deliberately joking use of the word 'compound' to refer to a school? (though probably how I felt about my first school emotionally). we had very few expulsions at the first school during my time there. but I can remember several instances of kids bullied until they had to leave. honestly it all seems so unjust and barbaric looking back.

konschubert 6y ago

With that logic, grown ups should be chewing each other's faces off in the street all the time. They don't. So clearly there is something (morale, social pressure, threat of punishment) that prevents them from doing it.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
DoreenMichele 6y ago
With that logic, grown ups should be chewing each other's faces off in the street all the time. Adults can be plenty cruel. It's just typically done with more subtlety, sophistication and plausible deniability than is employed by teens.
- cobraetor 6y ago
  Yes, it can be done at various levels of subtlety as well as at group levels. Why else would we have such words describing adult behavior as "workplace bullying", "online harassment", "domestic violence", "culture wars", "race hustling", etc.?
Ekaros 6y ago
Have you ever seen how people treat customer service? Too bad we can't punish them for such uncivil performance. Maybe we should go back to putting them on stocks and streaming it to world. Even with some sort of nice remote online interaction...
- oarsinsync 6y ago
  Have you ever seen how people get people in customer service departments to treat other people? I'm absolutely not saying the abuse given to customer service people get is justified, but it's not unprovoked either. Turns out when you codify bad behaviour, you get bad responses to that behaviour. What's the justification for codifying that bad behaviour in the first place?
6y ago

ymbeld 6y ago

We should just retire sociology. It’s all just human nature, and what that means is just obvious to everybody.

ymbeld 6y ago
Presumably people agree that we should “retire sociology” considering that I was being sarcastic.

choeger 6y ago

I call bullshit. Teenagers aren't complete in their development yet. That's why you can, and should, train and teach them. Teaching empathy is of course difficult and don't forget that the bullied peers are also teenagers that might behave "weirdly" (no victim blaming intended). But the whole thing still needs to be taught as it is a horrible thing that exists in reality. Compare this to drugs, STD, or plain old reckless behavior. You tell your teenagers not to take pills, use condoms, and not dive headfirst into unknown waters, right? Not everyone does this successfully, but there is no reason not to talk about it, just because your teenager will Roll their eyes. If that's any criterion, most parents would probably not talk to their kids at all between 12 and 20...

jkhdigital 6y ago
I think the real disagreement here is about how to effectively socialize children, not about whether they can be socialized at all. Hyperbolic arguments aside, we can agree that humans can be socialized to behave as good members of a community, but humans who are not socialized will frequently behave like animals.
- airhead969 6y ago
  Yes. Effectively socialize. The other issue is that humans are always going to be human, and seek will-to-power to advance their status to promote their genes and improve their lot in life. There's no undoing or wishing away human nature, only mild adjustments with nurture that we must keep trying to do with pragmatism.
lr4444lr 6y ago
He didn't say not to do anything. He said the (current) programs were pretending realities didn't exist, or that they could be scolded away. This is basically why the "Just Say No" anti-drug campaign failed.
- airhead969 6y ago
  Nancy, the 40th and first woman POTUS. ;) By being celebrities in their own bubbles, archaically-simplistic, and close-minded, the Reagans couldn't grasp reality or have empathy for anyone else. HIV/AIDS, final destruction of mental healthcare systems, War on Drugs, CIA crack epidemic-Iran Contra, and many more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan_administration_scandals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan_administration_scandals

eeZah7Ux 6y ago

First, "human nature" is a logical fallacy straight away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy Second, in many existing societies outside of the US school bullying is extremely uncommon.

fallingknife 6y ago
There are rules of human behavior just as there are rules of dog behavior. To state otherwise is ridiculous.
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  I never stated otherwise. The (well known) logical fallacy is in arbitrarily picking one behavior instead of another and labeling it "human nature" and claiming it's inevitable.

airhead969 6y ago

This is a good discussion. I hope we can dive into the nuances of what ways work to raise cooler kids, esp. becoming more messianic / moral courage: making peace, defending the weak, calling-out infliction of suffering, and setting better examples for their peers.