5 ms·

I hate, immensely, how effective "double down and never admit guilt" is, but I don't think there's anything we can do about it as a society. Thank goodness mos

I hate, immensely, how effective "double down and never admit guilt" is, but I don't think there's anything we can do about it as a society. Thank goodness most people don't have the guts to hold firm long enough to get away with it...

ripper1138 5y ago
Seems like the only benefit to admitting guilt is for ones own conscience, but clearly that’s not enough for many.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  our society is also not structured anymore to allowing one to admit guilt, and be absolved by some sort of community process after which you can return to a normal life; if you are guilty now you are forever cursed.
  - chaorace 5y ago
    I think that's because, thanks to the internet, "now" never truly ends. You're often just one Google search away from reanimating any significant event in someone else's life.
    - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      right, hence right to be forgotten laws in some places.
  - smogcutter 5y ago
    When was it structured that way? Serious question - I generally believe the same thing, but looking at it from the outside I’m finding it hard to reach a worthwhile example.
    - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      As chaorace above you suggested, it was so structured by the arrival of the technology to keep track of everything you ever did that was bad and put it online for future reference. The tendency to do it was already in place, it is likely that you see someone from high school that was a jerk and you think that jerk once did this, even if it was 15 years ago. That's a sort of normal human tendency. Some people are so notorious for rather innocuous things that they are outcast - Monica Lewinsky is an obvious example - I believe she was ostracized for a little more than a decade. Legally there is already the habit of judging people unfit for crimes, even if they have served their time. American society is structured to make people with felony convictions harder to employ. Now add in technology and imagine being able to treat anyone you have never met like that jerk in High School forever. The final step of structuring is then provided by people who can see ways to profit off of the fact that people who have done non felonious things might still have done things that society will find objectionable, and that the technology exists to keep this in people's eyes.
      - smogcutter 5y ago
        I agree with you, but that’s a subtly different claim than that we used to have a community process (or ritual, but that’s adding some baggage) for forgiveness/reintegration that has since been lost. Not having the technology that creates a social record is different than actively forgiving and forgetting.
        bryanrasmussen 5y ago
        well the community process thing is sort of a more complicated thing - some argue that the old process of putting people in the stocks / public humiliation was a more humane way of treating people because they then paid their debt and could be reintegrated. Not saying I agree but the argument at any rate is there was a community process. I am at any rate open to the possibility that this was a good aspect of a system that in many other ways was bad. If so that community process was destroyed and replaced with a system that would never forgive you for your transgressions. However the system was imperfect and thus people could move, reinvent themselves and reintegrate themselves by exploiting the imperfections. Technology is now working to remove this capability. So it was not that the community process was removed by the arrival of technology, it was removed and later the technology arrived to strengthen what had been put in its place - creating a system in which transgressions and punishments are eternal.
- branko_d 5y ago
  There are great benefits for the society, and dare I say species. Conscience, after all, is not an accident. Its a product of our evolution. We lived in small groups for most of our existence, and the very survival of the group was tied pretty directly to how well the group members worked together. Lying had consequences for a group that would not make lying have consequences for an individual. The problems is that we now live in groups much larger than anything we experienced before.
  - coddle-hark 5y ago
    > Conscience, after all, is not an accident. Its a product of our evolution. We lived in small groups for most of our existence, and the very survival of the group was tied pretty directly to how well the group members worked together. Lying had consequences for a group that would not make lying have consequences for an individual. Be careful making assumptions like this. I mean, you're right, having a conscience is a product of our evolution... but so is the ability to lie. You make it sound like disadvantageous qualities would be filtered out by evolution but that is clearly not the case.
    - branko_d 5y ago
      It's a balance between the (evolutionary) advantage for of the group vs the advantage for the individual. Some lying may be beneficial for the individual as long as it doesn't harm the group too much. Lie too much though, and the group gets less likely to survive as a whole, meaning individuals within the group are less likely to survive as well.
simonh 5y ago
For most of us there are only a handful of people we need to maintain our credibility with personally or professionally. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Yeah, it's a game of numbers. When you have 22 million subscribers and half of them don't trust you anymore, then you still have 11 million subscribers.
codeflo 5y ago
That’s a pessimistic way to put it, but you have a point. This depends on the target audience though. Some people seem unable to be convinced by hard evidence and reason. If you’re able to pick your audience — which is the case for content creators and politicians — you will always be able to address those people. In most professional settings, you’re more dependent on the goodwill of someone specific, and I think there the strategy is less effective.
- ZephyrBlu 5y ago
  In this case it wasn't so much that Dream chose his audience, but that his audience is primarily impressionable young kids. I looked through the Reddit threads that got posted around the time this happened and there were clearly a lot of young people who either chose to believe Dream because they didn't understand the statistics well enough to know it was BS, or were trying to rationalize that Dream was innocent based on some weird logic.
  - codeflo 5y ago
    That’s mostly my point though, if “doubling down” works best with impressionable, unreasonable (in this case, young) people, then the strategy limits you to that audience.
numpad0 5y ago
Could something like that possibly be a requirement for a self-sustaining life? Like you can’t be both alive and reasonable?
reedf1 5y ago
It seems like this strategy didn't work so well in the past - do we know the reason why?
- michaelt 5y ago
  Perhaps politicians lying is business as usual, and it only seems to have increased because society gradually forgets things as they recede into history. Just in the past the lie was "Iraq was behind 9/11 and has WMDs" or "The war in Vietnam is important to fight and easy to win"
thanatos519 5y ago
It's troubling when individuals do this, but I find it especially brutal that "double down and never admit guilt" is the go-to strategy for most nation states and corporations.
- vinw 5y ago
  What is a "nation state"? edit: Wikipedia says there are around 20 nation states. I don't know why you're picking those out specifically though.
  - infimum 5y ago
    lmgtfy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - pjc50 5y ago
    The rest of the world would call "country", but American govspeak has decided to call "nation state" for some weird reason.
    - bonoboTP 5y ago
      The English language is horribly ambiguous and confused around words like nation, state, nation state, country, nationality, citizenship, ethnicity, race etc.
      - pjc50 5y ago
        Yes, but I've not seen an explanation of which useful cases are covered by "nation state" but not by "country" or even better "government". I don't think it even solves the problem of countries which cause other people to get mad if you acknowledge their existence (Taiwan, Palestine) Meanwhile, does "nation state" apply to the Plurinational State of Bolivia?
SilkRoadie 5y ago
Deception can be planned or opportunistic. In this case, Dream planned to deceive people by tweaking game randomness. It is impossible to justify when hundreds of people are following the rules. This is why people double down. You mostly see apologies when opportunity got the best of judgement.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

ripper1138 5y ago

Seems like the only benefit to admitting guilt is for ones own conscience, but clearly that’s not enough for many.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago
our society is also not structured anymore to allowing one to admit guilt, and be absolved by some sort of community process after which you can return to a normal life; if you are guilty now you are forever cursed.
- chaorace 5y ago
  I think that's because, thanks to the internet, "now" never truly ends. You're often just one Google search away from reanimating any significant event in someone else's life.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    right, hence right to be forgotten laws in some places.
- smogcutter 5y ago
  When was it structured that way? Serious question - I generally believe the same thing, but looking at it from the outside I’m finding it hard to reach a worthwhile example.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    As chaorace above you suggested, it was so structured by the arrival of the technology to keep track of everything you ever did that was bad and put it online for future reference. The tendency to do it was already in place, it is likely that you see someone from high school that was a jerk and you think that jerk once did this, even if it was 15 years ago. That's a sort of normal human tendency. Some people are so notorious for rather innocuous things that they are outcast - Monica Lewinsky is an obvious example - I believe she was ostracized for a little more than a decade. Legally there is already the habit of judging people unfit for crimes, even if they have served their time. American society is structured to make people with felony convictions harder to employ. Now add in technology and imagine being able to treat anyone you have never met like that jerk in High School forever. The final step of structuring is then provided by people who can see ways to profit off of the fact that people who have done non felonious things might still have done things that society will find objectionable, and that the technology exists to keep this in people's eyes.
    - smogcutter 5y ago
      I agree with you, but that’s a subtly different claim than that we used to have a community process (or ritual, but that’s adding some baggage) for forgiveness/reintegration that has since been lost. Not having the technology that creates a social record is different than actively forgiving and forgetting.
      - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
        well the community process thing is sort of a more complicated thing - some argue that the old process of putting people in the stocks / public humiliation was a more humane way of treating people because they then paid their debt and could be reintegrated. Not saying I agree but the argument at any rate is there was a community process. I am at any rate open to the possibility that this was a good aspect of a system that in many other ways was bad. If so that community process was destroyed and replaced with a system that would never forgive you for your transgressions. However the system was imperfect and thus people could move, reinvent themselves and reintegrate themselves by exploiting the imperfections. Technology is now working to remove this capability. So it was not that the community process was removed by the arrival of technology, it was removed and later the technology arrived to strengthen what had been put in its place - creating a system in which transgressions and punishments are eternal.
branko_d 5y ago
There are great benefits for the society, and dare I say species. Conscience, after all, is not an accident. Its a product of our evolution. We lived in small groups for most of our existence, and the very survival of the group was tied pretty directly to how well the group members worked together. Lying had consequences for a group that would not make lying have consequences for an individual. The problems is that we now live in groups much larger than anything we experienced before.
- coddle-hark 5y ago
  > Conscience, after all, is not an accident. Its a product of our evolution. We lived in small groups for most of our existence, and the very survival of the group was tied pretty directly to how well the group members worked together. Lying had consequences for a group that would not make lying have consequences for an individual. Be careful making assumptions like this. I mean, you're right, having a conscience is a product of our evolution... but so is the ability to lie. You make it sound like disadvantageous qualities would be filtered out by evolution but that is clearly not the case.
  - branko_d 5y ago
    It's a balance between the (evolutionary) advantage for of the group vs the advantage for the individual. Some lying may be beneficial for the individual as long as it doesn't harm the group too much. Lie too much though, and the group gets less likely to survive as a whole, meaning individuals within the group are less likely to survive as well.

simonh 5y ago

For most of us there are only a handful of people we need to maintain our credibility with personally or professionally. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

imtringued 5y ago
Yeah, it's a game of numbers. When you have 22 million subscribers and half of them don't trust you anymore, then you still have 11 million subscribers.

codeflo 5y ago

That’s a pessimistic way to put it, but you have a point. This depends on the target audience though. Some people seem unable to be convinced by hard evidence and reason. If you’re able to pick your audience — which is the case for content creators and politicians — you will always be able to address those people. In most professional settings, you’re more dependent on the goodwill of someone specific, and I think there the strategy is less effective.

ZephyrBlu 5y ago
In this case it wasn't so much that Dream chose his audience, but that his audience is primarily impressionable young kids. I looked through the Reddit threads that got posted around the time this happened and there were clearly a lot of young people who either chose to believe Dream because they didn't understand the statistics well enough to know it was BS, or were trying to rationalize that Dream was innocent based on some weird logic.
- codeflo 5y ago
  That’s mostly my point though, if “doubling down” works best with impressionable, unreasonable (in this case, young) people, then the strategy limits you to that audience.

numpad0 5y ago

Could something like that possibly be a requirement for a self-sustaining life? Like you can’t be both alive and reasonable?

reedf1 5y ago

It seems like this strategy didn't work so well in the past - do we know the reason why?

michaelt 5y ago
Perhaps politicians lying is business as usual, and it only seems to have increased because society gradually forgets things as they recede into history. Just in the past the lie was "Iraq was behind 9/11 and has WMDs" or "The war in Vietnam is important to fight and easy to win"

thanatos519 5y ago

It's troubling when individuals do this, but I find it especially brutal that "double down and never admit guilt" is the go-to strategy for most nation states and corporations.

vinw 5y ago
What is a "nation state"? edit: Wikipedia says there are around 20 nation states. I don't know why you're picking those out specifically though.
- infimum 5y ago
  lmgtfy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- pjc50 5y ago
  The rest of the world would call "country", but American govspeak has decided to call "nation state" for some weird reason.
  - bonoboTP 5y ago
    The English language is horribly ambiguous and confused around words like nation, state, nation state, country, nationality, citizenship, ethnicity, race etc.
    - pjc50 5y ago
      Yes, but I've not seen an explanation of which useful cases are covered by "nation state" but not by "country" or even better "government". I don't think it even solves the problem of countries which cause other people to get mad if you acknowledge their existence (Taiwan, Palestine) Meanwhile, does "nation state" apply to the Plurinational State of Bolivia?

SilkRoadie 5y ago

Deception can be planned or opportunistic. In this case, Dream planned to deceive people by tweaking game randomness. It is impossible to justify when hundreds of people are following the rules. This is why people double down. You mostly see apologies when opportunity got the best of judgement.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]