7 ms·

What's most disturbing is the realization that a measurable percentage of humans are just f*cked up. Considering how many reports there are of Facebook, Youtub

by z9znz 4y ago

What's most disturbing is the realization that a measurable percentage of humans are just f*cked up. Considering how many reports there are of Facebook, Youtube, Tiktok, and other sites where content moderators are suffering from having to perform their jobs, it suggests that there's a great deal of really terrible stuff going on - and worse, that the people involved are filming and attempting to share it. This is a serious thing, and it paints humanity as being far darker than it would seem from the surface. It also suggests that the apocalyptic movies may not be so far off when they suggest that humanity will revert to open barbarism if we're faced with a catastrophy large enough.

cainxinth 4y ago
> What's most disturbing is the realization that a measurable percentage of humans are just f*cked up. I already knew that. I even know the percentage roughly. According to the Pareto principle, 80% of people are not totally fucked up, but the 20% that are cause 80% of the problems.
- omgomgomgomg 4y ago
  Whats the gender segmentation on that, any info?
- Bakary 4y ago
  There's a nested Pareto in that 20% of that 20% causes 80% of the 80%. Considering that psychopathy (or whatever the updated term is) runs at a bit more of a percent of the population...
- throwamon 4y ago
  > I even know the percentage roughly. No, you don't. This "principle" is not a law of physics, it's just a rule of thumb that may or may not be wildly off the mark for an arbitrary distribution. Its common usage is like statistics horoscope.
  - andreilys 4y ago
    Having worked as a data scientist at multiple companies (From FANG to startup), the first thing I look at when I get my hands on data is the existence of the Pareto principle. I still haven’t found one company where this principle didn’t show up.
    - throwamon 4y ago
      What does this prove? If you have lots of data and dimensions, I bet you could just as likely find distributions that are roughly 50/50, 60/40, 90/10, 100/0 if you looked for them.
    - dado3212 4y ago
      Agreed. It’s not necessarily 80/20, it’s just that power laws show up a LOT. 90/10, 99/1, etc.
    - tomp 4y ago
      So you massage your features until they can produce a 20-80% split? Very scientific.
    - hbarka 4y ago
      The 50/50 principle always shows up in my histogram with interval of two.
swayvil 4y ago
What's truly tragic is that these "fucked up people" will always be the loudest voice in any conversation (be it fucked up by genetics, upbringing, hormones, drugs or ideology). This is where the internet fails.
jrvarela56 4y ago
Humanity has suffered for millions of years. Just recently we have been able to live peacefully, but most of the population does not live in Japan or the Netherlands. And even then just 70 years ago these places went through a World War. We have a long way to go until everyone on the planet can grow up in conditions where you turn out 'default good/well-meaning towards others'.
- Bakary 4y ago
  Kinda makes you wonder about the ethical aspect of deciding to give birth
  - dylan604 4y ago
    Or the ethical aspect of forcing people to give birth
    - Bakary 4y ago
      What bothers me is that many basic ethical principles fall by the wayside when the topic shifts to our own children. The reason for that is obvious: we are the descendants of organisms that valued reproduction. It's nonetheless an interesting discussion to have. Is it ethical to create a sentient AI that might suffer? -> we already make similar decisions millions of times per day Don't treat humans as means to an end, instead treat them as ends -> we create other humans to satisfy our current needs in a world characterized by struggle And of course as you have pointed out, some groups consider that it's better by default for a child to exist in adverse starting conditions (whilst also negatively impacting other people) than to not exist
      - wussboy 4y ago
        The people who decide bringing new life into this world is unethical will quickly be replaced those who think it _is_ ethical. I understand your reasoning, but "don't have kids" can never be the answer.
orangepurple 4y ago
You should have seen what terms most people searched for when they used a searched engine back in the day. I doubt things changed much since then. It's all of the worst things you can imagine and probably even worse than you think.
ferrocarraiges 4y ago
That view goes back much farther than apocalyptic movies. In 1651, Thomas Hobbes wrote: >the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Hobbes, like many philosophers, did not have much faith in human nature.
- singlow 4y ago
  It goes back a bit further than Hobbes :) "The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it?" - Jeremiah "Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." - Moses, about man before the flood. "This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil." - the Gospel of John
Beltalowda 4y ago
A relatively small percentage of people can post a lot of horrible stuff; TikTok has about 1 billion – BILLION – users who are active once a month. If only 1% of those people are fucked up, and they all post one fucked up thing a month then we'd be talking about 10 million videos/month. I don't know how accurate that 1 billion number of users is exactly, but it's probably in the right ballpark. In reality there are probably a few million "serial posters" of horrible stuff. Either way, with numbers like that it's very easy to get millions of undisputedly horrible videos.
- dylan604 4y ago
  >I don't know how accurate that 1 billion number of users is exactly Ask Elon Musk to offer to buy it, then we'll see how accurate those numbers are. In reality, I never believe people's published numbers. OF COURSE they are inflated. Their entire (maybe majority?) valuations are dependent on those numbers being as high as possible.
  - random314 4y ago
    > OF COURSE they are inflated Bytedance is pre-IPO. However, you are accusing Google, Facebook, snapchat, Twitter of securities fraud. What is the latest from Musk, on Twitter's alleged securities fraud?
    - dylan604 4y ago
      I'm not accusing anyone of anything other than padding their numbers. How you interpret that is up to you. Do you really believe TikTok as exactly 1 Billion users, or 999,990,000+ users? Anyone that says that is 1 Billion is padding the numbers. Nobody is going to call that 999 million. If the number is anything close to being rounded, the number is padded. Unless they are showing you an exact number from the time the count was read, it is being padded.
  - Beltalowda 4y ago
    I didn't even check the source of those numbers; it was just the first thing that came up in a very quick search. It doesn't really matter: even with 500 million or 100 million you've got the same "a small percentage of a very large group can cause a lot of havoc"-effect. You see the same if you drive to work: you can easily encounter over a 100 of other drivers, and only a very small percentage of them can give the perception that "people are such bad drivers" when in fact it's just the 1% of the 100 people you encountered on that trip. I find it both depressing and comforting; it's comforting to know most people aren't that bad, and it's depressing that such a small group of assholes can fuck it all up.
notyourwork 4y ago
> and it paints humanity as being far darker than it would seem from the surface. Unless a person intentionally hides from the world, it is hard to not be aware of this. Human trafficking, cartels, pollution, there is a myriad of ways in which humans are just not "great people". Why act disillusioned by it?
mc32 4y ago
Some people are depraved and simply lack a moral compass. What's scary to think is these are, statistically, people you pass on your way to work. They exist in poor and rich countries, among the pious and among the irreverent and in between. It's the same kind of people who adopt[1] in order to get government subsidies but treat their charges worse than cattle --at least cattle get to graze nd do cattle things. [1] I hope it's not necessary to state that this is a small minority of adoptive/foster parents, but they exist, unfortunately.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
squokko 4y ago
onetimeusename 4y ago
It used to be more obvious. The internet used to have popular gore sites and all sorts of horrible content that would find its way online and even go viral in a number of cases. I think law enforcement, automated detection, anti spam measures, linking accounts to humans, and the centralization of content around just a few sites that had strict rules made it seem like this content barely existed and that people behaved sociably on the internet. I think people lost sight of the rough edges. TikTok is much harder to censor in automated ways, clearly. People also find ways around the censors. So all that awful stuff may have found a way back onto the internet.
parkingrift 4y ago
>This is a serious thing, and it paints humanity as being far darker than it would seem from the surface. "Build it yourself" internet bubbles are giving people hilariously wrong impressions of society, and humanity. These same bubbles led to many millions of people shocked and flabbergasted when Donald Trump won in 2016. There will probably be just as many flabbergasted people when Democrats get thrown out of the House in three weeks. Internet "safe spaces" and censorship of differing opinions give people that impression that society is changing, or has changed. It hasn't.
- z9znz 4y ago
  I hope you're wrong. And if you're right, I hope this is all a simulation.
  - parkingrift 4y ago
    Anything is possible, but the polls and prediction markets are telling a pretty grim story. Democrats may still hold the Senate, but it’s little better than a coin flip. The fact that people are downvoting this obvious proclamation is further proof of my original claim. People are in bubbles, unaware of reality. No one should be shocked that Democrats are about to lose the Congress, and yet here we are. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-election-forecast/house/?cid=rrpromo https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-election-forecast/... https://electionbettingodds.com/House2022.html https://electionbettingodds.com/House2022.html https://polymarket.com/market/which-party-will-win-the-us-house-in-the-2022-elections https://polymarket.com/market/which-party-will-win-the-us-ho...
MomoXenosaga 4y ago
The internet is anonymous. In meatspace people refrain from murder and rape because there are consequences.
threads2 4y ago
> What's most disturbing is the realization that a measurable percentage of humans are just f*cked up. yeah I think that's the theme of David Lynch movies > It also suggests that the apocalyptic movies may not be so far off when they suggest that humanity will revert to open barbarism if we're faced with a catastrophy large enough. I think that's disproven - I saw a study where they looked at peoples' behaviour during the WWII London bombings and it was mostly characterized by Mutual Aid

by z9znz 4y ago

cainxinth 4y ago

> What's most disturbing is the realization that a measurable percentage of humans are just f*cked up. I already knew that. I even know the percentage roughly. According to the Pareto principle, 80% of people are not totally fucked up, but the 20% that are cause 80% of the problems.

omgomgomgomg 4y ago
Whats the gender segmentation on that, any info?
Bakary 4y ago
There's a nested Pareto in that 20% of that 20% causes 80% of the 80%. Considering that psychopathy (or whatever the updated term is) runs at a bit more of a percent of the population...
throwamon 4y ago
> I even know the percentage roughly. No, you don't. This "principle" is not a law of physics, it's just a rule of thumb that may or may not be wildly off the mark for an arbitrary distribution. Its common usage is like statistics horoscope.
- andreilys 4y ago
  Having worked as a data scientist at multiple companies (From FANG to startup), the first thing I look at when I get my hands on data is the existence of the Pareto principle. I still haven’t found one company where this principle didn’t show up.
  - throwamon 4y ago
    What does this prove? If you have lots of data and dimensions, I bet you could just as likely find distributions that are roughly 50/50, 60/40, 90/10, 100/0 if you looked for them.
  - dado3212 4y ago
    Agreed. It’s not necessarily 80/20, it’s just that power laws show up a LOT. 90/10, 99/1, etc.
  - tomp 4y ago
    So you massage your features until they can produce a 20-80% split? Very scientific.
  - hbarka 4y ago
    The 50/50 principle always shows up in my histogram with interval of two.

swayvil 4y ago

What's truly tragic is that these "fucked up people" will always be the loudest voice in any conversation (be it fucked up by genetics, upbringing, hormones, drugs or ideology). This is where the internet fails.

jrvarela56 4y ago

Humanity has suffered for millions of years. Just recently we have been able to live peacefully, but most of the population does not live in Japan or the Netherlands. And even then just 70 years ago these places went through a World War. We have a long way to go until everyone on the planet can grow up in conditions where you turn out 'default good/well-meaning towards others'.

Bakary 4y ago
Kinda makes you wonder about the ethical aspect of deciding to give birth
- dylan604 4y ago
  Or the ethical aspect of forcing people to give birth
  - Bakary 4y ago
    What bothers me is that many basic ethical principles fall by the wayside when the topic shifts to our own children. The reason for that is obvious: we are the descendants of organisms that valued reproduction. It's nonetheless an interesting discussion to have. Is it ethical to create a sentient AI that might suffer? -> we already make similar decisions millions of times per day Don't treat humans as means to an end, instead treat them as ends -> we create other humans to satisfy our current needs in a world characterized by struggle And of course as you have pointed out, some groups consider that it's better by default for a child to exist in adverse starting conditions (whilst also negatively impacting other people) than to not exist
    - wussboy 4y ago
      The people who decide bringing new life into this world is unethical will quickly be replaced those who think it _is_ ethical. I understand your reasoning, but "don't have kids" can never be the answer.

orangepurple 4y ago

You should have seen what terms most people searched for when they used a searched engine back in the day. I doubt things changed much since then. It's all of the worst things you can imagine and probably even worse than you think.

ferrocarraiges 4y ago

That view goes back much farther than apocalyptic movies. In 1651, Thomas Hobbes wrote: >the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Hobbes, like many philosophers, did not have much faith in human nature.

singlow 4y ago
It goes back a bit further than Hobbes :) "The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it?" - Jeremiah "Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." - Moses, about man before the flood. "This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil." - the Gospel of John

Beltalowda 4y ago

A relatively small percentage of people can post a lot of horrible stuff; TikTok has about 1 billion – BILLION – users who are active once a month. If only 1% of those people are fucked up, and they all post one fucked up thing a month then we'd be talking about 10 million videos/month. I don't know how accurate that 1 billion number of users is exactly, but it's probably in the right ballpark. In reality there are probably a few million "serial posters" of horrible stuff. Either way, with numbers like that it's very easy to get millions of undisputedly horrible videos.

dylan604 4y ago
>I don't know how accurate that 1 billion number of users is exactly Ask Elon Musk to offer to buy it, then we'll see how accurate those numbers are. In reality, I never believe people's published numbers. OF COURSE they are inflated. Their entire (maybe majority?) valuations are dependent on those numbers being as high as possible.
- random314 4y ago
  > OF COURSE they are inflated Bytedance is pre-IPO. However, you are accusing Google, Facebook, snapchat, Twitter of securities fraud. What is the latest from Musk, on Twitter's alleged securities fraud?
  - dylan604 4y ago
    I'm not accusing anyone of anything other than padding their numbers. How you interpret that is up to you. Do you really believe TikTok as exactly 1 Billion users, or 999,990,000+ users? Anyone that says that is 1 Billion is padding the numbers. Nobody is going to call that 999 million. If the number is anything close to being rounded, the number is padded. Unless they are showing you an exact number from the time the count was read, it is being padded.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  I didn't even check the source of those numbers; it was just the first thing that came up in a very quick search. It doesn't really matter: even with 500 million or 100 million you've got the same "a small percentage of a very large group can cause a lot of havoc"-effect. You see the same if you drive to work: you can easily encounter over a 100 of other drivers, and only a very small percentage of them can give the perception that "people are such bad drivers" when in fact it's just the 1% of the 100 people you encountered on that trip. I find it both depressing and comforting; it's comforting to know most people aren't that bad, and it's depressing that such a small group of assholes can fuck it all up.

notyourwork 4y ago

> and it paints humanity as being far darker than it would seem from the surface. Unless a person intentionally hides from the world, it is hard to not be aware of this. Human trafficking, cartels, pollution, there is a myriad of ways in which humans are just not "great people". Why act disillusioned by it?

mc32 4y ago

Some people are depraved and simply lack a moral compass. What's scary to think is these are, statistically, people you pass on your way to work. They exist in poor and rich countries, among the pious and among the irreverent and in between. It's the same kind of people who adopt[1] in order to get government subsidies but treat their charges worse than cattle --at least cattle get to graze nd do cattle things. [1] I hope it's not necessary to state that this is a small minority of adoptive/foster parents, but they exist, unfortunately.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

squokko 4y ago

onetimeusename 4y ago

It used to be more obvious. The internet used to have popular gore sites and all sorts of horrible content that would find its way online and even go viral in a number of cases. I think law enforcement, automated detection, anti spam measures, linking accounts to humans, and the centralization of content around just a few sites that had strict rules made it seem like this content barely existed and that people behaved sociably on the internet. I think people lost sight of the rough edges. TikTok is much harder to censor in automated ways, clearly. People also find ways around the censors. So all that awful stuff may have found a way back onto the internet.

parkingrift 4y ago

>This is a serious thing, and it paints humanity as being far darker than it would seem from the surface. "Build it yourself" internet bubbles are giving people hilariously wrong impressions of society, and humanity. These same bubbles led to many millions of people shocked and flabbergasted when Donald Trump won in 2016. There will probably be just as many flabbergasted people when Democrats get thrown out of the House in three weeks. Internet "safe spaces" and censorship of differing opinions give people that impression that society is changing, or has changed. It hasn't.

z9znz 4y ago
I hope you're wrong. And if you're right, I hope this is all a simulation.
- parkingrift 4y ago
  Anything is possible, but the polls and prediction markets are telling a pretty grim story. Democrats may still hold the Senate, but it’s little better than a coin flip. The fact that people are downvoting this obvious proclamation is further proof of my original claim. People are in bubbles, unaware of reality. No one should be shocked that Democrats are about to lose the Congress, and yet here we are. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-election-forecast/house/?cid=rrpromo https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-election-forecast/... https://electionbettingodds.com/House2022.html https://electionbettingodds.com/House2022.html https://polymarket.com/market/which-party-will-win-the-us-house-in-the-2022-elections https://polymarket.com/market/which-party-will-win-the-us-ho...

MomoXenosaga 4y ago

The internet is anonymous. In meatspace people refrain from murder and rape because there are consequences.

threads2 4y ago

> What's most disturbing is the realization that a measurable percentage of humans are just f*cked up. yeah I think that's the theme of David Lynch movies > It also suggests that the apocalyptic movies may not be so far off when they suggest that humanity will revert to open barbarism if we're faced with a catastrophy large enough. I think that's disproven - I saw a study where they looked at peoples' behaviour during the WWII London bombings and it was mostly characterized by Mutual Aid