8 ms·

I recently read Rutger Bregman's "Humankind" (original Dutch tile: Most people are kind), and it really seems to be true, I like the optimistic tone of the book

I recently read Rutger Bregman's "Humankind" (original Dutch tile: Most people are kind), and it really seems to be true, I like the optimistic tone of the book and perhaps it's indeed robbing you of beautiful experiences when you are to distrustful towards others... And then there is twitter. Like a filter for the worst of the worst, I just stay away from it. Twitter helps me with that because having no account means that every encounter ends in that curse inducing black screen when you're half way into reading a tweet and the back button doesn't even work.

frgtmnm 4y ago
Isn't Twitter a counterexample to the conjecture "Most people are kind"? I also don't have a Twitter account. And I'm happy too keep it that way. But bad people don't cease to exist if you stop reading their tweets. In the past 100 years, we had Auschwitz, the killing fields, the gulags in USSR, genocides in central Africa, human trafficking, child abuse, and many other crimes against humanity. I don't see how people can decide within a couple of decades that, nevertheless, "most people are kind". There is a monster hiding in all of us. And it doesn't go away by ignoring it. Instead we should acknowledge it, and tame it. Because otherwise it will burst forth unexpectedly, and a new Hitler or Stalin is born.
- agileAlligator 4y ago
  > Isn't Twitter a counterexample to the conjecture "Most people are kind"? Not really, no. Coz the type of people on Twitter, and the type of people to actually tweet (and not just lurk) aren't exactly the sanest of humanity.
  - frgtmnm 4y ago
    Do you actually have evidence for that?
    - teekert 4y ago
      Rutger Bregman's "Humankind" is actually presenting a lot of (convincing) evidence towards the hypothesis that the vast vast majority of people are in fact kind, and have been throughout most of our recent history. This is thus also evidence for the statement "Twitter is a cesspool of the worst of the worst of us", although we may ask: Is it really? Or does "the algorithm" bring out the worst and to the surface? Does Twitter repel kind people? These are interesting, even very important questions imho.
      - nonrandomstring 4y ago
        It's an interesting question on a different level than individual choice/behaviour. In real life, most people shun being associated with a socially ostracised outlaw group, deviants or extremists. Even for actual criminals, deviants or extremists, we don't like to be labelled and lumped in with the others - except where a group is oppressed by obvious social-injustice, which engenders a sense of pride in belonging. Twitter, is, as far as I can see, widely recognised as "cesspool of the worst of the worst of us". And I have never perceived Twitter as some sort of oppressed minority unable to find a voice in society. Yet people choose to remain on the platform, and some have even built their entire identity and life around it. I think this is because the old media sought to legitimise it. They've worked very hard for a long time to bury the tawdry and unacceptable side of it.
      - frgtmnm 4y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humankind:_A_Hopeful_History#Reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humankind:_A_Hopeful_History#R... suggests that many experts think that his convincing evidence is lacking from a scientific point of view. Solzhenitsyn demonstrated that the Soviet Union was built on the lies of the ordinary people. It wasn't just some rotten apples at the top of the ruling class. It was rotten to the core. The vast majority of people were lying. To others and to themselves. I think it's really scary to ignore this, and pat ourselves on our back, and say that we're pretty kind after all. Of course I agree that in a peaceful civilization, a lot of people are pretty kind on the surface. But there's stuff lurking underneath the surface. And once we start preaching that this isn't really there, a lot of bad stuff can happen. There's war going on right now. And it's not just Putin that is evil. There are thousands of people actively participating in this war. Shooting others. The could decide to do something else, yet they don't. I think that one of the theses in Tolstoy's War and Peace is that these big wars aren't just the products of some bad apples at the top. He presents Napoleon as something like a puppet, driven by deeper forces that we barely understand. We should have more respect for these deeper chaotic forces, that we barely understand.
  - mavhc 4y ago
    Most people on twitter are great, question is not the people, it's what's chosen to be amplified, either by the media, or the algorithm, or the users.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Most people are kind IRL. There's a few reasons: They are affected by physical proximity, eye contact, body language, tone of voice, even smell. They lack the courage to be hostile to strangers who may possibly retaliate with physical force. Deeply entrenched socialisation and group norms operate mostly on the inter-personal, face-to-face level. These controls are so strong that people are quite unable to dehumanise others when face to face. See Andrew Kimbrall's 2000 Schumacher lecture [1] (in particular the story of the pilot shot down in Vietnam). Mass communications technology really requires we relearn our entire stack of socialisation skills using different signals and different brain faculties. Nobody is taught that. Nobody today has time for that. [1] https://archive.org/details/cold_evil_kimbrell https://archive.org/details/cold_evil_kimbrell
specialist 4y ago
> And then there is twitter. You may recall the advice about waiting til next morning to hit send on that scathing email reply. You might not feel so dramatic after a cooldown period. My working theory on why Twitter is so noxious is that it captures (then broadcasts) people's impulsiveness reaction. I keep thinking of Marshal McLuhan's The Medium is the Message. What would he say about Twitter? I've never grokked McLuhan's distinction between "hot" and "cold" mediums. (Makes sense; being one of the first to discuss this stuff, he had to invent a vocabulary.) My current guess involves feedback loops and channel bandwidth. "Hot" is reactive, "cold" is deliberative. But it's not just the immediacy of the medium, it's also the interactions (feedback loops). Face to face, there is very high bandwidth (included by not limited to backchannel, body language, facial expressions, context, etc) along with rapid feedback. So we have the information needed to keep communication from going off the rails. Alas, Twitter's very constrained bandwidth, while maintaining the rapid feedback loop, doesn't permit any sort collaborative moderating effort. In other words, Twitter is custom built for kneejerk clapbacks. For contrast, I keep thinking of John Carmack's journaling via a .plan file (and the finger protocol). Twas a precursor to blogging and RSS feeds. Why didn't that medium incite virality, outrage, and pogroms? .plan files are also low band width, right? I think it's because the feedback loops simply didn't exist.
- cnity 4y ago
  My theory about Twitter is that the UI makes it feel like you are interacting in a really small group (by constraining how much you can see at any one time), when in reality you are broadcasting to an audience of possibly many thousands. This produces speech and behaviour people would use with only close friends, but to a huge audience. If you were just with one other programming friend, you might make reference to a repo you'd seen and say something like "yeah that approach is totally batshit", but you wouldn't say the same thing to the author in a public forum in front of many people. I think Twitter tricks our minds into behaving like the former but actually in the latter. So it's easy to forget that you may as well be directly insulting the author.
  - cxr 4y ago
    > This produces speech and behaviour people would use with only close friends, but to a huge audience. Corollary: privately, most people really are assholes (and they just suppress it when they don't feel bold/secure enough to be open about it)?

frgtmnm 4y ago

Isn't Twitter a counterexample to the conjecture "Most people are kind"? I also don't have a Twitter account. And I'm happy too keep it that way. But bad people don't cease to exist if you stop reading their tweets. In the past 100 years, we had Auschwitz, the killing fields, the gulags in USSR, genocides in central Africa, human trafficking, child abuse, and many other crimes against humanity. I don't see how people can decide within a couple of decades that, nevertheless, "most people are kind". There is a monster hiding in all of us. And it doesn't go away by ignoring it. Instead we should acknowledge it, and tame it. Because otherwise it will burst forth unexpectedly, and a new Hitler or Stalin is born.

agileAlligator 4y ago
> Isn't Twitter a counterexample to the conjecture "Most people are kind"? Not really, no. Coz the type of people on Twitter, and the type of people to actually tweet (and not just lurk) aren't exactly the sanest of humanity.
- frgtmnm 4y ago
  Do you actually have evidence for that?
  - teekert 4y ago
    Rutger Bregman's "Humankind" is actually presenting a lot of (convincing) evidence towards the hypothesis that the vast vast majority of people are in fact kind, and have been throughout most of our recent history. This is thus also evidence for the statement "Twitter is a cesspool of the worst of the worst of us", although we may ask: Is it really? Or does "the algorithm" bring out the worst and to the surface? Does Twitter repel kind people? These are interesting, even very important questions imho.
    - nonrandomstring 4y ago
      It's an interesting question on a different level than individual choice/behaviour. In real life, most people shun being associated with a socially ostracised outlaw group, deviants or extremists. Even for actual criminals, deviants or extremists, we don't like to be labelled and lumped in with the others - except where a group is oppressed by obvious social-injustice, which engenders a sense of pride in belonging. Twitter, is, as far as I can see, widely recognised as "cesspool of the worst of the worst of us". And I have never perceived Twitter as some sort of oppressed minority unable to find a voice in society. Yet people choose to remain on the platform, and some have even built their entire identity and life around it. I think this is because the old media sought to legitimise it. They've worked very hard for a long time to bury the tawdry and unacceptable side of it.
    - frgtmnm 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humankind:_A_Hopeful_History#Reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humankind:_A_Hopeful_History#R... suggests that many experts think that his convincing evidence is lacking from a scientific point of view. Solzhenitsyn demonstrated that the Soviet Union was built on the lies of the ordinary people. It wasn't just some rotten apples at the top of the ruling class. It was rotten to the core. The vast majority of people were lying. To others and to themselves. I think it's really scary to ignore this, and pat ourselves on our back, and say that we're pretty kind after all. Of course I agree that in a peaceful civilization, a lot of people are pretty kind on the surface. But there's stuff lurking underneath the surface. And once we start preaching that this isn't really there, a lot of bad stuff can happen. There's war going on right now. And it's not just Putin that is evil. There are thousands of people actively participating in this war. Shooting others. The could decide to do something else, yet they don't. I think that one of the theses in Tolstoy's War and Peace is that these big wars aren't just the products of some bad apples at the top. He presents Napoleon as something like a puppet, driven by deeper forces that we barely understand. We should have more respect for these deeper chaotic forces, that we barely understand.
- mavhc 4y ago
  Most people on twitter are great, question is not the people, it's what's chosen to be amplified, either by the media, or the algorithm, or the users.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
Most people are kind IRL. There's a few reasons: They are affected by physical proximity, eye contact, body language, tone of voice, even smell. They lack the courage to be hostile to strangers who may possibly retaliate with physical force. Deeply entrenched socialisation and group norms operate mostly on the inter-personal, face-to-face level. These controls are so strong that people are quite unable to dehumanise others when face to face. See Andrew Kimbrall's 2000 Schumacher lecture [1] (in particular the story of the pilot shot down in Vietnam). Mass communications technology really requires we relearn our entire stack of socialisation skills using different signals and different brain faculties. Nobody is taught that. Nobody today has time for that. [1] https://archive.org/details/cold_evil_kimbrell https://archive.org/details/cold_evil_kimbrell

specialist 4y ago

> And then there is twitter. You may recall the advice about waiting til next morning to hit send on that scathing email reply. You might not feel so dramatic after a cooldown period. My working theory on why Twitter is so noxious is that it captures (then broadcasts) people's impulsiveness reaction. I keep thinking of Marshal McLuhan's The Medium is the Message. What would he say about Twitter? I've never grokked McLuhan's distinction between "hot" and "cold" mediums. (Makes sense; being one of the first to discuss this stuff, he had to invent a vocabulary.) My current guess involves feedback loops and channel bandwidth. "Hot" is reactive, "cold" is deliberative. But it's not just the immediacy of the medium, it's also the interactions (feedback loops). Face to face, there is very high bandwidth (included by not limited to backchannel, body language, facial expressions, context, etc) along with rapid feedback. So we have the information needed to keep communication from going off the rails. Alas, Twitter's very constrained bandwidth, while maintaining the rapid feedback loop, doesn't permit any sort collaborative moderating effort. In other words, Twitter is custom built for kneejerk clapbacks. For contrast, I keep thinking of John Carmack's journaling via a .plan file (and the finger protocol). Twas a precursor to blogging and RSS feeds. Why didn't that medium incite virality, outrage, and pogroms? .plan files are also low band width, right? I think it's because the feedback loops simply didn't exist.

cnity 4y ago
My theory about Twitter is that the UI makes it feel like you are interacting in a really small group (by constraining how much you can see at any one time), when in reality you are broadcasting to an audience of possibly many thousands. This produces speech and behaviour people would use with only close friends, but to a huge audience. If you were just with one other programming friend, you might make reference to a repo you'd seen and say something like "yeah that approach is totally batshit", but you wouldn't say the same thing to the author in a public forum in front of many people. I think Twitter tricks our minds into behaving like the former but actually in the latter. So it's easy to forget that you may as well be directly insulting the author.
- cxr 4y ago
  > This produces speech and behaviour people would use with only close friends, but to a huge audience. Corollary: privately, most people really are assholes (and they just suppress it when they don't feel bold/secure enough to be open about it)?