It's hard to not view this as whining about the failed gentrification of Reddit (especially with the biker bar analogy).
I'm struggling to think of any successful social network sites that are heavy-handed with moderation. Certainly twitter, facebook, ect. get the same accusations of harboring "unethical" groups.
For me it was just that I had a bunch of experiences where I hurt people and had no idea, only much later finding out, by essentially hearing from a third party about a fourth party doing exactly the same thing I did.
And it was clear that I wouldn't have heard those stories unless I had gone out of my way to understand what the "angry" people were mad about, and waded through quite a lot of background material. It was clear that no one would've trusted me with that kind of story until after I demonstrated that I had done some work to learn the basics of "offensiveness". Which, I had honestly only really done because I was in love with this girl who was into it. Kind of ironic really. I think that's how a lot of how this stuff grows though, you're a homophobe until someone you love turns out to be gay and then all of the sudden you figure it out.
Anyway after hearing enough stories about people like me carelessly, unknowingly fucking up other peoples' days, it clicked that I could never really know how many people I was hurting. And that knowledge just bugs me. I don't just want the illusion I'm being good to the people around me, I really want to feel secure that I'm doing a good job of that. It's how my Dad felt, not that he (or I) are necessarily the best at it. It's just my personality. And that provides the motivation to slow down and try to understand train wrecks that I could easily scoot on right by.
> Can you elaborate on why spending time and effort to find offensiveness in things makes sense to you?
Offensive things exist, it's simply a matter of whether you want to be aware of things that offend others or not. You can not put in the effort and walk around ignorant of behavior that offends people, or you can put in the effort because getting along with others generally requires not offending them.
For example, if you don't see sexism all around you, you aren't paying attention. If you don't see racism all around you, you aren't paying attention; our society is littered with both and women and minorities don't have the luxury of ignoring them.
> For example, if you don't see sexism all around you, you aren't paying attention. If you don't see racism all around you, you aren't paying attention; our society is littered with both and women and minorities don't have the luxury of ignoring them.
Please do keep in mind that this is an international forum, and the people you talk to mind come from wildly dissimilar societies than you.
For example where i grew up there was relatively little sexism, instead women were often the stronger people who more commonly fed the family. Similarly there was very little racism, though primarily due to a lack of people from foreign countries.
> Please do keep in mind that this is an international forum, and the people you talk to mind come from wildly dissimilar societies than you.
It may be, but largely the people here are from the United States. The international audience is by far a minority. Beyond that sexism and racism run rampant throughout the entire world, that you might be from a place you don't think it's very evident doesn't negate that reality.
> instead women were often the stronger people who more commonly fed the family
That's still sexist, just against men. Sexism doesn't mean putting down women. Not treating the sexes equally is sexist.
In a strict game-theory sense: if you're aware of what might cause offense to others, you'll inadvertently offend others less frequently, and your conversations/negotiations/etc. will have higher average outcomes.
Of course, I wouldn't usually phrase it in such a coldly logical way, so here's a practical example: when I meet someone in a professional context, I usually ask about background/expertise early on. This way, I avoid making unconscious assumptions like "she probably isn't an engineer" or "these people will all grok the super-technical explanation I'm about to launch into".
Another example: some of my relatives are more religious/traditional, so I avoid topics and words that wouldn't go over well when around them. Or: I'm in Greece, so I don't ask for Turkish coffee. And so on.
It's not about "spending time and effort." It does not require "time and effort" to see injustice, if you have an understanding of what it looks like and (this is important) the causes of it. It's about coming to grips the world as it treats people who are not like you--and a side effect of that is seeing that the deck is stacked and the dice are loaded and that things are much more grim than they appear to people like--well--you or me.
Instead of looking for wrongs, they become apparent to you, and there's a moral duty to not look away.
There's something weird about the way you phrased this. You're aware that what you said was impolite, but you can't think of a way to be more polite. I think this might be related to the fact that you find the idea of seeing how things that you don't find offensive might be offensive to other people 'outlandish'.
What it suggests is a lack of empathy, which extends to your assuming that other people are also incapable of empathy. Sorry, I'm also not sure how to word that more politely.
Imagine, for a moment, that other people are honest in their assertion that they are offended (for example that women find some common, everyday behavior offensive and sexist).
Imagine, for a moment that other people are capable of feeling empathy for those people (for example, that they have learned, through empathy, to notice the same sexist behavior and find it offensive, even though they are not women).
Then you might realize that they are not 'spending time and effort to find offensiveness', but just capable of empathy. Sorry if that seems outlandish, but.. it's the truth, sorry.
I feel this is just begging the question. It's not about being "capable of empathy" but directing that empathy toward very specific groups of people. To illustrate: how much would you modify your behavior to accommodate someone who is offended by gay marriage?
So now we're left with: why this set of people?
And while I'm sure there is a complex framework of narratives and rationalizations and models of power structures, etc. in support of who gets to be in the in-group and who doesn't, to me it seems mostly like a case of mindless tribalism.
Presenting/accepting horrifyingly bad arguments like "you don't share my viewpoint because you're incapable of empathy" is not done because people actually believe in them, but as a signal of tribal membership.
> To illustrate: how much would you modify your behavior to accommodate someone who is offended by gay marriage?
Not a whit, because after considering the situation I have concluded that same-sex marriage, while it may offend them, does not harm them. There's a world of difference between offended and harmed. My thought process goes, "hey, I can see people being harmed by not being able to get married to the person they love, while these people over there who are offended are going to be just fine not-gay-marrying each other."
I think those who prioritize their offense over others' harm really do lack empathy. (This is why, despite a personal dislike of a number of rather loud social justice activists, I'll go to bat for the causes that they support, while I can be offended by their conduct, they are right and others are being harmed. I am an adult and can put up with being offended to help others not be harmed.)
There's probably not a good way to succinctly prove my capacity for empathy to you, but I think trying to link social grace and empathy is also incorrect in general.
Assume for the sake of argument that, as you suggested, you've identified a statement in the course of conversation that someone else might find offensive. What's your recourse and how does it benefit society?
If you've simply misinterpreted the person's meaning (which I'd argue is more often than not the case), you probably force them to spend time clarifying and maybe they endeavor to spend more time and effort to avoid similar misunderstanding in the future - all to avoid the hypothetical situation where they might have actually offended someone (who could have just asked for similar clarification).
Perhaps instead you've actually identified some unintentionally disclosed socially unacceptable bias that the person holds. The offense you've taken is still imaginary (I guess you'd argue it's actually empathetic) so chances are you're not in a good position to reshape that person's belief system - especially since hiding the belief in the first place suggests they know it's socially unacceptable. Rather, you're more likely just teaching the person to hide their bias more convincingly. I think most people find hidden bias much more insidious.
The best case, I suppose, is shaming some intentionally offensive statement. This one seems reasonable to me. However, if the statement was intentionally offensive, you probably didn't need the mental gymnastics to identify it in the first place.
I'm open to any counter-arguments you might have; I just thought I'd clarify my own stance since your accusation seemed a little harsh.
> You're aware that what you said was impolite, but you can't think of a way to be more polite.
Wrong point of view in my opinion. I had the same question on my mind and it needs a qualifier not because it's impolite, but because you might be offended by it. Those are two entirely separate things.
That said, nothing of what you said makes it any easier to accept your answers, for me personally, because i still have no idea what things you're seeing as offensive that you might've missed earlier and i still can't compare whether i would've missed the same things, or whether those things weren't present in my environments.
Would you care to bring up some concrete examples?
> i still have no idea what things you're seeing as offensive that you might've missed earlier and i still can't compare whether i would've missed the same things, or whether those things weren't present in my environments.
That's not what the GP asked. They asked
> Can you elaborate on why spending time and effort to find offensiveness in things makes sense to you?
which is an entirely different question (with a very obvious subtext to boot).
People seem more sensitive now than before. Or maybe they always were, but now it just isn't taboo to admit it? In any case, just using myself as an example -- I've found that I become more and more sensitive and easily offended the more I involve myself and try to find disagreeable things (see: online echo chambers centred around a common identity of "the other side is bad/laughable/hurtful!"). And in the modern Information Age, that isn't hard at all.
Personally I don't spend time and effort to find offensiveness in things - but I'm interested in being informed about the world around me.
For example, I've always found it easy to hail a taxi; it wasn't until a few months ago I learned it can be hard to get a taxi when you're black.
That's information that can be useful if I'm travelling with a black friend or colleague; or discussing the merits of electronic taxi hailing, or the place of taxis in a public transport system.
Why would you bother to learn how to identify security flaws in code? Because you think a system without security flaws would be better and you can't prevent or fix them without seeing them.
The arguments to keep building it were almost as stupid as the arguments to stop building it.
I recall hateful accusations of "mismanagement" that boiled down to supplying liquor at a Christmas party. Drunk physicists... the horror. Oh, and the fact that our contribution to the ISS had roughly the same cost estimate meant... for some reason, that it was prudent to choose between to the two.
When are we going to accept the scientific evidence that video games (and movies before them (and books before them)) don't fundamentally change a person's philosophy? Books in particular are really good at helping you explore ideas and challenge your preconceived notions, but the subconscious effect is akin to hypnosis, completely incapable of making you do or believe something that you ordinarily wouldn't have.
Concern trolling makes for a good read I guess. People are wired to always be on the lookout for the next good thing to be concerned about.
The consistent trend going all the way back to the Payne Fund Studies is that someone somewhere thinks they can show some alarmist correlation between media and behavior.
However, the trend always disappears once you've accounted for shoddy research and disregarded short-term effects (i.e. hormone responses). I could cherry-pick you some recent results; the most popular lately seem to be video games and violence or video games and sexism. It wouldn't be very convincing since you can ostensibly find a variety of papers that say exactly the opposite. I urge you to browse through the google scholar results and draw your own conclusions.
Please do note: I'm arguing a subtle distinction here between subconscious subversion and conscious consideration. After seeing a horrifying documentary about war, I might consciously change my philosophy on death because the source is reliable and the information is believable/consistent. However, seeing silly deaths in a video game can't influence me in the opposite way because the source is dismissible and the conclusion is fantastical.
So, to answer your second question in an unsatisfying way: I think it's clear that people change their own philosophies.
As someone who fancies libertarianism but who's wary of its effectiveness in practice, I'm hoping we get to see this impromptu social experiment play out long enough to gather some useful statistics.
Err, extreme things like that really need to be entered into democratically rather than a very small minority foisting it on a city of millions. Especially when we're discussing public safety. I hope this ends quickly and conclusively.
They are still handling serious crimes normally. What they aren't doing is enforcing arrest, ticket, and summons quotas. I think this whole thing is going to backfire on the NYPD and demonstrate that the way they were doing things before was not in the best interest of the people living in NYC.
...you mean like the democratic way we all voted for the current system? The one where we all get to vote, without being turned away at the voting booth because we "registered in the wrong precint", or don't have valid ID?
I'm in agreement though I hope they keep enough of a presence and focus on major crimes such that we don't start seeing an increase in murders or rapes or something to that effect.
Drastic reduction in regulations outside of "actual harm" and objective "social order" issues. Criminalize and prosecute robbery, murder, theft, etc (actual harm), along with parking violations, traffic control, etc (organizing a lot of people functioning in a compact space, things get very ugly in a hurry if you don't), but stop the aggressive pursuit of "victimless" crimes like selling individual cigarettes without a license, stopping/interviewing anyone carrying something heavy in a pocket (to wit: potential handgun), petty drug possession, etc.
It's interesting watching such things over several decades: urban rush away from conservative/libertarian principles to highly regulated progressivism subsequently leading to a backlash which, for many/most practical purposes, amounts to a return to conservative/libertarian values.
If you have ever been to NYC you would know that if the parking regulations were not enforced so zealously the city would be a mess. The only reason why $40 parking garages are full is that you know if you park illegally on the streets of Manhattan, your car is getting ticketed, and likely towed. Surely it makes NYC a ton of revenue but it is the only way to make things work. I agree with you on the other points.
Every time I get annoyed by how religiously parking regulations are followed in the UK(and they are anal about it to the extreme), I remember how it works in the country I come from. Try parking in Krakow or Warsaw - very little regulation, and people park everywhere, on sidewalks, on the grass, on pedestrian crossings...they would park on top of each other if they could. Parking regulations are a good thing.
Libertarians should support aggressive parking enforcement. It's a clear correction of a substantial externality.
Of course, an even more libertarian approach would be to simply sell or lease the parking spaces to private entities and let them set whatever prices and rules they want for the use of their real estate, perhaps including making deals with local merchants to subsidize market rates during business hours.
Stop buying bullshit narratives against state funded science.
Rocket test stands are not limited to a single rocket model. The choice in 2010 was to spend $57m finishing a project that will undoubtedly see future use, or to abandon a $292m investment with 0 return.
Look for SpaceX to jump on this opportunity since they already lease testing facilities from Stennis.
SpaceX uses slight variants of their 1st stage rocket engines in vacuum, so they don't really need this kind of testing. And this test rig is 10x larger than SpaceX's current vacuum Merlin 1D needs.
This testing gets you valuable information about performance and stress characteristics which can allow you to make improvements to the rocket, either by changing its shape for better efficiency or by making it lighter where it turns out to be over engineered. SpaceX hasn't been doing this testing yet because it hasn't been necessary and building a test stand too expensive. Now they could.
I sure hope the Feynman lectures from Caltech aren't next.
People seem really quick to forget that fundamental science endures and political correctness is fleeting. I wonder what the next world threatening catastrophe to make people remember will be.
And we don't know what he was accused of and how serious it was, how strong the evidence was, and how fair the process was that condemned him.
Certainly there are plenty of cases of universities making terrible decisions in this space eg men being expelled for sexual assault, followed by conviction of the complainant for making a false report.
Levin seemed to be very popular with his female students; on one of the courses some of them actually came in at the end and sang him a song of appreciation.
I continue to be amazed at the degree to which "no actual harassment happened" is the strong default belief for so many people here, despite the fact that a thorough investigation has already happened and decided otherwise. A group of smart people (led by MIT physics professors who are friends of the accused, for goodness sake) looked at the evidence and concluded that serious harassment occurred. Doesn't that merit at least a bit of a Bayesian update?
I'm similarly amazed that the existence of examples of false accusations is taken as a more salient fact than the overwhelming weight and history of cultural indifference toward sexual harassment (or even approval). False accusations are the "man bites dog" story: they get attention because they're so far from the norm.
Consider that these people updated, you just don't share their conditional probabilities. In particular, they might think that P(response by MIT as given|harassment nonexistent or relatively trivial) is fairly high, given their understanding of or experience with the academic climate in the recent years, internal politics in academia, standards of institutional ass-covering etc. It's also notable (given that sexual harassment is a crime) that no involvement by authorities is described or even hinted at.
You do make a good point. "no harassment happened" shouldn't be the strong default belief (I'm not sure it actually is for many people here). But based on the statement and what is known about the relevant politics in academia, "serious harassment definitely occurred" shouldn't be one either.
When you put something in quotes you are saying that someone actually said that. As you can see from my post, I did not say that. I simply said we don't know much about the situation. So please stop misleading people.
I certainly do not exclude that he did sexually harass someone or more than one person. I have personally seen many cases of people in a position of power who abuse that power in many ways.
Even the court system with public hearings and a very high standard of proof (beyond reasonable doubt) regularly produces miscarriages of justice. Google the "innocence project" for many such cases.
The recent fiasco at Rolling Stone magazine (they specifically and repeatedly emphasized how they had verified the claims made in painstaking detail) reinforces retaining an open mind.
As you well know the topic at hand is people using that data to "stalk/harass/intimidate" as the OP said verbatim. Which is not protected by the 1st amendment.
I read it differently; "this stunt" is ambiguous in context.
In any case, I think you're misunderstanding the nature of the problem. The danger of "doxxing" is that people get overwhelmed by a flood of negative attention from many different people. In most cases, none of the "harassing" individuals actually do enough individual harassment to make the action illegal. You can't go after the doxxer because releasing the information was completely legal, and you can't go after the mob because none of the individuals have done enough to constitute a crime.
You could certainly go after a guy who sends a knife; pretty sure just mailing a knife is illegal in most places.
I think you're misreading this. Doxxing is the online equivalent of incitement to riot; as in a real riot, the chances of any individual participant doing anything blatantly illegal are low, it's the cover that the crowd provides for lawless activity and the intimidatory factor that's problematic. So if you're unpopular with some group in your town, and someone says 'Let's go to Byerley's house at 123 Quiet Street and make some noise' that could count as incitement to riot even if your name and address are widely available.
The problem is not the mere repetition of publicly available information, but its strategic use to focus the anger of a crowd upon a relatively defenseless individual. That creates a dangerous power asymmetry with the explicit or implicit function of intimidation. It's not a big deal if people peacefully protest in front of the White House - the President and his family live there but there's a bunch of secret service people to keep him safe due to the nature of the office, same way there are police permanently stationed outside the official residence of the UK prime minister. If you're Joe or Jill Ordinary and a large crowd shows up on your physical doorstep, you have a serious problem.
Virtual harassment is not immediately threatening in the same way but it depends on how far it goes. If I write something controversial and make it public and get a storm of hate email in my inbox, that's annoying but not really worrying. But if I start also getting telephone calls or snail mail (or seeing such things quoted in emails) then it's quite a bit more worrying.
There's a limit to which people can control the amount of their personal data that becomes public. For example, I own a house which means I have to pay property taxes, and where I live property ownership is a matter of public record. So I was surprised after buying the home to suddenly receive a huge amount of junk mail from companies who obviously subscribe to lists of property tax payers. I can't take back that information. Should everyone be expected to set up a shell company in order to purchase real property and still maintain some privacy?
The best hack to get around this is to create a holding company, so then that holding company name appears instead. This might be a costly measure, but well worth it if you value your privacy. However, in most property records also include an address to where the yearly property tax bill is sent, so you might also want to set up a PO box.
As I said, 'Should everyone be expected to set up a shell company in order to purchase real property and still maintain some privacy?'
Personally, I prefer the European approach of the Data Protection Act that gives consumers a fair bit of legal leverage over how their personal information can be used commercially, as opposed to requiring people to engage in expensive obfuscatory security measures.
What does constitute enough harassment in your opinion?
You make it sound as though there's nothing to be done against this. But that is not the case, things change. Perhaps releasing personal information about another relating to doxing should be made illegal. It's not as if it's hard to distinguish between someone who's trying to dox another and legitimate sharing of information.
"If you are able to insert in a publication the name of a nonexistent author in a publication, who will guarantee that even the scientific contents have been examined with care?"
Reviewers are typically asked to disregard the authors of a submission,
"Your review should be directed at the paper, not the author"
- Jay Smith, "The Task of the Referee", 1990
Scientists can get away with not considering the authors precisely because they base their evaluation on careful examination of the contents. This is a better example of selective attention than it is of lapses in scientific review.
I'm struggling to think of any successful social network sites that are heavy-handed with moderation. Certainly twitter, facebook, ect. get the same accusations of harboring "unethical" groups.