I don't know. Upvotes often do the same thing, especially in siloed communities. I feel like this is a larger problem -- people leaning into extremifying their views or just playing to an audience -- even though one might frame it as "prosocial" because it happens within the context of an online community.
> Upvotes often do the same thing, especially in siloed communities.
Yeah. I've gotten caught in this pattern here on HN. Post something, there's some disagreement but then I see the quiet upvotes trickling in, sometimes by the dozen. That sort of signal slowly convinced me I was right about plenty of stuff.
I used AI to datamine all of my HN comments and find those patterns. Then I started asking the AI to steelman the hell out of my world view, every single argument.
Biggest change was brazilian vs american laws. I had more knowledge of and respect for US laws than those of my own country, and Claude essentially fixed that. I started studying the law with Claude whenever I'd get into some argument involving copyright, and it started picking up on this pattern and showing me counterpoints where brazilian law precisely defined things that americans had to pay lawyers to go to court and get a judge to create precedent for.
AI measurably lowered the number of absolute claims I've been making. Tended to generalize and radicalize too much which would invite people to respond to the tone and the extremism instead of disproving the underlying idea. That sort of reply would actually reinforce my beliefs: if I was wrong, people would simply refute it. AI attacked my points with counterexamples until I was able to refine them into a core that's actually true.
These little distilled kernels of truth were the most valuable results. I found that many of my arguments actually have an underlying idea that holds up under scrutiny, but nobody cares because I try to prove it via extreme arguments. One such idea is anti-impossibility: laws and rules are all fine, but making it structurally impossible for people to disobey them is unacceptable. I used to try to argue that idea by defending running red lights which persuaded no one. Now I've identified the real idea and can make a much better argument for it.
One analogy might be to the misleadingly named motion picture. We all have heard the stories of early cinema-goers who dove out of the way when the train on the screen barreled towards them. It's easy to make the mistake of thinking of these images on the screen as the real thing -- even the mistake of thinking that they move.
But they don't move. They can't. In the end, a film is just a series of still images. The images are projected in such rapid succession that they fool us into seeing things in motion that are not actually in motion. And if we slowed the film down enough, from 20 frames a second, to say, a frame every 20 seconds, well... the illusion would stop. We'd see each discrete still image for exactly what it was.
This is the same way computers work. Every tick of the clock, we get a new static image in memory. But those images are all static, as still as the images on film. And no static matrix of information can be conscious, just like no still image can move.
This is radically different than the neurons in our brains, which are each living things, sensing things, with a continuous analog existence. Whatever we feel comes from their lives. We can measure the things they do with their lives, but we shouldn't mistake the measurement for the thing being measured. A ruler is a foot long, but it’s not ticklish.
To be fair, it doesn't sound like anyone is literally judging this person for his moral stance -- it sounds like he is judging others for not sharing his morals. They're not making him an outcast; he is literally casting others out of his life because they don't meet his purity standards.
I'm not saying that as a criticism. I think a lot of people who value a human-made culture are going to drop out of mainstream society in the next decade or so, find each other, and found human-first communities where shared human norms dominate. If AI companies wanted to get ahead of the bad press? They'd help found some of these communities. No strings attached.
I was just re-watching "Westworld" recently, and there's a moment when Aaron Paul's character Caleb is having a telephone conversation with a sympathetic HR employee who tells him that he didn't get the job.
"Listen, Caleb. Your application was very strong. Unfortunately, our strategy group just hasn't found an opening for you."
Caleb sighs, and says nothing.
The HR employee gently asks, "Caleb, are you still with me?"
"Ok, thank you. Is there anything I should be working on to make myself a better candidate?"
"Like I said, your application was very strong. We just don't have anything that would be a great fit for you right now."
"If I'm not a good fit, is there a different shape I could squeeze myself into?"
There is a pause.
Caleb asks, "Hey, no offense but... are you human?"
"I'm Shaun," the voice says. "I can help you with all kinds of resources... anything else I can do for you today, Caleb?"
I recently received a telemarketing robocall that had a convincingly human voice.
It did polite social chitchat quite well.
But there were a few tell-tale signs: the bot would never interrupt or overlap my talking. It would always wait until I finished speaking to parse my speech, and its pauses were very consistent and slightly longer than what was natural.
When I asked it if it were a robot, it replied, "(giggle) why, do I sound like a robot?"
When I threw it a few unconventional questions, it quickly became clear that there was a script.
Right. Just like the justice system would, social media will sentence him to the extremely harsh punishment of... not being invited to conferences anymore.
"Anarcho-capitalism, in my opinion, is a doctrinal system which, if ever implemented, would lead to forms of tyranny and oppression that have few counterparts in human history. There isn't the slightest possibility that its (in my view, horrendous) ideas would be implemented, because they would quickly destroy any society that made this colossal error."
Except we're seeing its horrendous ideas flourishing.
We really need a better vocabulary for talking about this sort of thing than the 20th century terms of fascism, communism, and liberalism. I don't have the words yet, but we need to start inventing them.
We are in a new era, and our disasters won't look like theirs. People who shrug away this kind of censorship with the magic words "private company" are in a dangerous form of denial.
... you say, as the OP links to a fully accessible social media post by Ron Paul.
From Techdirt:
Moderation is a platform/service owner or operator saying “we don’t do that here”. Personal discretion is an individual telling themselves “I won’t do that here”. Editorial discretion is an editor saying “we won’t print that here”, either to themselves or to a writer. Censorship is someone saying “you won’t do that anywhere” alongside threats or actions meant to suppress speech.
As I pointed out above, this is really 20th century thinking. Social media allows for a kind of mob behavior that has shown itself antithetical to the kind of market liberalism most of our current assumptions are based on.
Or did you not notice that Parler and its hundreds of thousands of users had literally been systematically erased from the internet yesterday by hounding their service providers?
It's bizarre to see the liberal left I grew up with now defending a kind of insane market fundamentalism and corporate control of the commons of free speech without even blinking at the contradiction. I think that liberal left I grew up with is dead.
We need a name for what it has become, and where they are taking us.
How about "social authoritarian"? Or "non-government authoritarian"? They don't have the power of government behind them, but they manage to be pretty authoritarian without it...
Well, I got "an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization" from the New Oxford American Dictionary.
We could also go with Wikipedia's "Fascism is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and of the economy which came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe" if you're down with crowd-sourced definitions.
If you're not, there's historian Kevin Passmore's more verbose one: "Fascism is a set of ideologies and practices that seeks to place the nation above all other sources of loyalty, and to create a mobilized national community. Fascist nationalism is reactionary in that it entails implacable hostility to socialism and feminism, for they are seen as prioritizing class or gender rather than nation. This is why fascism is a movement of the extreme right."
And, of course, we could go right to the source. Benito Mussolini wrote, "Granted that the 19th century was the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy, this does not mean that the 20th century must also be the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy. Political doctrines pass; nations remain. We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the 'right', a Fascist century."
If you really want to argue with the claim that fascism is a far-right, authoritarian movement, have at it, but that claim has a whole pile of evidence on its side.
They said they were. They also said they were peaceful and democratic. Read "The Manifesto in Practice" section of your link before you take what the manifesto said at face value.
Strong “feminists” that demanded the purpose of women was to stay at home and raise children. Most of Asia had suffrage for women much before the Western world but I would not call them strong feminists.
Nazi Germany took women backwards. Nice revisionism there.
> The policies contrasted starkly with the evolution of women's rights and gender equality under the Weimar Republic
> Women in Nazi Germany were subject to doctrines of Nazism by the Nazi Party (NSDAP), which promoted exclusion of women from the political life of Germany as well as its executive body and executive committees.
> the Nazi regime only permitted and encouraged women to fill the roles of mother and wife; women were excluded from all positions of responsibility, notably in the political and academic spheres.
The literal definition of fascism is an socialist economic system characterized by state run private enterprise. China is probably the closest modern example of true fascism in the literal sense.
No seriously fascism means none of the things people attribute to it today.
Read the about writings of giovanni gentile -- the karl marx of fascism -- if your interested in what literal fascism means.
If Trump and the Republicans confirm a new Justice, Democrats have indicated they will pack the Supreme Court, appointing as many Justices as they feel necessary to get the rulings they want.
"If they show that they're unwilling to respect precedent, rules and history, then they can't feign surprise when others talk about using a statutory option that we have that's fully constitutional in our availability," he said. "I don't want to do that. But if they act in such a way, they may push it to an inevitability. So they need to be careful about that."
The Constitution and Bill of Rights are interpreted through the Supreme Court. If you pack the court, you have essentially destroyed the legitimacy of Constitutional government. The consequences of this cannot be overstated.
All Constitutional rights will be up for reinterpretation and elimination. This is a very precarious moment in history. Perhaps the end of American history as we have known it. That's a grandiose statement, but it's not an incorrect one.
This is amusingly silly. Changing the composition of the Court is not unheard of and FDR, not exactly known as the poster child of "destroying the legitimacy of Constitutional government," nearly did it in 1937 (and likely would have if not for another untimely death.) https://today.law.harvard.edu/if-democrats-win-in-november-s...
Consider Maduro (Venezuela). He and his government are enduring all kinds of enormous attacks from all around the ("Western") world and horrible malicious interference by USA, but the only thing that we know of that Maduro's side did wrong (arguably) was packing the Supreme Tribunal of Justice.
"Venezuela: UN report urges accountability for crimes against humanity"
“The Mission found reasonable grounds to believe that Venezuelan authorities and security forces have since 2014 planned and executed serious human rights violations, some of which – including arbitrary killings and the systematic use of torture – amount to crimes against humanity,” said Marta Valiñas, chairperson of the Mission.
“Far from being isolated acts, these crimes were coordinated and committed pursuant to State policies, with the knowledge or direct support of commanding officers and senior government officials.”
I appreciate the link to the UN's press release for the new report, but note that my point stands: the attacks on Maduro happened long before this report, so long before they could have been justified.
Furthemore, considering the attacks on Maduro included a smearing campaign from media and governments all around the "Western" world, I will read the Mission's report with a heavy dose of skepticism. (Of course, on the other hand, it wouldn't surprise me if the Mission's report was honest.) An example warning sign: it seems strange to entrust the Mission to only three people. Another example, the Mission relied heavily on blogs and similar for the report.
I could have just as easily pointed out that Maduro didn't allow the opposition to run in 2018, or that Venezuela has been starving since 2012, etc, but the your comment coupled with news of the recent report was too much of a contrast not to point it out.
I'm not going to keep commenting about this though. Ultimately, I can't convince people who do not want to be convinced. The Western far Left supports murderous clients much like the governments it condemns - probably moreso. But the West's governments are actually elected, and they operate in the real-politick world. The far Left does its support for tyrants voluntarily as part as its struggle against other Western factions - treating the locals as pawns even more than the Western governments do.
I am not in any way invested in the Maduro regime, but it would be simply stupid to "want to be convinced" of something like this. When I saw a lot of journalistic coverage of Maduro that is not just non-neutral in the presentation, but even uninterested in presenting facts (at least in manner that the reader could verify); so basically just Maduro-bashing - of course I am going to be skeptical.
The uncertainty with the Venezuela-related facts is not the only thing that raises suspicion; the other thing is how deficiencies of democracy (even when the issues are much more clear cut) in non-socialist South America are under-reported compared to Venezuela (take, e.g., the coup in Bolivia, or how the former Brazilian president was seemingly framed, or the Pegasus spyware). One has to wonder why is it that all the big media organizations and most Western governments try to intervene in Venezuelan politics, and not, e.g. in such problems in some Indian state or in, e.g., some ex-USSR republic. I'm not claiming I know the answer, but it seems that some powerful but hidden motivations do exist. (I guess the simplest answer for the journalism part is that journalists need something sensational to write about and it's easy and acceptable to bash on some socialist government.)
From my cursory readings over the last few years, there has been far more coverage of Brazil than of Venezuela, and inasmuch there has been coverage of Venezuela it focused on the US-Venezuela relations angle (which is comfortable to the regime) rather than the 'Venezuelans are dying' issue (which isn't).
But again, this is a distraction. There will always been some excuse by the far Left which is basically 'look over there!'. The issue is not press coverage, but the crimes of the 'socialist' regime (that's how they call themselves, but not the practice, which is why Chavez's daughter's wealth is estimated in the billions).
The legitimacy of the court is long-gone--its nothing more than a political body. Don't like the precedent? Just overrule it and claim it was 'poorly argued'.
Especially funny, considering that Ginsburg was perhaps the most likely to vote based on how she thought the country should operate, and not on stare decisis or leaving issue to congress.
