Comment by ttctciyf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ttctciyf | Hacker News Reader

Maybe stating the obvious, but it's fascinated me for a while how online interactions with high affect content are almost exclusively aimed at the interactors' imaginary constructions of each other - there's so little of a person in their tweets or forum posts that imagination ('fantasy', 'projection', or whatever) is required in considerable degree for there to be any realistic sense of the interactee in the interactor's mind.

And yet, perhaps especially in online 'shaming' or targeted critique, the shamer is (presumably) unable to discern that they are really tilting at an imaginary person they have constructed themselves from rather scant information.

Not that it's a new behavioural feature, of course - propagandists and demagogues have relied on this sort of propensity forever. Maybe it's the capacity of internet media to 'present' a person by tiny amounts of information that brings it out.

By 'tiny' we could be talking about a single bit, btw - I've seen plenty of reactions apparently to individuals fully formed in the reactor's mind, despite that their information consists only in the fact that someone clicked 'downvote' rather than 'upvote'!

The other odd thing I find odd about these cases is the curious absence of genuine offense. I remember watching the Justine Sacco thing unfold and noticing that nobody really seemed particularly upset - to the contrary, people seemed positively giddy about the whole thing. Very little "how dare she say that?" and quite a lot of "haha she's toast, isn't this terrific?".

In a way, I guess dogpiling on someone like that is probably a lot easier when you know nothing about them except the thing you're reacting to.

For a surprising number of people, the presumption of offense is identical to the reality of offense. I can see why. It's a useful way to stir up the rage machine and direct its wrath without having to consider the opinions of whoever you purport to defend.

That's most social interaction you've just described there. We generally converse with a projection, an idiopathic construct representative of another, of their state of mind, so we can interpret and respond to them appropriately.

Issues arise when this projected individual differs substantially to the actual. On a one to one face to face basis, one typically rapidly readjusts one's model of another rapidly, as it's free floating and has no broader corpus to fall back on. This varies when you deal with someone famous (large corpus, many precepts) or intimate (seemingly large corpus, actually selection bias and neurosis), and the model usually becomes less accurate.

Where it gets interesting is herd interactions, either on or offline. Lynch mobs, trial by media, witch burning, Internet hate machine, war - all arise from inaccurate models of the minds of others, which are reinforced through perceived (abiline!) collective consensus.

Long story short, there's no good and evil, most narrative is self constructed, this is as old as man.

Exactly. Great post!

   all arise from inaccurate models of the minds of others

Inaccurate models not just of minds of others, but of the observers's environment, including non-minds. It's complexity reduction. Language is unable to represent the full complexity of what is being observed, the more so, the fewer words being used.

Yes, symbol set reduction can weigh in this too - that was the entire idea of orwell's newspeak, to reduce the available set of symbols and therefore thought - fundamentally providing a more malleable, more simplistic model.

Were humans not capable of and in the habit of treating assumptions as axioms, we could not function nor develop beyond an infantile inquisitive state, as we rely on inductive learning to link the symbols through which we interpret reality - so one can only work with this particular axiom (or assumption? Hah.) to effect change.

The Internet is damoclean in nature - at first flush it presents a divisive frontier of information, which leads to the behaviours we see today - but prolonged exposure could result in a general improvement in the models individuals and cultures carry, assuming auto-innoculation doesn't happen too quickly. It'll be interesting to watch pan out.

   prolonged exposure could result in a general improvement

That's certainly what happened after the previous two revolutions in communication: the invention of convenient writing and that of the printing press. So I have high hopes for the third! I doubt that will be part of the bright future though. It is antithetical to better communication.

Eventually, yes, but at the time they'd have been bemoaning this bloody Luther guy and that gutenburg idiot.

Progress doesn't always look like progress at the time. In fact, it rarely does - what we usually see and call progress is actually entrenchment.

> Long story short, there's no good and evil, most narrative is self constructed, this is as old as man.

And cultural relativism is a marvelous excuse for the evil of man.

You believe in moral absolutes? What is the ultimate good, then? And who is born evil?

Yes, I believe in moral absolutes in actions and deeds, not in people. I don't believe anyone is born evil.

I see. So which cultures are good, which are evil?

Cultural relativism is a refinement of cultural absolutism, in order better to deal with the empirically undeniable discrepancies in moral judgements between different individuals and groups. Basically:

Cultural absolutism: us good, them evil.

Cultural relativism: under these social circumstances, those moral preferences are likely to emerge.

Clearly, the former is easier to handle than the latter, which has advantages in some situations.

>Cultural absolutism: us good, them evil.

>Cultural relativism: under these social circumstances, those moral preferences are likely to emerge.

This strikes me as the fallacy of the excluded middle.

Many people believe one culture is better than another without necessarily believing one is entirely good/without fault and the other is entirely bad.

The problem with cultural relativism as I understand it is that it denies me the right to make any judgement. I mean, you phrased as opposing "they're bad" but in practice it opposes "they're worse"

    fallacy of the excluded middle.

I'd say I was being terse, and trying to boild down the matter to its essence, so as to enable clear thinking. Naturally, positions we hold are more complex.

   it denies me the right to make any judgement.

I don't think a mature cultural relativist denies you any judgements, it's more an invitation to investigate more nuanced positions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com