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Comment by goto11 | Hacker News Reader

The infamous murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964 was reported the medias as 38 witnesses in an apartment block saw or heard the murder but none did anything to save her, not even call the police. In 2007 someone digged into the story and discovered that this was wildly exaggerated. Only a few witnesses has seen the violence and they did in fact call the police - the police just didn't respond in a timely manner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese

Of course the original story resonated because it played into the eternal narrative that people "these days" don't care about each other, society is falling apart etc.

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It's not a coincidence that the 'original story' completely elides any negligence or wrongdoing by the police.

> people "these days" don't care about each other, society is falling apart etc.

Interesting point.It was 1964. The same people that complain about the current generation.

I think that it's great that this myth of debunked. People wants to be good. Give people education and means and they will run a society smoothly.

Interesting thought, I like to think about how there is an inherent juxtaposition of selfishness and selflessness required in evolution itself, and the manifestation of that "perfect conflict" from a non-thinking (un-intelligent) evolving line to a (intelligent )thinking yet still driven by evolution, line. Not sure if that makes any sense. :)

Every generation thinks they invented casual sex, every generation thinks the new generation is ruining the world. This has been true as long as history has been recorded.

/insert lyrics from "We Didn't Start the Fire"

It is curious. I am quite young still, but I can already observe myself thinking: “These youngsters shouldn’t do this — it is way to dangerous”

And then I realize, the things I did when I was young were way, way wilder than the things I complain about. And then I shut up, let them be and try to be there and speak the sage words when they need them and no second before.

I am not sure who treats the next generation worse:

- the kids who went through the real shit

- the kids who had a wild youth

- the kids who never did anything out of fear

A lie can truly travel around the world three times before the truth has got its boots on.

This is a bias we are all prone to. We all need to beware of letting a claim fly quickly into "unquestioned fact" status just because it fits into our narrative.

Eternity even

That sounds less like "wildly exaggerated" and more like just plain wrong in every way.

There is a very interesting small read from Georg Simmel written in 1903 called “The Metropolis and Mental Life” in which the Berlin based Simmel tries to describe how the new mega-cities influence the mind of it’s inhabitants. Even now, more than a century later his text still works.

However only up to a degree — many people like to take some sort of preceived trend (”people are getting more emotionally cold”) and extrapolate it into the future. This extrapolation becomes part of their Weltbild and because we like it when our anecdotes line up with our Weltbild, we start to leave out facts that don’t.

Does it mean that Simmel’s general idea that cities affect people is wrong? Probably not. It is just not as big of a thing as many make themselves belive it is.

On The Media did a good episode on this https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/131359-the-witnesses-that-...

Even if it were true, there's a more charitable and in my opinion more plausible explanation: people are afraid to bother the emergency line with redundant calls. These days it's probably more plausible than ever, because we hear of prank calls to the emergency line and don't want to occupy the emergency line more than necessary.

You can actually be evicted for calling 911 too often – even if those calls are legitimate [0].

0: https://thinkprogress.org/chronic-nuisance-laws-ordinances-e...

You are playing into the false story by suggesting that it is true that a number of witnesses was aware of the violence but didn't call the police.

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