Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

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> Honestly, the way people have been dehumanizing each other over politics kind of scares me. It reminds me of the way propaganda dehumanizes 'the enemy' in war time. It's not a good way to look at other people, especially not over which political party they voted for.

It reminds me of this:

> And it is triple ultra forbidden to respond to criticism with violence. There are a very few injunctions in the human art of rationality that have no ifs, ands, buts, or escape clauses. This is one of them. Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever.

https://www.readthesequences.com/Uncritical-Supercriticality

But counterarguments, well, you might not always have one of those. It could be that actually you're wrong about something. And if you're wrong and you still have a big fat angry mob behind you who can shout down anybody who tries to point that out, isn't that better than losing?

No. It isn't. It's better to lose when you're wrong. Because it's the only thing that allows you to win when you're right.

But it still feels bad, and you still have an angry mob at your disposal, and if you're weak you do the wrong thing.

Too many people today are weak. And they, we, should feel bad about that.

This has a lot of explanatory power. Weakness, or more accurately one's perceived vulnerability (inability to weather momentary losses), leads to pre-emption and escalation.

To use vitality as an example, a healthy person can handle the odd cold or cut that could be fatal to someone with compromised immune system. Rightly then the vulnerable person will react quickly and intensely to perceived threats that the healthy person may shrug off (or even engage with, like volunteering in a hospital.

And that's a feedback loop. People feel vulnerable because they're under attack, so they attack others, who then feel vulnerable because they're under attack. Somebody -- better yet, everybody -- has to be a grown up and stop the cycle.

Have you considered that people use angry mobs because good counterarguments get dismissed historically, and how they are angry, and want to do capture the momentum of rhetoric?

Historically, the mainstream news media would not even cover certain stories and would just spike them. People eventually go upset and found other ways to tell their story or force their opinion, e.g., social media and mobs.

An angry mob isn't about stories. It has no correlation with righteousness or reason or fairness. It's an instrument of chaos and destruction that can as easily be turned against you as your enemies. It's the rhetorical equivalent of setting the theater on fire instead of talking to the people inside.

Doing wrong is wrong even when you're angry.

And it's a short term gain for a long term loss. Every careless attack on a person who turns out to be innocent is an advertisement to join the opposition.

Worse than that, if you shout down dissent then you stay wrong. If you can't admit to a mistake then you can't stop making it.

Says who? Yudkowsky? Why are you listening to him?

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