Comment by wegs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wegs | Hacker News Reader

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We do get to both-sides this. The thing Facebook did amazingly well is silo people who hold identical opinions, and drive inflammatory false content to them. This maximized clicks, while inflaming and radicalizing people on both sides.

Hatred doesn't last long when you talk to people. But Facebook doesn't let people talk to each other across boundaries. It's segregatory. See Brown v. Board. Now, there is no middle, and we have a mess to clean up.

This maximized clicks. Facebook weren't the only ones doing it, but Facebook is the giant in the room. Facebook could have connected people on the left and on the right, and facilitated civil discussions. It chose not to do that.

Do I blame them for it? I'm not sure. Market forces are powerful, and I suspect its hand may have been forced. Nevertheless, it's something we need to fix. Regulation is nice since it changes market forces.

To say the polarized left isn't harmful is false. I don't much care about terrorists or bombers. There aren't enough of them to matter. I care about racists on the right. I care about vigilante doxers on the left. I care about people losing their careers. I care about kids from some communities not learning. I care about people hating each other. That's as much of a problem on each side.

There was an article I ran into earlier today about how the far left which just caused a USC professor to be suspended from teaching for saying 那个 in a course on communications (which sounds a lot like an American racial slur). This stuff happens all the time in the far left. Watch the video. What he said is exactly what you'll hear in China all the time.

https://reason.com/2020/09/03/usc-greg-patton-chinese-word-o...

As a footnote, if you do want to see terrorists on the left, tune into Fox News. They play nonstop footage of BLM protesters beating people up, setting fires, and in one case, executing someone. You can't just close your eyes here; half of America is seeing one reality, and half is seeing another. To start closing the gaps, it's helpful to see both.

>Hatred doesn't last long when you talk to people.

I talk to people almost every day in a completely uncensored environment who have nothing but the purest hatred and mockery for all liberal or leftist people and liberal or leftist ideologies. They unabashedly want to murder their enemies. They applaud the killing and beating and gassing of BLM protesters. Yes, "the left" has places where they mock the right unreasonably too, and they fire somebody sometimes for a stupid misunderstanding or for being too offensive, or they ban somebody from a web site for a not-good-enough reason - it's stupid and awful, but there is simply no comparison. Calling what the worst elements on the right are doing to society and discourse "stupid and awful" would be a comedic understatement. And yes, in the right-now, people in the protests are burning things and assaulting people, but they are responding to being murdered by police. If the state murders you in the street, it's hard to find a ceiling for responses past which I couldn't understand people going, even if the response ends up ultimately doing more harm than good, which I can't even predict. The thing they're responding to is one of the worst things that can happen in a civilization.

Edit: Somebody replied to me with the recent death of the Trump supporter, but got flagged (predictably so, considering the rest of their post). I just wanted to point out that it's a good example of cherry picking. Each time somebody dies, the people "on their side" will hold it up alone as evidence of how evil the enemy is. Of course, I'm speaking of the big picture, and I'm aware of the many smaller pieces, and I take pains to consider them.

> I talk to people almost every day in a completely uncensored environment who have nothing but the purest hatred and mockery for all liberal or leftist people and liberal or leftist ideologies.

And I live in one with the same feelings for the right! We're like brothers, I guess?

> They applaud the killing and beating and gassing of BLM protesters. Yes, "the left" has places where they mock the right unreasonably too, and they fire somebody sometimes for a stupid misunderstanding or for being too offensive, or they ban somebody from a web site for a not-good-enough reason - it's stupid and awful, but there is simply no comparison.

To be clear, I shared an institutional response from just about the most credible type of institution you might find on the left -- a university. This is not an individual response. Individual words are far, far worse. I'm not sure how you've gone from there to claiming the worst the left does is to "ban somebody from a web site."

Really? Are you willfully blind? You really need to tune into Fox News more. You're seeing the bad stuff on the right, and not the bad stuff on the left. For a lot of the stuff, they show real videos, so you know it's not fake! It might be rare -- in a country with 300 million people, just about anything happens somewhere -- but it's not fake.

> Each time somebody dies, the people "on their side" will hold it up alone as evidence of how evil the enemy is.

That's exactly what happens. Fox News cherry picks. You'll get the nights' selection of Worst Stuff on the Left.

The left goes back and cherry-picks too. The number Fox News constantly runs is that in 2018, a total of 18 unarmed black men were killed by police. We can quibble about statistical methods, but far more of the problems come from police brutality and from the extreme biases in our justice system end-to-end (The New Jim Crow is an excellent book) than the isolated police shooting. A lot of the stuff you see on smaller more left-leaning media designed to drive outrage (and especially the stuff that spreads virally on Facebook) is just fake too.

And you can be sure that Fox News careful takes apart the most fake news on the left, in the same way the left takes apart the most fake news on the right, so (rightfully) neither side believes the other.

And by the end of it, we live in a polarized nation with two very different perceptions of reality.

Reasonable argument....then you lost it with the "vigilante doxers," the Reason story, and especially Fox News.

Complaining about Facebook optimizing for rage clicks and then...citing the OG practitioners of rage attention optimization...

Was that deliberately meta or just completely un-self-aware?

> and especially Fox News.

Watching Fox News doesn't mean you have to agree with it. Citing someone as saying something doesn't mean you need to agree with them either -- a citation means that you're pointing to what someone is saying. I read (and cite) everything from moderate sources to foreign state propaganda newspapers, to radical extremists from all sides (not just US red-blue).

Sun Tzu said: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

Fox News is the top-rated news show in America. It has about the same ratings as CNN and MSNBC combined. If you're not watching Fox News, you can't understand where half of America is coming from. If that's the basis you're starting from, good luck working productively towards change.

The reality is half of America is seeing police violence. Half of America is seeing protester violence. That's the reality of our media. The things they show are real, but cherry-picked. It's actual video footage half of America is seeing. You can't just ignore that, and claim to understand what's going on.

You can't read about it either. Primary sources. Articles about what other people are saying are about half-fabrications at this point (on all sides).

Methinks that if you think that the best use of your time in "understanding what is going on" and fighting the battle against "inflammatory false content" is to watch it, cite it in conversation, and talk to people who watch it- it's your life and choice, but, forgive me: citing it is a mistake, because it is a false reflection of reality (on a personal level, an important distinction from the aggregate medium is the message level), and, trying to combat it by talking to people is like talking to an addict. Fox and other content providers are there because people want it. There is demand and dependence. You can get a reasonable conversation from one part of someone's brain that is disconnected from actual behavior, because the other is hungering for the hit.

Best wishes to you.

Sounds like you've got it all figured out. Read what you've written again. You've dehumanized half of America, and, well, subhumans ain't worth talkin' to. It'd be nice if someone saved them from themselves, but they can't be saved anyways, and besides, they wouldn't be worth saving if you tried.

Why, might a reasonable person ask?

Well, obviously, because they've dehumanized another part of America.

To quote you back: "Was that deliberately meta or just completely un-self-aware?"

No. Be careful with conclusions of dehumanization. That is the Fox narrative. It is the most insidious of the falsehoods.

More precisely, a choice to consume deliberately false and deadly toxicity to engage in communication to reach past "hate" in the interest of "saving"....is just that, a choice. It's maybe hopeful and optimistic but also sanctimonious, patronizing, sisyphean, and in some cases blind. If a humane choice, it's absolutely not the only humane choice. Fox is not the first deadly religion, and it won't be the last. There are many toxic forces and powers, and the deepest tragedy is that so many of them are so much greater than that of a single individual. There is needless pain and suffering and loss not only among the afflicted but the unafflicted as well, as the defensive walls are necessarily porous.

Best wishes in your task. Be careful about both sidesing, it is the devil's best trick, and aware of limits to empathy. Appreciate the engagement. I will see a response but will not be responding again. Take care.

I am careful with conclusions about dehumanization. Be careful with what you write about whole groups of people.

The culture we're born into is NOT a choice. Whether you're in a red-state culture, a blue-state culture, a Chinese culture, a Middle Eastern Muslim culture, or a Peruvian culture is up to your parents. Religion, political ideology, beliefs about male-female relations, beliefs about parent-child relations, and a whole slew of things follow.

Most people from all major demographic groups are good people. You may disagree with them. But most people are basically good. Every major group has a psychopathic minority. That's common to ALL of humanity, at least as far as I've seen. In most cases, members of the in-group will say that someone is not a "real Christian/Muslim/feminist/etc." about those psychopathic elements. There are also toxic elements to any culture, and being on the inside, it's very hard to see them. It takes work and engagement with other cultures. It's easiest to see this historically. For example, look at how we treated [insert minority group] [insert number of decades ago].

Yes, there are toxic beliefs in red state cultures. Yes, there are toxic beliefs in blue state cultures. They're no worse or better than, for example, mainstream views in China on Tibet or Taiwan. As much as it might seem that way, neither side is Nazi Germany.

There is an old joke where a man is about to commit suicide, and another man tries to save him. They have a conversation, where they seem to be building empathy through a series of questions, coming to the conclusion that their both Christians, Protestants, Presbyterians, and so on. At the end, one asks the other if they're from the reformation in 1938 or the reformation of 1948. It ends with one being pushed off of the bridge with a scream of "Die heretic!" I recall it being funny when I was a little kid, but I can't find it with Google, and can't tell with a good punchline.

But that's sort of what's happening here. Most American liberals are pretty well able to engage with people from all around the world, despite the well-known toxic elements of those cultures. See the defense of Muslims post-9/11 (whom I mention because they share so much similarity to many red state cultures along the lines liberals care about). Somehow, that can't happen close to home. Empathy goes away. Hate comes. We can read and cite Chinese government media objectively when trying to understand that culture, but we're bad people if we do the same with US right-wing media.

Take care.

I'd like to see you apply this logic to different opinions. Financial, regulatory, tech, sure.

Racism? You really think it's OK to allow both sides of discourse into that discussion?

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