Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

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It's sort of logical: if a "bad thing" is observed, a "good" observer must feel bad as a negative reinforcement against the "bad thing". Ideally the pressure of the negative emotions must force the "good" observer to stop just watching and go fix things, and afterwards prevent the "bad thing" from occurring again.

This works in simple cases, like spilling your drink: it: it feels bad, the feeling makes you clean it up, and be more careful.

It fails in cases where the immediate effectual action is impossible, or not known. The only reasonable course of action then is to spread the word, because you can't actually fix anything.

And here ingroup / outgroup signaling jumps in! Feeling bad about some issues becomes a signal of group belonging, a kind of virtue signaling. Not feeling bad and not expressing outrage becomes suspicious, if not defiant. This is one of the streams that feeds the outrage machine.

I know this is nitpicking and perhaps a dumb thing to say, but in my view the simple case of drink spilling does not apply.

Have you been around children who spill a drink? The ones who experience high levels of stress bury their heads and treat it as a catastrophe, waiting for someone else to clean it up and soothe them.

Those who treat it as no big deal are more likely to clean it up.

And being more careful only grows slowly with age. Oh, and using heavier glasses btw. It's way better to give kids real glass for drinks and tolerate the occasional breakage than to have constant spilling with light plastic cups.

I think you might be overthinking it. Kids learn to prevent bad things from happening. They learn it so well that sometimes they also learn much helplessness.

This idea you’ve presented is immediately visible all around when you know to look for it.

The failure case I see most often is when this thinking is applied to some kind of a wicked problem.

1. The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.

2.Wicked problems have no stopping rule.

3. Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.

4. Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique.

5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a "one shot operation".

6. Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.

Source: Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems 2006 Jeffrey Conklin ISBN: 978-0-470-01768-5

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