The psychology of hate: How we deny human beings their humanity | Hacker News Reader

The psychology of hate: How we deny human beings their humanity

salon.com

70 pointsyiedyie31 comments

While hate can be examined, analysis should also be made of the over-humanizing of certain peoples while blatantly ignoring others. While the proverbial fiddle plays during any Shoah reference, hardly anyone notices that Königsberg is not found on maps anymore and that its people have been scattered to the winds.

Many people suffer but scant few receive condolences. Rather than being blinded by preoccupation with historical "recognition" of hate, focus might instead be placed on justice in one's everyday life.

Had to roll my eyes at the "Trail of Tears" reference. It's pretty obvious that nothing of history is important if it can't be weaponized against the enemy of the moment.

Right now there is brewing conflict all around Russia that was (partly) a result of Soviet population transfer policies. Who cares?

There are de facto disenfranchised peoples in any country. There is injustice to be found in probably any social setting. You don't need to look far. Most people just don't want to see it, especially if it is close enough at hand to be potentially actionable on their part.

Agreed. If anything the rise of megacorporations and ever-more-powerful nation states necessitates denying the humanity of others on a regular basis.

The classical justification for why lying is unethical is that it deprives others of their humanity by denying them the chance to make their own decisions. That raises the question, is it unethical to lie to a machine? If machines aren't human to begin with, then the traditional ethical prohibitions against lying don't really hold up. Of course this applies to literal machines, like when a website asks you if you're 18. But what about machines that are made up of people? E.g. if the Nazis come to ask you if you have any jews in your attic, are you ethically obligated to tell the truth if it's reasonable to assume that what happens from there is determined entirely programmatically, even if those programs are executed by people? These questions are especially important given the massive power imbalances between ordinary people and machines, be they technological, corporate, or political.

I think the lesson for the modern world may be that perhaps we need to teach our kids both to recognize the humanity of others more, but paradoxically also to deny the humanity of other more.

> That raises the question, is it unethical to lie to a machine?

This is a fascinating question. I suppose many people would say that it is ok to lie to a machine because it is not sentient. Putting aside the possibility of sentient machines, someone still programmed the machine to ask the question. So by lying to the machine are you not lying to the person who programmed it?

> So by lying to the machine are you not lying to the person who programmed it?

Sure. And this is a problem that has many layers of depth to it, each with many interesting ethical questions waiting to be explored. It would probably make a really good book for someone who wants to make a name for themselves in philosophy.

At the most basic (simplistic?) level though, the reason software exists is to create a mapping such that every valid set of unique inputs always produces the same output. The question is, does the programmer sacrifice their humanity in doing so?

The way a human makes decisions is by looking at all the relevant facts, and then making the best decision in each case based on the information available. Software differs from this in that:

- You make a single decision, in advance, rather than a new decision for each case.

- This decision is only based on what you thought would be important at the time the decision was made, without taking into account the unique situational factors 'at run time'.

- You know in advance that there are going to be both false positives and false negatives, and determine the acceptable rate of each based on the economics of making hundreds or millions of these decisions in aggregate. Of course you also make mistakes when making one off decisions also, so the error rate of software can either be higher or lower than with human decision making. But even if the error rate is lower, the sorts of mistakes that are made aren't necessarily the same.

- The assumptions made by any given algorithm may become increasingly outdated over time, and often stick around long after any given individual would have stopped making the same decisions.

There are more differences obviously. And of course there are different types of software; lying to someone over a phone on the basis that there is some software converting the conversation from analog to digital and back again is probably different than telling some porn site you're 18. But overall I do believe that this may be one of the most important ethical issues of our time in the coming century.

>Rather than being blinded by preoccupation with historical "recognition" of hate, focus might instead be placed on justice in one's everyday life.

Good luck getting feminists and other sjws to agree to that. :/

This reminds of a TED talk about the expansion of empathy throughout history and how the reduction in mass cruelty over the centuries correlates directly with our ability as humans to include others (other villages, cities, states, nations, ethnicities, religions) in the same sphere as themselves and are thus able to empathize.

I've puzzled over this and it seems like even though the european age of discovery spread out with a shockwave of death due to various factors, the world left in its wake was more homogenous and connected and so genocide came to be less frequent.

I'd love to have a link to that talk, by the way.

I would argue the age of discovery can not be compared to another shockwave of death that came before, namely Genghis Khan.

Here's the link:

http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...

You might also enjoy Jeremy Rifkins' Empathic Civilisation stuff. Here's the RSAnimate version of his talk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7AWnfFRc7g

Nice. I'll check it out, thanks.

Really I think all civilians victims in the last 100 years beg to differ. We might not have had another massive world war in the last 69 years but there's been plenty of bloodletting and human savagery. Nothing to show that under the right circumstances humans don't fall back to basic tribal violence.

Certain medieval torture methods make me actually doubt that there is a person alive that could inflict it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_sawing

You might want to read up on some of the atrocities that have happened recently in tribal violence in Africa.

I find the medical experiments performed by Japanese and german doctors during ww2 to be more frightening because they where done in the name of medical science by "modern" humans completely capable of emphasizing with their victims.

The great lesson of the Nazis and the Milgram experiments is that all/most humans are capable of great evil when it is socially normalized.

To think that humans do these things out of hate and dehumanization puts the cart before the horse. Rather, there are cultural drives that incentivize certain behaviors, leading people then suppress and rationalize away their empathy in order to engage in those behaviors and reap the direct or indirect social benefits.

The most common pattern is devastatingly simple: hating an out-group is a powerful way to create an in-group bond.

Erm ,what about the videos where people have been beheaded? I have not and will not ever watch one, but its not some tidy guillotine. What about Lee Rigby, the soldier in England who was run over, then hacked to death in a London street? The murderers who did that certainly would have no problem with killing people in cruel ways, especially if they were given state sanction.

For other morbid Medieval executions, read about being broken on the wheel. It's hideous.

I wonder about that. If anything, it seems more like we've been quite destructive this past 100 years, from Hitler to the Stalinist purges. I'd love to claim there's some modern age of enlightenment, but the fact that there are significant conflicts every few years makes me question that.

I think the point made in that TED talk was that the numbers don't add up to that, though.

The figures I've seen put us as killing more than all previous generations combined. Granted, this is largely due to there being so many people, but the notion that the people so tormented are a smaller fraction of all people alive is scant comfort. Similar figures note that there are more slaves around (yes, in this day and age) than previously.

Better weapons and systems, wielded by a few.

Here's the talk referenced by WalterSear - The Surprising Decline in Violence:

http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...

Seems pretty persuasive.

Seems like a problem of measurement. Do we care about how many suffer or what percentage of the world population they represent?

If you are interested in history you might be interested in

http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hh

He's got some very good audio episodes on ww1, ww2, the mongols. He gives a very good telling of the horrors of the conflicts and the passions that drove the wave of murders.

Just keep in mind that he gets away with lots of egregious mistakes about history in his podcasts by saying that he is not a historian but just an entertainer.

This lesser minds effect has many manifestations, including what appears to be a universal tendency to assume that others’ minds are less sophisticated and more superficial than one’s own.

A lot of the stuff in this article runs rampant in various forums on the Internet and especially in interactions between programmers.

My exact thought when reading the article. I've long termed this phenomenon "correctness at any cost"; a zero-sum game of "rightness" wherein one bludgeons another with overblown self-righteousness in having memorized the equivalent of a 20-second Google search. Emily Post would have labeled such people "boors".

I think a simpler theory is that a lot of people in Internet societies like forums want to appear to be right above all else, even though they might intellectually realize that their "opponents" arguments are more solid.

But maybe that's just my own projection.

Why go so far? 1% of Americans are in prison or some form of detention. But yeah, they do no count.

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