Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Luis Dias on December 22, 2014, 03:57:01 am
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This author nails it so bad I think I am even being euphemistic by proclaiming it as the best thing I've read this year. 2014 was the year of the OUTRAGE discussion social media politics, but this is not a fad. What happens is a phenomena that is just getting worse due to the tools we have available in our hands.
It's a long article, but boy it's so good I just have to break my recent rule of never posting in Gen Disc and share it with you. Here's just a hint of what is about, but the whole article explains the process so much better than I ever could, despite my ever growing suspicions of these kinds of dynamics being at play for a long while:
Under Moloch, everyone is irresistably incentivized to ignore the things that unite us in favor of forever picking at the things that divide us in exactly the way that is most likely to make them more divisive. Race relations are at historic lows not because white people and black people disagree on very much, but because the media absolutely worked its tuchus off to find the single issue that white people and black people disagreed over the most and ensure that it was the only issue anybody would talk about. Men’s rights activists and feminists hate each other not because there’s a huge divide in how people of different genders think, but because only the most extreme examples of either side will ever gain traction, and those only when they are framed as attacks on the other side.
People talk about the shift from old print-based journalism to the new world of social media and the sites adapted to serve it. These are fast, responsive, and only just beginning to discover the power of controversy. They are memetic evolution shot into hyperdrive, and the omega point is a well-tuned machine optimized to search the world for the most controversial and counterproductive issues, then make sure no one can talk about anything else. An engine that creates money by burning the few remaining shreds of cooperation, bipartisanship and social trust.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
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I do not think the article applies to gen. disc at all. Most of the problematic arguments on Gen. Disc involve people trying rather hard to win a discussion even though there are no ways to actually define a "win" when it comes to discussion.
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I do. I think it encapsulates most of the problems in gendisc that I have seen in 2014 and hadn't seen before. But that was not the sole point of sharing this.
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I do not think the article applies to gen. disc at all. Most of the problematic arguments on Gen. Disc involve people trying rather hard to win a discussion even though there are no ways to actually define a "win" when it comes to discussion.
sure there is, the other side stops defending. this definition of "win" I think will explain a lot of the behavior you see.
As for the question posed about why there are so many high publicity rape cases that turn out to be false is IMHO because the true rape cases more often get handled by the normal process of police and investigations and evidence and juries. Accusations that need to be Listened and Believed rather than supported by evidence are the one's most likely to be dubious and the ones most likely to be dismissed by the authorities and so are the ones left over for lynch mobs to gather around. During these discussions I hear so often that these are victims of a horrible crime, when whether or not that crime happened at all is the very question being discussed.
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I think part of the article is applicable but large parts aren't because not many people here particularly care about the number of people who read a particular thread. No one is deliberately choosing controversial cases because they want attention.
I think it does partly explain why certain issues are big arguments while others aren't. But I tend to agree, the issue of people trying to 'win' the argument is a much larger problem.
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Just in the other thread Vega was asking "what about India's censorship of DA:I?", and the same answer applies to Eric Gardner's case vs Ferguson: it's not controversial, so we spend 10 units of time on it, while in the others, fueled by their very own ambiguities, we spend 1000s of time units, and we carve our own trenches on how we fall on those particular controversies.
The problem then becomes how on earth are we gonna end this memetic cycle of OUTRAGE build up and trenching up, and instead build a sort of structural mechanic that makes people more active around those very things where everyone agrees? It seems even like an impossible mission. The article is so dead right on this: such attempts fail because they just seem like "charity" and who has time or interest in these things? Join the forces to do something good? Only if at the same time we can use such "forces" to give a finger to Those Others Who are Very Very Bad People. Reminds me of the ReTake Mass Effect movement that started actually big charity donations, but the source of these donations was a movement that was entrenched in its negativity towards a particular game (ending).
This smells like a very big human trait that is hemorraging madness throughout the internet and the wider world. It explains #gamergate in the exact same way that it explains islam entrenchment and radicalization, it explains why GreenPeace are such assholes, just like PETA.
e: An exception. The article is also dead right by explaining how this functions in terms of tribalization and identity politics: you prove you are a christian if you do the christian praxis in precisely those things that are absurd, over the top, "surplus", like avoiding condoms like it's AIDS. So you have to do a ritualistic thing like that, in order to belong. There was a movement this year that had charity all over itself, but it actually spread like wildfire because it encapsulated this "surplus" into it, even despite the fact that this useless surplus wasn't part of it in the first place, but it ended up being essential to it. I'm talking of that ice bucket challenge.
Notice how the movement started as "either do the charity or do the ice bucket". But that was obviously never going to work, despite the "incentives" being apparently in the right direction. Fact is, humans behave in these paradoxical fashions: they are gonna do the ice bucket and do the charity. If the charity was the "only thing" it would never get viral like it did. If people started doing the ice bucket in order to get away from doing charity they would be seen as absolute assholes. Doing both signaled everyone they were doing some sort of social ritual, a rite of belonging to something larger than themselves, through a completely useless and ridiculous feat.
IOW, we still haven't figured out these social humans, and all the tools we have right now (twitter, tumblr, facebook, etc.) seem to have worsened all the negative aspects of our social interactions, rather than the reverse.
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this article explains how the big controversial topics find their way to HLP. The arguments you see here is the egg laying phase of the life cycle as it radicalizes a hand full of people on this board who then go out and start the argument on some other board.
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I think part of the article is applicable but large parts aren't because not many people here particularly care about the number of people who read a particular thread. No one is deliberately choosing controversial cases because they want attention.
This could be true on this forum, but social media is a different beast, and I think the article is spot-on.
Controversial issues (whether they are justified or not) or divisive issues in the social media age act like a memetic viruses and the end result of a succesful infection is social conflict and division. This is precisely what I was talking about when I said in an earlier discussion that introducing identity politics into gaming will inevitably lead to conflicts and schisms in the gaming community. And tech related fields are particularly vulnerable to the infection because almost everyone in tech related fields uses social media - a machine optimized to search for any shred of controversy and bring it to the front. Now gaming is infected (and if the article is true, it was pretty much unavoidable - sooner or later we will be infected anyway).
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It's strange to me that having no conflict over and no discussion of issues in a given subculture is held up as a good thing.
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the modern 'social media' paradigm with a small number of sites with massively huge numbers of people is the perfect environment for this sort of thing, the biggest transmission boundary is when you have to manually move the topic to a new site entirely by hand.
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It's strange to me that having no conflict over and no discussion of issues in a given subculture is held up as a good thing.
The_E, could you please read the article before posting sarcastic things aimed at strawmans? No one has ever railed against discussions and conflicts. The topic is how exactly these discussions are structured in the most polarizing and poisonous ways.
e: for instance I found it baffling when I learned that the Eric case was a month older than Ferguson's, and yet it was Ferguson, not Eric's case that got discussed in the wider media. Why is this, especially given how consensual Eric's case was and how things could have been improved?
It's not just that discussions are great and so let's diss everything out. It's also how racial relationships hit a 20 year low because of the way we discussed these topics. Hammer everything out, excellent. But that's not what is happening here. What is happening here is a deeper and graver scenario: an entrenchement of polarizing tribes who are fed (and feedback on them) by outrageous things.
Sigh, no, The_E, you have to read the article. For real. You won't regret it.
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I did, Luis. I was more responding to maslo's comment here:
This is precisely what I was talking about when I said in an earlier discussion that introducing identity politics into gaming will inevitably lead to conflicts and schisms in the gaming community. And tech related fields are particularly vulnerable to the infection because almost everyone in tech related fields uses social media - a machine optimized to search for any shred of controversy and bring it to the front. Now gaming is infected (and if the article is true, it was pretty much unavoidable - sooner or later we will be infected anyway).
A comment which I believe is complaining about something I believe to be fundamental to the way we form groups and group consensus as something new and intrusive. It's not the introduction of identity politics that's causing problems as much as it is the introduction of more individuals with differing opinions into the group, which means that the group identity is shifting away from what was once believed to be an eternal standard.
That said, I do like the overall article, the meme <-> toxoplasma analogy is pretty spot on in my estimation.
I strongly believe that one of the critical questions we, as a collective, have to figure out is how to communicate. We're not wired for the ability to have our thoughts transmitted into the world with a few muscle twitches, our entire social wiring is based on interactions with other monkeys, and the limitations that come with that are showing up more and more as dysfunctional behaviour online.
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Oh, ok I misread you, sorry. Personally, I don't appreciate this thing called "identity politics", but that's quite another fight altogether from this one.
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The Gardner case happened earlier, but the grand jury decision was after Ferguson. Given the protests are over the lack of any indictment, that's why people weren't talking about it much until after Ferguson.
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Interesting article, thanks for sharing Luis.
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The Gardner case happened earlier, but the grand jury decision was after Ferguson. Given the protests are over the lack of any indictment, that's why people weren't talking about it much until after Ferguson.
In any case, the Ferguson issue is orders of magnitude more discussed than Eric's. The article point stands.
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The Gardner case happened earlier, but the grand jury decision was after Ferguson. Given the protests are over the lack of any indictment, that's why people weren't talking about it much until after Ferguson.
Because I mean there was no response to the Ferguson incident at the time, right?
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The Gardner case happened earlier, but the grand jury decision was after Ferguson. Given the protests are over the lack of any indictment, that's why people weren't talking about it much until after Ferguson.
Because I mean there was no response to the Ferguson incident at the time, right?
See, this is inflammatory and likely to raise hackles. Try phrasing this in a way that makes the same point but doesn't pique people's emotions.
(I tried to provide an example of a non-inflammatory phrasing but I'm not even sure what you were trying to say here.)
Anyway, Luis, this is an excellent thought-provoking article, and a great find.
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The Gardner case happened earlier, but the grand jury decision was after Ferguson. Given the protests are over the lack of any indictment, that's why people weren't talking about it much until after Ferguson.
In any case, the Ferguson issue is orders of magnitude more discussed than Eric's. The article point stands.
Case and point I'd never even heard about Gardner until I read that article, but Ferguson was practically shoved in my face wherever I went - I couldn't have not heard about it if I tried.
Nice article, does shed some insight into why some groups do the obvious shoot-themselves-in-the-foot type stuff.
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Indeed. That kind of obvious, provocative sarcasm is never helpful. You've been warned repeatedly for it, PH. It needs to stop.
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"Free will is a myth, religion is a joke. We are all pawns, controlled by something greater: Memes. The DNA of the soul. They shape our will. They are the culture- they are everything we pass on. Expose someone to anger long enough, they will learn to hate. They become a carrier. Envy, greed, despair... All memes. All passed along." -???
+1 Internet Point if you can tell me who said this.
+9 Internet Points if you can tell me *why* I quoted this.
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Because Kojima had a point and everyone called him a charlatan all those years back?
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Because Kojima had a point and everyone called him a charlatan all those years back?
Good enough. +10 Internet Points to An4ximandros.
Perhaps I read too much into that part, but I cannot shake the feeling that it WAS a rather poignant moment. Even if it did occur wrapped in ludicrousness.
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Good Article Luis. Funny, I took Christmas Break off from HLP because these discussions were becoming an unhealthy obsession, and one of the first threads I see coming back is a perfect explanation of why.
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Good Article Luis. Funny, I took Christmas Break off from HLP because these discussions were becoming an unhealthy obsession, and one of the first threads I see coming back is a perfect explanation of why.
Unhealthy, yes. That's exactly what a seemingly increasingly large number of these gen disc discussions are. Increasingly unhealthy and increasingly of less value imo, value as in feeling you got a return on the investment of time put in.
I wonder how many people feel the discussions they participate in here were worth their time when it was over.
InsaneBaron, would you care to elaborate on why you felt they were becoming an unhealthy obsession?
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InsaneBaron, would you care to elaborate on why you felt they were becoming an unhealthy obsession?
Why would you ask such a question? What business is that of yours?
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InsaneBaron, would you care to elaborate on why you felt they were becoming an unhealthy obsession?
Why would you ask such a question? What business is that of yours?
To discuss the issues with Gen Disc.
He doesn't have to if he doesn't want to.
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Unhealthy, yes. That's exactly what a seemingly increasingly large number of these gen disc discussions are. Increasingly unhealthy and increasingly of less value imo, value as in feeling you got a return on the investment of time put in.
For the record, you are also allowed to take a sabbatical from posting in GD. No one stopping you.
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This non-divisive thread proves GD is the bomb and anyone who disagrees is a raging hooligan.
<3 GD Team Spirit :alright:
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GD is increasingly nothing, it's always been like this. the only change I think I've noticed over the years in an increase in attempts to moderate.
I mean when was the last time you heard someone utter the word "Christofascist"
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About five seconds ago when I read your post :P
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no, I meant bef... you know what forget it, it sure has gone downhill recently, this place isn't like it used to be in the good ole halcyon days when people could recognize my sarcasm and hyperbole.
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shhht Bob, sarcasm will get your ass banned. What are you, a vile disgusting human being? Come on.
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Good Article Luis. Funny, I took Christmas Break off from HLP because these discussions were becoming an unhealthy obsession, and one of the first threads I see coming back is a perfect explanation of why.
Unhealthy, yes. That's exactly what a seemingly increasingly large number of these gen disc discussions are. Increasingly unhealthy and increasingly of less value imo, value as in feeling you got a return on the investment of time put in.
I wonder how many people feel the discussions they participate in here were worth their time when it was over.
InsaneBaron, would you care to elaborate on why you felt they were becoming an unhealthy obsession?
This is precisely the point, the discussions consume huge amounts of time, and you don't gain very much from them except high blood pressure. And yet it takes a lot of willpower to just walk away, precisely because a lot of people define that as "loosing" the debate and will immediately proclaim you (and whatever you were defending) the looser (as if anyone ever "won" an internet debate.)
Ergo, I find myself repeated rewatching this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvv60iv_wjE) as a way to calm down and put it all in perspective.
Ergo, I did exactly what Scotty just suggested and took a sabbatical, because it was Christmas for crying out loud and trying to argue on the internet when your little brothers want you to play RISK is a crime in itself.
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Unhealthy, yes. That's exactly what a seemingly increasingly large number of these gen disc discussions are. Increasingly unhealthy and increasingly of less value imo, value as in feeling you got a return on the investment of time put in.
For the record, you are also allowed to take a sabbatical from posting in GD. No one stopping you.
You'd like that, wouldn't you.
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InsaneBaron, that is basically what I expected you to say. And I wonder how many people feel the same way in a roundabout way. A lot of people have already left. I wonder how many people actually feel their time was well spent on a regular basis in gen disc. Who enjoy conversing in gen disc. My suspicion is all or nearly all of us don't get a return on our investment. And for all the issues we have with gen disc and each other, if we were all having the same kinds of feelings about gen disc interaction, if we all had that common ground, I wonder if we could come together to do something about it.
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My suggestions for GD:
1) Repeat offenders get "Incoming jump signature, hostile configuration!" inserted at the beginnings of their first replies in threads.
2) An "Is it worth it?" prompt appears when you try to post something with a quote tag.
3) ROI counter appears when you try to post more than once on a thread telling you how many times you've posted and how much time it's sucked out of your only chance to be alive.
4) Rename board "GTD" to keep out Vasudans.
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1) Repeat offenders get "Incoming jump signature, hostile configuration!" inserted at the beginnings of their first replies in threads.
I unironically like this one.
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Should make the website have a soundbit for it too!
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3) ROI counter appears when you try to post more than once on a thread telling you how many times you've posted and how much time it's sucked out of your only chance to be alive.
I'll take this one. :)
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1) Repeat offenders get "Incoming jump signature, hostile configuration!" inserted at the beginnings of their first replies in threads.
I unironically like this one.
2nded :lol: