Jerks, Asshats, and the Unstable Politics of Civility [video] | Hacker News Reader

Jerks, Asshats, and the Unstable Politics of Civility [video]

stolaf.edu

54 pointsDowwie21 comments

i've built an algorithmic system to help people who are civil connect to each other.

it's like pagerank, but personalized. Rather than have a top score for the 'most civil person', you use the system to record who you find civil and who you don't.

When you interact with a stranger, you can quickly find out "should i bother talking to this person, or are they just going to troll me?"

if a bunch of your friends say "hey this guy is worth talking to", then maybe you will.

if a bunch of your friends say "this guy is a troll", you'll probably think the same thing.

https://github.com/neyer/respect

Wow, I see this as inevitably, extremely useful, but at the same time as the ultimate filter bubble. Much like Facebook, but more controlled by peoples own prejudice and less by FB advertising. Frightening, and cool.

I have a lower than average Uber rating for this exact reason. I've never been anything but polite. If anything, a little quiet, and untalkative if I'm tired. You're right - these systems generally select for the wrong things.

I'm sorry to hear that, but I think in this case you can't blame the algorithm. If the customers want a gregarious driver, this is what they select for. It's similar to if you were in any service profession. For example, a bartender would be expected to be even friendlier.

Passengers also have Uber ratings. I read wjagodfrey's comment as talking about their passenger rating, not their driver rating.

Wow, this is very cool stuff. You could even guesstimate how likely two strangers are to respect each other using a weighted sum of the n-th order implied respects. It wouldn't be too different from calculating a power series.

Your project has earned my respect. :-)

Does your ranking also work for actions? The most dangerous people are often very civil. Civility is an essential means to construct and keep a power pyramid in place.

idk maybe anyone who uses internet karma points to determine whether someone is worth talking to is both the jerk and the asshat

I apologize for being offtopic, but this is a horrendously bad video player. If you pause the video for more than a minute or so it loses its play position. Scrubbing through the video to find where you got disconnected is painful and glitchy. There is no way to adjust the playback speed to 1.3x or 1.5x. This video player sucks. I'm glad flash is dead.

Interestingly, I got redirected to rtsp://stolaf-flash.streamguys.net/vod/academic/academic/2016-03-31_ifc_symposium_one-1

rtmpdump or VLC should help you there.

rtsp://stolaf-flash.streamguys.net/vod/academic/academic/2016-03-31_ifc_symposium_one-4 is the higher resolution stream, fwiw.

Actually, dumping this (or rather, the high quality link Adaptive mentions) with VLC/mplayer/openrtsp has been a pain in the ass. I'll provide an Internet Archive link when I'm done downloading, transcoding, and QAing the resulting file.

I'd be interested to know what trouble you've had.

openrtmp wouldn't dump the stream (because it was an rtsp stream). Perhaps I was doing something wrong?

Then openRTSP wouldn't output an MP4 file properly.

So I used ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -rtsp_transport tcp -i "rtsp://stolaf-flash.streamguys.net/vod/academic/academic/2016-03-31_ifc_symposium_one-4" -acodec copy -vcodec copy -f mp4 2016-03-31_ifc_symposium_one.mp4

Note the "rtsp_transport" option; without that, I was getting UDP packet drops. Not good for archival purposes. Used the option for TCP to prevent said drops.

https://archive.org/download/JerksAsshatsAndTheUnstablePolit...

Definitely check out Jonathan Haidt's talk at the symposium. If you don't want to or cannot watch the entire talk, start at around 50 minutes.

Sorry but what does the video say in tl;dr? Anyone with background in this field?

It differentiates between jerks and asshats [and indirectly Bartlebys]. It describes their subtle effects in terms of game theory and suggests ways understanding and directing their behavior.

Because the concepts and issues are evocative in the manner Frankfurt's On Bullshit, the content tends to expand beyond the length of the video rather than condense down twoard a sound bite.

The main bullet point is that civility is when we agree it's essential to ensure that the "game" of discourse does not come to an end.

Because we want to play the game, we must protect the game from being subverted. That includes protecting the game from subversion by ourselves in the pursuit of our own, individual goals.

Civilization can tolerate cheats: people who agree that we're playing a game of discourse with a goal of cooperation (being truthful, adequately informative, relevant, and clear), although cheats try to break the rules without being caught.

It cannot tolerate "asshats": people with no regard whatsoever for the values (rules?) of the game of discourse

You have restated the stated goal of the talk, but personally I didn't find him convincing. Behind his stated argument was a lot of snobbery directed against those he clearly dislikes.

I prefer if the tone of a insult matches the content, I don't like politely worded sneers which he comes across as advocating in favor of. This whole business of "civilization can tolerate well educated cunning self interested liars better than it can rabble" is not a super familiar argument because it's not convincing or polite to make it.

I think civility is how we react to things that are different from us. In resolving conflict, we can bomb the shit out of each other, or we can greet our enemy with political statements. Both are painful but dead is an absorbing state, as long as you are alive, you can whine, rant or smile etc. Once you are dead, it's irrevokable.

Hence bombing is less civil on that ground.

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