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Comment by TameAntelope | Hacker News Reader

I hate, immensely, how effective "double down and never admit guilt" is, but I don't think there's anything we can do about it as a society.

Thank goodness most people don't have the guts to hold firm long enough to get away with it...

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It's troubling when individuals do this, but I find it especially brutal that "double down and never admit guilt" is the go-to strategy for most nation states and corporations.

I wouldn't limit this to nation states, seems a general approach by politicians all over the world. A certain one made it much more popular over the past four years.

What is a "nation state"?

edit: Wikipedia says there are around 20 nation states. I don't know why you're picking those out specifically though.

The rest of the world would call "country", but American govspeak has decided to call "nation state" for some weird reason.

The rest of the world makes a useful distinction between a 'country' (such as France), a 'state' (the public institutions which run France), and a 'government' (the political entity which controls the French state).

However in the US the word 'state' is overloaded, so 'nation state' is used. It's confusing, because 'nation' is sometimes used to mean 'country' (which is how it's intended in 'nation state') and more traditionally used to mean a people with a shared language and history.

As a friend in the State Department exlained, it's because of the French and the British. Generally,"nation" is used to refer to an autonomous political unit, but "nation-state" refers specifically to a sovereign nation.

And the French and the Brits have/had a lot of "nations" which are part of their "nation" and which thus are not "nation states" of their own. For example, Scotsland (and even technically Britain itself) are both nations that are themselves part of the nation-state that is the U.K. For the French, it gets a bit more complicated, since they have a number of territories which are nominally sovereign but are legally subordinate to the French government in Paris (like Tahiti).

"Britain" is a bit confusing. Most often it is used to refer to the UK itself, or sometimes to Great Britain the island. I doubt that's what you meant.

Yes, didn't notice the error until after window for editing had passed. I initially meant England, but "Britain" itself still works because the UK includes more than just the nations on the island itself.

Also, it's my understanding that the main island is Britain, and that "Great Britain" includes the smaller outlying islands, but not the island of Ireland.

The English language is horribly ambiguous and confused around words like nation, state, nation state, country, nationality, citizenship, ethnicity, race etc.

Yes, but I've not seen an explanation of which useful cases are covered by "nation state" but not by "country" or even better "government". I don't think it even solves the problem of countries which cause other people to get mad if you acknowledge their existence (Taiwan, Palestine)

Meanwhile, does "nation state" apply to the Plurinational State of Bolivia?

Government is also a murky concept. In the US it seems to cover all of the state apparatus, while in other cultures it only refers to the executive branch or even the "cabinet" specifically.

"Nation state" seems to be a thing because state alone could be confused with the 50 US states.

With nation state the focus is on the institutions and leadership, with country the focus is on land and ordinary people it seems.

"Nation state" is used colloquially just to mean "country", but it has a connotation of formality or even oppression. Where "country" just sounds like a place where people live, "nation state" has a kind of academic, officious sound.

So it's used in a context like this to imply something nefarious, treating a country a bit like a dystopian sci-fi megacorp.

That doesn't make the assertion wrong. It would have been equally valid with the term "country". Just explaining (over-explaining, probably) why the OP chose that particular phrase: it has a particular emotional impact.

You mean the list "Nation states where a single ethnic group makes up more than 85% of the population"?

Most of the world is currently organised in nation states, but most of those are multi-ethnic. Ethnicity != nationality in this sense.

lmgtfy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state

A nation is a body of people that believe they are similar (usually ethnicity or language.) "An imagined community".

A state is the entity that taxes people, builds roads, maintains a military. It has a "monopoly on violence" in a particular territory.

A nation can be stateless - like the Kurds or Uyghurs. They have a cohesive self-identity, but lack their own state. Colloquially, "nation" can also mean "country" - think "national champion", but this more specific meaning exists as well.

It's rarely necessary to use the term "nation-state". Just using "state" is fine. I suspect people like using it because it has a nice ring to it and sounds serious.

The USA has 50 states, none of which are nations (and thus not nation-states), but which together comprise the whole nation-state union. So the US government and US institutions tend to use "nation-state" more often than others do, because it's a useful disambiguation for them.

That makes sense but I think it should be possible to tell that a "state" refers to another country, not a US subfederal unit.

That’s a pessimistic way to put it, but you have a point.

This depends on the target audience though. Some people seem unable to be convinced by hard evidence and reason. If you’re able to pick your audience — which is the case for content creators and politicians — you will always be able to address those people.

In most professional settings, you’re more dependent on the goodwill of someone specific, and I think there the strategy is less effective.

In this case it wasn't so much that Dream chose his audience, but that his audience is primarily impressionable young kids.

I looked through the Reddit threads that got posted around the time this happened and there were clearly a lot of young people who either chose to believe Dream because they didn't understand the statistics well enough to know it was BS, or were trying to rationalize that Dream was innocent based on some weird logic.

That’s mostly my point though, if “doubling down” works best with impressionable, unreasonable (in this case, young) people, then the strategy limits you to that audience.

For most of us there are only a handful of people we need to maintain our credibility with personally or professionally. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Yeah, it's a game of numbers. When you have 22 million subscribers and half of them don't trust you anymore, then you still have 11 million subscribers.

Seems like the only benefit to admitting guilt is for ones own conscience, but clearly that’s not enough for many.

our society is also not structured anymore to allowing one to admit guilt, and be absolved by some sort of community process after which you can return to a normal life; if you are guilty now you are forever cursed.

I think that's because, thanks to the internet, "now" never truly ends. You're often just one Google search away from reanimating any significant event in someone else's life.

right, hence right to be forgotten laws in some places.

When was it structured that way? Serious question - I generally believe the same thing, but looking at it from the outside I’m finding it hard to reach a worthwhile example.

As chaorace above you suggested, it was so structured by the arrival of the technology to keep track of everything you ever did that was bad and put it online for future reference.

The tendency to do it was already in place, it is likely that you see someone from high school that was a jerk and you think that jerk once did this, even if it was 15 years ago. That's a sort of normal human tendency.

Some people are so notorious for rather innocuous things that they are outcast - Monica Lewinsky is an obvious example - I believe she was ostracized for a little more than a decade.

Legally there is already the habit of judging people unfit for crimes, even if they have served their time. American society is structured to make people with felony convictions harder to employ.

Now add in technology and imagine being able to treat anyone you have never met like that jerk in High School forever.

The final step of structuring is then provided by people who can see ways to profit off of the fact that people who have done non felonious things might still have done things that society will find objectionable, and that the technology exists to keep this in people's eyes.

I agree with you, but that’s a subtly different claim than that we used to have a community process (or ritual, but that’s adding some baggage) for forgiveness/reintegration that has since been lost.

Not having the technology that creates a social record is different than actively forgiving and forgetting.

well the community process thing is sort of a more complicated thing - some argue that the old process of putting people in the stocks / public humiliation was a more humane way of treating people because they then paid their debt and could be reintegrated. Not saying I agree but the argument at any rate is there was a community process. I am at any rate open to the possibility that this was a good aspect of a system that in many other ways was bad.

If so that community process was destroyed and replaced with a system that would never forgive you for your transgressions.

However the system was imperfect and thus people could move, reinvent themselves and reintegrate themselves by exploiting the imperfections.

Technology is now working to remove this capability.

So it was not that the community process was removed by the arrival of technology, it was removed and later the technology arrived to strengthen what had been put in its place - creating a system in which transgressions and punishments are eternal.

Yep. Even before technology made checking easy it was common for employers to ask about criminal convictions. Felons have had difficulty getting jobs since long before the Internet came around. In theory they'd paid their debt to society, but in practice society kept punishing them indefinitely. The internet (and background check databases, etc) just makes this cheaper for employers to do, but didn't cause the problem.

There are great benefits for the society, and dare I say species.

Conscience, after all, is not an accident. Its a product of our evolution. We lived in small groups for most of our existence, and the very survival of the group was tied pretty directly to how well the group members worked together. Lying had consequences for a group that would not make lying have consequences for an individual.

The problems is that we now live in groups much larger than anything we experienced before.

> Conscience, after all, is not an accident. Its a product of our evolution. We lived in small groups for most of our existence, and the very survival of the group was tied pretty directly to how well the group members worked together. Lying had consequences for a group that would not make lying have consequences for an individual.

Be careful making assumptions like this. I mean, you're right, having a conscience is a product of our evolution... but so is the ability to lie. You make it sound like disadvantageous qualities would be filtered out by evolution but that is clearly not the case.

It's a balance between the (evolutionary) advantage for of the group vs the advantage for the individual. Some lying may be beneficial for the individual as long as it doesn't harm the group too much. Lie too much though, and the group gets less likely to survive as a whole, meaning individuals within the group are less likely to survive as well.

Deception can be planned or opportunistic.

In this case, Dream planned to deceive people by tweaking game randomness. It is impossible to justify when hundreds of people are following the rules.

This is why people double down. You mostly see apologies when opportunity got the best of judgement.

It seems like this strategy didn't work so well in the past - do we know the reason why?

Perhaps politicians lying is business as usual, and it only seems to have increased because society gradually forgets things as they recede into history.

Just in the past the lie was "Iraq was behind 9/11 and has WMDs" or "The war in Vietnam is important to fight and easy to win"

Could something like that possibly be a requirement for a self-sustaining life? Like you can’t be both alive and reasonable?

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