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Comment by cousin_it | Hacker News Reader

If/when any of my friends get attacked by the mob, I hope I'll have the courage to stand by them publicly. A good recent test was the doxing of Scott Alexander. I signed the open letter against it with my real name and was happily surprised to see the names of many people I know. We should have more of these small but visible acts of resistance that let like-minded people find you.

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The Scott Alexander controversy isn't analogous at all. That was entirely due to his public writing, not alleged private interactions between him and others.

The post, and your comment, IMO wrongly frames this as courage .vs. cowardice in standing up for friends.

However, that fails to take into account any context of the particular “cancellation”.

eg, A situation with damning screenshots of lewd DMs are pretty ‘smoking gun’, and the barometer of “good friends would publicly support me” feels like an insane expectation when (in this hypothetical instance) the person did a bad thing.

Perhaps being cancelled isn’t the solution (because we’re all flawed) but the automatic expectation of character references come a scandal isn’t fair on one’s friends.

My view is more like "a true friend would help you hide a body", or the short story "Friends in San Rosario" by O.Henry. If I abandoned a friend to the mob due to "screenshots of lewd DMs", I'd have a hard time living with myself afterward.

That doesn’t feel like a worldview that would result in a fairer society or better personal conduct.

If defending a person, in the face of prima facie evidence, has the result of preserving their reputation and status (and keeping the reputation and status of the accuser in their original state) then it doesn’t feel useful or good.

I have a little kid. When we watch cartoons, they might point at the villain of the piece - e.g., Jafar - and say "he's a bad man!"

And I take the opportunity to nudge them and ask, "They did a bad thing. Does that mean they're always bad? Can they make things better? Should we forgive them? How do we know when to forgive them?" (not in a single tirade; these are just questions I drop over time.)

Because, in anticipation of the fact that they're definitely going to fuck up along the way, I want them to learn that mistakes and failures and even doing bad things don't make them irrevocably bad - that ultimately, the most important thing is making amends / trying again / etc. That your worst decision is not the sum total of who you are.

I don't see why I should try so hard to teach that to my kid, and then "disavow" friends who may have fucked up.

While I agree with your worldview as presented here there is a difference between:

1. helping a friend hide the body

2. telling your friend they are in the wrong and you will help them through the consequences IE likely charges, court, gaol time, life rebuilding etc.

It's in the nature of friendships to not be fair or good for the whole society. We regularly favor our friends over strangers for all sorts of things. If you want fair, don't favor your friends. The trouble is, that also means probably not having any friends. There's a personal price to pay for being "good".

Our actual legal system is adversarial, and for good reason. The best way to get to the truth is to have devoted partisans on both sides.

Just a heads up for any friends of mine reading this comment, if you kill someone, I'm not gonna help cover it up. Probably even if you were justified — you'll still have to take your chances with the court system. Good luck tho!

"a true friend would help you hide a body" <- if both of you are criminals, perhaps.

That kind of scenario doesn’t seem relevant, given the kind of attacks this thread is about, but if shown a damning screenshot, I would hope that I would not not immediately disavow a friend before looking into it, and if the situation was indeed that bad, would still love my friend enough to help them rehabilitate and obtain forgiveness from the people they wronged. I believe it’s possible to temporarily withdraw good graces to that end without permanently disavowing someone.

This is a good and much more balanced/nuanced outlook.

However (in my hypothetical scenario which was meant to challenge the utility of blanket statements of support), a message of support does effectively act as a counterweight to an accusation, and unless one possesses all of the facts it may have the effect of laundering the reputation of somebody who deserves criticism (though I’d argue that in most instances, cancellation is very very over the top as a penalty).

I think that a culture of lovingly challenging our friends is part of the solution to that problem of that counterweighting. I should be the first to uncover the sins, if you will, of my friend, and urge repentance and restitution, temporarily withholding approval to achieve that end, and involving more people in that knowledge to the degree necessary with public shaming being a last resort. (In this example, the problem is not one requiring legal intervention.)

Sadly, the idea that a friend can be a loyal one, while insisting on good behavior, seems alien today.

This is very good. I definitely endorse this approach (and largely agree with your final sentence).

> I think that a culture of lovingly challenging our friends is part of the solution to that problem of that counterweighting. I should be the first to uncover the sins, if you will, of my friend, and urge repentance and restitution, temporarily withholding approval to achieve that end, and involving more people in that knowledge to the degree necessary with public shaming being a last resort. (In this example, the problem is not one requiring legal intervention.)

This sounds very Catholic

Yep. :) I tried to generalize the philosophy but apparently didn’t cover my tracks well enough. I’d like to think that the principles would work for anyone.

They definitely don't. These things are easily manipulated and abused. Leaving the church was one of the best things I ever did, but now the moralistic tone makes sense. Thanks for your honesty.

Sorry to hear. I really tried to make clear that the whole point is to fight abuse from within as hard as possible, for those in any particular group.

Righteousness generally lends us to believing those things. I think my memories of it were that it was more harmful than good, though there was surely some benefit.

I think I know what you mean by the words righteous and moralistic. I’d definitely say I’m optimistic about these ideas, and obviously pessimistic about how rare they’re applied in the wild as I said a few comments ago. The criticism you’ve given me is exactly the kind of challenge and accountability I’m asking for, though, even though we aren’t in the same group aside from HN, so thank you!

I think an interesting question is: can you support people and wish the best for them even if they've done a bad thing?

With the exception of some particularly abhorrent things, I'm not sure I'd consider myself a friend to someone if I'm not willing to support them even if they're in the wrong. That doesn't mean lying for them or trying to pretend it wasn't bad, but I would expect myself to push back on mischaracterizations of them (positive or negative!) and help them navigate the consequences.

I’d like to think I could but it’s largely context and “acknowledgement + repentance dependent” on the part of the ‘accused’ (if they did do the bad thing).

That is, I am not going to defend somebody who won’t even be honest and open about their wrongdoing.

> I would expect myself to push back on mischaracterizations of them (positive or negative!) and help them navigate the consequences.

The thing is, what tell you it's actually mischaracterizations. You can believe me, I'm not the same in front of my parents, versus in front of my boss or in front of my friends. I'm not saying I'm doing anything bad, but there's trait that I'll show more or less depending on the involved party.

It can also pretty easily change between public and private settings, I don't have much situation for which it happens for me, except obviously my SO, but I have known people that does adapt to my more relax personality when they are alone with me. Nothing nefarious in my case, but a good example on how in private someone may act differently based on the other party.

So sure I agree that you may support them, tell your own story about that person, but you still need to understands that it's only your story, that has nothing to do with anyone else story.

Screenshots are trivially easy to fake. Friends don’t have to be character references, just public opinion defense attorneys who play dirty.

I should have caveated my comment with “screenshots that can be proved to be real”

What screenshots can be proven to be real?

You’re right. It was a bad, rushed example on my part.

I was effectively trying to say “Imagine a scenario where the wrongdoing was basically certain”, for the purposes of focusing on the ‘backing up friends with a public statement’ part of the situation.

I know that in reality this (probability of guilt) can’t readily be uncoupled from the result (the statement) but I asked people to imagine a situation of certain ‘guilt’.

Speaking of Scott Alexander, this kind of thinking seems exactly like the kind of virtue signaling he writes about in "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup". As the priest in the parable says:

>It seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don’t really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don’t regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. You forgive a conventional duel just as you forgive a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn’t anything to be forgiven.

And as Scott continues:

>Actual forgiveness, the kind the priest needs to cultivate to forgive evildoers, is really really hard. The fake forgiveness the townspeople use to forgive the people they like is really easy, so they get to boast not only of their forgiving nature, but of how much nicer they are than those mean old priests who find forgiveness difficult and want penance along with it.

I think about this a lot when I see the perennial discourse on canceling. Scott talks about this argument in terms of people being canceled by leftists, but I think it applies almost as well to people on the opposite side handwringing about cancellation. There are lots of great points to be made about the corrosive effects of cancellation mob rule, but I sometimes wonder if most of the left-right difference on this issue comes down to how strongly they feel about the infraction in question, rather than any level-headed consideration of what policy would lead to the best society.

> most of the left-right difference on this issue comes down to how strongly they feel about the infraction in question

I would say this is pretty clearly the case. Most of the time the question seems to be "is this cancel-worthy": the difference in your reaction to the "cancellation" of, say, J.K. Rowling vs. Nikole Hannah-Jones probably depends more on your feeling about what they've done than on your stance on "cancellation" itself.

This happened to a friend of mine recently. Some woman posted their conversation to an instagram story, saying all my friend wanted was sex and implying that people should stay away from him. It seemed like she thought she was doing something courageous, when in reality she's kind of a monster. The dude did nothing more than unfollow her on insta after she strongly hinted that there would be no possibility for romance after he invited her to hangout. Instead of just getting rejected for a pretty standard way to meet people, he gets shamed in front of potentially hundreds of people. So much for ostensibly sex friendly liberalism. Screenshots of DMs are hardly smoking gun evidence of anything if your audience is heavily inclined to pile on, nor does it matter because that's a shit way to communicate anyway and removes from someone any kind of recourse. I couldn't have done anything because she had a private account, but I couldn't have done anything to counter it anyway because it was just an outlet form of social media.

My point is that nobody did a bad thing until someone actually did a bad thing, and I think that's most people's gripe with 'cancellation'.

He should have sent vocals which cannot be screenshot

Screen record.

Ok but you have to do it immediately or you lose the ability to re-play the audio

> eg, A situation with damning screenshots of lewd DMs are pretty ‘smoking gun’

Not really. Fake screenshots of such things are trivial to create.

For example: https://streamable.com/zcgqie

One issue is that your friend would often not want your public support. You throwing yourself onto the pyre will not rescue them, only destroy you too. In many cases it would be symbolic-- and really just another example of virtue signaling, just like the mob but signaling a different set of virtues to a different audience.

Better that you stay employable so you can lend a financial hand if they aren't and protect your psychological health so you can be there for them in other ways.

So sure, pray for the courage to throw yourself physically in front of an unstoppable train... but also pray for the wisdom to know better. :)

Strongly disagree. Always stand by your friends, even if it's hard and costs you a lot.

I know of two people that went through the whole social media mob thing. The most hurtful thing to them was the lack of friends actually standing up for them. They felt completely alone. And with nobody taking their side, it feeds the narrative that they really are as bad as everyone claims. So no, I think you're completely wrong and what you are suggesting is cowardly.

How is this a similar situation? No one ever made accusations against Scott Alexander. No one said he did anything wrong.

I hope you'd ask them first. I see a lot of "cancellations" where the person at the center has already admitted fault and apologized while flying monkeys are swirling around screaming about censorship and mob justice, not realizing they're the mob and nobody asked for their help. They end up looking like idiots and make things worse.

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