Comment by alex_c | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alex_c | Hacker News Reader

So imagine a world where telepathy exists, and everyone can hear everyone else's thoughts. And there are no filters. With enough effort you learn to only "hear" thoughts in a certain range, but you can't filter out or block thoughts at will. And no one is able, or willing, to filter their own thoughts. They're just out there for everyone to hear. And they can be aimed at specific targets.

Imagine the cross-section of thoughts you would hear all the time. Most of it mundane - work, family, food, shopping, day to day life. Some stand out through the noise - strong emotions like love, lust, happiness, pain, hatred. Some beautiful, some terrifying, some outright vile. A true cross-section of humankind's deepest thoughts.

Now imagine the loudest ones start finding others like them, and start to aggregate and cluster - mentally, not physically. Feeding and amplifying each other and getting louder and bigger. And they start to look outward, and find the thoughts they hate, and feed on those. There are no physical restrictions, no limits on distance or speed, just thoughts bouncing around and searching and filtering each other.

And imagine that once groups hit a critical mass, they also start to gather physically. And it's no longer just thoughts, but physical actions, encouraged by the entire group.

Of course - the Internet is not telepathy, there are filters, and not everyone participates. But it's the closest we've come to it as a species so far. And this is who we are...

Spare a thought for those who spend any amount of time on Twitter. I'm sure there are those who can do it without losing their sanity. Perhaps that happens when you block things out so aggressively that you barely learn much of anything that's useful or new. But I'm definitely not one of those people, and I'm glad to be missing out. The four friends I have in real life will suffice, like they did for my parents, and their parents before them.

> And this is who we are...

This is what we became after being optimized for engagement.

4chan is not optimised for engagement, it's one of the most basic messageboards.

Image boards like 4chan are almost entirely free from adtech engagement optimization, so no. This is who we are when we are given a place to air our petty grievances with no accountability to prior postings.

I don’t think so.

We’ve had atrocities and violence throughout history. Usually in the context of war, but not always. Usually localized, but sometimes large scale. Sometimes condemned and opposed by the rest of society (whether it is a village, country, or continent), sometimes hushed and hidden away, sometimes openly supported.

The impulses and thoughts behind it have always been there, but limited and moderated by geography, time, and social norms.

Now for the first time(?), those limits are starting to blur out and disappear on a global scale. And the impulses and thoughts are visible in their raw form.

This is who we are.

In reality, when hate speech speakers congregate, they eventually end up being forced to stop by an ever-growing collective of people who will not tolerate hate speech; with speech, courts, laws, and violence.

In the world you describe with telepathy, we would know instantly who was thinking hate speech, and be able to identify them and protect those they hate from them, and prevent them from congregating into cancerous hate mobs. Some would argue that this is thoughtcrime enforcement, which is an expected outcome from granting telepathy to all. That is, in a nutshell, correct: peer enforcement of group morality in a telepathic society would, by definition, put the “thought” in “thoughtcrime”.

However, in today’s non-telepathic world, we cannot easily identify those who use hate speech online and protect others from their hate. This is presenting many difficulties not addressed by your telepathic example, and is the core of the problem that must be addressed.

Someone else has probably said this already, but I think what you'd find is that none of the people who think themselves morally pure enough to gather against "hate" are anywhere near as pure as they think, and might even find themselves targets of an equally powerful hypothetical thought mob.

That’s correct. However, purity is not relevant; only hate and non-hate is. The only requirement is to have non-haters that hate the haters. Everything else is specific variable details per social group and per person.

“A bunch of haters grouped together and started hating on people that they hated; the non-haters said “stop that”, and when the haters refused, the non-haters violently stopped them.”

This describes a variety of wars in human history, for example World War II. The non-haters aren’t “pure”, they don’t always succeed, sometimes they attempt non-violence first — but the tendency of societies to act in alignment with that description remains consistent across human history.

(ps. Humanity’s skills at balancing cognitive dissonance come into play quite strongly here, as being in the position of “non-hater” while also hating “haters” is definitely at tension with itself. I suppose the dissonance is balanced by over the tipping point of societal benefit versus personal benefit, but that’s not an area I’ve studied as closely yet; individual psychology is less interesting to me.)

>And imagine that once groups hit a critical mass, they also start to gather physically. And it's no longer just thoughts, but physical actions, encouraged by the entire group.

Martin Luther of Christianity's Lutheranism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_and_antisemitism

He was German and went on the influence people for centuries to come which inevitably formed the Nazi's objectives. Though obviously taking 400 years to do so, obviously Lutheranism is a thing that still exists today.

What's being described is really akin to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist

The irony is that censorship works in reverse. It inflames the zeitgeist and makes it stronger. This is why racist words like hate speech isn't a problem. That freedom of speech rights cannot include exceptions for hate speech.

What's a racist term for white people that you absolutely cannot say? There are tons of ethnic slurs against white people but there isn't really 1 you aren't allowed to say. There isn't really any super harmful slurs against white people.

What's a racist term for black people that you absolutely cannot say? Oh ya there's many here. The N word is an obvious first choice. However, it's the censorship and disallowance of saying the word that gives it the power. So as long as there are people who disallow the use of the N word, the racism continues. Want to end racism against black people? Stop trying to stop it.

Moreover, I'm pretty sure people know this. I find that the people who are most opposed to racism are often the most racist. They are doing this to continue racism. The only way forward to end racism is to drop the subject altogether.

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