Bots Should Punch Up (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Bots Should Punch Up (2013)

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38 pointsaskiiart20 comments

I think it's a fair point that bots should strive to be useful and not just mock people's mistakes, but in the 8 years since this was written the whole "punch up, not down" idea in comedy has gotten a lot of criticism and is kind of passe at this point, at least in my experience.

Human beings simply do not exist on a single monolith spectrum of power; who is "up" or "down" often depends quite a lot on context. If an underemployed white male comedian makes a joke about Kamala Harris, is that punching up or down? _Parasite_ is a movie that mocks a rich family even as it portrays their poorer help as scheming and untrustworthy - is that up, or down? To steal an example from this excellent Freddie de Boer post on the topic, if an adjunct professor runs afoul of a student, are they really the ones in the position of power?

Anyway Freddie sums the whole thing up much better than I could: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/punching-up-and-punchin...

In this comment you seem to be reading "punch up not down" as a very binary, fixed rule, as if it is a being used as a commandment. I don't think many people think of it that way. Of course you can make comedy about poor and disadvantaged people if you want to, the point of the phrase is that when you do so you you think carefully about it.

> In this comment you seem to be reading "punch up not down" as a very binary, fixed rule

de Boer's blogpost paints it as the opposite: it's a nebulous, indefinite phrase used to try and simplify a complex reality into something that's easy to understand. de Boer reckons that the only consistent usage is "up" referring to "people I don't like", and "down" referring to "people I like".

Yes, I disagree quite strongly with the blogpost. He writes

> For it to make any sense at all, human beings would have to exist on some unitary plane of power and oppression, our relative places easily interpreted for the purpose of figuring out who we can punch

I think this is obvious bullshit. You need a strict, easily interpreted hierarchy of oppressor and oppressed in order to implement this strawman version of the punching up/down rule. This straw man is what I was referring to when I described it as a "commandment" in my previous comment.

On the other hand when the "rule" is interpreted in a more realistic way. Which is something like "make comedy about whoever you like, but consider carefully why you want to make fun of these groups of people, and consider the context of what you're doing", then you don't need this strict hierarchy at all.

To be explicit: I don't think the concept needs a consistent definition of "up" and "down" in order to be useful.

The hidden assumption of "always punch up, never punch down" is that there is a total order that can be applied to humans, by which who is up or down can be determined.

As many victims of crime, faulty legal proceedings, false accusations, or their parents or relatives can attest, this is not the case.

What is even more insidious is that the public spectacle of "punching" (which usually means describing behavior or status, in one manner or another) is how we determine up and down in the first place. The more someone gets "punched", the more we believe they deserve it, based on the information in those "punches" - "Look what villains they are! How unfairly or violently they behave!"

This is all enabled by calling the transmission of information (in the form of a joke, a meme, gossip, a lecture,..) an act of violence, tricking your mind into thinking of it as such.

Also that you should punch anyone. I would argue it’s possible and even beneficial to just… not.

Self-deprecation seems like a safe play.

I think "only punch up" implies a partial order but not necessarily a total order. Even adding "never punch down" it could be read as emphasis, rather than implying sideways doesn't exist.

The best writing often does not give you new thoughts ut expresses your existing thoughts more clearly.

Of course one of the most important rules is to always punch up, not down. It makes it easier for people to give you the benefit of the doubt in grey areas. And then he says "as a white guy most of the grey areas are not grey in your favour". That we already know but it expresses it so clearly - it's basically knocking the whole me s rights movement into a hole with one sentence.

I liked the article !

Who determines social status? It seems to be the people wanting this rule enforced and not any objective measure. To use Colbert as an example is frankly strange and telling of how arbitrary this line of thinking is, someone who earns $15m a year constantly makes fun of regular people who end up on the news or in awkward situations.

If I were to make a joke about blue-collar neo-nazis am I allowed to do that? I get the feeling most who nod along to this article would say yes and howl along in laughter, but that implies that min wage and racist ideology is of higher status than average wage and moderate ideology, which again makes absolutely no sense unless you come to the conclusion that there is no "up" and "down", just "us" and "them".

The way I see it everyone should be fair game for jokes.

I think it depends on the joke, really. If you made a joke along the lines of "those nazis think they're hot stuff but you know what, they're POOR! They can't even afford to go to college and many grew up in POOR families!" I don't think that would be funny, even though I hate nazis, because the humor is based on dislike for a particular group of people. Not nazis, but poor people. "Nazis suck because they're poor" is the meaning. And that's punching down, even if the nominal target is nazis. Laughing at that joke is laughing at the poor for being poor and that sucks.

If the joke isn't related to the poverty part then its immaterial, and you're just making a joke about nazis, which is fine.

The only consistent measure I have seen is:

* Down = people I like.

* Up = people I don't like.

The broader internet has a problem with jokes about bodyshaming, but jokes about bald men or "small-dick energy" are ok because... reasons. You can have famous comedians with multi-million dollar movie deals making fun of members of the general public, and as long as they target people in a percieved "powerful" social group, its punching down - and any callout of this behaviour is an "-ism" of some description.

To me, it's closer to:

* Down = the "oppressed" * Up = the "oppressor"

But it's pretty much what you said, and it lends itself to patronizing behavior. As a member of the "oppressed" (minority in the US) I see it everywhere, particularly in media/entertainment but occasionally in real life, too. I'm a human being, I'm capable of taking a joke, and I have enough intelligence to tell when a joke isn't ill-intentioned. In fact, if it rings true, I'll probably enjoy it, just like white people have loved hearing jokes at their expense for decades.

I feel like in our modern discourse, the types of people that will read and understand this article, are already following this social guideline. Good thoughts nonetheless, especially with the advent of LLMs.

I have trouble with knowing what's appropriate and when and where. This sort of thing helps. It's not a full answer, maybe I'll know the full answer by the time I'm ready to shelter in the palm of the creator, but it helps me

Another such post that I think back to relatively frequently was about rules, that people don't actually care about rules and they only exist to stop unhappiness. When you annoy someone is when they start to get the rulebook out. I'm sure the original author put it better than this, though

I'm not really convinced the key difference between "bot that notifies people they've leaked their CC" and "bot that re-shares leaked CC pictures" is 'punch up not down'. -- One is trying to prevent people losing stuff, the other is trying to encourage stealing.

I don't think "punch up not down" is morally equivalent to "be helpful, not malicious".

With RLHF'd LLM chatbots, the output tries to balance being accurate, being helpful, and being inoffensive. -- I'd worry that "punch up not down" mandate dictates it's better for a bot to be inaccurate rather than to say something offensive. -- I think the "punch up not down" people don't understand that they might not be the ones who decide what gets considered 'offensive' or not.

Interestingly, the first comment is the article is from @CancelThatCard honoring @NeedADebitCard for doing the hard work of finding the tweets with card pictures. "...my bot wouldn't be able to do what it does without @NeedADebitCard doing the leg work and finding the cards. It's is a non-trivial challenge to do with a high success rate. My bot just messages the people @NeedADebitCard finds, nothing more."

I think this illustrates partly why the punch-up/down metaphor has fallen out of use. It's not such a clear distinction.

(2013)

This is one of those posts that makes me ask "why should I read this?".

I would love if there was some front matter provided on HN to help me determine if it's worth reading.

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