The young people sifting through the internet's worst horrors

Probably don't say this in front of actual veterans.

On the other hand many people, if I had to guess I'd say the vast majority, have not seen any of that stuff on the internet. I have, but because I actively went looking for it. Likewise if I ask around amongst friends the only ones who saw the real gore all admitted having actively searched for it. In other words: even before we saw it there might have been something different in our world view already.

pretty much sums it up; anything that does not break you, will make you stronger.

ever chewed on your food, breathing thru the nose, while cleaning diarrhea diapers and being screamed at? your parents did.

Sending goatse over IRC was a rite of passage back when I was in middle school. Kirk Johnson's service to humanity is invaluable.

It's funny how often we get asked "what's the worst call you've ever been on?" which, when you think about it, is a strange question to ask. Do you go around to other people in your life on social occasions to ask them to relive unpleasant events for your curiosity?

However, that being said:

It's generally assumed that it's the most gruesome call. The most unpleasant trauma. That's not the case. When it comes down to it, we're all just tissue and blood. We stop bleeding, put (some) things back where they belong, and try to replace what has been lost (fluids), etc.

The worst calls are generally the tragic, the emotional abuse. Child sexual assault. Elder neglect. The horrible accidents that are no-one's fault, but will rack someone with guilt for the rest of their lives.

Those ones add up. I'd say those are the reasons for most EMS and Fire PTSD.

There's a good documentary about the rebirth of Detroit, which was for a long time the number one city for arson in the world, called "Burn" (incidentally financed/championed by Denis Leary)...

One of the firefighters in that documentary says, sitting, emotionally exhausted and eyes shallow from a long night, or career:

> I wish my head could forget what my eyes have seen.

https://youtu.be/9fCMogDYtus?si=F2kLr-aGb1f_W8Ds&t=23

unsure how much of it is curiosity or whatever psychological conditions the rest of comments were suggesting. regardless, i would not consider it an ideal approach to build your stomach for the medical field.

At this volume, nobody could possibly win. Social networks need to break down quite a bit to get something manageable.

One solution to that is whitelisting. But we don't want 3rd party censorship, so a federated system where we rate sources and content ourselves seems like a good idea. Unfortunately kids won't filter anything - they are drawn to the unusual and forbidden.

https://weblog.masukomi.org/2018/03/25/zed-shaws-utu-saving-...

Basically baking in a reputation system into network protocols, to deter bad actors… not sure how viable a solution it is, just fun to think how far back people were thinking about solutions to these problems.

I disagree with that part of the statement.

Companies would just defer to the AI rather than human choices and say "Well, computer says no"

I'd say "I don't go home with guys like that any more", but I was never quite naïve enough to go home with guys like that in the first place.

I was in a Chatroulette one day that did a number on me. 10 seconds, mostly for me and my neighbor to parse what we were seeing. Once we did we immediately exited and shut the laptop and just sat there, completely mindfucked at what we saw. This was maybe like 2010 and I still think about it, it was horrid. If I was subjected to content like that for 40 hours a week I’d either be an alcoholic or checking myself into the psych ward.

The 'edgy, uncensored' internet you know about isn't even close to what paramedics and people in the OP experience. I know people that did the same thing, they grew up on that side of the internet. One of them became a paramedic and had to quit after a few years because it was starting to severely break them.

But by all means, if you're the kinda person to go 'Nah, I wouldn't break' then you should give these jobs a shot. See how far you get.

Your denial is a telltale sign of PTSD.

worse, he has to look at actual diseased dicks all day.

not enough eye bleach in kiev

A urologist can look at penises all day and not care because there's no ill intent behind the display. On a dating site that's absolutely not the case.

Finally, you curtail your argument by saying “simple nudity”. Trust and Safety exists because of context and action. These arent tasteful nudes or art people are looking at.

I wont speculate too much, but the intent of a picture, the context and the target make a difference. Sending a pic to someone not interested in them, or a minor - has a vastly different connotation.

I think a big part of it is adequate training; Think of surgery, a trained surgeon seems to be able to cut someone open (to help obviously) and go to bed fine that night but if I ever had to do it, regardless of the outcome I most likely wouldn't be able to sleep.

An adequately trained content moderator should be equipped with whatever emotional tools needed before they're expected to moderate their company's content safely.

"So much of what running a business is about is figuring out 'how do I connect with people?'" Shaich told BI. "What motivates them, and how do I help them decide to affiliate with what the mission of the enterprise is?" He said therapy is about better understanding ourselves, where we come from, and our own motivations. In turn, that can build our ability to form alliances and find commonalities with other people. "And that makes you a much more powerful manager," Shaich said. "Every one of us brings our own humanity to it. Similarly, I think it makes us more empathetic if we start by being empathetic to ourselves and learning and thinking about ourselves. We're able to be more empathetic, not just to our team members and the people we work with, but also to our customers."

...sounds like a total arsehole to me!

I say that because I have yet to reconcile how any good person could step up to run a business in a world where the sociopaths almost always win.

Good people cannot fake being evil, but evil can fake being good. Consequently, good people have an inherent disadvantage that will lose in the marketplace when faced with evil adversaries.

In a very competitive situation where those expenses hurt competitiveness, eventually that can result in the authority figure/organization losing the competition - which removes that authority figure from authority (or destroys the entire organization) and hence the benefits to the manipulator.

Having an authority figure who is always ruthless and selfish doesn’t have that failure mode.

The failure mode in that situation is one where the authority figure is inappropriately ruthless and selfish to the point it is harming their effectiveness/destroying the organization. However, the system is able to handle that better - as long as the authority figure follows the codified rules and delivers results, that’s ’business as usual’, and if they don’t, there are penalties - up to removing the authority figure or ruining them. It tends to be more obvious than excess manipulators, as by their nature assholes leave more obvious marks.

And the authority figures selfishness here helps prevent them from doing anything to that extent that can be documented.

In a brutal environment, a consistently ruthless and selfish authority figure (as long as they are effective in their goals) can be the easier and more stable option.

Near as I can tell, it’s why ‘dark triad’ traits are evolutionarily advantageous in the right mix.

Too much of them destroys what is needed to actually produce value and grow. Too little makes one susceptible to predators.

Until we see a culture shift corporate leadership, these type of people are going to continue to be rewarded and go on mentor the next generation to do the same.

I would beg to differ. AI is definitely good enough to identify fucked up things. Feed GPT-4 even a subtly fcked up question, or fcked up image and it'll be onto you immediately

When I said edge cases, I wasn't arguing that there wouldn't be any edge cases - I'm saying the human agents were being shown videos that were not edge cases - i.e sexual abuse, gore - if it's bad enough to traumatize a human being, it's also high signal enough for a model to pick it up.

Yes, human agents should be used for labelling ACTUAL edge cases where a model might be confused - i.e is this a nerf gun fight or a real gun fight, is this person nude or is it just their shirt... not a plain beheading video.

I think you have just described evil.

"Evil" because it can allow you to dismiss any moral values and basically be completely selfish without even noticing. You are just a small gear in the machine doing it's job. Even if it is doing some lousy paperwork, hauling some cargo to the port and then finally dropping toxic waste into the ocean. Reason for this is that corporation is a tool for "atomization of work" when everything is blended into small tasks and people are completely detached from the consequences of their actions.

So we as a human individuals profit from them greatly but also it can harm us because "they" act as cynical sociopaths. By they I mean corporations. With the use of "necessary evil" I was being hyperbolic But it is still double edged sword.

Cthulhu is definitely less evil than Meta.

Large corporate structures diffuse both responsibility and ability for coherent action.

Dealing with a corporation is like trying to communicate with some neurons in a brain. You might encounter helpful units, but the total sum of units operates at completely different levels.

C level execs deal with many issues directly, but inevitably have to delegate (to many levels) most of what they are responsible for. The ability of corporations to multitask in the thousands of threads (human tasks) comes with a price of lost coherence.

The structure of an organization becomes the overriding entity, one without any moral impulses, and highly insensitive to the details of myriads of problematic exceptional situations that individually seem very simple to solve.

But all the exception handling required to properly handle every problematic event would turn the organization to goo.

Especially talented & moral leaders can make a huge difference, bending the organization to prioritize a few important issues over others. But even they can’t close the gap overall.

And of course, many successful leaders we might think of as normal healthy people as individuals, are not the unusually talented moral leaders needed to deal with this complexity.

Wouldn't it just make them more dangerous?