Hacker News Reader

Comment by wyday | Hacker News Reader

I'd say read some history on effective non-carceral and non-violent ways to deal with hateful people: shunning and shaming is the best option. It lets hateful people live their lives in a bubble if that's what they want. But also gives them a chance to address their abhorrent views, make amends, and become part of a large community again.

But you have to understand history to know that.

View on HN

How did shunning and shaming 40% of the US population over the last 4 years work out?

Hmm, it never worked well for me. People just get more entrenched and resentful? What I have found works is to try and find some common ground and build up some level of mutual respect from there.

For example, I also grew up in a cult of southern baptist flavour. I've seen some fucked up shit too. Where the cult was a majority, they did a lot of shunning and shaming and that sucked. I just don't think that's right.

You cannot find common ground with someone whose world view is you are a subhuman worthy of slavery or death.

And why should we make the effort when they make none?

Rule of the biggest tribe with the biggest sticks still applies even today I suppose.

But one day...religion is dying out, slowly but surely. I can't wait for the day when the religious have to face what they dished out. I have no patience to teach people that who I am isn't worthy of death or admonishment again and again.

yelling at idiots idiots never work. Doing so imprint a snapshot of whatever they were doing deeper into their brains. Our brains take intersections of the zipped archives of situation logs and turn that into reproducible scripted acts. Negative emotions associated with the memory won't help the brain unlearn undesired behaviors, it just makes us sadder or angrier at scripted points.

A better, but painful, way is to somehow break the chain of undesired acts until they would be obsessed with better things to do.

Maybe there are even better ways at it and I'm mostly wrong about this - I had never taken any training to be a behavioral scientist - but my point is, point-and-screaming wrong things someone did never goes well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com