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Comment by shib71 | Hacker News Reader

Shame was more effective in the past is because it came with consequences - lost business, lower standing in the community, fewer romantic prospects. It used to be part a healthy survival instinct. Without repercussions, shame is just a handicap and those who don't have it have a massive advantage.

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I don't get it. On one hand people are lamenting departure of shame, on the other they complain how easy it is to get your life ruined by becoming a target of internet hate for a minor transgression.

Maybe the shame didn't disappear, just fell prey to increasing inequality where one end of the spectrum has very little where the other gets absurd amounts?

I think these two concepts go hand in hand. Perceived cancel culture is the thing that pushed some people to disregard the concerns of others entirely and live without shame.

Another example is the concept of involution and lying flat in China. You can't have both if you assume that the entire population is equal. Too much involution breeds lying flat. Too harsh of a cancel culture (for minor faux pas, not sexual assault) breeds contempt.

What's your definition of "involution" here? I looked it up, but I don't understand how it relates to lying flat.

Involution in the context of China laying flat means you work harder and harder only to stay in place with no chance of getting ahead. In China they work 12h day 6 day a week and still have 0 change to buy a home, start a family, etc. The lying flat movement is about giving up on the rat race and working just enough to get by because going above and beyond only get you working yourself to death for no tangible benefit.

> I’m more and more convinced that all of AI engineering is Neijuan (内卷, meaning curl inwards). In China it describes a system that demands ever more effort and competition without improving output. The way in which it sometimes shows up in the West is the 996 nonsense. The English term for Neijuan is “Involution” from the book Agricultural Involution. Agricultural involution describes the intensification of farming that raises productivity per square meter while leaving productivity per head unchanged.

Discussed earlier today here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49654229

If the consequences become a step function it makes intuitive sense that the gradual downstream behavior would go away.

Well, in practice shame is a local effect: it only matters if it's coming from people that you respect. Some people being angry at you in a community is going to affect you most severely when you're a member of that community: otherwise it's just how much that community can effectivity harass you (also something that scales with how close you are to it). This does mean that 'cancel culture' has a horrendous bias towards 'friendly fire' in its results.

The latter is the reason for the former.

There was such an over use of shame to hurt people's social standing and careers that it stopped being effective. At some point, people lost all trust in the institutions carrying out the shaming and life ruining and started fighting back.

All of this is orthogonal to personal wealth. Some of the shamers were very wealthy and powerful people and some of the shamed were those with very little wealth, influence or power.

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