Clicking Their Way to Outrage
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I'd say that the most popularly held belief around these parts is a Panglossian "this is the best of all possible worlds" mindset, in which promoters of self-contentedness like Steven Pinker are hailed as clear-sighted heroes. Anyone complaining about basically anything then becomes a maladapted pest- we are all self-interested, the HNer believes, so those who openly claim to be outraged on behalf of what is happening to others are just looking for something to get upset about.
It goes hand in with this romanticized view of what a "real" activist does:
>> Ultimately, Internet outrage is the milquetoast cousin to direct action, a way to protest by tapping and clicking rather than boycotting and marching. It is a noble endeavor to become incensed about a cause and risk arrest or toil without acclamation for one’s deeply held beliefs. Less honorable is joining a digital pile-on as a means of propping up one’s ego, even if it comes in the form of entertaining zings.
Although social justice is always an uphill struggle against the entrenched power, apathetic bystanders request again and again that its advocates handicap themselves- no social media, no having fun, no heroes, toil in silence else you're doing it for ego. It's a very religious attitude in many ways- if you're doing something that is righteous, you need to suffer for it, for reaching the objective is its own reward.
Social justice warriors are inauthentic by their very definition, as opposed to social justice activists.
That and no one needs to promote the stereotype, they do a fine job of it themselves.
no social media, no having fun, no heroes, toil in silence else you're doing it for ego
The difference is that social justice warriors most of the time are predominant or exclusive in those dominions. They're unproductive and sometimes even actively harmful to their own respective moments, as they are essentially all living and breathing straw men.
It's a very religious attitude in many ways- if you're doing something that is righteous, you need to suffer for it, for reaching the objective is its own reward.
There's nothing righteous about what they do. It's narcissistic and self-indulgent.
Many of the people who get mad at things on the Internet imply that those who don't get mad are complacent with the issue.
You'll see this often on Twitter and any social network or message board: "If you're not [denouncing X] you're [against us/on X's side]"
It's interesting that even HN isn't immune to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7971709
I wonder if it's human nature to try to shame those who are on the opposite side of an ideological line?
[1] http://betabeat.com/2014/02/outrage-porn-how-the-need-for-pe...
For example, even if I have a perfect record calling my parents when out late for almost a year, my parents may get irrationally angry when I forget for the first time. Upon agruing its revealed that they really are uncomfortable that I'm leaving for college and won't have to call as much anymore.
I often see this on the internet and in real life, people disliking others not because of their actions per se but because of what that person's actions represent to the disliker.
(edit: grammar)
At least that's what I choose to believe because the alternative is that large swaths of the population are completely insane and erupt over random comments on the Internet.
How would we know the difference?
http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/equal_weights.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7945058
The article here provides a similar set of examples. The only example I can think of that doesn't fit this pattern is "dog poo girl" from Korea ( http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dog-poo-girl ).
Does this anecdotal correlation reflect a trend, or is it merely the result of filtering and me being in the wrong circles? Data on this would be pretty awesome.
One of the things that I an curious about a certain infamous image board is the "troll as artform" idea. It encourages the user to wonder whether the other person is actually angry, pretending to be angry, intentionally provoking anger in others, or doing a combination to see what happens.
Look over your facebook or twitter feed whenever some significant event happens -- the Hobby Lobby court decision, a vote on same-sex marriage, even a sporting event. People will, for the most part, divide into camps of rage or euphoria. There's very little recognition of the validity of other points of view, very rarely mixed feelings, and often rejection of any facts that might potentially support another conclusion. In my experience, those who express any sort of nuance or recognition of key points from multiple sides tend to be treated disrespectfully (not merely argued with, but mocked, insulted, unfriended, stuff like that.)
It's as if everyone has been taught to act like an extremist troll in order to avoid the ire of extremist trolls.
The social justice student society on my campus literally marched into the campus library, seized and burned books in the parking lot that they said encouraged colonialism.
> I'm currently dating two lovely women, Svetlana and Elise. Unfortunately continuing to date both of them is unsustainable so I must choose one. In order to make such a choice, I wish to construct a ranking function - a function which takes as input the characteristics of a woman and returns as output a single number. This ranking function is meant to approximate my utility function - a higher number means that by making this choice I will be happier. If the ranking closely approximates utility, then I can use the ranking function as an effective decisionmaking tool. In concrete terms, I want to build a function f:Women→ℝ which approximately predicts my happiness. If f(Svetlana)>f(Elise) I will choose Svetlana, and vice versa if the reverse inequality holds.
Yeah I don't think readers who disliked your choice of "models" necessarily count as "social justice warriors." I figured the post itself was just meant to troll people in an attempt to show how superior your powers of logic and math were.
If you read the post, you'll find it answers a strange math puzzle. That's it's purpose. The example is given simply so that a reader can more easily understand what's going on.
Now, if you had consistently referred to the setup of dating lingerie models as you explained the math, then maybe you could more believably argue that, "Hey, lingerie models make this math easier to understand"...but you didn't. You discard the scenario quite early on, which makes some people think that the scenario was a bit gratuitous, as if the author's intent is to subtly say, "Hey, I'm not only a math genius, but I can appreciate a hot woman!"
Which, sure, isn't the kind of sexism that 19th-century-era women faced, but it also doesn't seem to add to any kind of mathematical understanding.
Actually, the difficulty was that you couldn't get past your preconception that the post was about machine learning. I didn't claim anywhere that I was writing about ML. The section entitled Why not use machine learning (TM)? may reduce your confusion.
In any case, only one of the complaints about the post was even remotely as articulate as yours (which is quite orthogonal to the "sexism" and "racism" claims).
Which, sure, isn't the kind of sexism that 19th-century-era women faced, but it also doesn't seem to add to any kind of mathematical understanding.
The clause about sexism in this sentence confuses me. It implies, without actually stating, that the post does contain sexism but of a different sort. Could you clarify?
Curse you Gawker.
Gawker is just a generalized family of gossip rags.
I'm reminded from a scene from the movie "American Beauty". Colonel Frank Fitts is reading the newspaper with a disgusted look and comments "This country is going straight to hell!".
And I'm guessing we have all seen people like this. They can't wait to read the news and become outraged.
The way the powerfull keep us in check is by saturating our brains with "fake news" and propaguanda.
Outrage has been used by demagogues of all kinds since the start of human history.
Gervais saying "Privilege would be something like gay people not paying taxes. Like churches don’t." is not ANY tweet supporting gay marriage. It's a particular kind of tweet supporting gay marriage, one that made my internal monologue say "ooohh shots fired!" I can simultaneously support the sentiment and tell you exactly why this would rile up some of my family members living in The South.
[1] http://thatjohnbarnes.blogspot.com/2011/12/i-hate-snark.html
Most of those RT and commenting didn't go on the demo...