> Thus I think "value" exists only in the eye of beholder, and trying to objectify it would only mean dismissing the values of part of the audience and emphasizing values of some other part of the audience.
And yet we need to do it. As you observed, "way more people value rants than measured, polite discussion", and I'd claim that this is a problem. The "value" may be subjective, but the consequences of both "kinds of speech" are real, and so it would be great to incentivize the kind that leads to a more stable, more just society, and disincentivize the one that causes thoughtless destruction.
Yes, I'm aware that "disincentivize" is getting dangerously close to "ban", but I feel we need to try and walk that fine line, if we want to have a society that's better than just random.
Who are "we"? And what is "it"? Do you just take on yourself the mantle of decider for the whole world who is worthy and who is not? Or how is it determined? Who is worthy to wear that mantle? I don't think any human is.
> I'd claim that this is a problem
Maybe human nature is a "problem". But what you're going to do, replace humanity with better species? Do you have one in mind? Beyond that, I don't see how declaring it "a problem" helps anything, unless there's a fix to this problem. History teaches me that all attempts to create a "new, better human race" didn't just end badly - they ended so awfully terrible that when people point at it, other people get offended that you dare to compare their ideas to that. So, we have to deal with what we have now - and had for millienia. Given what we did with it - well, not ideal, but certainly there have been some improvement.
> it would be great to incentivize the kind that leads to a more stable, more just society
How do you know what leads to more just society? Maybe rants would lead to more just society faster? As for stability, stability is only good when we're at the optimum. Are we?
> I feel we need to try and walk that fine line, if we want to have a society that's better than just random.
Which fine line? Everybody has their own fine line, that's the point. You could maybe find a bunch of people whose fine line is similar to your own, if you don't look too far into the future (and if you do, what you get is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4) - but pretending there's some line that's good for everybody is just willful blindness. And out of all possible ways of building a better society, I don't think dismissing people that have different views as something that doesn't matter is the best one to start with.
> Maybe human nature is a "problem". But what you're going to do, replace humanity with better species?
I agree that the root of the "problem" currently lies within people and not process. I agree that changing people wholesale is not easy and not desirable. I agree that there has been some improvement.
I also think human nature is a product of the environment. The way people behave on different websites, in different countries, and in different social situations shows this rather clearly. There is no fixed set of anything that constitutes the whole of how people act. Put someone in a nudist colony, and the environment changes, and the way they act changes (with time). If a reddit user starts going to 4chan, the environment changes, and the way they act changes. Put someone who follows the "always defect" strategy in a community of "always cooperate" people, and the environment changes, and the way they act changes. Put a racist in a racially diverse community of acceptance, and the environment changes, and the way they act changes.
If you accept this idea, it follows that certain environments can be better for society as a whole. Case in point with Reddit: they decided an environment without beastiality and certain violent elements would be better. Maybe they were wrong, but I don't think so. I'm not suggesting I have a wonderful theory of what the best environment is, only that there are better and worse ones. The problem of what we value is hard, but that doesn't mean it's not worth trying.
This ties the loop back: human nature is a product of environment, and environment is a product of humans. We have the power to create environments that make thoughtful discussion easier and hate harder. We can put energy toward solving the problem by changing the environment. HN has an environment I am very fond of, despite being here for only a couple years. I appreciate the work that has gone into making the comments an insightful, respectful, and generally nice place.
We can't replace humanity. We can't change people without changing the conditions they exist in. We can change the circumstances of our struggle in order to grow together as a species.
Picking out only a very small thing that you said:
> I don't see how declaring it "a problem" helps anything, unless there's a fix to this problem.
This seems wrong to me.
The process of (as a group) clearly identifying things that are problems, and coming to agreement that they are problems, and coming to agree on whether they are important, is of fundamental value, regardless of whether we have solutions at hand.
Without this step, folks will either be ignoring problems because they don't know about them, or proposing "solutions" to things that others don't even see as problems, neither of which can lead to any good...
No it is not. It's saying if you're looking at something as if your private point of view is objective reality and dismissing the very existence of other points then the problem may not be where you looking for it.
"How do you know?", "What are you going to do?" "Everyone is different so we can't know anything for sure!" are very much defeatist, knee-jerk responses to someone doing something extremely important:
Presenting what the problem is.
The first step to solving a problem is understanding it. It's not solving it. Trying to solve a problem immediately is like trying to write code before you fully understand the requirements.
If you lack the mental fortitude to simply look at a problem without having an immediate solution to it, you're not going to be able to solve major, ugly, nasty, uncomfortable problems like this.
But, inevitably, these problems will show up and knock on your door. Running away from them is not a good plan.
What if I don't believe in trying to control people at such a low level? What if I think people should be allowed to be as ranty as they want without having to worry about being "disincentivized"?
So we've got desires to identify with groups, and we've got desires to share criticisms of groups, and we struggle to find a balance. If we never criticize, we stagnate, if we never identify, we "self-destruct". We can come up with a "quick solution" as the notion of keeping more of our criticisms to ourselves, but that's certainly not a goal you want to pursue overzealously. You need to be able to share criticisms.
We can tell people it's not attractive to be ranty, but I'm not very comfortable going further than that, at the risk of wandering into thought policing.
Look at some modern political opinion, I'm sure you've seen it as much as me. Ranting is cool. Calling everything under the sun "problematic". The tricky thing is it's not always wrong. There's surely a nearly infinite list of "problems" one could identify, and some of them are truly important. But we just need to turn down the heat on the criticism for just a second. But you can't just ask bipartisans to listen to each other more. We need to make it less cool to be blindly partisan. We need to increase the value of being able to identify with anyone. And we need to make it really uncool to judge hundreds of millions of people you've never met with deep assumptions.
I don't know, it's an interesting problem and I haven't thought of it this way very much. All I'm sure of is that this growing lack of interest in protecting free speech is about the only topic in modern politics that I give a shit about.
> We can tell people it's not attractive to be ranty, but I'm not very comfortable going further than that, at the risk of wandering into thought policing.
I don't want to see it going much further than that either. I was thinking more along the lines of making it so being thoughtful is "sexy" and being ranty isn't, the way today owning a car is "sexy" and smoking isn't.
Free speech has its positive and negative consequences on stability and happiness; I do not want to fight free speech, I'm looking for ways to reduce the negative consequences. I'll protect your (and mine) right to rant about whatever you want, but I sure as hell would like the general policy discussion to involve less rants and more thoughtful cooperation.
> Free speech has its positive and negative consequences on stability and happiness; I do not want to fight free speech, I'm looking for ways to reduce the negative consequences. I'll protect your (and mine) right to rant about whatever you want, but I sure as hell would like the general policy discussion to involve less rants and more thoughtful cooperation.
I agree that free speech is an essential aspect of what makes us humans, and that it comes with both many positive and negatives.
In implementation of a plan to mitigate the negatives though, I much more support a private entity such as Reddit censoring whatever they wish, as if people believe it becomes to harsh they can simply leave. I'm paranoid that allowing an entity like the government (where constituents can't easily just leave) to get involved with it is good, as it allows for many conflicts of interest. These conflicts could be instances where the ruling party or minority parties push to label an opposing belief as more divisive, or where the ruling majority seeks to 'disincentivize' a minority or outside belief/religion by saying it is offensive to what they deem our values.
I feel like we should push for the civilization of speech to be a societal change, not a policy based change.
On a slightly different note, people have been saying that language and civil discourse have been going to hell for a very long time. George Orwell rather famously wrote an essay titled "Politics and the English Language" in the early-mid 20th century, wherein he detailed how society was moving towards using unclear and imprecise language to pander to the many without being forced to use falsifiable statements. Anthony Burgess wrote "A Clockwork Orange" in the 1960's where he highlights the main characters savagery in part by highlighting their usage of 'barbaric' dialect. William Langland wrote that “There is not a single modern schoolboy who can compose verses or write a decent letter.” in 1386. While civil and educated discourse is an important issue, people have been saying it will lead to the downfall of society for a very long time, but in many cases it is just changing and the entrenched powers dislike having to cope with that change.
I do. I propose we do exactly what we've been doing for the last 10000 years when human society didn't self-destruct. Do you have any other proposal that has a similar or better track record?
Those 10,000 years have involved very, very little in the way of free speech for most people - I don't think going back to the days of lèse-majesté and the Inquisition is what you had in mind, even though those institutions certainly provided stability in a sense.
Facebook and YouTube already do stuff like this: "too many people are just having fun clicking like on funny images instead of typing long comments, so let's increase the newsfeed and recommendation penetration of posts and videos with more comments... oh, shit, but now we are promoting flame wars as the best way to get more comments is to troll people".
While my policy might seem similar to theirs, were I in their shoes, I wouldn't be trying to promote content just for generating comments. Number of comments isn't a particularly useful measure for anything other than.. measuring how much discussion the content creates, it's no indication about the quality of that discussion.
And yet we need to do it. As you observed, "way more people value rants than measured, polite discussion", and I'd claim that this is a problem. The "value" may be subjective, but the consequences of both "kinds of speech" are real, and so it would be great to incentivize the kind that leads to a more stable, more just society, and disincentivize the one that causes thoughtless destruction.
Yes, I'm aware that "disincentivize" is getting dangerously close to "ban", but I feel we need to try and walk that fine line, if we want to have a society that's better than just random.