YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Just slap it on your favourite term and hurl it at the opponent.

Gen Z is an entire generation paralyzed by social anxiety.

Nowadays in the west, holding an option contrary to whatever herd you find yourself in falls into a binary label. There is no redemption for you, there is no second chance. "You voted for X? You're nothing but evil thoughts and vacuity where a human could have been".

I was that shameless annoyance once too. It doesn't mean shame is dead.

The framing of shame as a bad thing instead of an important mechanism of self regulation is destroying maturity and social cooperation at an obscene rate, and future generations will be the ones that pay the price in a society where government has stepped in with coercive force to moderate behaviour at a much more granular level in a society that no longer governs itself.

In this it is important to distinguish between shame and shaming. Shame is the useful mechanism of self regulation. Shaming is social aggression and is all too frequently hijacked by astroturfed “social movements” and vile and petty narcissists to project power. Shaming has its place, but needs to be legitimate social sanction or it’s just another form of unregulated violence.

Unfortunately, the reaction of society has been to reject shame, which is about as useful as rejecting fear, for example. Fear is a useful and necessary mechanism of self regulation, and people that lack it entirely tend to live short lives. That said, too much is crippling. Shame is much the same, but is a social contract. Societies that lack it tend to fail. Societies with too much are stifling.

Fortunately, now we have the CCP and Palintir, so we can shrug off the yoke of shame and give up over that mechanism of self regulation to social credit scores and surveillance capitalism. I’m not sure that will be so much better.

Treasure your shame. I’ve lived in societies where it has been replaced by violence, and it’s not better.

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?

They awarded themselves Pulitzers for publishing false stories. They don't go back and correct them, they just pretend like they never existed (and one day will silently delete them from the archives.)

They showed some shame after the Iraq War over continuously lying about WMD on behalf of the state, there was a little shame expressed after trying to link Saddam Hussein to 9/11, and I guess they decided that they were never going to do that again. They in fact put one of the largest spreaders of disinformation in charge of The Atlantic. The Atlantic is supposedly the leading magazine for the opposition.

Every day that the Washington Post kept the PropOrNot story up, even taking into consideration the lengthy corrections that kept being appended to it, made me realize that these institutions had no shame at all. I'm not sure if people are connected enough to particular institutions to have shame about what they do - they have backers, who will find them another place if the place they're at now becomes too hot for them. Straight from politics into being a lobbyist into journalism into a think tank into a consultant for a Middle East dictator into head of ethics for a tech company into head of ethics for a hedge fund, then back into politics again.

You'll see similar arguments on this thread: "shame is just what you don't approve of", etc. Yes, it's just about being a decent person, and no, scientists still haven't discovered a moral axis in the universe that says what that means. Unfortunately we're in a position where we have to explain that "just be a decent person", which is an inclination shared by 95% of people anyway, isn't some vestigial instinct that modern humans should be ridding themselves of.

This sounds like you're agreeing with the article about consequentialism / "optimization culture" being the cause.

Not saying the article is right, but the point is supposed to be that social norms used to (or should) be sufficient. People should feel and be made to feel shame for flagrant disrespect of core principles that their participation in a system would seem to entail (like playing to win).

Speaking for myself, shame has certainly sometimes been enabling, sometimes disabling. Wanting to live up to an image I have of myself and what I should be (and feeling ashamed when I don’t) is a pretty core part of how “I” work. I agree shame can certainly turn toxic, but there are times when it is fair to say, “you should feel ashamed of yourself” (including in some circumstances, “for driving that kid to suicide by making him feel ashamed of who he is”).

I know there are some strange people who eat pizza with a fork, but is there actually anyone who does that with say hamburgers?