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To forget is an ethical act
- erik_seaberg 2y agoThis book burning vibe is pretty extreme. I wish there were a reliable way for everyone to write pseudonymously. (I don't as a reminder that legal action against an employer could baselessly unprotect the whole team.)
- AbstractH24 2y agoThe problem with an anonymity is there’s no accountability. You can say or do anything and just make a new identity (as seen on sites like Reddit or even this) The idea of pseudo-anonymity is interesting. I’m not sure how it sound work, but would love to know if others could identify it. Only solution I can see is to stop being held accountable for every thought and action we’ve ever had. And while we can’t change society we can at least change how we look at our own past.
- renewiltord 2y agoI don’t care that much that all my past follows me. But the latest trend appears to be to visit my sins upon my children. Given that’s the case, it’s better to appear squeaky clean later on. I’ll CCPA HN and ask them to clean up.
- Duwensatzaj 2y agoIs corruption of blood a trend? I can think of one case where a minor sports figure was fired for decades old statements from his father, but I haven’t seen any others.
- darby_nine 2y ago[flagged]
- krapp 2y ago[flagged]
- ryandv 2y ago[flagged]
- saagarjha 2y agoThere's obviously a balance here which involves understanding how words make people feel and also understanding that people don't have bad intentions. You don't have to go all 1984 on it.
- ryandv 2y agoThe point is that intent has been rendered irrelevant; all that matters is the impact of the words on the audience, and therefore the audience can unilaterally determine the impact (and thus the moral valuation) of those words. Good intentions are not sufficient to exonerate you from mob invective. Social incentives further encourage reading maximum offence into language, as being offended offers one moral leverage over others in public discourse.
- jmward01 2y agoI did some cursory research on how important 'forgetting' is to neural networks. I didn't have conclusive results because I just played with a few ideas, never really making it serious, but the idea has stuck with me as important for a long time now. In a finite space the pigeon hole principle says you eventually must take something out to put something new in so finding algorithms that efficiently forget are likely key to learning. I think this applies to neural networks and, I think, to society as well. You can't preserve every building for history. You can't remember every grievance or act of heroism. Eventually you have to forget to move forward. At least that is the thought.
- echelon 2y agoHN should allow for post deletion.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ryandv 2y agoOne of the issues with removing traces of yourself online, when identity in the postmodern digital era is almost totally determined by those artifacts or representations of ourselves we publish, is that you are effectively performing an act of digital suicide. With no representations of yourself on the net, you may as well not exist, and people are free to project anything whatsoever unto the tabula rasa of your nonexistent persona. While this is an excellent Rorshach for exposing the internal biases of others and demonstrating that even the staunchest progressives are also readily capable of misidentifying others or failing to recognize their "self-identification", the issue of not being seen for who one is and constantly "misidentified" also presents its own challenges.
- Yodel0914 2y ago> With no representations of yourself on the net, you may as well not exist, and people are free to project anything whatsoever unto the tabula rasa of your nonexistent persona I think this is only as issue if you are a “known” person in some regard. For most of us plebs, receding into anonymous nonexistence is likely a very healthy thing.
- ryandv 2y agoEven while writing pseudonymously and innocuously you are at risk of being doxxed and subjected to mob "justice;" as an example of this see Scott Alexander's writings on Slate Star Codex. In light of this the safest recourse is to simply not post anything online at all, for fear of being doxxed at some point in the future (an inevitability given modern standards for and cultural attitudes towards privacy) and subjected to invective for years' old posts and writings. This is the culmination and terminal state of "anonymous nonexistence" you refer to. In this way the chilling effect achieves totality, and nobody feels comfortable sharing genuine thoughts online at all. It's arguable that this is a societally healthy state of affairs.
- seanhunter 2y agoThe Scott Alexander thing is interesting to me in terms of how online dramas work because the drama assumes its own momentum and the facts struggle to maintain the pace. Scott Alexander was not in fact doxxed. He said in his final post before deleting his blog that the NYT planned to reveal his name, deleted his blog and the NYT published their article three weeks after he had already revealed his own name.[1] The pros and cons of whether they would have revealed his name became this massive hoo-hah and maybe they would have revealed his name given the chance but the fact is he was not in reality doxxed by anyone other than himself. [1] eg this article cites an anonymous source saying that none of the proposed article about him had yet been written at the time he took his blog down https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/16/21325678/venture-capitalists-vc-media-silicon-valley-clubhouse-tech-journalists https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/16/21325678/venture-capitali...
- catcatdog 2y agoWhen I had Twitter many years ago, a friend would retweet lots of bloodsport tweets of the sort this post describes. I had wondered about how much being involved in this bloodsport impacted the participants. Interesting read.
- matrix87 2y agoI don't understand how people who are into their late 20s and 30s have time for all of this online drama If you have to work, manage relationships, and have to cook and clean up after yourself, where is the extra time for it? Not only that, but with what little free time that's left, people would choose to spend it on engaging in online drama instead of doing something actually pleasant It's one of those things that I thought was funny and entertaining when I was younger, but it just seems kind of dumb to me now. Similar to the digital nomad thing. Maybe I've just gotten boring, idk
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lapcat 2y agoYou've spent the time to go on Hacker News, read about the online drama, and then comment on the online drama. The author considered their writing on social media to be social activism, so that may be why they spent so much time on it, for a higher purpose.
- matrix87 2y ago> You've spent the time to go on Hacker News, read about the online drama, and then comment on the online drama. it's usually easier to read about something after the fact than it is to participate in it as it's unfolding. Especially if there are strong emotions involved > social activism It's less about the end goal than the way she goes about accomplishing it. Taking the time to seek out alt-right troll accounts to regularly engage with is probably the worst way of doing it (both from the standpoint of effectiveness and psychological cost involved)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- saurik 2y agoBut, this is the drama... you are part of the drama ;P (as am I! and we are both doing this--"instead of doing something actually pleasant"--because, what? FWIW, I can see the argument that it is maybe being justified mentally as "social activism"--for both of us, though in different ways--but I actually think, at least for me, that it is a form of escapism and addiction).
- peterweyand38 2y ago[flagged]
- paulryanrogers 2y agoIs this an excerpt from a dystopian novel?
- ryandv 2y agoCrass of you to dismiss someone's lived experience so flippantly. > I just want to live long enough to watch everyone destroy themselves out of evilness and stupidity. It happens eventually. Turning the other cheek is a good mechanism for letting the wicked dig themselves even deeper holes (even while they don the clothes of the righteous).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ThrowAwayAcct12 2y agoHey, I think you should consider talking to a doctor about what you're experiencing. I'm really sorry you're in so much pain.
- Jiro 2y agoIt's easy to say that forgetting is an ethical act if you're the perpetrator of things you want people to forget. Reading this article, it seems she once got her jollies making the world a worse place for her political enemies. She seems to sincerely think that Twitter is bad, but it's not bad because of what she did with it, it's bad because well, you don't always win fights on it and when you attack someone you can get in trouble too and that's really messy and she doesn't want to deal with that. If she didn't want to deal with it, she didn't have to participate; the kind of political activism described in this article is not how most people use Twitter. I can understand wanting people to forget if you said one or two things years ago and people took them out of context. Or even if you did one misdeed, but it was years ago. This is not, according to her article, why she wants people to forget.
- at_a_remove 2y agoYeah, it sounds like she only regrets the swings she took that didn't land. I am not surprised, she was so often busy cranking the wheels of the Euphemism Treadmill. Anything, I suppose, to distract one from the burden of self-awareness.
- binary132 2y agoI have never seen so very very many words written to say what sums up to “in hindsight, I wish I hadn’t posted that”.
- ryandv 2y agoAll of computing reduces to "just ones and zeros." In light of this let's just dispense with the decades of verbosity and libraries' worth of extraneous elaboration.
- ffsm8 2y ago01001111 01101011 01100001 01111001
- AbstractH24 2y agoI’m not sure I agree with that. They are just saying the person they are no longer reflects that. Because people are continuously evolving, but posts online are frozen in history without context. There are things I did in kindergarten that I no longer identify with, but that doesn’t mean they were wrong at that age or for the world at that time.
- tetris11 2y agoChrist, that was a grandiose article to read. To compare yourself to Lord Byron and to talk about one's legacy really screams "Hello, I am a narcissist." Take comfort in the contributions you have made to projects bigger than yourself will be incorporated into maybe some of humanities greatest works.
- bongobingo1 2y agoConceptually related The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling by Ted Chiang. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_of_Feeling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...
- paganel 2y ago> Eventually, trolling right wingers just became who I was. I was good at it—I still laugh at how I got Zuby banned for saying “ok dude” to me and then him writing his most popular song about it Somehow this person (hope this doesn't get me banned as well) felt that that was ok to put down into words. Twitter brain-rot at its finest, Musk did these people a lot of good when acquiring said company because it has allowed some of them to try and get some sort of normal life back.
- interludead 2y agoForgetting can be a necessary and empowering act of self-preservation
- alt187 2y agoI'm happy I got to read this. Sometimes, I feel guilty about spending too much time watching children's shows over the weekend.
- littlekey 2y agoI don't know what's more shocking: tweeting 40,000 times, or going through the deletion process and ending up still thinking you need to keep 6,000 of those tweets.