I remember when this started happening, something trickled over to Reddit and so I investigated to get the full story.
Needless to say, it was rather quite horrible and I really did feel for the girl. At the same time, I was utterly confused as to why on earth she tried to poke a hornets nest...
It's a shame that people are still trying to ruin her life more. It's almost like some people think if something is done over a computer, it's not "real".
I hope the people who harass her are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
The fact is, sometimes hornets' nests need poking, not because of the hornets that will fly out and sting you, but so an exterminator will notice the nest and remove it shortly.
While I question her motives (linking to a porn site of herself didn't exactly help) this really shows the dark side of the internet yet again.
I didn't feel bad for Timothy Treadwell when he got eaten by a grizzly bear as covered in the film, Grizzly Man. It was almost expected given his actions.
Just as I give both Timothy (who had spent 13 summer living among bears) and this girl (who as the article says was an old time /b/ user) the benefit of the doubt, that they rationally knew the extreme dangers that existed.
There's already enough tragedy that happens in this world - due to pure circumstance and things out of our control.
I only have a limited amount of energy and time on this planet. My empathy is better spent on the latter individuals than on those who knowingly put themselves in direct danger of being harmed.
Ethical and emotional matters are typically seen as separate from rational concerns. Empathy is not something that healthy people have a short supply of. Time and energy is another thing, but a person being eaten generally makes people feel bad.
I think empathy is more of an experience you feel when confronted with a situation or story, rather than something you grant to people after a process of logical judgement.
Although tempting, debating the meaning of empathy is probably not a beneficial contribution to this HN thread.
But I will say, the initial emotional response (for ex. feeling sad someone was harmed) is largely out of our control. But spending time feeling bad after the fact is a controllable state, and is the basis of a large amount of psychological and behavioral therapy.
But it's beside the point dmix is making and distraction from the central point of this thread. This sort of distraction, subtle changes of topic, is a common way discussions fail. If done deliberately it's also a way to appear to have won an argument.
My current view on it is that empathy isn't specifically an emotional or a rational response, but is more a sensory mirroring of the state of another entity real or imagined, and I am not sure that you can pick apart the strands into one realm or the other.
It can be influenced by conscious thought and logic, sure, but as it is primarily experiential in nature, I usually have an experience that I then rationalise about, rather than rationalising what my experience will be beforehand.
I felt bad for him, but not surprised at the outcome. But when grizzly bears ate Timothy Treadwell, they were not deliberately trying to be malicious, at least as far as we know.
No, because it's bloody obvious that they're doing things specifically to hurt people. Humans don't desecrate graves by instinct, that requires malice, I'd say.
Bullshit, we're social animals. That's what makes primates so distinct. Obviously there are exceptions, which these 4chan numbnuts have exemplified, but generally we're good at socialising and being friendly with another.
That's a reflex, which is different from an instinct. In any case, I think the rather creative behaviors of hurting people in this case are obviously learned.
Humans are just another species of animals, why wouldn't they have an instinct? The only difference is the cultural conditioning, which suppresses instinct behavior.
Because humans have such a capacity for learning, instincts would serve no purpose. Instincts are rigid and humans on the contrary are very adaptable. It appears to me that the scientific consensus is that there are no human instincts, but if you believe otherwise why don't you cite an example?
Well again I'd say that's not an instinct, just like hunger it's a desire. An instinct is a very specific pre-programmed behavior that can't be overridden, a desire or reflex doesn't fit that description.
The good news is Anonymous, representing the hive mind of the most primitive human desires before they've been filtered out by one's conscience, has a set attention span. They will eventually stop in about a week or two. It will get old to them and they'll move on.
I would bet their attention span is more like a power law distribution. While the vast majority will taper off over a couple of weeks, the long tail will be there to make sure the victim gets whats coming for an "appropriate" amount of time.
My assumption is that it is just like "real life" where something might be big drama in the family for a week or two. After that, only one or two people will still talk about it, but they will continue to talk about it years later.
That's an interesting hypothesis, and worth looking into. If the group is a graph connected by people becoming aware of the campaign, participating in it, and forgetting about it, then there's a feedback loop that should taper off in a predictable way. This would gel with what seems to happen.
And as you point out, there's also a moment where the event becomes calcified, earning an entry into some wiki that records the biggest campaigns against individuals. This also seems to have the effect of permanently branding the individual so that if they do anything else perceived as a violation by a member of the group, a significant chunk of the network can reactivate quickly for a second round.
There's also a thin line between observation and participation. Someone might be passively aware of what's going on from reading 4chan or seeing it here, and they might comment, and the comment (maybe a suggestion) could galvanize the network to act in some way (call her employer). Each individual who does this may feel moral responsibility only for a trivial fraction of the damage. "All I did was make one phone call. I'm not responsible for what other people do."
Add that to a good technological mechanism for acting anonymously, and we get what we're seeing: a huge campaign of harassment unencumbered by moral and social concerns. Somewhat different from a family drama but not totally so. I'm sure there are sociological studies on how "shunning" works, but if you could get a hook into the numbers here, maybe there's a pattern that has general properties that subsume cases where people are more accountable and less anonymous.
The other question that interests me is whether there's a point in the "ramping up" side of the distribution where an active intervention of some kind can mute it.
The only criteria for participation in Anonymous, for example, is a commitment to the "lulz" at hand. If you're not in the current campaign, you're not provably in Anonymous. For example, just after the name began to be appropriated by people at the edges who were mostly interested in targeting scientology, and described in the news as a good campaign against a cult, we saw an attack on an epileptic support forum. This had the effect of purging people who claimed to be Anonymous but morally disavowed it. That's synonymous (hmm) with splintering the group, but the criterion of doing it solely for laughs was retained by one group and lost by the other. It'd be reasonable to call the former the "core." So there IS a form of accountability in Anonymous, and it operates strictly in the moral dimension of the action.
That would imply that both the ramping up and ramping down of a campaign is exactly the same as the size of the group (as defined by devotion to "lulz") at any given moment. Perhaps tautological, but different from a family. Apply this generally to all anonymous distributed groups. It also implies that an action that subverts the moral identity of the group can subvert a campaign. If you do something so reprehensible that a large contingent of the individuals in the campaign are compelled to disavow it, then you could effectively kill the distributed campaign. Is that a net win? Probably only if you convince enough people that you did it without actually doing it. Another possibility is to engineer a compelling distraction that draws in members of the campaign. But it seems to me that with enough knowledge, an individual or a smaller group can actively and deliberately affect the tapering off, either through manipulation of attention span or manipulation of moral alignment.
I wonder how much of this issue is aggravated by the fact that we are unable to identify children on the internet. In regular society, we would not dream of putting up with anti-social behaviour of this type but online we seem only too fight for their right to do this, with what seem to be rather drastic consequences.
I think these behaviors are extremely innocent compared to some anti-social people we put up with in regular society. Any important soccer match around here involves way more destructive behavior than this.
Needless to say, it was rather quite horrible and I really did feel for the girl. At the same time, I was utterly confused as to why on earth she tried to poke a hornets nest...
It's a shame that people are still trying to ruin her life more. It's almost like some people think if something is done over a computer, it's not "real".