„There's something feral in us that comes out from time to time“? You write this, as if this is just human and inevitable. But in my experience it’s a matter of character. People can train their body and they can work on self control. I really wish more people would try to become a better person.

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I'm imagining someone who actually did have a deadbeat father growing up then seeing messaging on social media about deadbeat men. Probably their social media feeds create a vicious cycle that only solidifies their distrust of men. It is just showing them things that they saw to be true since they were young children.

> One very common pattern I saw is that the conclusion is always that the dad is useless. Any provided facts are downplayed. Any omitted facts are imagined in the most negative light possible. And to be fair, there really are LOTS of cases where the dad is useless. The issue is more that posts needed to contain a mountain of evidence to return a neutral ground where the dad is no longer seen as a piece of garbage, rather than starting from neutral ground.

You can find quite a lot of data showing that the burden of managing domestic matters falls primarily on women. I would recommend people check out the book Fair Play which examines the problem and puts forward a system where people are assigned various personal tasks that need to be done (there are 100 in total, not all of which may apply to your life/household):

> The result is Fair Play: a time- and anxiety-saving system that offers couples a completely new way to divvy up domestic responsibilities. Rodsky interviewed more than five hundred men and women from all walks of life to figure out what the invisible work in a family actually entails and how to get it all done efficiently. With four easy-to-follow rules, 100 household tasks, and a figurative card game you play with your partner, Fair Play helps you prioritize what's important to your family and who should take the lead on every chore from laundry to homework to dinner.

* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/44071899-fair-play

* Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6FfxfRMQkw

People are animals and animals can be trained. Dogs can be trained, elephants can be trained, tigers can be trained. This fact is hated, but has been known for thousands of years.

Foreign adversaries, political extremist groups and so on are all clawing away at every facet of society that can contribute to training people to be and do what they want. For all of our information, language and intellect, those strengths are just an open vulnerability if they aren't protected.

You have to train yourself sufficiently on the grounded basics of reality, the truth and the nature so that when adversarial training against you and others strikes you can be wise enough to push back like this. You have to be able to surround yourself with people who disagree and stand your ground, because they're all being pumped with garbage from everywhere and don't know any better.

It is one of Russia, China, Cuba's and even Iran's way of attacking the US at a distance by funding these groups and amplifying the dumbest stuff you can imagine until these minority voices reach majority saturation in some of the information spaces where they can fester. Taking over education, journalism, social media and so on.

If the idea of the open society is going to survive into the next century, we're either going to need AI to ground society if we can prevent AI from becoming too centralized, or we're going to need to rapidly change education to teach people to think even if the reason we haven't been doing so up to this point is that it fragments society too much. If the alternative is a fragmentation that our enemies control, then a new enlightenment may be the better way.

> One very common pattern I saw is that the conclusion is always that the dad is useless.

This is a sitcom trope no? I wonder if that's why that assumption is made.

A family is a autonomous unit, in theory capable of survival without society for a while. For those who marry the state to receive alimony from the taxpayer this independent union is a blatant declaration of war.

Telling women they're being abused even when the woman herself disagrees is a very ironic pattern I see often. Somehow it's seen as anti-sexist and yet it puts the onus on the woman to justify herself like the case here where she wrote an entire article. What happened to letting women make their own choices? I'm sure some of them are legitimately concerned, but I think a lot of people just want to spread their preferred narratives about the world.

The father-mother-child-donkey conundrum. Its only solution is: to hell with anyone's thoughts, we'll act as we prefer.

It’s not only online. Just last weekend, someone heckled me at Costco because my wife was pushing a heavy ass cart while I was walking freely next to her. She chose to do it, I offered to take it and she refused. But somehow a random stranger had something to say about it.

Online behavior is unfortunately a slightly worse mirror of real life. If you want to experience people outside of your bubble, just go to any public hearings or meetings and you’ll find that a lot of people are quite out there.

Or speculation grows and a few hours later it's suddenly historical fact, like a modern version of telephone... just with a more harmful outcome.

Is there any benefit to social media? Just seems like a new form of cancer we have to deal with now along with everything else.

Story also mentions SF Giants sports commentators making jokes about this

I noticed how easy it is to frame something online when you’re viewing it out of context. I’ve seen myself getting it wrong from time to time, because a title was misleading, and I don’t know why after 30 years of internet I’m not way more skeptical.

Also known as "Mind your own damn business" (to those karens who judge assuming they know better than the people in the situation themselves)

"A really toxic part of online interactions is that it's very common for people to see a tiny snippet of another person's life and then project all of their own personal resentments onto them."

While also erasing everything that is real about that person's life, too.

I cringe whenever I hear someone angrily yell something like "You don't/can't know how I feel!", because unless the person making the accusation knows the accused very, very well, they could well be really stepping it. Nobody makes it through this life unscathed. Everybody loses people they love. Everybody gets kicked in the gut multiple times in life. Yes, everyone's personal life story, if you get specific enough, isn't exactly like someone else's. I won't claim to know exactly what it's like to be sexually abused, for instance. Wouldn't dream of it. Very serious issue. But I've had kicks to the gut that the one screaming that they may not have an exact analog for either.

I may not know how your exact gut punch feels. Maybe you've had noticeably more gut punches than I have. But everybody has had some sort of experience with them.

If one day a genie's magic spell made you see text pop ups above everyone's head with their traumas and abuses in life, and the emotional and physical burdens they're carrying today, you'd probably have a very hard time walking down the street.

Similarly, I really have a distaste for any variation of the "everyone's sheep" meme, especially when it's because they're not being active in some particular political way that the person flinging the meme around thinks they should be. If you could see those popups, maybe you'd understand why not everyone has a bunch of spare time to do whatever it is you think they should do to not be "sheep". Looking out on to a crowd of people and presuming they are "sheeple" reveals a lack of imagination and sympathy with people rather that the possession of a wise eye and strong understanding of the world.

That seems to be a big part of it.

There's a widespread problem of anti-intellectualism and acting-out, including, in the US, by both right and left. Most of the learning feedback to that -- pointing out to people when they might be missing something or acting unfairly -- is ignored, except to attack those who point it out.

AFAICT, for various reasons, they're proud of being warriors for their beliefs, and anyone who sounds like they're saying anything differently is the enemy, and the only thing you do with an enemy is score points against them or hurt them, while trying not to concede anything that the enemy would claim as points or hurt you. It's a toxic recipe for society.

Coincidentally, recently I've decided even Fedi isn't safe from that (it's just different and fewer people doing ideological bully thinking), and have resigned myself that issues of substance can't be discussed there either. Maybe the only safe thing to post is cat pictures.

I think it's much less a problem with HN. Of course, over time you realize certain positions get downvotes that aren't flattering to the people doing it, and some annoying commenting behaviors, and not always all the integrity we'd like to see, which are relatively mild by social media standards. However, I'm also seeing occasional random individual actor extreme toxicity problems with HN. And I'm anticipating some related but different kind of problems from how AI-powered tools will be easily used with the corpus/firehose to play toxic games.

This is really toxic offline, too.

> If it was the other way around they would be saying what a hero he is lol.

I’m not so sure, I’m convinced people would not bat an eye. Or at least I don’t expect any positive compliments, only neutral or negative.

Yeah, it is complicated because we do live in a very misogynistic civilization with patriarchal privileges. It’s just often difficult not to overcompensate to counterbalance and resist these circumstances. Treat people as individuals instead of the archetypes.

As author wrote: we need to practice the benefit of the doubt. Or I like the “trust but verify” pattern

I started to notice a bit over a decade ago (about the same time as Cersei's walk of shame on GoT) that millennials as a generation were piling into naming and shaming people publicly as blindly appropriate punishment, without any consideration of what could go wrong and considering it their right and entitlement to do that. Any time a public figure gets into any kind of trouble, people demand to know all the details so they can satisfy their need to express outrage. It really is not healthy. Even if another person who was harmed comes out to express that they are satisfied with the outcome and the process that was followed, the crowd still wants to know all the details so they can feel angry.

TikTok threw up a big "login" popup that I couldn't skip, so here is a youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUwQmrEFf7E

I'm Danish, but how is this terrible? I should show these people a video of my twins sleeping in a snow covered trolley outside the bar I was having a beer and a board game by the window at.

Those comments are pure vitriol juice, my god, and they just keep coming from all angles as to why that dude is an absolutely piece of shit on very little data. Incredible stuff, and a good lesson right there.

> That this is something that has to be told to adults is the saddest part of humanity. No one has grown up.

It's worse, grown ass adults who taught me that this kind of reaction is wrong growing up are the same ones I see behaving this way now.

And she spells it out really well. But yeah.

People are imperfect.

I was thinking of this recently. I "dogsit" for many families and had one recently that wasn't great on leash. She would do this thing where she would lay down and try to eat something off the ground (sticks, garbage, animal/dog poop, dead mice, dead birds... whatever she could find). Much of it would likely make her sick and therefore I would have to quickly pull on the leash to prevent her from eating some random thing she found. Being an 80lbs dog, I had to tug quite hard to quickly get her away from whatever she had found. If someone saw me in that moment, they'd probably think I was a terrible dog owner. Without the context that I was actually trying to prevent harm, someone could take a video, post online with the caption "Identify this dog abuser!" and ruin my reputation.

The incredible thing is the husband came in for bashing not plausibly based on his actions in the video but based on mutating narrative.

Go from "X great, Y OK" to "X great, Y terrible".

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The internet feels like one those shitty religious villages were everyone is gossiping.

Reddit is kind of a cult. "Ditch your loved ones so you can spend more time on reddit telling people to ditch their loved ones."

This is the main takeaway from all this.

Link to transcript and audio of the This Is Water commencement speech:

https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/

Some of them would read this and still complain. There's no use in trying to please some very unhappy and likely single people online.

If you sort by 'controversial', it only shows the sane replies.

I think some of them caught wind of their shit-posting and started deleting their comments. Hopefully they learn something.

https://archive.is/MlgWh

Wow, Reddit is horrible. Atrocious behavior. Leave your brains in the anteroom!

> Whoever sees this and it reminds them of their current relationship, DUMP HIM

> you can tell by the body language, lack of initiative, and lack of joy and welcome-ness for his woman and baby to be back, everything you need to know.

> There is a VERY good chance that when he realizes he went viral for being the *Poster Manchild* of taking your spouse for granted, of choosing to act like a parasitic blob

Modern Reddit provides a simulacrum of commentary. There are posts and people discusing these posts, but nobody understands or wants to know anything about the underlying topic. The lack of comprehension is crucial to the community.

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Hopefully AI slop kills it

normal people -- employed, in a relationship, with chores and hobbies to occupy their free time -- simply do not participate in the gender war on the Internet. most are blissfully unaware that it's even happening. the womanosphere is a mirror image of its critically panned counterpart -- a refuge for the unhappy and/or mentally ill, an obnoxiously loud minority.

The conclusion was made from a 30s clip, and no amount of evidence can overturn that. New theories will be created to support the original conclusion to avoid any amount of critical self-reflection.

i thought that too, but that's not really a story, that's just normal for the US. in europe (most of the EU i am sure) and china and probably elsewhere it's illegal to lay someone off while they are pregnant. (exceptions exist, and if they apply insurance works also for the unemployed)

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If you have reasons to want to limit how much most people drink at your venue, this would be a good way to do it.

If only we truly knew how much divisive online content was generated from geopolitical adversaries…LLM or not.

What I notice quite often is a sort of "LLM derangement syndrome" where people start flagging the most innocuous figures of speech and speech pattern as "clearly LLM".

Quite ironic when we are talking about an article which argues for extending the benefit of the doubt.

Thing is, it might be or it might not be. At some point you have to realize that some people need wheelchairs to move, some people need glasses to see, and some people need LLMs to write.

IMHO It's when you see someone who is paid to write/think using LLMs that you might make a value judgement.

I once knew a girl who wore prescription-free glasses b/c it made her feel smarter so she'd study longer. Not kidding. I made a value judgement about that. But she got the studying done. There's been other more prevalent cases of that on socials.

It might be worth letting some people write in any way they can.

Plaease don't spoil threads with comments like this. The writing doesn't come up as LLM-authored according to the tools we use (polished, perhaps, but not generated).

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49858463 and marked it off topic.

Everything is LLM if you want it to be

Who cares? She isn't a public figure, and she never asked to be. She has some thoughts she wants to put out there after going viral due to nothing she did.

i suspect in some time people might begin to flag every bit of text they see online as "LLM sounding", even if it's very clearly not