A computer upgrade shut down BART

It causes shame, and shame paves the way for change. I'm a bay area native, and I'm fucking ashamed of the pathetic excuse of public transportation called the bart. Absolute travesty.

Think in terms of evolution. If snark didn't convey any survival benefit, why tf does it exist?

Seems like voting for someone else is the correct answer. If the uniparty that exists there today was in an away threatened, they might be motivated to competence. Complaining on HN won't motivate them. The snark is meant to be heard not just said to a void.

Voting hasn't done much good for this country. In fact voting is probably one of the most ineffective things for change in existence.

I'm not complaining to a void. All the readers of HN have heard me and other people complaining hear will be heard too. In aggregate many people complaining on many different venues creates an aggregate sentiment that hopefully will motivate the right people.

Cancel culture on social media has made big changes to this country and not everything necessarily good. But one thing is clear, it makes change effectively. Why not use it for the right thing?

Either way, I'm not complaining here because because I need some platform to say my piece. Bart IS categorically fucking garbage, that's less of a complaint and more of a statement. I'm just stating facts.

> an aggregate sentiment that hopefully will motivate the right people.

I can't comprehend the thought that polluting this not-bay-area specific forum with complaints will somehow eventually, hopefully, make its way to a politician.

> because I need some platform to say my piece.

This is soap boxing. To affect change, it would be better to do something directly in the real world, rather than hoping for the snark to overflow and leak out of here into the real world.

>I'm not complaining here because because I need some platform to say my piece.

Dude, fuck off. The full quote which you've taken out of context is this: "I'm not complaining here because because I need some platform to say my piece."

I hate it when people twist statements. I literally said I am not doing that. I am just stating the god awful truth which is: Bart is total shit. But here's another truth: When you manipulate my statement and take it out of context it makes you a shit head too.

Shame does not pave the way for change. Can you think of a shame-based culture that is prone to change?

Shame is like other kinds of abusive and toxic behavior. Does child abuse convey a survival benefit? Or spousal abuse? Evolution can be a useful guide, but it takes work and research to establish an evolutionary cause of a behavior.

Cancel culture has made exactly zero effective changes in our society. I've noticed that you've brought up how you don't think voting is effective.

One thing that's made a huge impact on our society is that many people participating in cancel culture and promoting shame and anger as solutions also tell people not to vote.

I watched it happen three times before the last three presidential elections and it was a big part of the voter suppression messaging tracked by democracy watchdogs. I'd argue that the biggest impact cancel culture has had is electing Donald Trump twice, weakening faith in democracy, and increasing the appeal of authoritarianism.

Shame, anger, and other tactics of using abuse to promote change is simply not effective. That's beyond the fact that it's unethical.

Cancel culture is appealing because hate and anger are addictive and they make you feel powerful. But they also make it hard to feel empathy. This is basically the main point of Star Wars, beyond just wanting to make a swashbuckler film set in space.

Every culture in the world operates on shame. It goes beyond culture and is intrinsic to human nature. The actions of almost everyone on the face of the earth accounts for shame. It’s an emotion we avoid and we act in ways to avoid it. It’s a very surface level thing. We break the rules of a society and others know about it, we feel shame. Thus to avoid shame we avoid publicly breaking the rules of society.

If an attribute of humanity is universal and historically prevalent it becomes for sure through induction that the attribute survived the gauntlet of natural selection. There is a huge survival benefit here.

All of evolutionary psychology can only be formulated through induction as there’s no way to find causal evidence for psychological attributes short of time travel.

> Does child abuse convey a survival benefit? Or spousal abuse?

We don’t know if it does. But abuse is possibly not evolutionary and possibly not beneficial. The reason is because it’s not universal across societies. Not like Shame.

Though there is evidence that it is beneficial. Hitting children in Asia is normal. The high achievement and IQ and work ethic of those in China are often achieved through physical abuse not to the extent where it injures the child extremely but to the extent where pain changes behavior. A large part of the economic success of the Chinese is due to high industriousness of the society which is very much influenced by physical abuse of children.

Additionally, the overwhelming majority of human societies have men as the dominant sex and often hitting a wife is equivalent to spanking a child in societies where men have power. Was this beneficial? Who knows. One thing is that in societies where men dominate women rate their lives as happier and the divorce rate is significantly down. While the data on this isn’t fully solid this isn’t strictly evidence it’s food for a thought. It’s also the overwhelming dominant paradigm of humanity where men dominate women. Modern society as we know it where women are equal to men is experimental we’ve never done it and there’s no way of knowing if natural selection will select for this.

Another thing to note is that modern societies are all experience population decline. There is enough of a correlation here that we believe modernity is causal to population decline. What part of modernity? We don’t know. Likely it is very complicated but male domination could be an aspect of it. Take India. Spousal abuse is much more common and men hold a dominant place in the family unit and they also follow more traditional arranged marriages. Indias population is not declining, it is growing and it is quite possible spousal abuse or the attributes that lead to spousal abuse are causal.

We don’t know. So my long winded explanation here is that you cannot use abuse as an example of evidence against the evolutionary benefits of shame. It doesn’t follow from the logic or the evidence and you only said it as if it was like dropping the mic because you’re heavily influenced by modern culture. Abuse = universally bad to you but from an impartial and objective standpoint it is not.

Just ask ChatGPT about the effective changes cancel culture has done to society. Look for specific examples.

Also in a separate window ask it for specific examples of how anger and hate has changed society for the better.

Tons of examples.

It's just regurgitating apologetics for cancel culture. The history isn't even correct.

ChatGPT will give you correct answers on most of these topics, but you have to walk it through the actual research first and then ask the question. That is, you have to load in the academic context rather than the political context.

This falls into the category of things like religion where the LLMs won't tell you the truth with a simple prompt like that because that would make too many of its users angry. They're aligned not to say anything negative about religious leaders. Similarly, they're aligned not to say anything negative about even terrorist groups if they have a lot of vocal defenders.

I’m not asking for a research report, just a general summary. Overall, the answers all prove your statements wrong.

There’s tons of examples of hatred, anger and cancel culture doing good for the world and making the world a better place.

Maybe ask it for examples of how snark has impacted the world in a positive way.

https://chatgpt.com/share/68bcde6c-5960-8001-93ce-63a026a7c6...

Point is the world doesn’t work in the same idealist way that you think.

I think we have very different concepts of what counts as evidence or proof.

At any rate I see your point. People have used snarkiness in the past and it does drive engagement, which is what I said above.

The disconnect is that that engagement has not improved society in any way. It feeds the anger junky and helps them feel smug and righteous. But it doesn't drive change.

Nothing personal, but I find this conversation dreadfully tedious. I've had it almost word for word with probably dozens of people with anger issues now. Every one of them feels their anger is righteous and good. The few I've known well spiralled into increasingly unhappy lives as their anger became the only way they could socialize.

Anger prevents you from thinking clearly. That's why people who crave power like to make others angry. It's also why you should be deeply skeptical of anyone promoting anger or hate as a solution to anything.

My bad, I misread. That wasn't intentional. I put very little effort into arguing with someone trying to make this place shittier.

But, your whole thing still fits the definition of soapboxing.

> To "soapbox" means to deliver a passionate or self-important public speech or express one's strong opinions, often on a topic one feels strongly about, originating from the literal practice of standing on an empty soapbox as an improvised platform to address a crowd. The term is frequently used figuratively to describe speaking forcefully or at length about a personal issue or belief.