So many commenters are missing the point or actively trying to misread the article. The point is that when you're young you're going to do things that seem correct and thought through at the time, but might not be when you've aged. For those of us that were able to make these mistakes before social media, we got the time to reflect and correct / adapt out behavior. We now strip the young of this moment of reflection when the web can explode over night over non-issues, effectively creating a situation where a simple Google on a twenty year old might bring up a wall of discussion about the bad behavior. I'm in my mid thirties and am not as angry with social issues as I were in my teens. The things I did and the things that shaped me were discussed and corrected by a small group of people, not an angry mob on the internet that didn't really know me. I'm grateful for that.
We need to find a balance of forgetting things online:
"I don't know if they did this in Germany, but in our elementary schools in America, if we did something particularly heinous, they had a special way of threatening you. They would say: "This is going on your permanent record".
It was pretty scary. I had never seen a permanent record, but I knew exactly what it must look like. It was bright red, thick, tied with twine. Full of official stamps.
The permanent record would follow you through life, and whenever you changed schools, or looked for a job or moved to a new house, people would see the shameful things you had done in fifth grade.
How wonderful it felt when I first realized the permanent record didn't exist. They were bluffing! Nothing I did was going to matter! We were free!
And then when I grew up, I helped build it for real."[0]
I don't know if they did this in Germany, but in our elementary schools in America, if we did something particularly heinous, they had a special way of threatening you. They would say: "This is going on your permanent record".
It was pretty scary. I had never seen a permanent record, but I knew exactly what it must look like. It was bright red, thick, tied with twine. Full of official stamps.
The permanent record would follow you through life, and whenever you changed schools, or looked for a job or moved to a new house, people would see the shameful things you had done in fifth grade.
How wonderful it felt when I first realized the permanent record didn't exist. They were bluffing! Nothing I did was going to matter! We were free!
And then when I grew up, I helped build it for real.[0]
I think it actually has to be erased, otherwise, some future employer, acquaintance etc, might judge you for something you've moved on from. People do learn and move on from their mistakes, but not when they are continually berated for them because that causes them to be self-defensive and it's my experience that as soon as the defenses go up the ability for self-reflection is lost.
What I mean by balance is that political scandals should definitely not be forgotten, but thoughtless things written by a minor should. I just don't know where the line should be and personally, I think it varies widely by the circumstances.
But I believe hypocrisy is a follow up, when you set the standard, that there might be no dark past.
So the person from human HR interviewing you than, can look down at you, because your incident made it into local news - but he got lucky and his incident gots forgotten and ereased. And he believes now in his righteous act, even though he did the same things (drugs, racism, whatever).
I rather believe there should be a right to move one. Yeah you did those things, but you learned from it. (or still stand by them) This I would like much more, than pretending everything is and was shiny, which it often was not. But you can't really solve the problems if you can't even talk about them.
Heck, even the threat that your grades from middle school would effect your ability to get into certain classes in high school turned out to be nonsense.
Hear hear! Even here on HN, e.g. discussions that come within a 200 mile radius of identity politics can immediately expect to be mobbed. I'm still trying to figure out whether these misrepresentations are deliberate, or just the result of an extremely biased or myopic world view.
Communication by nature only works if the parties involved are trying to understand each other. Deliberately trying to polarize or frame each sentence doesn't serve any purpose other than to fuel division.
I read a comment on here I believe where someone surmised this is an effect of the anti-bully movement that happened about 10 years ago. Now we not only have bullies (in the traditional term) but we have mobs of people who are eager to bully a perceived bully and have zero tolerance for anything other than their subscribed world view.
The antidote is the same it's been since before the internet: don't put much value in what people think about you.
In many things in life when people decide a 'side' it's most often an entirely subjective decision. This is by itself not immediately terrible - take a side and then adjust as you find a view more, or less, defensible or reasonable. The problem is when people get into situations where they consider the alternative absolutely unthinkable.
How can they respond to views that challenge their own in this case? I think this is why you see 95% of "discussion" in contentious topics end up as being loaded with little more than straw men, ad hominem, and all the other fun products of internet "discussion." Of course the problem is people thinking anything ought be unthinkable. The domain of the faithful is one I'd rather never rejoin again -- perhaps a personal voyage too few have been given the opportunity to undertake in today's society.
no we have not...social media is a volunteer activity same with using the phone posting letter to the editor of a newspaper etc...everyone has a choice to turn it off and not post...
you seek to make the young avoid ownership for their actions..something out fuck of a President does daily...No-fucking way sir or mam!
Taking ownership of one's voluntary actions is called...wait for it..wait for it...LEADERSHIP....
Rather than feed the young to disaster and no-sense of ownership let's lead the young to owning every voluntary action they may take..its a better and more pleasing future..
I've really struggled to understand where this mindset comes from and it seems to be pervasive enough to be the majority opinion for most internet commentators.
Where does mercy fit into all of this? Should a person who tries to change their life still be beholden to a recording of bad behavior from the past?
My experience is that executives are often extremely image conscious and if a google search brought up anything unsavory about a hire it could be career limiting. Given that it is almost impossible to know that an honest change-of-heart had occurred, it would be much easier to employ candidates who won't bring any baggage.
Depending on the jurisdiction, that could be a registerable sex offense. And the offense record won't say "Billy kissed a girl when he was in kindergarten", it'll say "INDCNCY W/ MINOR, VICTIM UNDER 12".
A friend wrote a heartfelt essay in a campus magazine that the rest of us found laughable. We taunted and laughed at him for years about it.
A couple years ago he won a Pulitzer Prize. The lineage from that essay to the prize is obvious in retrospect to me and probably looking forward for him at the time.
It's never too late for your dumb mistake. I'm 46 and my just-released podcast -- https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/leadership-and-the-envir... -- which opened at #38 in Science on iTunes, emerged from laughable mistakes I made public speaking on the environment earlier this year.
I love how he says people should make dumb mistakes and then in the next sentence actively disqualified people he disagrees with from having the same privilege under the guise of “well you can’t allo hate speech.”
It's also both a curious distinction and conflation that he implies when he says ...sexual violence or racial hatred. Why not just say violence instead of sexual violence? And why is racial hatred more of a bogeyman than general hatred. And then why conflate (physical) violence with hatred (thoughts)?
Corporations do not support free speech as they have shown time and again. A student opposed to it is unlikely to see any employment-related consequences from such stance.
Quite the opposite. Unlike vandalizing McDondald's, that editorial[1] shows the student is willing to abridge his own freedom in favour of diversity, which is probably the most popular corporate value, and conformity, which may be omitted from official documents but remains in demand.
You're mixing up the situation today with the situation as it was in the 80's. The whole point of the article was that it's helpful that people can make mistakes without a high level of public scrutiny. The suggestion being made is that this has become an endangered privilege in the modern age.
The editorial you shared is one from earlier this year. This does not disprove the article, if anything it reinforces it. The need to be more diplomatic whilst growing up is greater now because of that increased public scrutiny. The idea that 'hate speech' is best addressed by silence than dialogue is not one solely driven by a desire to give up on freedom, it is also driven by a practical need to stop youthful mistakes wrecking prospects in later life.
Take a step back and think about the mistakes you made growing up. Now consider if those same mistakes were permanently recorded in the public domain. Does that seem like something that would've been helpful to your personal growth?
The article I linked to is the example OP used, not something I offered. And it's not about the tone of that editorial but its direction which is completely aligned with the modern corporate expectations and nothing like vandalizing a McDonald's with an anti-corporate slogan.
Sure, maybe college kids are adjusting their values because of the permanence of record. But it's a completely different thesis from the one presented in the OP (let them make mistakes on a smaller scale). Actually, a much more interesting one.
> "Sure, maybe college kids are adjusting their values because of the permanence of record. But it's a completely different thesis from the one presented in the OP (let them make mistakes on a smaller scale)."
The central points of the article are covered by the following quotes...
"That’s the important bit. Because for all of the supposed liberating power of their digital devices, they might as well be wearing ankle monitors. Technological connectedness has made it much harder for them to make mistakes and learn from them.
Today’s students live their lives so publicly — through the technology we provide them without training — that much simpler errors than mine earn them the wrath of the entire internet."
"In my own life I made bad choices that went far beyond spray paint. I flunked out of college and at various points narrowly dodged jail time. When I think back to those mistakes, I’m horrified and chastened. I feel fortunate to have survived, to have had the privilege to make amends.
It would be nice to live in a world in which errors weren’t necessary. Or would it? Miles Davis left behind a quote that I think captures the beauty of a world in which mistakes are natural or even valued: “It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note — it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.”
Our children deserve the opportunity to play the music for themselves."
The general gist is that mistakes are an essential part of the learning process. Increased public scrutiny holds students back from learning from their mistakes. You hold people back from exploring ideas fully if you're aware that every simple misstep can carry a high price. Whether the students are consciously aware that they're being held back is an interesting point, but not the main one. The impact may not always be felt on an individual level, but if an impact is made on the cultural norms of the time then it can still affect the behaviour of these same individuals. If you don't know what you're missing out on you may be conditioned to accept current cultural norms without questioning them.
>If a Williams student spray-painted “Corporate Deathburgers” on a local building today
The biggest difference between today and when I went to college (a decade or so after the author) is now the kid would get thrown in jail, convicted and stuck with probation and a permanent record. Very difficult things to get out from under and in many states, follow you for life.
I understand the problem with the digital stuff as well, that is similar, if not just as bad as a permanent record.
This plea for leniency compared with the harsh treatment of poor kids no longer in school making similarly immature mistakes doesn't cut a whole lot of ice with me.
My objection is not just to the entitled hypocrisy, but also to giving leniency to young vandals with little self-awareness or understanding of how the world works. I see it as a failure of earlier education rather than something to be forgiven.
Yeah, OK, but let's just say some young person - privileged or otherwise - chooses to scrawl "Corporate Deathburgers" across a fast-food outlet. Nobody's saying they shouldn't be punished for it.
What I think the author is asking is, should that incident then follow them around forever and ruin the rest of their life? I'd say, no, it shouldn't. But nowadays there's a significantly higher than, say, 20 years ago chance that it might.
Justice, even retributive justice, demands that the punishment must fit the crime. Yet what we see nowadays is wildly disproportionate: Justine Sacco's life was completelyruined because she cracked a moderately poor taste joke on the internet. The response and consequences of this were entirely ridiculous, over the top, and unnecessary, and it's taken years for her to reconstruct a relatively normal life. I don't think that's OK. I think the author is suggesting he doesn't think it is either.
An alternative view is that a college student making dumb mistakes is not being sufficiently (or effectively) guided through their specific interests and passions. While I agree that people should be able to make mistakes and learn and recover from them I also think that college students are generally unguided. The consequence is that many opportunities (not dumb and not mistakes) are unrecognized and lost.
Interesting perspective, considering many of them today still live like children (living with one's parents is the polar opposite of living like an adult). As such, the age of majority in developed countries today is (functionally) nearly 25; I expect the law to catch up within a generation.
Of course, this is all due to economic circumstances- this isn't 1970, so you can't just walk into a factory and get a job like you could then.
And _that's_ the real reason for this conversation- the economy has contracted so much in its demand for manpower that being on social media doing something stupid is now a big deal (and even worse, that it's able to discriminate enough that university attendance is now mandatory to get jobs that should only require a high school education).
Maybe because I am from different culture, I don't see a big deal about that living arrangement. If it is cheaper and you don't have much money, it is more mature financially reasonable arrangement then paying more just to prove yourself adulthood. And if you live away from parents, bit they helped you with paying or getting college debt, then you are less independent then you think.
On the other extreme,I have read older geberation brags about how their adult children could not wait to leave and are independent enough to never call. I don't see that as achievement. If you was such a dick to your offspring that they disliked you so much, then you are just that.
In any case, cops nor judges treat these people as children. Nor should they, adulthood means we consider you old enough to co trolling your actions and be responsible for then. Living arrangement has little to do with it.
People are too eager to use their own consumer choices as adulthood marks. Adulthood is about making choices now, not back then. And is independent of whether you use public transport or car.
>Maybe because I am from different culture... it is more mature financially reasonable arrangement then paying more just to prove yourself adulthood
I don't believe your claim that your culture doesn't seem to understand the value of having a space in which you are not to be interfered.
Not having one stunts the development of your culture in ways I am sure you are already well acquainted.
Just extend that concept to the individual a little further- your social growth is absolutely stunted when you have to worry about destabilizing yourself. As an example, you can't come out as gay if you have to (pretend to) be straight to keep a roof over your head, or invest in a new idea if you only get paid enough to cover needs and not wants.
And that success and failure are meaningful is what separates children from adults. If success is no longer possible because people can no longer get that experience and grow from it, that's a bad thing, especially in a society where only the already-well-off get to do it. Social progress slows down when humans can't fully mature, and drags innovation down with it.
> I don't believe your claim that your culture doesn't seem to understand the value of having a space in which you are not to be interfered.
It is pleasant to have it. The question is, how much money you pay for that and how much you can afford. It is also necessary for old people to have help. Also, if you live with friends, especially if you don't have own room, you have no place where you are not to be interfered. If you have spouse and small kids, such place don't exists either.
Having a place where you are not to be interfered is exceptional state for most people in most history.
> or invest in a new idea if you only get paid enough to cover needs and not wants.
What does that have to do with living arrangements? Nothing. But also, this would imply that majority of people in the past were not adults either. It shapes your actions and options, but they were no less adults. We are a bit less adults compared to them, because we play more. (We also drink less and are less violent which is very likely related.)
> And that success and failure are meaningful is what separates children from adults.
There is very little success of failure in local factory job in stable economy you mentioned in above comment. Nor much personal development. You are changing standards here. And for adult 1960-1970 middle class women, there was not much personal success or failure at all - her success or failure being defined too much what other people do. Still considered adult (edit: on second thought, some feminists argued that arrangement prevents women to grow and become real adults. So there were people who agreed with you.).
> If success is no longer possible because people can no longer get that experience and grow from it, that's a bad thing, especially in a society where only the already-well-off get to do it. Social progress slows down when humans can't fully mature, and drags innovation down with it.
But of course, success is possible whether you live with parents and save money that way or not. Or whether you live alone or with friends. So is failure.
How would you live with friends and not have your own space? Bunk up in the same room?That's just not done in the Western countries. In the past decades a usual shared house would be a private room, often with a lock, in a house with a shared kitchen, lounge and bathroom(s).
I also think you don't realise how a factory job did used to be a decent wage earner and you could have a whole other life on top of it. As far as I understand it, socialist worker parties, unions, etc. were all producing intellectuals, politicians, etc. from the late 1800s until the crackdowns in the 1980s.
In the UK we are seeing calls to loosen laws around unions as the pendulum swung too far towards the owners of capital, I've recently read Peston's WTF[1] that was arguing it, Jeremy Corbyn is saying it, the idea is entering the main stream again.
[1] Pretty good read on why Brexit happened, I don't agree with everything he says but worth a read if you want some insight into it
I know people who live like that in San Francisco - programmers. So yeah, it is done. Moreover, if you live with parents you typically have own room too.
I read up quite a lot on German society prior/between wars and nope. Huge amount of very poor people. UK a bit less so, but undreclass definitelt existing. Where lack of privacy was least of their problems. Not sure if Poland count as west, but they had poverty too. So did Italian which counts definitely. Don't have such detailed books for America, but unions sis not happened to be real because of massive prosperity for everyone.
Also, America had huge black population at the time that was very poor and unable to get good living even if they had jobs - and class of poor whites júst a bit better off then them.
But yes, there was period of better prosperity in after WWII. That is when factory work was good. It still is better job then situation of poor prior and between those wars.
"Adult" doesn't mean anything when you use it that way. Many people reach adulthood without having the experiences necessary to conform to your expectations. What of them?
> Many people reach adulthood without having the experiences necessary to conform to your expectations.
First, they are adults without experience. Second, I don't think I have all that much higher expectations in whatever requires experience. Quite possibly I would excuse more immaturity in them then parent. However, I strongly believe that we are not doing them good service when we talk about them as if they would be in elementary school. When kindergarten kid destroys something, it is on adults. That is not how I evaluate 19 years old.
To keep with comparison, their peers who did not had good enough SAT score have no more experiences. And if they have, they are exactly experiences of a bad kind. More importantly, it is not just about experience. It is about your brain being less impulsive then as if you was 12 and about your ability to learn from new experiences and ability to think about morality at least little bit. On average, college students are the ones that should be expected to be more mature. College student is more likely to possess enough impulse control to not randomly spray McDonald and then be shocked it can get him arrested. When high school drop out does the same, his action is not excused as just dumb mistake - despite having higher chance to not possess that impulse control yet.
This double think, how 19 years old elite college student is talked about as a child while 19 years old drop out is treated with full gravity of action makes no sense to me.
It does not matter what kind of dumb mistake we talk. Dumb mistakes are not made equal. And then there are "dumb mistakes" that are neither dumb nor mistakes. They are simply immoral, unethical or asshole actions that the person knows as such, but has expectation of getting away with. I think that past actions of doing something morally wrong should be excused. However, I don't think they should be redefined down into "dumb mistakes" merely because perpetrator is sympathetic.
Fun exercise: what if the one spraying on store would not be charsmatic college student, but a dude who barely finished high school and looks ugly? How much of the causual attitude would apply?
If you treat people like children, immune from consequences, they will act like children. If you hold them to a higher standard, the vast majority will rise to it.
When are children immune from consequences? Any good parent will discipline or correct their child for mistakes. It is after the child leaves home and has to function on its own does it become a bigger problem.
A good parent will discipline its child, but also give its child a second chance. And a third, and so forth. An observation that I've read on HN is that second and third chances are distributed un-equally, typically favoring the children of the wealthy and powerful.
And if you raise standard too high, the majority will fail. That is an easy way how to get back to people or groups of people you dislike - hold them to higher standard.
I agree with the point about how technology exposes some kinds of experiments a bit too much.
But jail time? Sorry, that's not just a "mistake", that's outright reckless stupidity (obvious exception: protesting civil issues or similar).
Just because you (the author) made a stupid decision and narrowly avoided jail time, does not mean that what you did was a good thing in general.
Following that logic, should we also argue for reckless driving if some CEO of a startup narrowly missed killing someone back in the day? Should we all drive recklessly so that we can "learn from our mistakes"?
I think the point the author is trying to make is:
- Spray painting is easy.
- Political viewpoints change with time. They mature as the individual does.(whatever that means)
- Spray painting a political viewpoint in the 80's and getting caught wouldn't get the the entire online world riled up and debating the problem. You would get the opportunity to continue thinking the same way or change your way of thinking in a somewhat private matter.
In the 80's, if you had been caught doing what the author was doing, you'd probably have to clean it up (much harder than the original act).
People - especially younger people - need the opportunity to learn and grow. Some will make some terrible mistakes and that has to be dealt with. Others will make mistakes - and they need to have the opportunity to evaluate their position and learn from it (good or bad).
When the resume processing system checks your criminal record, that's going to take your rating way down. Today, anybody who did anything stupid like that has to go through the formal process of having the record expunged to get a decent job. This is a complex process and applications can be rejected.[1]
> the author is explicitly encouraging such behavior
That wasn't what I read.
What I read was if you do something that happens to be negative in some way and get noticed, this is now a permanent scarlet letter.
This can range from his "corporate deathburgers" (which is vandalism) to a "controversial editorial" (which isn't illegal at all but can bring the wrath of the universe on you).
I bet that ALL of us have said things at various points that we would not want recorded forever.
Unfortunately, we have not yet evolved appropriately calibrated social behaviors to deal with this. The current modality of "No Tolerance--Burn The Infidel(tm)" for everything, no matter how minor, is not helpful.
We have. It’s called forgetting and leaving stuff in the past. Now we have records of everything and disqualify folks with no meaningful reasoning.
When I started my career in the late 90s, I know of a half dozen senior leaders who were actively involved in the Vietnam era anti war movement. My one director had a scar on the back of his head when some cop on a horse cracked it open with a truncheon. He was arrested for loitering and woke up handcuffed to a hospital bed.
That experience might have excluded him from service with the FBI, but otherwise would have no impact. Twenty years from now, will some bullshit arrest like that impact an 18 year old at a Trump protest? Probably.
He didn't hurt anyone. He caused some harm to a corporation possibly. This deserves some punishment. It shouldn't follow him around for his entire life though - unless he keeps causing harm.
If someone is an activist that has committed criminal acts in the name of their cause, a company should know that when hiring them. That is a very strong signal that they will be a shitty employee.
> But jail time? Sorry, that's not just a "mistake", that's outright reckless stupidity (obvious exception: protesting civil issues or similar).
"Obvious" exception?
"Hey, get your stupid protest out of my way to work, jerk."
See how that works? Not so obvious anymore, is it?
The issue we currently have is that the US justice system is set up for punishment and retribution rather than rehabilitation. We also have a problem in that we somewhere began trying to punish people even after they have "served their punishment and made retribution".
You can get a permit to protest. Also, there are venues that are more suitable than others. If you are part of a strike, things become different.
But assuming all of the above is invalid, don't you think protesting an issue like segregation is worth getting people upset about their delayed commute?
Personally, I wouldn't mind sacrificing some of my convenience to support people protesting an issue that is important. In a way, it's the price I pay for not joining in on the protest!
> Personally, I wouldn't mind sacrificing some of my convenience to support people protesting an issue that is important.
Even at the height of the civil rights movement, the vast majority of the country was apathetic to hostile. That is simply the nature of fighting for these things.
As someone who has lived in dictatorships for most of my life, I strongly disagree with this statement. I guess it's the kind of thing that only someone who lives and breathes democracy would say.
On a related note, I'm always amused by people who are strongly against weapons research and manufacturing, especially in the US. It's easy to say "we don't need weapons research" when you are living in a country that possesses the most advanced weapons tech in the world, or even in a country that is a member of the EU or NATO.
When your country can't even manufacture an assault rifle and has to rely on potential future enemies to supply it with arms, that's when weapons research becomes necessary.
Weapons research and weapons manufacturing are different. If a country is just manufacturing weapons to defend themselves then fine (aside from nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, the spread of those weapons should be held back, they're too dangerous) but weapons research is unnecessarily extending the misery of war. Don't we have enough ways to kill each other? Why do we need any more?
No, I disagree: weapons research and weapons manufacturing are very closely coupled.
How do you choose when to "stop" researching better weapons? And how do you define "enough"? Did we have "enough" in the 1600s? How about the 1800s? Or the early 1900s?
Another point you are somehow overlooking is that we don't live in an ideal world, so if you decide to stop weapons research, someone else (likely an enemy) will ramp it up and eventually have better weapons than you do. The arms race is, by definition, a never ending one, and weapons research is a key part of that process.
If you argue that everyone should agree to stop research, then who gets to decide when to stop? The country with the most advanced weapons?
Finally, with better technology come more precise weapons. Now, we've seen that drones aren't really as "precise" as expected in practice, but they are leaps and bounds less destructive than older tech. We can only improve if we continue researching.
> "How do you choose when to "stop" researching better weapons? And how do you define "enough"? Did we have "enough" in the 1600s? How about the 1800s? Or the early 1900s?"
I would say around the 1970s. At that stage, with the maturity of ICBMs, it seems that we would have the weapons to wipe out the human race in less than a day. How much quicker at killing each other do you want us to be?
> "If you argue that everyone should agree to stop research, then who gets to decide when to stop? The country with the most advanced weapons?"
Yes, the country with the most advanced weaponry needs to be the country that leads the process to slow down the rate of weapon research. The USA leads the world in military spending by quite a way, they could easily slow down without risking their geopolitical position, and if they did so with enough conviction they could cause a economic downturn in military equipment companies, slowing down progress further.
> "Finally, with better technology come more precise weapons. Now, we've seen that drones aren't really as "precise" as expected in practice, but they are leaps and bounds less destructive than older tech. We can only improve if we continue researching."
What we're almost certainly going to see is war that can be conducted remotely. You see the start of it with piloted drones, but this is just the start. When war can be conducted with minimal human involvement in the military, do you think this is going make it easier or harder for a government to decide to go to war?
> I would say around the 1970s. At that stage, with the maturity of ICBMs, it seems that we would have the weapons to wipe out the human race in less than a day.
Nuclear bombs were developed in the 40s. Why not stop there?
> The USA leads the world in military spending by quite a way, they could easily slow down without risking their geopolitical position
Slowing down is not the same as stopping, my friend. My argument is against those who claim that weapons research is categorically wrong and must stop. Trust me, I have seen many people who hold this view in the US.
But let's assume that the US eases the world into stopping completely. From a game theoretic standpoint, can you ever truly ensure that all countries have ceased weapons research? The answer is simply no. Heck, we couldn't even manage to do that with nuclear disarmament: Iran, Israel, Pakistan, Libya, and NK have all illegally (and covertly) developed nuclear weapons at one point or another.
> When war can be conducted with minimal human involvement in the military, do you think this is going make it easier or harder for a government to decide to go to war?
I'm sure that the rules of engagement and warfare will develop as technology improves. Wars could reach the point where both sides operate unmanned vehicles that are only allowed to target each other. The primary goal would then be to cripple your enemy financially and strategically by destroying and/or disabling their unmanned weapons. In other words, targeting human soldiers/operators could become a war crime.
Don't get me wrong: I am against warfare in general. But I am also a realist, and from what I have read and seen, both history and human nature tell us that war will never stop.
What you mean is that the status quo doesn't need protests in support of it. When the status quo is unpopular, protests are certainly important, especially in support of popular positions.
> "Personally, I wouldn't mind sacrificing some of my convenience to support people protesting an issue that is important."
Okay, but what if what is being protested is important to the protestors but not important to you? What if that protest interferes with your day-to-day life? Would you still be supportive of their right to protest?
I agree. You can get a permit to protest. I don't think the politicians listen anymore. They might if you are a corporation funding their campaigns. Protests appear to be losing power over time. Politicians seem to be less and less reachable. We do have a problem here.
Indeed... I'm beginning to think that many protests now are meant to distract the most engaged people from the fact that they have no control. Different circus, same bread.
Spray painting on property that is not yours is vandalism. Vandalism is illegal.
When I said "protest", I meant getting wrongfully arrested for peaceful protesting, e.g., during the civil rights movement. The kind of arrest that involves standing up for what's right. That is something we can all learn from.
Getting arrested for spray painting? That's plain stupid. Maybe Banksy could write a similar op-ed, but I would still think that his argument was stupid.
An arrest can be perfectly legal, despite being unethical. Saying that vandalism is illegal and is therefore an illegitimate form of protest is like saying that the Civil Rights Movement sit-ins were illegal, and were therefore an illegitimate form of protest. It simply doesn't follow.
Do I think that it is an effective form of protest? Not in the slightest. Do I think that it can be categorically ruled out on the basis of legality? Absolutely not.
I agree with you completely: legality definitely is not absolute. But if your protest is illegal for no valid or higher moral reason, then I don't think it's worth the risk.
Going back to the "mistakes are good in college" argument, college students should be smart and mature enough to know which mistakes are actually worth the jail time.
College students should be sufficiently smart and mature, yes. I didn't read the article as saying that college students should deliberately make mistakes for the sake of having made them. Rather, the article was focusing more on the response when inadvisable behavior occurs. Should it be seen as a moral fault on the individual, to be punished, or should it be seen as a societal failure, to be used as a teaching moment?
The problem is that it is very hard to have situational rules as a population size gets very large. For a population of 100, everybody knows everybody else, and so any failing can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Since you see everybody every day, you can tell which failings are habitual, and which are rare. For a population with limited communication, exile is a useful tool, including self-inflicted exile after social shaming.
This is a useful conversation to have, because we are seeing the first generation with fast communication and indefinite storage. Effectively all college students now have everything about them recorded. 40 years down the line, all politicians will have a searchable history. We, as a society, will need to figure out how to deal with this glut of details, as no previous strategy suits the new situation. There are too many people to keep track of, so one can't get a feel for everybody's habitual behavior. There are also too many details available, so the previous strategy of excluding everybody who has a memorable negative detail available is no longer valid.
This turned into more of a ramble than I had expected, but I think it is a complicated issue, which deserves thought.
Yeah. But UC Davis had a bridge outside of town, kind of hidden by vegetation. While there was very little graffiti in the city, that bridge was an open space for graffiti and spray-paint art. I like having public places like that where vandalism is implicitly allowed, so that the rest of us can have nice property.
Banksy can paint on my property because he has something to say. Someone just writing their name needs somewhere else to work on their artistic voice.
Yes, I also like the idea of dedicated public space. It brings out really cool graffiti. For example, I remember seeing a huge mural on the side of an apartment building in Warsaw.
It's not "because he has something to say", but rather "because it's worth a shit ton". I'm sure there are many graffiti artists who have more interesting ideas than Banksy does. Would you be alright having an insightful tag on your wall that's worth nothing more than the insight?
I’m in college, and have made my fair of mistakes that I think are “dumb” in the eyes of my peers, family, friends, society, etc, but not many that I think are “dumb” in my eyes. The most prominent mistake that I can think of? I’m spending a fourth year at a community college rather than having transferred to a university after my second or third year. I graduated high school in June 2014. I should have graduated college in May/June 2018. But now I will most likely be graduating May/June 2020 (heck, maybe a few semesters later).
My life as of now has not turned out the way I had planned it. I have yet to have an internship under my belt. I have no connections. If you will, I’m a twenty-two-year-old modern day George Costanza prior to him getting that job with the New York Yankees - when he’s living with his parents and has no job. Yet I think I’ll be just okay.
But above all, I would like to advise other people, not only colleges students but to those who think they have made “dumb” decisions: Please do not worry. Modern mass culture, or as the film maker Tarkovsky writes, the civilization of prosthetics, cripples people's souls and makes people's mistakes/problems bigger than they actually are. Though I recall a year ago, struggling alone and having no hope. What guided me towards today? Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Here are a few quotes from the book:
"Everything seems to me to have its just emphasis; and after all I do only want to advise you to keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development; you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer."
"Consider yourself and your feeling right every time with regard to every such argumentation, discussion or introduction; if you are wrong after all, the natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly and with time to other insights. Leave your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything. Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of a feeling to come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life: in understanding as in creating."
"If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance. You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue."
"Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
"We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it."
"And if there is one thing more that I must say to you, it is this: Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find these words."
"There is perhaps no use my going into your particular points now; for what I could say about your tendency to doubt or about your inability to bring outer and inner life into unison, or about all the other things that worry you —: it is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case."
What a stupid article. Why should being a college student bring special privileges to make dumb mistakes and escape consequences? What about other young people? If it's important for college students to be able to make dumb mistakes then why shouldn't the same apply to young factory workers or bus drivers or soldiers?
It's articles like this by authors who have never worked a real job that make regular Americans think that academics are out of touch with the real world.
Wow, okay, I think you've missed the points made by this article.
To summarise the article...
1. We learn valuable lessons from our mistakes.
2. Before the era of smartphones and social media, people could make mistakes and not have those mistakes follow them around for the rest of their lives.
3. By making mistakes more public we're creating a chilling effect on learning.
4. The freedom to make mistakes isn't one that should be limited to a select few. Aside from certain types of mistake that should be dealt with strongly by the legal system, the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them is a privilege that we should give to the majority of people.
The article is from NYT's On Campus column, which specifically focuses on colleges.
> Dispatches from college students, professors and administrators on higher education and university life.
Despite the title, I don't get the impression that the author specifically limits his suggestions to college students, nor does he specifically exclude other young people.
Maybe the author could have put something like this in the article:
"Technology is a lead actor in this drama, but of course, privilege and power influence how the narrative plays out. Some people are given more learning opportunities than others. I might have been a longhair with spray paint when I got arrested, but the arresting officers also marked me as a white University of Michigan student. Had I been someone else, I might have learned a different lesson.
But our response to inequality shouldn’t be to strip the privilege of learning from the lucky few who can already enjoy it. We must expand this universal right to develop and grow."
Basically the author is arguing is that college students should be treated as children and therefore not responsible (and therefore accountable) for their actions because too young to know better.
Where we place the line between adults and children can be debated (are 18yo really mature enough to be treated as adults?). But one can't get "being taken seriously" and "having the protection offered to children for not knowing better" at the same time.
I personally think that you can't really consider them adults before age 22. And for that reason we should stop taking student protests seriously.
> "But one can't get "being taken seriously" and "having the protection offered to children for not knowing better" at the same time."
Sure you can. You're thinking in a binary manner, in reality 'respect' and 'protection' are not binary.
To explain in simple terms, a student should be able to have both 'some' protection and 'some' respect. You don't have to protect someone like a child at the same time as respecting them as an adult.
No college should not be a time for dumb mistakes. That should be earlier. 20 year olds should be treated like adults not children. College should not be a place to party, recklessly use drugs, recklessly have sex and sexually assault women, and graffiti things. What an incredibly low standard.
