Shame was more effective in the past is because it came with consequences - lost business, lower standing in the community, fewer romantic prospects. It used to be part a healthy survival instinct. Without repercussions, shame is just a handicap and those who don't have it have a massive advantage.
I don't get it. On one hand people are lamenting departure of shame, on the other they complain how easy it is to get your life ruined by becoming a target of internet hate for a minor transgression.
Maybe the shame didn't disappear, just fell prey to increasing inequality where one end of the spectrum has very little where the other gets absurd amounts?
Well, in practice shame is a local effect: it only matters if it's coming from people that you respect. Some people being angry at you in a community is going to affect you most severely when you're a member of that community: otherwise it's just how much that community can effectivity harass you (also something that scales with how close you are to it). This does mean that 'cancel culture' has a horrendous bias towards 'friendly fire' in its results.
I think these two concepts go hand in hand. Perceived cancel culture is the thing that pushed some people to disregard the concerns of others entirely and live without shame.
Another example is the concept of involution and lying flat in China. You can't have both if you assume that the entire population is equal. Too much involution breeds lying flat. Too harsh of a cancel culture (for minor faux pas, not sexual assault) breeds contempt.
Involution in the context of China laying flat means you work harder and harder only to stay in place with no chance of getting ahead. In China they work 12h day 6 day a week and still have 0 change to buy a home, start a family, etc. The lying flat movement is about giving up on the rat race and working just enough to get by because going above and beyond only get you working yourself to death for no tangible benefit.
> I’m more and more convinced that all of AI engineering is Neijuan (内卷, meaning curl inwards). In China it describes a system that demands ever more effort and competition without improving output. The way in which it sometimes shows up in the West is the 996 nonsense. The English term for Neijuan is “Involution” from the book Agricultural Involution. Agricultural involution describes the intensification of farming that raises productivity per square meter while leaving productivity per head unchanged.
There was such an over use of shame to hurt people's social standing and careers that it stopped being effective. At some point, people lost all trust in the institutions carrying out the shaming and life ruining and started fighting back.
All of this is orthogonal to personal wealth. Some of the shamers were very wealthy and powerful people and some of the shamed were those with very little wealth, influence or power.
Strange that this short article mostly focuses on the absence of shame in business and politics, which has been a constant for many times my lifetime. And we should blame social media for this, too? The only difference now is that everyone knows about backroom dealing. If the author didn't conspicuously omit the absence of shame in journalism, I feel like he'd be a step closer to an interesting observation.
> If the author didn't conspicuously omit the absence of shame in journalism
They awarded themselves Pulitzers for publishing false stories. They don't go back and correct them, they just pretend like they never existed (and one day will silently delete them from the archives.)
They showed some shame after the Iraq War over continuously lying about WMD on behalf of the state, there was a little shame expressed after trying to link Saddam Hussein to 9/11, and I guess they decided that they were never going to do that again. They in fact put one of the largest spreaders of disinformation in charge of The Atlantic. The Atlantic is supposedly the leading magazine for the opposition.
Every day that the Washington Post kept the PropOrNot story up, even taking into consideration the lengthy corrections that kept being appended to it, made me realize that these institutions had no shame at all. I'm not sure if people are connected enough to particular institutions to have shame about what they do - they have backers, who will find them another place if the place they're at now becomes too hot for them. Straight from politics into being a lobbyist into journalism into a think tank into a consultant for a Middle East dictator into head of ethics for a tech company into head of ethics for a hedge fund, then back into politics again.
Football / Soccer had "flopping" [1], which anyone who watched it in the early 2000s would recognize: every foul was accompanied by a "victim" writhing on the field in agony, in excess of anything you'd see in much more violent sports.
Apparently it's diminished a bit in recent years, but not because it's clearly shameful behavior: the leagues started issuing bans.
It wasn't about diving in particular, but rather post-match revisions and sanctions becoming more common to punish unsportsmanship. Add VAR in recent years, and the newest "1 minute out" rule for fake injury, and today players don't gain anything from diving.
FWIW I use public transport daily and it basically never happens (I honestly don't remember a single time, it's that rare). Maybe it's cultural thing, I mean country dependent? Loud teenagers of course happen, but they don't play music out loud.
That I really don't get (and I experience it a lot using transit for my commute) . It seems more common now, but you'd think it would be less common. Headphones used to be bulky things, now Bluetooth earbuds are tiny things easily put in your pocket -- why not use them?
In some places it's shameful to show one's hair, or to eat while you walk in public. In some, people don't think about those things at all. In others, the ability to do those things can be an expression of personal freedom.
Negative externalities is culturally dependent. The Japanese consider the sight of a person eating while walking to be a negative externality. Are we going to start complaining here on HN about people doing it? No, we recognize that those taboos vary across time and space.
But then people get angry if you don't want those "cultural differences" in your daily life. And when people question why you prefer private transportation.
Well, not quite. Not showing your hair or not eating in public may have meaning in somebody's culture/religion, but it doesn't hurt anyone else either way. Playing video/music without earphones does. And surely people must have experienced it from the other side when people nearby were playing music they didn't care for. I think it is reasonable for people to ask themselves "Would I like it if someone near me did <X>?", and if the answer is 'No' to not do it themselves. Maybe this is "shame" or maybe simple empathy.
Eating in public places not mean for eating subjects others to the smell of your food in the same way that listening to something on speaker subjects them to unwanted sound. Hijabs are more indirect but I would disagree that it doesn't affect others.
Have you traveled Latin America? Loud audio in public is so normal there that immigrants to Europe often can't see what all this fuss is about when people complain about loud phones on public transport. This is very much a mutable cultural thing.
More seriously, whenever I ask a young person on public transport to use headphones (and luckily I live in a region where I can safely do that and enjoy some authority as an older person), the response is usually that the youth doesn't have headphones on him for whatever reason (doesn't own any, left them at home, whatever). But with the breakdown of this taboo, people don't feel that not having headphones should stop them from sweet TikTok dopamine.
shame only works if there are consequences. if you're not calling them out then you are complicit. you are accepting that, and you need to live with it.
if you want someone to respect your feelings then ultimately you will have to make them. for broke-ass hoodrats, for whom economic factors won't work, that means eventually going to Louis' ultima ratio -- e.g. calling this out may lead to a fistfight on a moving bus.
More to the point, we currently share a society with many people of a violent culture, which makes directly shaming them dangerous and unwise. This was not always the case. The death of shaming is largely related to the increased daily proximity to violent subcultures who do not fear consequences.
Those subcultures have their own notions of shame and honor, and have lines they are careful about crossing and willingness to turn to violence if their honor is overly injured.
Disapproving glances on the subway when their music is too loud does not rise to that level, however.
In my experience it's dominantly teen-aged kids who are just figuring the world out, or in more unfortunate but very rare cases 30-somethings who never quite grew up.
I was that shameless annoyance once too. It doesn't mean shame is dead.
I think there’s a difference between knowing you’re doing something wrong and not caring, and not even knowing you’re doing anything wrong. What you’re describing is usually the latter.
They definitely get glares and annoyed looks from fellow passengers. And they must be oblivious if they’ve never noticed other people distractingly listening to music next to them or whatever.
There seems to be a bit of a gap vis a vis solutions in the article - someone could set the system up so it doesn't incentivise tanking. The punishment for tanking should be that the teams performed poorly for no compensation. It's all very well to set up a system to encourage poor behaviour then shame the people who behave rationally. But it is much more sustainable in the long term to make good behaviour also strategically optimal.
> Post-Hinkie, the league experimented with variations of the lottery, but none of them could deter teams from losing on purpose.
I struggle to believe they've tried everything unless they're also talking about players betting against themselves (which probably is impossible to overcome without bans). Incentives aren't easy things but there has to be some system where winning > losing.
On that topic we're actually pretty lucky - in the real world, the winning strategy over long time-frames is almost always talking, prosperity and cooperation. Not obvious why the powers that be are so keen to involve other strategies that routinely deliver worse material and moral results.
I recently heard the term _vice signaling_ and it’s very appropriate for this era. While in the past virtue signaling would be used to identify yourself as the member of an ingroup. It’s now common to signal that by doing things that would previously, and by many still are, considered beyond the pale.
Interesting I've been calling it sin signalling. It can also be a sort of power peacocking, "Look at me I'm so powerful I can get away with this vile thing." type stuff. It's not a modern creation but it's certainly popular with certain highly visible political clusters atm.
Might have to do with a lot of thought leaders and influencers pushing this.
In my own life/career I have seen that over a long enough horizon that lower shame seems to generally work out for people on the long run if you can back it up with some amount of confidence and competence.
In an industrial society, too many rule followers results in people being reduced to cattle. We need a subset of our society to be ungovernable in order to stave off tyranny, because historically, smart people aren't trying or succeeding at that. As another commenter in this thread stated, though under different context, our bodies wouldn't make the venom if we didn't need it to survive.
Regarding the article's example of "tanking" in NBA games in the opening paragraph, what would solve this is a switch from the franchise system to a promotion/relegation system. No team would bench their best players or throw a game when relegation to a lower division is on the line.
Makes me think of my boy John Adams; "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Moral relativism is emptiness all the way down, we're reaping what we sowed.
From the article: “And so, this past summer, the N.B.A. announced a full revamp of the system, with a new approach that penalizes the worst teams in the league. We will see how long this remediation lasts.”
Shame us what you lose when your turn to someone or something you trust for empathy and instead receive the opposite. Our body-personality would not produce venom if we didn’t need it to survive.
It's the same thing, and both are vulnerable to disingenuous applications of cultural relativism.
You'll see similar arguments on this thread: "shame is just what you don't approve of", etc. Yes, it's just about being a decent person, and no, scientists still haven't discovered a moral axis in the universe that says what that means.
Unfortunately we're in a position where we have to explain that "just be a decent person", which is an inclination shared by 95% of people anyway, isn't some vestigial instinct that modern humans should be ridding themselves of.
I was discussing this the other day. Shame and shaming are alive and well. Especially if you do not agree with whatever paradigm is being pushed, like supporting sports team X or not holding the prevailing opinion.
I don't really know if I would call that shame, though. In Japan if you wear your shoes into someone's house you'll be lambasted with shame, but that's got a deep religious and cultural foundation behind it-- the person being shamed gets their nose rubbed into their mistake so that they don't do it again. There is a "re-centering" of the person so they get another chance.
Nowadays in the west, holding an option contrary to whatever herd you find yourself in falls into a binary label. There is no redemption for you, there is no second chance. "You voted for X? You're nothing but evil thoughts and vacuity where a human could have been".
I do love Japan, but it also has serious problems with public shaming, particularly in schools (shame bullying) and with people who have media attention (idols, celebrities, influencers). It’s worse than in the US because people seem to internalize the shame more, so they will sometimes get bullied out of public life because they have too much debt, go through a messy divorce, or something like that. Japanese media companies also seem to treat shamed people as “toxic” and will drop them at the slightest hint of a scandal, which makes things worse.
OTOH Japan is generally very functional, despite this problem, so perhaps this is their homegrown Omelas. The few suffer greatly and unjustly so that the social order doesn’t break down. Hard to say. I hope it is possible for them to fix the problem without losing their culture.
If one day you may become my boss better treat you well.
If one day anyone may become my neighbor better treat anonymous people well.
If my kid may end married with yours then I better treat you well.
For billionaires shame makes no sense. They will never have to confront the people that they abuse. Inequality makes consequences go away. The powerful have not shame because they feel entitled to not need it.
Even average people knows that they only need to care about the powerful. It is better to wrong your neighbor than the powerful politician that will retaliate against you.
I think a lot of the loss of shame is a result of multiculturalism. The more cultures you accept, the fewer behaviors you can openly shame.
As a benign example, eating food with your hands rather than utensils. In some cultures this is rarely ever tolerated, in others it depends on the food item, and in others still you might always eat with your hands. These will be at odds and you have to decide what is OK to shame and what isn’t.
I think we as a society bias against shaming in seeking inclusivity, but some things can be lost along the way as well. To use the eating example again, eating with your hands instead of utensils may be more likely to spread disease (or maybe it needs to be coupled with a stronger shame against _not_ washing hands). I don’t know what the right approach is to strike a balance here in a multicultural society.
That is an interesting possibility, and seems plausible. When in Rome… becomes not so much about getting along, and more about maintaining social coherence, fostering prosperity and security.
> As a benign example, eating food with your hands rather than utensils. In some cultures this is rarely ever tolerated, in others it depends on the food item, and in others still you might always eat with your hands.
I know there are some strange people who eat pizza with a fork, but is there actually anyone who does that with say hamburgers?
Yes, there are people who eat burgers with utensils. It's more common in quasi-formal settings like business-organized dinners where people don't want to appear messy from my experience.
Shame isn’t dead. Specific kinds of shame are increasingly on the way out, particularly when it comes to individuality and self-expression, but shame itself isn’t dying or dead so much as accountability flatly does not exist anymore.
When the author bemoans a lack of shame in how the NBA teams tank games to improve later draft odds instead of playing out every game with ferocity and pride, what they’re actually bemoaning is the lack of consequences for such negative behavior - and misattributing that to a lack of shame by fans towards the team instead of a lack of consequences from governing bodies. It’s a naive fantasy of how the world works rather than a stinging critique of real problematic behavior.
It also ignores the grim reality that many people simply have no concept of shame in any sense that could correct their behavior. Zuckerberg absolutely has no shame, nor does Musk or Thiel or Bezos; it is impossible to shame them into better, healthier behavior, just as it’s impossible to shame Sony into manufacturing physical media again, or shaming the driver that just cut you off in traffic without a turn signal and used their vehicle as a missile to get their way by honking your horn or flipping them off. Shame alone means fuck all absent consequences.
And the thing about shame is that it too is a weapon that has been wielded to horrific ends in the past. Relying on shame alone is how you get McCarthy and the Red Scare, how you repress LGBTQ+ identities, how you segregate people based on skin color or ethnicity or national origin. Shame is toxic, and the few areas we rely on shame as a weapon are also areas of some of the greatest societal harms at present: homelessness, malnutrition, poverty, convicted felons, all are shamed for existence to the point they’re encouraged to disappear from society by any means other than improvement, like a one-way gate rather than a crisis to be addressed. In light of how we currently weaponize shame, I don’t think relying on expanding its use to address grievances is the right call.
Not saying the article is right, but the point is supposed to be that social norms used to (or should) be sufficient. People should feel and be made to feel shame for flagrant disrespect of core principles that their participation in a system would seem to entail (like playing to win).
Speaking for myself, shame has certainly sometimes been enabling, sometimes disabling. Wanting to live up to an image I have of myself and what I should be (and feeling ashamed when I don’t) is a pretty core part of how “I” work. I agree shame can certainly turn toxic, but there are times when it is fair to say, “you should feel ashamed of yourself” (including in some circumstances, “for driving that kid to suicide by making him feel ashamed of who he is”).
> the point is supposed to be that social norms used to (or should) be sufficient. People should feel and be made to feel shame for flagrant disrespect of core principles that their participation in a system would seem to entail (like playing to win).
This requires shared “norms” and “core principles”, which we no longer possess. I’m not sure how to regain them either. It’s not like we’re going to agree on a new set of shared principles; each major political group prefers that social norms should reflect only their own priorities.
Different countries must have different standards for that. Here, the result would be that the person owning the staircase would call a cleaning firm and then send the bill to the person, in combination with a warning that eviction may happen if further misuses of the property occur. If it happened every other week, the person would be evicted, and I suspect the bills from the cleaning company would be enough to make that happen regardless.
If they couldn't identity the person they would setup cameras or a passage system to identity who uses the staircase until the problem can be solved. The law here allows apartment owners to setup cameras in the case of resolving problems with property and shared spaces. For example, in my building there are cameras in the garage and the garbage room, and entry require tags that get recorded when opening the door. Those intrusive actions where done to address past theft and misbehavior which in turn cost money to the company who own the building.
The end result of this is that every place becomes locked down and covered in cameras, which is very expensive, and which also kills off the few remaining quasi-public (privately owned but freely accessible) spaces. All because we couldn’t figure out how to help or manage people with problems.
Shame is an internalised negative emotion that is a negative anticipation of social stigma. In general, it is a usefulness in thing. If you can’t look back at your behaviour a few years ago and find a source of secret embarrassment, you probably aren’t growing.
The framing of shame as a bad thing instead of an important mechanism of self regulation is destroying maturity and social cooperation at an obscene rate, and future generations will be the ones that pay the price in a society where government has stepped in with coercive force to moderate behaviour at a much more granular level in a society that no longer governs itself.
In this it is important to distinguish between shame and shaming. Shame is the useful mechanism of self regulation. Shaming is social aggression and is all too frequently hijacked by astroturfed “social movements” and vile and petty narcissists to project power. Shaming has its place, but needs to be legitimate social sanction or it’s just another form of unregulated violence.
Unfortunately, the reaction of society has been to reject shame, which is about as useful as rejecting fear, for example. Fear is a useful and necessary mechanism of self regulation, and people that lack it entirely tend to live short lives. That said, too much is crippling. Shame is much the same, but is a social contract. Societies that lack it tend to fail. Societies with too much are stifling.
Fortunately, now we have the CCP and Palintir, so we can shrug off the yoke of shame and give up over that mechanism of self regulation to social credit scores and surveillance capitalism. I’m not sure that will be so much better.
Treasure your shame. I’ve lived in societies where it has been replaced by violence, and it’s not better.
Shame was more effective in the past is because it came with consequences - lost business, lower standing in the community, fewer romantic prospects. It used to be part a healthy survival instinct. Without repercussions, shame is just a handicap and those who don't have it have a massive advantage.
I don't get it. On one hand people are lamenting departure of shame, on the other they complain how easy it is to get your life ruined by becoming a target of internet hate for a minor transgression.
Maybe the shame didn't disappear, just fell prey to increasing inequality where one end of the spectrum has very little where the other gets absurd amounts?
Well, in practice shame is a local effect: it only matters if it's coming from people that you respect. Some people being angry at you in a community is going to affect you most severely when you're a member of that community: otherwise it's just how much that community can effectivity harass you (also something that scales with how close you are to it). This does mean that 'cancel culture' has a horrendous bias towards 'friendly fire' in its results.
I think these two concepts go hand in hand. Perceived cancel culture is the thing that pushed some people to disregard the concerns of others entirely and live without shame.
Another example is the concept of involution and lying flat in China. You can't have both if you assume that the entire population is equal. Too much involution breeds lying flat. Too harsh of a cancel culture (for minor faux pas, not sexual assault) breeds contempt.
What's your definition of "involution" here? I looked it up, but I don't understand how it relates to lying flat.
Involution in the context of China laying flat means you work harder and harder only to stay in place with no chance of getting ahead. In China they work 12h day 6 day a week and still have 0 change to buy a home, start a family, etc. The lying flat movement is about giving up on the rat race and working just enough to get by because going above and beyond only get you working yourself to death for no tangible benefit.
> I’m more and more convinced that all of AI engineering is Neijuan (内卷, meaning curl inwards). In China it describes a system that demands ever more effort and competition without improving output. The way in which it sometimes shows up in the West is the 996 nonsense. The English term for Neijuan is “Involution” from the book Agricultural Involution. Agricultural involution describes the intensification of farming that raises productivity per square meter while leaving productivity per head unchanged.
Discussed earlier today here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49654229
[dead]
The latter is the reason for the former.
There was such an over use of shame to hurt people's social standing and careers that it stopped being effective. At some point, people lost all trust in the institutions carrying out the shaming and life ruining and started fighting back.
All of this is orthogonal to personal wealth. Some of the shamers were very wealthy and powerful people and some of the shamed were those with very little wealth, influence or power.
If the consequences become a step function it makes intuitive sense that the gradual downstream behavior would go away.
Strange that this short article mostly focuses on the absence of shame in business and politics, which has been a constant for many times my lifetime. And we should blame social media for this, too? The only difference now is that everyone knows about backroom dealing. If the author didn't conspicuously omit the absence of shame in journalism, I feel like he'd be a step closer to an interesting observation.
> If the author didn't conspicuously omit the absence of shame in journalism
They awarded themselves Pulitzers for publishing false stories. They don't go back and correct them, they just pretend like they never existed (and one day will silently delete them from the archives.)
They showed some shame after the Iraq War over continuously lying about WMD on behalf of the state, there was a little shame expressed after trying to link Saddam Hussein to 9/11, and I guess they decided that they were never going to do that again. They in fact put one of the largest spreaders of disinformation in charge of The Atlantic. The Atlantic is supposedly the leading magazine for the opposition.
Every day that the Washington Post kept the PropOrNot story up, even taking into consideration the lengthy corrections that kept being appended to it, made me realize that these institutions had no shame at all. I'm not sure if people are connected enough to particular institutions to have shame about what they do - they have backers, who will find them another place if the place they're at now becomes too hot for them. Straight from politics into being a lobbyist into journalism into a think tank into a consultant for a Middle East dictator into head of ethics for a tech company into head of ethics for a hedge fund, then back into politics again.
Football / Soccer had "flopping" [1], which anyone who watched it in the early 2000s would recognize: every foul was accompanied by a "victim" writhing on the field in agony, in excess of anything you'd see in much more violent sports.
Apparently it's diminished a bit in recent years, but not because it's clearly shameful behavior: the leagues started issuing bans.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_(association_football)
It wasn't about diving in particular, but rather post-match revisions and sanctions becoming more common to punish unsportsmanship. Add VAR in recent years, and the newest "1 minute out" rule for fake injury, and today players don't gain anything from diving.
but the lesson is clear: there needs to be consequences for shameful behavior. introduce a meaningful sanction and the behavior stops.
Apart from Argentina in the World Cup.
Sit on public transport and listen to everyone playing music / watching tiktok without headphones. Shame is dead.
FWIW I use public transport daily and it basically never happens (I honestly don't remember a single time, it's that rare). Maybe it's cultural thing, I mean country dependent? Loud teenagers of course happen, but they don't play music out loud.
It's a cultural thing. For example if you go to Japan, you can hear a pin drop in trains.. cultural homogeneity plays a large role in this.
That I really don't get (and I experience it a lot using transit for my commute) . It seems more common now, but you'd think it would be less common. Headphones used to be bulky things, now Bluetooth earbuds are tiny things easily put in your pocket -- why not use them?
In some places it's shameful to show one's hair, or to eat while you walk in public. In some, people don't think about those things at all. In others, the ability to do those things can be an expression of personal freedom.
What you experience is a cultural difference.
> What you experience is a cultural difference.
In that not all cultures recognize causing negative externalities as a bad thing?
Negative externalities is culturally dependent. The Japanese consider the sight of a person eating while walking to be a negative externality. Are we going to start complaining here on HN about people doing it? No, we recognize that those taboos vary across time and space.
But then people get angry if you don't want those "cultural differences" in your daily life. And when people question why you prefer private transportation.
Well, not quite. Not showing your hair or not eating in public may have meaning in somebody's culture/religion, but it doesn't hurt anyone else either way. Playing video/music without earphones does. And surely people must have experienced it from the other side when people nearby were playing music they didn't care for. I think it is reasonable for people to ask themselves "Would I like it if someone near me did <X>?", and if the answer is 'No' to not do it themselves. Maybe this is "shame" or maybe simple empathy.
Eating in public places not mean for eating subjects others to the smell of your food in the same way that listening to something on speaker subjects them to unwanted sound. Hijabs are more indirect but I would disagree that it doesn't affect others.
Have you traveled Latin America? Loud audio in public is so normal there that immigrants to Europe often can't see what all this fuss is about when people complain about loud phones on public transport. This is very much a mutable cultural thing.
Because fuck you, that's why.
More seriously, whenever I ask a young person on public transport to use headphones (and luckily I live in a region where I can safely do that and enjoy some authority as an older person), the response is usually that the youth doesn't have headphones on him for whatever reason (doesn't own any, left them at home, whatever). But with the breakdown of this taboo, people don't feel that not having headphones should stop them from sweet TikTok dopamine.
shame only works if there are consequences. if you're not calling them out then you are complicit. you are accepting that, and you need to live with it.
if you want someone to respect your feelings then ultimately you will have to make them. for broke-ass hoodrats, for whom economic factors won't work, that means eventually going to Louis' ultima ratio -- e.g. calling this out may lead to a fistfight on a moving bus.
More to the point, we currently share a society with many people of a violent culture, which makes directly shaming them dangerous and unwise. This was not always the case. The death of shaming is largely related to the increased daily proximity to violent subcultures who do not fear consequences.
Those subcultures have their own notions of shame and honor, and have lines they are careful about crossing and willingness to turn to violence if their honor is overly injured.
Disapproving glances on the subway when their music is too loud does not rise to that level, however.
That’s more about power than shame. When people feel powerless imposing on others is one of the only ways they can take a semblance of power back.
In my experience it's dominantly teen-aged kids who are just figuring the world out, or in more unfortunate but very rare cases 30-somethings who never quite grew up.
I was that shameless annoyance once too. It doesn't mean shame is dead.
It's easy to blame the young generations.
I noticed olders are more ignorant too:
* Standing prolonged in the way during smalltalk? Even 60y+ seems to have lost the art of stepping aside as much as possible.
* Stopping a crosswalks, esp. when children are waiting? 50y+ seem more prone to just driving ...
I think there’s a difference between knowing you’re doing something wrong and not caring, and not even knowing you’re doing anything wrong. What you’re describing is usually the latter.
They definitely get glares and annoyed looks from fellow passengers. And they must be oblivious if they’ve never noticed other people distractingly listening to music next to them or whatever.
Antisocial behaviour is easier, major crime is harder. Doesn't seem like the worst tradeoff to me.
In what way are these two things related that would make this a tradeoff?
> Evil genius is just a lack of shame.
-- Cory Doctorow
https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-04-11...
There seems to be a bit of a gap vis a vis solutions in the article - someone could set the system up so it doesn't incentivise tanking. The punishment for tanking should be that the teams performed poorly for no compensation. It's all very well to set up a system to encourage poor behaviour then shame the people who behave rationally. But it is much more sustainable in the long term to make good behaviour also strategically optimal.
> Post-Hinkie, the league experimented with variations of the lottery, but none of them could deter teams from losing on purpose.
I struggle to believe they've tried everything unless they're also talking about players betting against themselves (which probably is impossible to overcome without bans). Incentives aren't easy things but there has to be some system where winning > losing.
On that topic we're actually pretty lucky - in the real world, the winning strategy over long time-frames is almost always talking, prosperity and cooperation. Not obvious why the powers that be are so keen to involve other strategies that routinely deliver worse material and moral results.
> someone could set the system up so it doesn't incentivise tanking
It's called promotion and relegation.
https://archive.is/5ROzC
I recently heard the term _vice signaling_ and it’s very appropriate for this era. While in the past virtue signaling would be used to identify yourself as the member of an ingroup. It’s now common to signal that by doing things that would previously, and by many still are, considered beyond the pale.
Interesting I've been calling it sin signalling. It can also be a sort of power peacocking, "Look at me I'm so powerful I can get away with this vile thing." type stuff. It's not a modern creation but it's certainly popular with certain highly visible political clusters atm.
"If we don't do it, someone else will" is a perfect example of vice signalling.
Such an apt term, thanks.
Might have to do with a lot of thought leaders and influencers pushing this.
In my own life/career I have seen that over a long enough horizon that lower shame seems to generally work out for people on the long run if you can back it up with some amount of confidence and competence.
I assume by "shame" they mean "manners".
Well, the enforcement mechanism for manners.
and by "manners" they mean "people acting how I think they should act"
Yes, a shared understanding of the rules. Common context. Culture.
There are in fact expectations of your behavior and that is not a bad thing, despite western popular culture attempting to tell us otherwise.
In an industrial society, too many rule followers results in people being reduced to cattle. We need a subset of our society to be ungovernable in order to stave off tyranny, because historically, smart people aren't trying or succeeding at that. As another commenter in this thread stated, though under different context, our bodies wouldn't make the venom if we didn't need it to survive.
eating a smelly pizza in a cinema doesn't make you one of the Tolpuddle Martyrs
End stage capitalism is itself a result of shamelessness.
maybe they just mean consideration for others
Regarding the article's example of "tanking" in NBA games in the opening paragraph, what would solve this is a switch from the franchise system to a promotion/relegation system. No team would bench their best players or throw a game when relegation to a lower division is on the line.
https://archive.ph/5ROzC
Makes me think of my boy John Adams; "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Moral relativism is emptiness all the way down, we're reaping what we sowed.
The overuse of shaming tactics has led to the death of shame. Funny how that works. People adapt.
Could they change the rules so that there’s no or less incentive to “tank?”
From the article: “And so, this past summer, the N.B.A. announced a full revamp of the system, with a new approach that penalizes the worst teams in the league. We will see how long this remediation lasts.”
Shame us what you lose when your turn to someone or something you trust for empathy and instead receive the opposite. Our body-personality would not produce venom if we didn’t need it to survive.
How is shame different from "just being a decent person"?
Shame is a feeling, "decent person" is a moral characterization. The former might be part of an insentive structure leading to the latter.
I believe all four combinations exist in practice.
It's the same thing, and both are vulnerable to disingenuous applications of cultural relativism.
You'll see similar arguments on this thread: "shame is just what you don't approve of", etc. Yes, it's just about being a decent person, and no, scientists still haven't discovered a moral axis in the universe that says what that means. Unfortunately we're in a position where we have to explain that "just be a decent person", which is an inclination shared by 95% of people anyway, isn't some vestigial instinct that modern humans should be ridding themselves of.
I was discussing this the other day. Shame and shaming are alive and well. Especially if you do not agree with whatever paradigm is being pushed, like supporting sports team X or not holding the prevailing opinion.
I don't really know if I would call that shame, though. In Japan if you wear your shoes into someone's house you'll be lambasted with shame, but that's got a deep religious and cultural foundation behind it-- the person being shamed gets their nose rubbed into their mistake so that they don't do it again. There is a "re-centering" of the person so they get another chance.
Nowadays in the west, holding an option contrary to whatever herd you find yourself in falls into a binary label. There is no redemption for you, there is no second chance. "You voted for X? You're nothing but evil thoughts and vacuity where a human could have been".
I do love Japan, but it also has serious problems with public shaming, particularly in schools (shame bullying) and with people who have media attention (idols, celebrities, influencers). It’s worse than in the US because people seem to internalize the shame more, so they will sometimes get bullied out of public life because they have too much debt, go through a messy divorce, or something like that. Japanese media companies also seem to treat shamed people as “toxic” and will drop them at the slightest hint of a scandal, which makes things worse.
OTOH Japan is generally very functional, despite this problem, so perhaps this is their homegrown Omelas. The few suffer greatly and unjustly so that the social order doesn’t break down. Hard to say. I hope it is possible for them to fix the problem without losing their culture.
Agree. Shame is very much not dead.
Gen Z is an entire generation paralyzed by social anxiety.
Shaming being alive and well doesn’t imply that shame is.
The "-phobic" seems to be the suffix to use these days.
Just slap it on your favourite term and hurl it at the opponent.
You sound phobiaphobic.
Are you load-bearingophobic?
HN is rife with slopphobia.
45% of this article is about the NBA
Shame for what?
OF prostitutes and iShowSpeed make more money than neuroscientists. There are more incentives to be a bozo than an educated “pillar of the community”.
I thought that was only the top <very few>, and most just made pocket change?
Shame is only effective in a society of equals.
If one day you may become my boss better treat you well. If one day anyone may become my neighbor better treat anonymous people well. If my kid may end married with yours then I better treat you well.
For billionaires shame makes no sense. They will never have to confront the people that they abuse. Inequality makes consequences go away. The powerful have not shame because they feel entitled to not need it.
Even average people knows that they only need to care about the powerful. It is better to wrong your neighbor than the powerful politician that will retaliate against you.
Eliminate inequality and people will care again.
Shame is deeply entrenched in societies of great inequality and social hierarchy. There's a lot of reading within anthropology on honor cultures.
> For billionaires shame makes no sense. They will never have to confront the people that they abuse.
This sounds like you're agreeing with the article about consequentialism / "optimization culture" being the cause.
For me the reason is economic.
I think a lot of the loss of shame is a result of multiculturalism. The more cultures you accept, the fewer behaviors you can openly shame.
As a benign example, eating food with your hands rather than utensils. In some cultures this is rarely ever tolerated, in others it depends on the food item, and in others still you might always eat with your hands. These will be at odds and you have to decide what is OK to shame and what isn’t.
I think we as a society bias against shaming in seeking inclusivity, but some things can be lost along the way as well. To use the eating example again, eating with your hands instead of utensils may be more likely to spread disease (or maybe it needs to be coupled with a stronger shame against _not_ washing hands). I don’t know what the right approach is to strike a balance here in a multicultural society.
That is an interesting possibility, and seems plausible. When in Rome… becomes not so much about getting along, and more about maintaining social coherence, fostering prosperity and security.
> As a benign example, eating food with your hands rather than utensils. In some cultures this is rarely ever tolerated, in others it depends on the food item, and in others still you might always eat with your hands.
I know there are some strange people who eat pizza with a fork, but is there actually anyone who does that with say hamburgers?
Yes, there are people who eat burgers with utensils. It's more common in quasi-formal settings like business-organized dinners where people don't want to appear messy from my experience.
Shame isn’t dead. Specific kinds of shame are increasingly on the way out, particularly when it comes to individuality and self-expression, but shame itself isn’t dying or dead so much as accountability flatly does not exist anymore.
When the author bemoans a lack of shame in how the NBA teams tank games to improve later draft odds instead of playing out every game with ferocity and pride, what they’re actually bemoaning is the lack of consequences for such negative behavior - and misattributing that to a lack of shame by fans towards the team instead of a lack of consequences from governing bodies. It’s a naive fantasy of how the world works rather than a stinging critique of real problematic behavior.
It also ignores the grim reality that many people simply have no concept of shame in any sense that could correct their behavior. Zuckerberg absolutely has no shame, nor does Musk or Thiel or Bezos; it is impossible to shame them into better, healthier behavior, just as it’s impossible to shame Sony into manufacturing physical media again, or shaming the driver that just cut you off in traffic without a turn signal and used their vehicle as a missile to get their way by honking your horn or flipping them off. Shame alone means fuck all absent consequences.
And the thing about shame is that it too is a weapon that has been wielded to horrific ends in the past. Relying on shame alone is how you get McCarthy and the Red Scare, how you repress LGBTQ+ identities, how you segregate people based on skin color or ethnicity or national origin. Shame is toxic, and the few areas we rely on shame as a weapon are also areas of some of the greatest societal harms at present: homelessness, malnutrition, poverty, convicted felons, all are shamed for existence to the point they’re encouraged to disappear from society by any means other than improvement, like a one-way gate rather than a crisis to be addressed. In light of how we currently weaponize shame, I don’t think relying on expanding its use to address grievances is the right call.
> the lack of consequences
Not saying the article is right, but the point is supposed to be that social norms used to (or should) be sufficient. People should feel and be made to feel shame for flagrant disrespect of core principles that their participation in a system would seem to entail (like playing to win).
Speaking for myself, shame has certainly sometimes been enabling, sometimes disabling. Wanting to live up to an image I have of myself and what I should be (and feeling ashamed when I don’t) is a pretty core part of how “I” work. I agree shame can certainly turn toxic, but there are times when it is fair to say, “you should feel ashamed of yourself” (including in some circumstances, “for driving that kid to suicide by making him feel ashamed of who he is”).
> the point is supposed to be that social norms used to (or should) be sufficient. People should feel and be made to feel shame for flagrant disrespect of core principles that their participation in a system would seem to entail (like playing to win).
This requires shared “norms” and “core principles”, which we no longer possess. I’m not sure how to regain them either. It’s not like we’re going to agree on a new set of shared principles; each major political group prefers that social norms should reflect only their own priorities.
fuck shame, attend to guilt
[dead]
Shame is also a form of social control. Be ashamed you don't know your place, lower class person.
Lack of required shame used to be called being "uppity".
I'll tell that to the dude who pees in my staircase every other week, I must be just confused and too rich to understand.
Different countries must have different standards for that. Here, the result would be that the person owning the staircase would call a cleaning firm and then send the bill to the person, in combination with a warning that eviction may happen if further misuses of the property occur. If it happened every other week, the person would be evicted, and I suspect the bills from the cleaning company would be enough to make that happen regardless.
If they couldn't identity the person they would setup cameras or a passage system to identity who uses the staircase until the problem can be solved. The law here allows apartment owners to setup cameras in the case of resolving problems with property and shared spaces. For example, in my building there are cameras in the garage and the garbage room, and entry require tags that get recorded when opening the door. Those intrusive actions where done to address past theft and misbehavior which in turn cost money to the company who own the building.
The end result of this is that every place becomes locked down and covered in cameras, which is very expensive, and which also kills off the few remaining quasi-public (privately owned but freely accessible) spaces. All because we couldn’t figure out how to help or manage people with problems.
Not every society is like this.
That's causing objective damage. We don't invoke shame for behaviors that cause that.
You don't? Shame on you.
The article is all about people in positions of power, not lower class people.
Like most things in life, moderation is key
Consistency is also important. Making arbitrary distinctions just to cloak personal preferences is hypocritical.
Shame is an internalised negative emotion that is a negative anticipation of social stigma. In general, it is a usefulness in thing. If you can’t look back at your behaviour a few years ago and find a source of secret embarrassment, you probably aren’t growing.
The framing of shame as a bad thing instead of an important mechanism of self regulation is destroying maturity and social cooperation at an obscene rate, and future generations will be the ones that pay the price in a society where government has stepped in with coercive force to moderate behaviour at a much more granular level in a society that no longer governs itself.
In this it is important to distinguish between shame and shaming. Shame is the useful mechanism of self regulation. Shaming is social aggression and is all too frequently hijacked by astroturfed “social movements” and vile and petty narcissists to project power. Shaming has its place, but needs to be legitimate social sanction or it’s just another form of unregulated violence.
Unfortunately, the reaction of society has been to reject shame, which is about as useful as rejecting fear, for example. Fear is a useful and necessary mechanism of self regulation, and people that lack it entirely tend to live short lives. That said, too much is crippling. Shame is much the same, but is a social contract. Societies that lack it tend to fail. Societies with too much are stifling.
Fortunately, now we have the CCP and Palintir, so we can shrug off the yoke of shame and give up over that mechanism of self regulation to social credit scores and surveillance capitalism. I’m not sure that will be so much better.
Treasure your shame. I’ve lived in societies where it has been replaced by violence, and it’s not better.
Being uppity to your betters is one thing. Being inconsiderate towards everyone is something else.