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cannonprtoday at 12:43 PM8 repliesview on HN

It can look bad, but this is just an aspect of human behavior en masse that we don’t normally get to see. A long time ago there was an incident on a military base. A man had gotten up on a building to commit suicide, and while the officers tried to convince him not to jump, the drafted soldiers gathered underneath and started chanting “jump, jump” because of a rule that said witnessing the suicide of a fellow soldier cut down their draft length. Anyway, point being, situations where group A can benefit by harming group B are always problematic with large groups of people. The internet has produced novel and worse things than this.


Replies

Aurornistoday at 1:15 PM

That story is most certainly an urban legend. There is a whole class of urban legends like that. Another common one among college students is that if your roommate dies you get straight A grades that year, leading to creative urban legends of desperate students doing terrible things to their roommates.

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tomtomtom777today at 2:35 PM

I think that's horribly fatalistic perspective.

Yes, humans can be bad. But humans can change. Let's not start accepting bad stuff as not so bad, simply because it is "just human behavior".

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victorbjorklundtoday at 12:53 PM

Sounds like a urban legend.

happytoexplaintoday at 12:57 PM

>It can look bad, but this is just an aspect of human behavior

Why "can look", "but", "just"?

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sc68caltoday at 2:54 PM

So, because it's a human behavior, that means it's okay that there's a huge company out there amplifying that behavior and profiting off it?