But if evidence of that regrettable night is all over the internet, that is much worse. You then likely have a lot of other regrettable nights. College acceptances are rescinded, jobs lost.
I have a major quibble with this prediction. Namely my model is that the regrettability of nights, and moral character of people, is always graded on a curve, not absolutely.
Colleges still need to admit students. Employers still need employees. In a world where everyone smokes weed in high school but this is known about only 5% of students, it makes sense for jobs and colleges to exclude weed-smokers. But if 80% of people are known to have smoked weed (or had premarital sex, or shoplifted from CVS, or gotten into a fight), then it stops being a big deal.
An example from the other side would be cheating on your spouse: by some accounts half of us do it, but a lot fewer than half are publicly exposed for it. So today this still carries a huge stigma, but in a world where every cheater was being blackmailed, one of the main effects would be that cheating on a spouse would cease to be seen as an irredeemable sin.
I have a major quibble with this prediction. Namely my model is that the regrettability of nights, and moral character of people, is always graded on a curve, not absolutely.
Colleges still need to admit students. Employers still need employees. In a world where everyone smokes weed in high school but this is known about only 5% of students, it makes sense for jobs and colleges to exclude weed-smokers. But if 80% of people are known to have smoked weed (or had premarital sex, or shoplifted from CVS, or gotten into a fight), then it stops being a big deal.
An example from the other side would be cheating on your spouse: by some accounts half of us do it, but a lot fewer than half are publicly exposed for it. So today this still carries a huge stigma, but in a world where every cheater was being blackmailed, one of the main effects would be that cheating on a spouse would cease to be seen as an irredeemable sin.