You have also taken a specific situation and generalised it in ways that were not in fact being described in the post you are responding to.
I did say that my points don’t necessarily apply in your case, since I’m not familiar with all the details of it, and that I’ve taken it as motivation to make a more general point relevant to the topic at hand.
Now, regarding the specifics, one should always be suspicious of outrage, both of other people and one’s own. It signals with very high probability that some sort of bias has been triggered. (I’m now talking about outrage about matters of public discourse, not things where one is personally involved.)
If anything, there’s a whole lot going on in the world that you could reasonably be outraged over, but you can show active concern only about a very small subset of these events. In the overwhelming majority of cases—and, given the lack of information, I am not judging now whether that was the case in your specific example—people’s choice of what they get outraged over is determined by their preexisting hostility towards particular individuals, groups, and institutions. Therefore, in regular human interaction, interpreting outrage towards one’s favored institution as a signal of hostility—and conversely, interpreting shared outrage as a signal of ideological agreement and common cause—is a statistically accurate heuristic.
Even if someone gets actively outraged over what could be reasonably considered the very worst phenomenon currently being reported and discussed in the media, that still means that one might be relaying the biases of the media to which one is exposed. (This isn’t relevant if you believe that your favored media outlets are unbiased in what stories of outrage they choose to report with the highest prominence, and that they never bias their coverage towards greater or lesser outrage depending on the topic. But this seems to me clearly false; even the facts are usually reported selectively, let alone the commentary and the more subtly expressed attitudes.)
Finally, you say that in your discussion you made judgments regarding the assignment of blame, including the way the blame for the misdeeds of individual members of an institution should be assigned to the institution itself, as well as the blame that should be assigned indirectly to other members by affiliation. Now again, I can’t judge your concrete argument because I haven’t seen it, but this is another common case where strong biases are present in the overwhelming majority of instances. Just like with selective outrage, people tend to make the widest possible assignments of blame when it comes to the institutions they dislike in the first place, but at the same time they use entirely inconsistent criteria that minimize and individualize the extent of blame towards their favored institutions (if they even register that there might be something wrong going on in them).
David_Gerard:
I did say that my points don’t necessarily apply in your case, since I’m not familiar with all the details of it, and that I’ve taken it as motivation to make a more general point relevant to the topic at hand.
Now, regarding the specifics, one should always be suspicious of outrage, both of other people and one’s own. It signals with very high probability that some sort of bias has been triggered. (I’m now talking about outrage about matters of public discourse, not things where one is personally involved.)
If anything, there’s a whole lot going on in the world that you could reasonably be outraged over, but you can show active concern only about a very small subset of these events. In the overwhelming majority of cases—and, given the lack of information, I am not judging now whether that was the case in your specific example—people’s choice of what they get outraged over is determined by their preexisting hostility towards particular individuals, groups, and institutions. Therefore, in regular human interaction, interpreting outrage towards one’s favored institution as a signal of hostility—and conversely, interpreting shared outrage as a signal of ideological agreement and common cause—is a statistically accurate heuristic.
Even if someone gets actively outraged over what could be reasonably considered the very worst phenomenon currently being reported and discussed in the media, that still means that one might be relaying the biases of the media to which one is exposed. (This isn’t relevant if you believe that your favored media outlets are unbiased in what stories of outrage they choose to report with the highest prominence, and that they never bias their coverage towards greater or lesser outrage depending on the topic. But this seems to me clearly false; even the facts are usually reported selectively, let alone the commentary and the more subtly expressed attitudes.)
Finally, you say that in your discussion you made judgments regarding the assignment of blame, including the way the blame for the misdeeds of individual members of an institution should be assigned to the institution itself, as well as the blame that should be assigned indirectly to other members by affiliation. Now again, I can’t judge your concrete argument because I haven’t seen it, but this is another common case where strong biases are present in the overwhelming majority of instances. Just like with selective outrage, people tend to make the widest possible assignments of blame when it comes to the institutions they dislike in the first place, but at the same time they use entirely inconsistent criteria that minimize and individualize the extent of blame towards their favored institutions (if they even register that there might be something wrong going on in them).