I make a lot of jokes and incongruous juxtapositions and things like that, I hope not anywhere close to 'disinhibition' mentioned in the paper. But it makes me wonder how much laughing at a joke is appreciation of a witty idea vs how much of it is a social contract where you say something mildly interesting, laugh, and other conversation participants laugh.
It's still a genuine social exchange, but the point is that humor has empathy as a key component, and it helps us bond. If you were to convey the same concept in a tone of anger or disappointment, most listeners won't laugh. So maybe humor and rants are two sides of the same coin: socialized salience.
But like any other social contract, it can be abused. If you frame a sentence in the cadence of a joke or rant, you're expecting the listener to respond. If you rant for a very long time, people stop listening. If you make jokes 24/7, the social activity of joke-telling is no longer a two-way street, and people stop laughing. If you deliver nonsense like a joke, you may get the knee-jerk social laugh, but not the witty-idea laugh (unless nonsense is the witty idea). If it's inappropriate to bond in a situation, and you tell a joke, you might not get a laugh, let alone an acknowledgment.
For various reasons, patients described in the article only have pieces of this whole system, and struggle with the social aspect or the witty-idea aspect.
I would say there's a definite social component. I have some ability to speak Spanish, and work with several Spanish speaking coworkers. Sometimes I completely miss the joke, but laugh anyways, because everyone else is.
I once sat next to a businessman whose only conversation was making joke after joke during an entire dinner. They were not his own, just regular old jokes. He'd built a business worth 300 million euro over thirty years and he literally told me jokes for two and a half hours. By the end I struggled to even smile let alone laugh. He didn't appear to notice.
I suspect he believes the jokes are good because people pay attention to him because of the $300M, not because of the jokes but it's hard for him to tell the difference from where he's sitting.
The funny thing is until you said this it never occurred to me for a moment. My impression was much more of someone that couldn't help themselves. More as if he was terrified of even a moment's silence.
Someone I know had this for the earlier part of their life (till about 35). Mostly, it was a defense mechanism, against extreme nervousness, anxiety, and "out-of-placeness."
They're much much better now. But will still let loose when extremely stressed out.
You're right. It may not have been "Witzelsucht." But it makes me wonder if there's a mild form of "Witzelsucht" that's rampant in the population making people do cringeworthy things.
I think that Reddit is making this a lot worse, at least for the people using it. Pretty much everyone there is constantly trying to make jokes in order to get a few upvotes and as a result even the most serious subreddits have people who feel the need to crack jokes. It is really fucking annoying.
Reddit? It has always been like that! People try to crack jokes to get attention, now attention has a little number next to it (the upvotes/downvotes) but it's the same thing that's always happened ever. Think back in high school there was always a few kids who would ALWAYS crack jokes to be the center of attention, it isn't any different now that we have websites that kind of "promote" this content more than the rest.
Did you even read the article? Unless you think Reddit is causing severe brain damage, the phenomenon it's discussing is completely unrelated to this (and if it is causing the brain damage described it's hard to understand why anyone would upvote the jokes, since the other part of it is ruining your ability to laugh at other people's jokes).
Welcome to the people who want to participate in serious discussions. You still have threads, and whole subreddits for that matter, with jokes. But before this tag, people who wanted a joke-free discussion were unable to do so on Reddit, and had to dig through piles of puns and jokes to get some thoughtful comments. Now we have space for both groups.
When you're first getting started in tech I think HN seems much more serious than it is.
Once you're a bit more experienced you realize it's a bunch of hipsters talking about simple and insignificant technologies, and completely ignoring everything else as "old".
That being said, I think it's highly entertaining.
> hipsters talking about simple and insignificant technologies
Are you telling me that a new CSS framework that will save you two lines in your CSS files is insignificant? Or a new <insert the current language that is hip>-style language in <insert a number between 1 and 100> lines of JS!
Surely these are the greatest inventions of our time.
I have been active in high tech for many moons and like to look at this place as just another alternative feed for a old man ;) I would much rather HN than other sources, but my time is limited like many. So I just hop on occassionally and learn (or teach) something new. Once in a while a post resonates with me, but when it doesn't that doesn't mean it's just noise. It can mean I have much to learn.
I haven't been on for that long, but I am starting to see examples of what you mean. I tend to weed out what doesn't apply to me which I think many do.
It's still a genuine social exchange, but the point is that humor has empathy as a key component, and it helps us bond. If you were to convey the same concept in a tone of anger or disappointment, most listeners won't laugh. So maybe humor and rants are two sides of the same coin: socialized salience.
But like any other social contract, it can be abused. If you frame a sentence in the cadence of a joke or rant, you're expecting the listener to respond. If you rant for a very long time, people stop listening. If you make jokes 24/7, the social activity of joke-telling is no longer a two-way street, and people stop laughing. If you deliver nonsense like a joke, you may get the knee-jerk social laugh, but not the witty-idea laugh (unless nonsense is the witty idea). If it's inappropriate to bond in a situation, and you tell a joke, you might not get a laugh, let alone an acknowledgment.
For various reasons, patients described in the article only have pieces of this whole system, and struggle with the social aspect or the witty-idea aspect.