I think people tend to need a decent amount of evidence before they start talking about someone looking potentially abusive. Then the crux is “does this behavior seem normal or like a predictive red flag?”. In those cases, your lived experience directly influences your perception. Someone’s actions can seem perfectly fine to most people. But if some others experience spooky hair-raising flashes of their questionably abusive father or a bad ex, that’s evidence. The people who didn’t think anything was weird brush off the others as oversensitive, risk averse, or paranoid. Then those raising alarms think of everyone else as callous, imperceptive, or malicious. It’s not just people who don’t alieve the correct base rates. Certainly those people exist, though they’re much more plentiful on Tumblr than in person or on LW. It’s very non-obvious whether a strong reaction is correct.
Neither side can truly accept the other’s arguments. It’s a bad situation when both sides consider the other’s reasoning compromised beyond repair. That brings politics and accusations of bad faith on all sides. But there is a fact of the matter, and the truth is actually unclear. Anyone thinking at enough of a distance from the issue should have honest uncertainty. I suspect you’re particularly prone to refusing to let the conflicting experience of others be seen by your deep internal world-models, to strongly underestimating the validity and reliability of that type of evidence. That would cause what you say to be parsed as bad faith, which other people then respond to in kind. That would cause a positive feedback loop where your prior shifts even further away from them having useful things to say. Then you’d end up a frog boiled in a pot of drama nobody else is experiencing. I’m not sure this is what’s happening, but it looks plausible.
I think people tend to need a decent amount of evidence before they start talking about someone looking potentially abusive. Then the crux is “does this behavior seem normal or like a predictive red flag?”. In those cases, your lived experience directly influences your perception. Someone’s actions can seem perfectly fine to most people. But if some others experience spooky hair-raising flashes of their questionably abusive father or a bad ex, that’s evidence. The people who didn’t think anything was weird brush off the others as oversensitive, risk averse, or paranoid. Then those raising alarms think of everyone else as callous, imperceptive, or malicious. It’s not just people who don’t alieve the correct base rates. Certainly those people exist, though they’re much more plentiful on Tumblr than in person or on LW. It’s very non-obvious whether a strong reaction is correct.
Neither side can truly accept the other’s arguments. It’s a bad situation when both sides consider the other’s reasoning compromised beyond repair. That brings politics and accusations of bad faith on all sides. But there is a fact of the matter, and the truth is actually unclear. Anyone thinking at enough of a distance from the issue should have honest uncertainty. I suspect you’re particularly prone to refusing to let the conflicting experience of others be seen by your deep internal world-models, to strongly underestimating the validity and reliability of that type of evidence. That would cause what you say to be parsed as bad faith, which other people then respond to in kind. That would cause a positive feedback loop where your prior shifts even further away from them having useful things to say. Then you’d end up a frog boiled in a pot of drama nobody else is experiencing. I’m not sure this is what’s happening, but it looks plausible.
Strong endorsement of all of this.