(this comment has been significantly edited in response to the above retraction)
That’s my primary motivation, yeah. I agree that there’s a (significant) risk that I’m going about things the wrong way, and I do appreciate people weighing in on that side, but at the moment I’m trusting my intuitions and looking for concrete, gears-y, model-based arguments to update, because I am wary of the confusion of incentives and biases in the mix. The below HPMOR quotes feel really relevant to this question, to me:
“One answer is that you shouldn’t ever use violence except to stop violence,” Harry said. “You shouldn’t risk anyone’s life except to save even more lives. It sounds good when you say it like that. Only the problem is that if a police officer sees a burglar robbing a house, the police officer should try to stop the burglar, even though the burglar might fight back and someone might get hurt or even killed. Even if the burglar is only trying to steal jewelry, which is just a thing. Because if nobody so much as inconveniences burglars, there will be more burglars, and more burglars. And even if they only ever stole things each time, it would—the fabric of society—” Harry stopped. His thoughts weren’t as ordered as they usually pretended to be, in this room. He should have been able to give some perfectly logical exposition in terms of game theory, should have at least been able to see it that way, but it was eluding him. Hawks and doves—“Don’t you see, if evil people are willing to risk violence to get what they want, and good people always back down because violence is too terrible to risk, it’s—it’s not a good society to live in, Headmaster! Don’t you realize what all this bullying is doing to Hogwarts, to Slytherin House most of all?”
...
“There was a Muggle once named Mohandas Gandhi,” Harry said to the floor. “He thought the government of Muggle Britain shouldn’t rule over his country. And he refused to fight. He convinced his whole country not to fight. Instead he told his people to walk up to the British soldiers and let themselves be struck down, without resisting, and when Britain couldn’t stand doing that any more, we freed his country. I thought it was a very beautiful thing, when I read about it, I thought it was something higher than all the wars that anyone had ever fought with guns or swords. That they’d really done that, and that it had actually worked.” Harry drew another breath. “Only then I found out that Gandhi told his people, during World War II, that if the Nazis invaded they should use nonviolent resistance against them, too. But the Nazis would’ve just shot everyone in sight. And maybe Winston Churchill always felt that there should’ve been a better way, some clever way to win without having to hurt anyone; but he never found it, and so he had to fight.” Harry looked up at the Headmaster, who was staring at him. “Winston Churchill was the one who tried to convince the British government not to give Czechoslovakia to Hitler in exchange for a peace treaty, that they should fight right away—”
“I recognize the name, Harry,” said Dumbledore. The old wizard’s lips twitched upward. “Although honesty compels me to say that dear Winston was never one for pangs of conscience, even after a dozen shots of Firewhiskey.”
“The point is,” Harry said, after a brief pause to remember exactly who he was talking to, and fight down the suddenly returning sense that he was an ignorant child gone insane with audacity who had no right to be in this room and no right to question Albus Dumbledore about anything, “the point is, saying violence is evil isn’t an answer. It doesn’t say when to fight and when not to fight. It’s a hard question and Gandhi refused to deal with it, and that’s why I lost some of my respect for him.”
My primary disagreement with the moderation of LW2.0 has consistently been “at what threshold is ‘violence’ in this metaphorical sense correct? When is too soon, versus too late?”
I’m sorry. I re-read what you’d actually written and you’re right.
I’d been reading some discussion about something else slightly earlier, and then the temporal proximity of that-other-thing caused my impression of that-other-thing and my impression of what-Duncan-wrote to get mixed up. And then I didn’t re-read what you’d written before writing my comment, because I was intending to just briefly report on my initial impression rather than get into any detailed discussion, and I didn’t want my report of my initial impression to get contaminated by a re-read—not realizing that it had been contaminated already.
I have tremendous respect for the fact that you’re the type of person who could make a comment like the one above. That you a) sought out the source of confusion and conflict, b) took direct action to address it, and c) let me and others know what was going on.
I feel like saying something like “you get a million points,” but it’s more like, you already earned the points, out there in the territory, and me saying so is just writing it down on the map. I’ve edited my own comments as well, to remove the parts that are no longer relevant.
“Wolves, dogs, even chickens, fight for dominance among themselves. What I finally understood, from that clerk’s mind, was that to him Lucius Malfoy had dominance, Lord Voldemort had dominance, and David Monroe and Albus Dumbledore did not. By taking the side of good, by professing to abide in the light, they had made themselves unthreatening. In Britain, Lucius Malfoy has dominance, for he can call in your loans, or send Ministry bureaucrats against your shop, or crucify you in the Daily Prophet, if you go openly against his will. And the most powerful wizard in the world has no dominance, because everyone knows that he is a hero out of stories, relentlessly self-effacing and too humble for vengeance … In Hogwarts, Dumbledore does punish certain transgressions against his will, so he is feared to some degree, though the students still make free to mock him in more than whispers. Outside this castle, Dumbledore is sneered at; they began to call him mad, and he aped the part like a fool. Step into the role of a savior out of plays, and people see you as a slave to whose services they are entitled and whom it is their enjoyment to criticize; for it is the privilege of masters to sit back and call forth helpful corrections while the slaves labor … I understood that day in the Ministry that by envying Dumbledore, I had shown myself as deluded as Dumbledore himself. I understood that I had been trying for the wrong place all along. You should know this to be true, boy, for you have made freer to speak ill of Dumbledore than you ever dared speak ill of me. Even in your own thoughts, I wager, for instinct runs deep. You knew that it might be to your cost to mock the strong and vengeful Professor Quirrell, but that there was no cost in disrespecting the weak and harmless Dumbledore.”
… in at least some ways, it’s important to have Quirrells and Lucius Malfoys around on the side of LW’s culture, and not just David Monroes and Dumbledores.
… in at least some ways, it’s important to have Quirrells and Lucius Malfoys around on the side of LW’s culture, and not just David Monroes and Dumbledores.
This is an interesting point—and, ISTM, a reason not to be too demanding about people coming to LW itself with a purely “good faith” attitude! To some extent, “bad faith” and even fights for dominance just come with the territory of Hobbesian social and political struggle—and if you care about “hav[ing] Quirrells and Lucius Malfoys” on our side, you’re clearly making a point about politics as well, at least in the very broadest sense.
We totally have private messaging now! Please err on the side of using it for norm disputes so that participants don’t feel the eyes of the world on them so much.
(Not that norm disputes shouldn’t be public—absolutely we should have public discussion of norms—just it can be great to get past tense parts of it sometimes.)
That may be, but didn’t you say that your motivation was to get people to engage in less such behavior in the future, rather than causing more of it?
[EDIT: the second half of this comment has been retracted]
(this comment has been significantly edited in response to the above retraction)
That’s my primary motivation, yeah. I agree that there’s a (significant) risk that I’m going about things the wrong way, and I do appreciate people weighing in on that side, but at the moment I’m trusting my intuitions and looking for concrete, gears-y, model-based arguments to update, because I am wary of the confusion of incentives and biases in the mix. The below HPMOR quotes feel really relevant to this question, to me:
...
My primary disagreement with the moderation of LW2.0 has consistently been “at what threshold is ‘violence’ in this metaphorical sense correct? When is too soon, versus too late?”
I’m sorry. I re-read what you’d actually written and you’re right.
I’d been reading some discussion about something else slightly earlier, and then the temporal proximity of that-other-thing caused my impression of that-other-thing and my impression of what-Duncan-wrote to get mixed up. And then I didn’t re-read what you’d written before writing my comment, because I was intending to just briefly report on my initial impression rather than get into any detailed discussion, and I didn’t want my report of my initial impression to get contaminated by a re-read—not realizing that it had been contaminated already.
Will edit my previous comments.
I have tremendous respect for the fact that you’re the type of person who could make a comment like the one above. That you a) sought out the source of confusion and conflict, b) took direct action to address it, and c) let me and others know what was going on.
I feel like saying something like “you get a million points,” but it’s more like, you already earned the points, out there in the territory, and me saying so is just writing it down on the map. I’ve edited my own comments as well, to remove the parts that are no longer relevant.
One other HPMOR quote that feels relevant:
… in at least some ways, it’s important to have Quirrells and Lucius Malfoys around on the side of LW’s culture, and not just David Monroes and Dumbledores.
This is an interesting point—and, ISTM, a reason not to be too demanding about people coming to LW itself with a purely “good faith” attitude! To some extent, “bad faith” and even fights for dominance just come with the territory of Hobbesian social and political struggle—and if you care about “hav[ing] Quirrells and Lucius Malfoys” on our side, you’re clearly making a point about politics as well, at least in the very broadest sense.
We totally have private messaging now! Please err on the side of using it for norm disputes so that participants don’t feel the eyes of the world on them so much.
(Not that norm disputes shouldn’t be public—absolutely we should have public discussion of norms—just it can be great to get past tense parts of it sometimes.)