I think that treating Michael Vassar as an unchangeable force of nature is the right way to go—for the purposes of discussions precisely like this one. Why? Because even if Michael himself can (and chooses to) alter his behavior in some way (regardless of whether this is good or bad or indifferent), nevertheless there will be other Michael Vassars out there—and the question remains, of how one is to deal with arbitrary Michael Vassars one encounters in life.
In other words, what we’ve got here is a vulnerability (in the security sense of the word). One day you find that you’re being exploited by a clever hacker (we decline to specify whether he is a black hat or white hat or what). The one comes to you and recommends a patch. But you say—why should we treat this specific attack as some sort of unchangeable force of nature? Rather we should contact this hacker and persuade him to cease and desist. But the vulnerability is still there…
I think you can either have a discussion that focuses on an individual and if you do it makes sense to model them with agency or you can have more general threat models.
If you however mix the two you are likely to get confused in both directions. You will project ideas from your threat model into the person and you will take random aspects of the individual into your threat model that aren’t typical for the threat.
I think that treating Michael Vassar as an unchangeable force of nature is the right way to go—for the purposes of discussions precisely like this one. Why? Because even if Michael himself can (and chooses to) alter his behavior in some way (regardless of whether this is good or bad or indifferent), nevertheless there will be other Michael Vassars out there—and the question remains, of how one is to deal with arbitrary Michael Vassars one encounters in life.
In other words, what we’ve got here is a vulnerability (in the security sense of the word). One day you find that you’re being exploited by a clever hacker (we decline to specify whether he is a black hat or white hat or what). The one comes to you and recommends a patch. But you say—why should we treat this specific attack as some sort of unchangeable force of nature? Rather we should contact this hacker and persuade him to cease and desist. But the vulnerability is still there…
I think you can either have a discussion that focuses on an individual and if you do it makes sense to model them with agency or you can have more general threat models.
If you however mix the two you are likely to get confused in both directions. You will project ideas from your threat model into the person and you will take random aspects of the individual into your threat model that aren’t typical for the threat.