I actually agree with you that dfranke may have made a mistake, but I disagree about the identity of the mistake. The possible mistake would be the inverse of what you have been arguing. You cited Eliezer posts to the effect that obeying social rules is no excuse for being irrational. But the purported problem here surely is that dfranke broke certain social rules—the purported rule to make no assumptions about a poster’s gender when referring to them. It is the breaking of social rules, not irrationality per se, that typically causes offense. And offense is what was caused here.
No, mere offense is not the problem. AstroCJ reports:
When someone calls me “he”, the strong and immediate association in my mind is that they are about to verbally abuse or assault me. “He” as a default might be lovely and convenient for cisgendered men, but it’s not polite to women, and it stumbles across very, very negative and visceral associations to transwomen.
It happens that transwomen who physically look like men get physically asaulted, by people who identify the transwomen as a (defective) man, and make a point emphasizing this identification during the assault. So when someone else identifies her as a man, she anticpates (through the representitive heurestic) that she is about to be assaulted. This anticipation, though irrational and inaccurate and possibly even contradicted by more accurate explicit beliefs, is highly stressful. This stress is a real consequence of the misidentification, and I think we should be able to recognize this consequence as a bad thing independantly of social rules.
If I understand correctly, you agree that dfranke made an actual mistake about what decision to make to get good consequences, rather than merely violating a social rule.
Given that context, is there anything I said in the previous discussion that you were previously confused about that you understand now, or any assertions you may have confidently made that you should now reconsider?
I am only agreeing to the specified point, which is that the stress caused to AstroCJ is a bad thing independently of social rules.
It does not follow that dfranke necessarily made a mistake of rationality, given what dfranke knew at the time, and even given what dfranke was responsible for knowing at the time (to take the criterion of responsibility up a notch).
Would it be a normal psychological reaction for dfranke now to feel guilt and apologize for the stress caused, even if dfranke has genuinely done nothing wrong? Maybe. Recall this post. Quoting:
Fourth, guilt sometimes occurs even when a person has done nothing wrong.
As a matter of fact—and here I’m re-introducing the idea of the social norm—it may be a social norm for dfranke now to apologize even if dfranke has done nothing wrong. Such a social norm could be built on top of the psychological regularity that Yvain pointed out.
Ok, so you previously said that you agree “that dfranke may have made a mistake”, and you now agree that this mistake was not a violation of social rules. You still assert that it was not a “mistake of rationality”.
Would you agree that it was a mistake that dfranke, and others who behave the same way, should take note of and avoid repeating in the future? Ultimately, my point is that whatever rules were correctly or incorrectly followed to lead to this bad outcome, the bad outcome should be a red flag that says we should try to understand what happened, and fix the rules or follow the rules better or whatever will work to not repeat the mistake.
The general problem with arguing that bad outcomes were not caused by a mistake is that whatever denotations you use to make it technically correct, it is bringing in connotations that there is nothing to fix, which is flat out false.
Ok, so you previously said that you agree “that dfranke may have made a mistake”, and you now agree that this mistake was not a violation of social rules.
No, I retract entirely the claim that he may have made a social mistake. I do not substitute for it any other claim.
You thought that dfrank had made a mistake of violating a social rule.
I argued that the mistake was not merely violation of a social rule.
You accepted my argument, thus modifying your belief to: there was no mistake?
Tabooing “mistake”, would you agree that a bad outcome occured, and that in the future we should make better decisions so that similar bad outcomes do not occur?
No, I did not accept your argument. I accepted a particular point that you raised. I quoted the point that I accepted
Fine, consider line 3 to be modified to say “You accepted a point in my argument” instead of “You accepted my argument”. I still want to know: is the result that you now believe there was no mistake? If so, how did that happen? If not, what was the result?
(Was that distinction really so important that it had to take the place of responding to my questions?)
And the really important part of that comment was:
Tabooing “mistake”, would you agree that a bad outcome occured, and that in the future we should make better decisions so that similar bad outcomes do not occur?
Tabooing “mistake”, would you agree that a bad outcome occured, and that in the future we should make better decisions so that similar bad outcomes do not occur?
I think that even ideal decisionmaking will, in the face of uncertainty, occasionally produce bad outcomes. Therefore the occurrence of a single bad outcome is not proof, and may not even be strong evidence, that a bad decision was made.
I think moreover that thinking about modifying the rules in the immediate wake of a specific bad outcome can be a dangerous thing to do, because the recency of the particular event will tend to bias the result toward avoiding that class of event, at the disproportionate expense of those who are inconvenienced or bothered by the imposition of the rule. I’m pretty sure that this class of bias has been named here before, though I don’t recall the name.
I think that even ideal decisionmaking will, in the face of uncertainty, occasionally produce bad outcomes.
The problem here is that what we are using is not even close to ideal. Yes, you should consider the reasons of why you made the decision the way you did, and how modifying it prevent the recent bad outcome may make you vulnerable to other bad outcomes. But that concern doesn’t mean that you should avoid even considering how to improve. It may also be that after looking for ways to improve you can’t figure anything out with acceptable tradeoffs. But you still should take note there is something you are dissatisfied with and would like third alternatives for.
the recency of the particular event will tend to bias the result toward avoiding that class of event, at the disproportionate expense of those who are inconvenienced or bothered by the imposition of the rule.
In this case, if it were an available action to make everyone feel more welcome in communities where they are not the dominant gender, at the expense of making everyone accept the inconvenience of learning new pronouns, taking that action would be a no brainer. The tradeoff is clear even before looking at the visceral physical fear our ignorance can cause in victims of those who are actively for less tolerant than ourselves.
In this case, if it were an available action to make everyone feel more welcome in communities where they are not the dominant gender, at the expense of making everyone accept the inconvenience of learning new pronouns, taking that action would be a no brainer. The tradeoff is clear...
Not without numbers. Would you prefer that one person be made to feel horribly unwelcome in an online community, or that 3^^^3 members of the community go to the trouble of using new pronouns?
Not without numbers. Would you prefer that one person be made to feel horribly unwelcome in an online community, or that 3^^^3 members of the community go to the trouble of using new pronouns?
Ok, in the real world where we are making the decisions I am talking about, there are not 3^^^3 people at all. Yes in that world I would say fine, the trivial convenience of those 3^^^3 trumps the inclusiveness for 1 person. But in the real world, there are about 7 billion people, and a substantial fraction of them are subject to the problems of exclusiveness.
Dfranke apologising would be faux pas. Or at least it would be a strategically poor social move.
Really? If I unintentionally do something to offend someone, I apologize. If that holds for unintentionally bumping into someone, or spilling coffee on their shoe, then as a logical extension it holds true for things I say, whatever medium I use to say them. The relevant aspect in this case isn’t what I say, it’s what effect that has. If I said (or wrote) something that seemed reasonable at the time, but offended someone or hurt their feelings, then I’m sorry to have hurt their feelings. I won’t necessarily censor myself forever after, or even change the things I say, but I will apologize because it’s a social ritual that hopefully makes me feel less guilty and the hurt/offended party feel less offended or hurt.
If that holds for unintentionally bumping into someone, or spilling coffee on their shoe, then as a logical extension it holds true for things I say, whatever medium I use to say them.
I would apologise for spilling coffee on someone but not in this situation. The analogy is not a good one and definitely not one of logical deduction! Some relevant factors:
Astro was being obnoxious and disrespectful. (Barring a couple of exceptions that would not apply in this case) apologising to people when they are being obnoxious and disrespectful legitimises people behaving that way to you.
This isn’t direct personal interaction going on in good faith. It’s an absurd public spectacle. It’s an entirely different situation and one in which people’s judgement changes drastically, losing perspective. An apology here wouldn’t just be
Give an inch and they’ll take a mile. See JGWeissman’s behaviour here with Constant for an illustration. An apology would be twisted into a confession of guilt. As though Dfranke actually did something wrong. (Apart from spam the forum with Qualia nonsense—I’d appreciate an apology for that!)
Dfranke didn’t call Astro a dude—it was a guess that it was even one distinct individual and picking an arbitrary gender for the hypothesised individual isn’t saying anything about Astro at all. In fact the unknown downvoter could just as easily have been me. My voting patterns (everything by Dfranke in this thread down whenever I noticed it) match exactly what he described.
Dfranke apologising would be a (minor) slight to all those who have defended him from perceived unjust accusations. The clear consensus (by voting pattern) is that Astro was behaving inappropriately and there was a solid base of support for Dfranke at least as far as pronoun use goes. You don’t undermine that without good reason.
Dfranke basically isn’t involved in this discussion. That’s a good way to be. Some people have taken it as an excuse to push their spivak related political agenda but he has chosen not to try to desperately justify himself. Staying uninvolved is a wise move and if he did choose to make a statement it would be significant primarily as a political feature, not an instrument of furthering interpersonal harmony.
If Dfranke did feel guilt (or, more realistically given that it would be a response to public criticism, shame) then that is a problem of miscalibrated emotions and not something to submit to. Guilt would not be serving him in this instance and he has the opportunity to release that feeling and move the stimulus response pattern (disapproval → shame → supplication) one step closer to extinction.
Even if an apology is met with approval in the moment it is not necessarily producing an overall good outcome for you. It may get an apparently encouraging response from a minority but would not lead to being treated with respect in the future either by those people doing the encouraging or by others. You apologise when you have actually done something wrong, not because someone else tries to emotionally bully you.
See JGWeissman’s behaviour here with Costanza for an illustration.
I may have missed something, but I think the bulk of the interaction was with me, though Costanza added a comment at the end. The username similarity is pure coincidence.
I may have missed something, but I think the bulk of the interaction was with me, though Costanza added a comment at the end. The username similarity is pure coincidence.
Astro was being obnoxious and disrespectful. This isn’t direct personal interaction going on in good faith. It’s an absurd public spectacle. It’s an entirely different situation and one in which people’s judgement changes drastically, losing perspective.
I guess maybe I did not read the entire comment string, since I didn’t notice any ‘obnoxious’ comments from Astro, or much of an ‘absurd public spectacle’. You may be right about that.
Dfranke basically isn’t involved in this discussion. That’s a good way to be. Some people have taken it as an excuse to push their spivak related political agenda but he has (wisely) chosen not to try to desperately justify himself.
Agreed!
Guilt would not be serving him in this instance and he has the opportunity to release that feeling and move the stimulus response pattern (disapproval → shame → supplication) one step closer to extinction.
I would still apologize. That is the person I’ve chosen to be (and by extension, the person I’ve chosen to represent myself as). It may not produce an overall ‘good’ outcome, but I’m not sure what you define as ‘good’. I’ve never been treated with disrespect by people I’ve apologized too.
I actually agree with you that dfranke may have made a mistake, but I disagree about the identity of the mistake. The possible mistake would be the inverse of what you have been arguing. You cited Eliezer posts to the effect that obeying social rules is no excuse for being irrational. But the purported problem here surely is that dfranke broke certain social rules—the purported rule to make no assumptions about a poster’s gender when referring to them. It is the breaking of social rules, not irrationality per se, that typically causes offense. And offense is what was caused here.
No, mere offense is not the problem. AstroCJ reports:
It happens that transwomen who physically look like men get physically asaulted, by people who identify the transwomen as a (defective) man, and make a point emphasizing this identification during the assault. So when someone else identifies her as a man, she anticpates (through the representitive heurestic) that she is about to be assaulted. This anticipation, though irrational and inaccurate and possibly even contradicted by more accurate explicit beliefs, is highly stressful. This stress is a real consequence of the misidentification, and I think we should be able to recognize this consequence as a bad thing independantly of social rules.
All right, point taken.
If I understand correctly, you agree that dfranke made an actual mistake about what decision to make to get good consequences, rather than merely violating a social rule.
Given that context, is there anything I said in the previous discussion that you were previously confused about that you understand now, or any assertions you may have confidently made that you should now reconsider?
I am only agreeing to the specified point, which is that the stress caused to AstroCJ is a bad thing independently of social rules.
It does not follow that dfranke necessarily made a mistake of rationality, given what dfranke knew at the time, and even given what dfranke was responsible for knowing at the time (to take the criterion of responsibility up a notch).
Would it be a normal psychological reaction for dfranke now to feel guilt and apologize for the stress caused, even if dfranke has genuinely done nothing wrong? Maybe. Recall this post. Quoting:
As a matter of fact—and here I’m re-introducing the idea of the social norm—it may be a social norm for dfranke now to apologize even if dfranke has done nothing wrong. Such a social norm could be built on top of the psychological regularity that Yvain pointed out.
Ok, so you previously said that you agree “that dfranke may have made a mistake”, and you now agree that this mistake was not a violation of social rules. You still assert that it was not a “mistake of rationality”.
Would you agree that it was a mistake that dfranke, and others who behave the same way, should take note of and avoid repeating in the future? Ultimately, my point is that whatever rules were correctly or incorrectly followed to lead to this bad outcome, the bad outcome should be a red flag that says we should try to understand what happened, and fix the rules or follow the rules better or whatever will work to not repeat the mistake.
The general problem with arguing that bad outcomes were not caused by a mistake is that whatever denotations you use to make it technically correct, it is bringing in connotations that there is nothing to fix, which is flat out false.
No, I retract entirely the claim that he may have made a social mistake. I do not substitute for it any other claim.
Let me get this straight:
You thought that dfrank had made a mistake of violating a social rule.
I argued that the mistake was not merely violation of a social rule.
You accepted my argument, thus modifying your belief to: there was no mistake?
Tabooing “mistake”, would you agree that a bad outcome occured, and that in the future we should make better decisions so that similar bad outcomes do not occur?
No, I did not accept your argument. I accepted a particular point that you raised. I quoted the point that I accepted.
Fine, consider line 3 to be modified to say “You accepted a point in my argument” instead of “You accepted my argument”. I still want to know: is the result that you now believe there was no mistake? If so, how did that happen? If not, what was the result?
(Was that distinction really so important that it had to take the place of responding to my questions?)
And the really important part of that comment was:
I think that even ideal decisionmaking will, in the face of uncertainty, occasionally produce bad outcomes. Therefore the occurrence of a single bad outcome is not proof, and may not even be strong evidence, that a bad decision was made.
I think moreover that thinking about modifying the rules in the immediate wake of a specific bad outcome can be a dangerous thing to do, because the recency of the particular event will tend to bias the result toward avoiding that class of event, at the disproportionate expense of those who are inconvenienced or bothered by the imposition of the rule. I’m pretty sure that this class of bias has been named here before, though I don’t recall the name.
The problem here is that what we are using is not even close to ideal. Yes, you should consider the reasons of why you made the decision the way you did, and how modifying it prevent the recent bad outcome may make you vulnerable to other bad outcomes. But that concern doesn’t mean that you should avoid even considering how to improve. It may also be that after looking for ways to improve you can’t figure anything out with acceptable tradeoffs. But you still should take note there is something you are dissatisfied with and would like third alternatives for.
In this case, if it were an available action to make everyone feel more welcome in communities where they are not the dominant gender, at the expense of making everyone accept the inconvenience of learning new pronouns, taking that action would be a no brainer. The tradeoff is clear even before looking at the visceral physical fear our ignorance can cause in victims of those who are actively for less tolerant than ourselves.
Not without numbers. Would you prefer that one person be made to feel horribly unwelcome in an online community, or that 3^^^3 members of the community go to the trouble of using new pronouns?
Ok, in the real world where we are making the decisions I am talking about, there are not 3^^^3 people at all. Yes in that world I would say fine, the trivial convenience of those 3^^^3 trumps the inclusiveness for 1 person. But in the real world, there are about 7 billion people, and a substantial fraction of them are subject to the problems of exclusiveness.
I don’t see how this profits anyone. Constant has been precise enough already.
Dfranke apologising would be faux pas. Or at least it would be a strategically poor social move.
Really? If I unintentionally do something to offend someone, I apologize. If that holds for unintentionally bumping into someone, or spilling coffee on their shoe, then as a logical extension it holds true for things I say, whatever medium I use to say them. The relevant aspect in this case isn’t what I say, it’s what effect that has. If I said (or wrote) something that seemed reasonable at the time, but offended someone or hurt their feelings, then I’m sorry to have hurt their feelings. I won’t necessarily censor myself forever after, or even change the things I say, but I will apologize because it’s a social ritual that hopefully makes me feel less guilty and the hurt/offended party feel less offended or hurt.
(For the sake of abstract curiosity:)
I would apologise for spilling coffee on someone but not in this situation. The analogy is not a good one and definitely not one of logical deduction! Some relevant factors:
Astro was being obnoxious and disrespectful. (Barring a couple of exceptions that would not apply in this case) apologising to people when they are being obnoxious and disrespectful legitimises people behaving that way to you.
This isn’t direct personal interaction going on in good faith. It’s an absurd public spectacle. It’s an entirely different situation and one in which people’s judgement changes drastically, losing perspective. An apology here wouldn’t just be
Give an inch and they’ll take a mile. See JGWeissman’s behaviour here with Constant for an illustration. An apology would be twisted into a confession of guilt. As though Dfranke actually did something wrong. (Apart from spam the forum with Qualia nonsense—I’d appreciate an apology for that!)
Dfranke didn’t call Astro a dude—it was a guess that it was even one distinct individual and picking an arbitrary gender for the hypothesised individual isn’t saying anything about Astro at all. In fact the unknown downvoter could just as easily have been me. My voting patterns (everything by Dfranke in this thread down whenever I noticed it) match exactly what he described.
Dfranke apologising would be a (minor) slight to all those who have defended him from perceived unjust accusations. The clear consensus (by voting pattern) is that Astro was behaving inappropriately and there was a solid base of support for Dfranke at least as far as pronoun use goes. You don’t undermine that without good reason.
Dfranke basically isn’t involved in this discussion. That’s a good way to be. Some people have taken it as an excuse to push their spivak related political agenda but he has chosen not to try to desperately justify himself. Staying uninvolved is a wise move and if he did choose to make a statement it would be significant primarily as a political feature, not an instrument of furthering interpersonal harmony.
If Dfranke did feel guilt (or, more realistically given that it would be a response to public criticism, shame) then that is a problem of miscalibrated emotions and not something to submit to. Guilt would not be serving him in this instance and he has the opportunity to release that feeling and move the stimulus response pattern (disapproval → shame → supplication) one step closer to extinction.
Even if an apology is met with approval in the moment it is not necessarily producing an overall good outcome for you. It may get an apparently encouraging response from a minority but would not lead to being treated with respect in the future either by those people doing the encouraging or by others. You apologise when you have actually done something wrong, not because someone else tries to emotionally bully you.
I may have missed something, but I think the bulk of the interaction was with me, though Costanza added a comment at the end. The username similarity is pure coincidence.
That’s the one! Fixed.
I guess maybe I did not read the entire comment string, since I didn’t notice any ‘obnoxious’ comments from Astro, or much of an ‘absurd public spectacle’. You may be right about that.
Agreed!
I would still apologize. That is the person I’ve chosen to be (and by extension, the person I’ve chosen to represent myself as). It may not produce an overall ‘good’ outcome, but I’m not sure what you define as ‘good’. I’ve never been treated with disrespect by people I’ve apologized too.