I think that, to the extent you’re trying to make the case that Said and Zack should shape their behavior or leave / not comment on your posts (and other people should feel social cover to block them from commenting as well), you should expect them to take exception to the rules that would cause them to change the most, and it’s not particularly fair to request that they hold the debate over what rules should apply under your rules instead of neutral rules.
I don’t think I am making this request.
I do strongly predict that if I made free to verbally abuse Zack in the same fashion Zack verbally abuses others, I would be punished more for it, in part because people would be like “well, yeah, but Zack just kinda is like that; you should do better, Duncan” and in part because people would be like “DUDE, Zack had a traumatic experience with the medical system, you calling him insane is WAY WORSE than calling someone else insane” and “well, if you’re not gonna follow your own discourse rules, doesn’t that make you a hypocrite?”
It’s an asymmetric situation that favors the assholes; people tend not to notice “oh, Duncan rearmed with these weapons he advocates disarming because his interlocutors refused to join the peace treaty.”
Sure, I buy that any functional garden doesn’t just punish hypocrisy, but also failing to follow the rules of the garden, which I’m imputing as a motivation for your second and third paragraphs. (I also buy that lots of “let people choose how to be” approaches favor assholes.)
But… I think there’s some other message in them, that I can’t construct correctly? It seems to me like we’re in a broader cultural environment where postmodern dissolution of moral standards means the only reliable vice to attack others for is hypocrisy. I see your second and third paragraphs as, like, a mixture of disagreeing with this (‘I should not be criticized for hypocrisy as strongly as I predict I would be if I were hypocritical’) and maybe making a counteraccusation of hypocrisy (‘if there were evenly applied standards of conduct, I would be protected from Zack’s misbehavior, but as is I am prevented from attacking Zack but the reverse is not true’).
But I don’t think I really agree with either of those points, as I understand them. I do think hypocrisy is a pretty strong argument against the proposed rules, and also that double standards can make sense (certainly I try to hold LW moderators to higher standards than LW users).
“I’d like for us to not have a culture wherein it’s considered perfectly kosher to walk around responding to other users’ posts with e.g. ‘This is insane’ without clearing a pretty high bar of, y’know, the thing actually being insane. To the extent that Zack is saying ‘hey, it’s fine, you can verbally abuse me, too!’ this is not a viable solution.”
Fortunately, it seems that LessWrong generally agrees; both my suggested norms and Robbie’s suggested norms were substantially more popular than either of Zack’s weirdly impassioned defenses-of-being-a-jerk.
I guess I don’t know what you mean by “neutral norms” if you don’t mean either “the norms Duncan’s proposing, that are in line with what Julia Galef and Scott Alexander and Dan Keys and Eric Rogstad and Oliver Habryka and Vaniver and so on and so forth would do by default,” or “the norms Zack is proposing, in which you act like a dick and defend it by saying ‘it’s important to me that I be able to speak plainly and directly.’”
I don’t think I am making this request.
I do strongly predict that if I made free to verbally abuse Zack in the same fashion Zack verbally abuses others, I would be punished more for it, in part because people would be like “well, yeah, but Zack just kinda is like that; you should do better, Duncan” and in part because people would be like “DUDE, Zack had a traumatic experience with the medical system, you calling him insane is WAY WORSE than calling someone else insane” and “well, if you’re not gonna follow your own discourse rules, doesn’t that make you a hypocrite?”
It’s an asymmetric situation that favors the assholes; people tend not to notice “oh, Duncan rearmed with these weapons he advocates disarming because his interlocutors refused to join the peace treaty.”
Sure, I buy that any functional garden doesn’t just punish hypocrisy, but also failing to follow the rules of the garden, which I’m imputing as a motivation for your second and third paragraphs. (I also buy that lots of “let people choose how to be” approaches favor assholes.)
But… I think there’s some other message in them, that I can’t construct correctly? It seems to me like we’re in a broader cultural environment where postmodern dissolution of moral standards means the only reliable vice to attack others for is hypocrisy. I see your second and third paragraphs as, like, a mixture of disagreeing with this (‘I should not be criticized for hypocrisy as strongly as I predict I would be if I were hypocritical’) and maybe making a counteraccusation of hypocrisy (‘if there were evenly applied standards of conduct, I would be protected from Zack’s misbehavior, but as is I am prevented from attacking Zack but the reverse is not true’).
But I don’t think I really agree with either of those points, as I understand them. I do think hypocrisy is a pretty strong argument against the proposed rules, and also that double standards can make sense (certainly I try to hold LW moderators to higher standards than LW users).
I’m saying:
“I’d like for us to not have a culture wherein it’s considered perfectly kosher to walk around responding to other users’ posts with e.g. ‘This is insane’ without clearing a pretty high bar of, y’know, the thing actually being insane. To the extent that Zack is saying ‘hey, it’s fine, you can verbally abuse me, too!’ this is not a viable solution.”
Fortunately, it seems that LessWrong generally agrees; both my suggested norms and Robbie’s suggested norms were substantially more popular than either of Zack’s weirdly impassioned defenses-of-being-a-jerk.
I guess I don’t know what you mean by “neutral norms” if you don’t mean either “the norms Duncan’s proposing, that are in line with what Julia Galef and Scott Alexander and Dan Keys and Eric Rogstad and Oliver Habryka and Vaniver and so on and so forth would do by default,” or “the norms Zack is proposing, in which you act like a dick and defend it by saying ‘it’s important to me that I be able to speak plainly and directly.’”