Robin seems to have run smack into the reasonably obvious “slavery is bad, so anything that could be seen as justifying slavery, or excusing slavery, is also bad to say even if true” thing. It’s not that he isn’t sincere, it’s that it seems like he should have figured this one out by now. I am confused by his confusion, and wish he’d spend his points more efficiently.
The Asymmetric Justice model whereby you are as bad as the worst thing you’ve done would seem to cover this reasonably well at first glance—“Owned a slave” is very bad, and “Owned a slave but didn’t force them into it” doesn’t score a different number of points because “Owned a slave” is the salient biggest bad in addition to or rather than “Forced someone into slavery.”
There’s also the enrichment that, past a certain point, things just get marked as ‘evil’ or ‘bad’ and in many contexts, past that point, it doesn’t matter, because you score points by condemning them and are guilty along side them if you defend them, and pointing out truth counts as defending, and lies or bad arguments against them count as condemning. But that all seems… elementary? Is any of this non-obvious? Actually asking.
Pretty sure the only interesting thing here is twitter and how it puts different cultures with different ideas of what count as norm violations into a big room with each other and how this doesn’t lead to tolerance but instead leads to interminable anger and slap-downs, due to enough people thinking their own norms are ‘obvious’ and not ‘optimised for a particular environment’. Friend groups and scientists and journalists and businesspeople applying their areas’ norms to each other 100% of the time? Ugh.
Robin seems to have run smack into the reasonably obvious “slavery is bad, so anything that could be seen as justifying slavery, or excusing slavery, is also bad to say even if true” thing. It’s not that he isn’t sincere, it’s that it seems like he should have figured this one out by now. I am confused by his confusion, and wish he’d spend his points more efficiently.
The Asymmetric Justice model whereby you are as bad as the worst thing you’ve done would seem to cover this reasonably well at first glance—“Owned a slave” is very bad, and “Owned a slave but didn’t force them into it” doesn’t score a different number of points because “Owned a slave” is the salient biggest bad in addition to or rather than “Forced someone into slavery.”
There’s also the enrichment that, past a certain point, things just get marked as ‘evil’ or ‘bad’ and in many contexts, past that point, it doesn’t matter, because you score points by condemning them and are guilty along side them if you defend them, and pointing out truth counts as defending, and lies or bad arguments against them count as condemning. But that all seems… elementary? Is any of this non-obvious? Actually asking.
Pretty sure the only interesting thing here is twitter and how it puts different cultures with different ideas of what count as norm violations into a big room with each other and how this doesn’t lead to tolerance but instead leads to interminable anger and slap-downs, due to enough people thinking their own norms are ‘obvious’ and not ‘optimised for a particular environment’. Friend groups and scientists and journalists and businesspeople applying their areas’ norms to each other 100% of the time? Ugh.