Black swan events are not something I’m meaningfully including in my assessment of the risks. If there’s risks from black swans, and there do seem to be from e.g. bgaesop’s case, that’s on top of the risk from standard cases which is already substantial.
You would not notice most cases of harm, and I’m not sure why you think you would. I’d guess that only half or so of cases of harm (large error bars, roughly 5:1 to 1:5) are noticed by the person affected in a way that allows them to connect the emotional damage to the Circle (probably as a merely substantial contributor rather than a sole contributor; many causes is the norm for this kind of thing), and even those aren’t necessarily noticed immediately. The rest are likely to manifest as unease or nonspecific feelings of wrongness around the Circle, the people who were in it, that day, etc.; as misgivings about something tangentially related; or in no internally-legible way at all, just low-level anxiety/depression or worsening of issues that already existed. In other words, I would expect harm to present exactly like a mild social trauma, because that’s precisely what it is.
And the people most likely to be willing to try Circling are those who least need it and in fact need the opposite.
This feels like a fairly strong claim that I don’t think you’ve justified.
Black swan events are not something I’m meaningfully including in my assessment of the risks. If there’s risks from black swans, and there do seem to be from e.g. bgaesop’s case, that’s on top of the risk from standard cases which is already substantial.
You would not notice most cases of harm, and I’m not sure why you think you would. I’d guess that only half or so of cases of harm (large error bars, roughly 5:1 to 1:5) are noticed by the person affected in a way that allows them to connect the emotional damage to the Circle (probably as a merely substantial contributor rather than a sole contributor; many causes is the norm for this kind of thing), and even those aren’t necessarily noticed immediately. The rest are likely to manifest as unease or nonspecific feelings of wrongness around the Circle, the people who were in it, that day, etc.; as misgivings about something tangentially related; or in no internally-legible way at all, just low-level anxiety/depression or worsening of issues that already existed. In other words, I would expect harm to present exactly like a mild social trauma, because that’s precisely what it is.
I guess it’s a strong claim, but it’s the standard prior on advice, cf. All Debates Are Bravery Debates, The Loudest Alarm is Probably False, and leverage points in systems analysis. People’s biases for psychological interventions tend to be anticorrelated with how much they’re needed.
(quick note to avoid doublecounting: bgaesop’s black swan is the same one as mine)