Hi. I’m new to LW but really enjoy the culture which is fostered here. I’ve been reading AC10 and Marginal Revolution, etc for years so I feel like ive already been heavily influenced by the LW community. A week ago I posted “America’s Invisible Graveyard: Understanding the Moral Implications of Western sanctions” which got a fare amount of pushback over how it was written as well as a lot of great comments.
In particular, people reacted poorly to my last sentence calling for us to feel shame over western sanctions. Our contemporary political climate prob is overly abscessed with shaming, and I fully understand why LW has guidelines which limit specific types of shaming. Still I think shaming has its place. I myself was shamed for posting an article which didn’t meet the guidelines of LW. This is not to say those guidelines are wrong, but I would like to hear better reasons for why particular types of shaming are out of bounds while others are welcomed. This all made me think of an old TCowen post about shame “Who should be shamed, and who not? - Marginal REVOLUTION”.
Anyways just wanted to say hello, and that I look forward to learning from you all.
Having political discussions in a way that actually allows people to focus on the issues is hard. As a result we have stronger standards on LessWrong for how to have political discussions. Doing anything that makes it even harder, like calling for shame only, is therefore bad.
Instead of focusing on the implications of the empiric claims you make about sanctions of how they kill people and don’t work for changing policy, you should have focused more on backing up the empiric claims. At the shallow level you discussed them I doubt anyone who believes that sanctions are a useful tool will be convinced. You should have likely should provide a gear-model of why they do so and if you want to convince people that there’s an academic consensus for that thesis have a lot more sources.
Hi. I’m new to LW but really enjoy the culture which is fostered here. I’ve been reading AC10 and Marginal Revolution, etc for years so I feel like ive already been heavily influenced by the LW community. A week ago I posted “America’s Invisible Graveyard: Understanding the Moral Implications of Western sanctions” which got a fare amount of pushback over how it was written as well as a lot of great comments.
In particular, people reacted poorly to my last sentence calling for us to feel shame over western sanctions. Our contemporary political climate prob is overly abscessed with shaming, and I fully understand why LW has guidelines which limit specific types of shaming. Still I think shaming has its place. I myself was shamed for posting an article which didn’t meet the guidelines of LW. This is not to say those guidelines are wrong, but I would like to hear better reasons for why particular types of shaming are out of bounds while others are welcomed. This all made me think of an old TCowen post about shame “Who should be shamed, and who not? - Marginal REVOLUTION”.
Anyways just wanted to say hello, and that I look forward to learning from you all.
-Ezra
Having political discussions in a way that actually allows people to focus on the issues is hard. As a result we have stronger standards on LessWrong for how to have political discussions. Doing anything that makes it even harder, like calling for shame only, is therefore bad.
Instead of focusing on the implications of the empiric claims you make about sanctions of how they kill people and don’t work for changing policy, you should have focused more on backing up the empiric claims. At the shallow level you discussed them I doubt anyone who believes that sanctions are a useful tool will be convinced. You should have likely should provide a gear-model of why they do so and if you want to convince people that there’s an academic consensus for that thesis have a lot more sources.