The phrase “valid minority issues” implies that their are “invalid minority issues”, which are issues that it has been decided are not real issues and should never be discussed. So how would anything ever (even in principle) move from the invalid category to the valid category? If it cannot be talked about their is no way to even have the discussion.
If medicine did hypothetically discover one day an exact shade of green that caused agonizing pain to 0.1% of the population when they saw it then I would want polices that limited the use of that shade of green for clothes and houses.
To me the cost/benefit analysis looks like this. First, downsides (-)’s.
(-) By dismissing the point without hearing the person out we might put something in the wrong bucket. (eg. “this crazy person has emailed because they hate touch screens. What a lizardman—oops, I missed the part where they said they were blind.”)
(-) We create dangerous argumentative incentives to portray our opposition as lizardmen, rather than actually putting forward a good argument against them. Because once we have them painted as lizardmen they have already lost and no one will listen to them.
(-) That one time that something really obscure is a problem for us we have to just live with it. (Does worrying about AI safety make you a lizardman? Certainly not on LW, but maybe elsewhere in the world it does)
(-) Maybe it is an easy problem to solve: the person who hates the green house is happy to pay for it to be repainted, and the house owner would prefer it was painted red but couldn’t justify the cost.
Upsides:
(+) We can save some time. That is a real saving. But I don’t know how much we save. Being ignored isn’t going to make the guy on your block chill out and stop shouting at you.
The phrase “valid minority issues” implies that their are “invalid minority issues”, which are issues that it has been decided are not real issues and should never be discussed. So how would anything ever (even in principle) move from the invalid category to the valid category? If it cannot be talked about their is no way to even have the discussion.
In your “agonizing shade of green” hypothetical, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head—the mechanism for resolving the issue is for medical providers to notice a pattern of complaints among patients about the suffering they experience from this agonizing shade of green, gather enough evidence that we can update from “this seems really unlikely to be a real issue” to “this is probably actually a serious issue for a minority of people and worth doing something about” and then creating a new social norm in which complaining about that particular shade of green is valid by default.
At some point, you’re trading off between the right of minority populations to have their rare but genuine concerns addressed, vs. the cost and side effects of fielding recreational whining and made-up complaints that service a deeper agenda. This is a fuzzy grey zone and there will be limits and tradeoffs to how sensitive and responsive we are in either direction.
The phrase “valid minority issues” implies that their are “invalid minority issues”, which are issues that it has been decided are not real issues and should never be discussed. So how would anything ever (even in principle) move from the invalid category to the valid category? If it cannot be talked about their is no way to even have the discussion.
If medicine did hypothetically discover one day an exact shade of green that caused agonizing pain to 0.1% of the population when they saw it then I would want polices that limited the use of that shade of green for clothes and houses.
To me the cost/benefit analysis looks like this. First, downsides (-)’s.
(-) By dismissing the point without hearing the person out we might put something in the wrong bucket. (eg. “this crazy person has emailed because they hate touch screens. What a lizardman—oops, I missed the part where they said they were blind.”)
(-) We create dangerous argumentative incentives to portray our opposition as lizardmen, rather than actually putting forward a good argument against them. Because once we have them painted as lizardmen they have already lost and no one will listen to them.
(-) That one time that something really obscure is a problem for us we have to just live with it. (Does worrying about AI safety make you a lizardman? Certainly not on LW, but maybe elsewhere in the world it does)
(-) Maybe it is an easy problem to solve: the person who hates the green house is happy to pay for it to be repainted, and the house owner would prefer it was painted red but couldn’t justify the cost.
Upsides:
(+) We can save some time. That is a real saving. But I don’t know how much we save. Being ignored isn’t going to make the guy on your block chill out and stop shouting at you.
I’ll refer you to another comment of mine for my opinion on this issue.
In your “agonizing shade of green” hypothetical, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head—the mechanism for resolving the issue is for medical providers to notice a pattern of complaints among patients about the suffering they experience from this agonizing shade of green, gather enough evidence that we can update from “this seems really unlikely to be a real issue” to “this is probably actually a serious issue for a minority of people and worth doing something about” and then creating a new social norm in which complaining about that particular shade of green is valid by default.
At some point, you’re trading off between the right of minority populations to have their rare but genuine concerns addressed, vs. the cost and side effects of fielding recreational whining and made-up complaints that service a deeper agenda. This is a fuzzy grey zone and there will be limits and tradeoffs to how sensitive and responsive we are in either direction.