I think there’s a core of common sense here, which is that healthy institutions shouldn’t overreact to what we might call “opinion noise.” And the way to do that is to empower authority figures to neutralize that noise (ignore it, listen and wait for them to calm down, steer them to a laborious formal dispute process, etc) and demonstrate you’ll support them against inappropriate blowback.
Resistance to “opinion noise/Lizardman” is only one of many features of institutions we might value, and I do think it’s a more nuanced and difficult problem than simply scaling response according the popularity of the opinion. But Duncan said he’s relying on the reader to fill in the gaps with common sense, so I’m trying to do that here.
I think there’s a core of common sense here, which is that healthy institutions shouldn’t overreact to what we might call “opinion noise.” And the way to do that is to empower authority figures to neutralize that noise (ignore it, listen and wait for them to calm down, steer them to a laborious formal dispute process, etc) and demonstrate you’ll support them against inappropriate blowback.
Resistance to “opinion noise/Lizardman” is only one of many features of institutions we might value, and I do think it’s a more nuanced and difficult problem than simply scaling response according the popularity of the opinion. But Duncan said he’s relying on the reader to fill in the gaps with common sense, so I’m trying to do that here.