You misunderstand the problem with cancel culture. It’s not about personal safety. The political significance of a man with a gun is not that he might shoot you, but that the credible threat to shoot lets him boss everyone else around. (Because though he doesn’t have enough bullets to shoot everybody, no one wants to step out of line first.)
If the occasional dissident is willing the bear the costs of speaking, but can’t win the argument in public despite being correct (because winning the argument in public would require one’s interlocutors to concede, which they can never do if they can’t bear the costs of speaking), then your rationalist community fails to achieve the map that reflects the territory. The problem isn’t “safety” for individuals; the problem is that your community is failing to do the thing it markets itself as doing. At that point, you should probably stop calling the thing a “rationalist community” in order to avoid confusing innocents who came to you looking for shared maps? (But you still might want to have a cool website where people talk about Bayesian statistics!)
Can you add a quoted section to this comment to help clarify what you are responding to? I don’t currently have much of an idea what point in the post you are responding to, and what it’s relevance for the discussed decision is.
Social safety is a much tougher nut to crack. [...] The prominence of cancel culture and its effects on people such as Robin Hanson and Steve Hsu have put some rationalists on edge, especially those who write (or act) publicly in a way that’s traceable to their real identity. [...] I guess cities are maybe worse on the cancel culture dimension because if you’re hidden in the middle of nowhere it’s harder for people to credibly threaten to physically attack you.
I think I still don’t get it. But maybe this isn’t super important. I don’t think I understand what your second paragraph tries to suggest, or what it has to do with the discussion or decision at hand. Maybe it’s objecting to using the phrase “rationalist community”, but the paragraph seems like it’s talking about misunderstanding the mechanism behind cancel culture, and I don’t see how those go together.
I’ll try to reword/expand here what I read Zack as saying/implying, without presently agreeing or disagreeing with it (except for one meta bit below):
“mingyuan’s post implies that the main threat from cancel culture is being personally (perhaps physically) attacked. However, the main problem with attempting to center a rationalist community in an area that is sufficiently affected by cancel culture occurs well before the point where being personally attacked is likely. The problem is that people reflexively censor what they say, in such a way that the community stops being able to coordinate on anything that is true but cancellable, or even potentially-true but cancellable.¹ This would cause arrived-at consensus about reality to be distorted in a way that no longer reflects rationalist ideals and makes the resultant community no longer worthy of² the name. Because this has such an impact, centering on individual “social safety” as described in the original post is misleading and distracting when thinking about how to defend a rationalist community from the effects of cancel culture, in that it may lead to accepting solutions that preserve such individual safety but destroy defining aspects of the community in the process.”
¹ Zack’s first comment has other references about how this can create an equilibrium that’s difficult to break, and why partial answers work poorly, but I’m not confident enough to copy those here, and I think they may have been distracting as originally interleaved with the main argument.
² I considered writing “accurately described by” instead of “worthy of” here, but I place more salience on the emotion/motivation aspect in that part of Zack’s comment.
Zack, how accurate is this? habryka, does that help?
(My read on the meta-aspect of the very first part is that I interpret the “I guess cities are maybe worse on the cancel culture dimension because if you’re hidden in the middle of nowhere it’s harder for people to credibly threaten to physically attack you.” part of mingyuan’s post as less salient, and more intended as a potentially nonrepresentative example, compared to the “But, is there anywhere, physically, that one can go to escape cancel culture? My instinct is no”, which dominates my felt-sense of that section. So (without intending to judge whether this is good or bad) I think Zack is responding at something of an angle to the thrust of the original post.)
Yes, I got that part of his post, but the second paragraph feels more like a Carthage Delenda Est Comment that doesn’t have much to do with the first point, but I am not sure, and wanted to check. Like, it says some stuff about cancel culture and if you can’t win the public argument something bad happens and that we shouldn’t even be called the “rationalist community”, but I can’t figure out what that has to do with the location discussion.
The relevance is that your decisions as part of a group’s coordination process should depend on what you think the group is actually doing in practice.
(If that sentence didn’t make sense, then please forget it and write off this thread as a waste; I started typing a parable about the Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, but on reflection, it’s probably better if I withhold further commentary on this topic until I finish a future top-level non-Frontpageable post, which has been delayed a while because I also have to finish 20,000+ words of background material that I want to publish first or concurrently. Sorry if this has been obnoxious.)
You misunderstand the problem with cancel culture. It’s not about personal safety. The political significance of a man with a gun is not that he might shoot you, but that the credible threat to shoot lets him boss everyone else around. (Because though he doesn’t have enough bullets to shoot everybody, no one wants to step out of line first.)
If the occasional dissident is willing the bear the costs of speaking, but can’t win the argument in public despite being correct (because winning the argument in public would require one’s interlocutors to concede, which they can never do if they can’t bear the costs of speaking), then your rationalist community fails to achieve the map that reflects the territory. The problem isn’t “safety” for individuals; the problem is that your community is failing to do the thing it markets itself as doing. At that point, you should probably stop calling the thing a “rationalist community” in order to avoid confusing innocents who came to you looking for shared maps? (But you still might want to have a cool website where people talk about Bayesian statistics!)
Can you add a quoted section to this comment to help clarify what you are responding to? I don’t currently have much of an idea what point in the post you are responding to, and what it’s relevance for the discussed decision is.
In response to
I think I still don’t get it. But maybe this isn’t super important. I don’t think I understand what your second paragraph tries to suggest, or what it has to do with the discussion or decision at hand. Maybe it’s objecting to using the phrase “rationalist community”, but the paragraph seems like it’s talking about misunderstanding the mechanism behind cancel culture, and I don’t see how those go together.
I’ll try to reword/expand here what I read Zack as saying/implying, without presently agreeing or disagreeing with it (except for one meta bit below):
“mingyuan’s post implies that the main threat from cancel culture is being personally (perhaps physically) attacked. However, the main problem with attempting to center a rationalist community in an area that is sufficiently affected by cancel culture occurs well before the point where being personally attacked is likely. The problem is that people reflexively censor what they say, in such a way that the community stops being able to coordinate on anything that is true but cancellable, or even potentially-true but cancellable.¹ This would cause arrived-at consensus about reality to be distorted in a way that no longer reflects rationalist ideals and makes the resultant community no longer worthy of² the name. Because this has such an impact, centering on individual “social safety” as described in the original post is misleading and distracting when thinking about how to defend a rationalist community from the effects of cancel culture, in that it may lead to accepting solutions that preserve such individual safety but destroy defining aspects of the community in the process.”
¹ Zack’s first comment has other references about how this can create an equilibrium that’s difficult to break, and why partial answers work poorly, but I’m not confident enough to copy those here, and I think they may have been distracting as originally interleaved with the main argument.
² I considered writing “accurately described by” instead of “worthy of” here, but I place more salience on the emotion/motivation aspect in that part of Zack’s comment.
Zack, how accurate is this? habryka, does that help?
(My read on the meta-aspect of the very first part is that I interpret the “I guess cities are maybe worse on the cancel culture dimension because if you’re hidden in the middle of nowhere it’s harder for people to credibly threaten to physically attack you.” part of mingyuan’s post as less salient, and more intended as a potentially nonrepresentative example, compared to the “But, is there anywhere, physically, that one can go to escape cancel culture? My instinct is no”, which dominates my felt-sense of that section. So (without intending to judge whether this is good or bad) I think Zack is responding at something of an angle to the thrust of the original post.)
Yes, I got that part of his post, but the second paragraph feels more like a Carthage Delenda Est Comment that doesn’t have much to do with the first point, but I am not sure, and wanted to check. Like, it says some stuff about cancel culture and if you can’t win the public argument something bad happens and that we shouldn’t even be called the “rationalist community”, but I can’t figure out what that has to do with the location discussion.
Not Zach, but I think he’s saying that if:
You care about rationality as one of your primary values.
And 2. You believe cancel culture is anithetical to rationality.
Then 3. You should choose a location that has less of it.
This is very different from being personally worried for your safety, which Ming rightly points out you’re not safe from anywhere.
Rather, if you think there are pernicious cultural effects antithetical to your goals, you should be evaluating on that basis.
The relevance is that your decisions as part of a group’s coordination process should depend on what you think the group is actually doing in practice.
(If that sentence didn’t make sense, then please forget it and write off this thread as a waste; I started typing a parable about the Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, but on reflection, it’s probably better if I withhold further commentary on this topic until I finish a future top-level non-Frontpageable post, which has been delayed a while because I also have to finish 20,000+ words of background material that I want to publish first or concurrently. Sorry if this has been obnoxious.)