Thanks for clarifying. By “policy” and “standards” and “compelled speech” I thought you meant something more than community norms and customs. This is traditionally an important distinction to libertarians and free speech advocates. I think the distinction carves reality at the joints, and I hope you agree. I agree that community norms and customs can be unwelcoming.
Yes, it’s not a law, so it’s not a libertarian issue. As I said earlier:
Any community is free to have whatever standards they want for membership, including politically-coded compelled speech. But it is not exactly shocking if your membership is then composed 70% of one side and <2% of the other.
By “compelled speech” being a standard for community membership, I just meant “You are required to say certain things or you will be excluded from the community.” For instance, as jefftk pointed out,
The EA Forum has an explicit policy that you need to use the pronouns the people you’re talking about prefer.
I saw the the EA Forum’s policy. If someone repeatedly and deliberately misgenders on the EA Forum they will be banned from that forum. But you don’t need to post on the EA Forum at all in order to be part of the rationalist community. On the provided evidence, it is false that:
You are required to say certain things or you will be excluded from the community.
I want people of all political beliefs, including US conservative-coded beliefs, to feel welcome in the rationalist community. It’s important to that goal to distinguish between policies and norms, because changing policies requires a different process to changing norms, and because policies and norms are unwelcoming in different ways and to different extents.
It’s because of that goal that I’m encouraging you to change these incorrect/misleading/unclear statements. If newcomers incorrectly believe that they are required to say certain things or they will be excluded from the community, then they will feel less welcome, for nothing. Let’s avoid that.
I don’t have a bunch of citations but I spend time in multiple rationalist social spaces and it seems to me that I would in fact be excluded from many of them if I stuck to sex-based pronouns, because as stated above there are many trans people in the community, of whom many hold to the consensus progressive norms on this. The EA Forum policy is not unrepresentative of the typical sentiment.
So I don’t agree that the statements are misleading.
(I note that my typical habit is to use singular they for visibly NB/trans people, and I am not excluded for that. So it’s not precisely a kind of compelled speech.)
I disagree that his statements are misleading: the impression someone who believed them true would have is far more accurate than someone who believed them false. Is that not more relevant, and a better measure of honesty, than whether or not they’re “incorrect”?
Thanks for clarifying. By “policy” and “standards” and “compelled speech” I thought you meant something more than community norms and customs. This is traditionally an important distinction to libertarians and free speech advocates. I think the distinction carves reality at the joints, and I hope you agree. I agree that community norms and customs can be unwelcoming.
Yes, it’s not a law, so it’s not a libertarian issue. As I said earlier:
By “compelled speech” being a standard for community membership, I just meant “You are required to say certain things or you will be excluded from the community.” For instance, as jefftk pointed out,
I saw the the EA Forum’s policy. If someone repeatedly and deliberately misgenders on the EA Forum they will be banned from that forum. But you don’t need to post on the EA Forum at all in order to be part of the rationalist community. On the provided evidence, it is false that:
I want people of all political beliefs, including US conservative-coded beliefs, to feel welcome in the rationalist community. It’s important to that goal to distinguish between policies and norms, because changing policies requires a different process to changing norms, and because policies and norms are unwelcoming in different ways and to different extents.
It’s because of that goal that I’m encouraging you to change these incorrect/misleading/unclear statements. If newcomers incorrectly believe that they are required to say certain things or they will be excluded from the community, then they will feel less welcome, for nothing. Let’s avoid that.
I don’t have a bunch of citations but I spend time in multiple rationalist social spaces and it seems to me that I would in fact be excluded from many of them if I stuck to sex-based pronouns, because as stated above there are many trans people in the community, of whom many hold to the consensus progressive norms on this. The EA Forum policy is not unrepresentative of the typical sentiment.
So I don’t agree that the statements are misleading.
(I note that my typical habit is to use singular they for visibly NB/trans people, and I am not excluded for that. So it’s not precisely a kind of compelled speech.)
I disagree that his statements are misleading: the impression someone who believed them true would have is far more accurate than someone who believed them false. Is that not more relevant, and a better measure of honesty, than whether or not they’re “incorrect”?