They all attack the opponent with something else than an argument, be it physical or not.
And what, precisely, is an “attack”? Can you taboo that word and give a pretty precise definition, so we know what does and doesn’t count?
I’ve seen people on the Internet use words like “bullying”, “harassment”, “violence”, “abuse”, etc. to refer to stuff like ‘disagreeing with my political opinions’.
(The logic being, e.g.: “Anti-Semites have historically killed people like me. I claim that political opinion X (e.g., about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) is anti-Semitic. Therefore you expressing your opinion is (1) a thing I should reasonably take as a veiled threat against me and an attempt to bully and harass me, and (2) a thing that will embolden anti-Semites and thereby further endanger me.”)
I’m not saying that this reasoning makes sense, or that we should totally avoid words like “bullying” because they get overused in a lot of places. But I do take stuff like this as a warning sign about what can happen if you start building your social norms around vague concepts.
I’d rather have norms that either mention extremely specific concrete things that aren’t up for interpretation (see how much more concrete “death threats” is than “bullying”), or that mention higher-level features shared by lots of different bad behavior (e.g., “avoid symmetric weapons”).
And what, precisely, is an “attack”? Can you taboo that word and give a pretty precise definition, so we know what does and doesn’t count?
How about “hurting a person or deminishing their credibility, or the credibility of their argument, without using a rational argument”? This would make it acceptable when people get hurt by rational arguments, or when their credibility is diminished by such an argument. The problem seems to be when this is achieved by something else than a rational argument.
Maybe this is not the perfect definition of the cluster which includes both physical violence and non-physical aggression, but the pure “physical violence” cluster seems in any case arbitrary. E.g. social ostracization can be far more damaging than a punch in the guts, and both are bad as a response to an argument insofar they are not themselves forms of argument.
I’ve seen people on the Internet use words like “bullying”, “harassment”, “violence”, “abuse”, etc. to refer to stuff like ‘disagreeing with my political opinions’.
Yes, people do that, but them confusing disagreement with bullying doesn’t mean disagreement is bullying. And the fact that disagreement is okay doesn’t mean that bullying, mockery, etc. is a valid discourse strategy.
Moreover, the speaker can identify actions like mockery by introspection, so avoiding it doesn’t rely on the capabilities of the listener to distinguish it from disagreement. The vagueness objection seems to assume the perspective of the listener, but rule 2 applies to us in our role as speakers. It recommends what we should say or do, not how we should interpret others. (Of course, there could be an additional rule which says that we, as listeners, shouldn’t be quick to dismiss mere disagreements as personal attacks.)
How about “hurting a person or deminishing their credibility, or the credibility of their argument, without using a rational argument”?
“Hurting a person” still seems too vague to me (sometimes people are “hurt” just because you disagreed with them on a claim of fact), “Diminishing… the credibility of their argument, without using a rational argument” sounds similar to “using symmetric weapons” to me (but the latter strikes me as more precise and general: don’t try to persuade people via tools that aren’t Bayesian evidence for the truth of the thing you’re trying to persuade them of).
“A rational argument”, I worry, is too vague here, and will make people think that all rationalist conversation as to look like their mental picture of Spock-style discourse.
The problem seems to be when this is achieved by something else than a rational argument.
A lot of things can hurt people’s feelings other than rational arguments, and I don’t think the person causing the hurt is always at fault for those things. (E.g., maybe I beat someone at a video game and this upset them.)
but the pure “physical violence” cluster seems in any case arbitrary. E.g. social ostracization can be far more damaging than a punch in the guts, and both are bad as a response to an argument insofar they are not themselves forms of argument.
The point of separating out physical violence isn’t to say “this is the worst thing you can do to someone”. It’s to draw a clear black line around a case that’s especially easy to rule completely out of bounds. We’ve made at least some progress thereby, and it would be a mistake to throw out this progress just because it doesn’t solve every other problem; don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Other sorts of actions can be worse than some forms of physical violence consequentially, but there isn’t a good sharp black line in every case for clearly verbally transmitting what those out-of-bound actions are. See also my reply to DragonGod.
Even “this is at least as harmful as a punch in the gut” isn’t a good pointer, since some people are extremely emotionally brittle and can be put in severe pain with very minor social slights. I think it’s virtuous to try to help those people flourish, but I don’t want to claim that a rationalist has done a Terrible Thing if they ever do something that makes someone that upset; it depends on the situation.
I feel specifically uncomfortable with leaning on the phrase “social ostracization” here, because it’s so vague, and the way you’re talking about it makes it sound like you want rationalists to be individually responsible for making every human on Earth feel happy, welcome, and accepted in the rat community. “Ostracization” seems clearly bad to me if it looks like bullying and harassment, but sometimes “ostracizing” just means banning someone from an Internet forum, and I think banning is often prosocial.
(Including banning someone because of an argument! If someone keeps posting off-topic arguments, feel free to ban.)
“Hurting a person” still seems too vague to me (sometimes people are “hurt” just because you disagreed with them on a claim of fact),
Even “this is at least as harmful as a punch in the gut” isn’t a good pointer, since some people are extremely emotionally brittle and can be put in severe pain with very minor social slights. I think it’s virtuous to try to help those people flourish, but I don’t want to claim that a rationalist has done a Terrible Thing if they ever do something that makes someone that upset; it depends on the situation.
As I said, if someone feels upset by mere disagreement, that’s not a violation of a rational discourse norm.
The focus on physical violence is nice insofar violence is halfway clear-cut, but is also fairly useless insofar the badness of violence is obvious to most people (unlike things like bullying, bad-faith mockery, moral grandstanding, etc which are very common), and mostly irrelevant in internet discussions without physical contact, where most irrational discourse is happening nowadays, very nonviolently.
I feel specifically uncomfortable with leaning on the phrase “social ostracization” here, because it’s so vague, and the way you’re talking about it makes it sound like you want rationalists to be individually responsible for making every human on Earth feel happy, welcome, and accepted in the rat community.
That seems to me an uncharitable interpretation. Social ostracization is prototypically something which happens e.g. when someone gets cancelled by a Twitter mob. “Mob” insofar those people don’t use rational arguments to attack you, even if “attacking you without using arguments” can’t be defined perfectly precisely. (Something like the Bostrom witch-hunt on Twitter, which included outright defamation, but hardly any arguments.)
If you would consequently shun vagueness, then you couldn’t even discourage violence, because the difference between violence and non-violence is gradual, it likewise admits of borderline cases. But since violence is bad despite borderline cases, the borderline cases and exceptions you cited also don’t seem very serious. You never get perfectly precise definitions. And you have to embrace some more vagueness than in the case of violence, unless you want to refer only to a tiny subset of irrational discourse.
By the way, I would say banning/blocking is irrational when it is done in response to disagreement (often people on Twitter ban other people who merely disagree with them) and acceptable when off-topic or purely harassment. Sometimes there are borderline cases which lie in between, those are grey areas where blocking may be neither clearly bad nor clearly acceptable, but such grey areas are in no way counterexamples to the clear-cut cases.
And what, precisely, is an “attack”? Can you taboo that word and give a pretty precise definition, so we know what does and doesn’t count?
I’ve seen people on the Internet use words like “bullying”, “harassment”, “violence”, “abuse”, etc. to refer to stuff like ‘disagreeing with my political opinions’.
(The logic being, e.g.: “Anti-Semites have historically killed people like me. I claim that political opinion X (e.g., about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) is anti-Semitic. Therefore you expressing your opinion is (1) a thing I should reasonably take as a veiled threat against me and an attempt to bully and harass me, and (2) a thing that will embolden anti-Semites and thereby further endanger me.”)
I’m not saying that this reasoning makes sense, or that we should totally avoid words like “bullying” because they get overused in a lot of places. But I do take stuff like this as a warning sign about what can happen if you start building your social norms around vague concepts.
I’d rather have norms that either mention extremely specific concrete things that aren’t up for interpretation (see how much more concrete “death threats” is than “bullying”), or that mention higher-level features shared by lots of different bad behavior (e.g., “avoid symmetric weapons”).
How about “hurting a person or deminishing their credibility, or the credibility of their argument, without using a rational argument”? This would make it acceptable when people get hurt by rational arguments, or when their credibility is diminished by such an argument. The problem seems to be when this is achieved by something else than a rational argument.
Maybe this is not the perfect definition of the cluster which includes both physical violence and non-physical aggression, but the pure “physical violence” cluster seems in any case arbitrary. E.g. social ostracization can be far more damaging than a punch in the guts, and both are bad as a response to an argument insofar they are not themselves forms of argument.
Yes, people do that, but them confusing disagreement with bullying doesn’t mean disagreement is bullying. And the fact that disagreement is okay doesn’t mean that bullying, mockery, etc. is a valid discourse strategy.
Moreover, the speaker can identify actions like mockery by introspection, so avoiding it doesn’t rely on the capabilities of the listener to distinguish it from disagreement. The vagueness objection seems to assume the perspective of the listener, but rule 2 applies to us in our role as speakers. It recommends what we should say or do, not how we should interpret others. (Of course, there could be an additional rule which says that we, as listeners, shouldn’t be quick to dismiss mere disagreements as personal attacks.)
“Hurting a person” still seems too vague to me (sometimes people are “hurt” just because you disagreed with them on a claim of fact), “Diminishing… the credibility of their argument, without using a rational argument” sounds similar to “using symmetric weapons” to me (but the latter strikes me as more precise and general: don’t try to persuade people via tools that aren’t Bayesian evidence for the truth of the thing you’re trying to persuade them of).
“A rational argument”, I worry, is too vague here, and will make people think that all rationalist conversation as to look like their mental picture of Spock-style discourse.
A lot of things can hurt people’s feelings other than rational arguments, and I don’t think the person causing the hurt is always at fault for those things. (E.g., maybe I beat someone at a video game and this upset them.)
The point of separating out physical violence isn’t to say “this is the worst thing you can do to someone”. It’s to draw a clear black line around a case that’s especially easy to rule completely out of bounds. We’ve made at least some progress thereby, and it would be a mistake to throw out this progress just because it doesn’t solve every other problem; don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Other sorts of actions can be worse than some forms of physical violence consequentially, but there isn’t a good sharp black line in every case for clearly verbally transmitting what those out-of-bound actions are. See also my reply to DragonGod.
Even “this is at least as harmful as a punch in the gut” isn’t a good pointer, since some people are extremely emotionally brittle and can be put in severe pain with very minor social slights. I think it’s virtuous to try to help those people flourish, but I don’t want to claim that a rationalist has done a Terrible Thing if they ever do something that makes someone that upset; it depends on the situation.
I feel specifically uncomfortable with leaning on the phrase “social ostracization” here, because it’s so vague, and the way you’re talking about it makes it sound like you want rationalists to be individually responsible for making every human on Earth feel happy, welcome, and accepted in the rat community. “Ostracization” seems clearly bad to me if it looks like bullying and harassment, but sometimes “ostracizing” just means banning someone from an Internet forum, and I think banning is often prosocial.
(Including banning someone because of an argument! If someone keeps posting off-topic arguments, feel free to ban.)
As I said, if someone feels upset by mere disagreement, that’s not a violation of a rational discourse norm.
The focus on physical violence is nice insofar violence is halfway clear-cut, but is also fairly useless insofar the badness of violence is obvious to most people (unlike things like bullying, bad-faith mockery, moral grandstanding, etc which are very common), and mostly irrelevant in internet discussions without physical contact, where most irrational discourse is happening nowadays, very nonviolently.
That seems to me an uncharitable interpretation. Social ostracization is prototypically something which happens e.g. when someone gets cancelled by a Twitter mob. “Mob” insofar those people don’t use rational arguments to attack you, even if “attacking you without using arguments” can’t be defined perfectly precisely. (Something like the Bostrom witch-hunt on Twitter, which included outright defamation, but hardly any arguments.)
If you would consequently shun vagueness, then you couldn’t even discourage violence, because the difference between violence and non-violence is gradual, it likewise admits of borderline cases. But since violence is bad despite borderline cases, the borderline cases and exceptions you cited also don’t seem very serious. You never get perfectly precise definitions. And you have to embrace some more vagueness than in the case of violence, unless you want to refer only to a tiny subset of irrational discourse.
By the way, I would say banning/blocking is irrational when it is done in response to disagreement (often people on Twitter ban other people who merely disagree with them) and acceptable when off-topic or purely harassment. Sometimes there are borderline cases which lie in between, those are grey areas where blocking may be neither clearly bad nor clearly acceptable, but such grey areas are in no way counterexamples to the clear-cut cases.