I think you and I disagree strongly about the base rates of threat à la Scott Alexander’s “different worlds.” From your perspective, I imagine I’m coming across like someone saying that muggings never happen, because I grew up in an affluent suburb and am typical minding that everywhere else is just like that; from my perspective, it feels like your priors are skewed similar to those of parents who are anxiously preoccupied about child abductions because of overexposure in the news, and who don’t attend to base rates.
In other words, I don’t think I disagree with your actions given high priors of threat and need-to-defend; I just disagree that those priors are appropriate.
(I note that you’ve mentioned being missed or mischaracterized several times, so I’m sensitive to the possibility that I’m addressing a stereotype that doesn’t match the real you/your real beliefs.)
But basically, the whole lens of “military unit of abused children that carry out a genocidal war” feels false/disingenuous/inappropriate to me, given my priors. Like, to look at a nerd in a community of nerds proposing a group house modeled after the aesthetic of Dragon Army and have those nodes trigger seems (to me) to be waaaaaaaay miscalibrated, just as it would be miscalibrated to hear about Uber and immediately think of coordinated kidnappings to feed sex trafficking organizations.
But you may live in a meaningfully Different World.
One interesting thing about Tumblr and the SJsphere in particular is that because its members come disproportionately from marginalized communities, it has this sort of natural prior of “people often turn out to be abusers, every situation has to be made abuser-proof or else it will be a catastrophe.” I once dated someone I knew on Tumblr who did a weird test on me where (sorry, won’t give more details) they deliberately put me in a situation where I could have abused them to see what I would do. When they told me about this months later, I was pretty offended—did I really seem so potentially abusive that I had to be specifically cleared by some procedure? And people explained to me that there’s this whole other culture where somebody being an abuser is, if not thenorm, at least high enough to worry about with everyone.
I’m not sure what percent of the population is more like me vs. more like my date. But I think there’s a failure mode where someone from a high-trust culture starts what they think is a perfectly reasonable institution, and someone from a low-trust culture says “that’s awful, you didn’t make any effort to guard against abusers!” And then the person from the high-trust culture gets angry, because they’re being accused of being a potential abuser, which to them sounds as silly as being accused of being a potential terrorist (if you told your Muslim friend you wouldn’t hang out with him without some safeguards in case he turned out to be a terrorist, my guess is he’d get pretty upset). And then the person from the low-trust culture gets angry, because the person has just dismissed out of hand (or even gotten angry about) a commonsense attempt to avoid abuse, and who but an abuser would do something like that?
In my world and my experience, there is so-close-to-literally-zero-threat from people proposing stuff like Dragon Army that it’s hard to empathize with your concerns even when I deliberately boot up empathy and think about all the times I’ve been wrong or overconfident. Ender’s Game is much more salient (to me and people like me) as a story about bright kids having a destiny and being treated with respect/given agency, and cool near-future technology, and Paying Steep Personal Costs To Literally Save The World. The specific aspects that you lift out are equally valid and present and are indeed occasionally discussed, but they’re not what naturally comes to mind. Those concerns are in the realm of terrorism, where it’s so rare that (for a median person in middle-class America) worrying about it is ~objectively wrong, as opposed to being in the realm of car accidents, where it happens to people all the time and ordinary people need to be on guard.
I think I’m getting that that’s not your experience, but I still don’t understand why. And I don’t know how to address your concerns within your perspective without spending time in a way that feels like a disproportionate waste, as well as “confessing” to dangerousness that is false in my own frame.
i.e. it feels like if I validate your concerns sufficiently to pass your ITT and then assuage them, people watching in my culture will be like, “wait. Wait wait. Why’s he talking so much about abuse and violence? Why didn’t he just dismiss that out-of-hand? Doth he protest too much? Maybe he is crazy, why else would he validate this stuff/have it so close to the forefront of his mind? I mean, normal people don’t think about/go on about all of this so much...this is a bad sign...”
Interpretive labor request: I’d like people to try to read this comment (and for that matter pretty much all my comments) under the assumption that a demon has cast a spell on me to make me word things in a way that sounds more like scapegoating than I mean, and on you to interpret them that way whenever there’s any potential ambiguity. This isn’t an excuse for failures on my part to be clear, it’s just a request. If you see ways in which the demon has tricked me, I want that information so I can fix the problem.
Duncan, thanks for the interpretive labor you’re extending. I agree that given what I seem to you to be saying, you’re in a difficult position here.
I want to restate that my threat model was not primarily that things like the Dragon Army house resort to violence. (It didn’t!) It’s more that the appeal of proposals like Dragon Army is a really bad sign about the broader culture’s coordination protocols. We live in a world where violence is increasingly being compressed into tail events. Accordingly, I’m worried about ambient cultural protocols favoring violence leading to sudden phase transitions.
I’m not claiming that you are an especially important causal node in that phase transition. I am claiming that your project’s framing was important evidence about the state of that system.
The specific problem DA exemplified to me was the conflation—again, not specific to you—of getting things done with attacking the enemy such that even projects as obviously peaceful as living well together in a house end up using a military paradigm to project seriousness. The poverty of other paradigms is deeply worrying to me. (Likewise “Rationality Dojo” in hindsight seems like a bad sign, even though I’m not particularly worried about people beating me up with rationality techniques.)
Similarly, it’s not terribly worrying to me that one person in the community, with a high level of physicality, used Punch-Bug as an example when advocating a higher harm threshold. What seemed really terrible was that with a bunch of comments already, several of them approving comments from other prominent people who I respect, no one seemed to be attending to the systemic dangers of a game institutionalizing injustice with respect to physical violence. (Possibly pretty mild, although your post was at best ambiguous to me on this point and I don’t think it’s OK to expect people to reliably round potential threats down. This is a secondary factor that substantially increased my visceral sense of threat when writing my initial comment—a sense that vagueness about the level of violence proposed felt a bit like testing the waters with plausible deniability. This is not a confident assertion that that was your intention—just, that’s how it pattern-matched to me. Again, if I believe your assurances that you’d never initiate a substantially abnormal level of violence, then I’m not worried about direct threat from you, but get a lot more worried about what the normal level of violence is likely to become within the next decade.)
Posts I’ve written about how we seem to be using fundamentally adversarial operating protocols and moving towards a war of all against all:
Noting that my salience for Ender’s Game (which I like a lot, but not like Duncan likes it) wasn’t about kids treated with respect and given agency. It’s about a system that ruthlessly manipulates and exploits and lies to those kids, especially Ender, despite it taking a huge toll on all concerned, because the world needs saving and it’s time to be the SOBs that do what it takes to get them ready and motivated, and get results. And then the sequels are about him dealing with the consequences of that, plus some Mormonism.
My real crux here is something like Bayes.
I think you and I disagree strongly about the base rates of threat à la Scott Alexander’s “different worlds.” From your perspective, I imagine I’m coming across like someone saying that muggings never happen, because I grew up in an affluent suburb and am typical minding that everywhere else is just like that; from my perspective, it feels like your priors are skewed similar to those of parents who are anxiously preoccupied about child abductions because of overexposure in the news, and who don’t attend to base rates.
In other words, I don’t think I disagree with your actions given high priors of threat and need-to-defend; I just disagree that those priors are appropriate.
(I note that you’ve mentioned being missed or mischaracterized several times, so I’m sensitive to the possibility that I’m addressing a stereotype that doesn’t match the real you/your real beliefs.)
But basically, the whole lens of “military unit of abused children that carry out a genocidal war” feels false/disingenuous/inappropriate to me, given my priors. Like, to look at a nerd in a community of nerds proposing a group house modeled after the aesthetic of Dragon Army and have those nodes trigger seems (to me) to be waaaaaaaay miscalibrated, just as it would be miscalibrated to hear about Uber and immediately think of coordinated kidnappings to feed sex trafficking organizations.
But you may live in a meaningfully Different World.
In my world and my experience, there is so-close-to-literally-zero-threat from people proposing stuff like Dragon Army that it’s hard to empathize with your concerns even when I deliberately boot up empathy and think about all the times I’ve been wrong or overconfident. Ender’s Game is much more salient (to me and people like me) as a story about bright kids having a destiny and being treated with respect/given agency, and cool near-future technology, and Paying Steep Personal Costs To Literally Save The World. The specific aspects that you lift out are equally valid and present and are indeed occasionally discussed, but they’re not what naturally comes to mind. Those concerns are in the realm of terrorism, where it’s so rare that (for a median person in middle-class America) worrying about it is ~objectively wrong, as opposed to being in the realm of car accidents, where it happens to people all the time and ordinary people need to be on guard.
I think I’m getting that that’s not your experience, but I still don’t understand why. And I don’t know how to address your concerns within your perspective without spending time in a way that feels like a disproportionate waste, as well as “confessing” to dangerousness that is false in my own frame.
i.e. it feels like if I validate your concerns sufficiently to pass your ITT and then assuage them, people watching in my culture will be like, “wait. Wait wait. Why’s he talking so much about abuse and violence? Why didn’t he just dismiss that out-of-hand? Doth he protest too much? Maybe he is crazy, why else would he validate this stuff/have it so close to the forefront of his mind? I mean, normal people don’t think about/go on about all of this so much...this is a bad sign...”
Interpretive labor request: I’d like people to try to read this comment (and for that matter pretty much all my comments) under the assumption that a demon has cast a spell on me to make me word things in a way that sounds more like scapegoating than I mean, and on you to interpret them that way whenever there’s any potential ambiguity. This isn’t an excuse for failures on my part to be clear, it’s just a request. If you see ways in which the demon has tricked me, I want that information so I can fix the problem.
Duncan, thanks for the interpretive labor you’re extending. I agree that given what I seem to you to be saying, you’re in a difficult position here.
I want to restate that my threat model was not primarily that things like the Dragon Army house resort to violence. (It didn’t!) It’s more that the appeal of proposals like Dragon Army is a really bad sign about the broader culture’s coordination protocols. We live in a world where violence is increasingly being compressed into tail events. Accordingly, I’m worried about ambient cultural protocols favoring violence leading to sudden phase transitions.
I’m not claiming that you are an especially important causal node in that phase transition. I am claiming that your project’s framing was important evidence about the state of that system.
The specific problem DA exemplified to me was the conflation—again, not specific to you—of getting things done with attacking the enemy such that even projects as obviously peaceful as living well together in a house end up using a military paradigm to project seriousness. The poverty of other paradigms is deeply worrying to me. (Likewise “Rationality Dojo” in hindsight seems like a bad sign, even though I’m not particularly worried about people beating me up with rationality techniques.)
Similarly, it’s not terribly worrying to me that one person in the community, with a high level of physicality, used Punch-Bug as an example when advocating a higher harm threshold. What seemed really terrible was that with a bunch of comments already, several of them approving comments from other prominent people who I respect, no one seemed to be attending to the systemic dangers of a game institutionalizing injustice with respect to physical violence. (Possibly pretty mild, although your post was at best ambiguous to me on this point and I don’t think it’s OK to expect people to reliably round potential threats down. This is a secondary factor that substantially increased my visceral sense of threat when writing my initial comment—a sense that vagueness about the level of violence proposed felt a bit like testing the waters with plausible deniability. This is not a confident assertion that that was your intention—just, that’s how it pattern-matched to me. Again, if I believe your assurances that you’d never initiate a substantially abnormal level of violence, then I’m not worried about direct threat from you, but get a lot more worried about what the normal level of violence is likely to become within the next decade.)
Posts I’ve written about how we seem to be using fundamentally adversarial operating protocols and moving towards a war of all against all:
Matching donation fundraisers can be harmfully dishonest
The humility argument for honesty
Against neglectedness considerations
Posts I’ve written laying out a partial model of how we seem to have wound up in a state of permanent wartime mobilization:
Talents
There is a war
Noting that my salience for Ender’s Game (which I like a lot, but not like Duncan likes it) wasn’t about kids treated with respect and given agency. It’s about a system that ruthlessly manipulates and exploits and lies to those kids, especially Ender, despite it taking a huge toll on all concerned, because the world needs saving and it’s time to be the SOBs that do what it takes to get them ready and motivated, and get results. And then the sequels are about him dealing with the consequences of that, plus some Mormonism.
And thus it is not surprising that you were resonating with both me and Ben at different times in this thread.