Why would getting to punch other people be compensation for being punched, then? In what way is someone who doesn’t enjoy that deriving a benefit from it?
I get that part. Yes, the Punch Bug game is disparately impactful against those who value not-being-punched more than they value getting-to-punch, especially if they value getting-to-punch at zero. You could say the same about many things, such as throwing loud parties.
That said, I think there’s an important difference between a policy chosen in spite of the fact that it harms some people, and one chosen because of that fact. Yes, the latter has been known to masquerade as the former, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here (this is what I proposed as a crux). I also think that policies that tend to harm a preexisting group are suspect in a way that ones that harm an essentially-random set of people aren’t. “People who don’t want to punch and be punched” isn’t a random group, but it’s also nowhere near as suspect a group as “Jews” (maybe this is our crux?).
With those mitigating factors in place, allowing Punch Bug seems to me more like allowing loud parties and less like declaring a day of pogroms. The only thing that aligns it with the pogroms is the involvement of physical violence—and even then, I’d suspect most people would plot ‘punch in the arm’ closer to ‘annoyingly loud music’ than to ‘mass murder’ on the scale of harms. It’s only because we as a society draw a line in the sand at nonconsensual physical violence that the punch is in any sense closer to the murder. But this line in the sand is exactly what Duncan is asking us to reconsider, and I don’t think you intend to say there’s no way to reconsider that line without setting off the mass-murder alarms (unless you do… a third possible crux).
(And to be clear, none of the above conflicts with doing a cost-benefit analysis and saying Punch Bug is a bad idea overall. IMO playing the game by default is dubious at best, and making opt-out onerous or impossible is a terrible idea. Duncan seems to have missed the fact that the vast majority of people age out of the game for reasons unrelated to his thesis. I could go on...)
The only thing that aligns it with the pogroms is the involvement of physical violence—and even then, I’d suspect most people would plot ‘punch in the arm’ closer to ‘annoyingly loud music’ than to ‘mass murder’ on the scale of harms.
A friend of mine recently suffered a concussion after being punched on the street. It was cognitively compromising for a couple of weeks. Maybe you just think he’s oversensitive and that if he got concussed more often he’d learn to just roll with it, but if you’re willing to accept for the sake of argument that perhaps a particularly hard punch can cause substantial physical injury worth worrying about, it seems pretty bad to play a game that trains people not to react to street assault.
Also, loud parties generally don’t come with a no-loudback rule.
“A punch” and “a punch in the arm” are quite different, largely in that the latter is unlikely to cause brain injury.
(Posted early by accident, ETA:)
That said, I get the argument about training people to ignore street violence. I’m a bit doubtful of the effect size here, given that I think there are clear markers of a friendly hit, but I could be persuaded otherwise.
As for no loudback: suppose a neighborhood had a policy against loud noise unless you register a party. Only one party can be registered per night. Registration is first come first served. Tell me how this “no loudback” role changes anything?
Alternatively, would you withdraw your objection if the game were “punch bug maybe punch back”, where the punched party is allowed to return the punch if they wish?
suppose a neighborhood had a policy against loud noise unless you register a party. Only one party can be registered per night. Registration is first come first served. Tell me how this “no loudback” role changes anything?
That seems like a really weird policy for a neighborhood to have, given diminishing marginal cost of noisy parties, and I’d be really confused about what incentive gradient they were following. I don’t currently see a way that would be a problem, though.
(NOTE: The interpretive framework I just used is the one that generates the objection to “punch bug.” Rules aren’t totally arbitrary; they’re things particular people institute and enforce for particular reasons in particular contexts, and this—and how they play out—contains important information beyond the formal content of the rule!)
Part of the difference is that retaliatory violence is part of how people police their boundaries. If you’re not allowed to opt out, and you’re not allowed to punch back, then there’s no interface by which to do that. Likewise, for something I don’t mind so much, and definitely don’t consider to be violent for the most part: I’m all for chilling out about casual touch among people who interact repeatedly, but it would be pretty terrible if people who aren’t up for that couldn’t opt out except in their ghettoes. [ETA: Duncan strongly disputes the “ghetto” characterization. I don’t see how else the “safe spaces” proposal would work out, but “ghetto” is an inference I’m drawing, not the literal text of the OP.]
Alternatively, would you withdraw your objection if the game were “punch bug maybe punch back”, where the punched party is allowed to return the punch if they wish?
I wouldn’t like that proposal, I would still object to it, but it wouldn’t seem terrifyingly creepy in the same way. It would just seem a bit unpleasant.
It might help if you pointed at the groups you think the asymmetry is between, as I suspect you and SilentCal are imagining different lines here.
I think you see the asymmetry as being between “people who want to punch others” and “people who don’t want to punch others,” as only the first group sees any possible value from punch bug (in the short term*), and SilentCal sees the two people as “the person who saw the bug first” and “the person who didn’t see it,” where the only asymmetries are related to people’s abilities to spot bugs (and thus playing punch bug with the blind would raise these sorts of symmetry concerns).
*There are purported long-term benefits of playing the game, that Duncan describes in his post; in particular, it seems likely to make people more likely to notice cars of a particular type. You could use this to your benefit, as in the case where you’re attempting to get better at noticing motorcycles on the road, because you think that’ll make it less likely that you get into an accident with them, by playing a modified version of punch bug based on that thing.
Indeed, I note that lots of rationalist conversation norms fail to mesh with other conversational norms because rationalists are playing something like punch bug where the equivalent of the Volkswagen are various patterns of reasoning or argument. (“Why are you being mean to me?” “I was just pointing out an error in your thinking—you should feel free to do the same to me too.” “But that only makes sense as a deal if I want the ability to be mean to you with this sort of ‘no criticize back’ rule.”)
Probably best to taboo ‘asymmetric’ at this point. Based on your example I thought it meant “explicitly discriminatory” and not just “disparately impactful”.
Ah, cool. I only read the immediate comment you were replying to in detail, and when I used CTRL+F I had a space after “all”, which didn’t catch the original.
You could say the same about many things, such as throwing loud parties.
You could indeed, which is why throwing loud parties in residential areas without adequate soundproofing (i.e., disturbing your neighbors with your noise) is also very unethical.
What I’m trying to figure out is what important qualitative trait Punch Bug shares with a day of pogroms, that an absence of noise ordinances doesn’t also share. (All three of these things share the traits of being bad policy, and of hurting some more than others)
‘Involvement of physical violence’ is one such trait, and you could build a colorable argument that we shouldn’t encourage even small amounts of physical violence, but I didn’t think that was Benquo’s whole argument.
Other than that, there’s the no-punch-back thing. I guess I just don’t get the significance of the distinction between a punch back on the spot (which the game forbids), and a punch back later when you see a Beetle (which the game encourages). The latter is more annoying to use as a form of deterrence, sure, but not impossible.
The no-punchback rule is really the main thing for me, especially in conjunction the “it sure seems like you’re playing” no-opt-out rule and the proposal that “we” ghettoize people who don’t want to participate. If Duncan were just saying people should get into friendly fights more often, I wouldn’t like the proposal, but I don’t think it would be terrifyingly creepy to me.
Additionally sketchy is the way this was folded into a long and otherwise-reasonable discussion of why we should chill out about casual infliction of minor harms on others in the course of preference-discovery, as though these were the same thing.
[ETA (by Ben): Duncan strongly disputes the “ghetto” characterization. I don’t see how else the “safe spaces” proposal would work out, but “ghetto” is an inference I’m drawing, not the literal text of the OP.]
So I definitely will join you in condemning the no-opt-out rule. The ghettoization proposal… honestly, I think it was too absurd to me to even generate a coherent image, but if I try to force my imagination to produce one it’s pretty horrible.
I’m not sure I see the folding-in problem as keenly as you do. I read Duncan as saying “there’s a problem in that we freak out too much about accidental micro harms. My proposed solution is a framework of intentional micro-harms”. The first part is on firmer ground than the second, but I don’t think it’s illegitimate to pair them.
And it’s the deep creepiness of the no-punchback rule that I mainly don’t get. Like, if the puncher only said “Punch Bug”, and the possibility of a punch back were not discussed, I think the default assumption would be that a punch back is forbidden. That’s pretty what it means for the original punch to be socially sanctioned. Making the “no punch back” part explicit is, I guess, rubbing the punchee’s face in that fact? Is the face-rubbing the problem?
Wait, maybe I get it? Is the terrifying scenario being envisioned, essentially that of a bully saying, “I’m hurting you. For fun. And I’ve found a socially-sanctioned way to do it, so you’re beyond the reach of the forces you normally count on to prevent that!”
Perhaps thinking of ‘bullies’ as a group is the key insight here? I don’t believe Punch Bug is primarily a form of bullying, but the *marginal* impact of banning opt-out *is* mostly to facilitate bullying. That, I could get being deeply creeped out by.
The ghettoization proposal… honestly, I think it was too absurd to me to even generate a coherent image, but if I try to force my imagination to produce one it’s pretty horrible.
This is actually a huge part of what I was upset about, and it’s really helpful to have you make that explicit: The fact that no one else seems to have bothered to take the initiative to concretely visualize this proposal and respond to the implications of its literal content. And then, when I tried to point out the problem by pointing out a structural analogy to a thing there’s some agreement is bad, a mod criticized me for doing that. Which is, itself, a sort of epistemic “no punch-back” rule.
It’s not so much that “bully” is a natural group now, as that proposals like this make that particular division—between people who like punching people with no punchback and people who don’t take initiative in that sort of game—more salient, and create a visible minority group that’s fair game for (initially mild) abuse by the punching caste. (The “safe space” proposal made that really, really obvious to me once I noticed it.)
Jews are interesting because they’re a cultural and ethnic group that actually does noticeably resemble punchbug noninitiators. For just under two millennia, the Jewish strategy was to basically assume that while they’d face the occasional damage from a crusade or pogrom or expulsion from a country, this was an acceptable rate of loss, and keeping a low profile and mostly not bothering people would be a better deal than fighting back ad hoc, which would most likely lead to much more organized persecution by the authorities, or trying to create a nation-state, which would both require them to engage in organized violence (which is very much neither fun nor productive) and make them a more obvious target (this strategic shift was a response to three successive failed rebellions against the Roman empire). The 20th Century was pretty strong evidence that in the modern world this is not a reliably stable or sustainable arrangement, as about a third of Jews worldwide were rounded up and murdered within a single generation.
What I’m trying to figure out is what important qualitative trait Punch Bug shares with a day of pogroms, that an absence of noise ordinances doesn’t also share.
Why assume that there is such a thing? (Or, even if there is, that it would be relevant to the objections/discussion at hand?) One person’s modus tollens is another’s modus ponens; having loud parties (which is the comparable act, by the way—not “absence of noise ordinances”) is lower on the scale, but I see no reason to presuppose that it’s qualitatively different. (Maybe it is, but the assumption is unwarranted until justified.)
I guess I just don’t get the significance of the distinction between a punch back on the spot (which the game forbids), and a punch back later when you see a Beetle (which the game encourages).
The distinction is very simple:
Unilateral imposition of rules.
It doesn’t matter what specific rule you decide to impose on me, in what specific way you choose to limit my actions; the fact remains that you, unilaterally, at your whim, have decided that you have the right to dictate to me what actions I can and cannot take—taking that right away from me.
That cannot be allowed. It is a naked power grab (and its arbitrariness is, of course, not incidental, but in fact central; it demonstrates your ability to impose any rule you like). The only strategically justifiable (from a personal standpoint) and ethical (from a community/societal standpoint) response is to fight back, immediately and forcefully. Failure to do so results in the quick erosion in practice of rights and of autonomy.
I took Benquo to be saying there was such a qualitative difference. I already agree there are lots of reasons Duncan’s proposal would likely do more harm than good.
Unilateral imposition of rules.
What Duncan is proposing is a general societal agreement to allow the Punch Bug game, on a dubious but IMO sincerely-held theory that this would be to the general benefit. It’s no more a unilateral imposition than a law you voted against.
Why would getting to punch other people be compensation for being punched, then? In what way is someone who doesn’t enjoy that deriving a benefit from it?
I get that part. Yes, the Punch Bug game is disparately impactful against those who value not-being-punched more than they value getting-to-punch, especially if they value getting-to-punch at zero. You could say the same about many things, such as throwing loud parties.
That said, I think there’s an important difference between a policy chosen in spite of the fact that it harms some people, and one chosen because of that fact. Yes, the latter has been known to masquerade as the former, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here (this is what I proposed as a crux). I also think that policies that tend to harm a preexisting group are suspect in a way that ones that harm an essentially-random set of people aren’t. “People who don’t want to punch and be punched” isn’t a random group, but it’s also nowhere near as suspect a group as “Jews” (maybe this is our crux?).
With those mitigating factors in place, allowing Punch Bug seems to me more like allowing loud parties and less like declaring a day of pogroms. The only thing that aligns it with the pogroms is the involvement of physical violence—and even then, I’d suspect most people would plot ‘punch in the arm’ closer to ‘annoyingly loud music’ than to ‘mass murder’ on the scale of harms. It’s only because we as a society draw a line in the sand at nonconsensual physical violence that the punch is in any sense closer to the murder. But this line in the sand is exactly what Duncan is asking us to reconsider, and I don’t think you intend to say there’s no way to reconsider that line without setting off the mass-murder alarms (unless you do… a third possible crux).
(And to be clear, none of the above conflicts with doing a cost-benefit analysis and saying Punch Bug is a bad idea overall. IMO playing the game by default is dubious at best, and making opt-out onerous or impossible is a terrible idea. Duncan seems to have missed the fact that the vast majority of people age out of the game for reasons unrelated to his thesis. I could go on...)
A friend of mine recently suffered a concussion after being punched on the street. It was cognitively compromising for a couple of weeks. Maybe you just think he’s oversensitive and that if he got concussed more often he’d learn to just roll with it, but if you’re willing to accept for the sake of argument that perhaps a particularly hard punch can cause substantial physical injury worth worrying about, it seems pretty bad to play a game that trains people not to react to street assault.
Also, loud parties generally don’t come with a no-loudback rule.
“A punch” and “a punch in the arm” are quite different, largely in that the latter is unlikely to cause brain injury.
(Posted early by accident, ETA:)
That said, I get the argument about training people to ignore street violence. I’m a bit doubtful of the effect size here, given that I think there are clear markers of a friendly hit, but I could be persuaded otherwise.
As for no loudback: suppose a neighborhood had a policy against loud noise unless you register a party. Only one party can be registered per night. Registration is first come first served. Tell me how this “no loudback” role changes anything?
Alternatively, would you withdraw your objection if the game were “punch bug maybe punch back”, where the punched party is allowed to return the punch if they wish?
That seems like a really weird policy for a neighborhood to have, given diminishing marginal cost of noisy parties, and I’d be really confused about what incentive gradient they were following. I don’t currently see a way that would be a problem, though.
(NOTE: The interpretive framework I just used is the one that generates the objection to “punch bug.” Rules aren’t totally arbitrary; they’re things particular people institute and enforce for particular reasons in particular contexts, and this—and how they play out—contains important information beyond the formal content of the rule!)
Part of the difference is that retaliatory violence is part of how people police their boundaries. If you’re not allowed to opt out, and you’re not allowed to punch back, then there’s no interface by which to do that. Likewise, for something I don’t mind so much, and definitely don’t consider to be violent for the most part: I’m all for chilling out about casual touch among people who interact repeatedly, but it would be pretty terrible if people who aren’t up for that couldn’t opt out except in their ghettoes. [ETA: Duncan strongly disputes the “ghetto” characterization. I don’t see how else the “safe spaces” proposal would work out, but “ghetto” is an inference I’m drawing, not the literal text of the OP.]
I wouldn’t like that proposal, I would still object to it, but it wouldn’t seem terrifyingly creepy in the same way. It would just seem a bit unpleasant.
?
It might help if you pointed at the groups you think the asymmetry is between, as I suspect you and SilentCal are imagining different lines here.
I think you see the asymmetry as being between “people who want to punch others” and “people who don’t want to punch others,” as only the first group sees any possible value from punch bug (in the short term*), and SilentCal sees the two people as “the person who saw the bug first” and “the person who didn’t see it,” where the only asymmetries are related to people’s abilities to spot bugs (and thus playing punch bug with the blind would raise these sorts of symmetry concerns).
*There are purported long-term benefits of playing the game, that Duncan describes in his post; in particular, it seems likely to make people more likely to notice cars of a particular type. You could use this to your benefit, as in the case where you’re attempting to get better at noticing motorcycles on the road, because you think that’ll make it less likely that you get into an accident with them, by playing a modified version of punch bug based on that thing.
Indeed, I note that lots of rationalist conversation norms fail to mesh with other conversational norms because rationalists are playing something like punch bug where the equivalent of the Volkswagen are various patterns of reasoning or argument. (“Why are you being mean to me?” “I was just pointing out an error in your thinking—you should feel free to do the same to me too.” “But that only makes sense as a deal if I want the ability to be mean to you with this sort of ‘no criticize back’ rule.”)
Probably best to taboo ‘asymmetric’ at this point. Based on your example I thought it meant “explicitly discriminatory” and not just “disparately impactful”.
(I can’t find the sentence fragment you are quoting here anywhere else on the page. I assume it’s been edited since you wrote this?)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/um3FHuHfcHh98YYs9/duncan-sabien-in-defense-of-punch-bug#H4GqFySDrK8DqZwr4
Ah, cool. I only read the immediate comment you were replying to in detail, and when I used CTRL+F I had a space after “all”, which didn’t catch the original.
You could indeed, which is why throwing loud parties in residential areas without adequate soundproofing (i.e., disturbing your neighbors with your noise) is also very unethical.
What I’m trying to figure out is what important qualitative trait Punch Bug shares with a day of pogroms, that an absence of noise ordinances doesn’t also share. (All three of these things share the traits of being bad policy, and of hurting some more than others)
‘Involvement of physical violence’ is one such trait, and you could build a colorable argument that we shouldn’t encourage even small amounts of physical violence, but I didn’t think that was Benquo’s whole argument.
Other than that, there’s the no-punch-back thing. I guess I just don’t get the significance of the distinction between a punch back on the spot (which the game forbids), and a punch back later when you see a Beetle (which the game encourages). The latter is more annoying to use as a form of deterrence, sure, but not impossible.
The no-punchback rule is really the main thing for me, especially in conjunction the “it sure seems like you’re playing” no-opt-out rule and the proposal that “we” ghettoize people who don’t want to participate. If Duncan were just saying people should get into friendly fights more often, I wouldn’t like the proposal, but I don’t think it would be terrifyingly creepy to me.
Additionally sketchy is the way this was folded into a long and otherwise-reasonable discussion of why we should chill out about casual infliction of minor harms on others in the course of preference-discovery, as though these were the same thing.
[ETA (by Ben): Duncan strongly disputes the “ghetto” characterization. I don’t see how else the “safe spaces” proposal would work out, but “ghetto” is an inference I’m drawing, not the literal text of the OP.]
So I definitely will join you in condemning the no-opt-out rule. The ghettoization proposal… honestly, I think it was too absurd to me to even generate a coherent image, but if I try to force my imagination to produce one it’s pretty horrible.
I’m not sure I see the folding-in problem as keenly as you do. I read Duncan as saying “there’s a problem in that we freak out too much about accidental micro harms. My proposed solution is a framework of intentional micro-harms”. The first part is on firmer ground than the second, but I don’t think it’s illegitimate to pair them.
And it’s the deep creepiness of the no-punchback rule that I mainly don’t get. Like, if the puncher only said “Punch Bug”, and the possibility of a punch back were not discussed, I think the default assumption would be that a punch back is forbidden. That’s pretty what it means for the original punch to be socially sanctioned. Making the “no punch back” part explicit is, I guess, rubbing the punchee’s face in that fact? Is the face-rubbing the problem?
Wait, maybe I get it? Is the terrifying scenario being envisioned, essentially that of a bully saying, “I’m hurting you. For fun. And I’ve found a socially-sanctioned way to do it, so you’re beyond the reach of the forces you normally count on to prevent that!”
Perhaps thinking of ‘bullies’ as a group is the key insight here? I don’t believe Punch Bug is primarily a form of bullying, but the *marginal* impact of banning opt-out *is* mostly to facilitate bullying. That, I could get being deeply creeped out by.
This is actually a huge part of what I was upset about, and it’s really helpful to have you make that explicit: The fact that no one else seems to have bothered to take the initiative to concretely visualize this proposal and respond to the implications of its literal content. And then, when I tried to point out the problem by pointing out a structural analogy to a thing there’s some agreement is bad, a mod criticized me for doing that. Which is, itself, a sort of epistemic “no punch-back” rule.
It’s not so much that “bully” is a natural group now, as that proposals like this make that particular division—between people who like punching people with no punchback and people who don’t take initiative in that sort of game—more salient, and create a visible minority group that’s fair game for (initially mild) abuse by the punching caste. (The “safe space” proposal made that really, really obvious to me once I noticed it.)
Jews are interesting because they’re a cultural and ethnic group that actually does noticeably resemble punchbug noninitiators. For just under two millennia, the Jewish strategy was to basically assume that while they’d face the occasional damage from a crusade or pogrom or expulsion from a country, this was an acceptable rate of loss, and keeping a low profile and mostly not bothering people would be a better deal than fighting back ad hoc, which would most likely lead to much more organized persecution by the authorities, or trying to create a nation-state, which would both require them to engage in organized violence (which is very much neither fun nor productive) and make them a more obvious target (this strategic shift was a response to three successive failed rebellions against the Roman empire). The 20th Century was pretty strong evidence that in the modern world this is not a reliably stable or sustainable arrangement, as about a third of Jews worldwide were rounded up and murdered within a single generation.
Okay, I think I see where you’re coming from. I’ve definitely updated towards considering the OP proposal scarier. Thanks for spelling things out.
Why assume that there is such a thing? (Or, even if there is, that it would be relevant to the objections/discussion at hand?) One person’s modus tollens is another’s modus ponens; having loud parties (which is the comparable act, by the way—not “absence of noise ordinances”) is lower on the scale, but I see no reason to presuppose that it’s qualitatively different. (Maybe it is, but the assumption is unwarranted until justified.)
The distinction is very simple:
Unilateral imposition of rules.
It doesn’t matter what specific rule you decide to impose on me, in what specific way you choose to limit my actions; the fact remains that you, unilaterally, at your whim, have decided that you have the right to dictate to me what actions I can and cannot take—taking that right away from me.
That cannot be allowed. It is a naked power grab (and its arbitrariness is, of course, not incidental, but in fact central; it demonstrates your ability to impose any rule you like). The only strategically justifiable (from a personal standpoint) and ethical (from a community/societal standpoint) response is to fight back, immediately and forcefully. Failure to do so results in the quick erosion in practice of rights and of autonomy.
I took Benquo to be saying there was such a qualitative difference. I already agree there are lots of reasons Duncan’s proposal would likely do more harm than good.
What Duncan is proposing is a general societal agreement to allow the Punch Bug game, on a dubious but IMO sincerely-held theory that this would be to the general benefit. It’s no more a unilateral imposition than a law you voted against.