… the thing I’m beginning to track and scared of isn’t actually direct advocacy of violence against me. It’s more like, an underlying obliviousness to the possibility of covert aggression or coordination towards violence …
I’m curious about this. I don’t think I share this concern (perhaps I’m one of the oblivious ones), but I’m also not sure I understand exactly what the concern is. (And maybe I would share it if I understood it.)
When you say that you’re not worried about direct advocacy of violence towards yourself, but you are worried about coordination towards violence, do you have in mind a slippery slope kind of thing where no one’s advocating violence now, but we’re also not being sufficiently vigilant with some things we’re saying and doing and it might lead to violence somewhere down the line?
I would have thought the odds were pretty low for our community turning violent, mostly just on base rates for well-educated, coastal, liberal-ish people. (Though I suppose the punching Nazis phenomenon and the Berkeley protests in the last year update me slightly towards violence being more likely in our vague reference class.)
If we do disagree about that, do you have any idea what, from your perspective, might be missing from my model? (I realize this might not be an easy question to answer.)
The line between overt physical, informational, and structural violence is blurry in our world. A toy example of the sort of violence that could actually happen quite soon is that people coordinate to subtly gaslight one of my friends, my friend starts acting strangely as a result, people call the police on them for acting strangely, and due to a not very surprising misunderstanding my friend is shot to death.
I’m not worried about this happening to me personally, because I’m good at explaining myself, and because I have a level of privilege sufficient not to rely on this community for meeting some of my basic needs—I can just leave, and did so for a few months. But I’m safe because I’m treating my environment as unsafe. (Around the same time I checked out physically, another friend checked out mentally, which resulted in them having some pretty unpleasant experiences.) I and people like me don’t end up investing in this community as much as we might—this is part of why my post about the Berkeley REACH had the tone of “if you people want nice things you should fund them” rather than “here’s a great thing for the community we’re building.”
The mechanism by which posts like Duncan’s promote this outcome is that they build consensus that appeals to a shared sense of justice are naive, and we should only be able to appeal to utility directly (which imposes adverse externalities on people bearing illegible costs) or to a general sense of what our sort of people do.
The post is very long. Most of it is making the basic point that you can’t and shouldn’t actually ban imposing costs on others. Definitely some people argue against punch-buggy on nonaggression purism grounds, and Duncan correctly argues that those people are confused—but this is a weakman. The central example being discussed is punching people. [EDITED TO SAY: While Duncan describes his present behavior (prior to the paradigm shift he’s advocating for) as gentle taps, the paradigmatic case described in the post is punching hard.] I would actually not be able to think in common or public spaces with that ambient level of physical threat.
Elsewhere in the comments here people pointed to a common social media behavior-policing tactic that Duncan [EDITED TO SAY: rounds off to] just someone expressing their feelings. This is especially creepy after what happened to Z. M. Davis, whose sense that he was being lied to about gender—regardless of whether he was correct or mistaken about the specific alternative hypotheses he suggested—was initially met with quite a lot of social policing against overtly entertaining hypotheses that might hurt someone’s feelings. Look back to my first paragraph. He didn’t actually get shot, but to some extent that’s just luck.
I’m not saying the SF Bay Rationalist community is worse than others. I’m only pointing out that it fails to meet this standard because I think some people in it might be interested in meeting that standard. The usual way this works is that if people can’t appeal to justice, they’re silenced and try to conform, they’re scapegoated and things go badly for them, or they simply leave. If we want discourse we need to do better.
ETA: Since people have been reading a lot into what I’ve been saying, I want to clarify that I’m not attributing any of what happened in the Davis case to Duncan. It’s an unrelated example of how direct physical threats can emerge fairly naturally from current social dynamics.
I would actually not be able to think in common or public spaces with that ambient level of physical threat.
As I understand the argument, the claim is that you (or rather, the reference class of people who feel like you) only react like that because you are hypersensitized to harmless (ie. with a short physiological return to baseline) threats due to lack of exposure.
If I am around a spider, I am in a state of mild to severe panic, depending on size. But this is not a fact about the inherent horribleness of spiders, but about my phobic mindset, and attempting to make the world spider-free would be a completely undue cost compared to treating my phobia.
To me, the question with Punch Bug is whether the suffering imposed on people who are naturally ill-suited to mild violence outweighs the suffering caused by lack of physicality and possible neuroticism (?) due to underexposure in people well-suited to mild violence.
To me, the question with Punch Bug is whether the suffering imposed on people who are naturally ill-suited to mild violence outweighs the suffering caused by lack of physicality and possible neuroticism (?) due to underexposure in people well-suited to mild violence.
Do we have to choose between everyone playing punch-bug and no one playing punch-bug?
It seems like the ideal would be that everyone who thrives in a kind of rough-and-tumble, highly physical environment would play punch-bug with each other. And the kind of people who go, “Wtf, you’re pro-punching?” would not. And everyone would be able to tell who’s who at a glance, and never mistake one for the other.
I would point to (the ethical parts of) the BDSM community as an example of useful norms about this.
1) You do not hit people who do not want you to hit them.
1a) Outside of the context of a relationship in which it can be assumed your partner generally wants you to hit them, you ask someone before hitting them.
2) You do not engage in consensual violence around nonconsenting individuals. (A light tap is not violence; punching someone is.)
2a) Bystander consent may be assumed if the bystanders are at a party or social event arranged for the specific purpose of facilitating people consensually hitting each other.
3) If you are going to be playing games where “no” doesn’t mean “no” (for example, “you’re not hitting me back so I guess you are playing punch bug!”), you establish a safeword ahead of time which means “no”.
This seems like about the best one can do for shared spaces that don’t require nonconsensual hitting to function. If people like Duncan want to delineate spaces for modes of coordination that do require this, then it’s not obvious that we should do much more than try to make sure people have a viable way to exit those spaces if they want to—as long as the space is clearly delineated, it’s not threatening to outsiders the way forming a military barracks might be.
In practice it seems difficult to guarantee adherence to BDSM norms for some groups such as small children, since many of them seem to have a strong drive to hit each other nonconsensually from time to time.
I’m curious about this. I don’t think I share this concern (perhaps I’m one of the oblivious ones), but I’m also not sure I understand exactly what the concern is. (And maybe I would share it if I understood it.)
When you say that you’re not worried about direct advocacy of violence towards yourself, but you are worried about coordination towards violence, do you have in mind a slippery slope kind of thing where no one’s advocating violence now, but we’re also not being sufficiently vigilant with some things we’re saying and doing and it might lead to violence somewhere down the line?
I would have thought the odds were pretty low for our community turning violent, mostly just on base rates for well-educated, coastal, liberal-ish people. (Though I suppose the punching Nazis phenomenon and the Berkeley protests in the last year update me slightly towards violence being more likely in our vague reference class.)
If we do disagree about that, do you have any idea what, from your perspective, might be missing from my model? (I realize this might not be an easy question to answer.)
The line between overt physical, informational, and structural violence is blurry in our world. A toy example of the sort of violence that could actually happen quite soon is that people coordinate to subtly gaslight one of my friends, my friend starts acting strangely as a result, people call the police on them for acting strangely, and due to a not very surprising misunderstanding my friend is shot to death.
I’m not worried about this happening to me personally, because I’m good at explaining myself, and because I have a level of privilege sufficient not to rely on this community for meeting some of my basic needs—I can just leave, and did so for a few months. But I’m safe because I’m treating my environment as unsafe. (Around the same time I checked out physically, another friend checked out mentally, which resulted in them having some pretty unpleasant experiences.) I and people like me don’t end up investing in this community as much as we might—this is part of why my post about the Berkeley REACH had the tone of “if you people want nice things you should fund them” rather than “here’s a great thing for the community we’re building.”
The mechanism by which posts like Duncan’s promote this outcome is that they build consensus that appeals to a shared sense of justice are naive, and we should only be able to appeal to utility directly (which imposes adverse externalities on people bearing illegible costs) or to a general sense of what our sort of people do.
The post is very long. Most of it is making the basic point that you can’t and shouldn’t actually ban imposing costs on others. Definitely some people argue against punch-buggy on nonaggression purism grounds, and Duncan correctly argues that those people are confused—but this is a weakman. The central example being discussed is punching people. [EDITED TO SAY: While Duncan describes his present behavior (prior to the paradigm shift he’s advocating for) as gentle taps, the paradigmatic case described in the post is punching hard.] I would actually not be able to think in common or public spaces with that ambient level of physical threat.
Elsewhere in the comments here people pointed to a common social media behavior-policing tactic that Duncan [EDITED TO SAY: rounds off to] just someone expressing their feelings. This is especially creepy after what happened to Z. M. Davis, whose sense that he was being lied to about gender—regardless of whether he was correct or mistaken about the specific alternative hypotheses he suggested—was initially met with quite a lot of social policing against overtly entertaining hypotheses that might hurt someone’s feelings. Look back to my first paragraph. He didn’t actually get shot, but to some extent that’s just luck.
I’m not saying the SF Bay Rationalist community is worse than others. I’m only pointing out that it fails to meet this standard because I think some people in it might be interested in meeting that standard. The usual way this works is that if people can’t appeal to justice, they’re silenced and try to conform, they’re scapegoated and things go badly for them, or they simply leave. If we want discourse we need to do better.
ETA: Since people have been reading a lot into what I’ve been saying, I want to clarify that I’m not attributing any of what happened in the Davis case to Duncan. It’s an unrelated example of how direct physical threats can emerge fairly naturally from current social dynamics.
As I understand the argument, the claim is that you (or rather, the reference class of people who feel like you) only react like that because you are hypersensitized to harmless (ie. with a short physiological return to baseline) threats due to lack of exposure.
If I am around a spider, I am in a state of mild to severe panic, depending on size. But this is not a fact about the inherent horribleness of spiders, but about my phobic mindset, and attempting to make the world spider-free would be a completely undue cost compared to treating my phobia.
To me, the question with Punch Bug is whether the suffering imposed on people who are naturally ill-suited to mild violence outweighs the suffering caused by lack of physicality and possible neuroticism (?) due to underexposure in people well-suited to mild violence.
Do we have to choose between everyone playing punch-bug and no one playing punch-bug?
It seems like the ideal would be that everyone who thrives in a kind of rough-and-tumble, highly physical environment would play punch-bug with each other. And the kind of people who go, “Wtf, you’re pro-punching?” would not. And everyone would be able to tell who’s who at a glance, and never mistake one for the other.
I would point to (the ethical parts of) the BDSM community as an example of useful norms about this.
1) You do not hit people who do not want you to hit them.
1a) Outside of the context of a relationship in which it can be assumed your partner generally wants you to hit them, you ask someone before hitting them.
2) You do not engage in consensual violence around nonconsenting individuals. (A light tap is not violence; punching someone is.)
2a) Bystander consent may be assumed if the bystanders are at a party or social event arranged for the specific purpose of facilitating people consensually hitting each other.
3) If you are going to be playing games where “no” doesn’t mean “no” (for example, “you’re not hitting me back so I guess you are playing punch bug!”), you establish a safeword ahead of time which means “no”.
This seems like about the best one can do for shared spaces that don’t require nonconsensual hitting to function. If people like Duncan want to delineate spaces for modes of coordination that do require this, then it’s not obvious that we should do much more than try to make sure people have a viable way to exit those spaces if they want to—as long as the space is clearly delineated, it’s not threatening to outsiders the way forming a military barracks might be.
In practice it seems difficult to guarantee adherence to BDSM norms for some groups such as small children, since many of them seem to have a strong drive to hit each other nonconsensually from time to time.