Edit: Welp no, I wrote a silly comment. While I think that this comment points somewhat to why a certain subset of people find punch bug morally wrong, this is not responding to the OP well at all and does not describe it accurately. The OP is not about punch bug, it is about social ownership of the micro, and is only discussing that aspect of punch bug. I do not think physical dominance is at all what the post is about, and if there was a standard alternative to punch bug that involved no physical dominance then my model of Duncan would also use it in the post. My apologies to Duncan for writing a silly comment.
---
Thanks for this comment, it helped me understand the OP much better.
In particular, one of the significant aversions I have to punch bug is not that I get punched. It’s that I remember where punch bug came from. It came from being at school, a place where my sovereignty was consistently overruled by the institution. And we kids were in the same boat, all being trampled over.
But then the kids realised youcould do the same to others. They could punch you and you couldn’t punch back, not because of any agreement you’d come to, but because it’s the rules. The conversation-stopper that makes the decision unquestionable. I remember the gleeful explanation the other kids would give when they realised they had free reign to dominate you.
(This had a similar—but not physically violent—cause to the rules of the game ‘jinx’, where if you and someone else said the same thing at the same time, if you said ‘jinx’, then the other person was not allowed to talk again until a particular magic word was said by the jinxer. This one didn’t catch on too much though, perhaps because it had a continuous cost to the person obeying the rules, which meant a higher amount of submissiveness was required to follow the rules.)
It seems that if you create a place with a norm that you defer to a centralised authority whenever they say so even if it violates your sovereignty significantly, then others who want to dominate you will be incentivised to use that power against you.
And the reason punch bug only happened to me at school, is because this was the part of my life that had the most regular and powerful submission to authority. I can speculate that the OP was inspired by a desire to be able to better coordinate about such an authority, although it seems quite like a lost purpose to optimise for the game created by those who wanted to dominate and took advantage of the free power this system gives as a side effect. Especially without any discussion of who gets to decide ‘the rules’ or anything, and I can see why Ben would feel fear about the proposal of such a norm.
“Let’s bring back a norm that was created by people who wanted an arbitrary excuse to dominate you when you deferred to authority a lot, and I’ll say nothing explicit about what authority this norm should support” is scary, and seems to me like a pretty reasonable interpretation of this post. I could see this argued for possibly if the adherence to the authority was super important, but it’s not even discussed in the OP.
My model of Duncan here says that he certainly doesn’t want to do it because he feels joy at randomly dominating people, and we shouldn’t commit the genetic fallacy of saying an idea is bad because of where it came from. But then I would respond that the genetic heuristic applies, and that if you’re finding that a norm creates value for you which was created by those who wanted to dominate for pleasure, then you should be very skeptical of how that norm is in fact creating value for you.
Added: I like the point made elsewhere by SilentCal that “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”. The part of Duncan’s post that’s best is the discussion of moving the micro/macro boundary of what’s significant. But bringing back a norm predicated on an abuse of power is a uniquely terrible suggestion of how to improve the situation.
Added2: Another response Duncan could give is that the whole point of his post is that punch bug is not that bad. Reminding ourselves that deferring to authority can often be pretty low-cost on an absolute scale (while, if done right, allowing for valuable coordination) means this is good.
(Mod notice: Btw, I am currently NOT AT WORK because I have all the deadlines at university right now and so am not able to e.g. set time aside to think about the moderation discussion. I did find Ben’s comment rather insightful in a way that no other comment on this post has been anywhere on the web—I made all the above connections because of Ben’s comment—and so one reason for adding this post was to add that datapoint to currently working mods’ info. I’m commenting here in my capacity as person-with-a-LW-habit, not as a person who is working at my job at LW.)
Edit: Welp no, I wrote a silly comment. While I think that this comment points somewhat to why a certain subset of people find punch bug morally wrong, this is not responding to the OP well at all and does not describe it accurately. The OP is not about punch bug, it is about social ownership of the micro, and is only discussing that aspect of punch bug. I do not think physical dominance is at all what the post is about, and if there was a standard alternative to punch bug that involved no physical dominance then my model of Duncan would also use it in the post. My apologies to Duncan for writing a silly comment.
---
Thanks for this comment, it helped me understand the OP much better.
In particular, one of the significant aversions I have to punch bug is not that I get punched. It’s that I remember where punch bug came from. It came from being at school, a place where my sovereignty was consistently overruled by the institution. And we kids were in the same boat, all being trampled over.
But then the kids realised you could do the same to others. They could punch you and you couldn’t punch back, not because of any agreement you’d come to, but because it’s the rules. The conversation-stopper that makes the decision unquestionable. I remember the gleeful explanation the other kids would give when they realised they had free reign to dominate you.
(This had a similar—but not physically violent—cause to the rules of the game ‘jinx’, where if you and someone else said the same thing at the same time, if you said ‘jinx’, then the other person was not allowed to talk again until a particular magic word was said by the jinxer. This one didn’t catch on too much though, perhaps because it had a continuous cost to the person obeying the rules, which meant a higher amount of submissiveness was required to follow the rules.)
It seems that if you create a place with a norm that you defer to a centralised authority whenever they say so even if it violates your sovereignty significantly, then others who want to dominate you will be incentivised to use that power against you.
And the reason punch bug only happened to me at school, is because this was the part of my life that had the most regular and powerful submission to authority. I can speculate that the OP was inspired by a desire to be able to better coordinate about such an authority, although it seems quite like a lost purpose to optimise for the game created by those who wanted to dominate and took advantage of the free power this system gives as a side effect. Especially without any discussion of who gets to decide ‘the rules’ or anything, and I can see why Ben would feel fear about the proposal of such a norm.
“Let’s bring back a norm that was created by people who wanted an arbitrary excuse to dominate you when you deferred to authority a lot, and I’ll say nothing explicit about what authority this norm should support” is scary, and seems to me like a pretty reasonable interpretation of this post. I could see this argued for possibly if the adherence to the authority was super important, but it’s not even discussed in the OP.
My model of Duncan here says that he certainly doesn’t want to do it because he feels joy at randomly dominating people, and we shouldn’t commit the genetic fallacy of saying an idea is bad because of where it came from. But then I would respond that the genetic heuristic applies, and that if you’re finding that a norm creates value for you which was created by those who wanted to dominate for pleasure, then you should be very skeptical of how that norm is in fact creating value for you.
Added: I like the point made elsewhere by SilentCal that “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”. The part of Duncan’s post that’s best is the discussion of moving the micro/macro boundary of what’s significant. But bringing back a norm predicated on an abuse of power is a uniquely terrible suggestion of how to improve the situation.
Added2: Another response Duncan could give is that the whole point of his post is that punch bug is not that bad. Reminding ourselves that deferring to authority can often be pretty low-cost on an absolute scale (while, if done right, allowing for valuable coordination) means this is good.
(Mod notice: Btw, I am currently NOT AT WORK because I have all the deadlines at university right now and so am not able to e.g. set time aside to think about the moderation discussion. I did find Ben’s comment rather insightful in a way that no other comment on this post has been anywhere on the web—I made all the above connections because of Ben’s comment—and so one reason for adding this post was to add that datapoint to currently working mods’ info. I’m commenting here in my capacity as person-with-a-LW-habit, not as a person who is working at my job at LW.)