I want to note that one and only one side of this debate has argued for initiating physical violence here. The side doing that is not mine.
I’d be able to accept this sort of criticism gracefully if I saw you policing that line as well. But as it is, your initial reaction was to second Zvi’s praise of Duncan’s bravery in advocating unaccountable violence. I haven’t bothered enumerating all the symmetries here because that would be tedious, but please try to assess them before picking a side in a debate like this.
ETA: This is a symmetry argument against “no-punchback” rules, not an argument from my own perspective that Duncan’s post was out of bounds on the object level. I actually think Duncan’s arguments for a higher tolerance of physical violence aren’t obviously wrong. But if you’re going to have bright-line rules, and accusing people of physical threat using particular words that one might naturally be inclined to use to describe the threat compactly is out of bounds, it seems pretty important to acknowledge that this makes it more difficult to complain about those kinds of physical threat, and police things that are plausibly actual impositions of physical threat accordingly.
[Moderator hat still on because it’s sort of dishonest to take it off, although this comment is much more off the cuff and not intended as a definitive LW Moderator Take, and the mod-hat in this case is more “I’m speaking as a guy with opinions on discourse which are informed by being a LW mod”]
First, while I stand by the “have a higher bar for invoking Nazis” guideline, the most important bit here is, as Zvi says in the Second Circle, remember to win. We are here to figure things out. I’m not confident I’m getting all the nuances here right, and making the right judgment calls is more important than having easy-to-follow guidelines. (With a further caveat that we do at least need good enough guidelines that there doesn’t always have to be a huge discourse when this sort of thing comes up)
With that in mind:
…
So, I see basically four ways to look at the situation:
...
1. Discussion/promotion of Punch Bug in particular, or anything relating to a combination of physical violence and opposition to BDSM style consent norms, is forever off the table – completely over the line.
2. It’s not intrinsically over the line, but it requires a lot of care and higher-than-average standards, and Duncan failed to meet those standards.
3. It requires care/higher-than-average-standards, and Duncan did meet those standards
4. LW (or related spaces) doesn’t have a strong stance on matters of consent or violence.
...
Options #1 and #4 both seem pretty bad to me. To be clear, #4 seems *worse* than #1, by a lot. Having a space for extreme truthseeking requires lower Maslow tiers to be satisfied.
But one of the most important points of LW, to me, is actually being able to say “hey, what if we’re wrong about our basic assumptions” even when it’s scary. We need to be able to have conversations that, if they go well, shape our future light-cone, hopefully for the better, and this will necessarily require resolution of meta-level conflict between people with very different values and frames. (If it didn’t involve such disagreements, this wouldn’t because “we picked the right frame and values”, it’d just be because we filter bubbled ourselves into an echo chamber)
It’d be convenient if that style of conversation could take place entirely in far mode without ramifications on the world we live in and the way we interact with each other on a day-to-day basis, but it doesn’t, and this means someone is going to feel threatened at least on occasion.
I can definitely imagine debating #2 vs #3, and I think adjaecent debates of “what exactly are the meta-level norms that we can agree on that reasonably satisfice on as many people as possible feeling safe enough to have the kinds of conversations we need to have” are important.
From what I can tell, you’re basically advocating for #1. (I’m also happy to debate #1, since, like, it’s a necessary part of the process. But, my current take is a strong “no”)
[taking off my mod hat, insofar as I honestly can]
I think the essay makes a lot of good points. I don’t like Punch Bug – I think it was the wrong choice of symbol to carry the argument forward, in particular because “no-punch-back” rules on non-opted-in games seem like bullshit to me, and importantly so. I’m not certain about roughhousing in general or the threshold of “punch” being the correct line.
But I think the essay is well within bounds. It is an important case study for attempting a deep/aesthetic double crux on a topic that normally would involve completely talking past each other.
And as much as I think no-punchback-rules are bullshit, I think they are importantly not on the same level as pogroms.
It so happens you can more easily paint a visceral picture of how no-punchback-roughhousing-games leads to pogroms, than, say, how bad economic policy might lead to pogroms. But I think bad economic policy is probably more relevant (or at least tied). Economic policy is also hard to get right, and there’s a lot of room for i.e. people arguing for and against minimum wage pointing at each other and calling each other monsters, and that clearly isn’t the environment you want for figuring out good economic policy, and I don’t think it’s the environment you want for figuring out interpersonal societal norms either.
In an adjaecent comment, Ozy describes BDSM consent norms, and notes that “a light tap doesn’t count as violence.” In the present-day world, I think it’s fair for people to note, if someone says “punch buggy no punch backs” and does a light tap, they are totally setting up a potential future situation where harder punches might happen.
But I can imagine a world, 20 years from now, where consent norms more firmly solidify, and someone hypothetically manages to invent “tap on the shoulder no tap back” without the historical baggage, and people react just as strongly as they are to the punching thing now. I think this would most likely be real bad.
And the argument here is that this has already happened, or is a about to happen. Humans adapt to treat pain signals as relevant depending on their context, and the feedback loop of treating smaller and smaller pain thresholds as suffering is bad – not actually reducing suffering on net, and meanwhile crimping a lot of important needs regarding touch, both gentle and rough.
I’m not sold on this argument, but it’s not obviously wrong.
The part where I think the essay is most wrong is where it doesn’t engage with the notion of actual abuse, with Punch-Bug-No-Punchbacks being a cover for bullying. But I feel like the correct response to this is more like “okay, this essay obviously misses this thing”, and then think about how to take the essay’s points seriously and do the thesis/anti-thesis/synthesis dance.
(I think this is mostly what’s been happening – pretty much every thread I’ve seen re: this post has included people bringing up those points, and at least some amount of synthesis, and I think this is basically correct)
It is an important case study for attempting a deep/aesthetic double crux on a topic that normally would involve completely talking past each other.
I’ve never done a double crux as such or even watched one before, so my understanding here is limited, but I don’t see how someone who disagrees with Duncan is supposed to find the “double crux” with him, given that (1) the OP doesn’t engage with three important counter-arguments in the post itself: cover for actual abuse/bullying, slippery slope towards a lot more violence, people who hate Punch-Bug-No-Punchbacks and wouldn’t just get used to it (how is the analogy to “peanut-free zone” actually supposed to work?!) and (2) the author seems to have no intention of engaging with critics who subsequently bring up these counter-arguments.
Yeah, I was stretching/abusing the definition of double crux here. I’d edit the original but I’m actually not sure how to quite phrase what I meant.
There’s a concept I’ve been thinking about lately I’ve been internally calling “aesthetic doublecrux” or “deep doublecrux.” In an in-person-conversation, I’d expect it to take at least a full day of discussion, quite likely much more.
The OP would essentially be the *first* stage of the discussion. (In person, it’d actually be an interwoven with the two people trying to explain all their background assumptions and mash their worldviews together. Online, in essay format… well I don’t know exactly how it’d work, but there’d need to be at least four stages of Essay/Response/Counter-Response/counter-counter-response (and it’d only end there if the counter-counter-response was “ah, I agree with your counter-response”).
In the spheres where Duncan has been commenting (which doesn’t include LW), I have noticed the pattern you point to (i.e. he hasn’t been engaging with the three major criticisms), and yeah this post does not earn the term “deep doublecrux” until he actually does that, and I think it makes sense to be wary about the fact that he hasn’t.
The version of my remark I’d endorse is something more like “whatever you want to call it, the original post was a huge amount of effort, and I think fairly successful at being the first stage of an extended disagreement, of a class that normally doesn’t even get to the first stage. And it makes sense to hold up the bar that says ‘you aren’t actually done until we get to the end’, but I think it’s also important to at least acknowledge the effort so far.”
(The situation on how to consider the post and subsequent LW is a bit confusing, since Duncan didn’t post it here)
I’m saying something sort of like 2, but the specific thing I’m saying is the thing you’re asking me not to say, so I’m in something of a double bind.
The creation of an implied “we” who are to unaccountably administer violence to a minority defined by a strong preference for rule-following, and by a comparative lack of affinity for violence outside the apparatus of a legitimate state, whenever this minority wanders out of the specific delineated space “we” have defined for them, is not really a thing it’s necessary to propose in order to address the general question of whether our society’s threshold for censurable violence needs to be higher than it is. The fact that it was proposed is pretty salient to me, and I’m not interested in legitimizing a discourse where asking whether people like me should effectively be confined to a ghetto is within the bounds of acceptable discourse, but indirectly alluding to historical examples where this has worked out pretty poorly for the people thus confined is outside the bounds.
I’m done with this conversation for the time being, and I’m considering whether legitimizing LessWrong at all is a thing I still want to do, given the current direction of moderation.
I’m done with this conversation for the time being, and I’m considering whether legitimizing LessWrong at all is a thing I still want to do, given the current direction of moderation.
Perhaps you and Duncan have found something to agree on ;-)
I mean, physically assaulting anyone is a crime; so the OP arguably violates one of these existing rules. This is definitely true (technically) if he suggested doing anything like that with newcomers to a LW meetup unless they specifically say not to. While we likely want a looser approach to enforcement (compared to a zero-tolerance policy that would ban Duncan) it sounds to me like you should tell him not to do it again.
One important bit of context is that Duncan has already left LW because he didn’t like the moderation policies (it’s sort of an awkward grey area where other people post and link to his stuff and talk about it).
I don’t currently have bandwidth to respond in more detail about the main point you’re making. I think that having some kind of principled way to address either this sort of post (possibly), or ones that are not too far removed from it, is very important. And I don’t think we have such a principled approach yet, and that we should.
It’s also worth noting that typing the phrase ‘initiating physical violence’ in bolded and italicized text to refer to acts that don’t even merit a middle school detention is exactly analogous to people who put catcalls and rape in the same bucket.
I’m not sure why you would elide those differences when they’re extremely important; if you’re trying to say something more complex like ‘this is the start of a slippery slope that ends with serious violations’ (which seems to be part of your thesis, from looking at other comments) then say that, and explain the lines of causality that make it so.
As it is, this reads (to me, at least) as disingenuous at best and deliberately attempting to manipulate your audience at worst.
These differences are in fact important, as you say.
I read Raemon as suggesting there should be bright-line rules. I meant to reply that IF we have bright-line rules against certain sorts of statements, advocating initiating physical violence seems like one natural line to consider, and it seems like there’s an inherent asymmetry in policing the language with which people respond to (perceived) threats, but not the (perceived) threats themselves.
There’s separately the object-level question of whether the proposed policies in your post actually have the outcome I claim they would have, and the question of whether my construal of the policies themselves is reasonable. But I think Raemon was claiming that even if for the sake of argument we grant that my point of view were correct on those two questions, it would still be objectionable to draw the comparisons I drew because they constitute a sort of rhetorical damage to the commons. That’s the (perceived) context I was responding to.
I’ve added a clarification to the comment you’re referring to. It seems like a pretty bad sign about LessWrong as a venue for conversation that basic symmetry considerations like this are so hard to get across, and not sustainable to do this amount of interpretive labor, but it’s not fair to externalize the costs of that onto you and let a comment stand that might cause people to assume that you’re directly advocating initiating strong violence. You’re obviously not.
If the explanation I added seems inadequate and you explain how, I’ll seriously consider further amending it. But I won’t assume a nonreply is an endorsement either.
I wrote a long reply to this, but it engaged with the object-level disagreement in such a way that I decided it would be better to save it until the meta-level has calmed down.
I don’t have a clear and comprehensive solution. But I have an inkling of what’s needed, and according to me, it’s punch bug.
(Here I am using punch bug as an archetype, an example, a metaphor, and a flag. I’m not advocating the specific game, but rather using it as an instance of a class and trying to point at the thing that generated it, the type of culture that endorses it, and the characteristics of a person who grew up playing it.)
What happens in the game of punch bug?
You’re pretty routinely having your sovereignty violated.
You’re pretty routinely experiencing non-negligible physical pain (I tap very gently these days, but back in primary and secondary school, we … y’know … punched).
The pain and violation are mostly coming from people you care about—people you trust and who are supposed to have your back.
You’re heavily constrained in your ability to respond (a key ingredient of serious trauma)—pretty much the whole game is “no punching back,” and people who break that rule can get ostracized hard. You don’t even have the opportunity for retributive justice until there’s another Volkswagen beetle, at which point you’re basically just as likely to get hit again.
(And if you say “I’m not playing,” people will often smirk and reply, “well, you’re not hitting me back, so it sure looks like you’re playing.”)
This is at least an approving reference to punching people who express objections to playing punch-bug.
(I edited my comment’s first sentence to remove “overtly” & “against a class” because I’m not quite sure that’s right.)
I do not understand how you could have possibly construed approval, here—this is a list of overtly bad things which are connoted as bad in their very description. Sovereignty violations are bad, pain is bad, betrayal is bad, constraint is bad (I note that it’s a key ingredient of trauma!). Usually, in a list of five things, the last entry is not meant to have the exact opposite connotation of the previous four.
The fact that the list is followed by a “but”—that I pose the hypothesis that perhaps a small, measured amount of these unquestionably bad things might be instrumentally valuable—does not in any way mean that I approve of them generally, which should be obvious in the first place and which would definitely emerge from a reading of the piece which is either deliberately charitable or at least seriously questions its own knee-jerk rejections.
(Here I point to the literally hundreds of words I spent validating the other side of the debate in multiple places in the essay, including honoring their clearly philanthropic motives and making an explicit attempt to pass their ITT along with an explicit recognition that I might’ve failed. I would like you to attempt to meet the same standard of charity that I myself was shooting for, in the OP.)
Two analogies:
Murder and property destruction are bad. Sometimes we go to war. The murder and property destruction that take place thereby are no less terrible for the fact that war is occasionally justified. One can advocate for the actions of soldiers in justified wars, and yet also not be fundamentally pro-violence.
Cutting into people with knives is bad. Sometimes, people need surgery. The pain and injury that takes place thereby is no less terrible for the fact that it was inflicted in the service of further healing. One can advocate for the existence of surgeons and surgery, and yet also not be fundamentally pro-cutting.
I don’t think you said or meant to say that punch-bug has no costs. But it seems to me like the quoted text (1) expresses approval of punch-bug, and (2) defines punch-bug to include punching those who express objections to the game and don’t otherwise participate.
The sentence that expresses approval:
I don’t have a clear and comprehensive solution. But I have an inkling of what’s needed, and according to me, it’s punch bug.
The sentence that defines it to include punching those who express objections to the game and otherwise don’t participate:
(And if you say “I’m not playing,” people will often smirk and reply, “well, you’re not hitting me back, so it sure looks like you’re playing.”)
The reason I quoted a longer block initially, rather than just those two very short excerpts, was to keep them in context so that readers would have an easier time noticing if they disagreed with my reading.
And yet, despite all of that, literally millions of people still play the game (voluntarily!) and have a grand ol’ time while doing so.
… which contains the crucial phrase “despite all of that” and the surprise-signaled “voluntarily!” which makes the whole section way less open-to-interpretation and makes your reading more close-to-objectively incorrect.
(And leaving out the three lines after that, where I took the time to brainstorm three possible explanations that were ‘inconvenient’ to the point I was trying to make, and which explicitly turn the reader’s eye toward coherent frameworks in which people might be acting against the good when they play punch bug, i.e. in which the things on the list are bad and not even instrumentally valuable.)
From my own personal perspective, I do not agree that you can reasonably claim to have been a) trying to be neutral/charitable, or b) have been holding a sufficiently high bar for “does the territory justify me holding my opinion here?” From my own personal perspective, and according to the standards that I think you and I and all of us should be striving to meet (which I acknowledge plenty of smart and good people may reasonably disagree with), if you had been doing due diligence as a rationalist, you could not in this case have ended up typing the sentence:
This is at least an approving reference to punching people who express objections to playing punch-bug.
...your truth-tracking algorithms should’ve stopped it at the border, or at the very least, if it slipped past in a moment of emotion or inattention, you should now unequivocally retract it.
(I reiterate that boiling things down into a pure binary of approves-or-disapproves is the wrong move in the first place; this is an oversimplification à la bucket errors.)
To be fair, he does suggest that people who don’t want to play Punch Bug be accommodated with permission to live in a ghetto instead:
If there are people among us who, because of their particular makeup, need a space safe from punch bug, I say we provide it the same way we provide a space free of peanuts for the allergic (rather than by banning peanuts entirely).
[Moderation Note – this comment is attributing things to Duncan he didn’t say, swapping in words with importantly different and inflammatory connotations. More thoughts on this here. – Ray]
[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.]
Since apparently literally no one else will say it, even after nine days:
This is grotesquely uncharitable and patently false even just from the quotation you cite in support. There is no ghetto into which we place people with peanut allergies; I went to school with them, went to summer camp with them, have worked with them, and have flown on planes with them.
I do not know what lens it is that you are using, as you read through my writings and attempt to judge my intentions and my character, but it is a lens with flaws, and it is causing you to reach alarmingly false conclusions all over this thread and in other places where we have interacted. Your statement is both wrong in truth and does not follow from its alleged source.
(This comment was edited to remove a false claim that wasn’t relevant to the central point anyway, pointed out in the subthread below. Appreciation to ESRogs for the highlight.)
Yes, the grandparent post is bad: it uses an unfair and extremely-inflammatory analogy which predictably made the conversation worse. But: Please ease up on the time pressure.
Earlier on in this thing (on Friday), I started a long post with an overview of what happened here as I understood it, and things everyone involved could have done differently to make things go better. ~6 hours in I set it aside because I wanted to be sure to get it right, because an outside view suggested that a cooldown would be wise, and because it was threatening to compete for time with paid work. To the extent that I’ve had time to devote to this narrative since, it’s been spent on collecting perspectives and on replying on easier-to-deal-with tangentially related to threads.
The overall situation pattern-matches somewhat with an experience I had in the Boston community awhile back; the main takeaway I took from that was that time pressure makes everything worse. Several people in that narrative felt like nothing was happening, and acted to create pressure to ensure their concerns hadn’t been dropped, but actually things were happening and this instead forced people into a defensive-reactive mode. (The end result was terrible for everyone involved.)
(Note: I am kinda-technically a moderator, in the sense that I have moderator power, but due to time constraints since the site launched I have not done any moderating.)
You’re not crediting the fact that having upvoted, unobjected-to libel of one’s personal character on LessWrong can be an active and ongoing hurt/threat; that in this case the LessWrong platform was being unfairly abused by Ben to make my lifeactively worse, and that this was allowed to go on for more than a week as if that hurt to me is of no consequence whatsoever.
Expecting some public action to be taken in nine days does not feel, to me, like an unreasonable request of a moderation team with at least five people on it. We’ll never know how long it would’ve taken, if I hadn’t caved and responded myself, but I think it’s reasonable to posit that it would’ve been at least a few more days, meaning something like two weeks in total.
It is the job of moderators to moderate. If, in nine days and with plenty of pointing, none of the moderators could manage to get here and just drop a quick note like “We’re going to follow up on this privately, but just for the record, this doesn’t match my reading of the quote,” then something has gone deeply wrong with moderation as a whole.
That one sentence would’ve been enough, to signal that Ben’s statement was recognized as problematic without harming Ben. Instead, users have been coming by for nine days and seeing an upvoted comment and drawing from that whatever conclusions they will—both about me and about the norms of the site as a whole.
I don’t want to engage with this too much right now, but do want to give a tiny bit more background that I don’t think settles this issue, but does complicate it a bit:
In practice, on this specific issue, the moderation team consisted of just Ray and me and not really anyone else. We discussed the issues with other moderators, but because of the high-stakes nature of this conflict, I thought that it was important that the relevant decisions and comments were made by the people who I thought had the most detailed background on both the people involved, and the long-term goals of LessWrong moderation. This usually would have also included Ben Pace, but he isn’t around for this month.
I don’t think that in retrospect (mostly implicitly) restricting moderation action on this issue to just Ray and me was a bad call, given the constraints at the time. I think criticizing us for not having scaled our moderation team better, and establishing procedures that allow everyone on the team to meaningfully contribute to this situation, is a valid criticism, and something I do think we could have done better. I also think that even with just me and Ray, being more immediately transparent would have been achievable, and something I plan to be better at in the future. But I do think the error is significantly less severe than it would have been had we had access to 5 moderators instead of just 2.
The people who upvoted you here must have done so out of personal politics, and not out of adherence to the goals of LessWrong
I agree with everything in your comment except this line. I think you are neglecting alternative explanations. For example, whenever someone answers a question I’ve asked them I upvote the response, whether I agree with it or not.
I’m editing the original post to correct this overreach, which I agree was an uncharitable overreach and an example of me not reaching the correct standard.
I should have been clearer. I don’t think you’re imagining a ghetto when you think of this proposal. I’d have to know the inside of your mind to know that, and only you know the inside of your mind.
I do think that the particular dynamics of a no-punchback rule push towards the creation of that sort of thing: there’s a particular sort of person who, when they wander out of their specially designated space without wearing a clearly visible marker of their minority status, gets punched by others but doesn’t punch others.
I don’t think most people who read the post actually bothered to imagine what a safe space with respect to punchbug in particular would look like.
Duncan makes it clear that the reason he doesn’t punch people hard is because he doesn’t think he can get away with that right now
In two places in this conversation so far, I have noticed you verbally espousing and endorsing a good and virtuous norm while not noticing that you have previously violated it. The other example is when, after accusing me of wanting to ghettoize people, you endorsed a norm of not attributing to people things they didn’t actually say.
To be clear: I do not want to be interacting with benquo on this thread. I asked for moderation for days and days and days and in the meantime no one stepped up to speak true words in my defense in the public sphere where damage was being done. I am here in violation of a very strongly held personal desire not to be posting on LW anywhere outside of meta. If anybody else is willing to take up the torch of preventing benquo from making comments as though he has not clearly been doing damage to me in order to make his points, I will gladly vanish and stop posting replies here.
I want to note that one and only one side of this debate has argued for initiating physical violence here. The side doing that is not mine.
I’d be able to accept this sort of criticism gracefully if I saw you policing that line as well. But as it is, your initial reaction was to second Zvi’s praise of Duncan’s bravery in advocating unaccountable violence. I haven’t bothered enumerating all the symmetries here because that would be tedious, but please try to assess them before picking a side in a debate like this.
ETA: This is a symmetry argument against “no-punchback” rules, not an argument from my own perspective that Duncan’s post was out of bounds on the object level. I actually think Duncan’s arguments for a higher tolerance of physical violence aren’t obviously wrong. But if you’re going to have bright-line rules, and accusing people of physical threat using particular words that one might naturally be inclined to use to describe the threat compactly is out of bounds, it seems pretty important to acknowledge that this makes it more difficult to complain about those kinds of physical threat, and police things that are plausibly actual impositions of physical threat accordingly.
[Moderator hat still on because it’s sort of dishonest to take it off, although this comment is much more off the cuff and not intended as a definitive LW Moderator Take, and the mod-hat in this case is more “I’m speaking as a guy with opinions on discourse which are informed by being a LW mod”]
First, while I stand by the “have a higher bar for invoking Nazis” guideline, the most important bit here is, as Zvi says in the Second Circle, remember to win. We are here to figure things out. I’m not confident I’m getting all the nuances here right, and making the right judgment calls is more important than having easy-to-follow guidelines. (With a further caveat that we do at least need good enough guidelines that there doesn’t always have to be a huge discourse when this sort of thing comes up)
With that in mind:
…
So, I see basically four ways to look at the situation:
...
1. Discussion/promotion of Punch Bug in particular, or anything relating to a combination of physical violence and opposition to BDSM style consent norms, is forever off the table – completely over the line.
2. It’s not intrinsically over the line, but it requires a lot of care and higher-than-average standards, and Duncan failed to meet those standards.
3. It requires care/higher-than-average-standards, and Duncan did meet those standards
4. LW (or related spaces) doesn’t have a strong stance on matters of consent or violence.
...
Options #1 and #4 both seem pretty bad to me. To be clear, #4 seems *worse* than #1, by a lot. Having a space for extreme truthseeking requires lower Maslow tiers to be satisfied.
But one of the most important points of LW, to me, is actually being able to say “hey, what if we’re wrong about our basic assumptions” even when it’s scary. We need to be able to have conversations that, if they go well, shape our future light-cone, hopefully for the better, and this will necessarily require resolution of meta-level conflict between people with very different values and frames. (If it didn’t involve such disagreements, this wouldn’t because “we picked the right frame and values”, it’d just be because we filter bubbled ourselves into an echo chamber)
It’d be convenient if that style of conversation could take place entirely in far mode without ramifications on the world we live in and the way we interact with each other on a day-to-day basis, but it doesn’t, and this means someone is going to feel threatened at least on occasion.
I can definitely imagine debating #2 vs #3, and I think adjaecent debates of “what exactly are the meta-level norms that we can agree on that reasonably satisfice on as many people as possible feeling safe enough to have the kinds of conversations we need to have” are important.
From what I can tell, you’re basically advocating for #1. (I’m also happy to debate #1, since, like, it’s a necessary part of the process. But, my current take is a strong “no”)
Is Duncan Right?
[taking off my mod hat, insofar as I honestly can]
I think the essay makes a lot of good points. I don’t like Punch Bug – I think it was the wrong choice of symbol to carry the argument forward, in particular because “no-punch-back” rules on non-opted-in games seem like bullshit to me, and importantly so. I’m not certain about roughhousing in general or the threshold of “punch” being the correct line.
But I think the essay is well within bounds. It is an important case study for attempting a deep/aesthetic double crux on a topic that normally would involve completely talking past each other.
And as much as I think no-punchback-rules are bullshit, I think they are importantly not on the same level as pogroms.
It so happens you can more easily paint a visceral picture of how no-punchback-roughhousing-games leads to pogroms, than, say, how bad economic policy might lead to pogroms. But I think bad economic policy is probably more relevant (or at least tied). Economic policy is also hard to get right, and there’s a lot of room for i.e. people arguing for and against minimum wage pointing at each other and calling each other monsters, and that clearly isn’t the environment you want for figuring out good economic policy, and I don’t think it’s the environment you want for figuring out interpersonal societal norms either.
In an adjaecent comment, Ozy describes BDSM consent norms, and notes that “a light tap doesn’t count as violence.” In the present-day world, I think it’s fair for people to note, if someone says “punch buggy no punch backs” and does a light tap, they are totally setting up a potential future situation where harder punches might happen.
But I can imagine a world, 20 years from now, where consent norms more firmly solidify, and someone hypothetically manages to invent “tap on the shoulder no tap back” without the historical baggage, and people react just as strongly as they are to the punching thing now. I think this would most likely be real bad.
And the argument here is that this has already happened, or is a about to happen. Humans adapt to treat pain signals as relevant depending on their context, and the feedback loop of treating smaller and smaller pain thresholds as suffering is bad – not actually reducing suffering on net, and meanwhile crimping a lot of important needs regarding touch, both gentle and rough.
I’m not sold on this argument, but it’s not obviously wrong.
The part where I think the essay is most wrong is where it doesn’t engage with the notion of actual abuse, with Punch-Bug-No-Punchbacks being a cover for bullying. But I feel like the correct response to this is more like “okay, this essay obviously misses this thing”, and then think about how to take the essay’s points seriously and do the thesis/anti-thesis/synthesis dance.
(I think this is mostly what’s been happening – pretty much every thread I’ve seen re: this post has included people bringing up those points, and at least some amount of synthesis, and I think this is basically correct)
I’ve never done a double crux as such or even watched one before, so my understanding here is limited, but I don’t see how someone who disagrees with Duncan is supposed to find the “double crux” with him, given that (1) the OP doesn’t engage with three important counter-arguments in the post itself: cover for actual abuse/bullying, slippery slope towards a lot more violence, people who hate Punch-Bug-No-Punchbacks and wouldn’t just get used to it (how is the analogy to “peanut-free zone” actually supposed to work?!) and (2) the author seems to have no intention of engaging with critics who subsequently bring up these counter-arguments.
Yeah, I was stretching/abusing the definition of double crux here. I’d edit the original but I’m actually not sure how to quite phrase what I meant.
There’s a concept I’ve been thinking about lately I’ve been internally calling “aesthetic doublecrux” or “deep doublecrux.” In an in-person-conversation, I’d expect it to take at least a full day of discussion, quite likely much more.
The OP would essentially be the *first* stage of the discussion. (In person, it’d actually be an interwoven with the two people trying to explain all their background assumptions and mash their worldviews together. Online, in essay format… well I don’t know exactly how it’d work, but there’d need to be at least four stages of Essay/Response/Counter-Response/counter-counter-response (and it’d only end there if the counter-counter-response was “ah, I agree with your counter-response”).
In the spheres where Duncan has been commenting (which doesn’t include LW), I have noticed the pattern you point to (i.e. he hasn’t been engaging with the three major criticisms), and yeah this post does not earn the term “deep doublecrux” until he actually does that, and I think it makes sense to be wary about the fact that he hasn’t.
The version of my remark I’d endorse is something more like “whatever you want to call it, the original post was a huge amount of effort, and I think fairly successful at being the first stage of an extended disagreement, of a class that normally doesn’t even get to the first stage. And it makes sense to hold up the bar that says ‘you aren’t actually done until we get to the end’, but I think it’s also important to at least acknowledge the effort so far.”
(The situation on how to consider the post and subsequent LW is a bit confusing, since Duncan didn’t post it here)
I’m saying something sort of like 2, but the specific thing I’m saying is the thing you’re asking me not to say, so I’m in something of a double bind.
The creation of an implied “we” who are to unaccountably administer violence to a minority defined by a strong preference for rule-following, and by a comparative lack of affinity for violence outside the apparatus of a legitimate state, whenever this minority wanders out of the specific delineated space “we” have defined for them, is not really a thing it’s necessary to propose in order to address the general question of whether our society’s threshold for censurable violence needs to be higher than it is. The fact that it was proposed is pretty salient to me, and I’m not interested in legitimizing a discourse where asking whether people like me should effectively be confined to a ghetto is within the bounds of acceptable discourse, but indirectly alluding to historical examples where this has worked out pretty poorly for the people thus confined is outside the bounds.
I’m done with this conversation for the time being, and I’m considering whether legitimizing LessWrong at all is a thing I still want to do, given the current direction of moderation.
Perhaps you and Duncan have found something to agree on ;-)
I mean, physically assaulting anyone is a crime; so the OP arguably violates one of these existing rules. This is definitely true (technically) if he suggested doing anything like that with newcomers to a LW meetup unless they specifically say not to. While we likely want a looser approach to enforcement (compared to a zero-tolerance policy that would ban Duncan) it sounds to me like you should tell him not to do it again.
One important bit of context is that Duncan has already left LW because he didn’t like the moderation policies (it’s sort of an awkward grey area where other people post and link to his stuff and talk about it).
I don’t currently have bandwidth to respond in more detail about the main point you’re making. I think that having some kind of principled way to address either this sort of post (possibly), or ones that are not too far removed from it, is very important. And I don’t think we have such a principled approach yet, and that we should.
It’s also worth noting that typing the phrase ‘initiating physical violence’ in bolded and italicized text to refer to acts that don’t even merit a middle school detention is exactly analogous to people who put catcalls and rape in the same bucket.
I’m not sure why you would elide those differences when they’re extremely important; if you’re trying to say something more complex like ‘this is the start of a slippery slope that ends with serious violations’ (which seems to be part of your thesis, from looking at other comments) then say that, and explain the lines of causality that make it so.
As it is, this reads (to me, at least) as disingenuous at best and deliberately attempting to manipulate your audience at worst.
These differences are in fact important, as you say.
I read Raemon as suggesting there should be bright-line rules. I meant to reply that IF we have bright-line rules against certain sorts of statements, advocating initiating physical violence seems like one natural line to consider, and it seems like there’s an inherent asymmetry in policing the language with which people respond to (perceived) threats, but not the (perceived) threats themselves.
There’s separately the object-level question of whether the proposed policies in your post actually have the outcome I claim they would have, and the question of whether my construal of the policies themselves is reasonable. But I think Raemon was claiming that even if for the sake of argument we grant that my point of view were correct on those two questions, it would still be objectionable to draw the comparisons I drew because they constitute a sort of rhetorical damage to the commons. That’s the (perceived) context I was responding to.
(I am noting places where I am upvoting benquo’s writing.)
I’ve added a clarification to the comment you’re referring to. It seems like a pretty bad sign about LessWrong as a venue for conversation that basic symmetry considerations like this are so hard to get across, and not sustainable to do this amount of interpretive labor, but it’s not fair to externalize the costs of that onto you and let a comment stand that might cause people to assume that you’re directly advocating initiating strong violence. You’re obviously not.
If the explanation I added seems inadequate and you explain how, I’ll seriously consider further amending it. But I won’t assume a nonreply is an endorsement either.
I wrote a long reply to this, but it engaged with the object-level disagreement in such a way that I decided it would be better to save it until the meta-level has calmed down.
It’s not clear to me that this is true, though I might not have read Duncan’s post closely enough (I confess that I skimmed).
I had interpreted Duncan as advocating that punch-bug is a fine game to play. Not that you should play punch-bug with people who don’t want to.
Did you interpret him as advocating the latter?
The following sure seems like it to me:
This is at least an approving reference to punching people who express objections to playing punch-bug.
(I edited my comment’s first sentence to remove “overtly” & “against a class” because I’m not quite sure that’s right.)
I do not understand how you could have possibly construed approval, here—this is a list of overtly bad things which are connoted as bad in their very description. Sovereignty violations are bad, pain is bad, betrayal is bad, constraint is bad (I note that it’s a key ingredient of trauma!). Usually, in a list of five things, the last entry is not meant to have the exact opposite connotation of the previous four.
The fact that the list is followed by a “but”—that I pose the hypothesis that perhaps a small, measured amount of these unquestionably bad things might be instrumentally valuable—does not in any way mean that I approve of them generally, which should be obvious in the first place and which would definitely emerge from a reading of the piece which is either deliberately charitable or at least seriously questions its own knee-jerk rejections.
(Here I point to the literally hundreds of words I spent validating the other side of the debate in multiple places in the essay, including honoring their clearly philanthropic motives and making an explicit attempt to pass their ITT along with an explicit recognition that I might’ve failed. I would like you to attempt to meet the same standard of charity that I myself was shooting for, in the OP.)
Two analogies:
Murder and property destruction are bad. Sometimes we go to war. The murder and property destruction that take place thereby are no less terrible for the fact that war is occasionally justified. One can advocate for the actions of soldiers in justified wars, and yet also not be fundamentally pro-violence.
Cutting into people with knives is bad. Sometimes, people need surgery. The pain and injury that takes place thereby is no less terrible for the fact that it was inflicted in the service of further healing. One can advocate for the existence of surgeons and surgery, and yet also not be fundamentally pro-cutting.
I don’t think you said or meant to say that punch-bug has no costs. But it seems to me like the quoted text (1) expresses approval of punch-bug, and (2) defines punch-bug to include punching those who express objections to the game and don’t otherwise participate.
The sentence that expresses approval:
The sentence that defines it to include punching those who express objections to the game and otherwise don’t participate:
The reason I quoted a longer block initially, rather than just those two very short excerpts, was to keep them in context so that readers would have an easier time noticing if they disagreed with my reading.
Leaving out the immediately next line
… which contains the crucial phrase “despite all of that” and the surprise-signaled “voluntarily!” which makes the whole section way less open-to-interpretation and makes your reading more close-to-objectively incorrect.
(And leaving out the three lines after that, where I took the time to brainstorm three possible explanations that were ‘inconvenient’ to the point I was trying to make, and which explicitly turn the reader’s eye toward coherent frameworks in which people might be acting against the good when they play punch bug, i.e. in which the things on the list are bad and not even instrumentally valuable.)
From my own personal perspective, I do not agree that you can reasonably claim to have been a) trying to be neutral/charitable, or b) have been holding a sufficiently high bar for “does the territory justify me holding my opinion here?” From my own personal perspective, and according to the standards that I think you and I and all of us should be striving to meet (which I acknowledge plenty of smart and good people may reasonably disagree with), if you had been doing due diligence as a rationalist, you could not in this case have ended up typing the sentence:
...your truth-tracking algorithms should’ve stopped it at the border, or at the very least, if it slipped past in a moment of emotion or inattention, you should now unequivocally retract it.
(I reiterate that boiling things down into a pure binary of approves-or-disapproves is the wrong move in the first place; this is an oversimplification à la bucket errors.)
To be fair, he does suggest that people who don’t want to play Punch Bug be accommodated with permission to live in a ghetto instead:
[Moderation Note – this comment is attributing things to Duncan he didn’t say, swapping in words with importantly different and inflammatory connotations. More thoughts on this here. – Ray]
[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.]
Since apparently literally no one else will say it, even after nine days:
This is grotesquely uncharitable and patently false even just from the quotation you cite in support. There is no ghetto into which we place people with peanut allergies; I went to school with them, went to summer camp with them, have worked with them, and have flown on planes with them.
I do not know what lens it is that you are using, as you read through my writings and attempt to judge my intentions and my character, but it is a lens with flaws, and it is causing you to reach alarmingly false conclusions all over this thread and in other places where we have interacted. Your statement is both wrong in truth and does not follow from its alleged source.
(This comment was edited to remove a false claim that wasn’t relevant to the central point anyway, pointed out in the subthread below. Appreciation to ESRogs for the highlight.)
Yes, the grandparent post is bad: it uses an unfair and extremely-inflammatory analogy which predictably made the conversation worse. But: Please ease up on the time pressure.
Earlier on in this thing (on Friday), I started a long post with an overview of what happened here as I understood it, and things everyone involved could have done differently to make things go better. ~6 hours in I set it aside because I wanted to be sure to get it right, because an outside view suggested that a cooldown would be wise, and because it was threatening to compete for time with paid work. To the extent that I’ve had time to devote to this narrative since, it’s been spent on collecting perspectives and on replying on easier-to-deal-with tangentially related to threads.
The overall situation pattern-matches somewhat with an experience I had in the Boston community awhile back; the main takeaway I took from that was that time pressure makes everything worse. Several people in that narrative felt like nothing was happening, and acted to create pressure to ensure their concerns hadn’t been dropped, but actually things were happening and this instead forced people into a defensive-reactive mode. (The end result was terrible for everyone involved.)
(Note: I am kinda-technically a moderator, in the sense that I have moderator power, but due to time constraints since the site launched I have not done any moderating.)
You’re not crediting the fact that having upvoted, unobjected-to libel of one’s personal character on LessWrong can be an active and ongoing hurt/threat; that in this case the LessWrong platform was being unfairly abused by Ben to make my life actively worse, and that this was allowed to go on for more than a week as if that hurt to me is of no consequence whatsoever.
Expecting some public action to be taken in nine days does not feel, to me, like an unreasonable request of a moderation team with at least five people on it. We’ll never know how long it would’ve taken, if I hadn’t caved and responded myself, but I think it’s reasonable to posit that it would’ve been at least a few more days, meaning something like two weeks in total.
It is the job of moderators to moderate. If, in nine days and with plenty of pointing, none of the moderators could manage to get here and just drop a quick note like “We’re going to follow up on this privately, but just for the record, this doesn’t match my reading of the quote,” then something has gone deeply wrong with moderation as a whole.
That one sentence would’ve been enough, to signal that Ben’s statement was recognized as problematic without harming Ben. Instead, users have been coming by for nine days and seeing an upvoted comment and drawing from that whatever conclusions they will—both about me and about the norms of the site as a whole.
I don’t want to engage with this too much right now, but do want to give a tiny bit more background that I don’t think settles this issue, but does complicate it a bit:
In practice, on this specific issue, the moderation team consisted of just Ray and me and not really anyone else. We discussed the issues with other moderators, but because of the high-stakes nature of this conflict, I thought that it was important that the relevant decisions and comments were made by the people who I thought had the most detailed background on both the people involved, and the long-term goals of LessWrong moderation. This usually would have also included Ben Pace, but he isn’t around for this month.
I don’t think that in retrospect (mostly implicitly) restricting moderation action on this issue to just Ray and me was a bad call, given the constraints at the time. I think criticizing us for not having scaled our moderation team better, and establishing procedures that allow everyone on the team to meaningfully contribute to this situation, is a valid criticism, and something I do think we could have done better. I also think that even with just me and Ray, being more immediately transparent would have been achievable, and something I plan to be better at in the future. But I do think the error is significantly less severe than it would have been had we had access to 5 moderators instead of just 2.
I appreciate this for its position in the Venn diagram of (true things) and (olive branches).
I too would have preferred it if something like this had happened.
I agree with everything in your comment except this line. I think you are neglecting alternative explanations. For example, whenever someone answers a question I’ve asked them I upvote the response, whether I agree with it or not.
That’s true.
I’m editing the original post to correct this overreach, which I agree was an uncharitable overreach and an example of me not reaching the correct standard.
I should have been clearer. I don’t think you’re imagining a ghetto when you think of this proposal. I’d have to know the inside of your mind to know that, and only you know the inside of your mind.
I do think that the particular dynamics of a no-punchback rule push towards the creation of that sort of thing: there’s a particular sort of person who, when they wander out of their specially designated space without wearing a clearly visible marker of their minority status, gets punched by others but doesn’t punch others.
I don’t think most people who read the post actually bothered to imagine what a safe space with respect to punchbug in particular would look like.
In two places in this conversation so far, I have noticed you verbally espousing and endorsing a good and virtuous norm while not noticing that you have previously violated it. The other example is when, after accusing me of wanting to ghettoize people, you endorsed a norm of not attributing to people things they didn’t actually say.
To be clear: I do not want to be interacting with benquo on this thread. I asked for moderation for days and days and days and in the meantime no one stepped up to speak true words in my defense in the public sphere where damage was being done. I am here in violation of a very strongly held personal desire not to be posting on LW anywhere outside of meta. If anybody else is willing to take up the torch of preventing benquo from making comments as though he has not clearly been doing damage to me in order to make his points, I will gladly vanish and stop posting replies here.
Quick further update: my full response to Benquo is written, waiting on getting a final round of feedback from other moderators.
I’m in the process of writing a series of replies here.