[This is my reaction to the entire thread as of writing this, and I saw the OP only after the tone editing]
I praised Duncan for writing this, not because I think everyone should be playing Punch Bug, or that it should be an opt-out game. I strongly disagree with that, and like many, think it was a poor choice of central example. I praised him, and I stand strongly by this, because this essay felt extremely risky to write due to the exact concerns it was complaining about, and opened up the author to very over-sized retaliation. I’m not brave enough to write such things, and as Talib points out repeatedly in Skin in the Game, I should feel shame about that. Which I do.
Also, I didn’t notice the point Benquo is making, until Benquo made it. At which point, I saw it very, very clearly. He came to my apartment last Purim and we read the Megillah together, so shared cultural context doubtless helped. Despite that context, I think that saying the word pogrom (or similar) here is necessary to make the point. I wouldn’t have gotten there reliably without it, even with a very Jewish background and outlook, so it seems very necessary in general.
We need to defend the need for people to physically interact with the world, and potentially have some of those interactions be unfun, without invoking patterns of behavior that really do lead to terrible things. The line “you sure look like you’re playing” should scare the living hell out of you. So should Duncan’s statement about what should be done with those who don’t want to play. There’s a reason I think ‘punch them as hard as you can right in the face’ is not only allowed, but the correct reaction, and I’m not one to advocate violence, including Nazi punching.
If you’re trying to point out that something pattern matches and leads to things very over the line and feels deeply unsafe, you may need to mention those unsafe things. It obviously needs to be done carefully, and perhaps the OP’s first version was not sufficiently careful, but current version is, and as noted the resulting discussion utilizes this to make important points rather than to inflame. It does not turn into a demon thread except (perhaps) insofar as we have a potential reaction to moderation issues.
So I think the ‘literal Nazi’ exception to Godwin’s Law applies here, and Nazis are being treated with the appropriate seriousness. If after reading this thread you don’t think that, I worry that you haven’t groked the thing Benquo is trying to point at. I am sympathetic to the point that once you break the absolute prohibition things could go quite badly, and I think it’s good to point out that this line is being crossed and we’re nervous about it, but frankly: I’ll allow it.
Just to make sure we have complete clarity around exactly what words seemed outside the bounds of acceptable discourse here to Raemon, my original unedited comment began:
As a Jew, I’m very worried about people unilaterally claiming the right to initiate physical violence against me with impunity because they were reminded of a prominent German brand. (Ironically, I have the exact same worry about the “punch Nazis” advocacy I was seeing on the internet a few months ago, given the general unwillingness to work out a legible standard by which Nazis might be identified.)
We need to defend the need for people to physically interact with the world, and potentially have some of those interactions be unfun, without invoking patterns of behavior that really do lead to terrible things.
I notice some level of confusion here.
Suppose Alice came to me with an argument like the following (about which I will make a meta-level, not an object-level, point; I don’t endorse the entirety of what follows):
1) The life satisfaction of humans in general depends heavily on whether or not they can bring their authentic selves to the social sphere, and this means the satisfaction of LGBT individuals in particular depends on how gender identity and relationships are policed culturally.
2) One method of policing such relationships is ‘gay bashing,’ but note that the perception of counterfactual gay-bashing is perhaps more important than the statistics of actual gay-bashing because people make decisions based on what they perceive their constraints to be. (The actual world could have everyone hiding themselves, and no one getting gay-bashed, which looks safe from the statistical view but doesn’t let us know what would happen if people didn’t hide themselves.)
3) One causal factor leading to gay bashing is the culture of sports and physical fitness, both because of historical factors and practical factors. (For example, it is simply easier for a physically fit athlete to intimidate or injure a normal person.)
4) Therefore, in order to maximize life satisfaction, we need to ban all sports, and all discussion that could lead to a culture of sports.
How would you go about responding to this argument? (Not the logical details or content of your response, but the methodology of how you give it.)
Personally, I point out that I’m a gay man, and thus have a license to discuss the object-level details because I’m sympathetic to the concerns of LGBT individuals, and then proceed with the object-level discussion of the argument. But imagine the hypothetical straight me, or even worse, the hypothetical straight athlete me. It seems like there’s some chilling going on where straight Vaniver is being punished not for actually gay bashing, but for doing anything perceived as the other party as potentially providing cover for gay bashing.
Though here I should take a step back, and look at the phrase “actually gay bashing.” In doing some fact-checking for this comment I discovered that the phrase “gay bashing,” which I had originally heard in the context of physical violence leading to hospitalization or murder, covers both verbal and physical abuse, both actual and threatened. Obviously verbally bullying someone for their sexual orientation is unacceptably cruel, but I find myself wishing there were some obvious threshold (on the level of injury, perhaps, instead of mere verbal vs. physical, which doesn’t carve reality at the joints) and short word to point to “intimidation of gays above this threshold,” so that I could say things like “I am opposed to people who hospitalize gays because they unacceptably damage the social fabric and freedom of expression for gays, while I support people who argue that some methods that reduce hospitalization of gays aren’t worth their other costs because they’re part of how society correctly handles difficult decisions about tradeoffs” with pre-existing categories for both, so that it was an easier sentence to write.
It’s not obvious to me that Alice feels my desire for such a threshold, or would find it convenient if that threshold existed. It seems to me that when Alice follows her own logic, she ends up being convinced that providing cover for gay bashing is bad for the same reasons that gay bashing is bad, even if it’s not as bad. The sort of callousness that I see as probably necessary to make good tradeoffs is of the same kind as the callousness that Alice hates, because it doesn’t oppose the evil she opposes.
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So it seems plausible to me that straight Vaniver would not engage with the argument, because the environment around the argument doesn’t give him any place to bring his actual self and actual views. Perhaps he feels a pang of ironic sympathy when considering point (1) of the argument.
Agreed that we should ignore the object-level, so I’m doing my best to ignore it.
This argument sounds like it is saying we should ban such consensual actions and discussion as a society/nation, rather than a website. In that case, I’d respond with the usual reasons why banning the action is folly, and banning discussions that could lead to ‘a culture of X’ is madness. Mumble mumble free speech, free association, etc. But of course, I’d also defend someone’s right to advocate for such decisions.
On the website level, I don’t get that easy an out, but I want to be clear I wasn’t suggesting I was against discussion of or advocacy of punch bug. I just wish Duncan had hit upon a better rallying cry slash central point, think trying to make this a thing without checking with people first would be pretty bad, and think it’s really important that we let Benquo point out that there’s something dangerous and alarming here if he senses that (even if we don’t think he’s right).
If after reading this thread you don’t think that, I worry that you haven’t groked the thing Benquo is trying to point at.
I definitely haven’t grokked the thing Benquo is trying to point at, at all. (I’m plenty Jewish by any anti-semite’s definition, fwiw). I don’t see what’s asymmetric about the ‘no punch back’ rule at all—the punchee is free to spot the next bug, in which case they will become the beneficiary of the ‘no punch back’ rule.
Is it hard for you to imagine that some people might not be violent sadists?
ETA: I meant this literally, not as an insult. People who enjoy punching others are going to disproportionately be punch-bug initiators. People who either don’t enjoy causing others (ostensibly minor) suffering, or don’t enjoy doing so through (ostensibly minor) physical violence, are not beneficiaries of the right to punch with impunity, and are potential beneficiaries of the right to punch back.
However, I think SilentCal’s subsequent behavior justified more interpretive labor than my initial comment extended. One should sometimes make this sort of false-negative error, but it’s important to own up to it when one does. This comment was bad for the commons. I’m sorry. Oops!
[Moderation Note: After Ben’s most recent edit, I still think this comment is a) crossing important rhetorical lines, and b) making some underlying errors. More thoughts here.– Ray]
Let me back up. Zvi convinced me there was a big important click to be had here, and I’m bothered that I haven’t had the click. My current understanding of your argument is unpersuasive. That probably means it’s an incorrect understanding.
Maybe our crux is that I don’t think the Punch Bug game was ever significantly about hurting people who don’t want to play it?
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.
Let me clarify: I believe that if you took all of the people who currently want to play Punch Bug, and put them all in one one community, they would continue to play Punch Bug. They would *not* find that the absence of unwilling victims spoiled the fun, because unwilling victims were never the source of the fun.
I agree and my objection doesn’t rest on those grounds. Thanks for clarifying. Overall your last several comments did a lot to shift my perceptions towards the possibility of being heard, which has updated me towards a higher level of interpretive labor on my end being appropriate.
[This is my reaction to the entire thread as of writing this, and I saw the OP only after the tone editing]
I praised Duncan for writing this, not because I think everyone should be playing Punch Bug, or that it should be an opt-out game. I strongly disagree with that, and like many, think it was a poor choice of central example. I praised him, and I stand strongly by this, because this essay felt extremely risky to write due to the exact concerns it was complaining about, and opened up the author to very over-sized retaliation. I’m not brave enough to write such things, and as Talib points out repeatedly in Skin in the Game, I should feel shame about that. Which I do.
Also, I didn’t notice the point Benquo is making, until Benquo made it. At which point, I saw it very, very clearly. He came to my apartment last Purim and we read the Megillah together, so shared cultural context doubtless helped. Despite that context, I think that saying the word pogrom (or similar) here is necessary to make the point. I wouldn’t have gotten there reliably without it, even with a very Jewish background and outlook, so it seems very necessary in general.
We need to defend the need for people to physically interact with the world, and potentially have some of those interactions be unfun, without invoking patterns of behavior that really do lead to terrible things. The line “you sure look like you’re playing” should scare the living hell out of you. So should Duncan’s statement about what should be done with those who don’t want to play. There’s a reason I think ‘punch them as hard as you can right in the face’ is not only allowed, but the correct reaction, and I’m not one to advocate violence, including Nazi punching.
If you’re trying to point out that something pattern matches and leads to things very over the line and feels deeply unsafe, you may need to mention those unsafe things. It obviously needs to be done carefully, and perhaps the OP’s first version was not sufficiently careful, but current version is, and as noted the resulting discussion utilizes this to make important points rather than to inflame. It does not turn into a demon thread except (perhaps) insofar as we have a potential reaction to moderation issues.
So I think the ‘literal Nazi’ exception to Godwin’s Law applies here, and Nazis are being treated with the appropriate seriousness. If after reading this thread you don’t think that, I worry that you haven’t groked the thing Benquo is trying to point at. I am sympathetic to the point that once you break the absolute prohibition things could go quite badly, and I think it’s good to point out that this line is being crossed and we’re nervous about it, but frankly: I’ll allow it.
Just to make sure we have complete clarity around exactly what words seemed outside the bounds of acceptable discourse here to Raemon, my original unedited comment began:
I notice some level of confusion here.
Suppose Alice came to me with an argument like the following (about which I will make a meta-level, not an object-level, point; I don’t endorse the entirety of what follows):
How would you go about responding to this argument? (Not the logical details or content of your response, but the methodology of how you give it.)
Personally, I point out that I’m a gay man, and thus have a license to discuss the object-level details because I’m sympathetic to the concerns of LGBT individuals, and then proceed with the object-level discussion of the argument. But imagine the hypothetical straight me, or even worse, the hypothetical straight athlete me. It seems like there’s some chilling going on where straight Vaniver is being punished not for actually gay bashing, but for doing anything perceived as the other party as potentially providing cover for gay bashing.
Though here I should take a step back, and look at the phrase “actually gay bashing.” In doing some fact-checking for this comment I discovered that the phrase “gay bashing,” which I had originally heard in the context of physical violence leading to hospitalization or murder, covers both verbal and physical abuse, both actual and threatened. Obviously verbally bullying someone for their sexual orientation is unacceptably cruel, but I find myself wishing there were some obvious threshold (on the level of injury, perhaps, instead of mere verbal vs. physical, which doesn’t carve reality at the joints) and short word to point to “intimidation of gays above this threshold,” so that I could say things like “I am opposed to people who hospitalize gays because they unacceptably damage the social fabric and freedom of expression for gays, while I support people who argue that some methods that reduce hospitalization of gays aren’t worth their other costs because they’re part of how society correctly handles difficult decisions about tradeoffs” with pre-existing categories for both, so that it was an easier sentence to write.
It’s not obvious to me that Alice feels my desire for such a threshold, or would find it convenient if that threshold existed. It seems to me that when Alice follows her own logic, she ends up being convinced that providing cover for gay bashing is bad for the same reasons that gay bashing is bad, even if it’s not as bad. The sort of callousness that I see as probably necessary to make good tradeoffs is of the same kind as the callousness that Alice hates, because it doesn’t oppose the evil she opposes.
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So it seems plausible to me that straight Vaniver would not engage with the argument, because the environment around the argument doesn’t give him any place to bring his actual self and actual views. Perhaps he feels a pang of ironic sympathy when considering point (1) of the argument.
Agreed that we should ignore the object-level, so I’m doing my best to ignore it.
This argument sounds like it is saying we should ban such consensual actions and discussion as a society/nation, rather than a website. In that case, I’d respond with the usual reasons why banning the action is folly, and banning discussions that could lead to ‘a culture of X’ is madness. Mumble mumble free speech, free association, etc. But of course, I’d also defend someone’s right to advocate for such decisions.
On the website level, I don’t get that easy an out, but I want to be clear I wasn’t suggesting I was against discussion of or advocacy of punch bug. I just wish Duncan had hit upon a better rallying cry slash central point, think trying to make this a thing without checking with people first would be pretty bad, and think it’s really important that we let Benquo point out that there’s something dangerous and alarming here if he senses that (even if we don’t think he’s right).
I definitely haven’t grokked the thing Benquo is trying to point at, at all. (I’m plenty Jewish by any anti-semite’s definition, fwiw). I don’t see what’s asymmetric about the ‘no punch back’ rule at all—the punchee is free to spot the next bug, in which case they will become the beneficiary of the ‘no punch back’ rule.
Is it hard for you to imagine that some people might not be violent sadists?
ETA: I meant this literally, not as an insult. People who enjoy punching others are going to disproportionately be punch-bug initiators. People who either don’t enjoy causing others (ostensibly minor) suffering, or don’t enjoy doing so through (ostensibly minor) physical violence, are not beneficiaries of the right to punch with impunity, and are potential beneficiaries of the right to punch back.
However, I think SilentCal’s subsequent behavior justified more interpretive labor than my initial comment extended. One should sometimes make this sort of false-negative error, but it’s important to own up to it when one does. This comment was bad for the commons. I’m sorry. Oops!
[Moderation Note: After Ben’s most recent edit, I still think this comment is a) crossing important rhetorical lines, and b) making some underlying errors. More thoughts here. – Ray]
Let me back up. Zvi convinced me there was a big important click to be had here, and I’m bothered that I haven’t had the click. My current understanding of your argument is unpersuasive. That probably means it’s an incorrect understanding.
Maybe our crux is that I don’t think the Punch Bug game was ever significantly about hurting people who don’t want to play it?
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.
I don’t think “aboutness” is really a helpful concept here. Strategies might be implemented by minds that don’t fully understand the strategy.
Let me clarify: I believe that if you took all of the people who currently want to play Punch Bug, and put them all in one one community, they would continue to play Punch Bug. They would *not* find that the absence of unwilling victims spoiled the fun, because unwilling victims were never the source of the fun.
I agree and my objection doesn’t rest on those grounds. Thanks for clarifying. Overall your last several comments did a lot to shift my perceptions towards the possibility of being heard, which has updated me towards a higher level of interpretive labor on my end being appropriate.