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.)
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.)