Interpretive labor request: I’d like people to try to read this comment (and for that matter pretty much all my comments) under the assumption that a demon has cast a spell on me to make me word things in a way that sounds more like scapegoating than I mean, and on you to interpret them that way whenever there’s any potential ambiguity. This isn’t an excuse for failures on my part to be clear, it’s just a request. If you see ways in which the demon has tricked me, I want that information so I can fix the problem.
Duncan, thanks for the interpretive labor you’re extending. I agree that given what I seem to you to be saying, you’re in a difficult position here.
I want to restate that my threat model was not primarily that things like the Dragon Army house resort to violence. (It didn’t!) It’s more that the appeal of proposals like Dragon Army is a really bad sign about the broader culture’s coordination protocols. We live in a world where violence is increasingly being compressed into tail events. Accordingly, I’m worried about ambient cultural protocols favoring violence leading to sudden phase transitions.
I’m not claiming that you are an especially important causal node in that phase transition. I am claiming that your project’s framing was important evidence about the state of that system.
The specific problem DA exemplified to me was the conflation—again, not specific to you—of getting things done with attacking the enemy such that even projects as obviously peaceful as living well together in a house end up using a military paradigm to project seriousness. The poverty of other paradigms is deeply worrying to me. (Likewise “Rationality Dojo” in hindsight seems like a bad sign, even though I’m not particularly worried about people beating me up with rationality techniques.)
Similarly, it’s not terribly worrying to me that one person in the community, with a high level of physicality, used Punch-Bug as an example when advocating a higher harm threshold. What seemed really terrible was that with a bunch of comments already, several of them approving comments from other prominent people who I respect, no one seemed to be attending to the systemic dangers of a game institutionalizing injustice with respect to physical violence. (Possibly pretty mild, although your post was at best ambiguous to me on this point and I don’t think it’s OK to expect people to reliably round potential threats down. This is a secondary factor that substantially increased my visceral sense of threat when writing my initial comment—a sense that vagueness about the level of violence proposed felt a bit like testing the waters with plausible deniability. This is not a confident assertion that that was your intention—just, that’s how it pattern-matched to me. Again, if I believe your assurances that you’d never initiate a substantially abnormal level of violence, then I’m not worried about direct threat from you, but get a lot more worried about what the normal level of violence is likely to become within the next decade.)
Posts I’ve written about how we seem to be using fundamentally adversarial operating protocols and moving towards a war of all against all:
Interpretive labor request: I’d like people to try to read this comment (and for that matter pretty much all my comments) under the assumption that a demon has cast a spell on me to make me word things in a way that sounds more like scapegoating than I mean, and on you to interpret them that way whenever there’s any potential ambiguity. This isn’t an excuse for failures on my part to be clear, it’s just a request. If you see ways in which the demon has tricked me, I want that information so I can fix the problem.
Duncan, thanks for the interpretive labor you’re extending. I agree that given what I seem to you to be saying, you’re in a difficult position here.
I want to restate that my threat model was not primarily that things like the Dragon Army house resort to violence. (It didn’t!) It’s more that the appeal of proposals like Dragon Army is a really bad sign about the broader culture’s coordination protocols. We live in a world where violence is increasingly being compressed into tail events. Accordingly, I’m worried about ambient cultural protocols favoring violence leading to sudden phase transitions.
I’m not claiming that you are an especially important causal node in that phase transition. I am claiming that your project’s framing was important evidence about the state of that system.
The specific problem DA exemplified to me was the conflation—again, not specific to you—of getting things done with attacking the enemy such that even projects as obviously peaceful as living well together in a house end up using a military paradigm to project seriousness. The poverty of other paradigms is deeply worrying to me. (Likewise “Rationality Dojo” in hindsight seems like a bad sign, even though I’m not particularly worried about people beating me up with rationality techniques.)
Similarly, it’s not terribly worrying to me that one person in the community, with a high level of physicality, used Punch-Bug as an example when advocating a higher harm threshold. What seemed really terrible was that with a bunch of comments already, several of them approving comments from other prominent people who I respect, no one seemed to be attending to the systemic dangers of a game institutionalizing injustice with respect to physical violence. (Possibly pretty mild, although your post was at best ambiguous to me on this point and I don’t think it’s OK to expect people to reliably round potential threats down. This is a secondary factor that substantially increased my visceral sense of threat when writing my initial comment—a sense that vagueness about the level of violence proposed felt a bit like testing the waters with plausible deniability. This is not a confident assertion that that was your intention—just, that’s how it pattern-matched to me. Again, if I believe your assurances that you’d never initiate a substantially abnormal level of violence, then I’m not worried about direct threat from you, but get a lot more worried about what the normal level of violence is likely to become within the next decade.)
Posts I’ve written about how we seem to be using fundamentally adversarial operating protocols and moving towards a war of all against all:
Matching donation fundraisers can be harmfully dishonest
The humility argument for honesty
Against neglectedness considerations
Posts I’ve written laying out a partial model of how we seem to have wound up in a state of permanent wartime mobilization:
Talents
There is a war