The standard that you seem to be suggesting is Kafkaesque. Someone accuses you of something, you prove them false, but that doesn’t count because of strategic meanings of words. What?
But imagine this from the other side of a conflict. There’s a social norm:
Don’t isolate people (e.g. because it makes them vulnerable, e.g. to abuse).
Now a hypothetical (cartoonishly explicit) bad actor comes along and says “Aha, I know what to do, I will use my soft power to isolate my employee, but only from some people, and that way I’m not “isolating” them, but I can still control their social context of influences, support, and ideology”. (To be extra clear: I’m not following the story in detail and I’m genuinely not claiming that Nonlinear is like this; there’s some possible relevance, in that their genuinely well-intended actions might possibly have had a similarly bad effect as this hypothetical cartoonish bad actor would hypothetically have had.)
So this bad actor does this. Now, did they isolate the person? Did they violate the norm? Can you accuse them of isolating their employee? Do you have to exactly specify what shape of isolation, on pain of making an infinitely malleable accusation? If you later specify the shape / form of the isolation, are you changing the accusation?
You should be specifying enough so that they don’t say something that rebuts the accusation and you can then respond with “well, they rebutted what I actually said, but they didn’t rebut what I meant, so it doesn’t count”.
Alice and Chloe report that they were advised not to spend time with ‘low value people’, including their families, romantic partners, and anyone local to where they were staying, with the exception of guests/visitors that Nonlinear invited. Alice and Chloe report this made them very socially dependent on Kat/Emerson/Drew and otherwise very isolated.
If that’s what she’s accusing people of, you have no business later saying “well, actually, they invited her romantic partner, and she was encouraged to invite friends and family, but the accusations are still totally true because she was socially isolated.” That’s not just a slightly different interpretation of her words, that’s flat out saying that the very things brought up in the original accusation as a smoking gun suddenly don’t matter now that they were proven false.
I think this is a good first step towards understanding it. That said, this almost frames it as a way to handle adversarially chosen edge-cases, which I think doesn’t get to the core of the understanding. One thing I would highlight:
Don’t isolate people (e.g. because it makes them vulnerable, e.g. to abuse).
That is, “don’t isolate people” isn’t a rule because People Are Happier When They Are Around Others (even though that is true in a generic sense, and happiness does in a generic sense correlate with goodness). Rather, “don’t isolate people” is a rule because of the strategic consequences of isolation. As such, it is natural that “don’t isolate people” would focus on the strategic facet of isolation.
But imagine this from the other side of a conflict. There’s a social norm:
Now a hypothetical (cartoonishly explicit) bad actor comes along and says “Aha, I know what to do, I will use my soft power to isolate my employee, but only from some people, and that way I’m not “isolating” them, but I can still control their social context of influences, support, and ideology”. (To be extra clear: I’m not following the story in detail and I’m genuinely not claiming that Nonlinear is like this; there’s some possible relevance, in that their genuinely well-intended actions might possibly have had a similarly bad effect as this hypothetical cartoonish bad actor would hypothetically have had.)
So this bad actor does this. Now, did they isolate the person? Did they violate the norm? Can you accuse them of isolating their employee? Do you have to exactly specify what shape of isolation, on pain of making an infinitely malleable accusation? If you later specify the shape / form of the isolation, are you changing the accusation?
You should be specifying enough so that they don’t say something that rebuts the accusation and you can then respond with “well, they rebutted what I actually said, but they didn’t rebut what I meant, so it doesn’t count”.
If that’s what she’s accusing people of, you have no business later saying “well, actually, they invited her romantic partner, and she was encouraged to invite friends and family, but the accusations are still totally true because she was socially isolated.” That’s not just a slightly different interpretation of her words, that’s flat out saying that the very things brought up in the original accusation as a smoking gun suddenly don’t matter now that they were proven false.
I think this is a good first step towards understanding it. That said, this almost frames it as a way to handle adversarially chosen edge-cases, which I think doesn’t get to the core of the understanding. One thing I would highlight:
That is, “don’t isolate people” isn’t a rule because People Are Happier When They Are Around Others (even though that is true in a generic sense, and happiness does in a generic sense correlate with goodness). Rather, “don’t isolate people” is a rule because of the strategic consequences of isolation. As such, it is natural that “don’t isolate people” would focus on the strategic facet of isolation.