Some defensiveness is both justified and adaptive.
This seems right but tricky. That is, it seems important to distinguish ‘adaptive for my situation’ and ‘adaptive for truth-seeking’ (either as an individual or as a community), and it seems right that hostility or counterattack or so on are sometimes the right tool for individual and community truth-seeking. (Sometimes you are better off if you gag Loki: even though gagging in general is a ‘symmetric weapon,’ gagging of trolls is as asymmetric as your troll-identification system.) Further, there’s this way in which ‘social monkey’-style defenses seem like they made it harder to know (yourself, or have it known in the community) that you have validly identified the person you’re gagging as Loki (because you’ve eroded the asymmetry of your identification system).
It seems like the hoped behavior is something like the follows: Alice gets a vibe that Bob is being non-cooperative, Alice points out an observation that is relevant to Alice’s vibe (“Bob’s tone”) that also could generate the same vibe in others, and then Bob either acts in a reassuring manner (“oh, I didn’t mean to offend you, let me retract the point or state it more carefully”) or in a confronting manner (“I don’t think you should have been offended by that, and your false accusation / tone policing puts you in the wrong”), and then there are three points to track: object-level correctness, whether Bob is being cooperative once Bob’s cooperation has been raised to salience, and whether Alice’s vibe of Bob’s intent was a valid inference.
It seems to me like we can still go through a similar script without making excuses or obfuscating, but it requires some creativity and this might not be the best path to go down.
This seems right but tricky. That is, it seems important to distinguish ‘adaptive for my situation’ and ‘adaptive for truth-seeking’ (either as an individual or as a community), and it seems right that hostility or counterattack or so on are sometimes the right tool for individual and community truth-seeking. (Sometimes you are better off if you gag Loki: even though gagging in general is a ‘symmetric weapon,’ gagging of trolls is as asymmetric as your troll-identification system.) Further, there’s this way in which ‘social monkey’-style defenses seem like they made it harder to know (yourself, or have it known in the community) that you have validly identified the person you’re gagging as Loki (because you’ve eroded the asymmetry of your identification system).
It seems like the hoped behavior is something like the follows: Alice gets a vibe that Bob is being non-cooperative, Alice points out an observation that is relevant to Alice’s vibe (“Bob’s tone”) that also could generate the same vibe in others, and then Bob either acts in a reassuring manner (“oh, I didn’t mean to offend you, let me retract the point or state it more carefully”) or in a confronting manner (“I don’t think you should have been offended by that, and your false accusation / tone policing puts you in the wrong”), and then there are three points to track: object-level correctness, whether Bob is being cooperative once Bob’s cooperation has been raised to salience, and whether Alice’s vibe of Bob’s intent was a valid inference.
It seems to me like we can still go through a similar script without making excuses or obfuscating, but it requires some creativity and this might not be the best path to go down.
That is pretty much my picture. I agree completely about the trickiness of it all.
At some point I’d be curious to know your thoughts on the other potential paths.