My stance is “the more we promote awareness of the psychological landscape around destructive patterns of behavior, the better.” This isn’t necessarily at odds with what you’re saying because “the psychological landscape” is a descriptive thing, whereas your objection to Nate’s proposal is that it seeks to be “immediately-decision-relevant,” i.e., that it’s normative (or comes with direct normative implications).
So, maybe I’d agree that “maleficient” might be slightly too simplistic of a classification (because we may want to draw action-relevant boundaries in different places depending on the context – e.g., different situations call for different degrees of risk tolerance of false positives vs. false negatives).
That said, I think there’s an important message in Nate’s post and (if I had to choose one or the other) I’m more concerned about people not internalizing that message than about it potentially feeding ammunition to witch hunts. (After all, someone who internalizes Nate’s message will probably become more concerned about the possibility of witch hunts – if only explicitly-badly-intentioned people instigated witch hunts or added fuel to the fires, history would look very different.)
“maleficient” might be slightly too simplistic of a classification
There is an interesting phenomenon around culture wars where a crazy amount of concepts is generated to describe the contested territory with mind-boggling nuance. I have a hunch that this is not just expertise signaling, but actually useful for dissolving the conceptual superweapons in a sea of distinctions. This divests the original contentious immediately-decision-relevant concept of its special role that gives it power, by replacing it with a hundred slightly-decision-relevant distinctions where none of them have significant power.
A disagreement that was disputing a definition about placement of its boundaries becomes a disagreement about decision procedures in terms of many unchanging and uncontroversial definitions that cover all contested territory in detail. After the dispute is over, most of the technical distinctions can once again be discarded.
Could you give some examples? I understand you may not want to talk about culture war topics on lesswrong, so it’s fine if you decline, but without examples I unfortunately cannot picture what you’re talking about
My stance is “the more we promote awareness of the psychological landscape around destructive patterns of behavior, the better.” This isn’t necessarily at odds with what you’re saying because “the psychological landscape” is a descriptive thing, whereas your objection to Nate’s proposal is that it seeks to be “immediately-decision-relevant,” i.e., that it’s normative (or comes with direct normative implications).
So, maybe I’d agree that “maleficient” might be slightly too simplistic of a classification (because we may want to draw action-relevant boundaries in different places depending on the context – e.g., different situations call for different degrees of risk tolerance of false positives vs. false negatives).
That said, I think there’s an important message in Nate’s post and (if I had to choose one or the other) I’m more concerned about people not internalizing that message than about it potentially feeding ammunition to witch hunts. (After all, someone who internalizes Nate’s message will probably become more concerned about the possibility of witch hunts – if only explicitly-badly-intentioned people instigated witch hunts or added fuel to the fires, history would look very different.)
There is an interesting phenomenon around culture wars where a crazy amount of concepts is generated to describe the contested territory with mind-boggling nuance. I have a hunch that this is not just expertise signaling, but actually useful for dissolving the conceptual superweapons in a sea of distinctions. This divests the original contentious immediately-decision-relevant concept of its special role that gives it power, by replacing it with a hundred slightly-decision-relevant distinctions where none of them have significant power.
A disagreement that was disputing a definition about placement of its boundaries becomes a disagreement about decision procedures in terms of many unchanging and uncontroversial definitions that cover all contested territory in detail. After the dispute is over, most of the technical distinctions can once again be discarded.
Could you give some examples? I understand you may not want to talk about culture war topics on lesswrong, so it’s fine if you decline, but without examples I unfortunately cannot picture what you’re talking about
The cost of this statement is feeding the frame where it’s not necessarily fine.