I think generally though it’s easy to misunderstand people, and if people respond to clarify, you should believe what they say they meant to say, not your interpretation of what they said.
Depends on context. Not (e.g.) if someone has a pattern of using plausible deniability to get away with things (I actually don’t know if this applies to Hanania) or if we have strong priors for suspecting that this is what they’re doing (arguably applies here for reasons related to his history; see next paragraph).
If someone has a history of being racist, but they say they’ve changed, it’s IMO on themto avoid making statements that are easily interpreted as incredibly racist. And if they accidentally make such an easily misinterpretable statement, it’s also on them to immediately clarify what they did or didn’t mean.
Generally, in contexts that we have strong reason to believe that they might be adversarial, incompetence/stupidity cannot be counted continuously as a sufficient excuse, because adversaries will always try to claim it as their excuse, so if you let it go through, you give full coverage to all malefactors. You need adversarial epistemology. Worst-case scenario, you’ll judge harshly some people who happen to merely be incompetent in ways that, unfortunately, exactly help provide cover to bad actors. But [1] even though many people make mistakes or can seem incompetent at times, it’s actually fairly rare that incompetence looks exactly the same as what a bad actor would do for more sinister, conscious reasons (and then claim incompetence as an excuse), and [2], sadly enough, a low rate of false positives seems the lesser evil here for the utilitarian calculus because we’re in an adversarial context where harms conditional on being right are asymmetrically larger than harms on being wrong. (Of course, there’s also an option like “preserve option value and gather further info,” which is overall preferable, and I definitely like that you reached out to Hanania in that spirit. I’m not saying we should all have made up our minds solely based on that tweet; I’m mostly just saying that I find it pretty naive to immediately believe the guy just because he said he didn’t mean it in a racist way.)
Depends on context. Not (e.g.) if someone has a pattern of using plausible deniability to get away with things (I actually don’t know if this applies to Hanania) or if we have strong priors for suspecting that this is what they’re doing (arguably applies here for reasons related to his history; see next paragraph).
If someone has a history of being racist, but they say they’ve changed, it’s IMO on them to avoid making statements that are easily interpreted as incredibly racist. And if they accidentally make such an easily misinterpretable statement, it’s also on them to immediately clarify what they did or didn’t mean.
Generally, in contexts that we have strong reason to believe that they might be adversarial, incompetence/stupidity cannot be counted continuously as a sufficient excuse, because adversaries will always try to claim it as their excuse, so if you let it go through, you give full coverage to all malefactors. You need adversarial epistemology. Worst-case scenario, you’ll judge harshly some people who happen to merely be incompetent in ways that, unfortunately, exactly help provide cover to bad actors. But [1] even though many people make mistakes or can seem incompetent at times, it’s actually fairly rare that incompetence looks exactly the same as what a bad actor would do for more sinister, conscious reasons (and then claim incompetence as an excuse), and [2], sadly enough, a low rate of false positives seems the lesser evil here for the utilitarian calculus because we’re in an adversarial context where harms conditional on being right are asymmetrically larger than harms on being wrong. (Of course, there’s also an option like “preserve option value and gather further info,” which is overall preferable, and I definitely like that you reached out to Hanania in that spirit. I’m not saying we should all have made up our minds solely based on that tweet; I’m mostly just saying that I find it pretty naive to immediately believe the guy just because he said he didn’t mean it in a racist way.)