âThese people [...] harassing people in subwaysâ clearly refers to Daniel Pennyâs victim, Jordan Neely, so surely it refers to a group Jordan Neely is a part of. Jordan Neely isnât a woke activist. Thereâs nothing in the tweet that connects âthese peopleâ and âwoke activismâ; note also that âwalking around in suitsâ is hardly a stereotypical woke activist behaviour.
I reached out to Hanania and this is what he said:
ââThese peopleâ as in criminals and those who are apologists for crimes. A coalition of bad people who together destroy cities. Yes, I know how it looks. The Penny arrest made me emotional, and so it was an unthinking tweet in the moment.â
He also says itâs quoted in the Blocked and Reported podcast episode, but itâs behind a paywall and I canât for the life of me get Substack to accept my card, so I canât doublecheck. Would appreciate if anybody figured out how to do that and could verify.
I think generally though itâs 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.
I think generally though itâs 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 donât know if this applies to Hanania) or if we have strong priors for suspecting that this is what theyâre doing (arguably applies here for reasons related to his history; see next paragraph).
If someone has a history of being racist, but they say theyâve changed, itâs IMO on themto avoid making statements that are easily interpreted as incredibly racist. And if they accidentally make such an easily misinterpretable statement, itâs also on them to immediately clarify what they did or didnât mean.
Generally, in contexts that we have strong reason to believe that they might be adversarial, incompetence/âstupidity 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, youâll 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, itâs 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 weâre in an adversarial context where harms conditional on being right are asymmetrically larger than harms on being wrong. (Of course, thereâs also an option like âpreserve option value and gather further info,â which is overall preferable, and I definitely like that you reached out to Hanania in that spirit. Iâm not saying we should all have made up our minds solely based on that tweet; Iâm mostly just saying that I find it pretty naive to immediately believe the guy just because he said he didnât mean it in a racist way.)
âThese people [...] harassing people in subwaysâ clearly refers to Daniel Pennyâs victim, Jordan Neely, so surely it refers to a group Jordan Neely is a part of. Jordan Neely isnât a woke activist. Thereâs nothing in the tweet that connects âthese peopleâ and âwoke activismâ; note also that âwalking around in suitsâ is hardly a stereotypical woke activist behaviour.
I reached out to Hanania and this is what he said:
ââThese peopleâ as in criminals and those who are apologists for crimes. A coalition of bad people who together destroy cities. Yes, I know how it looks. The Penny arrest made me emotional, and so it was an unthinking tweet in the moment.â
He also says itâs quoted in the Blocked and Reported podcast episode, but itâs behind a paywall and I canât for the life of me get Substack to accept my card, so I canât doublecheck. Would appreciate if anybody figured out how to do that and could verify.
I think generally though itâs 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 donât know if this applies to Hanania) or if we have strong priors for suspecting that this is what theyâre doing (arguably applies here for reasons related to his history; see next paragraph).
If someone has a history of being racist, but they say theyâve changed, itâs IMO on them to avoid making statements that are easily interpreted as incredibly racist. And if they accidentally make such an easily misinterpretable statement, itâs also on them to immediately clarify what they did or didnât mean.
Generally, in contexts that we have strong reason to believe that they might be adversarial, incompetence/âstupidity 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, youâll 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, itâs 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 weâre in an adversarial context where harms conditional on being right are asymmetrically larger than harms on being wrong. (Of course, thereâs also an option like âpreserve option value and gather further info,â which is overall preferable, and I definitely like that you reached out to Hanania in that spirit. Iâm not saying we should all have made up our minds solely based on that tweet; Iâm mostly just saying that I find it pretty naive to immediately believe the guy just because he said he didnât mean it in a racist way.)