[EDIT: As Oliās next reponse notes, Iām misinterpreting him here. His claim is that the movement would be overall larger in a world where we lose this group but correspondingly pick up others (like Robin, I assume), or at least that the direction of the effect on movement size is not obvious.]
***
Thanks for the response. Contrary to your claim that you are proposing a third option, I think your (3) cleanly falls under mine and Benās first option, since itās just a non-numeric write-up of what Ben said:
Sure, we will lose 95% of the people we want to attract, but the resulting discussion will be >20x more valuable so itās worth the cost
I assume you would give different percentages, like 30% and 2x or something, but the structure of your (3) appears identical.
***
At that point my disagreement with you on this specific case becomes pretty factual; the number of sexual abuse survivors is large, my expected percentage of them that donāt want to engage with Robin Hanson is high, the number of people in the community with on-the-record statements or behaviour that are comparably or more unpleasant to those people is small, and so Iām generally willing to distance from the latter in order to be open to the former. Thatās from a purely cold-blooded āmaximise community outputā perspective, never mind the human element.
Other than that, I have a number of disagremeents with things you wrote, and for brevity Iām not going to go through them all; you may assume by default that everything you think is obvious I do not think is obvious. But the crux of the disagreement is here I think:
it seems very rarely the right choice to avoid anyone who ever has said anything public about the topic that is triggering you
I disagree with the non-hyperbolic version of this, and think it significantly underestimates the extent to which someone repeatedly saying or doing public things that you find odious is a predictor of them saying or doing unpleasant things to you in person, in a fairly straightforward āleopards donāt change their spotsā way.
I canāt speak to the sexual abuse case directly, but if someone has a long history of making overtly racist statements Iām not likely to attend a small-group event that I know they will attend, because I put high probability that they will act in an overtly racist way towards me and I really canāt be bothered to deal with that. Iām definitely not bringing my children to that event. Itās not a matter of being ātriggeredā per se, I just have better things to do with my evening than cutting some obnoxious racist down to size. But even then, Iām very privileged in a number of ways and so very comfortable defending my corner and arguing back if attacked; not everybody has (or should have) the ability and/āor patience to do that.
Thereās also a large second-order effect that communities which tolerate such behaviour are much more likely to contain other individuals who hold those views and merely havenāt put them in writing on the internet, which increases the probability of such an experience considerably. Avoidance of such places is the right default policy here, at an individual level at least.
No. How does my (3) match up to that option? The thing I am saying is not that we will lose 95% of the people, the thing I am saying is we are going to lose a large fraction of people either way, and the world where you have tons of people who follow the strategy of distancing themselves from anyone who says things they donāt like is a world where you both wonāt have a lot of people, and you will have tons of polarization and internal conflict.
How is your summary at all compatible with what I said, given that I explicitly said:
with the second (the one where we select on tolerance) possibly actually being substantially larger
That by necessity means that I expect the strategy you are proposing to not result in a larger community, at least in the long run. We can have a separate conversation about the exact balance of tradeoffs here, but please recognize that I am not saying the thing you are summarizing me as saying.
I am specifically challenging the assumption that this is a tradeoff of movement size, using some really straightforward logic of āif you have lots people who have a propensity to distance themselves from others, they will distance themselves and things will splinter apartā. You might doubt that such a general tendency exists, you might doubt that the inference here is valid and that there are ways to keep such a community of people together either way, but in either case, please donāt claim that I am saying something I am pretty clearly not saying.
Thank you for explicitly saying that you think your proposed approach would lead to a larger movement size in the long run, I had missed that. Your actual self-quote is an extremely weak version of this, since āthis might possibly actually happenā is not the same as explicitly saying āI think this will happenā. The latter certainly does not follow from the former āby necessityā.
Still, I could have reasonably inferred that you think the latter based on the rest of your commentary, and should at least have asked if that is in fact what you think, so I apologise for that and will edit my previous post to reflect the same.
That all said, I believe my previous post remains an adequate summary of why I disagree with you on the object level question.
Your actual self-quote is an extremely weak version of this, since āthis might possibly actually happenā is not the same as explicitly saying āI think this will happenā. The latter certainly does not follow from the former āby necessityā.
Yeah, sorry, I do think the āby necessityā was too strong.
[EDIT: As Oliās next reponse notes, Iām misinterpreting him here. His claim is that the movement would be overall larger in a world where we lose this group but correspondingly pick up others (like Robin, I assume), or at least that the direction of the effect on movement size is not obvious.]
***
Thanks for the response. Contrary to your claim that you are proposing a third option, I think your (3) cleanly falls under mine and Benās first option, since itās just a non-numeric write-up of what Ben said:
I assume you would give different percentages, like 30% and 2x or something, but the structure of your (3) appears identical.
***
At that point my disagreement with you on this specific case becomes pretty factual; the number of sexual abuse survivors is large, my expected percentage of them that donāt want to engage with Robin Hanson is high, the number of people in the community with on-the-record statements or behaviour that are comparably or more unpleasant to those people is small, and so Iām generally willing to distance from the latter in order to be open to the former. Thatās from a purely cold-blooded āmaximise community outputā perspective, never mind the human element.
Other than that, I have a number of disagremeents with things you wrote, and for brevity Iām not going to go through them all; you may assume by default that everything you think is obvious I do not think is obvious. But the crux of the disagreement is here I think:
I disagree with the non-hyperbolic version of this, and think it significantly underestimates the extent to which someone repeatedly saying or doing public things that you find odious is a predictor of them saying or doing unpleasant things to you in person, in a fairly straightforward āleopards donāt change their spotsā way.
I canāt speak to the sexual abuse case directly, but if someone has a long history of making overtly racist statements Iām not likely to attend a small-group event that I know they will attend, because I put high probability that they will act in an overtly racist way towards me and I really canāt be bothered to deal with that. Iām definitely not bringing my children to that event. Itās not a matter of being ātriggeredā per se, I just have better things to do with my evening than cutting some obnoxious racist down to size. But even then, Iām very privileged in a number of ways and so very comfortable defending my corner and arguing back if attacked; not everybody has (or should have) the ability and/āor patience to do that.
Thereās also a large second-order effect that communities which tolerate such behaviour are much more likely to contain other individuals who hold those views and merely havenāt put them in writing on the internet, which increases the probability of such an experience considerably. Avoidance of such places is the right default policy here, at an individual level at least.
No. How does my (3) match up to that option? The thing I am saying is not that we will lose 95% of the people, the thing I am saying is we are going to lose a large fraction of people either way, and the world where you have tons of people who follow the strategy of distancing themselves from anyone who says things they donāt like is a world where you both wonāt have a lot of people, and you will have tons of polarization and internal conflict.
How is your summary at all compatible with what I said, given that I explicitly said:
That by necessity means that I expect the strategy you are proposing to not result in a larger community, at least in the long run. We can have a separate conversation about the exact balance of tradeoffs here, but please recognize that I am not saying the thing you are summarizing me as saying.
I am specifically challenging the assumption that this is a tradeoff of movement size, using some really straightforward logic of āif you have lots people who have a propensity to distance themselves from others, they will distance themselves and things will splinter apartā. You might doubt that such a general tendency exists, you might doubt that the inference here is valid and that there are ways to keep such a community of people together either way, but in either case, please donāt claim that I am saying something I am pretty clearly not saying.
Thank you for explicitly saying that you think your proposed approach would lead to a larger movement size in the long run, I had missed that. Your actual self-quote is an extremely weak version of this, since āthis might possibly actually happenā is not the same as explicitly saying āI think this will happenā. The latter certainly does not follow from the former āby necessityā.
Still, I could have reasonably inferred that you think the latter based on the rest of your commentary, and should at least have asked if that is in fact what you think, so I apologise for that and will edit my previous post to reflect the same.
That all said, I believe my previous post remains an adequate summary of why I disagree with you on the object level question.
Yeah, sorry, I do think the āby necessityā was too strong.