Thanks for the pushback, I’m still confused and it helped me think a bit better (I think). What do you think about the idea that the issue resolves around what Kelsey Piper called competing access needs? I explained how I think about it in this comment. I feel like I want to protect edgy think aloud spaces like those from Hanson. I feel like I benefit a lot from it and I feel like I (not being on any EA insides) am already excluded from many valuable but potentially offending EA think aloud spaces because people are not willing to bare the costs like Hanson does.
That all makes sense. I’m a bit puzzled why it has to be edgy on top of just talking with fewer filters. It feels to me like the intention isn’t just to discuss ideas with people of a certain access need, but also some element of deliberate provocation. (But maybe you could say that’s just a side product of curiosity about where the lines are – I just feel like some of the tweet wordings were deliberately optimized to be jarring.) If it wasn’t for that one tweet that Hanson now apologized for, I’d have less strong opinions on whether to use the term “misstep.” (And the original post used it in plural, so you have a point.)
I’m a bit puzzled why it has to be edgy on top of just talking with fewer filters.
Presumably every filter is associated with an edge, right? Like, the ‘trolley problem’ is a classic of philosophy, and yet it is potentially traumatic for the victims of vehicular violence or accidents. If that’s a group you don’t want to upset or offend, you install a filter to catch yourself before you do, and when seeing other people say things you would’ve filtered out, you perceive them as ‘edgy’. “Don’t they know they shouldn’t say that? Are they deliberately saying that because it’s edgy?”
[A more real example is that a friend once collected a list of classic examples and thought experiments, and edited all of the food-based ones to be vegan, instead of the original food item. Presumably the people who originally generated those thought experiments didn’t perceive them as being ‘edgy’ or ‘over the line’ in some way.]
but also some element of deliberate provocation.
I read a lot of old books; for example, it’s interesting to contrast the 1934 and 1981 editions of How to Win Friends and Influence People. Deciding to write one of the ‘old-version’ sentences in 2020 would probably be seen as a deliberate provocation, and yet it seems hugely inconsistent to see Dale Carnegie as out to deliberately provoke people.
Now, I’m not saying Hanson isn’t deliberately edgy; he very well might be. But there are a lot of ways in which you might offend someone, and it takes a lot of computation to proactively notice and prevent all of them, and it’s very easy to think your filters are “common knowledge” or “obvious” when in fact they aren’t. As a matter of bounded computation, thoughts spent on filters are thoughts not spent on other things, and so there is a real tradeoff here, where the fewer filters are required the more thoughts can be spent on other things, but this is coming through a literal increase in carelessness.
Now, I’m not saying Hanson isn’t deliberately edgy; he very well might be.
If you’re not saying that, then why did you make a comment? It feels like you’re stating a fully general counterargument to the view that some statements are clearly worth improving, and that it matters how we say things. That seems like an unattractive view to me, and I’m saying that as someone who is really unhappy with social justice discourse.
Edit: It makes sense to give a reminder that we may sometimes jump to conclusions too quickly, and maybe you didn’t want to voice unambiguous support for the view that the comment wordings were in fact not easy to improve on given the choice of topic. That would make sense – but then I have a different opinion.
you didn’t want to voice unambiguous support for the view that the comment wordings were in fact not easy to improve on given the choice of topic.
I’m afraid this sentence has too many negations for me to clearly point one way or the other, but let me try to restate it and say why I made a comment:
The mechanistic approach to avoiding offense is to keep track of the ways things you say could be interpreted negatively, and search for ways to get your point across while not allowing for any of the negative interpretations. This is a tax on saying anything, and it especially taxes statements on touchy subjects, and the tax on saying things backpropagates into a tax on thinking them.
When we consider people who fail at the task of avoiding giving offense, it seems like there are three categories to consider:
1. The Blunt, who are ignoring the question of how the comment will land, and are just trying to state their point clearly (according to them).
2. The Blithe, who would put effort into rewording their point if they knew how to avoid giving offense, but whose models of the audience are inadequate to the task.
3. The Edgy, who are optimizing for being ‘on the line’ or in the ‘plausible deniability’ region, where they can both offend some targets and have some defenders who view their statements as unobjectionable.
While I’m comfortable predicting those categories will exist, confidently asserting that someone falls into any particular category is hard, because it involves some amount of mind-reading (and I think the typical mind fallacy makes it easy to think people are being Edgy, because you assume they see your filters when deciding what to say). That said, my guess is that Hanson is Blunt instead of Edgy or Blithe.
Thanks, that makes sense to me now! The three categories are also what I pointed out in my original comment:
Yes, it’s a tradeoff, but Hanson’s being so close to one extreme of the spectrum that it starts to be implausible that anyone can be that bad at communicating carefully just by accident. I don’t think he’s even trying, and maybe he’s trying to deliberately walk as close to the line as possible.
Okay, so you cared mostly about this point about mind reading:
While I’m comfortable predicting those categories will exist, confidently asserting that someone falls into any particular category is hard,
This is a good point, but I didn’t find your initial comment so helpful because this point against mind reading didn’t touch on any of the specifics of the situation. It didn’t address the object-level arguments I gave:
[...] I just feel like some of the tweet wordings were deliberately optimized to be jarring.)
but Hanson’s being so close to one extreme of the spectrum that it starts to be implausible that anyone can be that bad at communicating carefully just by accident.
I felt confused about why I was presented with a fully general argument for something I thought I indicated I already considered. If I read your comment as “I don’t want to comment on the specific tweets, but your interpretation might be a bit hasty” – that makes perfect sense. But by itself, it felt to me like I was being strawmanned for not being aware of obvious possibilities. Similar to khorton, I had the impulse to say “What does this have to do with trolleys, shouldn’t we, if anything, talk about the specific wording of the tweets?” Because to me, phrases like “gentle, silent rape” seem obviously unnecessarily jarring even as far as twitter discussions about rape go.” (And while one could try to defend this as just blunt or blithe, I think the reasoning would have to be disanalogous to your trolley or food examples, because it’s not like it should be surprising to any Western person in the last two decades that rape is a particularly sensitive topic – very unlike the “changing animal food to vegan food” example you gave.)
Because to me, phrases like “gentle, silent rape” seem obviously unnecessarily jarring even as far as twitter discussions about rape go.”
I am always really confused when someone brings up this point as a point of critique. The substance of Hanson’s post where he used that phrase just seemed totally solid to me.
I feel like this phrase is always invoked to make the point that Hanson doesn’t understand how bad rape is, or that he somehow thinks lots of rape is “gentle” or “silent”, but that has absolutely nothing to do with the post where the phrase is used. The phrase isn’t even referring to rape itself!
When people say things like this, my feeling is that they must have not actually read the original post, where the idea of “gentle, silent rape” was used as a way to generate intuitions not about how bad rape is, but about how bad something else is (cuckoldry), and about how our legal system judges different actions in a somewhat inconsistent way. Again, nowhere in that series of posts did Hanson say that rape was in any way not bad, or not traumatic, or not something that we should obviously try to prevent with a substantial fraction of our resources. And given the relatively difficult point he tried to make, which is a good one and I appreciate him making, I feel like his word choice was overall totally fine, if one assumes that others will at the very least read what the phrase refers to at all, instead of totally removing it from context and using it in a way that has basically nothing to do with how it was used by him, which I argue is a reasonable assumption to make in a healthy intellectual community.
I did read the post, and I mostly agree with you about the content (Edit: at least in the sense that I think large parts of the argument are valid; I think there are some important disanalogies that Hanson didn’t mention, like “right to bodily integrity” being way clearer than “moral responsibility toward your marriage partner”). I find it weird that just because I think a point is poorly presented, people think I disagree with the point. (Edit: It’s particularly the juxtaposition of “gently raped” that comes also in the main part of the text. I also would prefer more remarks that put the reader at ease, e.g., repeating several times that it’s all just a thought experiment, and so on.)
There’s a spectrum of how much people care about a norm to present especially sensitive topics in a considerate way. You and a lot of other people here seem to be so far on one end of the spectrum that you don’t seem to notice the difference between me and Ezra Klein (in the discussion between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein, I completely agreed with Sam Harris.) Maybe that’s just because there are few people in the middle of this spectrum, and you usually deal with people who bring the same types of objections. But why are there so few people in the middle of this spectrum? That’s what I find weird.
Some people here talk about a slippery slope and having to defend the ground at all costs. Is that the reasoning?
I want to keep up a norm that considerateness is really good. I think that’s compatible with also criticizing bad outgrowths of considerate impulses. Just like it’s compatible to care about truth-seeking, but criticize bad outgrowths of it. (If a virtue goes too far, it’s not a virtue anymore.)
I find it weird that just because I think a point is poorly presented, people think I disagree with the point.
Sorry! I never meant to imply that you disagree with the point.
My comment in this case is more: How would you have actually wanted Robin Hanson to phrase his point? I’ve thought about that issue a good amount, and like, I feel like it’s just a really hard point to make. I am honestly curious what other thing you would have preferred Hanson to say instead. The thing he said seemed overall pretty clear to me, and really not like an attempt to be intentionally edge or something, and more that the point he wanted to make kind of just had a bunch of inconvenient consequences that were difficult to explore (similarly to how utilitarianism quickly gives rise to a number of hard to discuss consequences that are hard to explore).
My guess is you can probably come up with something better, but that it would take you substantial time (> 10 minutes) of thinking.
My argument here is mostly: In context, the thing that Robin said seemed fine, and I don’t expect that many people who read that blogpost actually found his phrasing that problematic. The thing that I expect to have happened is that some people saw this as an opportunity to make Robin look bad, and use some of the words he said completely out of context, creating a narrative where he said something he definitely did not say, and that looked really bad.
And while I think the bar of “only write essays that don’t really inflame lots of people and cause them to be triggered” is already a high bar to meet, but maybe a potentially reasonable one, the bar of “never write anything that when taken out of context could cause people to be really triggered” is no longer a feasible bar to meet. Indeed it is a bar that is now so high that I no longer know how to make the vast majority of important intellectual points I have to make in order to solve many of the important global problems I want us to solve in my lifetime. The way I understood your comment above, and the usual critiques of that blogpost in particular, is that it was leaning into the out-of-context phrasings of his writing, without really acknowledging the context in which the phrase was used.
I think this is an important point to make, because on a number of occasions I do think Robin has actually said things that seemed much more edgy and unnecessarily inflammatory even if you had the full context of his writing, and I think the case for those being bad is much stronger than the case for that blogpost about “gentle, silent rape” and other things in its reference class being bad. I think Twitter in particular has made some of this a lot worse, since it’s much harder to provide much context that helps people comprehend the full argument, and it’s much more frequent for things to be taken out of context by others.
I felt confused about why I was presented with a fully general argument for something I thought I indicated I already considered.
In my original comment, I was trying to resolve the puzzle of why something would have to appear edgy instead of just having fewer filters, by pointing out the ways in which having unshared filters would lead to the appearance of edginess. [On reflection, I should’ve been clearer about the ‘unshared’ aspect of it.]
Comparing trolley accidents to rape is pretty ridiculous for a few reasons:
Rape is much more common than being run over by trolleys.
Rape is a very personal form of a violence. I’m not sure anyone has ever been run over by a trolley on purpose in all of history.
If you’re talking to a person about trolley accidents, they’re very unlikely to actually run you over, no matter how cheerful they seem, because most people don’t have access to trolleys. If you’re talking to a man about rape and he thinks it’s not a big deal, there’s some chance he’ll actually rape you. In some cases, the conversation includes an implicit threat.
If you’re talking to a man about rape and he thinks it’s not a big deal, there’s some chance he’ll actually rape you.
I realise you did not say this applied to Robin, but just in case anyone reading was confused and mistakenly thought it was implicit, we should make clear that Robin does not think rape is ‘not a big deal’. Firstly, opposition to rape is almost universal in the west, especially among the highly educated; as such our prior should be extremely strong that he does think rape is bad. In addition to this, and despite his opposition to unnecessary disclaimers, Robin has made clear his opposition to rape on many occasions. Here are some quotations that I found easily on the first page of google and by following the links in the article EA Munich linked:
I was not at all minimizing the harm of rape when I used rape as a reference to ask if other harms might be even bigger. Just as people who accuse others of being like Hitler do not usually intend to praise Hitler, people who compare other harms to rape usually intend to emphasize how big are those other harms, not how small is rape.
of course I’m against rape, and it is easy to see or ask.
Separately, while I don’t know what the base rate for a hypothetical person who supposedly doesn’t take rape sufficiently seriously will rape someone at an EA event as a result (I suspect it is very low), I think we would be relatively safe here as it would presumably be a zoom meeting anyway due to German Immigration Restrictions.
Yes, I’m not saying that Robin Hanson is a criminal, and it’s good to point out that he’s not pro-rape. Thanks for that.
I was thinking about what it would look like for the whole EA community to generally try to avoid upsetting people who have been traumatized by rape, and comparing that to if the EA community tried to avoid upsetting people who have been traumatized by trolley accidents, which was a suggestion above.
My intuition about the base rate of people who have experienced sexual assault and how often sexual assault happens at EA events is probably different from yours which may explain our different approaches to this topic.
Comparing trolley accidents to rape is pretty ridiculous for a few reasons:
I think you’re missing my point; I’m not describing the scale, but the type. For example, suppose we were discussing racial prejudice, and I made an analogy to prejudice against the left-handed; it would be highly innumerate of me to claim that prejudice against the left-handed is as damaging as racial prejudice, but it might be accurate of me to say both are examples of prejudice against inborn characteristics, are perceived as unfair by the victims, and so on.
And so if you’re not trying to compare expected trauma, and just come up with rules of politeness that guard against any expected trauma above a threshold, setting the threshold low enough that both “prejudice against left-handers” and “prejudice against other races” are out doesn’t imply that the damage done by both are similar.
That said, I don’t think I agree with the points on your list, because I used the reference class of “vehicular violence or accidents,” which is very broad. I agree there’s an important disanalogy in that ‘forced choices’ like in the trolley problem are highly atypical for vehicular accidents, most of which are caused by negligence of one sort or another, and that trolleys themselves are very rare compared to cars, trucks, and trains, and so I don’t actually expect most sufferers of MVA PTSD to be triggered or offended by the trolley problem. But if they were, it seems relevant that (in the US) motor vehicle accidents are more common than rape, and lead to more cases of PTSD than rape (at least, according to 2004 research; I couldn’t quickly find anything more recent).
I also think that utilitarian thought experiments in general radiate the “can’t be trusted to abide by norms” property; in the ‘fat man’ or ‘organ donor’ variants of the trolley problem, for example, the naive utilitarian answer is to murder, which is also a real risk that could make the conversation include an implicit threat.
If you think my arguments are incorrect, it would be useful to explain how rather than silently downvoting.
I am starting to wonder if I will be downvoted on the EA Forum any time I point out that rape is bad. That can’t be why people downvote these comments, right?
I’m glad you came back to look at this discussion again because I found your comments here (and generally) really valuable. I refrained from upvoting your comment because you called the comparison “pretty ridiculous”. I would feel attacked if you called my reasoning ridiculous and would be less able to constructively argue with you.
I think you are right when pointing out that some topics are much more sensitive to many more people, and EAs being more careful around those topics makes our community more welcoming to more people. That said, I understood vaniver’s point was to take an example where most people reading it would not feel like it is a sensitive topic, and *even there* you might upset some people (e.g. if they stumble on a discussion comparing the death of five vs. one). So the solution should not be to punish/deplatform somebody that discussed a topic in a way that was upsetting for someone, and going forward stop people from thinking publically when touching potentially upsetting topics, but something else.
I’m fairly sure the real story is much better than that, although still bad in objective terms: In culture war threads, the typical norms re karma roughly morph into ‘barely restricted tribal warfare’. So people have much lower thresholds both to slavishly upvote their ‘team’,and to downvote the opposing one.
I downvoted the above comment by Khorton (not the one asking for explanations, but the one complaining about the comparison of Trolley’s and rape), and think Larks explained part of the reason pretty well. I read it in substantial parts as an implicit accusation of Robin to be in support of rape, and also seemed to itself misunderstand Vaniver’s comment, which wasn’t at all emphasizing a dimension of trolley problems that made a comparison with rape unfitting, and doing so in a pretty accusatory way (which meerpirat clarified below).
I agree that voting quality somewhat deteriorates in more heated debates, but I think this characterization of how voting happens is too uncharitable. I try pretty hard to vote carefully, and often change my votes multiple times on a thread if I later on realize I was too quick to judge something or misunderstood someone, and really spend a lot of time reconsidering and thinking about my voting behavior with the health of the broader discourse in mind, so I am quite confident about my own voting behavior being mischaracterized by the above.
I’ve also talked to many other people active on LessWrong and the EA Forum over the years, and a lot of people seem to put a lot of effort into how they vote, so I am also reasonably confident many others also spend substantial time thinking about their voting in a way that really isn’t well-characterized by “roughly morphing barely restricted tribal warfare”.
Thanks for the pushback, I’m still confused and it helped me think a bit better (I think). What do you think about the idea that the issue resolves around what Kelsey Piper called competing access needs? I explained how I think about it in this comment. I feel like I want to protect edgy think aloud spaces like those from Hanson. I feel like I benefit a lot from it and I feel like I (not being on any EA insides) am already excluded from many valuable but potentially offending EA think aloud spaces because people are not willing to bare the costs like Hanson does.
That all makes sense. I’m a bit puzzled why it has to be edgy on top of just talking with fewer filters. It feels to me like the intention isn’t just to discuss ideas with people of a certain access need, but also some element of deliberate provocation. (But maybe you could say that’s just a side product of curiosity about where the lines are – I just feel like some of the tweet wordings were deliberately optimized to be jarring.) If it wasn’t for that one tweet that Hanson now apologized for, I’d have less strong opinions on whether to use the term “misstep.” (And the original post used it in plural, so you have a point.)
Presumably every filter is associated with an edge, right? Like, the ‘trolley problem’ is a classic of philosophy, and yet it is potentially traumatic for the victims of vehicular violence or accidents. If that’s a group you don’t want to upset or offend, you install a filter to catch yourself before you do, and when seeing other people say things you would’ve filtered out, you perceive them as ‘edgy’. “Don’t they know they shouldn’t say that? Are they deliberately saying that because it’s edgy?”
[A more real example is that a friend once collected a list of classic examples and thought experiments, and edited all of the food-based ones to be vegan, instead of the original food item. Presumably the people who originally generated those thought experiments didn’t perceive them as being ‘edgy’ or ‘over the line’ in some way.]
I read a lot of old books; for example, it’s interesting to contrast the 1934 and 1981 editions of How to Win Friends and Influence People. Deciding to write one of the ‘old-version’ sentences in 2020 would probably be seen as a deliberate provocation, and yet it seems hugely inconsistent to see Dale Carnegie as out to deliberately provoke people.
Now, I’m not saying Hanson isn’t deliberately edgy; he very well might be. But there are a lot of ways in which you might offend someone, and it takes a lot of computation to proactively notice and prevent all of them, and it’s very easy to think your filters are “common knowledge” or “obvious” when in fact they aren’t. As a matter of bounded computation, thoughts spent on filters are thoughts not spent on other things, and so there is a real tradeoff here, where the fewer filters are required the more thoughts can be spent on other things, but this is coming through a literal increase in carelessness.
If you’re not saying that, then why did you make a comment? It feels like you’re stating a fully general counterargument to the view that some statements are clearly worth improving, and that it matters how we say things. That seems like an unattractive view to me, and I’m saying that as someone who is really unhappy with social justice discourse.
Edit: It makes sense to give a reminder that we may sometimes jump to conclusions too quickly, and maybe you didn’t want to voice unambiguous support for the view that the comment wordings were in fact not easy to improve on given the choice of topic. That would make sense – but then I have a different opinion.
I’m afraid this sentence has too many negations for me to clearly point one way or the other, but let me try to restate it and say why I made a comment:
The mechanistic approach to avoiding offense is to keep track of the ways things you say could be interpreted negatively, and search for ways to get your point across while not allowing for any of the negative interpretations. This is a tax on saying anything, and it especially taxes statements on touchy subjects, and the tax on saying things backpropagates into a tax on thinking them.
When we consider people who fail at the task of avoiding giving offense, it seems like there are three categories to consider:
1. The Blunt, who are ignoring the question of how the comment will land, and are just trying to state their point clearly (according to them).
2. The Blithe, who would put effort into rewording their point if they knew how to avoid giving offense, but whose models of the audience are inadequate to the task.
3. The Edgy, who are optimizing for being ‘on the line’ or in the ‘plausible deniability’ region, where they can both offend some targets and have some defenders who view their statements as unobjectionable.
While I’m comfortable predicting those categories will exist, confidently asserting that someone falls into any particular category is hard, because it involves some amount of mind-reading (and I think the typical mind fallacy makes it easy to think people are being Edgy, because you assume they see your filters when deciding what to say). That said, my guess is that Hanson is Blunt instead of Edgy or Blithe.
Thanks, that makes sense to me now! The three categories are also what I pointed out in my original comment:
Okay, so you cared mostly about this point about mind reading:
This is a good point, but I didn’t find your initial comment so helpful because this point against mind reading didn’t touch on any of the specifics of the situation. It didn’t address the object-level arguments I gave:
I felt confused about why I was presented with a fully general argument for something I thought I indicated I already considered. If I read your comment as “I don’t want to comment on the specific tweets, but your interpretation might be a bit hasty” – that makes perfect sense. But by itself, it felt to me like I was being strawmanned for not being aware of obvious possibilities. Similar to khorton, I had the impulse to say “What does this have to do with trolleys, shouldn’t we, if anything, talk about the specific wording of the tweets?” Because to me, phrases like “gentle, silent rape” seem obviously unnecessarily jarring even as far as twitter discussions about rape go.” (And while one could try to defend this as just blunt or blithe, I think the reasoning would have to be disanalogous to your trolley or food examples, because it’s not like it should be surprising to any Western person in the last two decades that rape is a particularly sensitive topic – very unlike the “changing animal food to vegan food” example you gave.)
I am always really confused when someone brings up this point as a point of critique. The substance of Hanson’s post where he used that phrase just seemed totally solid to me.
I feel like this phrase is always invoked to make the point that Hanson doesn’t understand how bad rape is, or that he somehow thinks lots of rape is “gentle” or “silent”, but that has absolutely nothing to do with the post where the phrase is used. The phrase isn’t even referring to rape itself!
When people say things like this, my feeling is that they must have not actually read the original post, where the idea of “gentle, silent rape” was used as a way to generate intuitions not about how bad rape is, but about how bad something else is (cuckoldry), and about how our legal system judges different actions in a somewhat inconsistent way. Again, nowhere in that series of posts did Hanson say that rape was in any way not bad, or not traumatic, or not something that we should obviously try to prevent with a substantial fraction of our resources. And given the relatively difficult point he tried to make, which is a good one and I appreciate him making, I feel like his word choice was overall totally fine, if one assumes that others will at the very least read what the phrase refers to at all, instead of totally removing it from context and using it in a way that has basically nothing to do with how it was used by him, which I argue is a reasonable assumption to make in a healthy intellectual community.
I did read the post, and I mostly agree with you about the content (Edit: at least in the sense that I think large parts of the argument are valid; I think there are some important disanalogies that Hanson didn’t mention, like “right to bodily integrity” being way clearer than “moral responsibility toward your marriage partner”). I find it weird that just because I think a point is poorly presented, people think I disagree with the point. (Edit: It’s particularly the juxtaposition of “gently raped” that comes also in the main part of the text. I also would prefer more remarks that put the reader at ease, e.g., repeating several times that it’s all just a thought experiment, and so on.)
There’s a spectrum of how much people care about a norm to present especially sensitive topics in a considerate way. You and a lot of other people here seem to be so far on one end of the spectrum that you don’t seem to notice the difference between me and Ezra Klein (in the discussion between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein, I completely agreed with Sam Harris.) Maybe that’s just because there are few people in the middle of this spectrum, and you usually deal with people who bring the same types of objections. But why are there so few people in the middle of this spectrum? That’s what I find weird.
Some people here talk about a slippery slope and having to defend the ground at all costs. Is that the reasoning?
I want to keep up a norm that considerateness is really good. I think that’s compatible with also criticizing bad outgrowths of considerate impulses. Just like it’s compatible to care about truth-seeking, but criticize bad outgrowths of it. (If a virtue goes too far, it’s not a virtue anymore.)
Sorry! I never meant to imply that you disagree with the point.
My comment in this case is more: How would you have actually wanted Robin Hanson to phrase his point? I’ve thought about that issue a good amount, and like, I feel like it’s just a really hard point to make. I am honestly curious what other thing you would have preferred Hanson to say instead. The thing he said seemed overall pretty clear to me, and really not like an attempt to be intentionally edge or something, and more that the point he wanted to make kind of just had a bunch of inconvenient consequences that were difficult to explore (similarly to how utilitarianism quickly gives rise to a number of hard to discuss consequences that are hard to explore).
My guess is you can probably come up with something better, but that it would take you substantial time (> 10 minutes) of thinking.
My argument here is mostly: In context, the thing that Robin said seemed fine, and I don’t expect that many people who read that blogpost actually found his phrasing that problematic. The thing that I expect to have happened is that some people saw this as an opportunity to make Robin look bad, and use some of the words he said completely out of context, creating a narrative where he said something he definitely did not say, and that looked really bad.
And while I think the bar of “only write essays that don’t really inflame lots of people and cause them to be triggered” is already a high bar to meet, but maybe a potentially reasonable one, the bar of “never write anything that when taken out of context could cause people to be really triggered” is no longer a feasible bar to meet. Indeed it is a bar that is now so high that I no longer know how to make the vast majority of important intellectual points I have to make in order to solve many of the important global problems I want us to solve in my lifetime. The way I understood your comment above, and the usual critiques of that blogpost in particular, is that it was leaning into the out-of-context phrasings of his writing, without really acknowledging the context in which the phrase was used.
I think this is an important point to make, because on a number of occasions I do think Robin has actually said things that seemed much more edgy and unnecessarily inflammatory even if you had the full context of his writing, and I think the case for those being bad is much stronger than the case for that blogpost about “gentle, silent rape” and other things in its reference class being bad. I think Twitter in particular has made some of this a lot worse, since it’s much harder to provide much context that helps people comprehend the full argument, and it’s much more frequent for things to be taken out of context by others.
In my original comment, I was trying to resolve the puzzle of why something would have to appear edgy instead of just having fewer filters, by pointing out the ways in which having unshared filters would lead to the appearance of edginess. [On reflection, I should’ve been clearer about the ‘unshared’ aspect of it.]
Comparing trolley accidents to rape is pretty ridiculous for a few reasons:
Rape is much more common than being run over by trolleys.
Rape is a very personal form of a violence. I’m not sure anyone has ever been run over by a trolley on purpose in all of history.
If you’re talking to a person about trolley accidents, they’re very unlikely to actually run you over, no matter how cheerful they seem, because most people don’t have access to trolleys. If you’re talking to a man about rape and he thinks it’s not a big deal, there’s some chance he’ll actually rape you. In some cases, the conversation includes an implicit threat.
I realise you did not say this applied to Robin, but just in case anyone reading was confused and mistakenly thought it was implicit, we should make clear that Robin does not think rape is ‘not a big deal’. Firstly, opposition to rape is almost universal in the west, especially among the highly educated; as such our prior should be extremely strong that he does think rape is bad. In addition to this, and despite his opposition to unnecessary disclaimers, Robin has made clear his opposition to rape on many occasions. Here are some quotations that I found easily on the first page of google and by following the links in the article EA Munich linked:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/11/hanson-loves-moose-caca.html
https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/990762713876922368?lang=en
https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/991069965263491072
https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1042739542242074630
and from personal communication:
Separately, while I don’t know what the base rate for a hypothetical person who supposedly doesn’t take rape sufficiently seriously will rape someone at an EA event as a result (I suspect it is very low), I think we would be relatively safe here as it would presumably be a zoom meeting anyway due to German Immigration Restrictions.
Yes, I’m not saying that Robin Hanson is a criminal, and it’s good to point out that he’s not pro-rape. Thanks for that.
I was thinking about what it would look like for the whole EA community to generally try to avoid upsetting people who have been traumatized by rape, and comparing that to if the EA community tried to avoid upsetting people who have been traumatized by trolley accidents, which was a suggestion above.
My intuition about the base rate of people who have experienced sexual assault and how often sexual assault happens at EA events is probably different from yours which may explain our different approaches to this topic.
How often does sexual assault and/or rape happen at EA events, in your opinion? Are we talking 1 in 10 events, 1 in 100, 1 in 1000?
I think you’re missing my point; I’m not describing the scale, but the type. For example, suppose we were discussing racial prejudice, and I made an analogy to prejudice against the left-handed; it would be highly innumerate of me to claim that prejudice against the left-handed is as damaging as racial prejudice, but it might be accurate of me to say both are examples of prejudice against inborn characteristics, are perceived as unfair by the victims, and so on.
And so if you’re not trying to compare expected trauma, and just come up with rules of politeness that guard against any expected trauma above a threshold, setting the threshold low enough that both “prejudice against left-handers” and “prejudice against other races” are out doesn’t imply that the damage done by both are similar.
That said, I don’t think I agree with the points on your list, because I used the reference class of “vehicular violence or accidents,” which is very broad. I agree there’s an important disanalogy in that ‘forced choices’ like in the trolley problem are highly atypical for vehicular accidents, most of which are caused by negligence of one sort or another, and that trolleys themselves are very rare compared to cars, trucks, and trains, and so I don’t actually expect most sufferers of MVA PTSD to be triggered or offended by the trolley problem. But if they were, it seems relevant that (in the US) motor vehicle accidents are more common than rape, and lead to more cases of PTSD than rape (at least, according to 2004 research; I couldn’t quickly find anything more recent).
I also think that utilitarian thought experiments in general radiate the “can’t be trusted to abide by norms” property; in the ‘fat man’ or ‘organ donor’ variants of the trolley problem, for example, the naive utilitarian answer is to murder, which is also a real risk that could make the conversation include an implicit threat.
If you think my arguments are incorrect, it would be useful to explain how rather than silently downvoting.
I am starting to wonder if I will be downvoted on the EA Forum any time I point out that rape is bad. That can’t be why people downvote these comments, right?
I’m glad you came back to look at this discussion again because I found your comments here (and generally) really valuable. I refrained from upvoting your comment because you called the comparison “pretty ridiculous”. I would feel attacked if you called my reasoning ridiculous and would be less able to constructively argue with you.
I think you are right when pointing out that some topics are much more sensitive to many more people, and EAs being more careful around those topics makes our community more welcoming to more people. That said, I understood vaniver’s point was to take an example where most people reading it would not feel like it is a sensitive topic, and *even there* you might upset some people (e.g. if they stumble on a discussion comparing the death of five vs. one). So the solution should not be to punish/deplatform somebody that discussed a topic in a way that was upsetting for someone, and going forward stop people from thinking publically when touching potentially upsetting topics, but something else.
That’s a very helpful overview, thank you.
I’m fairly sure the real story is much better than that, although still bad in objective terms: In culture war threads, the typical norms re karma roughly morph into ‘barely restricted tribal warfare’. So people have much lower thresholds both to slavishly upvote their ‘team’,and to downvote the opposing one.
I downvoted the above comment by Khorton (not the one asking for explanations, but the one complaining about the comparison of Trolley’s and rape), and think Larks explained part of the reason pretty well. I read it in substantial parts as an implicit accusation of Robin to be in support of rape, and also seemed to itself misunderstand Vaniver’s comment, which wasn’t at all emphasizing a dimension of trolley problems that made a comparison with rape unfitting, and doing so in a pretty accusatory way (which meerpirat clarified below).
I agree that voting quality somewhat deteriorates in more heated debates, but I think this characterization of how voting happens is too uncharitable. I try pretty hard to vote carefully, and often change my votes multiple times on a thread if I later on realize I was too quick to judge something or misunderstood someone, and really spend a lot of time reconsidering and thinking about my voting behavior with the health of the broader discourse in mind, so I am quite confident about my own voting behavior being mischaracterized by the above.
I’ve also talked to many other people active on LessWrong and the EA Forum over the years, and a lot of people seem to put a lot of effort into how they vote, so I am also reasonably confident many others also spend substantial time thinking about their voting in a way that really isn’t well-characterized by “roughly morphing barely restricted tribal warfare”.
I am reasonably confident that this is the best first-order explanation.
EDIT: Habryka’s comment makes me less sure that this is true.