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 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.