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”.
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.