Mh, crux is wrong. My objections are consistent with my past behaviour in similar situations.
I am not categorically defending Sam from everything. I am conditionally defending him from a subset of things. Though I think his welfare is important, my primary purpose here isn’t about that. (I do think his welfare matters, just as anyone should have their core dignity as a sentient being respected, regardless of who they are or what they’ve done.)
I would write something equivalent to this post regardless of whether I believed Sam had done something unethical,[1] because I think some of the community’s response was, in part, unhealthy and dangerous either way.
When it involves outrage, our epistemic rigour and reluctance to defer to mass opinion should be much stricter than baseline. What happened instead was that people inferred Sam’s guilt by how confidently outraged their peers were. And because in our present culture it’s really hard to believably signal condemnation without also signalling confidence, this is a recipe for explosive information cascades/bandwagons. This is extremely standard psychology, and something we should as a high-trust community be unceasingly wary of. For this reason primarily, we should be very—but not infinitely—reluctant to enforce “failing to condemn” as a crime.
I don’t object to people condemning his actions, especially not to the people who are clearly conditionalising their condemnation on seeing specific evidence. I’m not claiming other people don’t know more than me, and they might have much stronger reasons to be confident.
Ridicule is more tangential to the harm, and has much more associative overlap with cruelty compared to anger and condemnation. Ridicule doesn’t even pretend to be about justice (usually). If ridicule must be used, it works better as a tool for diminishing people in power, when you want them to have less power; when someone is already at the bottom, ridicule is cruelty. (Maybe the phase shift in power was so sudden that people failed to notice that they are now targeting someone who’s suddenly very vulnerable to abuse.)
I have my object-level probabilities, but part of my point is how expected I am to reveal them, which makes me think I should leave it ambiguous, at least in public. “Which side are you on?!” ← Any social instincts that pressure a resolution to this question should be scrutinised with utmost suspicion.
I don’t want to imply that failure to condemn is itself worthy of condemnation (except once we’re over a threshold of confidence). I do mean to say that trying to defend SBF from the small harm of ridicule by memes is a bad prioritisation of words.
It was a surprising enough decision that it made more sense to me to think you were motivated by your uncertain beliefs about his actions rather than a principled stance against ridicule. But I am willing to believe you have such a principled stance against ridicule. So now I want to argue that you shouldn’t take such a strong stance against ridicule.
If you like, please tell me in what scenarios you think outrage and ridicule are appropriate, if any. That would help to cash out what actual trade off between punishment and compassion you are recommending and I could see how far we are from agreeing.
I should clarify that the harm I envision is not mostly about Sam or others at FTX. It’s the harm I imagine indirectly caused to the movement, and by the movement, by condoning insufficiently-informed bandwagons of outrage and pile-on ridicule. It harms our alignment, our epistemic norms, and our social culture; and thereby harms our ability to do good in the world.
Anger, ostracism—heck, even violence—seems less likely to misfire than ridicule. Ridicule is about having fun at another’s expense, and that’s just an exceedingly dangerous tool even when wielded with good intentions (which I highly doubt has been the primary motivation most people have had for using it).
Mh, crux is wrong. My objections are consistent with my past behaviour in similar situations.
I am not categorically defending Sam from everything. I am conditionally defending him from a subset of things. Though I think his welfare is important, my primary purpose here isn’t about that. (I do think his welfare matters, just as anyone should have their core dignity as a sentient being respected, regardless of who they are or what they’ve done.)
I would write something equivalent to this post regardless of whether I believed Sam had done something unethical,[1] because I think some of the community’s response was, in part, unhealthy and dangerous either way.
When it involves outrage, our epistemic rigour and reluctance to defer to mass opinion should be much stricter than baseline. What happened instead was that people inferred Sam’s guilt by how confidently outraged their peers were. And because in our present culture it’s really hard to believably signal condemnation without also signalling confidence, this is a recipe for explosive information cascades/bandwagons. This is extremely standard psychology, and something we should as a high-trust community be unceasingly wary of. For this reason primarily, we should be very—but not infinitely—reluctant to enforce “failing to condemn” as a crime.
I don’t object to people condemning his actions, especially not to the people who are clearly conditionalising their condemnation on seeing specific evidence. I’m not claiming other people don’t know more than me, and they might have much stronger reasons to be confident.
Ridicule is more tangential to the harm, and has much more associative overlap with cruelty compared to anger and condemnation. Ridicule doesn’t even pretend to be about justice (usually). If ridicule must be used, it works better as a tool for diminishing people in power, when you want them to have less power; when someone is already at the bottom, ridicule is cruelty. (Maybe the phase shift in power was so sudden that people failed to notice that they are now targeting someone who’s suddenly very vulnerable to abuse.)
I have my object-level probabilities, but part of my point is how expected I am to reveal them, which makes me think I should leave it ambiguous, at least in public. “Which side are you on?!” ← Any social instincts that pressure a resolution to this question should be scrutinised with utmost suspicion.
Thanks.
I don’t want to imply that failure to condemn is itself worthy of condemnation (except once we’re over a threshold of confidence). I do mean to say that trying to defend SBF from the small harm of ridicule by memes is a bad prioritisation of words.
It was a surprising enough decision that it made more sense to me to think you were motivated by your uncertain beliefs about his actions rather than a principled stance against ridicule. But I am willing to believe you have such a principled stance against ridicule. So now I want to argue that you shouldn’t take such a strong stance against ridicule.
If you like, please tell me in what scenarios you think outrage and ridicule are appropriate, if any. That would help to cash out what actual trade off between punishment and compassion you are recommending and I could see how far we are from agreeing.
I should clarify that the harm I envision is not mostly about Sam or others at FTX. It’s the harm I imagine indirectly caused to the movement, and by the movement, by condoning insufficiently-informed bandwagons of outrage and pile-on ridicule. It harms our alignment, our epistemic norms, and our social culture; and thereby harms our ability to do good in the world.
Anger, ostracism—heck, even violence—seems less likely to misfire than ridicule. Ridicule is about having fun at another’s expense, and that’s just an exceedingly dangerous tool even when wielded with good intentions (which I highly doubt has been the primary motivation most people have had for using it).
(Thanks for highlighting these questions.)