Why do you perceive ridicule to be significantly worse than other expressions of anger or social punishment? It seems you endorse condemnation here, but are strongly against the former. But ridicule is one of the most powerful forms of condemnation.
If you endorse condemnation, why not spend more breath condemning SBF than defending him? (My hypothesis for why not follows.)
Given my beliefs about the scale of his wrongdoing[1], two things follow: firstly, it’s odd to prioritise compassion for Sam Bankman-Fried so strongly over the victims, and secondly this is exactly the moment for us to cooperate on reinforcing the norms he broke. That is the value of punishment: not because it’s intrinsically good, but because of the importance of maintaining the norm. Given what I believe.
Isn’t the reason you have different feelings—the compassion and desire to protect him, and the lack of anger and lack of desire to condemn[2] -- because you have different beliefs about what he did, rather than because you think social punishment is so often mistaken as to not apply in the case of massive norm breaking? It seems that’s more likely the crux, because I’d be surprised to hear you disavow social punishment across the board. You are uncertain whether he acted wrongly, and so you want to prevent others from jumping too far in their judgments and punishments too quickly.
In which case it’s a mistake to dwell on general and meta-level arguments about why it’s epistemically dangerous to be angry, as opposed to directly addressing the object level claim that we should still be uncertain of the facts.
I could be wrong about the crux. You talk about anger and compassion trading off, so is there some scenario in which you think anger and ridicule are appropriate?
Originally I was going to say ‘defection’ rather than ‘wrongdoing’ to appeal more to your charitable posture towards SBF, but then I realised I’d be part of the problem I’m arguing against, namely, failing to condemn.
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).
Why do you perceive ridicule to be significantly worse than other expressions of anger or social punishment? It seems you endorse condemnation here, but are strongly against the former. But ridicule is one of the most powerful forms of condemnation.
If you endorse condemnation, why not spend more breath condemning SBF than defending him? (My hypothesis for why not follows.)
Given my beliefs about the scale of his wrongdoing[1], two things follow: firstly, it’s odd to prioritise compassion for Sam Bankman-Fried so strongly over the victims, and secondly this is exactly the moment for us to cooperate on reinforcing the norms he broke. That is the value of punishment: not because it’s intrinsically good, but because of the importance of maintaining the norm. Given what I believe.
Isn’t the reason you have different feelings—the compassion and desire to protect him, and the lack of anger and lack of desire to condemn[2] -- because you have different beliefs about what he did, rather than because you think social punishment is so often mistaken as to not apply in the case of massive norm breaking? It seems that’s more likely the crux, because I’d be surprised to hear you disavow social punishment across the board. You are uncertain whether he acted wrongly, and so you want to prevent others from jumping too far in their judgments and punishments too quickly.
In which case it’s a mistake to dwell on general and meta-level arguments about why it’s epistemically dangerous to be angry, as opposed to directly addressing the object level claim that we should still be uncertain of the facts.
I could be wrong about the crux. You talk about anger and compassion trading off, so is there some scenario in which you think anger and ridicule are appropriate?
Originally I was going to say ‘defection’ rather than ‘wrongdoing’ to appeal more to your charitable posture towards SBF, but then I realised I’d be part of the problem I’m arguing against, namely, failing to condemn.
I recognise I’m interpolating your emotional response from sparse data; feel free to contradict. I am going on private data here too.
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.)