Not to attack you, but I quit reading political subreddits because it was making me unhappy. If this kind of thing becomes common on LW, it'll be less fun for me.

When steelmanning I think it would be helpful to start with defining the claim you want to steelman. Steelmanning is about starting with a claim and then arguing for it.

It isn't about engaging a topic and trying to dig up an uncontroversial claim that might be held by some people.

It seems to me that you didn't steelman "social justice", only a small part of it. There are people (such as myself) who are quite okay with the ideal of making the world a safer place -- of course, after considering the costs and trade-offs; it's not like I would sacrifice everything else for the smallest increase of safety -- but object against some other parts of "social justice". So, from my perspective, you didn't steelman social justice at all. You only showed that it also contains some reasonable parts... which I already believed, because that is my standard assumption about all belief systems.

The usual problem with "safe spaces" is that often a safe space for X is an unsafe space for Y, because a thing that one person needs sometimes happens to be a thing that triggers another person. Making something a "safe space" for everyone would require a consensus on what is good and what is bad.

And we could find some generally accepted values, and e.g. make a space where no one is allowed to physically attack another person. But when we go further and declare that e.g. contradicting the beliefs of my tribe is literally violence... well, that makes it merely a safe space for one tribe, plus people who are willing to submit to the tribe's rules. It isn't even a safe space for skeptics or heretics within that tribe.

This may be difficult to notice for a naive, or politically mindkilled person, because "obviously" the safe space only needs to be safe for the good people; and it's quite okay (maybe even desirable) if it makes the bad people feel unsafe. There is nothing wrong about helping good people at the expense of bad people, right? I mean, no one is forcing you to be bad; you could just stop being bad, and repent. If you are sincere, the good people would probably find it in their heart to forgive you, especially if your words are accompanied by real action, such as defending good people, attacking bad people, and promoting the expansion of safe spaces.

So, as I said, as long as we can have a consensus on what is good and what is bad, there is no problem with building universally safe spaces. Until then, we can only have tribe-specific safe spaces. If we try to turn the entire society into a safe space, unless it means an archipelago where each tribe gets its place, it probably means the dominance of one tribe and subjugation of everyone else (including the skeptics and heretics of the dominant tribe).

Related: A Response To Apophemi on Triggers; Safe Spaces As Shield, Safe Spaces As Sword.

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I understand this post as trying to steelman the part of social justice movement that advocates for things like trigger warnings, safe spaces, and callout/cancel culture. It doesn't seem to touch upon the part of social justice that tries to enact policies aimed at reducing or eliminating inequities between groups. Does this seem fair?

I'd like to thank you for writing this up. I have a strong intuition that many of the ideas central to social justice would work well alongside the rationalist movement if it were less politically charged. Maybe if Scott Alexander's thesis about New Atheism transforming into Social Justice is correct (and the corollary that a new hamartiology will show up soon and take its place) then it is plausible social justice ideology will become less toxic and more amenable to an approach at the object-level (which is where I think we excel).

I am not sure this model is complete; in another comment [LW(p) · GW(p)], Wei_Dai points out that much of the social justice movement is centered around social inequalities, and your frame of "reducing suffering that can cause from predicted harms" doesn't seem to exactly hit on the problems systemic inequality can cause (such harms are often relatively easy to measure, even if not as straightforward to correct).

Social justice, as I currently understand it, is at least partially about reducing freedom in order to increase safety.

This makes sense to me. My model of a social justice advocate would argue that threats to safety are also threats to freedom: if someone does not feel safe in their environment then the range of actions they can de facto pursue is reduced even if they are technically permissible. In either case, my suspicion and the underlying assumption that good-faith social justice advocates must believe: social Pareto improvements exist.

Thanks for sharing, I found this helpful. I think this is a valuable lens to have. I think it would be useful for me to also raise a counterpoint: sometimes making concessions simply encourages people to demand more. Of course, this is highly dependent on the actual social dynamics like the attitude of the person who wants the concession and whether you can offer the concession with dignity and without it coming off as submission. But as I said, what you've posted here is definitely a useful lens.

Not sure why this post has been downvoted so much. I had upvoted it from 6 to 9, and now it's at -5. I don't see any new strong criticisms of it posted since that time, so what gives? ETA: I just did a strong upvote to bring the karma into positive territory, otherwise nobody can see my question under "Recent Discussion".

Social justice does not need steelmanning. The wikipedia definition makes perfect sense as is: "Social justice is a concept of fair and just relations between the individual and society." I am not sure what you are trying to steelman (or, from the tone of your post, dismiss), but it is something else, unrelated to social justice except maybe in some loose way.