Duncan Sabien: "In Defense of Punch Bug"

Just wanted to chime in with "same".

I mention with some carefulness (since it brings _another_ dimension of political pendulum swinging for people to have strong opinions about), that, in particular, "ugh, X, dead animals in my feed" pattern matches pretty explicitly to a particular vegan social move that's clearly designed to convince people to stop posting about dead animals.

Agreed; if I were just annoyed about this but didn't want the person to stop, I would certainly not post something like that. I think D is not expressing themself clearly in that example.

(Note that to my mind, the appropriate reaction for D in such a case is to hide the post.)

I thought just the same as you. It's extremely confusing to me that D would say "ugh" and then be unhappy when C changes their behavior. I didn't know this was a way people felt.

That said, I don't interpret "ugh" as a very strong comment. I wouldn't bother thinking to change my behavior because one person said "ugh."

Feel similarly; since Facebook comments are a matter of public record, disputes and complaints on them are fully public and can have high social costs if unaddressed. I would not be worried about it in a small group chat among close friends.

Yeah, agree.

And to be clear I have absolutely had interactions where I was basically in D's situation where I express a mild annoyance that I don't mean to be taken very seriously, and then someone takes it way more seriously than I wanted them to, and I do find this extremely frustrating. But in this situation I don't see how C could possibly have interpreted it differently!

So, um, OK, time to step in it. Hoping this doesn't count as a "hot-button political issue". This is going to echo some things I've said over in the comments at Thing of Things, but I'm not going to go digging for those links right now...

It seems to me that some of what Duncan describes here is closely related to that infamous problem which led to such writings as Scott's old "Meditations" series, Scott Aaronson's "comment 171", etc. It's not so much a matter of "social ownership of the micro", but rather micro-vs-macro interpretations of certain instructions. Let's consider the situation in Vignette #1. In it, Alexis and Blake both correctly observe that how you ask a person about something may, at a micro level, affect how comfortable they feel with the possible responses to it.

(This may be a different sense of "micro". After all -- if this micro-emotional effect affects their actual decision, it then necessarily has macro effects! Which is to say, our brains' all-or-nothing decision systems can take the micro and amplify it. The "micro" here isn't so much in terms of results but in terms of the fact that what things hinge on here is, things that are small. The details of how a request is phrased or the tone it's presented in.)

So, if a person X reads writings -- written by people thinking in macro terms, or who don't recognize that these micro-influences exist -- about how it is wrong to ever pressure anyone, but interprets them in a micro manner... yeah. You see how it goes. That's not a matter of "social ownership of the micro", but it is a matter of recognizing the micro and considering it as morally relevant and attempting to account for it.

Let me step away from this narrow and hopefully not too hot-button point to make a broader one: We need what I'll call "a theory of legitimate influence"; I think the lack of one is a big part of where Alexis/Blake situations (or the more controversial one I just mentioned) come from. (What do I mean by "we"? Um. I dunno. People. I dunno.)

What do I mean by a "theory of legitimate influence"? Well, let me start by presenting three examples:

1. "Classical liberal" theory of legitimate influence -- People are more or less rational agents who can be trusted to act in their own interests. So force, coercion, and lying to people to get them to do what you want are wrong, but basically anything else is OK; so long as you're honest and don't use force it's not like you'll thereby get people to do things they don't want to do.

2. "Nerd" theory of legitimate influence -- People are kind of like rational agents, but can be biased by all sorts of arational considerations. So, influencing people via reasoned argument is OK, as you're just helping them by providing them with good reasoning, but attempting to influence them by other, necessarily arational means is wrong.

3. "Sociopathic" theory of legitimate influence -- Other people don't really have preferences, or to the extent they do they don't matter; do anything you want.

The thing here is that I don't think any of these three theories are tenable. #3 is blatantly immoral. #1 is better but fails to rule illegitimate things such as, say, badgering a person -- no, it's not using violence or threats or lying, but it's still wrong. Meanwhile #2 makes the opposite mistake -- it's impossible not to influence people arationally, every interaction you have with other people is full of such things, so to take this seriously leads to total paralysis.

(And to be clear I am not in any way restricting this to the sorts of situations I initially implicitly mentioned at the top here -- this is a generic phenomenon, one that comes up in any request or offer or attempt to organize people to do something. That said, it obviously has an especial relevance to such situations, because clearly being charming -- which is a thing that one does that influences other people's responses! -- should be considered legitimate influence, it would seem.)

So, by a "theory of legitimate influence", I mean a theory of which ways of influencing other people are -- without having to do constant consequentialist reasoning -- morally permissible (reasoned argument: definitely OK) and which are not (death threats: definitely not OK).

And I think in order to develop one that works, there are several insights one needs to take into account, that commonly expressed ones don't. A few I can think of:

1. Once you go micro enough, once you get to the level where people can be influenced, you hit the problem that at such a level there often isn't really such a thing as preexisting un-influenced preferences. If your theory assumes people always have definite preferences, or says that doing anything that shapes other people's preferences is wrong, it's not going to work.

2. On the other hand, to state the obvious, sometimes people really do act like agents and have actual preferences -- on the larger scale this approximation definitely holds -- and if you ignore this then you also will have a problem. (I mean, duh, but worth restating in light of #1.)

3. An important factor that doesn't seem to go much remarked upon, but which to my mind is crucial, is, well, how the person being influenced feels about it! That is to say: There are forms of influence that feel like another person imposing their will upon you, and there are those that make you more likely to do something but just... don't. Ego-dystonic vs ego-syntonic influence, one might call it. To my mind this is really morally relevant, not just in the heuristic sense I'm mostly talking about but also in a more direct consequentialist sense. But it seems like commonly-expressed theories of influence don't really take any notice of this, even as the people expressing those theories don't in fact condemn ego-syntonic influence as their explicitly stated theories make it seem like they would; they just seem to fail to recognize such things as influence at all, as if of course the way the request was phrased had no effect on their response because they had a fixed preexisting preference, duh. (Important note: Getting someone else to internalize some burdensome moral obligation that they feel terrible about and can't actually enact and have to doublethink around is also not OK, just in case that was not clear! This doesn't really fit cleanly into either of the two categories above -- the obligation isn't exactly external, no, but it still feels bad -- it's its own third thing; but morally it's clearly on the bad side of the line.)

4. Maximizing autonomy -- maximizing the ability of the person you're talking to both to say "yes", and to say "no", and to say "I reject the question" -- may not always be possible. Ideally you could accomplish all of these simultaneously, but in reality they often trade off against one another. At a macro level, if you don't sweat the micro, you can of course accomplish all three, by just, you know, not putting people under horrible pressure or anything, and also explicitly noting the "I reject the question" option, which people often have a hard time coming up with for themselves. But if you care about the micro level, well, a that level there will likely be a tradeoff, and if you don't account for that or just refuse to make any tradeoffs, you may encounter a problem.

I don't know -- it's possible I just have less definite preferences / am more influenceable than other people and so think of this as more important; e.g. in previous discussions over at Thing of Things, Nita responded to my comments on the matter with, no, I really do have definite fixed preferences, none of this applies to me. So, IDK, typical mind fallacy very possible here. But, I think this is important, I think this is worth pointing out.

Sounds like that was what school was like for many, and this certainly rings true given my school experiences - if you're in school, then you're physically forced into proximity with people who will punch you whenever they feel like it, and it's supposed to teach you an important lesson, or something. Duncan seems unsure whether we have too little of this, or too much.

Note that he says if you tell them you're not playing, they respond "It sure looks like you're playing, you're not punching me back." Which I think (at least, unless you can call in Reasonable Authority Figure and have them be punished appropriately without becoming a pariah, but actually even then) makes it a moral obligation to punch them. As hard as you can. Right in the face. And ideally then walk away, silently.

So, yeah, not being able to opt out of that seems pretty terrible. I think there's a lot of value in playing such a game, especially that it forces you to pay attention to the world around you and also to make it clear that the occasional punch/whatever really isn't a big deal, on an easy-to-actually-get level. Plus, it's just fun. I think I cried tears of joy during the preview for the movie Tag. But the idea of not even being allowed to opt out of it seems pretty terrible.

And I hereby opt into the game with Duncan and only Duncan. Cause otherwise it's a asymmetric pickoff, plus I don't know how to punch well.

I think it's more about situations that have insufficient information. The initial example has him being called "rapey" for a light tap on a friends shoulder for the first time. It's different if he were to slug them hard and it's different if the recipient already expressed they aren't interested. But if the first time someone taps their friend on their shoulder is compared to actual rape in any way then we clearly need to reevaluate something.

A bit about my history that colors this - I grew up being taught in a way that I thought going up to someone, especially a woman, introducing myself, and extending my hand for a handshake was vaguely rapey. People with different experiences than mine may find the article a lot less important than I do. In my personal pendulum swing I still avoid punch buggy like things towards people who have said no to them but am a lot more open to trying it for the first time with a new person who seems like the type who'd enjoy them.

My read it is that he mostly criticizes people who object to the game on ideological grounds. Typically, you wouldn't hit hard, it's a playful thing.

It's about making a big thing out of a small thing, when it would be equally easy (easier, ultimately) to ignore it and play along.

Now, surely we can imagine an abusive scenario. What to do? I think it requires social finesse. Either you're being hit too hard and you think you have a good case to be made for that. You just say: you hit me too hard, stop doing it. That might work. But maybe the person thinks you're objecting on unreasonable ideological ground, or maybe he's just a jerk. Then don't mount your high horses, just punch them back.

If I could give advice to my younger self, one of the most important one would be: throw a few punches. I was never bullied, but people did give me a lot of flack because I was a good students (and with hindsight, there are other things I could have done to ease the situation, but I digress). I should have punched one or two students who gave me a hard time. Even if I ultimately got beaten. The point is to send a signal that messing with you is costly, it has consequences. It's not a matter of debate.

I agree with almost all of this, disagree with a couple of minor things, have some other comments, and overall think this is a good comment.

But—could you make your bulleted list into a numbered list? This will make it a lot easier to respond to individual points!

I’m flagging individual comments that clearly violate norms with brief mod-notes, which link back to this comment.

Before I dive into them, I wanted to summarize my understanding of Benquo’s position, based on our conversation yesterday.

• Ben’s epistemic state is that the Punch Bug article is advocating for a change with a decent chance of escalating into violence with serious consequences.
• Most of his concern is not about what Duncan said or intended to say, but in what the likely consequences of it getting promoted are. One important consideration here is downstream effects as the message gets propagated and simplified by the sorts of people who don’t make serious efforts to interpret 14,000 word texts and retain their nuance.
• Independent of whether Ben was right in his assessment of the chance of serious escalation, he considered important that, at least in principle, there could be posts on LessWrong advocating for things with dangerous downstream consequences, and we should be cognizant of how our discourse norms will affect our ability to talk about that.
• Ben’s model of why and how the post is likely to lead to bad outcomes are informed by the mechanics of how anti-Jew pogroms (and Nazis in particular) have functioned. This is not a claim about the magnitude of how strong the concern is, but it is a claim about the nuances of the dynamics involved. (He specifically noted: it very much would not have made sense to compare it to other forms of escalating violence, genocide, etc, because the dynamics there are different).
• Ben experienced a lot of frustration that it is difficult to communicate about this sort of claim without people assuming the claim is about magnitude. In particular, he wanted it recognized that if our discourse norms include “Nazis are special, and either can’t be used as examples or comparisons, at least without a lot of additional interpretive effort on the part of the commenter”, this is creating a world where specific classes of behavioral patterns are harder to talk about.
• That all said, by the end of the conversation, Ben and I seemed mostly in agreement on most of the specific areas where I considered his points clearly over the line. (see next section).

Bright Lines

There are a few specific bright lines that Benquo crossed. I don’t think avoiding these specific issues would have been sufficient for this discussion to have gone well, but it’s easiest to start with the clearest issues:

• Irrelevant, inflammatory points – In Ben’s original comment, while I was generally worried about casually invoking Nazis and pogroms for rhetorical emphasis, the “german car” quip seemed particularly unjustified. Maybe it was an important part of Ben’s thought process that helped him notice something subtle, but as an argument it was clearly irrelevant to the broader point – I doubt Ben’s concerns depend on whether kids had invented Punch Bug or Punch Ford.
• Attributing words to Duncan that he didn’t say – It’s not okay to substitute different words with different connotations and then ascribe them to someone as if they’d made a different claim. It’s doubly not okay when the connotations are as intensely bad as “ghetto.”
  
  LessWrong does need to be the sort of place where, if you think someone is advocating for something with bad consequences, you are able to describe those consequences. But it is not okay to do that without clearly indicating that this is an inference you are making.
  
  I think this issue was exacerbated by an issue Duncan noted, of Ben pointing towards norms that are indeed good and valuable, without acknowledging that Ben had already violated them.
  
• Ascribing “Violent Sadist” as a motivation – This comment had a number of things going wrong with it. First, it was worded in an inflammatory way that made the discussion more adversarial. Ben reworded the comment in an attempt to alleviate that. I don’t think he went far enough in the rewording. But mostly I think the comment has a deeper, underlying issue – a failure of some combination of charity, imagination, empathy, or curiosity.
  
  Said recently made some comments about penalizing “inner workings” rather than outward actions. I think there is something important to that – at the very least I think LW users (and mods) have a responsibility to be very careful with that sort of reasoning.
  
  In this case, I can lay down some concrete rules/policies – if you find yourself making guesses about the motivations of someone you’re debating, and your explanation is “violent sadism”, you have a responsibility to at least come up with one alternate explanation. A serious explanation, not “house elves are stealing our magic [LW · GW]”. (You should probably generally do this whenever someone advocates for something you find baffling)
  
  But this rule doesn’t really feel sufficient to me. It accounts for this particular failure mode, but doesn’t quite carve reality at the joints and prevent a broad class of related issues. And here we get into a bit less “bright line” territory.
  
  I have guesses about what inner-generator Ben was running here. In our in-person conversation we chatted a bit about it. While wearing my official moderator hat, what I feel comfortable saying is:
  
  There will be times when we see a user making a string of bad comments. We need to be able to both say “this is bad for this specific reasons”, and also “something about your inner generator that is producing these comments is reliably degrading LessWrong discourse, and it is your responsibility to figure out what, and do something differently.” It cannot always be the full responsibility of the LessWrong team to tell all commenters precisely what needs to change.

Importantly, I think that even if Ben had avoided the error modes listed above, there’s a good chance the conversation still might have deteriorated (perhaps creating an even harder moderating challenge, since instead of clear over-the-line comments to critique, there would have been a bunch of juuuuust under-the-line comments requiring difficult judgment calls).

I don’t have anything specific to say here, other than “in a thread like this (where the primary discussion is about shifting social consensus), I think it’s important for everyone to spend more than what-feels-like-their-fair-share of charity and interpretive effort, because otherwise things tend to slowly escalate.”

Towards Clearer Policies

We had considered straight-up deleting some of Benquo’s comments a week ago. We didn’t end up doing so. I don’t think we had principled reasoning one way or the other, but my own post-facto introspection is that, at least for myself, it felt like most ways we could intervene had a strong chance of making things worse. It felt important to talk to Ben in person, and in general take the time to think and gather information before taking much explicit action.

There are certain moderation tools that would have made this easier to handle – I think we probably should have locked the entire thread after our initial warning and Ben’s subsequent reply, until we’d had a chance to talk in person.

I am embarrassed to note that I explicitly considered and discarded the idea that we could manually lock replies on each individual comment (since we do have the tool to do that), which would have taken maybe 10 minutes of effort, and my brain just straight up slided off that because it felt silly to spend 10 minutes doing a thing that I could envision how to automate.

There were a few other actions we could have taken with minimal effort that would have made this experience much less stressful for everyone involved without making major tradeoffs, and all I have to say is that none of us thought of them. In some cases I notice specific biases that led to us not thinking of it, in other cases it was just a matter of “this is a high dimensional problem space that we were not very experienced in – we had not yet formed good models of it to make thinking about it easier.”

Over the past week we’ve collectively spent a couple dozen hours thinking about both this specific discussion, and moderation in general. I don’t think our next major moderation crisis will be anywhere near perfect, but I do expect us to be better at noticing quick, low-cost actions we can take to communicate better and keep the situation from escalating.

I also expect that at least for situation similar to those we’ve faced before, we’ll be able to act faster.

Explicit Warnings

With all that in mind, specific mod notices for Ben.

• For blatant violations of the type described above, we’ll be aiming to quickly flag comments that are crossing the line. Depending on circumstances, we may delete comments that cross the line, with an explanation of why (note: our delete button sends the user a PM containing the text of the comment, so the content isn’t lost)
• In the future, in discussions where you notice yourself tempted to make comments similar the ones we’re flagging here, I ask that you put a lot more effort into ensuring the comments are high quality. This is important both for avoiding the explicit bright lines as well as grey-area-just-under-the-line comments.
  
  Yes, this is a cost that makes certain kinds of conversations harder. And we should be cognizant of that. But my current take is that this is just a necessary cost we have to pay.
• I’m fairly confident, based on extended conversations I’ve had with Ben over the years as well as the one last night, that the situation won’t escalate past the point of periodic warnings. I disagree with Ben on some important object level (and meta level) things, but I trust Ben’s underlying goals, principles and error-correction algorithms to be aligned with LessWrong’s overall mission.
  
  But because we do need legibly clear rules, it’s important to note that if this sort of discussion became a pattern, we would follow a policy of “warnings of increasing severity and publicity, followed by escalating temp bans.”

Edit: Welp no, I wrote a silly comment. While I think that this comment points somewhat to why a certain subset of people find punch bug morally wrong, this is not responding to the OP well at all and does not describe it accurately. The OP is not about punch bug, it is about social ownership of the micro, and is only discussing that aspect of punch bug. I do not think physical dominance is at all what the post is about, and if there was a standard alternative to punch bug that involved no physical dominance then my model of Duncan would also use it in the post. My apologies to Duncan for writing a silly comment.

---

Thanks for this comment, it helped me understand the OP much better.

In particular, one of the significant aversions I have to punch bug is not that I get punched. It's that I remember where punch bug came from. It came from being at school, a place where my sovereignty was consistently overruled by the institution. And we kids were in the same boat, all being trampled over.

But then the kids realised you could do the same to others. They could punch you and you couldn't punch back, not because of any agreement you'd come to, but because it's the rules. The conversation-stopper that makes the decision unquestionable. I remember the gleeful explanation the other kids would give when they realised they had free reign to dominate you.

(This had a similar - but not physically violent - cause to the rules of the game 'jinx', where if you and someone else said the same thing at the same time, if you said 'jinx', then the other person was not allowed to talk again until a particular magic word was said by the jinxer. This one didn't catch on too much though, perhaps because it had a continuous cost to the person obeying the rules, which meant a higher amount of submissiveness was required to follow the rules.)

It seems that if you create a place with a norm that you defer to a centralised authority whenever they say so even if it violates your sovereignty significantly, then others who want to dominate you will be incentivised to use that power against you.

And the reason punch bug only happened to me at school, is because this was the part of my life that had the most regular and powerful submission to authority. I can speculate that the OP was inspired by a desire to be able to better coordinate about such an authority, although it seems quite like a lost purpose to optimise for the game created by those who wanted to dominate and took advantage of the free power this system gives as a side effect. Especially without any discussion of who gets to decide 'the rules' or anything, and I can see why Ben would feel fear about the proposal of such a norm.

"Let's bring back a norm that was created by people who wanted an arbitrary excuse to dominate you when you deferred to authority a lot, and I'll say nothing explicit about what authority this norm should support" is scary, and seems to me like a pretty reasonable interpretation of this post. I could see this argued for possibly if the adherence to the authority was super important, but it's not even discussed in the OP.

My model of Duncan here says that he certainly doesn't want to do it because he feels joy at randomly dominating people, and we shouldn't commit the genetic fallacy of saying an idea is bad because of where it came from. But then I would respond that the genetic heuristic [LW · GW] applies, and that if you're finding that a norm creates value for you which was created by those who wanted to dominate for pleasure, then you should be very skeptical of how that norm is in fact creating value for you.

Added: I like the point made elsewhere by SilentCal that "we as a society draw a line in the sand at nonconsensual physical violence that the punch is in any sense closer to the murder. But this line in the sand is exactly what Duncan is asking us to reconsider". The part of Duncan's post that's best is the discussion of moving the micro/macro boundary of what's significant. But bringing back a norm predicated on an abuse of power is a uniquely terrible suggestion of how to improve the situation.

Added2: Another response Duncan could give is that the whole point of his post is that punch bug is not that bad. Reminding ourselves that deferring to authority can often be pretty low-cost on an absolute scale (while, if done right, allowing for valuable coordination) means this is good.

(Mod notice: Btw, I am currently NOT AT WORK because I have all the deadlines at university right now and so am not able to e.g. set time aside to think about the moderation discussion. I did find Ben's comment rather insightful in a way that no other comment on this post has been anywhere on the web - I made all the above connections because of Ben's comment - and so one reason for adding this post was to add that datapoint to currently working mods' info. I'm commenting here in my capacity as person-with-a-LW-habit, not as a person who is working at my job at LW.)

[This is my reaction to the entire thread as of writing this, and I saw the OP only after the tone editing]

I praised Duncan for writing this, not because I think everyone should be playing Punch Bug, or that it should be an opt-out game. I strongly disagree with that, and like many, think it was a poor choice of central example. I praised him, and I stand strongly by this, because this essay felt extremely risky to write due to the exact concerns it was complaining about, and opened up the author to very over-sized retaliation. I'm not brave enough to write such things, and as Talib points out repeatedly in Skin in the Game, I should feel shame about that. Which I do.

Also, I didn't notice the point Benquo is making, until Benquo made it. At which point, I saw it very, very clearly. He came to my apartment last Purim and we read the Megillah together, so shared cultural context doubtless helped. Despite that context, I think that saying the word pogrom (or similar) here is necessary to make the point. I wouldn't have gotten there reliably without it, even with a very Jewish background and outlook, so it seems very necessary in general.

We need to defend the need for people to physically interact with the world, and potentially have some of those interactions be unfun, without invoking patterns of behavior that really do lead to terrible things. The line "you sure look like you're playing" should scare the living hell out of you. So should Duncan's statement about what should be done with those who don't want to play. There's a reason I think 'punch them as hard as you can right in the face' is not only allowed, but the correct reaction, and I'm not one to advocate violence, including Nazi punching.

If you're trying to point out that something pattern matches and leads to things very over the line and feels deeply unsafe, you may need to mention those unsafe things. It obviously needs to be done carefully, and perhaps the OP's first version was not sufficiently careful, but current version is, and as noted the resulting discussion utilizes this to make important points rather than to inflame. It does not turn into a demon thread except (perhaps) insofar as we have a potential reaction to moderation issues.

So I think the 'literal Nazi' exception to Godwin's Law applies here, and Nazis are being treated with the appropriate seriousness. If after reading this thread you don't think that, I worry that you haven't groked the thing Benquo is trying to point at. I am sympathetic to the point that once you break the absolute prohibition things could go quite badly, and I think it's good to point out that this line is being crossed and we're nervous about it, but frankly: I'll allow it.

[In this comment I have my moderator hat on]

Ben, I think this comment is crossing an important line, that is necessary that LessWrong preserve.

The short, easily-followed-guideline-version is:

• Comparing people you're debating with to Nazis is a rhetorical trick with a long history of making it harder to argue in good faith, as well as degrading the seriousness of literal Nazis. Sometimes it's actually necessary. This did not seem like one of those times.

More generally, and nuancedly... important, contentious discussions about the Overton window are where it's hardest to keep things truth-oriented, and in good faith.

It matters if we've obliviously building momentum towards violence that will escalate beyond anyone's control. It matters if (as Duncan argues), we're overreacting to a cluster of fears relating to violence and consent and creating a world where people are subtly starved for important human interactions. It matters if both are true and we'll be needing to make a lot of careful judgment calls with a clear head.

There are going to be a lot of questions and overton-window-fights that are at least as important as these ones, and it matters that rationalists can reliably have conversations about them that stays as oriented-as-possible towards truth, even in adversarial conditions. You are one of the people I learned from, that it's important to build longterm capacity for knowledge building over short rhetorical advantage.

Overton fights are always going to be somewhat epistemically dicey and involve more coalition-building-rhetoric than usual, and I don't know if it's possible or desirable to reduce it to zero. But this comment seemed to me to fall clearly over the line of "we are better than this."

Quick update: Last week I'd asked Ben if we could chat privately rather than continue hashing things out in public. We finally got to do that tonight, which I think went productively. I'm sorry that this took a long time and that I didn't communicate well about it (to either Duncan or Habryka, who I think might have made different decisions if he hadn't been assuming I'd touched base about it. Habryka wrote more detailed thoughts on why it's taken us a while to close the loop on this here [LW(p) · GW(p)], with some thoughts on how we can improve in the near and longer term).

Tomorrow I'll be writing up more detailed thoughts on where and why I think several of Benquo's comments break important norms, without which I think LessWrong would fail as a discussion platform.

The casual acceptance and signal-boosting of posts like this is part of why I don't feel safe in the San Francisco Bay Area Rationalist community.

Could you clarify what you mean by "posts like this"? This is the only one I can think of that celebrates a childhood game that involves punching, and I can't think of anything else that comes close to advocating violence.

Is my memory just failing me? Or is approval of some kind of violence not the relevant thing?

Let's take the example of catcalling, because it's even more clear-cut than slug bug.

Ideally you're right. Pragmatically there is nothing you can do to stop catcalling on a big scale. Hence you're better off not letting it bother you rather than uselessly railing against it or letting it embitter you.

As for slug bug, it doesn't help anyone, it's just something people do for fun. You'd certainly never start slug bug by holding a conversation "oh, slug bug will help our feeling of cohension, let's play it". You just try it out. And then maybe someone says they don't like it. Then it's up to you and that's what the post discusses.

The question is, what accuracy rate is acceptable here? If being wrong and making someone feel defensive potentially could ruin your entire life then no one is good enough to do this even if they're 99% right. That seems quite bad. Whereas if you're only running 60%, you should probably just stop doing it without asking first.

I'm truly baffled that people would become very self-conscious of all the small unease of everyday life and then choose to elevate them as major inconveniences. It's a bit like discovering who holds your chains and redoubling in bondage and obedience to this silent master.

Nobles can take offense at peasants, but peasants can't take offense at nobles.

Peasants are expected to take care not to offend nobles, but nobles aren't expected to take care not to offend peasants.

Maybe it's a bit like that.

(More generally, we can imagine a sort of "metaperennialist" framework, whereby there are, for whatever reason, common human behavioral modules that can be activated when certain conditions obtain, even if no one involved is thinking in terms of these modules and in fact they all think they're doing something completely different. (Cf. standard perennialism, whereby there are metaphysical truths underlying all religions, which can be mystically experienced even when no one involved is thinking in terms of these truths and in fact they all think they're being visited by the Holy Spirit or talking to Jibril or whatnot.) One advantage of this framework is that it can easily explain why people would choose to pay such attention to the micro -- and why certain people would make this choice, and certain others would not. Frankly, the people who pay the most attention to the micro tend to remind me of Captain Aguilera.)

Reify it?

It's a lot better than some other ways that could have gone - Harley could have just said "Fuck you, asshole, this wasn't any of your business" and stormed off. It's better to be able to understand and articulate what and why something is causing you distress than to simply react to distress.

It was linked on his FB wall by a friend of his, so I think that's fine.

I actually think this post essentially needed to be as long as it is. Most of the points are not _new_ and if seen in isolation, would be sort of "okay, sure, now what?" The reason they're all necessary is to actually process an entire alternate worldview at once to talk about something that people will have a lot of extreme, knee jerk reaction to.

Is Duncan/Conor OK with you linking his content here at LW? (There are of course reasons why I think this is a sensible question to ask, but I won't be going into them here.)

Yes, he Is.