So, I’ve read the two posts on Benquo’s blog you’ve linked to. The first one “Bad Intent Is a Disposition, Not a Feeling”, depended on the claim he made that mens rea is not a real thing. As was pointed out in comments that he himself acknowledged those comments made some good points that would cause him to rethink the theme he was trying to impart with his original post. I looked up both the title of that post, and ‘mens rea’ on his blog to see if he had posted any updated thoughts on the subject. There weren’t results from the date of publication of that post onward on either of those topics on his blog, so it doesn’t appear he has publicly updated his thoughts on these topics. That was over 2 years ago.
The second post on the topic was more abstract and figurative, and was using some analogy and metaphor to get its conclusion across. So, I didn’t totally understand the relevance of all that in the second post to the first post, even though the second was intended as a sequel to the first. It seemed to me the crux of resolving the problem was:
Sadly, being honest about your sense that someone else is arguing in bad faith is Officially Not OK. It is read as a grave and inappropriate attack. And as long as that is the case, he could reasonably expect that bringing it up would lead to getting yelled at by everyone and losing the interaction. So maybe he felt and feels like he has no good options here.
Benquo’s conclusion that for public discourse and social epistemology, at least in his experience, that to be honest about your sense someone else is arguing in bad faith is Officially Not OK because it is always construed as a grave and inappropriate personal attack. So, resolving the issue appears socially or practically impossible. My experience is that just isn’t the case. It can lend itself to better modes of public discourse. One thing is it can move communities to states of discourse that are much different than where the EA and rationality communities currently are at. One problem is I’m not sure even those rationalists and EAs who are aware of such problems would prefer the options available, which would be just hopping onto different platforms with very different discourse norms. I would think that would be the most practical option, since the other viable alternative would be for these communities to adopt other communities’ discourse norms, and replace their own with them, wholesale. That seems extremely unlikely to happen.
Part of the problem is that it seems how Benquo construes ‘bad faith’ is as having an overly reductionistic definition. This was what was fleshed out in the comments on the original post on his blog, by commenters AGB and Res. So, that makes it hard for me to accept the frame Benquo bases his eventual conclusions off of. Another problem for me is the inferential distance gap between myself, Benquo, and the EA and rationality communities, respectively, are so large now that it would take a lot of effort to write them up and explain them all. Since it isn’t a super high priority for me, I’m not sure that I will get around to it. However, there is enough material in Benquo’s posts, and the discussion in the comments, that I can work with it to explain some of what I think is wrong with how he construes bad faith in these posts. If I write something like that up, I will post it on LW.
I don’t know if the EA community in large part disagrees with the OP for the same reasons I do. I think based off some of the material I have been provided with in the comments here, I have more to work with to find the cruxes of disagreement I have with how some people are thinking, whether critically or not, about the EA and rationality communities.
So, I’ve read the two posts on Benquo’s blog you’ve linked to. The first one “Bad Intent Is a Disposition, Not a Feeling”, depended on the claim he made that mens rea is not a real thing. As was pointed out in comments that he himself acknowledged those comments made some good points that would cause him to rethink the theme he was trying to impart with his original post. I looked up both the title of that post, and ‘mens rea’ on his blog to see if he had posted any updated thoughts on the subject. There weren’t results from the date of publication of that post onward on either of those topics on his blog, so it doesn’t appear he has publicly updated his thoughts on these topics. That was over 2 years ago.
The second post on the topic was more abstract and figurative, and was using some analogy and metaphor to get its conclusion across. So, I didn’t totally understand the relevance of all that in the second post to the first post, even though the second was intended as a sequel to the first. It seemed to me the crux of resolving the problem was:
Benquo’s conclusion that for public discourse and social epistemology, at least in his experience, that to be honest about your sense someone else is arguing in bad faith is Officially Not OK because it is always construed as a grave and inappropriate personal attack. So, resolving the issue appears socially or practically impossible. My experience is that just isn’t the case. It can lend itself to better modes of public discourse. One thing is it can move communities to states of discourse that are much different than where the EA and rationality communities currently are at. One problem is I’m not sure even those rationalists and EAs who are aware of such problems would prefer the options available, which would be just hopping onto different platforms with very different discourse norms. I would think that would be the most practical option, since the other viable alternative would be for these communities to adopt other communities’ discourse norms, and replace their own with them, wholesale. That seems extremely unlikely to happen.
Part of the problem is that it seems how Benquo construes ‘bad faith’ is as having an overly reductionistic definition. This was what was fleshed out in the comments on the original post on his blog, by commenters AGB and Res. So, that makes it hard for me to accept the frame Benquo bases his eventual conclusions off of. Another problem for me is the inferential distance gap between myself, Benquo, and the EA and rationality communities, respectively, are so large now that it would take a lot of effort to write them up and explain them all. Since it isn’t a super high priority for me, I’m not sure that I will get around to it. However, there is enough material in Benquo’s posts, and the discussion in the comments, that I can work with it to explain some of what I think is wrong with how he construes bad faith in these posts. If I write something like that up, I will post it on LW.
I don’t know if the EA community in large part disagrees with the OP for the same reasons I do. I think based off some of the material I have been provided with in the comments here, I have more to work with to find the cruxes of disagreement I have with how some people are thinking, whether critically or not, about the EA and rationality communities.