Also, excellent post from Slatestarscratchpad that sums up (I think) something like 85% of the fundamental disagreement:
One thing that’s seemed striking to me in this Dragon Army discussion is the priors on different people’s threat assessments.
I remember when I was younger, I used to want to meet my friends from the Internet, and my parents were horrified, and had all of these objections like “What if they’re pedophiles who befriended you so they could molest you?” or “What if they’re kidnappers who befriended you so they could kidnap you?”, or less lurid possibilities like “What if they’re creepy drug people and they insist on bringing you along to their creepy drug abuse sessions and won’t let you say no?”
And I never developed a good plan that countered their concerns, like “I will bring pepper spray so I can defend myself”. It was more about rolling my eyes and telling them that never happened in real life. I’ve now met hundreds of Internet friends, and I was absolutely right—it’s never happened, and any effort I put into developing a plan would have been effort wasted.
I’m not claiming there are no Internet pedophiles or kidnappers. I’m saying that based on my own Internet communities, and my threat-detection abilities, and the base rate, I was pretty sure it was more in the realm of terrorism (the kind of stuff you hear about on the news) than the realm of car accidents (the stuff that happens to real people and that you must be guarding yourself against at every moment).
This is also how I think of people turning out to be abusers. It’s possible that anyone I date could turn out to be an abuser, just like it’s possible I could be killed by a terrorist, but it’s not something likely enough that I’m going to take strong precautions against it. This is obviously a function of my personal situations, but it’s a real function of my personal situation, which like my Internet-friend-meeting has consistently been confirmed over a bunch of different situations.
(Please don’t give me the “that’s just male privilege!” speech; men and women get abused at roughly similar rates. I do think that probably women are socialized to fear abuse much more, and that’s a big part of this, and probably other axes of marginalization contribute more)
One interesting thing about Tumblr and the SJ-sphere in particular is that because it comes disproportionately from marginalized communities, it has this sort of natural prior of “people often turn out to be abusers, every situation has to be made abuser-proof or else it will be a catastrophe”. I once dated someone I knew on Tumblr who did a weird test on me where (sorry, won’t give more details) they deliberately put me in a situation where I could have abused them to see what I would do. When they told me about this months later, I was pretty offended—did I really seem so potentially-abusive that I had to be specifically cleared by some procedure? And people explained to me that there’s this whole other culture where somebody being an abuser is, if not the norm, at least high enough to worry about with everyone.
I’m not sure what percent of the population is more like me vs. more like my date. But I think there’s a failure mode where someone from a high-trust culture starts what they think is a perfectly reasonable institution, and someone from a low-trust culture says “that’s awful, you didn’t make any effort to guard against abusers!”.
And then the person from the high-trust culture gets angry, because they’re being accused of being a potential abuser, which to them sounds as silly as being accused of being a potential terrorist. If you told your Muslim friend you wouldn’t hang out with him without some safeguards in case he turned out to be a terrorist, my guess is he’d get pretty upset. At the very least it would engender the “stop wasting my time” reaction I had when my parents made me develop anti-pedophile plans before meeting my Internet friends.
And then the person from the low-trust culture gets angry, because the person has just dismissed out of hand (or even gotten angry about) a common-sense attempt to avoid abuse, and who but an abuser would do something like that?
I think it’s interesting that the Dragon Army idea received more positive feedback or constructive criticism on LW (where it was pitched to, and which is probably culturally more similar to me) and more strongly negative feedback on Tumblr (which is more full of marginalized people and SJ-aligned people, and also maybe more full of abusers as judged by the number who get called out all the time).
Yeah, I saw that earlier. In my case, I’m not panicked (or at least, I quickly became not panicked) about rampant abuse, and I also have not been directly exposed to a lot of abuse. My concerns are more about ways I’ve been directly exposed to harm by authoritarianism with good intentions. It’s no coincidence that that is what I was inclined to bring up. Since I’m probably not unique, there’s probably something worth taking seriously in every complaint. But everyone is probably weighting their own concerns the most. So that summarizes to something like:
-abuse is often perpetuated in structures that share significant characteristics with DAB, and you should think about specific plans to avoid abusing people
-there are unique systemic issues with authoritarian structures that facilitate unsustainable dysfunction even when no individual person is deviating much from normal behavior
-sex and romance will cause problems and it might be worth restricting behavior inside the house
+1 to all this. In particular, if my pendulum swing model is correct, the new position of the pendulum (extreme aversion to the risk of abuse) is a result of the pendulum’s previous stuck point being “a lot of people suffering abuse in these kinds of environments.”
I’m proposing swinging back toward the old norm and trying not to cross the ideal point, and I agree it’s a hard problem. Posts like yours are excellent for improving models and reducing risk as a result.
Also, excellent post from Slatestarscratchpad that sums up (I think) something like 85% of the fundamental disagreement:
Yeah, I saw that earlier. In my case, I’m not panicked (or at least, I quickly became not panicked) about rampant abuse, and I also have not been directly exposed to a lot of abuse. My concerns are more about ways I’ve been directly exposed to harm by authoritarianism with good intentions. It’s no coincidence that that is what I was inclined to bring up. Since I’m probably not unique, there’s probably something worth taking seriously in every complaint. But everyone is probably weighting their own concerns the most. So that summarizes to something like:
-abuse is often perpetuated in structures that share significant characteristics with DAB, and you should think about specific plans to avoid abusing people
-there are unique systemic issues with authoritarian structures that facilitate unsustainable dysfunction even when no individual person is deviating much from normal behavior
-sex and romance will cause problems and it might be worth restricting behavior inside the house
-etc (I have not read every single complaint)
+1 to all this. In particular, if my pendulum swing model is correct, the new position of the pendulum (extreme aversion to the risk of abuse) is a result of the pendulum’s previous stuck point being “a lot of people suffering abuse in these kinds of environments.”
I’m proposing swinging back toward the old norm and trying not to cross the ideal point, and I agree it’s a hard problem. Posts like yours are excellent for improving models and reducing risk as a result.