I think people are implicitly confusing two levels of thinking.
Level 1 thinking is “drawing Mohammed is bad”, “people who get offended at drawings of Mohammed are silly”, “we should punish them”, etc. I think most people on this forum are beyond this sort of thinking.
Level 2 thinking is about status, evo-psych and harm minimization.
Problems occur when you mix the levels of thinking. You end up with “People who get offended at pictures of Mohammed are genuinely offended but they’re still doing it for status reasons, so they’re bad people and we should punish them by drawing lots of Mohammeds”.
Think of Draw A Mohammed Day. It’s the exact opposite of a good idea. Its organizers incur a status hit—they make America look like dicks—and they commit the massive strategic failure of letting their opponents frame the debate. And then on top of that they create some disutility by offending people.
A much more effective approach would be to think of a game-theoretic strategy which would win the status game (or at least stop others winning by ramping up the display of being offended).
I’ll concede that some sort of game-theoretic “punishment” may be needed to disincentivize the “getting offended” behaviour. But that punishment doesn’t have to be in the form of more offense. It can be to make the opponent look silly. It can be to portray him as a violent thug who flips out over nothing (though this is not to be preferred as it will tend to incur a “racism” status hit).
And once you’ve got a good strategy for playing the status game, you can then try and tune it to remove as much offense-disutility as possible.
a game-theoretic strategy which would win the status game
I think this is a winning strategy. They are easily made to look like dicks—and then their opponents either embark on what could be easily represented as a murderous rampage, or renege on their threat. Either option is a bigger status hit for the opponent.
These are good points. I was just curious as to why the conversation wasn’t framed as “accept that offense is a type of harm; now let’s discuss the winning strategy”
Probably because most commentors weren’t aware that their response to the situation was a case of what the algorithm feels like from inside. They determined a winning move, but in status games (and bargaining Schelling style) an unreasonable or irrational attachment to a winning move is much more effective than selecting that move because it’s the best.
I think people are implicitly confusing two levels of thinking.
Level 1 thinking is “drawing Mohammed is bad”, “people who get offended at drawings of Mohammed are silly”, “we should punish them”, etc. I think most people on this forum are beyond this sort of thinking.
Level 2 thinking is about status, evo-psych and harm minimization.
Problems occur when you mix the levels of thinking. You end up with “People who get offended at pictures of Mohammed are genuinely offended but they’re still doing it for status reasons, so they’re bad people and we should punish them by drawing lots of Mohammeds”.
Think of Draw A Mohammed Day. It’s the exact opposite of a good idea. Its organizers incur a status hit—they make America look like dicks—and they commit the massive strategic failure of letting their opponents frame the debate. And then on top of that they create some disutility by offending people.
A much more effective approach would be to think of a game-theoretic strategy which would win the status game (or at least stop others winning by ramping up the display of being offended).
I’ll concede that some sort of game-theoretic “punishment” may be needed to disincentivize the “getting offended” behaviour. But that punishment doesn’t have to be in the form of more offense. It can be to make the opponent look silly. It can be to portray him as a violent thug who flips out over nothing (though this is not to be preferred as it will tend to incur a “racism” status hit).
And once you’ve got a good strategy for playing the status game, you can then try and tune it to remove as much offense-disutility as possible.
I think this is a winning strategy. They are easily made to look like dicks—and then their opponents either embark on what could be easily represented as a murderous rampage, or renege on their threat. Either option is a bigger status hit for the opponent.
These are good points. I was just curious as to why the conversation wasn’t framed as “accept that offense is a type of harm; now let’s discuss the winning strategy”
Probably because most commentors weren’t aware that their response to the situation was a case of what the algorithm feels like from inside. They determined a winning move, but in status games (and bargaining Schelling style) an unreasonable or irrational attachment to a winning move is much more effective than selecting that move because it’s the best.
I believe this is called the “Rage Boy” meme. But the actual person who is depicted in the “Rage Boy” meme is apparently a torture victim and demonstration organizer, not a killer.