“It was a huge disappointment for me when Ben Hoffman compellingly argued in favor of parallel social worlds coexisting unobtrusively adjacent to one another without causing a large shift in our community discourse. It was consequentially a huge source of relief when the blog of record, made a similar argument almost exactly a year later, and the discussion was everything I could have hoped for.”
I think one factor here is that Scott took efforts to “de-politicise”* the post which made it more sharable and useful as a go-to reference. It also meant that more of the attention was going to focus on the object-level discussion, rather than the general principle.
I do agree that we probably have a bias towards being too skeptical, especially when it comes towards evaluating claims from groups that refuse to apply any skepticism towards claims that they want to believe.
* The post still talks about political issue, but in such a way to try avoiding setting off arguments.
I re-read Ben’s article, and while it was quite good, it was highly focused on an important object-level issue—sexual assault and how we deal with it—in the context of a presidential campaign. It was making the more general point, but it didn’t focus on it, so that wasn’t the default takeaway, and if you share the article, the message you’re sending is more about sexual assault than it is about different worlds. Scott is willing to spend a ridiculous amount of effort in order to get people to calm down and listen to underlying issues. Ben’s willingness to spend vast amounts of effort lie elsewhere.
Part of the issue is a bias toward skepticism, part is a bias toward seeing the role of language as discursive rather than active. In the idealized situation, one can cleanly separate the discursive speech of the trial from the active speech of the judge’s or jury’s final decision, but there are also times when one simply takes a vocal action without any prior discourse, for instance, shouting ‘Stop’ based on one’s own type two error laden perception. Doing this is a form of aggression, an attempt to control the group’s behavior personally rather than only doing so through the medium of discourse, but all politics is aggression and a HUGE fraction of what people do is politics.
As a general rule, when you are participating in a political conflict, you are taking sides whether you want to or not, and if you consistently take the side of the powerful, of those who have more authority and more live options, others are correct to notice you doing so and to incentivize you to do otherwise.
“It was a huge disappointment for me when Ben Hoffman compellingly argued in favor of parallel social worlds coexisting unobtrusively adjacent to one another without causing a large shift in our community discourse. It was consequentially a huge source of relief when the blog of record, made a similar argument almost exactly a year later, and the discussion was everything I could have hoped for.”
I think one factor here is that Scott took efforts to “de-politicise”* the post which made it more sharable and useful as a go-to reference. It also meant that more of the attention was going to focus on the object-level discussion, rather than the general principle.
I do agree that we probably have a bias towards being too skeptical, especially when it comes towards evaluating claims from groups that refuse to apply any skepticism towards claims that they want to believe.
* The post still talks about political issue, but in such a way to try avoiding setting off arguments.
I re-read Ben’s article, and while it was quite good, it was highly focused on an important object-level issue—sexual assault and how we deal with it—in the context of a presidential campaign. It was making the more general point, but it didn’t focus on it, so that wasn’t the default takeaway, and if you share the article, the message you’re sending is more about sexual assault than it is about different worlds. Scott is willing to spend a ridiculous amount of effort in order to get people to calm down and listen to underlying issues. Ben’s willingness to spend vast amounts of effort lie elsewhere.
Part of the issue is a bias toward skepticism, part is a bias toward seeing the role of language as discursive rather than active. In the idealized situation, one can cleanly separate the discursive speech of the trial from the active speech of the judge’s or jury’s final decision, but there are also times when one simply takes a vocal action without any prior discourse, for instance, shouting ‘Stop’ based on one’s own type two error laden perception. Doing this is a form of aggression, an attempt to control the group’s behavior personally rather than only doing so through the medium of discourse, but all politics is aggression and a HUGE fraction of what people do is politics.
As a general rule, when you are participating in a political conflict, you are taking sides whether you want to or not, and if you consistently take the side of the powerful, of those who have more authority and more live options, others are correct to notice you doing so and to incentivize you to do otherwise.
This suggests that Scott’s “things I will regret writing” would get an unusually low level of engagement. I do not think that this is true.