My objection is that it doesn’t distinguish between [unpleasant fights that really should in fact be had] from [unpleasant fights that shouldn’t]. It’s a very handy term for delegitimizing any protracted conflict, which is a boon to those who’d like to get away with really shitty behavior by hijacking politeness norms.
“There was a Muggle once named Mohandas Gandhi,” Harry said to the floor. “He thought the government of Muggle Britain shouldn’t rule over his country. And he refused to fight. He convinced his whole country not to fight. Instead he told his people to walk up to the British soldiers and let themselves be struck down, without resisting, and when Britain couldn’t stand doing that any more, we freed his country. I thought it was a very beautiful thing, when I read about it, I thought it was something higher than all the wars that anyone had ever fought with guns or swords. That they’d really done that, and that it had actually worked.” Harry drew another breath. “Only then I found out that Gandhi told his people, during World War II, that if the Nazis invaded they should use nonviolent resistance against them, too. But the Nazis would’ve just shot everyone in sight. And maybe Winston Churchill always felt that there should’ve been a better way, some clever way to win without having to hurt anyone; but he never found it, and so he had to fight.” Harry looked up at the Headmaster, who was staring at him. “Winston Churchill was the one who tried to convince the British government not to give Czechoslovakia to Hitler in exchange for a peace treaty, that they should fight right away—”
“I recognize the name, Harry,” said Dumbledore. The old wizard’s lips twitched upward. “Although honesty compels me to say that dear Winston was never one for pangs of conscience, even after a dozen shots of Firewhiskey.”
“The point is,” Harry said, after a brief pause to remember exactly who he was talking to, and fight down the suddenly returning sense that he was an ignorant child gone insane with audacity who had no right to be in this room and no right to question Albus Dumbledore about anything, “the point is, saying violence is evil isn’t an answer. It doesn’t say when to fight and when not to fight. It’s a hard question and Gandhi refused to deal with it, and that’s why I lost some of my respect for him.”
“And your own answer, Harry?” Dumbledore said quietly.
“One answer is that you shouldn’t ever use violence except to stop violence,” Harry said. “You shouldn’t risk anyone’s life except to save even more lives. It sounds good when you say it like that. Only the problem is that if a police officer sees a burglar robbing a house, the police officer should try to stop the burglar, even though the burglar might fight back and someone might get hurt or even killed. Even if the burglar is only trying to steal jewelry, which is just a thing. Because if nobody so much as inconveniences burglars, there will be more burglars, and more burglars. And even if they only ever stole things each time, it would—the fabric of society—” Harry stopped. His thoughts weren’t as ordered as they usually pretended to be, in this room. He should have been able to give some perfectly logical exposition in terms of game theory, should have at least been able to see it that way, but it was eluding him. Hawks and doves—“Don’t you see, if evil people are willing to risk violence to get what they want, and good people always back down because violence is too terrible to risk, it’s—it’s not a good society to live in, Headmaster! Don’t you realize what all this bullying is doing to Hogwarts, to Slytherin House most of all?”
In particular, I note that the set of people with vocal distaste for demon threads seems to strongly disoverlap with the set of people I’ve seen actually effectively come to the aid of someone being bullied. The disoverlap isn’t total, but it’s a really good predictor in my personal experience.
I think this is a subject where we’d probably need to hash out a dozen intermediary points (the whole “inferential distance” thing) before we could come close to a common understanding.
Anyway, yeah, I get the whole not-backing-down-to-bullies thing; and I get being willing to do something personally costly to avoid giving someone an incentive to walk over you.
But I do think you can reach a stage in a conversation, the kind that inspired the “someone’s wrong on the internet” meme, where all that game theory logic stops making sense and the only winning move is to stop playing.
Like, after a dozen back-and-forths between a few stubborn people who absolutely refuse to cede any ground, especially people who don’t think they’re wrong or see themselves as bullies… what do you really win by continuing the thread? Do you really impart outside observers with a feeling that “Duncan sure seems right in his counter-counter-counter-counter-rebuttal, I should emulate him” if you engage the other person point-by-point? Would you really encourage a culture of bullying and using-politeness-norms-to-impose-bad-behavior if you instead said “I don’t think this conversation is productive, I’ll stop now”?
It’s like… if you play an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, and every player’s strategy is “tit-for-tat, always, no forgiveness”, and there’s any non-zero likelihood that someone presses the “defect” button by accident, then over a sufficient period of time the steady state will always be “everybody defects, forever”. (The analogy isn’t perfect, but it’s an example of how game theory changes when you play the same game over lots of iterations)
(And yes, I do understand that forgiveness can be exploited in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma.)
My objection is that it doesn’t distinguish between [unpleasant fights that really should in fact be had] from [unpleasant fights that shouldn’t].
Again, I don’t think I have a sufficiently short inferential distance to convince you of anything, but my general vibe is that, as a debate gets longer, the line between the two starts to disappear.
It’s like… Okay, another crappy metaphor is, a debate is like photocopying a sheet of paper, and adding notes to it. At first you have a very clean paper with legible things drawn on it. But as it progresses, you have a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, you end up with something that has more noise from the photocopying artifacts than signal from what anybody wrote on it twelve iterations ago.
At that point, no matter how much the fight should be had, you’re not waging it efficiently by participating.
I mean, seeing some of those discussions thread Duncan and others were involved in… I’d say it’s pretty bad?
To me at least, it felt like the threads were incredibly toxic given how non-toxic this community usually is.
My objection is that it doesn’t distinguish between [unpleasant fights that really should in fact be had] from [unpleasant fights that shouldn’t]. It’s a very handy term for delegitimizing any protracted conflict, which is a boon to those who’d like to get away with really shitty behavior by hijacking politeness norms.
In particular, I note that the set of people with vocal distaste for demon threads seems to strongly disoverlap with the set of people I’ve seen actually effectively come to the aid of someone being bullied. The disoverlap isn’t total, but it’s a really good predictor in my personal experience.
I think this is a subject where we’d probably need to hash out a dozen intermediary points (the whole “inferential distance” thing) before we could come close to a common understanding.
Anyway, yeah, I get the whole not-backing-down-to-bullies thing; and I get being willing to do something personally costly to avoid giving someone an incentive to walk over you.
But I do think you can reach a stage in a conversation, the kind that inspired the “someone’s wrong on the internet” meme, where all that game theory logic stops making sense and the only winning move is to stop playing.
Like, after a dozen back-and-forths between a few stubborn people who absolutely refuse to cede any ground, especially people who don’t think they’re wrong or see themselves as bullies… what do you really win by continuing the thread? Do you really impart outside observers with a feeling that “Duncan sure seems right in his counter-counter-counter-counter-rebuttal, I should emulate him” if you engage the other person point-by-point? Would you really encourage a culture of bullying and using-politeness-norms-to-impose-bad-behavior if you instead said “I don’t think this conversation is productive, I’ll stop now”?
It’s like… if you play an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, and every player’s strategy is “tit-for-tat, always, no forgiveness”, and there’s any non-zero likelihood that someone presses the “defect” button by accident, then over a sufficient period of time the steady state will always be “everybody defects, forever”. (The analogy isn’t perfect, but it’s an example of how game theory changes when you play the same game over lots of iterations)
(And yes, I do understand that forgiveness can be exploited in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma.)
Again, I don’t think I have a sufficiently short inferential distance to convince you of anything, but my general vibe is that, as a debate gets longer, the line between the two starts to disappear.
It’s like… Okay, another crappy metaphor is, a debate is like photocopying a sheet of paper, and adding notes to it. At first you have a very clean paper with legible things drawn on it. But as it progresses, you have a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, you end up with something that has more noise from the photocopying artifacts than signal from what anybody wrote on it twelve iterations ago.
At that point, no matter how much the fight should be had, you’re not waging it efficiently by participating.