I don’t think this is necessarily what eukaryote explicitly intended...
… But I also don’t think it particularly matters whether they meant it this way or not. “I dislike this person so I will boycott this event”, implemented at scale, is what cancelling is. If a whole bunch of people coordinate to boycott the event unless Alice is blacklisted, that creates a threat-like pressure on event organizers to blacklist Alice if they want to maximize the number of attendees.
If a community wants to avoid such dynamics, then “I will boycott the event if Alice is there, not because I expect Alice to make the event unpleasant, but because I disagree with some of Alice’s beliefs and think she should be deplatformed” is something that shouldn’t be considered acceptable behavior, at the group-norm level. The intent behind the behavior doesn’t matter; the behavior itself is the problem.
And indeed, in the Simulacrum Levels framework, it’s not a Simulacrum Level 1 move. It’s Simulacrum Level 3-4, fashioning a cudgel out of your social resources and trying to beat the social realities into shape using it.
The acceptable response is IMO starting a discussion regarding Alice’s character and openly questioning whether she’s the kind of person who deserves to be invited to rationalist events. But not unilaterally setting up a game-theoretic structure that decreases the event’s value iff your demands are not met.
I don’t think this is necessarily what eukaryote explicitly intended...
… But I also don’t think it particularly matters whether they meant it this way or not. “I dislike this person so I will boycott this event”, implemented at scale, is what cancelling is. If a whole bunch of people coordinate to boycott the event unless Alice is blacklisted, that creates a threat-like pressure on event organizers to blacklist Alice if they want to maximize the number of attendees.
If a community wants to avoid such dynamics, then “I will boycott the event if Alice is there, not because I expect Alice to make the event unpleasant, but because I disagree with some of Alice’s beliefs and think she should be deplatformed” is something that shouldn’t be considered acceptable behavior, at the group-norm level. The intent behind the behavior doesn’t matter; the behavior itself is the problem.
And indeed, in the Simulacrum Levels framework, it’s not a Simulacrum Level 1 move. It’s Simulacrum Level 3-4, fashioning a cudgel out of your social resources and trying to beat the social realities into shape using it.
The acceptable response is IMO starting a discussion regarding Alice’s character and openly questioning whether she’s the kind of person who deserves to be invited to rationalist events. But not unilaterally setting up a game-theoretic structure that decreases the event’s value iff your demands are not met.