I think you need to be a lot more deflationary about the g-word. If you think, “But ‘gaslighting’ is something Bad people do; Scott Alexander isn’t Bad, so he would never do that”, well, that might be true depending on what you mean by the g-word. But if the behavior Habryka is trying to point to with the word to is more like, “Scott is adopting a self-serving narrative that minimizes wrongdoing by his allies and inflates wrongdoing by his rivals” (which is something someone might do without being Bad due to having “somewhat snapped”), well, why wouldn’t the rivals reach for the g-word in their defense? What is the difference, from their perspective?
“Gaslighting” should probably be avoided because it is anywhere between meaningless and a fighting word depending on who says it and how.
The g-word is a very nasty accusation. It gets thrown around and means a bunch of stuff down to just “saying stuff I disagree with”, but it shouldn’t.
It is originally a conscious, malicious attempt to drive someone insane by strategically lying to them.
On the substance, people are honest but wrong an awful lot, and honest but massively overstating their case even more often. Assuming your rivals are malicious or dishonest when they’re just wrong or overstating is a huge source of conflict and thereby confusion.
It’s a really useful pointer towards a tactic that is relatively widespread and has no better word. I am personally happy to use other words, but I have the sense that sentences like “I am so very very tired of the ambiguous but ultimately strategic enough attempts at undermining my ability to orient in this situation by denying pretty clearly true parts of reality combined with intense implicit threats of consequences if I indicate I believe the wrong thing that might or might not be conscious optimizations happening in my interlocutors but have enough long-term coherence to be extremely unlikely to be the cause of random misunderstandings” would work that well.
Yeah I would call that “gaslighting”. It looks like my initial interpretation of what you meant by it is closer than Zack’s. I think Scott isn’t doing that. I’m inclined to believe you when you say other people have behaved this way.
I think you need to be a lot more deflationary about the g-word. If you think, “But ‘gaslighting’ is something Bad people do; Scott Alexander isn’t Bad, so he would never do that”, well, that might be true depending on what you mean by the g-word. But if the behavior Habryka is trying to point to with the word to is more like, “Scott is adopting a self-serving narrative that minimizes wrongdoing by his allies and inflates wrongdoing by his rivals” (which is something someone might do without being Bad due to having “somewhat snapped”), well, why wouldn’t the rivals reach for the g-word in their defense? What is the difference, from their perspective?
“Gaslighting” should probably be avoided because it is anywhere between meaningless and a fighting word depending on who says it and how.
The g-word is a very nasty accusation. It gets thrown around and means a bunch of stuff down to just “saying stuff I disagree with”, but it shouldn’t.
It is originally a conscious, malicious attempt to drive someone insane by strategically lying to them.
On the substance, people are honest but wrong an awful lot, and honest but massively overstating their case even more often. Assuming your rivals are malicious or dishonest when they’re just wrong or overstating is a huge source of conflict and thereby confusion.
It’s a really useful pointer towards a tactic that is relatively widespread and has no better word. I am personally happy to use other words, but I have the sense that sentences like “I am so very very tired of the ambiguous but ultimately strategic enough attempts at undermining my ability to orient in this situation by denying pretty clearly true parts of reality combined with intense implicit threats of consequences if I indicate I believe the wrong thing that might or might not be conscious optimizations happening in my interlocutors but have enough long-term coherence to be extremely unlikely to be the cause of random misunderstandings” would work that well.
Yeah I would call that “gaslighting”. It looks like my initial interpretation of what you meant by it is closer than Zack’s. I think Scott isn’t doing that. I’m inclined to believe you when you say other people have behaved this way.