This schema seems like it has some very important gaps. As we’ve discussed elsewhere, there’s a need for criticism that isn’t mainly about one person being bad—for instance, a call to action might be based on wrong ideas or factual errors. Even if this is a call to action around which some people have built their identities or social standing, criticizing it is not intrinsically the same thing as the kind of call to conflict you defined here.
If these are in practice the same thing, then that’s a huge problem.
There’s another legitimate type of criticism, which is, “so and so has violated community standards,” which is both a claim about their behavior and about what the community standards are and ought to be. It’s not obvious that “punishment” should follow in all cases, even if they actually did violate community standards, if those standards were unclear. In any case, a step we have to pass through before enforcement—if we want to have standards at all and not just mob rule—needs to be clarifying specific cases, and it might make sense to be much more lenient in cases where the mods aren’t already on board.
There’s a third class of criticism that’s not about being “bad”—though it overlaps a bit with the first two—which is, a specific sort of epistemic defense—pointing out a pattern of communication that is seeking to induce errors. Obviously if we can’t talk about that as prominently as we can talk about any other given thing, that’s a huge security vulnerability.
Agreed that all three types of criticism are quite important – And yes I intended for “criticizing an error entangled with someone’s identity” to be quite different from what I mean by “call to conflict” here. (“Call to Conflict” maybe fits more into the second bullet point here, and the way I was intending to use it was particularly extreme instances)
I have more thoughts but they’re taking awhile to get in order.
This schema seems like it has some very important gaps. As we’ve discussed elsewhere, there’s a need for criticism that isn’t mainly about one person being bad—for instance, a call to action might be based on wrong ideas or factual errors. Even if this is a call to action around which some people have built their identities or social standing, criticizing it is not intrinsically the same thing as the kind of call to conflict you defined here.
If these are in practice the same thing, then that’s a huge problem.
There’s another legitimate type of criticism, which is, “so and so has violated community standards,” which is both a claim about their behavior and about what the community standards are and ought to be. It’s not obvious that “punishment” should follow in all cases, even if they actually did violate community standards, if those standards were unclear. In any case, a step we have to pass through before enforcement—if we want to have standards at all and not just mob rule—needs to be clarifying specific cases, and it might make sense to be much more lenient in cases where the mods aren’t already on board.
There’s a third class of criticism that’s not about being “bad”—though it overlaps a bit with the first two—which is, a specific sort of epistemic defense—pointing out a pattern of communication that is seeking to induce errors. Obviously if we can’t talk about that as prominently as we can talk about any other given thing, that’s a huge security vulnerability.
Agreed that all three types of criticism are quite important – And yes I intended for “criticizing an error entangled with someone’s identity” to be quite different from what I mean by “call to conflict” here. (“Call to Conflict” maybe fits more into the second bullet point here, and the way I was intending to use it was particularly extreme instances)
I have more thoughts but they’re taking awhile to get in order.