Of course words can be “aggressive”. Yes, they are a different form of aggression from literal physical violence, but we still have norms for words. Some tweets are obviously “acts of aggression”.
(Unless you mean to import some technical meaning with those words, in which case I am happy to clarify that I am not meaning to import any technical meaning behind “aggression” and just mean the obvious everyday usage of the word)
Regarding “calling for violence”: I can’t find any specific example scrolling through your past tweets, so it’s plausible I am wrong about this! I do think I remember some, but as you say yourself, you have >80,000 tweets and I don’t know of an efficient way to search through all of them. I apologize if it turns out to be wrong, I did not mean to imply a high level of confidence in that specific adjective. There are some tweets that I feel like someone could argue are calls for violence, though I don’t think any of the ones I’ve found with 5 minutes of searching obviously cross that line.
habryka—regarding what ‘aggression’ is, I’m coming to this from the perspective of having taught courses on animal behavior and human evolution for 35 years.
When biological scientists speak of ‘aggression’, we are referring to actual physical violence, e.g. hitting, biting, dismembering, killing, eating, within or between species. We are not referring to vocalizations, or animal signals, or their modern digital equivalents.
When modern partisan humans refer to ‘aggression’ metaphorically, this collapses the distinction between speech and violence. Which is, of course, what censors want, in order to portray speech that they don’t like as if it’s aggravated assault. This has become a standard chant on the Left: ‘speech = violence’.
I strongly disagree with that framing, because it is almost always an excuse for censorship, deplatforming, and ostracizing of political rivals.
I think to maintain the epistemic norms of the Rationality community, we must be very careful not to equate ‘verbal signals we don’t like’ with ‘acts of aggression’.
When biological scientists speak of ‘aggression’, we are referring to actual physical violence, e.g. hitting, biting, dismembering, killing, eating, within or between species. We are not referring to vocalizations, or animal signals, or their modern digital equivalents.
No, the usual term both in common usage and that biological scientists use for that kind of stuff is “violence”. Aggression very much includes speech. I would be surprised if you were to find biologists consistently avoiding the word aggression when e.g. referring to intimidation behavior between animals in lieu of actual physical contact.
Indeed, just the first Google result for “animal aggression behavior” looks like this:
This also aligns with the common usage of those words.
That said, I am very happy to use a different word for the context of this comment thread if you want. We don’t have to agree on the meanings of all words to have a conversation here.
Of course words can be “aggressive”. Yes, they are a different form of aggression from literal physical violence, but we still have norms for words. Some tweets are obviously “acts of aggression”.
(Unless you mean to import some technical meaning with those words, in which case I am happy to clarify that I am not meaning to import any technical meaning behind “aggression” and just mean the obvious everyday usage of the word)
Regarding “calling for violence”: I can’t find any specific example scrolling through your past tweets, so it’s plausible I am wrong about this! I do think I remember some, but as you say yourself, you have >80,000 tweets and I don’t know of an efficient way to search through all of them. I apologize if it turns out to be wrong, I did not mean to imply a high level of confidence in that specific adjective. There are some tweets that I feel like someone could argue are calls for violence, though I don’t think any of the ones I’ve found with 5 minutes of searching obviously cross that line.
habryka—regarding what ‘aggression’ is, I’m coming to this from the perspective of having taught courses on animal behavior and human evolution for 35 years.
When biological scientists speak of ‘aggression’, we are referring to actual physical violence, e.g. hitting, biting, dismembering, killing, eating, within or between species. We are not referring to vocalizations, or animal signals, or their modern digital equivalents.
When modern partisan humans refer to ‘aggression’ metaphorically, this collapses the distinction between speech and violence. Which is, of course, what censors want, in order to portray speech that they don’t like as if it’s aggravated assault. This has become a standard chant on the Left: ‘speech = violence’.
I strongly disagree with that framing, because it is almost always an excuse for censorship, deplatforming, and ostracizing of political rivals.
I think to maintain the epistemic norms of the Rationality community, we must be very careful not to equate ‘verbal signals we don’t like’ with ‘acts of aggression’.
No, the usual term both in common usage and that biological scientists use for that kind of stuff is “violence”. Aggression very much includes speech. I would be surprised if you were to find biologists consistently avoiding the word aggression when e.g. referring to intimidation behavior between animals in lieu of actual physical contact.
Indeed, just the first Google result for “animal aggression behavior” looks like this:
This also aligns with the common usage of those words.
That said, I am very happy to use a different word for the context of this comment thread if you want. We don’t have to agree on the meanings of all words to have a conversation here.