Jessica explained what she saw as the problem with this. What Ben was proposing was creating clarity about behavioral patterns. I was saying that I was afraid that creating such clarity is an attack on someone. But if so, then my blog was an attack on trans people. What was going on here?
Socially, creating clarity about behavioral patterns is construed as an attack and can make things worse for someone. For example, if your livelihood is based on telling a story about you and your flunkies being the only sane truthseeking people in the world, then me demonstrating that you don’t care about the truth when it’s politically inconvenient is a threat to your marketing story and therefore to your livelihood. As a result, it’s easier to create clarity down power gradients than up them: it was easy for me to blow the whistle on trans people’s narcissistic delusions, but hard to blow the whistle on Yudkowsky’s.
The phrase “construed” makes me wonder… Is it not an attack? I guess I have a relatively shallow/mostly-aesthetic model of what is an “attack” or not in debates, because I can’t really think of any crisp arguments in favor or against.
The phrase “construed” makes me wonder… Is it not an attack? I guess I have a relatively shallow/mostly-aesthetic model of what is an “attack” or not in debates, because I can’t really think of any crisp arguments in favor or against.