“Hurting a person” still seems too vague to me (sometimes people are “hurt” just because you disagreed with them on a claim of fact),
Even “this is at least as harmful as a punch in the gut” isn’t a good pointer, since some people are extremely emotionally brittle and can be put in severe pain with very minor social slights. I think it’s virtuous to try to help those people flourish, but I don’t want to claim that a rationalist has done a Terrible Thing if they ever do something that makes someone that upset; it depends on the situation.
As I said, if someone feels upset by mere disagreement, that’s not a violation of a rational discourse norm.
The focus on physical violence is nice insofar violence is halfway clear-cut, but is also fairly useless insofar the badness of violence is obvious to most people (unlike things like bullying, bad-faith mockery, moral grandstanding, etc which are very common), and mostly irrelevant in internet discussions without physical contact, where most irrational discourse is happening nowadays, very nonviolently.
I feel specifically uncomfortable with leaning on the phrase “social ostracization” here, because it’s so vague, and the way you’re talking about it makes it sound like you want rationalists to be individually responsible for making every human on Earth feel happy, welcome, and accepted in the rat community.
That seems to me an uncharitable interpretation. Social ostracization is prototypically something which happens e.g. when someone gets cancelled by a Twitter mob. “Mob” insofar those people don’t use rational arguments to attack you, even if “attacking you without using arguments” can’t be defined perfectly precisely. (Something like the Bostrom witch-hunt on Twitter, which included outright defamation, but hardly any arguments.)
If you would consequently shun vagueness, then you couldn’t even discourage violence, because the difference between violence and non-violence is gradual, it likewise admits of borderline cases. But since violence is bad despite borderline cases, the borderline cases and exceptions you cited also don’t seem very serious. You never get perfectly precise definitions. And you have to embrace some more vagueness than in the case of violence, unless you want to refer only to a tiny subset of irrational discourse.
By the way, I would say banning/blocking is irrational when it is done in response to disagreement (often people on Twitter ban other people who merely disagree with them) and acceptable when off-topic or purely harassment. Sometimes there are borderline cases which lie in between, those are grey areas where blocking may be neither clearly bad nor clearly acceptable, but such grey areas are in no way counterexamples to the clear-cut cases.
As I said, if someone feels upset by mere disagreement, that’s not a violation of a rational discourse norm.
The focus on physical violence is nice insofar violence is halfway clear-cut, but is also fairly useless insofar the badness of violence is obvious to most people (unlike things like bullying, bad-faith mockery, moral grandstanding, etc which are very common), and mostly irrelevant in internet discussions without physical contact, where most irrational discourse is happening nowadays, very nonviolently.
That seems to me an uncharitable interpretation. Social ostracization is prototypically something which happens e.g. when someone gets cancelled by a Twitter mob. “Mob” insofar those people don’t use rational arguments to attack you, even if “attacking you without using arguments” can’t be defined perfectly precisely. (Something like the Bostrom witch-hunt on Twitter, which included outright defamation, but hardly any arguments.)
If you would consequently shun vagueness, then you couldn’t even discourage violence, because the difference between violence and non-violence is gradual, it likewise admits of borderline cases. But since violence is bad despite borderline cases, the borderline cases and exceptions you cited also don’t seem very serious. You never get perfectly precise definitions. And you have to embrace some more vagueness than in the case of violence, unless you want to refer only to a tiny subset of irrational discourse.
By the way, I would say banning/blocking is irrational when it is done in response to disagreement (often people on Twitter ban other people who merely disagree with them) and acceptable when off-topic or purely harassment. Sometimes there are borderline cases which lie in between, those are grey areas where blocking may be neither clearly bad nor clearly acceptable, but such grey areas are in no way counterexamples to the clear-cut cases.