In a hostile memetic environment, it is extremely dangerous to accept any justification which grounds out in optics, consensus, legibility, etc.
I don’t think “refuse to accept justifications which ground out in optics, consensus, legibility, etc so as to defend against parasitic memes” is a defensible line to draw. Weirdness points have real costs. They’re grounded in optics, but the costs they impose are real. Making this unnecessarily personal, I think you are several standard deviations bad at seeing weirdness points, and you likely get annoyed by people distorting their actions and epistemics for what (to you) are stupid invisible reasons that barely exist. And that independence has real epistemic benefits! But it also has real costs and I worry that temperamentally you might not see those costs.
And the blast zone seems limited here? If you didn’t hire someone because she made controversial statements in the past, that enables parasitic memes against many people and many true controversial statements. If you don’t hire the lead designer of Chernobyl for your nuclear power plant, not because they’re a bad designer but because they were one of the two public faces for the worst PR disaster in nuclear power plant history, that seems like a much more limited attack surface for parasitic memes?
I don’t think “refuse to accept justifications which ground out in optics, consensus, legibility, etc so as to defend against parasitic memes” is a defensible line to draw. Weirdness points have real costs. They’re grounded in optics, but the costs they impose are real. Making this unnecessarily personal, I think you are several standard deviations bad at seeing weirdness points, and you likely get annoyed by people distorting their actions and epistemics for what (to you) are stupid invisible reasons that barely exist. And that independence has real epistemic benefits! But it also has real costs and I worry that temperamentally you might not see those costs.
And the blast zone seems limited here? If you didn’t hire someone because she made controversial statements in the past, that enables parasitic memes against many people and many true controversial statements. If you don’t hire the lead designer of Chernobyl for your nuclear power plant, not because they’re a bad designer but because they were one of the two public faces for the worst PR disaster in nuclear power plant history, that seems like a much more limited attack surface for parasitic memes?