There are a lot of people I know who say something like “the free market of ideas is really important and we need to seek truth. It’s important to let everyone have their fair say and share the evidence that they possess. So what we’re going to do is not shame anyone for expressing any belief, as long as they follow a few common-sense guidelines about niceness and civility.” I am very sympathetic to this point of view but I don’t think it will ever work.
I do not mean to say that it won’t work to personally decide to be as nice and civil as you can. I think that’s a good idea and more people should, and certainly I have met many extraordinarily nice people over the course of my life. The problem is when you make niceness and civility a social requirement, the sort of thing you will be punished for not adhering to.
First, it has been a commonplace observation since the day of John Stuart Mill that civility rules are almost always enforced unfairly. If someone is making an ineffectual and stupid argument, you’re unlikely to take much offense at it; in fact, those arguments are usually just funny. But if someone is hitting you at your actual weak points, pushing you hard on exactly the points you find most difficult to answer, then you’re going to get really upset and triggered and you’re probably not going to respond rationally. Incisive questioning of a locally unpopular view is called “being insightful”; the proponent of a locally unpopular view being triggered by it is called “letting your emotions run away with you in a rational discussion” and “blowing up at someone for no reason.” Incisive questioning of a locally popular view is called “uncharitable” and “incredibly rude”; the proponent of a locally popular view being triggered by it is called “a reasonable response to someone else’s assholery.” It all depends on whether the people doing the enforcement find it easier to put themselves in the shoes of the upset person or the person doing the questioning.
There are lots of tactics that are sometimes civil and sometimes not. Sometimes a cutting satire sums up an entire point more eloquently than anything else; sometimes it misrepresents other people’s viewpoints or is just mean. Sometimes anger is an appropriate way to convey exactly how you feel about an injustice; sometimes anger is cruel. In general, people tend to cut more slack to viewpoints they agree with and viewpoints that don’t threaten them or make them feel defensive. If you like someone, it’s righteous indignation; if you dislike someone, it’s being an oversensitive jerk. If you agree with it, it’s witty and biting; if you disagree with it, it’s strawmanning and misrepresenting others.
Civility norms will always be enforced disproportionately against viewpoints that the people in power don’t like. This is why a lot of free speech advocates are cautious about campus speech codes and other attempts to enforce civility on campus, but I think it’s worth considering even in a social setting.
Second, people’s differing opinions often lead them to have different conclusions about what is and is not civil.
Consider the concept of radical honesty. Radical honesty means that you should not say or withhold information to manipulate someone’s opinion of you. For example, proponents of radical honesty hold that if you think someone is being an obnoxious asshole, you should say that without even trying to be tactful. The proponents of radical honesty would argue that radical honesty is (to quote the website) “the kind of authentic sharing that creates the possibility of love and intimacy”, and for that reason calling people obnoxious assholes when you think they’re obnoxious assholes is, in fact, the nicest and most civil thing to do. Conversely, the mainstream opinion is that if you are trying to be nice to people you probably shouldn’t insult them at all even a little bit.
Or imagine that your Great-Aunt Gertrude and your Great-Aunt Bertha are trying to work together on Thanksgiving dinner. Great-Aunt Gertrude is a proper Southern lady. She thinks no one should curse in mixed company (in fact, she’s rather suspicious of the word ‘goshdarnit’). She believes it is unconscionably rude for children not to say “sir” and “ma’am” to their elders. And certainly sex should never be discussed, much less joked about, where women and children are able to hear it.
Conversely, Great-Aunt Bertha skipped school in the fifties to go get drunk with sailors and was the first woman in the Hell’s Angels. Great-Aunt Bertha thinks it is very rude that Great-Aunt Gertrude keeps saying “a-HEM” five times a sentence just because she’s talking the way she normally talks. All her best jokes are sex jokes, and really Great-Aunt Gertrude should have a sense of humor. It’s not polite to interrupt what people are saying by getting offended and storming out. And that whole “sir” and “ma’am” business– unlike Great-Aunt Bertha’s story about the two clowns and the goat– is actually offensive. Children are people and it is wrong to treat them as if they are subservient to adults.
Great-Aunt Bertha and Great-Aunt Gertrude will have some difficulty agreeing about what is polite behavior at the Thanksgiving table.
The same thing happens in more directly political contexts. Trans people think it is polite to use the pronouns people prefer; anti-trans activists think it is rude to demand that other people lie if they think “she” refers only to people assigned female at birth. Muslims think it is cruel to them to draw pictures of the Prophet; many non-Muslims think it is rude to yell at people over stick-figure drawings labeled “Mohammad.” A certain word referring to the female genitalia is so taboo in America that I can’t actually make myself type it out, whereas in many other countries in the Anglosphere it is used without even being intended as an insult.
One could resolve these problems by taking some authority on etiquette, perhaps Miss Manners, and then saying that civility is officially now defined as doing what Miss Manners says to do. On the other hand, many aspects of etiquette have nothing to do with being nice to people but instead are ways of signalling that one is upper-class, or at least a middle-class person with pretensions of same. (Most obviously, anything about what forks one uses; more controversially, rules about greetings, introductions, when to bring gifts, etc.) You wind up excluding poor and less educated people, which people in many spaces don’t want.
So what’s the solution? There isn’t one that works literally 100% of the time. If you just give up on socially enforcing civility at all, then you get 4Chan. Not to bash 4Chan, but I for one am pretty happy about the existence of social spaces that are not 4Chan.
I think it’s important to think carefully about what your space is and is not for. Maybe this is actually just Great-Aunt Bertha’s Thanksgiving, and Great-Aunt Gertrude will have to suck up the curse words and sex jokes or organize her own Thanksgiving. Maybe you want your support group to be welcoming of trans people, and people who are strongly opposed to using people’s preferred pronouns have to go to a different support group. This is totally fine: no space is ever for everyone.
Sometimes you do want civil dialogue to occur between two groups who disagree a lot about what civility is. If everyone involved has good faith and is willing to compromise, that can happen okay. For example, maybe Great-Aunt Gertrude really cares about not hearing sex jokes, and Great-Aunt Bertha really cares about being allowed to swear, and they can have Thanksgiving together both feeling only a little bit uncomfortable. Maybe the anti-trans people will use trans people’s preferred pronouns and not describe their bodies as mutilated, while the trans people will avoid using the word “TERF” and call themselves “natal females/males” instead of “assigned female/male at birth”.
If the rules are explicit (for example, in an online group with moderators), it’s a good idea to make sure all sides are equally represented in the group of people who enforce the rules, so everyone has their concerns respected. If the rules are implicit (for example, in a group of friends), it’s a good idea to focus mostly on correcting the behavior of people you agree with and not the behavior of people you disagree with. If you ever feel scared or defensive, take a break from the conversation: online, this might mean stepping away from your computer, while offline you might ask for a change of subject.
MugaSofer said:
“Incisive questioning of a locally popular view is called “uncharitable” and “incredibly rude”; the proponent of a locally unpopular view being triggered by it is called “a reasonable response to someone else’s assholery.””
This doesn’t seem to be true among Rationalists, at least online? I see a lot of insightful criticism of popular views, and it’s generally welcomed.
Indeed, isn’t this post insightful criticism of a popular view?
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ozymandias said:
I think this is definitely true in the rationalist community (although it’s a bit confusing because “viewpoints people are scared/threatened by” doesn’t match up precisely with “viewpoints people disagree with”– neoreactionaries are the classic example of something that is the latter but not the former).
It’s also different because the rationalist community has a wide diversity of views on some issues (cause areas, social justice) and thus winds up being a space where lots of views are represented and everyone is somewhat uncomfortable.
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MugaSofer said:
Hmm, what are the views rationalists (as a group) are scared/threatened by? Rationalists seem weirdly willing to engage with even “rationalists are all terrible people” relative to most groups.
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Aapje said:
I think that many rationalists alieve that they can defend themselves by convincing people with threatening beliefs, so I don’t think you can equate a willingness to engage with not being scared/threatened.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
I reread this section like 5 times trying to make sense of it and concluded that “popular” and “unpopular” should probably be switched around in the part about proponents of popular/unpopular views responding to provocation. If not, I don’t understand this at all.
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ozymandias said:
I am very sorry for my confusing habit of occasionally replacing words with their literal opposites and then failing to notice even when I’m looking for typoes. This is probably the single most confusing typo habit it is possible to have. It should be fixed now.
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Aapje said:
Ozy,
Other people have typo habits too and many WordPress sites offer a grace period where you can make edits to your comment. For example, at SSC it is an hour and at another site, it’s 15 minutes.
Have you considered adding that feature to your blog?
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benquo said:
Overall I agree very strongly and think this is a really important thing to understand.
One thing I would have emphasized more than you did is the extent to which this is of a piece with rules of polite/rational discourse that apply unequal standards of evidence. There are always unspoken norms that determine how a narrative gets set, some of which are usually about who gets to speak and not about what’s true.
Groups organized around a narrative hold denial of the narrative to a higher standard than affirmation of it. Overtly challenging the narrative on the object level, with no more explicit justification than the official narrative has, tends to be construed as making wild claims without justification. If you try to “go meta” and challenge it on the process level, then you’re in effect saying the narrative is dishonest, which gets rounded off to personal insults, and therefore hurtful and bad.
Calling out outgroup dishonesty, or the dishonesty of dissenters, seems not to produce that sort of immune response. Instead, the people being called liars are construed as violating norms of civility, and the people calling them out are construed as defenders of civility.
(Bizarrely, I’ve heard multiple people refer to Slate Star Codex’s IN FAVOR OF NICENESS, COMMUNITY, AND CIVILIZATION as an argument against calling people liars because that’s uncivil, when a fair amount of the post consists of calling people liars. This consistent misremembering only makes sense if people are tacitly applying different standards to the ingroup and the outgroup, and reading this into Scott’s piece. The implied choice of outgroup goes a long way towards explaining why Scott’s perceived as antifeminist by many.)
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act said:
Doesn’t “think carefully about what your space is for and is not” fall into the exact same trap? Supporters of the locally popular view will be seen as sympathetic, and the adjustments they ask for as normal. Supporters of unpopular views will be seen as asking for unreasonable or unjustifiable adjustments, and will be told to get their own group. (And will typically find it much harder to get their own group, because there are typically more safe spaces for popular views than for unpopular ones.)
This seems to be a trap some rat groups fall into. This space is for truth seeking, and if the things you’re asking for are incompatible with truth seeking, you can get your own space. But whether you say “Angry voices make it harder to think rationally, so if you need to shout then you can get your own space, because this space is for truth seeking” or “Judging people on their tone or the volume of their voice means you’re not judging the truth of their argument, so if you need to tone-police then you can get your own space, because this space is for truth seeking” depends less on which rule has been found to actually promotes truth seeking, and more on which need seems more sympathetic / which position is more popular.
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ozymandias said:
I think it’s valuable to be honest about the tradeoff you’re making, because then you can make it consciously instead of just assuming that “civility” means “being nice to people you like.” For example, I ban neoreactionaries and members of the alt-right (except Nydwracu, who has generally behaved himself), because I don’t think their opinions are valuable enough to justify their tendency to make every thread about people arguing with their niche political views. And I think going “okay, whichever way we do this we’re going to make SOMEONE unwelcome” opens the door to trying to figure out whether tone-policing or anger is more truth-seeking (in this particular context, I don’t think there’s a general answer to that question).
It’s true that having opinions that are unpopular in general (rather than locally, like Trump supporters in EA) does involve a cost, in that there are far fewer spaces you can participate in. Trans people can’t go to church in huge swathes of America; people who have ten children for religious reasons feel unwelcome in many parenting groups; the radically honest may have to look a while to find any place that will tolerate them. I’m not sure that there’s any way to prevent people with generally unpopular opinions from having to pay that cost, since in fact many people do find them unpleasant to interact with. It’s a good thing that the Internet exists, since it lets people with generally unpopular opinions make their own spaces much more easily.
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act said:
I think the difficulty is that people don’t always actually end up thinking “okay, whichever way we do this we’re going to make SOMEONE unwelcome”, because there’s a background assumption of asymmetry; people see needs-they’re-sympathetic-to as actual needs, and needs-they’re-not-sympathetic-to as just preferences.
Autistic people with sensory issues sometimes need things to be quiet, whereas hyperactive ADHD people sometimes need to be allowed to be loud. If sitting still and being quiet is very easy for someone, they might assume that “be allowed to be loud” isn’t a real need, and the ADHD person could be very quiet if they just *tried harder*. So they say “in this space there will be no loud shouting, because otherwise we would exclude people with sensory issues”. If the ADHD person doesn’t turn up any more, that’s *their* fault for unreasonably ragequitting.
Conservatives don’t *actually expect that misgendering trans people will exclude or harm them*; they think that if the trans people just take a deep breath and count to ten and accept reality, they will be fine. Meanwhile trans activists don’t *actually expect that having trans people in the women’s bathroom will make women be/feel unsafe*; they think that if the women just take a deep breath and count to ten and get over their bigotry, they will be fine. So nobody actually sits down and says “ok, whichever way we do this we’re going to make *some* group unhappy, how will we decide this on our values?” because nobody actually has a model saying “whichever way we do this we’re going to make some group (validly/reasonably/really/truly) unhappy”.
Even when groups come up with seemingly principled rules about what they will or won’t accept in their space, they tend to apply them inconsistently depending on what’s sympathetic. “That’s nothing to do with you so your feelings about it don’t matter” applies if someone is annoyed by witnessing others kissing each other, but doesn’t apply if someone is annoyed by witnessing others raising their voices at each other. “You’re responsible for your own actions; you can’t blame anyone else for making you feel a certain way” applies if someone makes you very angry and you shout, but not if someone causes you a panic attack and you scream. “We always respect trigger warnings in this space no matter how weird your triggers are” applies to someone who is triggered by sexual assault mentions, but not to someone triggered by people of a certain race. There might be reasonable reasons for excluding one behaviour and welcoming the other, but the reasons people *state* often have little to do with it – and so I’m always a little wary when people claim they’re making these decisions by having reasonable-sounding Principles Their Space Is Founded On.
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act said:
There’s also some amount of something-analogous-to-intersectionalism here. A trans person will find it relatively difficult to attend church, but relatively easier to attend a mental health support group at a university. A radically honest New Atheist will be able to find safe spaces much more easily than a radically honest spiritualist. An autistic nerd with severe acne will find welcoming Dungeons and Dragons groups easily, and a communist vegan lesbian feminist will find welcoming hippy environmentalist camping groups easily, but if the lesbian wants to play DnD or the nerd wants to join an environmentalist camping group, then tough luck.
There are many spaces for survivors of childhood emotional abuse with many triggers, and many spaces for conservatives, but very few that overlap and would welcome someone who is both. And it’s incredibly hard for them to *build* their own spaces (even on the internet), because if they ask “who else here would be interested in starting a group for ultra-conservatives?” in their lefty abuse-survivor support-group then they’ll be run off the internet by an enraged mob, and if they ask “who else would be interested in starting a support group for emotional abuse survivors with triggers?” in their conservative support group then they’ll be mocked off the internet by a hate campaign.
(Or they can just be hard to find; trans TERFs totally exist, but most trans people have never seen one and never will, let alone find the somewhat-secretive network of groupchats that makes up their community.)
One can imagine Great-Aunt Bertha and Great-Aunt Gertrude each running their own Thanksgivings. Someone at Great-Aunt Bertha’s Thanksgiving expresses a need to not have any sex jokes, and Bertha says, “That’s not what this space is for – go get your own”. Bertha doesn’t really think it’s a big deal to kick this person out, because they can just attend Great-Aunt Gertrude’s Thanksgiving instead. However, if this person is a lefty atheist feminist teenager who happens to be asexual and sex-repulsed, they are *also* not welcome at Great-Aunt Gertrude’s Thanksgiving. So they can’t attend a Thanksgiving at all.
I think this is exacerbated by people having strong notions about “what this space is for”, because often it comes out to something like “this space is for people-like-this”, and there tend to be *many* spaces that all cater to the same few stock tribes of people-like-this. If you don’t fit into one of the stock Tribes or if you are solidly part of the people-like-this cluster but have a particular trait/need/preference which is outgroup, you’re screwed by *all of the spaces simultaneously* even if your need is not that costly to accommodate.
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sniffnoy said:
There are a lot of people I know who say something like “the free market of ideas is really important and we need to seek truth. It’s important to let everyone have their fair say and share the evidence that they possess. So what we’re going to do is not shame anyone for expressing any belief, as long as they follow a few common-sense guidelines about niceness and civility.” I am very sympathetic to this point of view but I don’t think it will ever work.
I think the key thing here is to not fall into a lost purpose. Remember what the point is: To allow actual arguments to happen and the market of ideas to function. Focus on that.
I mean, I could go on here about what sorts of civility I think are and are not helpful, but it’s all going to be reiterating that criterion, so…
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po8crg said:
That assumes that this is the point. For many situations, it isn’t. At Thanksgiving, the point is to have a pleasant experience that reinforces family bonds. In which case, the point is not to have arguments, but to have entertaining conversation.
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gemmaem said:
Although there are no neutral civility norms, there is a notion similar to neutrality that can be extremely valuable — I’ll call it breadth. A broad civility norm is one that allows a large range of viewpoints to be represented.
People who aim for neutral civility norms occasionally obtain broad ones (even though they never obtain neutral ones) and this is frequently a very good thing. Engagement between people who disagree is really important and broad civility norms are the only way to achieve this. Indeed, it is possible to imagine a situation where viewpoints percolate across groups as a good idea that arose in one context is slowly transferred across a series of broad civility norms, changing as it goes.
It’s a problem when people think they have a neutral civility norm and use that as an excuse to pour scorn on those viewpoints that don’t fit in. But aside from that, the broad civility norms that arise from attempts at neutrality can sometimes be a really important thing.
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Aapje said:
Civility is about disagreeing without disrespect, seeking common ground as a starting point for dialog about differences, listening past one’s preconceptions, etc.
However, many people want to limit the civility in their space. They don’t want certain arguments made, don’t want certain preconceptions to be challenged, etc. There are valid reasons for this. For example, perhaps the purpose of the space is not debate, but moral support or another purpose. Perhaps certain initially civil discussions often turn uncivil and it’s far easier to contain this by snuffing it out at the start than to wait for things to spiral out of control. Perhaps you just want your space to be civil debate on one or more specific topics and not be about other topics. Perhaps you don’t want to deal with ignorant people who nevertheless debate with civility. Etc. Many of these reasons are quite fair for spaces that you create yourself and that people can freely opt-in or -out of.
Yet, it’s not uncommon for people to present their civility-limiting rules as pro-civility rules, which is insulting to those with different preferences, because it’s an implicit claim that they are disrespectful, acting in bad faith or such. So I think that such framing is impolite and unnecessarily antagonizes people.
A related issue is that some people want to impose civility-limiting rules on spaces that are not theirs and/or that people can’t freely opt-in or -out of. At that point it is no longer about merely creating a space that works for them, as this is done at the expense of the freedom of others. Of course, that doesn’t automatically make it wrong to do so, but this requires a lot of concern about potential abuses. Often you want clear, neutral rules and neutral judges and police.
I would argue that it is very pro-civility in general to use neutral terminology. Using a term that has connotations that the other person/side/ideology rejects generally either results in derailing because that person will feel forced to explain why she rejects that terminology or anger because the other person feels coerced into a frame. If this happens too much, the debate runs off the rails.
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Lawrence D'Anna said:
“I would argue that it is very pro-civility in general to use neutral terminology.”
Yes!
I wish everyone would adopt that ethic. Too many people want to win the debate with framing and semantic infiltration. That’s not argument, it’s marketing. It treats the other side as objects to be cynically manipulated, not as minds to communicate with.
Of course there’s no such thing as absolutely neutral terminology, and what sounds as “neutral” depends on who you’re talking to and what presuppositions you share with them, but many people seem to gleefully go out of their way to use the most non-neutral terminology they can think of. I really despise that form of argument no matter what side it comes from.
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Pseudonym said:
The problem with talking about ‘spaces’ in the abstract like this is that it’s concealing the actual cause of the conflict.
In an entirely non-hypothetical case, let’s say that you’re a graduate student at a university. Even if you dislike academia and want to leave for industry, you need to actually get your degree first: saying “you’ll have to find another space” is really saying “hope you like autoclaves because you’re going to be a technician for the rest of your career!” It’s not just a matter of conscience whether you obey civility rules: whether or not you obey has immediate material consequences for you and your dependents.
Nobody is demanding norms which are neutral in some vague philosophical sense. The issue is that the norms being pushed now under the guise of civility are nakedly partisan and would exclude a plurality of the population from higher education and gainful employment. It’s not about “spaces,” PC norms are a weapon to impoverish and silence political opponents and they’re supporters aren’t shy about admitting it.
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Lawrence D'Anna said:
“I think it’s important to think carefully about what your space is and is not for. ”
It is important and it helps sometimes, but it may not be enough to protect you. If your space is generating visible value or prestige, culture warriors from both sides will show up using civility norms as weapons and intent on turning your space into the next battlefield. Even if it’s a knitting circle, it doesn’t matter. They’ll come for any cultural territory worth occupying, because they hate to see the other side being allowed to occupy it.
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pansnarrans said:
“A certain word referring to the female genitalia is so taboo in America that I can’t actually make myself type it out, whereas in many other countries in the Anglosphere it is used without even being intended as an insult.”
Would a passing American be so kind as to explain the rules on this one for me? I only found out a few years ago that it’s supposed to be super-taboo in the US. Didn’t make sense until I realised what it means in American. Then I started watching HBO and other such stuff and it’s used with happy abandon. Game of Thrones in particular uses it in every single British meaning of the term. What is the deal with this word in the States?
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tcheasdfjkl said:
I think Game of Thrones basically uses British English since the actors are British.
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pansnarrans said:
But I kind of imagine millions of Americans watching Game of Thrones and flinching every time someone says it – see the author’s treatment of it above, and this isn’t the first time I’ve encountered this aversion. But that can’t actually be right, because then they wouldn’t put it in the show, or at least wouldn’t have likeable characters say it.
So I was wondering if attitudes massively differ in different parts of America, or depending on class or whether you’re red or blue, or something like that.
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gazeboist said:
It’s pretty variable / space dependent? I usually think of it as “about as weighty as swears can get, not as big a deal as the heaviest slurs (depending on usage)”, but other Americans consider it to be one of the more taboo slurs.
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