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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32893 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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It occurred to me after I posted that a good collection of bedrock yet underappreciated principles is found right at the top of this thread. I think it was /u/TraceWoodgrains who wrote it originally? Like, where in the censorship/misinformation debate do people ever call for speaking plainly, or the hazards of shaming, consensus building or sweeping generalizations? Yet I don't think we'd be here in this forum today if the mods hadn't been able to point at this as our shared set of principles for years now. Mostly the world has given up on public forums, or is pretending like fact-checkers and public authorities are somehow going to be able to save Facebook and Twitter. But we have an existence proof right here that with a small group of dedicated mods, you can have a forum open to the world where people deal with the hottest of hot button issues without resorting to impositions of draconian ideological conformity. And those pillars up in the banner are what hold it up.

I wrote it.

Mind you, I had help -- most of the wording that you're praising here is either directly borrowed from, or somewhat downstream of, this post from /u/Obsidian and this post from reddit user Bakkot. Which is to say that much of what I was articulating was developed by the original moderators of /r/slatestarcodex, back when the Motte was the Culture War Thread. Their achievement is indeed impressive.

For my part, I've got a long standing interest in discussion norms that includes a couple of blog posts that are relevant to your comments above. My post on pluralist civility grew out of me trying to justify to myself as to why this community is worth engaging with. And my much more recent post on ideological diversity and nonreciprocated virtue is quite relevant to your discussion of the value of having principles -- I approach it from a virtue ethical perspective rather than from the perspective of articulated principles, but it's covering the same sort of ground.

On the whole, I find the virtue ethical perspective on tolerance and civility to be a particularly useful one. I think pretty much all people have speech that they would respond to punitively in one way or another, whether by vociferous denunciation or shaming, or ceasing contact with that person, or stronger varieties of cancellation. You can't actually ask everyone to outlaw all of this on principle without infringing on rights of speech or of freedom to choose who to associate with.

Productive discussion with people whose views are different to yours will always be something of an art. Rules can help, but rules will never be the heart of it. Ultimately, tolerance is not adherence to a simple rule. It's a learned virtue.

From your post on pluralist civility, linked above:

Here, then, is my (local) pluralist manifesto.

  • Respect that discussion norms are local. Don't try to make them universal.
  • Be part of the overlap. Belong to more than one community.
  • Encourage other people to recognise that discussion norms can and should differ from place to place.
  • Encourage other people to recognise that broad discussion norms are incredibly valuable and should be nurtured wherever they are compatible with community aims.

I endorse this unreservedly. Thank you for your contributions.

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