another-normal-anomaly:

enye-word:

slatestarscratchpad:

One thing that’s seemed striking to me in this Dragon Army discussion is the priors on different people’s threat assessments.

I remember when I was younger, I used to want to meet my friends from the Internet, and my parents were horrified, and had all of these objections like “What if they’re pedophiles who befriended you so they could molest you?” or “What if they’re kidnappers who befriended you so they could kidnap you?”, or less lurid possibilities like “What if they’re creepy drug people and they insist on bringing you along to their creepy drug abuse sessions and won’t let you say no?”

And I never developed a good plan that countered their concerns, like “I will bring pepper spray so I can defend myself”. It was more about rolling my eyes and telling them that never happened in real life. I’ve now met hundreds of Internet friends, and I was absolutely right - it’s never happened, and any effort I put into developing a plan would have been effort wasted.

I’m not claiming there are no Internet pedophiles or kidnappers. I’m saying that based on my own Internet communities, and my threat-detection abilities, and the base rate, I was pretty sure it was more in the realm of terrorism (the kind of stuff you hear about on the news) than the realm of car accidents (the stuff that happens to real people and that you must be guarding yourself against at every moment).

This is also how I think of people turning out to be abusers. It’s possible that anyone I date could turn out to be an abuser, just like it’s possible I could be killed by a terrorist, but it’s not something likely enough that I’m going to take strong precautions against it. This is obviously a function of my personal situations, but it’s a real function of my personal situation, which like my Internet-friend-meeting has consistently been confirmed over a bunch of different situations.

(Please don’t give me the “that’s just male privilege!” speech; men and women get abused at roughly similar rates. I do think that probably women are socialized to fear abuse much more, and that’s a big part of this, and probably other axes of marginalization contribute more)

One interesting thing about Tumblr and the SJ-sphere in particular is that because it comes disproportionately from marginalized communities, it has this sort of natural prior of “people often turn out to be abusers, every situation has to be made abuser-proof or else it will be a catastrophe”. I once dated someone I knew on Tumblr who did a weird test on me where (sorry, won’t give more details) they deliberately put me in a situation where I could have abused them to see what I would do. When they told me about this months later, I was pretty offended - did I really seem so potentially-abusive that I had to be specifically cleared by some procedure? And people explained to me that there’s this whole other culture where somebody being an abuser is, if not the *norm*, at least high enough to worry about with everyone.

I’m not sure what percent of the population is more like me vs. more like my date. But I think there’s a failure mode where someone from a high-trust culture starts what they think is a perfectly reasonable institution, and someone from a low-trust culture says “that’s awful, you didn’t make any effort to guard against abusers!”.

And then the person from the high-trust culture gets angry, because they’re being accused of being a potential abuser, which to them sounds as silly as being accused of being a potential terrorist. If you told your Muslim friend you wouldn’t hang out with him without some safeguards in case he turned out to be a terrorist, my guess is he’d get pretty upset. At the very least it would engender the “stop wasting my time” reaction I had when my parents made me develop anti-pedophile plans before meeting my Internet friends.

And then the person from the low-trust culture gets angry, because the person has just dismissed out of hand (or even gotten angry about) a common-sense attempt to avoid abuse, and who but an abuser would do something like that?

I think it’s interesting that the Dragon Army idea received more positive feedback or constructive criticism on LW (where it was pitched to, and which is probably culturally more similar to me) and more strongly negative feedback on Tumblr (which is more full of marginalized people and SJ-aligned people, and also maybe more full of abusers as judged by the number who get called out all the time).

A background observation of this post seems to be that SJWs set up especially abuse-proof systems, which is patently false and also the reverse of reality, from what I’ve seen.

Do you think they might be *trying* to set up abuse-proof systems, but failing to do as well as the “strategy” of [being a high-trust community that naturally screens out both abusers and vulnerable people]?

Could be; that’s above my pay grade.

Jun. 1 2017
Via slatestarscratchpad
109 notes

Notes

  1. chronohat reblogged this from freelancejake
  2. freelancejake reblogged this from slatestarscratchpad
  3. injygo reblogged this from bloomsneet
  4. fgyee reblogged this from slatestarscratchpad
  5. bloomsneet reblogged this from osberend
  6. cromulentenough reblogged this from osberend
  7. osberend reblogged this from slatestarscratchpad and added:
    Tangential but I think relevant: A lot of discussion of “abusers” — or “racists,” “transphobes,” etc., as regards this...
  8. bpd-anon reblogged this from slatestarscratchpad
  9. enye-word reblogged this from another-normal-anomaly and added:
    Could be; that’s above my pay grade.
  10. another-normal-anomaly reblogged this from enye-word and added:
    Do you think they might be *trying* to set up abuse-proof systems, but failing to do as well as the “strategy” of [being...
  11. bartlebyshop reblogged this from kaminiwa and added:
    I can only speak for myself re: evaluating the trustworthiness of others. What I mean is that I don’t want to even...
  12. paradox523 reblogged this from kaminiwa and added:
    I was going to write something replying to the OP but then I realised Zach Weinersmith had already perfectly explained...
  13. tartapplesauce said: Probably is down to personal experience, to be frank. And unfortunately every time I’ve had the instinctual “this could be a bit dodgy” reaction which I then over-rode with your model of “Oh come on, that’s over-reacting, that’s highly unlikely to happen and you’re conflating a few cases you saw on the news with real life”, it’s turned out badly. Once it could even have turned out very badly, but I managed to literally run away from it. So now I go with gut reaction.
  14. yrro reblogged this from slatestarscratchpad and added:
    I keep stumbling across alternative definitions of “privilege” that I like better than the standard ones… I’ll add this...
  15. jack-v reblogged this from slatestarscratchpad and added:
    Huh. That’s interesting, because I feel like I have a similar background to you, in most of my life, I don’t...
  16. slatestarscratchpad posted this