Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

It's really helpful to read your positive take. Maybe I'm just hopelessly tilted when it comes to this issue, but I read it in a more negative light. I know it could have been much worse, and is more fair than not.

This passage bothered me the most: "The rationalists regularly fail to reckon with power as it is practiced, or history as it has been experienced, and they indulge themselves in such contests with the freedom of those who have largely escaped discrimination."

Assuming, for the sake of charity, that this is neither a mere insult nor lip service to oppression politics but an actual critique, how would you answer it?

Nearly all venues for discourse necessitate a mixture of decoupling and contextualizing strategies. It can be valuable to just try looking at an idea from a pure decoupling perspective as a group, and the nature of group settings makes those venues rare. A feature, not a bug.

I interpret the quote as meaning any venue that claims or practices too much decoupling behaviour is suspicious. I suppose this is because apparent decoupling is sometimes accompanied by hidden motives. But social decoupling environments with pure motives are rare and valuable.

This doesn't mean that decoupling is bad! Just that it's a bad look for Rationalists to both have decoupled conversations on touchy subjects and also pretend that we're persecuted victims. I broadly agree and think that we should double down on the former.

I think you dramatically underestimate how much social (and sexual) trauma the modal SSCer has suffered. High decoupling isn’t an artifact of safety, it was often the thing that left us beat up, ridiculed, lonely, and raped in our formative years.