Zach Stein-Perlman's Shortform

Zach Stein-Perlman

This is a special post for quick takes by Zach Stein-Perlman. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

You suspect someone in your community is a bad actor. Kinds of reasons not to move against them:

You're uncertain
1. Especially if your uncertainty will likely be largely resolved soon
You lack legible evidence (or other ways of convincing others), and they're not already seen as sketchy
1. Especially if you'll likely get better legible evidence soon
They're doing some good stuff; you need them for some good stuff
They're popular, politically powerful, or have power to hurt you
1. And so you'd fail
  1. And maybe you'd get kicked out or lose power (especially if your move is unpopular or considered inappropriate, or "community" is more like "team" or "circle")
2. And so making them an enemy of [you or your community] is costly
Personal psychological costs
It's just time-consuming to start a fight, especially because they'll be invested in discrediting you and your claims

This is all from-first-principles. I'm interested in takes and reading recommendations. Also creative affordances / social technology.

The convenient case would be that you can privately get the powerful stakeholders on board and then they all oust the bad actor and it's a fait accompli, so there's no protracted conflict and minimal cost to you and your community. If you can't get the powerful stakeholders on board, I guess you give up and just privately share information with people you trust — unless you're sufficiently powerful/independent/ostracized that it's cheap for you to make enemies, or it's sufficiently important, or you can share information anonymously. If you're scared about telling the powerful stakeholders, I guess it's the same situation.

This is assuming that the main audience for your beliefs is some powerful stakeholders. Sometimes it's more like many community members.

More reasons:

2.b. The problem is not lack of legible evidence per se, but the fact that the other members of the group are too stupid to understand anything; from their perspective even quite obvious evidence is illegible.

7. If you attack them and fail, it will strengthen their position; and either the chance of failure or the bonus they would get is high enough to make the expected value of your attack negative.

For example, they may have prepared a narrative like "there is a conspiracy against our group that will soon try to divide us by bringing up unfounded accusations against people like me", so if your fail to convince the others, you will provide evidence for the narrative.

11RationalElf1y

Another is concern that the cure is worse than the disease. I.e. the drama and relationship damage caused by trying to expel them in the community might hurt the community more than removing them. Like there are scissor statements, there are also scissor people. You might be in a community where you don't think people will agree with you that they're a bad actor, even if you can establish the truth about what events occurred in the world, because there's a value disagreement between you and your community. Also concern about them and their well-being. Being publicly ostracized is very traumatizing and scary for most people. Particularly if they seem mentally fragile, you might fear the consequences for them or potentially for others who aren't just you if they're forced to endure a public ousting. You might fear or be averse to causing them pain. You might have sympathy for them, particularly if you think the sense in which they're a bad actor was in turn caused by something bad happening to them. You might fear that exposing their bad behavior will bring harm to others who are associated with them. For example, if they're part of some oppressed minority group and you fear that people will overgeneralize from their bad behavior to being mistrustful of or more prejudiced against others.

7Buck1y

I'd add that a common reason to choose not to act against someone is that many of those factors are combined. I think situations where it's (e.g.) purely "they have power to hurt you" or "you lack legible evidence" are much rarer than situations where it's an awkward combination of those with other things, and so it's hard to even know whether you should take on the project of acting against someone carefully and well.

Zach Stein-Perlman's Shortform

5

Zach Stein-Perlman's Shortform

5