(This is a linkpost for Duncan Sabien's article "Thresholding" which was published July 6th, 2024. I (Screwtape) am crossposting a linkpost version because I want to nominate it for the Best of LW 2024 review - I'm not the original author.)

If I were in some group or subculture and I wanted to do as much damage as possible, I wouldn’t create some singular, massive disaster.

Instead, I would launch a threshold attack.

I would do something objectionable, but technically defensible, such that I wouldn’t be called out for it (and would win or be exonerated if I were called out for it). Then, after the hubbub had died down, I would do it again. Then maybe I would try something that’s straightforwardly shitty, but in a low-grade, not-worth-the-effort-it-would-take-to-complain-about-it sort of way. Then I’d give it a couple of weeks to let the memory fade, and come back with something that is across the line, but where I could convincingly argue ignorance, or that I had been provoked, or that I honestly thought it was fine because look, that person did the exact same thing and no one objected to them, what gives?

Maybe there’d be a time where I did something that was clearly objectionable, but pretty small, actually—the sort of thing that would be the equivalent of a five-minute time-out, if it happened in kindergarten—and then I would fight tooth-and-nail for weeks, exhausting every avenue of appeal, dragging every single person around me into the debate, forcing people to pick sides, forcing people to explain and clarify and specify every aspect of their position down to the tiniest detail, inflating the cost of enforcement beyond all reason.

Then I’d behave for a while, and only after things had been smooth for months would I make some other minor dick move, and when someone else snapped and said “all right, that’s it, that’s the last straw—let’s get rid of this guy,” I’d object that hey, what the fuck, you guys keep trying to blame me for all sorts of shit and I’ve been exonerated basically every time, sure there was that one time where it really was my fault but I apologized for that one, are you really going to try to play like I am some constant troublemaker just because I slipped up once?

And if I won that fight, then the next time I was going to push it, maybe I’d start out by being like “btw don’t forget, some of the shittier people around here try to scapegoat me; don’t be surprised if they start getting super unreasonable because of what I’m about to say/do.”

And each time, I’d be sure to target different people, and some people I would never target at all, so that there would be maximum confusion between different people’s very different experiences of me, and it would be maximally difficult to form clear common knowledge of what was going on. And the end result would be a string of low-grade erosive acts that, in the aggregate, are far, far, far more damaging than if I’d caused one single terrible incident.

This is thresholding, and it’s a class of behavior that most rule systems (both formal and informal) are really ill-equipped to handle. I’d like for this essay to help you better recognize thresholding when it’s happening, and give you the tools to communicate what you’re seeing to others, such that you can actually succeed at coordinating against it.

I.

There are at least three major kinds of damage done by this sort of pattern. . .

(crossposter note: the rest is at https://homosabiens.substack.com/p/thresholding.)