> I hear “but you fought back wrong” while no one was there to help when I begged for weeks for help fighting back “right”. No one can seem to say in my shoes what would have been “right” is other than lie down and let them do what they want. I am no one’s victim.

I've been thinking a lot about this point lately. This argument and its variations are ones I've heard a lot from activists and other Angry Internet People, but it's taken a long time to really understand where they're coming from. Actually, the main help was a Slate Star Codex article called Conflict vs Mistake[0].

In that article, Scott Alexander argues for two modes of thinking about disagreement: mistake theory says that people disagree because they misunderstand, and conflict theory says that people disagree because they want to win. Mistake theorists, such as Scott, myself, and most people who consider themselves rationalists, occasionally find themselves in totally baffling conversations with marxists, social justice diablo_class_name_here, and other genres of conflict theorist. Not feigned-ignorant "please explain your curious argument" baffling, but genuine I-feel-like-one-of-us-is-speaking-Norse all-consuming confusion.

An example that is so hot right now: content providers censoring bad speech on their platforms. Cloudflare terminated the account of the Daily Stormer[1], a toxic white nationalist forum; Reddit continues to host /r/The_Donald, a toxic white nationalist subreddit[2][3]. In both cases, the argument for mistake theorists comes down to this: the problem with white nationalists is that they're wrong. If the positions were reversed, and I was wrong about something, the right approach wouldn't be to censor or punish me, but to educate me.

The conflict-theorist counterargument is simple: the positions wouldn't be reversed, and that symmetry is a disingenuous illusion. These people are not suffering from a lack of knowledge, but engaging in a deliberate and malicious course of action that your both-sides symmetrical systematising does nothing to prevent. They want to win and they want you to lose, don't you get it? Are you trying to lose?

Consider this (admittedly cheap, but I'm going for pathos here) analogy: in World War 2, our ancestors killed Nazis by the (literal) millions. How could they do this, when killing people is bad - or, worse, rude? Haven't they heard of Rawls' veil of ignorance? If you had to decide whether killing Nazis is okay before you get to find out whether you're a Nazi, surely you would suggest a more moderate response. This is what a mistake theorist sounds like to a conflict theorist.

If someone wants to win, systematic rulemaking will not help. If you say white supremacy is banned, they will become white nationalists. If you say white nationalism is banned, they will become independent researchers of human biodiversity. No complex formal system, however sophisticated, can fully define statements about itself[4]. You cannot build a system that determines when people are using the system in bad faith.

And so this, finally, is the reason for the epistemic gulf between conflict and mistake theorists: one saying "your individual behaviour is wrong because it does not generalise into a coherent universal system of behaviour", and the other saying "your universal system of behaviour is wrong because it does not recognise the wrongness in this individual situation".

Mistake theorists on conflict theorists: "No bad tactics, only bad targets"

Conflict theorists on mistake theorists: "Would you mind showing me evidence of any negative thing any sea lion has ever done to you?"[5]

The issue with mistake vs conflict theory is that it is a prisoner's dilemma. If everyone acts in good faith, everyone comes away more enlightened and understanding. If one party is acting in bad faith, you better hope it's you. This is why conflict theorists are so baffled that mistake theorists keep offering new sets of good-faith rules to people who have no intention of playing by them[6]. Don't worry, Charlie Brown, I'm sure she'll let you kick the football this time.

Lest this comes off as a diatribe against mistake theorists, I should clarify that, being one, I have absolutely no idea how else you can build a stable society, and I stopped following Naomi Wu after she posted Jason Koebler's address on the internet. That's doxxing, and doxxing is wrong.

But there is this slow, creeping dissonance I have begun to feel. Is justice the guiding light of objective morality shining down from the platonic realm of universal rationality? Or is it the olive branch we extend to the Martin Luther Kings of this world so they can hold back the Malcom X right behind them[7], and to the Naomi Wus so they don't dox us? No justice, no peace, as they say.

Returning to the quote from the article, you at least have to observe that she has a solid strategic argument. Within her situation, with her resources, what recourse did she have for her grievances? If the best advice you have is "you lost and you have no power in this situation, so lose quietly and be a good sport about it", it's no surprise she didn't listen. Would you, if you genuinely believed you were wronged?

So she broke the rules, did wrong, and now pays the price. But she also threw an elbow, and the elbow caught some attention, without which her fight with Vice would be over. My inner mistake theorist asks: what kind of world do we have if everyone starts throwing elbows? My inner conflict theorist asks: who should win here? Are they?

Deep down, I really just wish all the conflict theorists would go jump in a lake so we could get back to building our positive-sum utopia. But life's not that easy. I bet they wish we'd all jump in a lake so they could just win without all this concern over whether they're winning the right way.

[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

[2] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dissecting-trumps-most-...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/stopadvertising/comments/851018/fif...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarski%27s_undefinability_theo...

[5] http://wondermark.com/1k62/

[6] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Sartre#Anti-Semite_a...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ballot_or_the_Bullet