Published on July 18, 2025 6:41 AM GMT
In 2015, Autistic Abby on Tumblr shared a viral piece of wisdom about subjective perceptions of "respect":
Sometimes people use "respect" to mean "treating someone like a person" and sometimes they use "respect" to mean "treating someone like an authority"
and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say "if you won't respect me I won't respect you" and they mean "if you won't treat me like an authority I won't treat you like a person"
and they think they're being fair but they aren't, and it's not okay.
There's the core of an important insight here, but I think it's being formulated too narrowly. Abby presents the problem as being about one person strategically conflating two different meanings of respect (if you don't respect me in the strong sense, I won't even respect you in the weak sense). That does happen sometimes, but I think relevantly similar conflicts can occur when two people have different standards of respect that they're both applying consistently.
What, specifically, is the bundle of privileges associated with being "respected"? Does it merely entail "address people in accordance with commonly accepted norms of speech in polite Society", or does it furthermore entail something like, "don't question people's competence or stated intentions; assume that people are basically honest and know what they're talking about"?
If someone who is used to being treated like an authority said, "If you dare question my competence or stated intentions, then I'll question your competence and stated intentions", then There would be no conflation, but there's still a problem, because competence and intentions are real things in the real physical universe, and literal questions about them should have literal answers. If any attempt to imply the literal question is construed as a mere attack to be met in turn with a counterattack, then the questions never get answered.
In 2019, Benjamin Hoffman commented on a private document about ways people can be hurt by speech:
What I see as under threat is the ability to say in a way that's actually heard, not only that opinion X is false, but that the process generating opinion X is untrustworthy, and perhaps actively optimizing in an objectionable direction. Frequently, attempts to say this are construed primarily as moves to attack some person or institution, pushing them into the outgroup. Frequently, people suggest to me an "equivalent" wording with a softer tone, which in fact omits important substantive criticisms I mean to make, while claiming to understand what's at issue.
In a culture where people respect each other in a strong "don't question people's competence or stated intentions" sense, it's possible to have a discussion that considers whether an interlocutor's belief in X is false. Everyone makes mistakes, after all. It's a lot harder to have a discussion that also considers whether the process that generated opinion X is false, because that would seem to imply questions about the competence or intentions of people who believe X—that it wasn't an "innocent" mistake.
Thus, to people enmeshed in such a culture of strong-sense "respect", any attempt to use language to express hypotheses about systematically flawed belief-generators will end up sounding "harsh" to some degree. It's not going to be easy to propose an equivalent wording, because the disrespect is implied by the hypothesis, not the mere choice of words.
The phrase "systematically flawed belief-generators" is kind of a mouthful. A shorter word that can be used to mean the same thing is bias. It's going to be hard to overcome bias on a website where it's hard to talk about biases.
In a discussion about how to moderate web forums, Wei Dai advanced a similar thesis: that since the nature of offense is about defending against threats to one's social status, there's no way to avoid giving offense while delivering serious criticism as long as it's the case that it's low-status for one's work to deserve serious criticism.
I think there is something to this, though I think you should not model status in this context as purely one dimensional.
Like a culture of mutual dignity where you maintain some basic level of mutual respect about whether other people deserve to live, or deserve to suffer, seems achievable and my guess is strongly correlated with more reasonable criticism being made.
And just, what? What? This is just such a wild thing to say in that context! "[D]eserve to live, or deserve to suffer"? People around here are, like, transhumanists, right? Everyone deserves to live! No one deserves to suffer! Who in particular was arguing that some people don't deserve to live or do deserve to suffer, such that this basic level of mutual respect is in danger of not being achieved?
What's going on in someone's head when they jump from "it's impossible to avoid giving offense when delivering serious criticism" to "but we can at least achieve some basic level of mutual respect about whether other people deserve to live"?
If I had to guess, it's an implied strong definition of respect that bundles not questioning people's competence or stated intentions with being "treated like a person" (worthy of life and the absence of suffering). I'm imagining the response to my incredulity would go something like: "Sure, no one explicitly argued that someone didn't deserve to live or did deserve to suffer, but people aren't dumb and can read subtext. Complying with commonly accepted norms of speech in polite Society just makes it passive-aggressive rather than overtly aggressive, which is worse."
But from the standpoint of the alleged aggressor who doesn't accept that notion of respect, we're not trying to say people should suffer and die. We just mean that opinion X is false, and that the process generating opinion X is untrustworthy, and perhaps actively optimizing in an objectionable direction.
The people who interpret that as treating someone like a non-person think they're being fair—and they are being fair with respect to a notion of fairness that's about mutually granting a bundle of privileges that includes both a right to life and the right to not have one's competence or stated intentions questioned. But that notion of fairness impairs our ability to construct shared maps that reflect the territory, and it's not okay.
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