blame is a confusion
- What is Blame? It's a confusion.
- It's literally a con-fusion of things that need to be de-fused in order to see clearly.
- This comment articulates potently that attempting to model things in terms of blame confuses your actual causal models
- ... and this where I want to say NO. My instinct says DO NOT EVER ASK THAT QUESTION, it is a WRONG QUESTION, you will be instantly mindkilled every time you ask "who should be blamed for X?".
- ... on reflection, I do not want to endorse this as an all-the-time heuristic, but I do want to endorse it whenever good epistemic discussion is an objective. Asking "who should we blame?" is always engaging in a status fight. Status fights are generally mindkillers, and should be kept strictly separate from modelling and epistemics.
- Now, this does not mean that we shouldn't model status fights. Rather, it means that we should strive to avoid engaging in status fights when modelling them. Concretely: rather than ask "who should we blame?", ask "what incentives do we create by blaming <actor>?". This puts the question in an analytical frame, rather than a "we're having a status fight right now" frame.
3 linked references
March 4th, 2025
- some new articulations of this
- notably, the "I can't just convey this simple thing because this person keeps taking it personally and making it infinitely big or infinitely small" thing turns out to approximately have "blame" as its cause
- and then you can also use the classic we-fi example as a case study of a situation where people are pretty good at sorting out the connection issues without blame, but out can sort of demo where blame would make them stupider
- then there was a new example of a couple fighting, and mutually triggering each other, and getting into the complex dance of "well we wouldn't have this disconnection if you didn't do X" "well I wouldn't need to do X if you didn't Y" and my interlocutor tonight was like "well someone has to choose to do something different"
- in some ways this becomes a different topic there, but in other ways it's the same, because there's a core question of: does your view include the idea that everything that everybody's doing made sense at the time / in context everyone is always doing whatever makes the most sense to them
post-blame apology
- This has a powerful and problematic effect. Since an apology says "you were wronged", if there's no space for different frames, that directly implies that I did something wrong! Which is blame, and blame is a confusion.
- Accepting blame can be a dangerous thing to do, particularly when people are looking for someone to punish: Relatedly: don't apologize to angry mobs making demands, because then they'll conclude that since you admitted you were wrong, they must be right, and they'll try to enact ever more from you.
- Warning: this is an advanced technique, to be practiced in contexts that already have some amount of shared frame on why you might want to do away with apology altogether, and why nobody is to blame / blame is a confusion.
- (edit much later: eh I think it's potentially fine for anyone to use it. not that there aren't downsides but this isn't the central one)
- You might get some mileage out if it in other contexts, but I make no guarantees about those contexts. I mean, I can't make guarantees in any case, since there's no way to communicate correctly or incorrectly - there's just what works in context and what doesn't work, so if you try this and it doesn't work for someone, it doesn't work for them.
- Relatedly: don't apologize to angry mobs making demands, because then they'll conclude that since you admitted you were wrong, they must be right, and they'll try to enact ever more from you.