I am writing these words on a flight back from Minnesota. In 2018, a Chinese female student at the University of Minnesota was sexually assaulted by one of the richest men in China. I had been following this case on and off, along with a dozen other sexual assault cases that were tied to college campuses. In December of 2018, the state of Minnesota decided to not press criminal charges against the assaulter due to insufficient evidence, which is quite common in sexual assault cases. The survivor, Jingyao Liu, decided to file a civil case against him. The procedural hearing, occurred in September of 2019. Four Chinese women went to the hearing as audience members to show support. They later explained to the internet that the company (JD) owned by the defendant (Qiangdong Liu) claimed that the defendant was not properly served of legal documents and requested an extremely convoluted form of service. This is a common stalling tactic both in sexual assault cases and in cross-national cases. The judge ruled that Jingyao would “try her best” to serve the documents for three months and the court would reconvene to decide if that was enough. The second hearing was scheduled for January 7th of 2020.
A post was circulated on Social Media calling for another court support effort. I decided to join. The hearing was later rescheduled to January 28th, but most volunteers bought non-refundable tickets, so we decided to fly in anyway. As one of 25 volunteers, my presence there was certain not in any way unique. Nevertheless, it did take me quite some time to decide to go, and I did feel courageous when I booked my tickets.
I have been thinking about the question of courage for quite some time. I am not an especially courageous person. Like many people, my best rebuttal comes to me in the shower the day after the incident. I have seen my fair share of troubles, of course, and I often try to make sense of these things through narratives I’ve read in books and seen in movies. It doesn’t really work. I don’t usually feel the epiphany that is supposed to be there at certain points and my worries are not usually addressed as common concerns. I often feel that I’m “doing it wrong”.
Regardless, I decided to make myself more courageous. If I can learn to be an analytic philosopher, surely I’m capable of learning to be more courageous. If I’m indeed doing it wrong, maybe I can learn to do it righter.
A major obstacle for me is not knowing what to expect before I fully commit. I have a limited amount of courage and I don’t want to put myself in a situation where I would need way more courage than I actually have. For this reason, I tend to look at the initial stages of involvement with extreme suspicion. When it is unclear what being involved entails, I yield on the side of under-commitment. I have met people who are less risk averse than I am but they sometimes would commit to something they can’t actually handle and that can be bad too. So I figured I’d write about some of the obstacles one might encounter when trying to do something that needs courage (however little), so people can ration their courage better. There are probably a lot of nudge theories on similar themes from the perspective of recruiters (e.g., charities or NGOs). But my perspective is from the recruited. I also offer far fewer answers.
Facing your powerlessness
Most of us are pretty powerless most of the time. Very few things make or break because of something we do as individuals. Nevertheless, it’s usually fairly easy to cope with this fact in everyday life because most of us aren’t trying to do a lot of things in everyday life. Moreover, we are often incentivized in some shape or form for the process (e.g., enjoying a hobby or getting paid on a time-based schedule) and so we are not that attached to the result.
In the context of social engagement, however, the result is all there is. I don’t especially enjoy the process of donation and I certainly didn’t enjoy my 7 hours of total flight time in the past three days. I do these things because I want to make some sort of change. In this context, all my attention is focused on the power my actions may or may not have in bringing about change.
If I’m realistic, I know that most of my actions probably don’t have any power to make any change at all, and even if they do, the results will only be slightly better than they would otherwise but still pretty bad overall. That’s a pretty crappy feeling. Crappy enough to make me want to just forget about the whole discourse.
Donation-based charities and NGOs often dedicate a substantive trunk of their websites on “impact” or “results”, featuring photos of those who have been helped along with stories or quotes. Many break down the impact of effort into concrete pieces, such as “$20 can secure fresh water for one child”. They serve as ways to empower potential donors.
As a general rule, I don’t trust these narratives. I don’t think they paint an accurate picture of how social organizations work, but I understand that they are probably developed out of nudge theory and probably make quantifiable differences in the amount of donations they receive, so I don’t count it against an organization.
Non-donation-based activisms also employ strategies to shift attention away from the big goal that usually appears as infeasible. Small victories are celebrated frequently and enthusiastically. Rallies and social gatherings are often important aspects of the activism process where participants are encouraged to share their emotional journeys and celebrate each other. This sense of community, as well as the moral capital that comes with it, incentivizes the process of engagement so that not all eggs are in the basket that is the result.
I’m quite suspicious of moral capital. While I think it’s great for people to be proud of themselves for acting kindly and to praise each other for doing similar, I’m often unsettled by the sense of entitlement that sometimes comes with too much moral pride. “I have volunteered at a resource-poor school quite a few times so let me tell you about poverty” and such. It is especially risky when moral capital can be quickly and disproportionally gathered through social media.
For this reason, I often feel a little guilty when I share my social engagements, like I’m doing it for the brag. But, of course, if I don’t share at all, I’m taking all the incentives out of the process and putting it in the result, and my powerlessness becomes that much more salient. As someone with a more external locus of control, I deal with powerlessness better than many others I know. But still. I don’t deal with it very well.
What I’ve currently settled on is “controlled bragging”. I brag in such a way that I can control how much praise I get (e.g., I direct message friends individually for this so I can stop when I feel like I’ve had enough). This way I can make sure I don’t get an amount of praise that’s too out of proportion with what I’ve done (according to my own judgments, of course), and so I don’t feel as guilty. I’ve also become increasingly consequentialist. As long as my actions are net positive in results, I’ve decided to not police my intentions so closely. The same applies to other people as well – I’ve become a lot more tolerant of virtue signaling on the internet than I used to be, as long as it doesn’t come with misrepresentations of the vulnerable.
Making mistakes
If you don’t say anything, you won’t say anything wrong.
The thought of doing something wrong is immensely powerful. It is extremely anxiety inducing, and yet many people often don’t recognize its nature and so don’t understand why they are so scared for no apparent reason.
I saw a tweet the other day where a woman makes fun of a man who complains that actresses in a Disney film aren’t sexy enough. It was one of those “blown-up” tweets, with thousands of retweets and hearts. The tweet was something along the lines of: imagine watching a Disney superhero movie for kids and complaining that the heroin isn’t sexy enough to cure your erectile dysfunction. I thought it was pretty witty, especially considering it was probably written with rage. I clicked open the thread (a bad habit, I know) and the author has apologized and explained that she didn’t mean to make fun of people with erectile dysfunction or other forms of disability.
I’m not trying to say that she shouldn’t have apologized or people are being too serious, since microaggressions do often appear in the form of thoughtless joking asides. Whether or not you think her critics are being reasonable, it is safe to say that she would rather avoid this situation if she had thought of it at the time of tweeting.
I understand mistakes of this kind to fall on a scale. On the one end, there is the serious screw-up where ignorance or oversight has really undermined your entire project. On the other end, anything that has received any attention at all will attract haters who think you are the most disgraceful human in existence. Many mistakes fall in between the two extremes, of course, but it’s often really difficult to tell which end they are closer to. We’ve all see the person who embarrasses themselves by saying something glaringly wrong and then deciding to stick to it because y’all are just hatin’. We’ve also seen people who retract something reasonable they’ve said or retreat from online presence because they took too hard of a hit from unjust criticisms.
The best way to not make mistakes is to not act. Even if a mistake is genuine and no one else could’ve done better than you did, it can still feel worse than if you have done nothing.
There is a phenomenon in management called narrow framing: a company has a number of investment opportunities. All of them are risky, of course, but the expected utility is pretty good, so the company is best served to invest in all of them. However, each investment manager employed by the company is only in charge of a few of these opportunities and, if these ones don’t work out, the manager is fired; whereas if they do work out, the benefits for the manager are comparatively small. Consequently, investment managers are incentivized to be hyper-risk averse, hurting the company’s overall profit.
I like to think of social activism in the same way. The more stuff you do, the more likely you’ll make mistakes, and the punishment for making mistakes tends to far outstrip the rewards of not making mistakes (because we are all powerless, remember?).
Having thought through that, the problem becomes emotion management in light of mistakes. Obviously, if the mistake is genuine, one should always apologize. But in the age of social media, the spread of apologies doesn’t always track the spread of the original mistake. I’ve seen many tweets where someone who has make a mistake writes something like “I acknowledge and apologize for this mistake, so please stop PMing me about it. I’ve gotten 300 PMs so far.”
On the one hand, it makes sense for people who hadn’t seen the apology to continue to point out the mistake; on the other hand, it certainly feels like one is being punished disproportionally. What I have tried to do is to limit access to myself. I have a group of trusted friends to serve as my moral compass and I try to restrict contact between myself and outside feedback. If I have made a genuine mistake worth apologizing for, I trust that my friends will tell me. If random people just like to tell me how inadequate I am, I’d rather not see it at all.
I usually like to have three sections, but this post is getting too long, so I’m ending here. More tips always welcome.
- It might happen after all - May 14, 2023
- Another job market data point - December 17, 2022
- Our place in the fediverse - November 30, 2022