Explanation is not a justification:

The fact that there exists an explanation of an action or decision does not automatically mean that the action or decision was justified. Explanation is only about being able to understand why somebody did something. Justification is about the moral judgment over that person and what they did.

Hanlon's razor:

We humans are great at ascribing agency and intentionality where there is none. We love to make things about ourselves. We see faces in the clouds, deity’s wrath in volcanic eruptions, and targeted, premeditated malice in somebody else’s decisions or actions — especially ones that affect us in a bad way.

Hanlon’s razor states:

> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

A system’s purpose is what it does:

Let’s say we have a complex system — technical, political, social, whatever the kind. And let’s say that it keeps having certain bad outcomes. Everyone involved in creating and maintaining it keeps insisting that these bad outcomes are accidental, and keep promising this can be fixed, but somehow it never is.

At some point it just makes sense to treat these bad outcomes as the actual purpose of the system.

Life is not a zero-sum game:

There are situations which are a zero-sum game. Trying to get tickets to a popular concert is an example: if you get your tickets, I might not get mine. The resource is strictly limited and we are competing for it. Your win is my loss.

But a lot of thorny political and social issues that are portrayed publicly or talked about as if they were a zero-sum game — aren't one.

Two things can be true at the same time:

In a way, truth is also often not a zero-sum game.

It is true that Titanic’s captain’s actions can be considered reckless by today’s standards, and had contributed to the catastrophe, but it is also true they probably did not appear reckless to him or his peers at the time.

This is a form of a false dichotomy, making it seem as if we have to “choose a side” out of a limited set of options. But the world is more complex than that.

@rysiek

Hm~ I've observed enough cases of people not caring that two (or more) statements they profess are literally contradictory that I tend to emphasize the nearly opposite statement: if two things are actually contradictory (which they often aren't even if at first glance they appear to be) then they can't be both true. I think that emphasizing that is actually productive, because it (at least sometimes) focuses the discussion on figuring out what are the conditions under which both can be true.

(That said, the discussions I've been in the vicinity of over the past ~2years have gotten worse over time, so I might be acquiring bad calibrations about what works. But again, I've had this approach for way longer than 2y.)