If there's no substance to their objections beyond "I am offended at this general pattern of behavior", then it sounds like they are in the wrong, no? When a commoner crosses a noble's path without proper kowtowing, the noble may feel very offended indeed, and even have the commoner whipped; but in our enlightened times we know better than to agree with the noble, because the commoner hasn't hurt the noble in any way. That's the moral standard I'm applying here.
Also consider the analogy with gays. What is it that tells you people shouldn't get offended by others' homosexuality? Would you be sympathetic to someone claiming gays should change their behavior in public because he's genuinely hurt by it, or would you consider that person "axiomatically in the wrong"? If the latter, didn't you just apply an instance of the general standard that actually non-hurtful behavior is okay even though some people may complain - and even be sincere in their complaints?
During discussion in my previous post, when we touched the subject of human statistical majorities, I had a side-thought. If taking the Less Wrong audience as an example, the statistics say that any given participant is strongly likely to be white, male, atheist, and well, just going by general human statistics, probably heterosexual.
But in my actual interaction, I've taken as a rule not to make any assumptions about the other person. Does it mean, I thought, that I reset my prior probabilities, and consciously choose to discard information? Not relying on implicit assumptions seems the socially right thing to do, I thought; but is it rational?
When I discussed it on IRC, this quote by sh struck me as insightful:
I came up with the following payoff matrix:
In this case, the second option is strictly preferable. In other words, I don't discard the information, but the repercussions to our social interaction in case of an incorrect guess outweigh the benefit from guessing correctly. And it also matters whether either Alice or Bob is an Asker or a Guesser.
One consequence I can think of is that with a sufficiently low p, or if Bob wouldn't be particularly offended by Alice's incorrect guess, taking the guess would be preferable. Now I wonder if we do that a lot in daily life with issues we don't consider controversial ("hmm, are you from my country/state too?"), and if all the "you're overreacting/too sensitive" complaints come from Alice incorrectly assessing a too low-by-absolute-value negative payoff in (0, 1).