X and Y are cooperating to contain people who object-level care about A and B, and recruit them into the dialectic drama. X is getting A wrong on purpose, and Y is getting B wrong on purpose, as a loyalty test. Trying to join the big visible org doing something about A leads to accepting escalating conditioning to develop the blind spot around B, and vice versa.

X and Y use the conflict as a pretext to expropriate resources from the relatively uncommitted. For instance, one way to interpret political polarization in the US is as a scam for the benefit of people who profit from campaign spending. War can be an excuse to subsidize armies. Etc.

I wrote about this here: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/discursive-warfare-and-faction-formation/

I can’t tell quite what you think you’re saying because “worse” and “morality” are such overloaded terms that the context doesn’t disambiguate well.

Seems to me like people calling it “evil” or “awful” are taking an adversarial frame where good vs evil is roughly orthogonal to strong vs weak, and classifying the crime as an impressive evil-aligned act that increases the prestige of evil, while people calling it disgusting are taking a mental-health frame where the crime is disordered behavior that doesn’t help the criminal. Which one is a more helpful or true perspective depends on what the crime is! I expect people who are disgusted to be less tempted to cooperate with the criminal or scapegoat a rando than people who are awed.

Possessing a home also imposes costs on everyone else - it costs scarce materials and labor to build, equip, and electrify/warm/cool/water a home, and it uses up scarce space in a way that excludes others. It’s not obvious that a homeless person who works & is taxed, and is thus contributing to collective capacity to build and maintain the amenities they take advantage of, is a free rider; you’d need to actually do the math to demonstrate that.

Reality is sufficiently high-dimensional and heterogeneous that if it doesn’t seem like there’s a meaningful “explore/investigate” option with unbounded potential upside, you’re applying a VERY lossy dimensional reduction to your perception.

There’s a common fear response, as though disapproval = death or exile, not a mild diminution in opportunities for advancement. Fear is the body’s stereotyped configuration optimized to prevent or mitigate imminent bodily damage. Most such social threats do not correspond to a danger that is either imminent or severe, but are instead more like moves in a dance that trigger the same interpretive response.

It's true that people who ask for "collaborative truth-seeking" are lying, but false that no one does it. Some things someone might do to try to collaborate on seeking the truth instead of pushing a thesis are:

• Active listening (e.g. trying to restate someone's claims and arguments in one's own words, especially where they seem most unclear or surprising.)
• Extending interpretive labor to try to infer the cause of a disagreement.
• Offering various considerations for how to think about a question instead of pushing a party line - and clarifying the underlying model in general terms even when one does have a clear thesis.

IME people are perfectly able to distinguish this from less collaborative behavior, though some are more likely to respond strongly positively, and others are more likely to complain that the first two are "judgmental," "accusatory," or "mind-reading," and that the third is "unclear" because it doesn't include a command to endorse some particular conclusion. The second group seems like it overlaps a lot with the sorts of people who ask for the sort of "epistemic charity" you're complaining about.

People who are engaged in collaborative truth-seeking are more likely to talk about or simply demonstrate specific ways to accomplish particular component truth-seeking tasks better together, which is collaborative, and less likely to complain vaguely about how you should be more "collaborative," which is not.

Wouldn’t that imply more upside than downside in staying over?

Huh, I notice I casually used male pronouns here when I previously wasn’t especially inclined to. I guess this happened because I dropped politeness constraints to free up working memory for modeling the causal structure of the problem.

If this had been a lower-latency conversation with the implied greater capacity to make it awkward to ignore a legitimate question, my first reply would have been something like, “well, did you actually assault them? Seems like an important bit of information when assessing whether they made a mistake.” And instead of the most recent comment I’d have asked, “You identify as a woman. Do you think you are being naïve, or devaluing your sexualness or cleverness or agency? If so, why? If not, why?”