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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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In my experience how someone behaves in low-stakes scenarios is more illustrative of character than high-stakes

The extreme end of this line of thinking is that anyone who commits small infractions like driving 1mph over the speed limit is giving a clear indication that they're willing to commit the most serious crimes, like murder. Obviously this isn't true. The distance between previous crimes and the current allegations matter, e.g. if a person has a long history of violently attacking people to within an inch of their life, that would be clearly indicative that they're more likely to commit murder.

I'm not intimately familiar with the chess scene, Chess.com, or the current allegations, but from the brief stuff I've read it seems like cheating on Chess.com is fairly low-stakes. Perhaps it should raise peoples' priors on the likelihood of cheating in real tournaments slightly, but not much beyond that, and he certainly shouldn't "lose the benefit of the doubt" which is just a euphemism for "guilty until proven innocent".

For a non-chess example, remember that time Pewdiepie said the N word during a moment of clear frustration? Wokists and their allies in the media descended on him insinuating that anyone who would say it on stream like that was clearly a raging Neo Nazi in their private life, and such a person deserved to be cancelled. They didn't succeed, thankfully, but their actions should serve as a clear lesson to beware the slippery slope of deducing a person's entire moral compass from a few minor infractions.