[clavicat]

>Damore wasn't burned at the stake or shot in the head; he was fired from one especially cushy software job at a giant, publicly-traded company.

How do you think regimes normally deal with dissent? Extreme violence makes for vivid imagery but it’s not typical. Usually, it’s as simple as threatening to fire you from respectable employment and education. This is how the entire Eastern Bloc kept a lid on things.

[Lambent_Cactus]

The Eastern Bloc did ... kind of a lot of violent coercion? The penalty for jumping the Berlin Wall was not losing your job.

[clavicat]

Yes, but being shot was not the fate of a typical dissident under late socialism. Gentler states like that of Hungary also managed to suppress dissident and not with bullets. More typical is the following:

>Konrád lost his job by order of the political police in July 1973. For half a year he worked as a nurse's aide at the work-therapy-based mental institution at Doba.

[Lambent_Cactus]

Orders of the political police are backstopped by violence. I'm not sure what distinction you're drawing?

Either way, the head-shooting and the stake-burning are Scott Alexander's metaphors here, from the linked SSC post. As the severity, suddenness, and violence of the sanctions heretics actually face go down my intuitions about his Parable of Lightning start to change. Dial them all the way down to Damore's situation (private business terminating at-will employment, for repeated on-the-job behavior that creates HR problems, totally non-violent) and my intuitions flip entirely.

All the rhetorical work of the Parable is done by this false equivalence. That it falls apart when stated so plainly causes me at least to worry about the reliability of SSC's digressive style. What other unfounded assumptions slip through on mood affiliation when you're not disciplined enough to write straightforwardly?