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David_Gerard comments on Open Thread, January 16-31, 2013 - Less Wrong
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Comments (221)
Dear MIRI:
This is ludicrous behaviour.
What the fuck are you thinking? I mean, really. What the fuck?
I'm not MIRI affiliated, and not saying this to proudly display my banners. But when an account is labelled as destructive/trollish and it is explicitly stated that his/her comments are subject to be removed whenever encountered, then such deletions should come as no surprise.
Consider you labelled someone as a troll and wanted to dissuade him/her from having a presence at your forum. Would you need to sift through every comment of his/her checking whether it has some merit or not? That's asking for a lot and may be counter productive, allowing that person to build credibility which can then be used to have a more attentive audience when presenting the content that's considered trollish/destructive.
You're using the passive voice a lot there ... who decided these things?
David - you're a strong critic of lots of stuff about CFAR, MIRI, Less Wrong. Have any of your comments ever been deleted?
I recall that I'm in quite a few of the vast fields of comment deleted, though I don't have a string to show you to hand (my comment history is long and annoying to dredge through a page at a time), so I offer only my admittedly fallible memory. I haven't noticed individual targeted zappings of any. I suspect I've had less deletions than Dmytry because I like LW really, I just find its all-too-human stupidities as annoying as any and have an unfortunately defective tact filter.
No, you've "had less deletions" because you're often mistaken, but you're not a fucking troll and there's an obvious fucking difference. I don't think you've ever run afoul of the deletion policy unless you were in a general thread that was getting stomped.
It seems to me that the claim that criticism is being targeted for deletion is obviously false, and I remark that it is amazing what people will talk themselves into when they find it politically convenient to believe. But I'm not deleting your comments claiming so, because that's got nothing to do with the stated and practiced moderation policies.
Obviously, trolls will post "critical" comments to provoke reactions and so that they can scream censorship afterward (concern trolling) but there's lots, and lots, and LOTS of non-troll criticism on LW which doesn't get deleted. Like, you know, the meta stuff in this open thread. It brought the trolls out to play and the trolls got deleted - and what's left is more than 50% critical, which is a normal day on LW.
I hope that clears things up.
From my limited experience running and helping to run channels and forums, life is easier when you have clearly defined ground rules, and any deletion is stamped with something like "violation 3.1 (a)", the way it is on traffic tickets.
Additionally, a simple and clear appeal process goes a long way toward reducing temper flare-ups. Some of the meta rules tend to be
appeal request can only be made by the original post/comment author in PM. Appeal decisions are final.
appeal notice and appeal outcome is posted in the thread, which is locked for the duration of the appeal and permanently if the decision stands, with all downstream comments deleted at the discretion of the moderator.
all discussion of forum rules and moderation decisions must happen in a single thread "forum rules".
no public discussion allowed of a particular moderation decision in the moderated thread itself or any thread other than the "forum rules" thread (redundant, but usually necessary).
The main goal is, of course, shifting the discussion from the cries of "censorship!" over a particular moderation decision to that of forum rules.
Some of what people call "trolling" (on the net in general, not LW specifically) amounts to asymmetrical resource starvation attacks against humans. This sort of troll can be modeled as thinking, "What's the least work I can do, that will elicit the costliest response from the mods / regulars / other suckers?"
If the process for dealing with alleged trolls is itself costly for mods or regulars, then it becomes a vulnerability.
Or, for example, the most-upvoted post in LW's history.
It's been deleted now AFAIK, but this post was dismissed as an outlier due to Karnofsky's relative celebrity. Establishing an historical trend (which does exist, as far as I recall) would be more useful evidence.
E.g. check out the anonymous multifoliaterose's numerous positive balance SI and specifically EY-critical posts, some of them rather harsh indeed in content, although mostly following usual conversational and politeness norms (with some striking exceptions):
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2l8/existential_risk_and_public_relations/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/2lh/other_existential_risks/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/2lr/the_importance_of_selfdoubt/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/2m5/transparency_and_accountability/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/3aa/friendly_ai_research_and_taskification/
No, not deleted. You can find it easily by visiting the top posts page.
More recent examples include this and this.
I meant that the comment expressing the sentiment that Karnofsky is an outlier has been deleted, AFAIK. Of course the actual post hasn't been deleted, or else it couldn't be used an example at all.
I did.
Well, fair enough. It still strikes me as problematic, potentially quite severely so, but it is in fact yours to keep all the pieces of.
Why was this downvoted? It's a reasonable question with a real answer.
What had the comment been saying before deletion?
User is welcome to post in the page referenced here:
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/gkv/official_lw_uncensored_thread_on_reddit/