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Mark_Friedenbach comments on Self-serving meta: Whoever keeps block-downvoting me, is there some way to negotiate peace? - Less Wrong
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No, this behavior devalues the community as a whole. Karma works as a democratic filter, and abuse of karma allows control over the community which is out of line of stated objectives. These are crimes against everyone who is participating in good faith, not just you.
You're only moral obligation is to be as certain as you can be of the guilt of the accused.
If the LW community cares about this issue, then they should just petition an admin to check who is doing the downvoting. There is a log of "liked" and "disliked" which is available. They could even set "dislikes" to public. Even in the event that the retributive downvoter uses a puppet account to downvote, we can still automatically prevent accounts from selectively downvoting all a users posts.
There's absolutely no reason to guess at naming specific people and starting a witch hunt. Since the person didn't necessarily use a sockpuppet, there may is an easy way to know for sure who is doing this if we are willing to do just a little extra waiting and petitioning the mods.
I say this as one of the people who has been block downvoted. Even discounting the chance of ialdabaoth naming the wrong name, I doubt that the act of naming someone has a better expected outcome than the act of not naming someone. It sets a bad precedent and makes the community vulnerable to all sorts of social exploits in the future. In particular, since downvote sources are hidden, framing is completely trivial to do.
(I realize the admins haven't done anything about the issue in the past, but despite that this is still the course of action I would advocate.)
Anyway, it's too late for ialdabaoth to not name his/her suspicions. As we have already seen, it has had an adverse outcome regardless of whether his/her guess (which even s/he put at only p>.75) was correct and has led to more abuse of the voting system. Downvoting as retribution against retributive down-voting is dumb because retributive downvoters can simply take alt. accounts and continue what they were doing.
However, we can still petition the admins to check the records / make downvoting public / put in automated measures / etc.. We can still not do this "guessing" thing next time. We can still create a informal rule against calling people out for things despite low certainty.
In that case, I need to be clear about probabilities.
I am pretty certain (p > ~0.97) that someone is doing this.
I have very strong suspicions (p > 0.75) that it's Eugine Nier, based on two reasonably strong facts:
The first instance of suspicious block downvoting happened within a few minutes after this spat - in which, I freely admit, I do NOT come out smelling like a rose. After that argument, I began noticing that EVERYTHING I posted was downvoted - and it has not stopped since.
about 80% of the block downvotes happen within a few minutes of him showing up in the 'recent posts' sideboard after his not having posted for a few days.
I can conceive of several alternate hypotheses, but none of them are particularly convincing in light of that pattern.
Some other people who have been complaining about block downvoting are daenerys, NancyLebovitz and shminux.
I notice that one thing all of these people (including you) have in common is that you have all said progressive things about gender, whereas Eugine Nier says reactionary things regarding gender.
It's probably worth talking to these people and seeing if the timing works out the same, but it does seem likely that the downvoting is all caused by the same person, and thus would have similar motives and MO with the downvoting.
You can count me as another member who has both been block downvoted, and suspects Eugine Nier as the most likely candidate based on my patterns of downvotes received when I participate in conversations or debates with him.
Looking at his comment history, it seems he focuses on US politics and gender issues a disproportionate amount. Politics is the mindkiller?
I saw what looked like a small-scale block-downvote, and I'm mostly quite reactionary on gender (and my most recent likely-controversial statements have been a very reactionary view on polyamory).
Personally, I am pretty certain that is gender issues that cause my karma stalking. It's the only topic I write on that gets any significant number of downvotes. Also, due to timing, my best guess (though I'm not highly confident) is that the triggering event was my post in the mistakes thread admitting to staying married longer than I should have due to not being confident in my independence. I knew when writing it that some of the MRA assholes on here would take offense at it.
Also, whoever is doing it has pretty effectively made me unlikely to post a lot on here. (I still occassionally browse, and obviously I'm writing this, so it's not like I've completely quit or anything.) It's annoying to deal with (and saying "you should just stop caring" is about as effective of advice as telling people to "be more confident"). Considering that half my facebook feed is rationalist/LWers anyways, it's higher reward to just post my thoughts there and not have to deal with the LW baggage, but still get the interesting conversation with the people I want to talk with anyways.
Just figured I should say something because if evaporative cooling is happening in general (and it isn't just me), it could be hidden because the people who leave aren't saying anything.
(ETA: I actually have not lost a LOT of karma from this, so it's not the amount/number. It's just the fact that it's consistent, and it's everything I post)
That's actually pretty frightening, since that indicates that this sort of thing has a real impact on the tenor and participation in the community. This strongly makes me update to thinking that we should have admins actually look at logs for this sort of thing.
Data Point (of questionable value):
I post here must less often that I used to. Reasons:
1) Not good use of my time
2) This site reinforces modes of thought that are not useful for me - I love philosophy, especially moral philosophy, but that's not what I do for a living and I shouldn't allow my mental attention to be diverted.
3) Highly predictable downvotes on the topics I want to discuss - with a perception that one side gets more downvotes than the other for the purpose of evaporative cooling away of the one side. Of course, I think my side gets the short end of that stick (and I would, because politics and personal identity are the mind-killer).
Objectively, 1 & 2 are more important reasons, but subjectively, 3 feels more causally relevant to my withdrawal.
It seems conceptually easy to create a script to return sets of votes that satisfy the following conditions:
1) Occur fairly close together, time-wise 2) Are made by the same user 3) Are down-votes 4) Decrease the post's score by => a fraction
This would likely make it easier for mods to review things like this. Unfortunately, I don't have the time+skills to do this.
I have what seems to me like quite good evidence that there is at least one LW user who engages in what one might call intimidatory downvoting of users who express "progressive" views on gender.
I consider this a very, very bad thing for LW.
I am not aware of any reason to think that there is intimidatory downvoting based on any other issue. (Of course there might be some that I haven't noticed.)
Do you mean by "intimidatory downvoting" something substantively different from the thing (or things) others have referred to as "retributative downvoting", "block-downvoting", "karmassassination", etc., in this and related threads? If so, can you clarify what you mean?
I'll explain how I use all those terms.
Intimidatory downvoting: Downvoting whose purpose is to discourage people from expressing certain kinds of views on LW by the threat of massive karma loss. (In particular, the threat of much more than they would lose just from having their comments expressing those views downvoted.)
Retributive downvoting: Downvoting whose purpose is to get back at someone who has annoyed or upset you, or whom you don't like for some other reason.
Block-downvoting: Largely-indiscriminative downvoting of a user's comments, whatever the reason. (I might also use the term to describe downvoting everything in some conversation, though I might not because it isn't standard terminology.)
Karmassassination: Large-scale downvoting whose aim is to reduce a particular user's karma score, for whatever reason (could be retributive, could be because you've nothing personal against them but think, after careful reflection, that it would be best for LW if they left, etc.).
I dislike intimidatory downvoting because (1) it's unreasonably unpleasant for the victim, (2) it seems like an attempt to exercise more power over what views are expressed on LW than the karma system is really meant to enable, (3) it distorts the per-comment information karma scores are meant to provide (expressed not only in the scores themselves but in thread ordering), and (4) because most users will avoid it on account of #1 and #3, it gives extra influence to those who care less about the LW community as a whole and extra importance to opinions on topics that push those people's buttons.
[EDITED to add: It occurs to me that it's possible that when not explicitly prompted to distinguish carefully between these terms, I may actually use them less carefully. I don't think so, though. I don't think I've actually used, as opposed to quoting others' use of, the term "karmassassination", which I find ugly. Though I suppose maybe an ugly thing deserves an ugly word. I've also used the term "mass-downvoting", meaning much the same as "block-downvoting".]
(nods) Makes sense. Thanks for clarifying.
Huh. This just convinced me that I should be quick to upvote things if they were even a little helpful, so that no one who isn't posting really counterproductive stuff gets that negative hit. Because you're probably not on my facebook feed, and I probably don't already agree with all the things you're going to say, so I want you and people like you to keep posting on lesswrong.
Ideological difference is particularly pervasive in topics that are related to social sciences. I get the feeling from reading your post that you're angry. Angry not about the downvoting but more about the ideological differences.
I'm skeptical that this can be boiled down to some particular issue like that.
It seems far more likely to me that the block downvoter is simply doing it out of a sense of resentment regarding the individuals he/she is downvoting. I say this because he/she seems to downvote posts rapidly and without reading them, which suggests he/she is targeting individuals rather than specific viewpoints. In particular, most of the downvoted comments do not seem to have anything to do with gender.
It's possible that you're right and Eugine (or whoever is doing the block downvoting) is on a personal mission to destroy progressive views on this website. However, this is a very specific accusation and I'd like to see more evidence supporting it.
Reading through your own posts, you have focused far more on gender than either of the three you mention, and this suggests to me that you have to reconsider your own biases. Sorry, but I feel I have to say this.
It is evidence of an ideological or even a personality difference, even if it is not the specific issue.
I do not consider this pattern to be anything but very weak evidence. I'm surprised that you noticed this though - I looked through my comments, and I did not see very many comments about gender going back to May.
If by 'it' you mean the comments themselves, I agree. Someone's comments can be taken as evidence of ideological difference. As you said, though, it's probably not the specific issue.
My block downvoting with a similar pattern started after I made some comments regarding polyamory (but also after the larger thread I made where I ranted that we shouldn't call ourselves a cult) so that kind of fits the pattern.
Edit: Also mine, ialdabaoth and fubarobfusco's comments in this thread seem to have been downvoted by one person at around the same time while not all others were.
I would be quite surprised if whoever karma-stalked me was pissed off at anything I said about gender issues.
Well, you complained on October 25th about block downvotes starting over the "last couple of days".
And a few days before, you made these comments, the one linked to in particular strikes me as the sort of thing that might aggravate someone into block downvoting you.
Huh, you might be right. My point was less about gender issues and more about the symptoms of motivated cognition, but I see your point.
I am willing to sacrifice large amounts of karma to test this as someone who cares deeply about both the quality of the LW community and about gender issues, and who experiences significant intangible benefit from cleverly cracking someone's utility function. Should I?
Publicly admitting this plan is likely to reduce its effectiveness.
I am not quite clear as to how will you test this. Are you saying you will just troll? That doesn't look likely to increase the quality of the forum.
Uhm.. you don't have large amounts of karma (I have lost more karma in the block down votes I'm receiving than your total)and as people said announcing your intentions seems counter-productive.
So, I made a hypothesis that turned out to be (barring very strange circumstances) uncomfortably correct. I'm currently going through this thread, trying to figure out how to update my entire social prediction and execution model - an aspect of my intelligence which has always suffered notorious levels of under-performance. Would anyone care to advise?
It would be easier to give advice about updating if you describe your model.
What were you thinking posting this? How would you take these accusations if you were in Eugine's position, and innocent? Is he now guilty until proven innocent? Do you really think people are going to treat those accusations just as numbers?
That it's a wonderful double-bind between your position and Bayeslisk/Mark_Friedenbach's.
It's not a double bind because you're not bound. What you see is conflicting advice which is pretty much the norm.
You are allowing people to pressure you into specific moral choices which, generally speaking, is not the best idea.
ialdabaoth: I didn't mean to cause you unhappiness. I was attempting to provide a means of progression, and show support for you over the probable person who was doing this. Further, hyporational, I'd imagine that ialdabaoth has a fair amount of evidence as to who might have had reason to block-downvote (and we need a compact tomato-light word for it) and wouldn't simply throw accusations around lightly.
Requests are not obligations, and what follows is other people are not responsible for your actions.
Of course they aren't. But if I'm not a moral expert, and I'm not an expert at knowing who is a moral expert, then whose counsel should I trust?
What you're seeing here is the culmination of a LOT of moral processing. Eugine's plausible outcomes, my plausible outcomes, the community's plausible outcomes... this is far, far more data than I know how to accurately process, and all the heuristics I can fall back on have known serious flaws, but no known good compensatory algorithms.
All that's left is moral experimentation, which I find terrifying. But is action selfish weakness, or is failure to act moral cowardice? And how do I find out, unless I commit to a course of action and then analyze its consequences? (Assuming I'm even competent to do so, which itself is not necessarily certain).
ETA: Does anyone have any good recommendations, beyond the Sequences/etc., where someone without financial means could go to learn better ethical heuristics?
Captain Awkward?
Spend more time irl with people to see what actually works and what doesn't. People do most of the experimentation for you.
As I see it the problem isn't the complexity of moral processing, but that you fail to recognize the important parts. Your failure here is fairly simple. Let's take the community's plausible outcomes, because yours and Eugine's are a drop in the ocean.
Do you wish this kind of mud slinging to become the community norm? "Oh, I'm 25% sure that ialdabaoth is block-downvoting me, and 50% sure it's bayeslisk." Seriously, I don't know how trustworthy you are, so your probabilities provide me almost zero information. You however provided a name, and I can't see the reason being anything else than a personal grudge. I'm sure people who share it are happy to join you.
If you want karma to be more accurate, this is not the way to go. Trying to introduce a less abusable system might be.
The question is ambiguous.
Sense 1: "Do you want it to become normal for people to throw out such accusations when they have good reason to think they're being mass-downvoted?"
Sense 2: "Do you want it to become normal for people to throw out such accusations just as a means of causing trouble for others?"
Clearly no one wants #2, but there's something to be said for #1.
As it stands, hyporational's challenge here seems like a fully general objection to anyone ever complaining about any alleged abuse that isn't trivial to verify. [EDITED to add: More specifically, complaining and naming names.] I don't think the world would be a better place if no one ever complained about any alleged abuse that isn't trivial to verify. [EDITED to add: Or even if no one ever named the alleged abuser in such cases.] In the present instance, there's at least good evidence (see satt's comment) that someone is doing to ialdabaoth what he claims someone is doing.
The behaviour ialdabaoth is complaining about seems to me extremely bad for LW, and indeed a "less abusable system" would be good. So far as I can tell, no one has so far proposed one, and I bet it would be difficult to get a substantially different system in place. So proposing that as an alternative to complaining isn't very reasonable.
Nice strawman.
Sense 1 and Sense 2 can't be reliably distinguished from the outside.
It isn't. It's an objection against naming people without providing reliable evidence. Complain all you wish for all I care, but if you wish to handle the situation, do it by changing the system, not by taking justice in your own hands.
What am I portraying you as saying that differs from what you're actually saying? I'm certainly not intentionally putting up strawmen. (If you mean the thing where I agree below that I should have been more explicit, then, er, I agree.)
Indeed they can't, but they are still different things; it's reasonable to have different attitudes towards #1 becoming a community norm and towards #2 becoming a community norm; and what encourages #1 and what encourages #2 might be different.
You're right -- I should have said "complaining and providing names". Sorry about that. I shall edit my comment to clarify.
In what way do you think I'm taking justice into my own hands? What do you think anyone concerned can actually, realistically, do to change the system?
(In principle, one could change the system by changing how the LW karma system works in a way that eliminates the possibility of anonymous mass-downvoting. In practice, so far no one has proposed a change that would accomplish this and so far as I know no one knows of any such change that would work well. And in practice, even with such a change fully designed it would then be necessary to arrange for it to be incorporated into the LW codebase; it is reasonable to suspect that the odds of that are not good.)
I disagree. There may be specific cases where they are difficult to distinguish, but I think in general it is not so hard to reliably distinguish them. In this particular case, based on the model I've formed of ialdabaoth from reading a number of his comments, based on the specific arguments he has offered, and based on what others are saying, I'd assign sense 1 a considerably higher probability than sense 2, and I'm quite confident in this distinction. I would be very surprised if it turned out ialdabaoth was falsely accusing Eugine simply to cause him trouble.
Introducing a norm of naming names is a mechanism for changing the system. It might be a change to the system that does more harm than good, but that is an empirical question, and one on which I suspect you are wrong. Labeling it as "taking justice in your own hands", and contrasting it with "changing the system", just seems like well-poisoning, a rhetorical maneuver to sidestep discussion on whether "complaining and naming) is in fact a more effective way of changing the system than thinking up and trying to implement some software solution. Here I mean "effective" not just in terms of the probability of a strategy working, but the probability of the strategy being fully implemented in the first place.
Really?
I can see at least two other (closely linked) reasons for ialdabaoth's providing the name of the conjectured culprit. (1) Two people specifically asked him to do it. (2) Abuse of the LW karma system is damaging to the whole community and everyone benefits if such abuse results in public shaming.
There are, of course, reasons in the other direction (the danger you mention, of such accusations becoming commonplace and themselves being used as a tool of abuse and manipulation; and the danger that people will be more reluctant to disagree with Eugine because they don't want him to do to them what he is alleged to be doing to ialdabaoth). So it's not obvious that ialdabaoth did well to reveal the name. But there seem to be obvious reasons other than "a personal grudge".
Note there's not even a consensus whether there should be a rule against such usage. What you find to be 'abuse' others may find to be valid expressions within the system of wanting someone to 'go away'. No details, no demarcation line, but calling for 'public shaming'? Please.
Before you say "well it's implicitly clear!", consider 1) suffering from a typical mind fallacy and 2) the precedent that there even was an explicit post about not recommending violence against actual people on LW (so much for 'implicitly clear').
Lastly, don't counter jerks by advocating being a jerk. "Benefits" and "public shaming" ... don't get me started. What's this, our community's attempt at playing Inquisition? You're already participating, mentioning a possible culprit who broke a non-existing rule in the same comment that calls for public shamings.
In that vein, hey gjm, I heard you stopped beating your wife? Good for you!
There could be consensus that it's harmful without consensus that there should be a rule against it. (I have no idea whether there is.) After all, LW gets by fairly well with few explicit rules. In any case, all that's relevant here is that ialdabaoth might reasonably hold that such behaviour is toxic and should be shamed since the question was whether his actions have credible reasons other than a personal grudge.
Was there ever a similar poll about whether there should be a community norm against such actions? About whether such actions are generally highly toxic to the LW community?
A brief perspective check: The Inquisition tortured people and had them executed for heresy. What has happened here is that someone said "I think so-and-so probably did something unpleasant".
It is possible that you have misunderstood what I said -- which is not that I think Eugine did what ialdabaoth says he probably did (I do have an opinion as to how likely that is, but have not mentioned it anywhere in this discussion).
What I said is that if it comes to be believed that Eugine acted as ialdabaoth says he thinks he probably did, then that may lead LW participants to shy away from expressing opinions that they think Eugine will dislike. This can happen even if Eugine is wholly innocent.
This seems rather tenuous to me. I did not accuse him of anything, nor did I call for him to be shamed. (Still less for anything to be done to him that would warrant the parallel with the Inquisition.)
Yeah, other possibilities exist. What I meant to say is that my social heuristics strongly point to a particular interpretation of the situation based on why people usually seem to be doing these kinds of things.
A socially competent person should have some kind of an idea what accusing people publicly means. What follows, I think, is that he did it to hurt Eugine, or that he's not socially competent.
Yup.
Doesn't follow. It means that he did it knowing it would hurt Eugine or else is not socially competent. But a thing can have predictable consequences that are not reasons for your doing it. A medically competent person knows that major surgery causes pain and inconvenience and risk, but that doesn't mean that someone medically competent undergoing or recommending major surgery must be doing it to bring about the pain and inconvenience and risk. They're doing it for some other benefit, and putting up with those unfortunately unavoidable side effects.
(I don't know ialdabaoth. It is possible that s/he did intend to hurt Eugine. But I don't see any good evidence for that, nor any grounds for assuming it.)
You took action, after careful thought failed to provide an obviously safe pathway. That already puts you above most people, regardless of the validity of the action (I happen to agree with it, but it was obviously going to be contentious). So congrats and an upvote for that.
Regarding ethics, I wouldn't even recommend the sequences. Perhaps one of the many philosophical resources out there on the web. Ethics is applied morality, and morality comes from within. The way to cultivate ethics is to apply your inner morality over and over again to various hypothetical situations, which is what most moral philosophical argumentation is about.
The hand-wringing in most of the parent comments about the ethics of ialdabaoth naming names is kind of amusing, given that ialdabaoth basically called Eugine_Nier out months ago with far less circumspection.
Well, he didn't start a top level discussion post about it back then, so there's that. He also got downvoted because of those accusations back then, as I think he should be now.
Yep, that was not one of my finer moments.
I find it more interesting there that that Eugine didn't deny the statement at all.
If you participate in a mud-slinging contest, even as the winner you're still likely to end up full of mud.
I love wedrifid's response to ialdabaoth, and am considering implementing it myself.
It's not a bad response. While I assert that wedrifid's (and hyporational's) assumptions about why I'm doing this are incorrect, you all have no reason to trust that assertion. From your perspective, this could easily be a simple grudge or whining or social ploy, and it makes good sense to respond to it the way you are.
That said, I'll continue to take whatever karma hit you impose, because my own karma is less important than bringing attention to this sort of thing. I bring attention to my own case instead of other people's because I'm closest to my own, but I have frequently thought "I can't be the only one experiencing this", and that has motivated me to complain rather than simply going away.
Part of the problem is that I have three different classes of situations in which I will post about karma.
Class 1 is when I notice that I am confused. My post will typically convey something like "why was this voted down?". I fear that wedrifid has mistaken those posts for an attempt at shaming, but my actual intent was to say, "I thought karma was supposed to be used like {this}, but I see it being used like {that}. Please help me correct my understanding of karma's purpose?"
Case 2 is when I have a reasonably strong suspicion that karma is being abused. My post will typically convey something like "is this really how we want to behave as a community?". I can understand why another person's view might blend these together with case 1, but they actually are completely different. When wedrifid posted his admonition/threat, I took that opportunity to re-evaluate how I was communicating in Case 1 and Case 2. Hopefully I'm doing a little better.
Case 3 is when I am tired, and lonely, and perhaps a little irrational, and feel somewhat persecuted. My post will typically convey something like "why are you doing this to meeeeee?". I can see why another person's view might blend these together with case 1 and case 2, but unfortunately when I'm in that kind of mood, my rational facilities are not operating at peak performance. Whenever I do this, I actually APPRECIATE people like you and wedrifid downvoting that post to oblivion, because it provides useful social feedback not do to that shit. As an imperfectly rational being, I must rely on the social feedback of other imperfectly rational beings to improve my rationality.
Thanks for the evidence. I'll keep an eye out for it.
How is he supposed to achieve that? More importantly, how is he supposed to convince other people of that? Should we simply believe him? What a convenient way to tarnish someone's reputation that would become. Now that you have a name, what's a your estimation that it's actually correct? What was the positive value of publishing that suspicion?
I thought it was obvious, but: when there is no further action he can take on his own that would help clarify the guilt of the accused.
He doesn't, and I wouldn't require that (a proof) of him.
So it's just the effort he makes to be certain, not how certain he is, that is important to you? Interesting. Should we all start throwing out names just in case if we just make reasonable effort? I have plenty of improbable accusations to make.
You must be friends then. That doesn't help me to judge the veracity of his claims.
Crimes, really?
BURN THE WITCH!!