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iceman comments on Rationality Quotes Thread August 2015 - Less Wrong
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I am going to publicly call for banning user VoiceOfRa for the following reasons:
(1) VoiceOfRa is almost certainly the same person as Eugene_Nier and Azathoth123. This is well known in rationality circles; many of us have been willing to give him a second chance under a new username because he usually makes valuable contributions.
(2) VoiceOfRa almost certainly downvote bombed the user who made the grandparent comment, including downvoting some very uncontroversial and reasonable comments.
(3) As I have said before in this context, downvote abuse is very clear evidence of being mindkilled. It is also a surefire way to ensure you never change your mind, because you discourage people who disagree with you from taking part in the discussion and therefore prohibit yourself from updating on their information. I do not understand how someone who genuinely believes in epistemic rationality could think this is a good strategy.
I will also note that I was the first person to publicly call out Eugine_Nier under his previous username, Azathoth123, at http://lesswrong.com/lw/l0g/link_quotasmicroaggressionandmeritocracy/bd4o . Like I said in that comment, I continue to believe he is a valuable contributor to the community. Like many other people, I have been willing to give him a second chance under his new username. However, this was conditional on completely ceasing and desisting with the downvote abuse. And yes, any downvoting of old comments made in a different context is a clear example of abuse.
The following links provide background material for readers who are unfamiliar with Eugine_Nier and the context in which I am requesting a ban:
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/kbk/meta_policy_for_dealing_with_users/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/kfq/moderator_action_eugine_nier_is_now_banned_for/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/ld0/psa_eugine_nier_evading_ban/
Edited to add: If I see clear evidence that VoiceOfRa is not Eugine_Nier, or that he was not behind the most recent downvote abuse, I will retract this message and publicly apologize
Consequentially...why bother even if this is true?
Assuming you are correct, Eugene's response to being banned (twice!) was to just make another account. It's highly likely that if you ban this new account, he will make a fourth account. That account will quickly quickly gain karma because, as you note, Eugene's comments are actually valuable. You are proposing that we do the same thing a third time and expect a different result.
Possible actual solutions that are way too much work:
move LW on to an Omnilibrium like system of voting where Eugene's votes will put him strongly into the optimate cluster and won't hurt as much.
give up on moderation democracy on the web.
My proposed solution would be something like this:
My proposed solution would consist entirely of
It is our inability to implement this solution which necessitates all the other ones.
That would be a poor use of human time. If we don't want mass downvoting, remove the ability to do it.
We don't want to remove the ability to do mass downvoting. If someone posts 100 random Wikipedia articles in the belief that this provides insight, they should be downvoted. What we want to do is remove the ability to do mass downvoting based on the downvoter's motivation. No automated process can detect motivation, so we can't do that without using a moderator.
Yes, but not necessarily by one person.
I think you may be using different definitions of "mass downvoting". I think Jiro means downvoting many of one user's comments with just one account. I think several people have "mass-downvoted" Clarity this week, but nobody complained.
I think someone who makes a huge mistake like posting 100 random Wikipedia articles will be sufficiently downvoted by a number of different people.
This process won't be blocked by limiting how much individuals can downvote.
How about having a limit to what proportion of another user's downvotes are allowed to come from one user? So if clarity gets downvoted by 20 people there are no limits to how many votes they can get from each of them, but if it is only Nier going on a spree against a new user he pretty soon runs into 5% or whatever the limit is, and then can't downvote that user any more.
OTOH a formal definition of what qualifies as mass downvoting could prevent bickering about whether a particular instance does. Dunno if the benefits would outweigh the costs, though.
The captcha seems like a terrible solution when we have someone following Penn Jillette's advice for stage magicians:
You're effectively suggesting we put up a fence (to use Moody's example) in order to show him we disapprove of what he's doing. He already knows that.
Well, at least a captcha would prevent people from using scripts to downvote each other's comments, but I don't think VoiceOfRa is doing that now (though he probably was when going by Eugene Nier). But yes, blocking people altogether from casting too many downvotes would probably make more sense.
How does Omnilibrium voting work?
I'm not sure about the mathematical details, but as described in their FAQ, they presume that it's inevitable that people will form into local Blue and Green tribes, so they attempt to cluster the population into Blue and Green to not just be a better recommendation engine to both Blues and Greens, but also calculate a nonpartisan score of upvotes by the other side and downvotes by your side.
In general, I thought this was fascinating because it gets to the heart about what voting is for on social websites. If we're trying to build a recommendation engine, having an extremely diverse set of viewpoints is probably something that we want in the input stream of links and discussion. However, we then don't want to have everyone's voting then represent a single score variable, because people are different and have different worldviews. Mixing everyone's scores together will make a homogenized mess that doesn't really speak to anyone.
The idea of tracking partisanship not just to Bayes voting to make better recommendations to users, but to get a sense of nonpartisan quality really impressed me as an idea that's totally obvious...in retrospect. I do wonder how well it scales, as Omnilibrium is fairly small right now.