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Houshalter comments on [moderator action] The_Lion and The_Lion2 are banned - Less Wrong
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He is one a one-man crusade to show that rationality is identical to adherence to his object level political beliefs, and feels entitled to punish irrational people, ie people who disagree with him politically, by downvoting. He does not define rationality in terms of being able to provide reasoned arguments for beliefs, and does not regard his own inability to provide good reasoned arguments for his political beliefs to impugn his own presumed level of rationality.
I'm not saying that I agree with him at all, but I think it's important to understand this kind of behavior, rather than merely dismissing it as a crazy person. Though it is quite possible he is crazy, too.
But I think he feels like his political beliefs are being dismissed by others because they are controversial. There's a certain kind of person who's really attracted to contrarian beliefs like that. He thinks he can provide rational arguments for their beliefs, but people dismiss him and downvote him anyway.
This probably led to t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶o̶c̶k̶p̶u̶p̶p̶e̶t̶ ̶a̶c̶c̶o̶u̶n̶t̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ downvote people he didn't like [and sockpuppet accounts to upvote his own comments to undo it]. Again, not defending this at all, just trying to understand it.
Many people treat downvotes like insults. If your comment gets downvoted, its kind like if a bunch of people told you loudly and publicly "Shut up!", or that you are stupid. It's a public humiliation and a loss of status. That can lead to anger and frustration and a desire to get revenge.
Downvotes as shaming is a real effect. I certainly don't post comments which I think have a chance of being downvoted. Which is why I post comments here much less frequently than I otherwise would on other discussion sites. And I'm not trying to complain, because I love reddit's comment system and think it's really good at filtering discussion. But it is problematic that people treat it like a disagree button.
Then he gets banned for that behavior. That feeds into his persecution complex and gets him even angrier. And well, we've seen the results of that.
Eugine's beliefs are "politically incorrect", but that's not completely unusual at LW. The main reason why we don't see them here often is that we don't debate politics often. And ironically, Eugine's downvoting crusades have contributed significantly to reducing the political debates on LW. There were times when we used to have a political debate in a separate thread or in an Open Thread once in a while. And at some moment, such debates started predictably ending with someone saying "I have disagreed with Eugine yesterday, and today I see I have lost hundreds of karma points and most of my old comments are at -1; fuck this". This makes the debate unpleasant even for the people who on object level happen to agree with Eugine on the specific topic. Most of us see the difference between "I won the debate by providing convincing arguments" and "I won the debate by strategically downvoting or otherwise harrassing my opponents" (or "I won the debate because my opponents were harrassed by a third party").
Also, Eugine's comments seem like optimized to offend. Such comments are "convincing for the already believing, and irritating for the unbelieving". They don't change anyone's opinion, and are usually used by a majority, to silence a minority. Ironically, majority is exactly what Eugine doesn't have here. So this leaves me with two models:
Eugine is too mindkilled to understand all this nuance, despite having spent years here. He still doesn't get what LW is about. In such case, his mental abilities are insufficient for LessWrong.
Eugine may understand the nuance, he just doesn't give a fuck about rationality or LW culture. For him, victory of his tribe is the ultimate goal. That also means he doesn't belong here, just for different reasons.
Regardless of whether he understands or doesn't understand what he is doing wrong, he has shown no capacity to learn or to improve his behavior. Like, come on, it's not like moderators are paranoidly observing IP addresses of every user to make sure the lifelong bans stay enforced. All he would have to do is to create a new account and change his behavior so that no one would suspect it's the same person. He is either incapable or unwilling to do that. Well, fuck him; we are not here to provide him group therapy.
I mean, feel free to speculate about his true reasons. I am just saying they don't change anything about the ban.
This is a very beautiful and short summary of how a lot of political discussions actually look like. This concept is not new for me, but I've never seen it summarized this well before.
Did he start out this way or did this develop over time as he got more frustrated? I thought his comments got particularly worse after he got banned.
Let me be clear, I'm just trying to understand why this happened. This behavior absolutely should be banned. Even if he had reasons for his actions, they were still wrong and he's still an asshole.
I think he got worse with time (though was never 100% unproblematic to begin with), but I'm fully not sure.
I don't remember.
This comment is an excellent summary of Eugine_Nier's history at LW and what's wrong with his behavior.
I've been mass-downvoted quite a bit by Eugine and I don't recall ever seeing any comment of mine downvoted more than once. If he's using sockpuppets, it's not so much "to downvote people" but either (1) to hide his mass-downvoting by splitting it among socks or (2) to upvote his own comments (whose karma trajectory over time is often rather peculiar).
Sockpuppets are for upvoting, not downvoting, because downvoting requires karma and upvoting doesn't.
Also, whereas as gjm noticed hardly any comments have more than one "anomalous" downvote, plenty of comments have like half a dozen anomalous upvotes.
Traditionally he posted quotes in Rationality Quotes threads to farm karma he could use for the downvotes. Maybe he got tired of doing that.
He is partly wrong -- many users with similar beliefs but more reasonable attitudes got plenty of upvotes. (Part of that trend I describe in the linked comment can be explained as LW getting less tolerant of reactionary ideas with time, but not all of it: for example, Aurini was mostly active in the first year after LW opened and yet his karma is 60% positive.)