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Jiro comments on The Fable of the Burning Branch - Less Wrong
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Comments (175)
I find this request to have worse implications than the post itself, because if this request is serious, it destroys discourse. Normally when discussing a topic, one must leave things out. Requiring people to justify leaving things out amounts to "every person is banworthy".
Everyone is "banworthy", in the sense that the moderators have the power to ban anyone for any reason and so far as I know there are no defined limits on their actions.
This particular post
and I think some kind of moderator action in response is eminently reasonable. Personally I'd have gone for "This article is not suitable for LW because [...]; I will wait two days so that anyone who wants to preserve what they've written can take a copy, and then delete it; further attempts at posting this sort of thing may result in a ban".
(I think Nancy was right to ask "what about women's preferences?" and right to apply a bit of moderatorial intimidation, but I don't think the two should have gone together.)
That's similar to saying that cops have the power to shoot anyone for any reason. There's some truth in it, in one sense, but in another sense, it's quite untrue.
Jiro's argument is, in effect, that if the moderators can threaten to ban someone if they don't justify the holes in their analogies then they can threaten to ban anyone. That's true, but no truer than the fact that they can (in any case) threaten to ban anyone. In either case, the scenario to worry about is unreasonable moderators; and if we have unreasonable moderators they can threaten to ban, or ban, as they please even without this precedent.
(I should maybe remark that Nancy didn't in fact threaten to ban anyone; she didn't make any specific threat. I'm not sure that actually makes anything better, but this discussion is developing somewhat as if she'd said in so many words "answer or I ban you", which she didn't say.)
The issue isn't whether a threat to ban was made explicitly or not (the only moderator powers are to ban and to delete posts, as far as I know, therefore "I ask as a moderator" implies "I have a gun in my hand, give me a reason to not use it"). The issue is whether moderators are in charge of policing posts and comments on the basis of "does it offend my sensitivities".
The EphemeralNight's post was compared, justifiably in my opinion, to bad adolescent goth poetry. Do you think that "I want an answer for how you could think it was reasonable to leave out female preferences" is, in any way, an adequate response to bad goth poetry?
It could also be "I have a gun: you might want to consider keeping on the right side of me lest I use it later".
As you can see from (e.g.) Richard Kennaway's comment, the votes on Nancy's question, etc., it is by no means only Nancy's sensitivities that are at issue here.
Whether something is as badly written as bad goth poetry is an entirely separate question from whether it should be judged as if it is bad goth poetry.
Your list of reasons seem to me to be the very reason we have karma. Why does this post deserve moderation in a system where karma sends the message about the community's desire for more of the same?
I'm not certain whether it does. The obvious disadvantages of moderator action are (1) effort and (2) heavy-handedness (real or perceived). The advantages of moderator action are (3) to make it more explicit that this sort of stuff is not wanted around here and (4) to get rid of it more thoroughly so that, e.g., people are less likely to stumble across it in search engine results and there's no danger that future trolls with sockpuppet armies will vote it up out of spite[1].
I'm not sure how those weigh up against one another, and indeed it's not hard to cook up arguments that #2 is actually a good thing ("sending a message") or that #4 is actually a bad thing (all else being equal, destroying even low-quality information is sad). But on the whole I think #3 and #4 are advantages, which is why moderator action is at least worth considering.
[1] This isn't as crazy a scenario as it sounds. There is at least one LW user strongly suspected of using sockpuppets for upvoting, generally hostile to Nancy, unsympathetic to (let's say) "women's causes", and known to be untroubled by scruples about what's considered acceptable behaviour on LW...
Fair enough. I don't follow the personalities here, so the situations where someone engages in sock-puppetry would totally escape my notice. My priors incline me to preferring good speech as the remedy for bad speech.
Your reasons amount entirely to "The hecklers want to veto this" and "I don't like this content". We've had worse than this before.
I'm not serious very often, particularly here, but I am entirely serious when I say this: If you think the prohibitions on political discourse exist to prevent this content, you do not understand the prohibitions on political discourse; they exist to prevent these responses.
That is plainly untrue.
The second and third things I said about this post kinda-sorta pattern-match to "the hecklers want to veto this" ... provided you take care not to look too carefully. (One person found it the last straw and is leaving. Does that mean he "wants to veto" it? No, it means he's gone. It fits into an anti-LW narrative that encourages people to stay away. Does that mean the people saying mean things about LW "want to veto" it? No; actually, they're probably glad it's there because it gives them another stick to beat LW with.)
The first and fourth kinda-sorta pattern-match to "gjm doesn't like this content", but again only if you take care not to look carefully. I gave specific reasons why I think it's bad, and it is to those rather than to the fact that I don't like this post that I appealed. Would you collapse all criticism into "X doesn't like this content"? If so, then classifying a particular bit of criticism that way conveys zero information. If not, why does what I wrote deserve to be so collapsed?
So what?
I didn't say anything about "the prohibitions on political discourse". In particular, when I say this is in no way on topic for LW, I don't mean "... because of the prohibitions on political discourse". I mean it's simply not on topic here. It isn't about rationality (the notional main subject here), nor is it a discussion topic particularly suited to "refining the art of human rationality" (as the LW header has it). It isn't about AI (the main focus of the people who pay for LW). It isn't, to judge from all the downvotes, something LW users as a whole want to discuss here.
I'm going to be ruder than I usually am, and tell you that you only have one true argument here: That this is harmful to Less Wrong. Your perception, which you fairly plainly state, is that this is harmful to your identity group. Should I link you to the appropriate material about identity and mindkilling? Should I note the irony in the situation?
This is not Orphan amusing himself. This is Orphan telling you that this path will lead to ruin. Less Wrong will survive a user's unpopular opinion if it deserves to survive at all, but it certainly will not survive a precedent of content-based mindkilled moderation.
This is not your Final Exam in rationality; there are no final exams in rationality in the real world. But this is -an- exam. Rationalize your prechosen answer or humor your teachers' passwords at your peril.
Almost any argument that something should be subject to moderatorial action on Less Wrong can be summarized that way. Even so, you have managed to be incorrect: it is not harmful only to Less Wrong. In the (admittedly not very likely) event that some reader is inspired by it to think as the author seems to, that will be harmful to them (because it will mess up their relations with women) and potentially to any women they may encounter (for the same reason). And while that hypothetical reader can ipso facto be considered part of "Less Wrong", those women can't.
You just made that up. (I'm not even sure what my "identity group" even is; I can't think of any plausible candidate for which what you say applies.) I certainly haven't "fairly plainly" stated what you claim I have.
How about content-based non-mindkilled moderation?
Do you consider that no one could have a serious problem with this material other than by being mindkilled?
Is that reductio ad absurdum applied to basilisks..? X-D
Constructing a memetically safe space is... dangerous.
Your argument proves too much.
That would require the participants be not-mindkilled, which you clearly are, since you think moderating bad literature is a good idea.
I find it badly written, but that's not a moderation-worthy offense. It presents no serious argument and poses no threat of inspiration. It's about as noteworthy as the average teenage goths' poetry describing what dying would feel like, and cringeworthy for about the same reasons.
I'm forcing this conversation into two positions, in case you haven't noticed: Either you concede it's terrible but harmless and not -worth- moderating, or you now argue that it's actually dangerous.
Do please go ahead and show what it proves that shouldn't be proved.
I do wish you'd stop saying false things about what I think.
You seem very fond of boasting of how you're manipulating this and forcing that and dark-artsing the other. I feel about this roughly the way you feel about Gleb T's writing.
Nope. What I actually say is: (1) it's probably harmless, but that doesn't suffice to make it not worth moderating, and (2) there is a small but nonzero chance that someone takes it more seriously than it deserves and ends up harmed by it.
(Unless you are adopting a very broad definition of "harm" according to which, e.g., something that is merely boring and unpleasant and irrelevant is "harmful" because it wastes people's time and attention. In that case, I would argue that the OP is harmful. Of course that's not the same as "dangerous" and yes, I did notice that you opposed "harmless" to "dangerous" as if the two were one another's negations.)
On #1: well-kept gardens die by pacifism and while Eliezer is there arguing mostly for energetic downvoting of bad material, I suggest that the same arguments can justify moderator action too. If someone is contributing a lot of low-quality material and nothing valuable, maybe it's OK to ban them. If something posted is low-quality and irrelevant and liable to bring Less Wrong into disrepute, maybe it's OK to delete it. If someone is persistently obnoxious, maybe it's OK to ban them. None of this requires that the thing being sanctioned be dangerous.
On #2: people can be inspired by the unlikeliest things. (I went to a rather good concert once where one of the better pieces of music was a setting of what may be the worst poem I have ever read, firmly in teenage goth territory.)
If I were going to boast, it would be about how you changed your mind on multiple things simultaneously to avoid the obvious feint - and apparently didn't notice. Your arguments at this point are so weak as to fall apart at the touch; "probably harmless" and "small but nonzero chance of harm" are such a weak standard of evidence for moderation that nothing would be permitted to be discussed here. It would be much harder to prove your prior version proved too much - but you did the work for me.
But go on and keep thinking that what I'm doing is boasting.
You are, not for the first time in this thread, arguing against things I have not said.
And those are legitimate reasons to ban him. And none of them are "we require that posts don't leave out how the humans feel, and if you do leave that out you should get banned". I agree that we should ban him. I'm just saying we need to be careful about what justification we give for banning him.
Do you have any idea how much is covered by the requirement "you can't ignore humans in your posts", or can be spun as covered by it? "In your torture versus dust specks example, tell me why we should ignore the feelings of the person actually suffering the torture. You can't just dispassionately compare them and ignore that you're saying a human being should suffer". "What? You oppose the minimum wage? Tell me why you left out anything about the poor person who starves to death because of your policy."
I agree. See the last sentence of what I wrote.
Yes. It would be bad if it became the norm that any time anyone makes an analogy that doesn't match the thing it points at in every detail, or made an argument that failed to consider the preferences and feelings of some people, the moderators of LW demanded that they justify themselves.
We should not have that norm, and I have not (so far as I can tell) suggested that there should be one.
Precisely because of the unusual badness of the thing Nancy was responding to (and, perhaps unlike you, I think that does have a lot to do with its apparent indifference to women's feelings), I don't think there's any way to get from "a moderator challenges EphemeralNight on these grounds here" to "moderators issue similar challenges to everyone who posts anything that can be claimed to neglect anyone's feelings".
Incidentally, I think the challenges you mention in your second paragraph are (without the element of moderatorial intimidation) reasonable challenges. The answers might be, respectively, "We absolutely shouldn't ignore the feelings of the person suffering the torture; they are a very big deal. But we also shouldn't ignore the feelings of the people suffering the dust specks, which are indeed small in isolation but add up to a lot because of the unthinkably colossal number of people involved." and "I didn't intend to leave out anything about the poor person who starves to death because their pay is too low; I just say that we should also consider the poor people starving to death because they have no pay at all as a result of the minimum wage.". (I do not necessarily endorse TORTURE over SPECKS or disapprove of a minimum wage; the point is that you can do so without ignoring anyone's feelings, and that if you were ignoring anyone's feelings then that would be a strike against your position.)
This post is of a quality that it harms the community by driving valuable people away. As such I think it does make sense to ask the author to justify his choices. If we want a LW 2.0 where the people who left LW come back I don't think that's compatible with allowing posts like this.
That's what the downvote system is for, and it is working perfectly fine. Moderation is for abusive behaviors.
As for Richard, if he's going to be offended that a heavily-downvoted post exists, well, good riddance. You want a good culture, it doesn't start by putting the Heckler's Veto on a shrine and worshipping it.
I don't think Richard is the only one driven away by posts like this. In general people who are willing to have their public identities linked to this website are more likely driven away because they don't want to be associated with that kind of content. It furthermore produces a climate unwelcoming to women.
After a certain point, no one wants to be associated with all the content + comments occurring and everyone generally feels unwelcome and judged. This is the worst case scenario for a discussion and a very strong reason to not have political discourse here.
Not allowing posts which don't pass some arbitrary threshold that smells of social justice will drive more people away.
I think it's one thing to allow every position to be argued. It's another thing to allow any position to be proposed with a story while the author tries to escape arguing for it.
NancyLebovitz requests here that the author argues for the position he takes.
I haven't noticed any attempts to escape. I would like to suggest they are products of your imagination.
He escaped into the medium of a parable.
/rolls eyes
So, parables are now non grata on LW? Perhaps you'd like to revise the Sequences and take all parables out of it, too?
I think the plural is non gratae. (SCNR.)
Yes, but if you want to get that technical, the correct form depends on the gender of the latin word for "parable". The two options are parabola (which has the "parable" meaning only in late Latin, I think) and fabula ( == fable, e.g. Aesop's). Luckily, both are feminine so non gratae is correct.
Although you can make an argument that the English word "parables" has the neuter gender and so it still should be non grata :-)
I was thinking of feminine parabola, but...
:-)
That's not what I said. I think that when it comes to emotionally charged topics it's important to focus on on explicit discussing of arguments.
Post shouldn't be banned because just because they spread a certain opinion or just because they use a certain style but posts that do voice problematic opinions in a non-fact based style shouldn't be here.
How about you start with Three Worlds Collide, then?
Could someone just revoke Nancy's moderator powers already? It's becoming increasingly clear that she can't be trusted with them.