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Wei_Dai comments on Meta: LW Policy: When to prohibit Alice from replying to Bob's arguments? - Less Wrong Discussion
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What is the current LW moderation policy? I did a search but couldn't find it. (I have the power to ban individual comments and posts but have never used it except on obvious spam.)
There is none. Moderation power is exercised arbitrarily at the whims of the enforcers.
(Arbitrarily rather than at random, to be precise.)
What is the distinction that you wish to draw?
Not sure why the parent was downvoted.
"Arbitrary" and "random" tend to be used in different senses. "Random" connotes unpredictability, while "arbitrary" connotes subjectivity to individual judgement.
I was not intending to claim that the moderators' actions are based on rolling dice, for example.
("Meaning" and "sense" have very similar meaning and sense to me.)
And so we see that I am a terrible communicator. I would blame the study of philosophy for introducing me to wonderful distinctions that no one else uses, though I'm sure a student of philosophy would tell me that "sense" and "reference" are the relevant subcategories of "meaning", and both of what I referred to above fall under "sense". Is Frege or C.S.Peirce in the house?
But seriously, fixed (I hope).
Thanks, fixed
This is false, see above (or refer to counterexamples).
(Edit: I shouldn't have made this comment, it doesn't usefully move the discussion.)
No, neither of those is false. There is no stated LW moderation policy, which as far as I'm concerned is equivalent to having no moderation policy. And given the lack of policy, moderation power is necessarily exercised arbitrarily. This does not imply that your judgement is bad, nor does it imply that other moderators' judgement is good.
If there is some official LW moderation or comment policy, I'd appreciate being pointed to it. But again, I've been active here since the beginning and I'm not aware of one, so it might as well not exist.
As I understand it, the word "arbitrary" refers to lack of relevant or systematic explanation or reason for something. I'm not sure what meaning you intend, the word is confusing the way you use it in this context. (Suppose hypothetically that the policy I stated above was more prominently stated previously.)
Ah, glancing at a dictionary, I had intended "Based on or subject to individual judgement or preference" with a splash of "despotic".
As I understand it, moderators are expected to use their judgement, and do not have any firm guidelines on where to apply it. Alicorn recently commented that the best she got for guidance was "ban shoe ads" (quoted from memory).
Yes, if the putative policy you stated above was more prominently stated before, that would help. Notably, if it were on record somewhere, endorsed by those who run the site, in a place where we could cite it and more importantly argue that it's inappropriate and should be changed.
The policy that I follow and that others don't seem to be violating is that apart from spam and very rare unusual cases (like retroactive edits by sockpuppets), the only comments that can be banned are bad comments by users who managed to accumulate minus hundreds of 30-day Karma (or applied a lot of concentrated and highly downvoted effort more quickly). Bad comments are not banned if they are rare or in form of occasional bursts, for example. If I'm not forgetting someone, of the active users, currently only Will_Newsome and sam0345 have this distinction. (Edit: and now also eridu.)
At least as of today this also applies to Eridu.
Right, didn't see that yet. Minus 169 30-day Karma at this moment.
Basing any action on 30-day karma seems unfair in this case. There was a relatively short window during which the comments were being downvoted, and now they're banned; typically for a controversial topic, those would have been reversed by upvotes over the next week. I don't know if that would have happened in this case, but now we'll never know.
Systematically downvoted comments indicate some sort of failure mode, even when it's not the failure mode of being wrong, or when it's a failure mode on the part of downvoters. It's usually possible to reframe the debate in a more constructive manner, long before you get remotely close to start getting banned. I'm not aware of any cases where persisting in highly downvoted behavior on LW achieved anything, apart from some unpleasantness (more unpleasantness the more the behavior persists).
I might agree with you about this in most cases, but that does not really ameliorate the problem of unfairness I referenced. If those comments were not banned and you showed up tomorrow, for example, eridu might not have made the list.
Perhaps notably, if I were aware that Eridu's downvotes would result in banning of his comments, then I might have correctively upvoted his comments so that they would not be banned, since I do believe there were some valuable pieces in that discussion. Though I don't know if we want to encourage my sort of behavior.