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[moderator action] Eugine_Nier is now banned for mass downvote harassment
As previously discussed, on June 6th I received a message from jackk, a Trike Admin. He reported that the user Jiro had asked Trike to carry out an investigation to the retributive downvoting that Jiro had been subjected to. The investigation revealed that the user Eugine_Nier had downvoted over half of Jiro's comments, amounting to hundreds of downvotes.
I asked the community's guidance on dealing with the issue, and while the matter was being discussed, I also reviewed previous discussions about mass downvoting and looked for other people who mentioned being the victims of it. I asked Jack to compile reports on several other users who mentioned having been mass-downvoted, and it turned out that Eugine was also overwhelmingly the biggest downvoter of users David_Gerard, daenarys, falenas108, ialdabaoth, shminux, and Tenoke. As this discussion was going on, it turned out that user Ander had also been targeted by Eugine.
I sent two messages to Eugine, requesting an explanation. I received a response today. Eugine admitted his guilt, expressing the opinion that LW's karma system was failing to carry out its purpose of keeping out weak material and that he was engaged in a "weeding" of users who he did not think displayed sufficient rationality.
Needless to say, it is not the place of individual users to unilaterally decide that someone else should be "weeded" out of the community. The Less Wrong content deletion policy contains this clause:
Harrassment of individual users.
If we determine that you're e.g. following a particular user around and leaving insulting comments to them, we reserve the right to delete those comments. (This has happened extremely rarely.)
Although the wording does not explicitly mention downvoting, harassment by downvoting is still harassment. Several users have indicated that they have experienced considerable emotional anguish from the harassment, and have in some cases been discouraged from using Less Wrong at all. This is not a desirable state of affairs, to say the least.
I was originally given my moderator powers on a rather ad-hoc basis, with someone awarding mod privileges to the ten users with the highest karma at the time. The original purpose for that appointment was just to delete spam. Nonetheless, since retributive downvoting has been a clear problem for the community, I asked the community for guidance on dealing with the issue. The rough consensus of the responses seemed to authorize me to deal with the problem as I deemed appropriate.
The fact that Eugine remained quiet about his guilt until directly confronted with the evidence, despite several public discussions of the issue, is indicative of him realizing that he was breaking prevailing social norms. Eugine's actions have worsened the atmosphere of this site, and that atmosphere will remain troubled for as long as he is allowed to remain here.
Therefore, I now announce that Eugine_Nier is permanently banned from posting on LessWrong. This decision is final and will not be changed in response to possible follow-up objections.
Unfortunately, it looks like while a ban prevents posting, it does not actually block a user from casting votes. I have asked jackk to look into the matter and find a way to actually stop the downvoting. Jack indicated earlier on that it would be technically straightforward to apply a negative karma modifier to Eugine's account, and wiping out Eugine's karma balance would prevent him from casting future downvotes. Whatever the easiest solution is, it will be applied as soon as possible.
EDIT 24 July 2014: Banned users are now prohibited from voting.
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Comments (366)
How about also making a rule that you can't downvote something that you've replied to?
It's often convenient to be able to write a post explaining a downvote. I'd be okay with barring people from downvoting replies to their own posts, though, which also prevents downvote duels in long threads but preserves the ability to explain a vote.
(It'd likely be marginally easier to implement, too, since the presence of a post is stabler than the direction of a vote.)
How bad does downvoting have to be before it's not allowed?
There's a thread where everything I say has been downvoted. This amounts to a loss of 14 karma. Because of the pattern of downvotes, it appears it's all from one person. I highly doubt that that I'm saying things ten times as worse in this thread than I am anywhere else, so it seems that I've been downvoted for expressing an unpopular view.
Is this a criticism of Eugine or a criticism of others for neglecting their duty? I don't know all of those users but in some cases the only way Eugine could have been "overwhelmingly" the biggest downvoter is if all the people with decent standards realised they had better things to do than fix people wrong on the internet.
Or if no-one else thought that botvoting of people was a good idea. Or did Eugine manually perform all those downvotes himself? Where were his standards when he downvoted the good and neutral as well as the bad?
I had presumed so. When I was active I read every comment and a vote is a single click so 'botting' would change little. Eugine was fairly active so is more likely than not to have applied the votes manually. Not that it particularly matters.
I have no idea, Eugine was an assclown. But even assuming every voting decision he ever made was based on dickishness I can still conclude that it is impossible to have been 'overwhelmingly' the biggest downvoter of some users based on some suitable definition of 'whelm', comparison with the proportion of quality posts and the realisation that "100%" is the upper bound on how many of another user's comments a single account could have possibly made.
Eugine, his actions and his psychological motives are actually irrelevant for the purpose of the reasoning in the grandparent.
With all the karma talk, all sorts of interesting analyses pop into my head.
What are the karma stats when A replies to B? Upvotes, downvotes, totals, percentage upvote, and how do the karma stats of the initial posts correlate with the replies? And that's all just using anonymous karma votes.
So, I am curious about the new legal regime on LW :-/
It seems that the rule "karma vote the post, not the user" has been made explicit and the breaking of it is a bannable offence now. Is that so?
Let's say I think user X is a troll, and idiot, and a disgrace and so should be encouraged to remove himself from LW. Can I use karma voting to express my attitude? Let's say it's a new user who posts a lot, so at pretty much every post of his I facepalm and downvote. Is that fine? In a couple of months it will look like I mass-downvoted him (and under some definitions of "mass-downvoting" I did).
Now, I'm far to lazy to downvote all posts I don't like (or to write a script to do it). But it's conceivable that one day someone will annoy me enough to downvote a bunch of his posts. Is it a bannable offence now?
Downvoting someone's all posts because all of the posts are genuinely bad is fine; downvoting them all (even the good ones) because the person just happens to annoy you in general is not.
Of course telling the two cases apart can be difficult, so in practice people won't be banned unless it looks particularly obvious that they are engaging in indiscriminate mass-downvoting.
I don't know what that means.
As an example, consider this recent spat.
The reason the (far away over the internet) person annoys me is because his posts annoy me. Can I downvote them? In large numbers? The great majority of that user's posts?
In grading terms, you're thinking in terms of grading on a curve and I'm thinking in terms of grading on an absolute basis.
By the way, making it so that no one can downvote a post more than a couple of months old (but can upvote it) is one way to solve or at least mitigate the karmassasination issue.
I guess a simple test would be: "if I saw this post and didn't know who had written it, would I still downvote it?". If yes, then it's fine, even if you did do the downvoting in large numbers. Because you'd be making your decision based on the quality of the specific comment rather than e.g. a general dislike of the person's other comments.
(This heuristic isn't quite perfect, given that knowing the writer of a comment does sometimes provide information that helps evaluate the comment better - e.g. if there's someone who I know to have a background in physics and they tell me that I'm wrong about a question of physics, I have more reason to take that seriously than if the comment came from the Time Cube guy. But the rough idea should be helpful anyway, I hope.)
As for the question of "how do I tell whether someone really has applied that test"... well, I have some thoughts about that, but I'm not sure whether it's a good idea to give a detailed explanation of the methodology, since that would allow people to game whatever tests I have in mind.
Fuck, I think that guy was one of my biggest upvoters. You'll pay for this.
I wish I could be sure you were kidding.
What happened to " Harry Yudkowsky and the Methods of Postrationality: Chapter One: Em Dashes Colons and Ellipses, Littérateurs Go Wild"? It was funny, it got karma, and it seems as though there was a flawed effort to move it to Main.
Eliezer deleted it presumably.
Why delete it with a fake move to Main rather than actually deleting it?
Oh I didn't know about the attempted move to Main. Maybe a mod was feeling trolly and tried to move it to Main and then another mod was like "this isn't main material" and hid it? When I go to edit it from my Overview page it still says "Less Wrong discussion" in the dropdown thingy.
I don't know that there was an attempted move to Main-- that's my deduction.
What I actually see is that if I go to the article from your name page and click on the title, I get Main with a notification that the article doesn't exist.
I share the concerns voiced by buybuydandavis, Salemicus, larks, and nywracu.
This isn't necessarily to say I disagree with the banning decision. And I know it must be tough to be a mod, especially when you hadn't planned on becoming one.
But Kaj_Sotala's decision looks like a good case of mission creep. His powers as moderator were originally just for deleting spam; now he has used them for something different. And the behavior of Eugine_Nier does not appear to have clearly broken any rules; Kaj_Sotala has still tried to justify his ban under a very liberal interpretation of the anti-harassment rule. Thus Kaj_Sotala has used powers beyond their intended scope to punish someone who did not really break a rule. And the punishment was probably excessive; a massive karma penalty would probably have sufficed.
Given all this, it may still have been a good decision on net to ban Eugine_Nier. But mission creep is usually just something I read about, not witness live, and it's nice to view it from closer to the "inside."
LW had a problem with not being moderated enough and Kaj was at a place to do something about that issue. He asked the community for feedback and then went ahead. If that's mission creep than I like mission creep.
Interesting point.
(Just so you know, the formatting is broken on your comment - I think you need to put a backslash before your _ symbols in names, looks like they turned into italics.)
Fixed, thanks.
I am puzzled by the technological limits suggested in this post.
Can an administrator not change the password on a user's account?
If so, a solution would be to change Eugine's password to something Eugine doesn't know. Eugine could then not log on and would not be able to either post or upvote/downvote other users.
I also meant to mention that administrators could log on to Eugine's account and revert manually all the now-officially-disliked downvotes. If years of working with coding have taught me one thing, it is that sometimes the fastest way to do something is to do it manually.
Given that mass downvoting continues, it apparently is extremely hard.
It appears to be a cross between a lack of manpower and a truly terrible codebase and data structures. (I haven't looked at either myself, for much the same reasons I've so far successfully avoided Two Girls One Cup.)
I am glad to see this decision.
It is odd, though, that the effect of the banning is apparently to prevent him from doing anything on LW except the conduct for which he was banned. Everyone is a hero to himself, and there is no reason to expect him not to carry on this behaviour while he can. I hope to see a technical resolution of this in the near future. I am surprised that access to his account was not simply removed. That is what banning seems to have meant in the past.
As for his past votes, reverting every one of them would be the simplest action. The collateral damage of removing such legitimate signal as there was in his other votes is a small price to avoid exercising judgement over every individual case.
I can't help but feel threatening Eugine with a ban might have been better than summarily blocking him for past offenses.
I mean, this is his first time breaking the rules, right? And he can't have known this would be a banning offense before it was declared one. He might well be willing to obey the new edict if given a choice between that and punishment.
I am not party to the conversation that took place between Eugine and Kaj, but there was a conversation and I would be surprised if it was not clear to him that his membership of LessWrong was on the line.
"First time" is not a good description of a persistent pattern of behaviour over a substantial course of time.
He was publicly named some time ago but laid low: he knew that what he was doing was not going down well, and not just with those he was downvoting. No-one has spoken up in favour of his activity; the nearest thing to that is weak remarks about downvoting being about whatever the downvoter wants to see less of, which sounds more like obsessive adherence to an imaginary rule than any positive defence of the practice. I often see people publicly saying that this or that post is downvoteworthy, but I have never seen anyone say that this or that person is, not even the most egregious intruders that lasted no more than weeks or days before being thrown out.
It appears (but is so far unconfirmed) that he is not willing to cease the systematic downvoting of persons even after "banning". If so, how would he have been willing to stop on threat of it?
So no, he had already burned all those bridges before the axe fell.
This is not a difficult question. If Eugine assigns value to not getting banned then the threat of banning represents a disincentive. If the banning has already occurred that disincentive does not exist and all spite related motivations are likely to increase and any respect for the moral authority of the powers that be obliterated. What remains is the trivial inconvenience of continuing to downvote via other mechanisms.
Not actually having the power to stop a threat is a reason to use the power that you do have wisely. Were this just about influencing Eugine's voting patterns then it would be a poor decision. But such actions are made more to establish precedent and influence others.
Disclaimer: I was largely indifferent to Eugine being banned. He certainly would have been on my block list were this forum not crippled in that regard. But the parent ask a rhetorical question with a straightforward decision-theory related answer.
Sorry, I meant that this was the first rule he had broken. You're right, he was not a "first offender" in the sense that leniency is often extended to first offenders.
True, but there's a significant difference between "this will make me unpopular" and "this will get me permabanned".
What possible benefit could it do him, to stop after being banned for life?
ETA:
Are you serious, or is that some sort of hyperbole?
I am serious. By his activity, I mean specifically his mass downvoting activity. It is possible I have missed someone defending this action. Show me some examples, if there are any.
I have seen people opposing the ban. I have seen people querulously quibbling, "ah, but suppose I find everything a user posts bad and I downvote each of them, is that a bannable offense and if not how are you going to tell, eh?" But I have not yet see anyone saying, Eugine was right to downvote everything that these people posted, regardless of what it was, and everyone else should do the same until they are driven away.
I wouldn't say that about all of Eugine's targets. There are some other users (or accounts) for which it would have been entirely appropriate. Particularly given that there were no moderators preventing sockpuppet abuse by trolls.
Ah, I see. There's defending it and then there's defending it.
Some people think it's a bad idea to mass-downvote, but not banworthy. Some people think it is/was sometimes a good idea to mass-downvote - that's what I was thinking of.
But you meant more along the lines of "Eugine was right to downvote everything that these people posted, regardless of what it was, and everyone else should do the same until they are driven away"?
You're right, I haven't seen anyone who claimed that.
Ah, but it's not clear that those are different activities, or if they are, whether there's any way in the database or logs to tell the difference. So, when people "quibble" about the first, they're implying (I think) that they believe that in the future someone might be right to downvote everything someone posts, because that person always posts terrible posts.
Part of the reason this is coming up is a lack or perceived lack of transparency as to exactly what patterns "convicted" Eugine_Nier.
In the present case, there was enough evidence to raise a reasonable suspicion, whereupon Kaj approached Eugine, who confirmed that he "was engaged in a "weeding" of users" (quoted from original post).
Rules come from judgement, not judgement from rules.
Any bad post is worth downvoting. If someone writes nothing but bad posts, and there have been a few examples, every one of their posts gets downvoted. Such people are rare and they never last long. When an obvious moron or crank pops up here, I have myself on occasion systematically read their entire comment history (it's never very long) and judged every comment. But I am always voting on the individual comment, never the person. I am certainly not going to downvote a meetup announcement because the poster is a Bad Person who must be spat on wherever they show their face, let alone write a bot to do the spitting for me.
The transparency of how this case has been handled seems sufficient to me.
The no longer mysterious downvoter strikes again. An immediate downvote on this is just bizarre. We have scotch'd the snake, not killed it.
ETA: And a downvote here too! Well, what a surprise!
I checked my recent comments, because I was planning to say that so far he doesn't seem to have offended after the banning, however I found no evidence of that. The two comments from the last 2 days, which I had noticed did't get any downvotes initially, now had one (as do my other comments). This doesn't prove much, so I checked all the other users who were getting mass downvoted for extended periods (the list in the post) and it seems like all their recent comments had at least 1 downvote as well.
The above is not definite proof, but what I suspect might be happening is that Eugine's bot/script is still running, despite him leaving the site.
First, I'm not sure if I agree with the ban, but I would allow EN to post one last apologia at least.
Second, considering karma as a property of users rather than of comments is toxic. Let's stop it. Let's consider the sum of all comments and post that happen to be written by the same person no more meaningful than the sum of all comments and post that happen to be posted the same day.
If we must rank users, e.g. to decide whom to allow to post articles, let's have a system where users can rate each other directly (but anonymously). Maybe make higher-ranked users' ratings count more (i.e. each user's score is proportional to the component of the eigenvector of the matrix of ratings with the largest eigenvalue).
What makes you think that Eugine has any desire to post one last apology? If that's what I would have wanted to do, he could have acted differently if Kaj would have queried him.
I think (p~=0.7) you are interpreting "apologia" to mean "saying sorry", and I think (p~=0.95) army1987 meant it in the sense "statement of self-justification".
I did (otherwise I would have spelt it “apology”).
Yup, that's what I thought. (I'm not sure that with the "apologia" spelling it even can mean "saying sorry", but I was too lazy to check and of course for all I know you might have got it wrong, hence only p~=0.95. ... I've now checked, and I think it can in principle mean "saying sorry" but I bet it basically never does. Because every path by which people come to know the word "apologia" goes back to Newman's book where it's very clear that the meaning is "self-justification" rather than "saying sorry".)
It may be interesting to have comment rank be the sum of positive and negative votes, while user rank counts only the positive votes.
I'd personally like that, and think it's a great point.
Where we disagree is much more interesting than where we agree. That's where we can really learn something.
If he sends it by e-mail to Kaj, I am sure Kaj would publish it (using Kaj's account).
Let him whine somewhere else on the Internet if he wants a parting shot, if he's not doing so already. He's active enough elsewhere.
A google on "Eugine Nier" for the past week brings up "Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe. Learn more" Well, that's interesting.
(In any event, that's not his real name FWIW.)
It says that for most (it is supposed to be all) name searches, when you are googling from Europe, except when the name is too ubiquitous
Doesn't show up for "David Gerard" or "Eliezer Yudkowsky".
It does for me if I include the quotes.
It shows up for me even with "Mencius Moldbug", whether with or without the quotes.
And for me, with all of: my own name, "David Gerard", "Eliezer Yudkowsky", "Eugine Nier" and "Eliezer Arbuthnot" (a fake name I just made up, for which Google finds no results with the quotation marks, offers me results without them, and again gives the "data protection" warning).
So I think this is a bit like searching for "rat vomit" and getting "Buy Cheap Rat Vomit now" ads from eBay: it's just an algorithmic thing that gets inserted into certain categories of search.
A game I used to work on did something like this to gate content that was considered more advanced or more susceptible to balance problems. It caused an astonishing amount of drama between users and didn't seem to work very well as a gatekeeping mechanism.
I'm against it, pending details.
This solution does not seem scalable: it is going to require an amount of moderator effort proportional to the number of crazy people the site attracts.
Part of this solution is that it has a deterrence effect. That doesn't need much moderator effort. That said, if the forum grows there isn't much of a problem with recruiting additional moderators.
Tracking excessive downvoting seems like something that can be pretty well automated.
Or, if the rule for how much you are allowed to downvote (something like 1:4 on karma?) isn't the right rule, change it to something else explicit.
We're a growing site, but we're not growing that fast, especially in the last year or so. Historically we seem to have attracted a crank every few months or so, which should be handleable by a mod staff of any size so long as it actually, you know, moderates stuff. At linear growth rates that should hold for years, longer if the mods are willing to name new mods from time to time.
Just wanted to note that giving Eugine -20,000 karma penalty (effectively a 3-year no-voting sentence) instead of the permanent ban (a forum equivalent of the capital punishment) would have worked so much better and is probably trivial to implement. And you guys who upvote the OP for more than simply outing the perp are effectively supporting incompetence. How disappointing.
I upvoted this, but I think it's reasonable to "support" incompetence. Nobody's perfect, and Kaj seems far better than the default.
I think supporting mild competence is an important step on the path to supporting actual competence. This is a LOT better than the doing nothing that was going on for months even if it was the sub-optimal solution.
We all agree that mild competence is better than none at all. That doesn't explain why shminux's comment has received downvotes.
Eh? The expected result of punishing/insulting people for doing something is people doing nothing.
And the expected result of never pointing out when things can be done better is people doing things incompetently.
There's a difference between attacking a person and suggesting an alternative course of action for them to take.
Shminux was suggesting a different course to Kaj but attacking people who upvoted the OP.
I want to have someone at LW that moderating and who has the authority to make moderation decisions. Even if I might have done things differently, I'm very grateful that Kaj takes the role of moderating.
Great job Kaj and Jackk, congrats!
I hope this sets a good enough precedent that this won't be needed again; Eugine had plenty of warning both that this was frowned upon by pretty much everybody, and that he could be identified.
Question: Daenarys rarely posts now and by her description part of that was due to the systematic downvoting. Has someone contacted her ourside LW to let her know this has happened?
I believe that she is aware of it thanks to someone sharing the link to this post on Facebook.
You want to check to be sure?
Hi Stuart! Swimmer is correct; ChrisHallquist posted a link to this on my facebook wall. Personally, I'm glad Eugine is gone, because even without the downvoting he was an asshole. And having anti-feminist or biorealist assholes running around is a great way to drive off women and minorities.
Anyways, I prefer the walled garden, and the conversational tone, and the positive emotional support that Facebook provides, so I doubt I'll come back to posting here.
I'm still extremely active in the meatspace community though, and I have a friend who will be posting some very exciting news here in a couple days about a new rationality non-profit! Also, I'm moving to NYC, and a group of us are starting up a new rationalist house there.
ETA: Another upside of posting on facebook is that it does a better job of raising the general sanity waterline than posting here. It exposes rationality ideas and conversations in a friendly/humanising way to people who would never have sought them out (all my non-rationality friends), and it allows them to participate and interact with those ideas in a much more supportive way. :)
Daenerys, since there seems to be some uncertainty:
Are you saying that you would prefer if LessWrong increased the height of it's metaphorical wall, keeping out "anti-feminist or biorealist assholes"?
Or are you saying that the model of a public forum is inherently "a great way to drive off women and minorities", and thus you don't use LessWrong and don't care about the moderation policy much?
I've seen different people reading your comment different ways.
Much closer to the latter. I am not making any policy recommendations about LW moderation. I don't really care, since I'm not on LW anymore (except for things like this where people ask me specifically something).
I said that one of the reasons I prefer Facebook is that it's a walled garden. I did NOT say that I want LessWrong to be a walled garden. I would think neo-reactionaries would support the idea of just going to the place that has the rules you like/ voting with your feet.
I do think there can be public forums that do not drive off women and minorities, which is where I disagree with your second statement.
I do not think all biorealists or antifeminists are assholes. I thought EUGINE was an asshole. He was also a biorealist. So he was a biorealist asshole. I've already made a comment about that, but people keep saying that I said that anyways. And quoting only me saying "biorealist assholes". I DO think biorealists and anitfeminists have to be especially epistemically polite (and generally polite) if they want to have any chance of people actually engaging with their ideas.
As an example:
Christian asshole: Fred Phelps
Christian not-an-asshole: Leah Libresco
Skeptic asshole: Penn Jilette
Skeptic not-an-asshole: All the CFAR people
See how I consider "assholeness" as an unrelated trait to whether or not I agree with a viewpoint. If there were prolific skeptic assholes, they would drive off religious users. If there were prolific Christian assholes they would drive of skeptic and LGBTQ users. All assholes tend to drive off all non-assholes.
This whole "OMG! daenerys says all biorealists are assholes and should be banned11!!!!!1" reaction feels like people are willfully misinterpreting me, putting words in my mouth, and using tiny quotes completely out of context (like "biorealist asshole") Especially AFTER I wrote a comment clarifying that I meant ONLY what I said an nothing else. This is another reason I don't LW. Commenting on LW is like reading the comments on a general website. Sometimes you get the impulse to do it, but as soon as you do you immediately remember why you don't. Note that I'm again, only EXPLAINING why I don't use LW, and am NOT demanding moderation changes.
ETA: Also, MugaSofer, I commend (and upvote) you for doing the Right Thing... When a discussion partner says something that you could interpret two ways, and Interpretation A is sane, but Interpretation B would cause you to get super-offended and launch a multi-comment barrage, the polite (non-asshole) thing to do is just to ask if they meant A or B, and NOT to just assume B and get offended and launch the multi-comment barrage. Especially when A is the literal interpretation and B requires quite a bit of twistiness to get to.
Excellent, I agree wholeheartedly. Thank you for clarifying.
Now, in fairness, I wouldn't characterize people misunderstanding as willful, assholeish misunderstanding. Applying the Principle of Charity is the reason I understood you in the first place, right?
As I said, different people interpreted your phrasing in different ways; your phrasing was genuinely ambiguous regarding whether the operative word was "asshole" or "biorealist". I guess this shows our default assumptions about ... sentences?
Thanks for the Rationality Compliment, I'm flattered :)
A fine example of "asshole" = "those who disagree with my values".
Should those who disagree similarly start whooping it up for banning feminists and biodenialists? Or should they just be similarly denigrating them as a matter of course?
More and more, I'm thinking they need to fight back in kind.
It's strange that the supposedly evil, nasty reactionaries are social pacifists who refuse to respond with a little tit for the incessant tat they receive.
Charming to see all the karma upvotes going to a post which denigrated a whole swath of users as "assholes" because of their beliefs. Real "friendly/humanising".
No way you could have seen this comment when you wrote this, so here's a heads up - it turns out that's not how it was meant.
The emphasis was intended on "asshole", not "biorealist", if you see what I mean - "biorealist" is the reason it drives off "women and minorities" specifically, not the reason he was an asshole.
I just realized the non-asshole examples list didn't include an attempt of naming a non-asshole biorealist. Then started wondering how it would go if you tried giving examples of non-asshole biorealists or even assert the possibility of one existing on a SJ-friendly forum.
I did not. I had a lot of direct replies that were taking my attention.
That's an inference you might make from the available data. Perhaps it is even true.
I think that by the ordinary usage of the English language, my interpretation of the text is more consistent with what was written than the interpretation you quote. If you really want to hear my close textual analysis, I would oblige, but I don't see a lot of mileage in it.
(Penn Jillette an asshole? Really? To me, he seems incredibly gracious to others, often to the point of being overly deferential.)
Also, it was posted three days after you wrote your comment. I can see how that might present a bit of a challenge.
I was genuinely confused to see someone interpreting it another way, if that helps your analysis - the other interpretation hadn't occurred to me.
But yes, I suppose it's definitely possible they simply leaped on a convenient excuse.
Yes, but I get the impression that the assholiness threshold/criterion is different for biorealists and antifeminists on the one hand and SJWs on the other.
I'm not sure what 'biodenialists' are exactly but on the basis that the word ends with "ists" it's reasonably unlikely that any particular social-politically active '*ist' will be of net value, given the change such agendas have on thought.
Post I was replying to used the term
Not that I'm a fan of the asshole == ideological opponent mentality, but we are talking about a guy who spent probably cumulative days of his time downvoting people in a self-confessed effort to drive them away from the forum. That doesn't sound like the behavior of a social pacifist to me. Indeed, it sounds quite a bit like the behavior of an asshole.
See the original quote:
We're not talking about downvoting, we're talking about biorealists and antifeminists. They're the assholes.
How peculiar. I could have sworn I quoted you talking about "evil, nasty reactionaries", as typified in this context by Eugine_Nier.
I'm not trying to endorse Daenerys' apparent opinion re: biorealists and antifeminists, as you may have gleaned from the fact that I directly said I disagree with it. But you're going too far in the other direction. You may, of course, make whatever assertions you please regarding the general behavior of groups he may belong to, but I feel it's somewhat disingenuous to cast any of those groups as entirely innocent of social wrongdoing ("social pacifists") when this entire friggin' thread is about social wrongdoing by a member of those groups. If you're instead going for some kind of No True Scotsman deal, it'd help to say that Eugine's not a true Scotsman.
The sarcastic, not using my own voice tone didn't come through, even from the context? Did you genuinely think I was earnestly calling reactionaries evil? If not, this seems like a complete red herring.
He's a member of LessWrong too. Is everyone here an asshole?
Two very different cases.
Eugine, at least by his own argument, was voting down people with a low rationality quotient. He has been widely condemned by all, including the evil reactionaries, and was banned.
daenerys called a lot of people on the list assholes based on them having opinions she disagreed with, and suggested they be banned for the same. She was widely upvoted.
Generalizations are about general trends, and not absolute truths admitting of no exceptions.
Which side heaps abuse on the other, and suggests sanctions against the other? Which side defends their own? What's the broad trend?
You keep coming back to Eugine, but neither daenerys nor I were predominantly talking about Eugine.
Go to my previous comment in this thread. Currently, two downvotes for an accurate correction of your misrepresentation of her original statement. Do you want to further debate that point, or will you grant my reading? If so, isn't it odd that a couple of people on the list are downvoting a clearly accurate interpretation of the text that corrects a clearly inaccurate misinterpretation.
Upvotes for calling people assholes and suggesting they be banned for their beliefs, downvotes for accurate analysis. The voting seems to align better with ideology than truth, and is positive for one ideology, and negative for the other. Which is the trend I'm pointing out.
Point of order: can you quote where they said being reactionary should be a banning offence? Because I don't see it.
I applaud the decision to ban Eugine_Nier for abusing the karma system, but I'm a bit disturbed by the idea that espousing certain views could be a valid reason for banning a user. I agree with the goal of attracting more women and minorities, but I think there are good reasons to believe this is not best accomplished by thought policing.
(Upon reading your comment more carefully, it is now unclear to me whether you are saying that having anti-feminist and biorealist views could be a valid reason for banning someone. It seems you are kind of suggesting that, though I'm not sure.)
I'm currently driving cross country and typing this on my phone at a rest stop so I can't comment as much as I would like, but I DO want to clarify that my post meant what it said and nothing more. Eugine himself was an asshole. He ALSO was a biorealist and an anti feminist. When you combine those traits in a prolific user they're likely to drive away women and minorities.
Even if it's epistemically true, discussing those issues in an assholey way is instrumentally unhelpful (for people with goals at all similar to mine).
But the clear implication is that people having those views are "assholes".
Too much censorship is dangerous, but too little censorship is dangerous too. It's true that Less Wrong would die if every dissenting opinion were to be culled. However, if Less Wrong were to be overrun by irrational jerks without moderators taking some sort of action, Less Wrong would die too. Would you really oppose banning literal Nazis from posting their views on this forum? Because if so, I find your lack of censorship disturbing.
Asking "should we ban people for their views or should we have freedom of speech?" is a false dilemma. The correct question is: "how much censorship should we have relative to freedom of speech, and which views should we ban if any?"
I nominate socialists. Socialist regimes killed more people than nazi regimes.
(Just joking. I mean, the numbers are correct, but I actually don't support censorship.)
Per unit time per capita or totally?
Also, the ones the Nazis killed were better ;-)
<gd&r>
I think that the Khmer Rouge hold the per capita record, and the Soviets (*) the total one. Dunno about per unit time.
( * I'm not counting the Great Chinese Famine, since it was apparently caused by incompetence rather than deliberate malice.)
Fair enough--the value of free speech needs to be weighed against other values that might be promoted by censoring specific viewpoints. Still, I think there are good rule-utilitarian grounds for making free speech the default position and for requiring a high standard of proof for deviating from that default in a particular case. The considerations for censoring nazism probably meet that standard, whereas I don't think that standard is met in the case of anti-feminism or biorealism. (The latter, in particular, seems to consist primarily in certain factual rather than normative claims, and there are particularly strong reasons against censoring views of that sort.)
Note, too, that the karma system might in most cases allow the community to discourage certain viewpoints from being expressed without the need to resort to censorship.
If I understand it correctly, the tradition of "not providing Nazis platforms for free speech" came from history when Nazis used violence against their opponents. I mean... it sounds crazy if you are polite and fair enough to invite them to a debate table, they use it to debate with you and express their beliefs... and on the way home from the debate they kill you.
So it's something like: "Don't try to cooperate with a known DefectBot".
The question is, these days, which people use extra-debate tools to silence their opponents?
Yes, precisely! This is what I think should be the golden standard for censorship. Ask yourself if the other person would try to censor you if they thought they could get away with it even if you were nice to them, and if the answer is yes it is acceptable (but not necessarily desirable!) to censor them. So an honest and reasonable bio-realist should not be censored, but Eugine Nier should be. It's simply a matter of memetic self-defence.
That's funny because I view progressives as the exact group that would instantly throw me under the bus the moment I didn't want to help them against someone else. Neoreactionaries at least propose to leave me alone.
That isn't what a DefectBot is. A DefectBot is an agent that would defect in every position, including this one.
For example, the Nazis might do everything in their power to hurt you now (such as attacking you on the way home), and when they are in power (such as, well, I think we all know the canonical example of that.)
On the other hand, they might act nice now but, you suspect, defect when they find themselves in power. Or they might attack as hard as they can now, but be generous in victory. Neither of those are DefectBot.
I think you are going to run into problems here. I suspect that most adherents of many ideologies would censor opposing views if they could get away with it.
The problem is how does one distinguish someone defecting because he's dealing with a DefectBot with someone defecting because he is a DefectBot.
Yes, that's a very reasonable position to take, and I'm leaning the same way. I see the issue as being very similar to the question of whether or not a society should condone killing people: It makes perfect sense to have a general rule that says you can't, but sometimes you have no choice. Pacifism is not the solution here.
The karma system does not solve this problem because a small number of people can have a disproportionate impact simply by voting more. And of course, extremists care more and so are more likely to vote. My post above is now at -3: Is this because the community disapproves? Or is it because 3 bio realists felt threatened by the notion that we should ban literal nazis because it might extend to them as well? I am not at all convinced it's the former.
Heinrich Himmler is a racist. Eugene_Nier, not so much.
My laugh for the evening.
Are you implying that none of EN's contributions were much more problematic than saying “Negro spirituals”?
Non-central fallacy or focusing on disputing definitions possibly?
I'm pretty sure (but don't feel like spending time tracking down examples, so I could be wrong) that I've seen Eugine saying biorealist things.
I changed "racist" to "biorealist" in my comment, if you don't think the two should be equated.
I commend you for your reasonableness, which quality seems increasingly rare in the modern world.
Is it not possible for an administrator to change the password on Eugine's account to something that would take Eugine a few decades to crack? Is it not possible for an administrator, having done that, to log on to Eugine's account and reverse the now-defined-against-the-rules votes, if not by script then by hand?
Seems like the best possible way to enact a ban, yes.
I had a brief period of block down votes (it was obvious, as only old comments were being downvoted, and it was a continual, regular process), but it passed quickly.
I think the ban was justified because of the number of people targeted. Going after one person is bad, but vendettas are understandable (if not approved). But going after huge amounts of people... Well, there we have to multiply.
As for those deploring the ban, I can see your deontological position, but do you think that Less Wrong is going to become measurably worse because of this decision?
Why? Seriously asking. I see no evidence that we were somehow powerless to stop this without banning him.
But if that were the case I would definitely be in favor of doing so.
Well ... yeah. Worse by one user.
(It's not as if his contributions were terrible, remember, a troll that we're well rid of - Eugine was a high-karma user, that's how he was able to downvote so many comments.)
I've been thinking of the ban as deontological-- the premise is that Eugene has shown himself to be a sufficiently bad sort of person that he just isn't worth having around.
Perhaps it's a matter of competing deontological frameworks.
<nitpick> Surely that's virtue-ethical, not deontological? </nitpick>
You may be right. I thought deontogical covers all "do the right thing no matter what happens" systems.
First, thanks Kaj for doing your best out of a complicated situation. I'm op on some IRC channels, and I also know how difficult it is to take such decisions.
I don't think the ban was a mistake as a penalty (nothing prevents Eugine from creating another account, so it's not that harsh a penalty) but I do think it doesn't solve the main problem. The most important remediation would be to undo all of Eugine's mass downvotes, and if not easily possible, all of Eugine's votes. Any chance of that to happen ?
I'm not upset about the ban but I'll chime in and say in terms of comments rather than mass downvotes I think Eugine Nier was net positive.
Did he admit his guilt, or his actions? From the outside, it sounds like the latter.
Begging the question that mass downvoting amounts to harassment. Downvoting is downvoting. Votes can be positive or negative. Would he be similarly banned if he had karma bombed positive votes and it made people feel all warm and fuzzy?
I assumed it was everyone's place to decide how to cast their votes. Think globally, act locally, yada yada. Ironically, he was acting in accordance with the widely held view that some people needed to be silenced to improve the atmosphere.
People told you he "made" them feel bad. I guess "Feel Bad" negative karma votes are ok. And get a lot of action from those with power too.
He remained silent about how he voted, in line with the privacy configuration for votes, which has now been explicitly violated by those with the power entrusted to them. Bad precedent.
Really? Breaking social norms is now verboten in our community of polyamorous transhumans?
Seems to me he was simply acting in accordance with one prevailing norm (one that I disagree with), by violating another (that I agree with).
Other people were part of the causal chain of a "worsened atmosphere". Assigning him as "the cause" is a judgment. Me, I'm not enthusiastic with the prevailing culture of "I'm upset, therefore you're wrong."
And the pitchforks came out. Three years, 9000+ karma. Now, banned for life. The mob is fickle.
Funny thing is, I was equally unimpressed with all the signal to noise complaints. I've turned off filtering based on karma. I'd rather filter based on vote count than vote sum.
I find an atmosphere of bad feelings and social shunning rather tiresome all the way around. Buck up and don't shun - that's my preferred atmosphere, and that goes for Eugine and the concerns about signal to noise as much as those who would ban him now for hurt feelings.
All indications are his negative votes were for people being MoreWrong, in his opinion. Having people think you're MoreWrong is unpleasant. I don't think the ideal answer is to shut up those who share that opinion with you.
Perhaps differences between eugine's and kaj's political views caused a harsher punishment.
That's something that irked me as well: I would have preferred the ban to be performed by somebody other than a self-identified feminist.
OTOH, I have seen no evidence that Kaj's political views had anything to do with his decision (I just have a sizeable prior for it because he's human), and I can't even recall him ever talking about politics on LW off the top of my head (I only know about his political views from his comments on Slate Star Codex, and the idea of holding people accountable for things they've said in a different venue, well..., it reminds me of something.)
Then why didn't you speak up when Kaj asked the community how to deal with the issue?
I wasn't watching the issue that closely back then.
Kaj's political views likely played a part in how he saw this, as would anyone's, but I don't get the sense of "I'm gonna stick it to the other team" from Kaj here.
EDIT: BUT, I think political views likely played a part in the more general reaction, and thereby the resulting punishment.
EDIT2: see http://lesswrong.com/lw/kfq/moderator_action_eugine_nier_is_now_banned_for/b2gp
Karmacampaigning is an interesting case-- it doesn't seem likely to cause damage in the same way that karmabombing does.
Sometimes I'll find my karma going up, and it's hard to find out which comment or post is attracting karma. A karma dif option (probably with a time frame) would be nice, but I don't know how hard it would be to add.
I'd like that too.
He did it with the intention of driving away people from the community. Doing things with the intention of weeding out people is well described as harassment.
Eugine would have had the possibility to respond to Kaj with an apology and a promise to not engage in this activity again in the future. From Kaj summary it looks like he didn't. While I would have prefered a solution where he could have stayed, I think strong moderation is valuable and I therefore support Kaj's decision.
It's good for the forum to drive some people out. The question is in correctness of particular decisions about driving people out and in acceptability of means of doing so. Applying the concept of harassment is misleading (noncentral), as it suggests incorrect conclusions (e.g. driving people out is undesirable in general), even if some of the other conclusions happen to be correct (e.g. disapproval of Eugine's behavior).
(One currently accepted method of deciding to drive a user out is to see if most of their comments are significantly downvoted by many users, and if they keep posting similar stuff regardless. If that's the case, their comments start getting deleted, which is a means of driving them out or motivating them to reduce active participation.)
That is likely to be true, but I'd argue that it's not good for the forum if a single self-selected mostly-anonymous person is the only one deciding who gets driven out.
'Single' implies that consensus among the community is not required; 'self-selected' implies that anyone with an end goal different to that of the site can attempt to force their goal on the community; mostly-anonymous implies a lack of accountability for their decisions. These are all red flags.
Yeah, I believe even the signal to noise crowd is generally opposed to individual karma bombing.
Some people describe that as improving the signal to noise ratio. A good many, I believe.
Likely he's the hero of his own story, and believes he has nothing to apologize for. Never had that lesson in losing against those with power over you.
Instead of social shunning, would you perhaps prefer the situation where Eugine was allowed to single-handedly send away new users he personally didn't like? Because that's what we had here until now. (i.e. Kaj's solution may not be perfect, but it's a huge improvement.)
I consider mass-downvoting of new users to be much worse than mass-downvoting of old users. Old users usually (1) have enough karma to survive the attack, (2) understand what's going on, even if they don't know who exactly did it, and (3) if they complain, they are guaranteed to have our sympathies, and they know it. New users don't have a clue; they may believe they are disliked by the whole community.
Imagine if Ander, instead of complaining publicly, just walked away. Should we feel less sorry for him than we feel for Eugine? Also, some other users may have had the same experience and just walked away silently; we wouldn't know about this.
Eugine expressed that he found certain people MoreWrong. As far as I know, that's it. Isn't something of the point of this place, to distinguish LessWrong from MoreWrong? But not if some people feel uncomfortable thereby?
But I was incorrect.
Eugine engaged in a very weak and cowardly shunning - anonymous karma bombing.
But he hasn't really been shunned in turn, because people don't seem to have the stomach for it. He's been banished through technical means, and had his "anonymous" karma votes similarly exposed through technical means. Instead of shunning, power was used against him because people said they felt bad from being downvoted.
Is that the kind of list you'd like, people complain about their hurt feelings from someone else's evaluation of them, and he's banished?
Think you never "make" people feel bad?
If people wanted to shun him, and ignore with a public plonk, that would have been fine with me. Good, in fact. Call him out for being an ass, if you think he was one. Great. But instead, let's not actually deal with the person, let's just excommunicate him if we have the ear and sympathy of he who wields the kill switch.
Seems to me that there are some very different cultures here on the list.
We can cut each other some slack, or we can fight for control of that kill switch.
The world is full of people who were never here in the first place. I don't lose sleep over it.
And if some guy leaves because he can't handle the thought of someone thinking him incorrect, I can live with that too, as I doubt that he has the right stuff to benefit much from this place, or benefit others here much in turn.
But note that I, softy that I am, wasn't thereby telling him or anyone to get lost, I was trying to encourage him and others to get over their dismay at being thought wrong by others, which, IMO, would be good for them personally, and good for the function of the list generally.
But apparently that suggestion makes me a horrible person in the eyes of many. Fine. People have different values. Their values aren't mine either.
He had no power to send people away. People who left, chose to leave. The continued formulations of this episode which portray his targets as helpless victims lacking agency are dysfunctional. They act and chose too.
New users should have some clue on what to expect on the internet, including encountering jerks. And they should have some expectation at LessWrong that someone may express that they are MoreWrong.
But again, I'm a softy, and generally cut extra slack for newbies. I've already expressed that I disapprove of karma bombing. I disapprove of plenty in this thread as well. But I haven't seen anything that would have me reaching for the kill switch.
You do realize that karma is more than just a feel-good point system, right? If your karma is low enough, it materially hinders your ability to participate on this site. You can't make discussion posts, or top-level comments, and you have a limited ability to reply to comments. All of this actively discourages low-karma users from participating, not just by making them feel bad, but by actually making participation a hassle.
So a newbie who has been karma-bombed may not be leaving simply because he can't handle the heat; he may be leaving because, with the ability to meaningfully accrue karma denied to him, he faces numerous annoying technical obstacles to participation (and certain modes of participation are effectively closed off to him).
Yes.
True, but that was how it was expressed (not exactly in those terms, of course).
And the proper way to expose the fallacies in someone's opinions is downvoting all their comments, both those that contain the fallacies, and those that don't? Even including, if I remember correctly, meetup announcements?
And if perchance I disagree with Eugine's opinion about a user X, the proper way to express my disagreement would be to upvote all their comments, both those smart and those not smart; because otherwise my vote has smaller value than Eugine's? And then if we all adopt this norm, we will keep upvoting and downvoting comments according to the users' popularity, regardless of the merits of specific comments? Why not simplify the whole system and upvote and downvote users directly? -- Do you have the same political opinion as I do? Upvoted. The opposite opinion? Downvoted. Certainly there is a lesson somewhere about how this would lead to increased rationality.
You know, in the political debates I often had a similar position like Eugine. But I didn't mass-downvote my opponents, and as far as I know, none of them mass-downvoted me. Something like implicit cooperation in a prisonners' dilemma. Which allowed the debates to be much more civilized than most of the internet. Which I enjoyed. I partially blame Eugine for destroying this possibility of having civilized political debates on LW. It's hard to have a respectful debate, when one of participants is systematically downvoted regardless of whether they made a smart or stupid comment, whether they made a fallacy or exposed their opponent's fallacy. How are people supposed to learn and change their minds in such a debate? Isn't that one of the purposes of Less Wrong?
In the past I have explicitly objected against trying to bring new members based on their political opinion, to create a "balance". But removing new members based on their political opinion, that's even worse. At least the former contributes to the growth of the community, and there is a chance that those people might changed their opinions when exposed to intelligent arguments against. The latter just promotes one view; and if someone would update in the wrong direction, well, they might suddenly find their karma disappearing miraculously.
Which I believe is a great thing! Eugine's actions did not start an arms race of mutual mass-downvoting. Not even on a website where many people have the ability to write a script for doing it, so such warfare wouldn't cost them too much energy. (For example, I probably would be able to writte one. I have previously used Perl scripts to scrape content from some websites; maybe it would be relatively easy to customize them for LW. I didn't try.)
Here you use too general terms. There are many ways to make people "feel bad"; but we are talking specifically about mass-downvoting here. People were making each other feel bad by posting comments the other side didn't agree with, politically, pretty often. No one was ever banned for that.
We had a few threads complaining about the mass-downvoting (although the identity of the downvoter wasn't confirmed then), so it kinda happened.
Just to be sure how deep is the cultural difference: does mass-downvoting of new users belong to the "cut each other some slack" category? Should we aim for a balance of "I will mass-downvote the new users who seem to be on your side, and in turn you can mass-downvote the new users who seem to be on my side, and perhaps we can try destroying each other by downvoting scripts, but no one will call the moderator to intervene"?
No, that would communicate a more general evaluation on a person's body of work.
Perhaps not all their comments, but have you never sought to right some karma wrong with compensatory votes of your own to bring more balance to the Force? I occasionally do.
I've never said karma vote according to popularity, Eugine didn't, and your scenario didn't either.
MoreWrong +1.
Karma votes can certainly be interpreted that way, or voted that way. That's apparently how Eugine was voting.
Not yet that I am aware. But you (or I) would certainly be in the running to be the first. I think I'd be in the lead today, but I'm sure you'll take the lead on other days.
I think Eugine is still on the list if his downvotes had been upvotes. The horrific consequence of his downvoting was "people felt bad and so stopped posting". That can happen from any expressed opinion. Likely many of yours. And mine. And I believe some people had expressed that many opinions I believe you and I hold are simply beyond the pale and should not be "tolerated".
"First they came for Eugine, and I thought he was a dick, so I did not speak out..."
Somebody I can't recall ever having heard of thinks I "insulted" them - I'm guessing for my comment on dysfunction, though they weren't specific. Let's not talk about winning or losing anymore, what is functional and dysfunctional, because someone might feel insulted if the shoe fits.
No it's not.
Better to light a candle than curse the darkness. If you saw that happening, you could have rectified the horror of Karma -1 with your own vote. We're talking about a single karma point here, per post, which needn't have put someone in a tizzy in the first place.
Life isn't so difficult, even when people disagree with you.
Mischaracteriztion. He is reported to have said:
No talk of "sides" here, just rationality.
MoreWrong +1
MoreWrong +1. I've frequently said I'm opposed to mass downvoting.
I don't care about the conditional probability P( me gets banned for my opinions | someone gets banned for their opinion ) if the probability P( someone gets banned for their opinion ) is extremely low, which I believe it is. Actually, I don't even believe the conditional probability is so high for me; though it could be a bit higher for you, but anyway...
I believe the probability of either of us getting banned on LW during the next five years, assuming we continue writing our comments more or less the same way we do now (which I intend to) and don't participate in any activity such as mass-downvoting; and assuming that MIRI and CFAR will continue to exist and be connected with LW... is less than 2%.
I agree with you in this. I just believe those people don't have enough power to enforce their threats here, and they are more likely to leave this web disappointed than remain here long enough to gain that power. Also, contrarianism works against them.
My model of him says that he detected "insufficient rationality" when people disagreed with him politically. What you quoted is how it felt to him from inside. (I admit I cannot prove this.)
Today. But it's rather telling that the threats were made and discussed seriously.
You're not from the US, right?
Things have been pretty wacky here in the last year, with numerous high profile cases of people losing their jobs/status/property for Thoughtcrime. I would have considered these highly unlikely just a year ago.
My prior would put that as fairly likely. Without going through the posts of the people involved, and I won't, it's hard to know. I have a vague "reasonable guy" tag in my head for him. Could be for similar reasons.
No, I'm not from US. But I read internet, so I am probably aware of some things.
And they achieved zero success. Because this is Sparta... ahem, Less Wrong.
And if they tried the same thing next time, there even wouldn't be so much drama again, because we are already inoculated. "There are more nerd boys than nerd girls, therefore nerds are sexists!" Yeah, already heard it, not impressed.
This deserves a longer debate (and LW is probably not the right place to have it) about specific details. I would guess that in most of these cases, those people were thrown overboard by their colleagues, in an effort to protect money from government or wide public. Less Wrong does not take government money, and our public supporters are mostly contrarians by nature. In other words, we are not a university, and we cannot be destroyed by a Twitter campaign.
Most importantly, I don't believe Eliezer would jump on a political correctness bandwagon. Also, there are already many "shocking" news about LW (basilisk, polyamory, etc.); it would be too late to try a PR coverup.
Yes. People cave. Much easier for everyone to throw someone to the mob than to fight. That's the magic of people who mean it. Small groups of motivated people who mean it can easily cow larger groups who don't want a fight.
If he has meant at all what he has said about UFAI, he'll turn over the keys of LessWrong to the Thought Police in a second if it further the efforts for FAI, for much the same reasons that everyone else caves.
Even a small, motivated group can destroy value. Everyone caves, unless they're equally looney.
Well...
(I agree with the rest of your comment.)
I think many would not characterize that action as jumping on the political correctness bandwagon.
Karma is supposed to influence behaviour.
I see your points, but...
But what if shunning didn't work?
I have 12 500 or so Karma. That gives me around 50 000 downvotes. That's enough to zero out tens if not hundreds of contributors, especially if I concentrated on newbies. I could literally zero them out - keep them at zero, whatever they posted (and prevent them from posting top level comments), and either break them or the Karma system. Then once they'd left, I could reverse all my downvotes, and apply them to someone else.
If I was that cruel, and willing to ignore people's opinions, then shunning would have no effect on me, nor would it reduce my power to cause destruction. At some point, something other that social means would be needed to stop me.
Thank you for listening to them.
Exactly. "At some point." We were a good ways away from the hypothetical you described. Social response should be commensurate with the social problem.
The example given is some guy who lost like 40 points? Let's say that was the scale of the issue for a dozen people. This is a trivial problem for any individual, save for their propensity to curl up in a fetal position when someone on the internet expresses through those 40 points that he thinks their posts aren't up to snuff.
I think I've lost more karma responding to this nonsense, and spent much time responding as well, because I find the response a little out of proportion, a little unfair, and worst of all, an empowering of the "you hurt my feelings, shut up" principle.
The social problem he was responding to was a perceived worsening of the signal to noise ratio, and a sizable chunk of the list seemed to share that opinion, and share that karma feedback was an appropriate response for the desired end state of shutting some people up, though I think that individual karma bombing has limited support.
I believe the solution I had suggested was for the moderators to contact the karma bomber and tell him "hey, you're causing a problem, can you knock it off?"
That might have ended it without further escalation, and we could have all go on our merry way.
I don't know the details of the discussion between Kaj and Eugine. Maybe that was it.
Solution if he won't knock it off?
I'm torn. Which is the bigger problem - people taking action to protect their tender ears from the "noise" of posts they don't like, or people taking action to protect their tender feelings from being hurt when someone expresses disapproval? Both are quite disruptive and tiresome, IMO.
First, there should be pretty easy technical countermeasures that would limit the power of any karma bombing campaign. Limiting all votes to your karma limit would be a nice start, particularly compelling to the signal to noise enthusiasts.
Second, often these "I've been karma bombed" threads provoke a karma telethon, where the target gets karma back and "validation" from interested parties. User affirmed, gets karma back, and widespread condemnation of karma bombing educates users on the problem of karma bombing and the general disapproval of it. Probably a necessary price to pay periodically.
Third, if the list wants to make an explicit policy against karma bombing, fine, let them do it, but applying it retroactively is bad form, IMO. The policy could be made after a thread inviting opinions on the policy, where people could discuss the general issue of policy somewhat divorced from their interest in a particular instance. This is a price I'd hope we could have avoided.
Fourth - I think there is widespread disapproval of karma bombing, even from the signal to noise purifiers. If the behavior continues in the face of explicit policy, then you can kick him off while mitigating any backlash and mollifying people with more concern for due process.
You make some valid points. And possibly I'd have done things differently, were I a moderator. Possibly.
But this kind of phrasing isn't helpful:
Either the overall Karma system does its job (by using feelings, or reputation, or whatever), or it doesn't. It doesn't, no one would care. Clearly, they do care, so it is doing some of its job. Yay!
Eugine exploited a technical and social loophole, and threatened to destroy the whole system. Hyperbole? Do you really want to see competitive karma bombing, rushing to nuke your opponent's score before they can do it to you? Reducing this level of misbehaviour to "feelings were hurt" is entirely misleading. Eugine cheated (exploited what was self evidently a difficult to close loophole), people got angry at being cheated (a useful evolutionary response) and the cheating could have irreparably damaged the website.
Yeah, I get that a lot.
Then again, I think a lot of other people's phrasing isn't helpful. I think many of their ideas are positively harmful. But in any group, I don't always expect to get my way.
It's funny that all the people bemoaning his karma bombing of others where he perceives their irrationality, have little compunction about karma bombing my posts here so that I have to spend karma to not be rude and leave people hanging who took the time and effort to respond to me.
I've made arguments all the way through here. Anyone here saying I'm simply irrational? Not making any points? Can't put an argument together?
Not that I've seen. It's all tone. It's all about hurt feelings. It's all about having different values. If I were karma voting on those terms, I'd get carpal tunnel syndrome in a week. Click click click click click.
Look upthread at my -6, followed by your 100% +9. So, in your estimate, is that an accurate evaluation of our comparative rationality in those two posts? I was abysmally irrational, and you're pristinely rational and insightful?
Looking at the pattern of votes, I think it's unlikely that even the majority of my downvotes came from people who actually read each of my posts. A lot of people are just signaling disapproval. Like Eugine was doing.
Eugine is at least downvoting people on his perception of their rationality quotient.
Who's really cheating here?
But is there anyone sharpening the tines of their pitchforks for these new cheaters? Strange how the pitchforks magically align to ideological north, instead of cheating north.
Hurt feelings are the crux of the matter. The "cheating" business is a minor transgression serving as rationalization for the picthforks, and as we've seen, a rationalization hardly consistently applied.
Turn all of Eugine's downvotes to upvotes. Still "cheating". Should provoke the same outrage, if the outrage was really about cheating. Do you maintain upvotes would have provoked the same outrage?
I think, people would have disapproved a little, but there would have nowhere near the level of stink about it, and he would not have been banned.
Yep. He was a minor annoyance that people blew up into major drama that was much more destructive.
Meanwhile, he was also a poster with 9000 karma. Seems like he was producing a good deal of value for some people. Not anymore.
As to what I'd really want - to be God Emperor, of course, but the Universe shows no sign of obliging any time soon. So I'm putting those plans on hold for the near future, and likewise don't expect a list with a lot of people with very different values and preferences than mine to conform themselves to what I really want. Or even kind of want.
And that's the difference. Live and let live. Even with assholes, who largely are just people with different values. I thought Eugine was being a dick, but <shrug>. The world is an imperfect place. Other people are being karma dicks here, but <shrug>. I'd rather we kept our powder dry for things that really mattered.
I do see a problem with that strategy, but I don't know that you're going to like the solution. Basically, people who give others slack are great when they get together. They have a nice buffer from real conflict. Throw in a few random slack takers, and they're annoying, but the preponderance of slackers can easily mitigate the damage and dissuade the assholes through numbers, if not intensity.
But when with enough slack takers, and particularly those pulling in the same direction, slack givers are just giving out more and more slack until the slack takers hang them with it. A few random slack takers like Eugine aren't a problem, but a large contingent of slack takers pulling in the same direction are. Against them, slack givers may have to hold the line on slack.
Again, not what I really want, but maybe what I should be doing.
Given that the downvoting continues unabated (just got a couple of dozen drop), he clearly does not think he did anything wrong.
What a weird system, that he is banned but can still vote.
But maybe someone else took up his sword?
(And no, it wouldn't be me.)
But back to the issue of his guilt, per the OP, he was confronted and gave his reason. Sounds like he meant it in the first place, and considered it a public service.
From OP:
It's extra important to police the social norms of a community that's about breaking the prevailing social norms, if you want to have a community at all. The norms you police are the borders of your community.
Huge props and many thanks for doing this, Kaj!
I'm pretty sure I was also a victim, if a rather recent and relatively small scale one, and I'm glad to see something was done. However much I told myself it wasn't really important, that karma's a horribly noisy measure, with a few slightly funny comments gaining me the majority of my karma while my most thoughtful contributions usually only gathered a handful, the block downvoting really did make me feel disinclined to post new comments. Banning seems like an extreme measure, and I guess I can see where people who think there should have been warnings are coming from, but I'm actually kind of surprised that it was all or nearly all one person, and given the amount of distress it seems to have caused, I think we can do without a person like that around here, even if he did sometimes contribute good comments.
Precisely the same situation here. I almost stopped posting entirely after the first wave of downvotes he dumped on me.
First of all: I agree with shminux. If the point of the site is to create a community that can produce high-quality discussion, rather than one that's full of cooperatebots, banning users who make quality contributions for defecting from social norms that don't directly involve their contributions seems contrary to that point. Maximizing discussion quality requires tradeoffs: if the presence of someone who produces high-quality discussion is so opposed by others who produce same that the town isn't big enough for both of them, someone has to go. But was this the case here? -- that is, what would be the effect of EugineNier's mere presence, as opposed to his ability to mass-downvote? The town isn't big enough for both EugineNier's downvoting and its targets / others who see the community as having become less cooperatish due to that downvoting.
This also sets a dangerous precedent, one which I've seen play out before: the most 'elitist' (offensive/annoying to certain other members, usually of lower quality) users get banned for being 'elitist'/offensive/annoying, with no regard to the effect on quality -- so, naturally, quality goes downward. If you don't bite the noobs, you get Eternal Septembered -- but if you bite too hard, you drive off other users who make high-quality contributions. It's often hard to see which way the tradeoff should go -- on the forum where I most recently saw this dynamic play out to its Septembered conclusion, there were six bans, I only disagreed with one of them, and the most that any user I know of disagreed with was three of the six -- so my intention in pointing this out is not to suggest any hard-and-fast rule, but to call to attention the existence of this tradeoff and suggest an optimization criterion for moderation policy going forward.
I don't know what the LW consensus is on the issue of quality vs. quantity; I naturally favor quality, but I don't have any financial interest, direct or indirect, in any of the organizations/charities in the same general area as LW, so those who are affiliated with MIRI or similar, or who place a much higher priority on their ability to get as much money as possible, may have different interests. I would suggest, however, that quality has a quantity of its own -- that is, that optimizing for high-quality discussion/contributions/etc. will serve as a draw to people who want such an environment, since there aren't all that many environments for that -- and furthermore, that the people drawn in by that are more likely to be well-placed with regard to the ability to propagate the rationalist memeplex and the [concomitant?] awareness of the aforementioned organizations.
Now, another interesting question is: given that the karma system is open by its nature to abuses of this sort, what ought to be done about it? Downvote-bombing is clearly harmful; how can the potential for it be reduced/eliminated?
A few possibilities that I can think of:
Making it so that you can't downvote more than ten posts by one user in a day. (But this might just make it harder to notice.)
Automatic alerts to moderators if a user downvotes more than fifty posts by one user in a week.
A 'tactical nuke' option, to remove all karma from a user found to practice mass downvoting.
A karma lockout option, to remove a user found to practice mass downvoting from the karma system entirely: their posts would still be able to accumulate karma, but they wouldn't be able to either upvote or downvote posts.
As above, but only blocking downvotes.
Simply knowing that you would be outed is likely to be enough of a deterrent, no need for advanced technical solutions.
I'd like to just add a quick note that I think is worth emphasizing for people reading this thread: there's an obvious temptation to read Eugine's actions as reflecting his political and philosophical viewpoints here, and it wouldn't even be that hard to think of post-hoc hypotheses connecting them. Please don't do this. I caught myself starting to do it, and it really isn't helpful. Events like this say more about individuals than their belief systems.
Connecting a specific political view point to this behavior is a post-hoc hypothesis.
But perhaps it was possible to predict in advance that if this happens, it will more likely be done by a person with strong political opinions (of any kind).
However, that lesson is already included in understanding that "politics is the mindkiller".
His downvotes were certainly largely politically/philosophically motivated; I and several other people (off the top of my head the only other name I remember was daenerys) noted the downvote floods beginning specifically after debating "Culture War"-type topics; LGBT issues, feminism, racism, etc.
I don't think that's what you intended to say, but it's an easy misreading, so clearing that up.
Oh sure, (I was potentially downvoted for the same reason). The point isn't that they weren't politically motivated but rather that one shouldn't think the inclination to defect in this fashion is somehow more connected to a specific political viewpoint. Someone on the end opposite Eugine on these issues could easily be motivated to do the same thing.
Wow, I picked the culprit.
(I have no signed prior statement to prove this, but I certainly guessed it.)
Edit: And there's my points going up already!
Everyone following the situation knew it was Eugine. At least one victim named him publicly. Sometimes he was referred to obliquely as "the person named in the other thread" or something like that, but the people who were following the story knew what that meant.
And I just dropped from 9800ish to 8909. But still at +269 last 30 days. What?
30-day karma counts karma on comments made in the last 30 days, not the delta in your total karma over the last 30 days. It's somewhat counterintuitive, yes.
That doesn't explain what caused David to lose 900 karma points abruptly. (I don't think it can be that all Eugine's votes have been reversed because (1) I'm pretty sure my losses at his hands haven't been undone and (2) I'd be rather surprised if Eugine gave David 900 upvotes in the history of ever. Not least because that would mean 10% of David's karma is upvotes from Eugine.)
Oh, I thought that went without saying -- elsewhere in the thread, several of the people that have been targeted for block downvotes have said that they've continued, so chances are David's having the same problem. I was only trying to explain the difference between the changes in his total and 30-day karma.
Oh, I see. But the usual pattern of block-downvoting has been much less abrupt than that. (In my case it was, I think, somewhere in the range of 1-10 downvotes per day while it was happening.)
I suppose it's possible that Eugine is trying to do as much damage as he can before his ability to downvote finally goes away, but that seems obviously pointless (it's just asking to have all his votes reversed) so I'd guess it's someone else. This seems like a particularly stupid time to be engaging in obnoxious downvoting patterns, though -- much more likely to get caught, probably more likely to get slapped down hard for it.
I don't think this really helps you. As you acknowledge, this clause does not actually imply that downvoting is harassment at all. Nor does it imply that blocking users is the appropriate response!
Indeed, the fact that explicitly mentions some crimes (leaving rude comments) and punishments (deleting comments) is probably evidence against this moderation action. If the policy had been totally non-specific, it would imply a wide degree of moderator discretion. The more specific it is, the stronger the implication that things left unmentioned are not actually verbotten.
Furthermore, consider that in the case mentioned in the policy (harassing comments) deleting them is a coherent response which addresses the underlying issue, without very much collateral damage. In this case, banning Eugine from posting does not actually prevent him from downvoting, so the objective is not achieved, but considerable collateral damage is inflicted, by ending his often interesting comments.
This is true. OTOH, dicks gonna be dicks, and trolls regard rules as playground equipment.
(I have been on communities where "don't be a dick" is an explicit rule. Guess what? Users who zoom in on this rule and try to argue it ... are pretty much all dicks.)
This, this, 1000 times this. If you tightly police the actions of moderators, who are constrained already to act in good faith, to follow only and exactly the letter of the rules, you will never get a good result. (Because the bad faith users can always find a way around the letter of the rules.)
This is a major failure mode of law in general, IMO.
In practice we avoid this problem by granting a lot of discretion to judges and prosecutors (i.e. mods).
The specific circumstance is explicitly offered as one particular example of a general policy (it's preceded by "e.g."), so I think there's a pretty strong implication that there are other things left unmentioned that are in fact verboten.
Unfortunately the origional rule was not really grammatical enough to establish a general policy. If you remove the 'e.g.', as you should from a valid sentance, all we're left with is
Which doesn't even vaguely hint at a general policy!
It's pretty much always a mistake to apply legal-style reasoning to moderator actions on an Internet forum, anyway. The job of moderators is to keep the forum working, not merely to follow previously published procedures. Legal rules such as nulla poena sine lege don't apply in this context. They're supposed to wing it a bit when necessary.
Sure, but then they shouldn't pretend to be justified on the basis of rules that actually do no such thing. I'm happy with Eliezer's dictatorship, but it should be an epistemically honest dictatorship.
Speaking of which, Eliezer has been strangely silent throughout this whole affair.
Eliezer has been silent on LW in general; I'm pretty sure it has little to do with this.
He last commented on June 27, so it's entirely possible he hasn't seen it yet.
"It's like a bar. The idea is to maintain a good time. If you are asked to cool it at a bar, and you start debating the precise details of the rules and the wording thereof and who can eject you when and so forth, the large fellow with the number on his shirt will be guiding you to the exit in short order, possibly with a humorous CLANG off the bins opposite." (from a Facebook group; doesn't quite apply to LW directly)
I don't think this actually makes sense. Generally the way a group comes to a decision something is for a few individuals to come to believe it, and then they convince others. If individuals are not allowed to decide, it's unclear how any weeding can ever be decided upon. Indeed, it's unclear if this rule would even allow you Kaj to ban Eugine!
Pattern A: Someone writes a stupid comment. I downvote the comment, you downvote the comment, Eugine downvotes the comment. The comment now has -3 karma, and the user lost 3 karma. If they continue writing stupid comments, their karma will drop to zero.
Pattern B: Someone writes a stupid comment, I go berserk and downvote all their 30 comments and 2 articles. The user lost 50 karma.
The difference is that in Pattern A, it was individuals making the decision, but it took more than one individual to sent a strong signal. Also, the signals were connected to comments: if the user wrote ten smart comments and ten stupid comments, they would see the difference. Thus, they can learn.
Having more rights than an average user is pretty much the definition of a moderator.
Like shminux, I am unhappy with the ban, which I consider both disproportionate and ill-advised. Eugine didn't break any specific rule, has (as far as I am aware) never been warned about his conduct by an admin, and yet you jump straight to the ultimate sanction. In my opinion, the correct moderator response is to tell him "Don't do this again." If he doesn't agree with that, or that is considered too lenient, the correct response is to remove his karma privileges. What purpose is served by banning him entirely?
Eugine is one of the highest quality posters here and the site will be poorer for his loss. I am not defending his behaviour in this instance but the punishment does not fit the crime.
Many many people have been complaining about mass downvoting for a long time now. A couple of people have also indicated that it has contributed to them not wanting to participate on LW any more. There have been multiple threads with hundreds of comments about this. Eugine is a very frequent visitor to this site, so I'm sure he was aware of all this. Had he stepped in to one of these threads and defended his actions, or apologized for them, or even discontinued the down-voting without admitting to it, I would agree that banning is disproportionate. But he simply ignored the whole discussion and continued surreptitiously block-downvoting people, despite all the disquiet it was causing.
That shows an almost pathological disregard for the well-being of this community and the opinions of its participants. I don't think banning is an inappropriate response.
That said, I also disagree with your opinion about the general quality of Eugine's comments, and it is quite probable that this is coloring my judgment in this matter.
I agree that it would have been better had Eugine defended himself, because he was obviously aware that he was making people unhappy. But from the sounds of it, he did try to justify/defend his position when contacted by the moderators. Therefore we shouldn't assume he was acting in bad faith; it is just as likely that, in the context that the downvote threads existed in, he didn't think he'd get a fair hearing or that discussion would be helpful. To be clear, I don't agree with his actions, but I don't see them as evincing a "pathological disregard" (your words) or anything like it.
To give an example: gwern has repeatedly insulted me, and recently made a subtle, but personal, jab at me in an Open thread comment. What should my response be? I don't see myself as morally obliged to respond in kind and get into an argument in hostile circumstances. I think the correct behaviour is to rise above it and ignore him . Yet that will also have the effect of confirming, in the mind of gwern and his sympathisers,that I am indeed a troll as he says. I would not like my silence (out of genuine concern for community harmony) to be used against me, particularly by a poster as(IMHO) intellectually bankrupt as gwern. But by the same token I think we shouldn't hold Eugine's public silence against him.
There is a pretty big difference between ignoring one commenter who doesn't like you and ignoring the complaints of a large proportion of the community. This wasn't just one or two people kvetching. It was a large number of people, including many (like me) not directly targeted by the behavior. I don't think you have any obligation to respond to gwern, but if a significant segment of the community objected strongly to your allegedly trollish behavior, and some valuable contributors said they no longer felt comfortable participating on LW because of that behavior, I would consider it "pathological disregard" for you to continue what you were doing as if none of this was happening, without addressing it in any way.
Keep in mind that Eugine continued (surreptitiously) with his block-downvoting not just after a number of users expressed their dissatisfaction, but also after the administration of this site made it clear they disapproved of the behavior. First Eliezer said that he was trying to track down the block downvoter (he failed for some reason), then Kaj put up this post. And Eugine kept down-voting. I don't see how this doesn't read as disregard for the community.
Perhaps he thought he was somehow making the community better by his actions (although it's much more plausible to me that he was just ridiculously mind-killed, since virtually all of the block-downvoting appears to be motivated by political disagreement), but he was still doing it in the face of the community's express wishes, and to the evident detriment of community relations. Thinking that his behavior would make the community better/more successful is so disconnected from the reality of what was actually happening that it qualifies as pathological disregard for the community, I think. Disregard for what people think and how they feel, and disregard for the observable consequences of his behavior.
I don't see a contradiction here. If someone is mind-killed, then from inside it seems like all people with different political opinions are idiots, and the debate would be more rational without them.
Thus in my opinion Eugine completely failed in the lessons about mindkilling and ethical injunctions, and was incompatible with the spirit of Less Wrong.
How could you possibly know this?
I would interpret it as signaling the mod's resolve rather than expressing an iron-clad precommitment. Changing one's mind based on new information is certainly not a trait Kaj lacks.
I read it as specifically resolving not to be moved by a Clever Arguer, or even many clever arguers; i.e. precommitting not to cave to political pressure. That is exactly the position a mod should take.
Moderation doesn't have to be perfect, but it should not be fickle. Walking the line between being authoritative and being authoritarian is difficult. If a mod shrinks back from that, you get a failure mode where mod actions are reversible by pressure alone, and mod authority carries no weight. Of course, you can also have an opposite failure mode where the mod behaves dictatorially or else simply uses their power too lightly.
So far I think Kaj has handled this well, whether or not I agree with the specific punishment handed down. He's acted with both weight and care. Here's hoping that continues.
It is also a disincentive against possible hundreds of comments debating what should have been done differently, etc. I am sure Kaj does not want to spend the rest of his life debating that.
Just remember the situation with the "basilisk", where Eliezer removed a few comments, and then years later we had threads after threads debating whether Eliezer should or shouldn't have done it, what he should have done instead, etc.
We should not punish moderators for making any decision by wasting additional hours of their time debating how wrong they were. I mean, we have less than one such decision per year, so it's not like we are living under a horrible oppressive censorship. Moderators have to make decisions, and of course someone will disagree. Especially on a website full of contrarians, saying that things should have been solved differently will always be the popular thing to do.
In fairness this seems like a sensible move, whether you agree with it or not. Whereas the basilisk handling was stupid any way I look at it.