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Lumifer comments on Voiceofra is banned - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (222)
Nancy, I support Scott's (Yvain's) approach. Just say you are a dictator and ban at a whim (or perhaps ban "virtue-ethically" rather than "deontologically" -- "we don't want your type around here.") Publishing rules just invites people to bend them.
There is a slight problem in that LW is not Nancy's personal blog to be shaped by her whims.
Voting for a new CEO is dramatically more effective than the board trying to micromanage the current CEO with rules. Find a reasonable person and let them be flexibly reasonable.
That only works if there is a mechanism for getting rid of CEOs who abuse their power. See comment above. Also note, that the victims of said abuse are generally not in a position to defend themselves.
In Eliezer's post about gardens dying through pacifism, he says that in online gardens, you should either trust he moderators, or garden. A place where moderators get really worried about who to moderate is a place where trolls get in.
There is a mechanism. It will be fruitless in this case, as Nancy is not abusing her power.
LW is not a corporation and I don't think it needs a Great Leader, especially of the CEO type.
As Romeo noted, Nancy was appointed roughly by popular acclaim (more like, a small number of highly dedicated and respected users appointing her, and no one objecting). I think it's reasonable in general to give mods a lot of discretionary power, and trust other veteran users to step in if things take a turn for the worse.
I believe that Nancy is conservative enough with management that this is not a real danger.
She's already abused her power at least once to ban someone for expressing opinions she doesn't like.
I was asked if I wanted to be moderator. There is no policy requiring me to only ban for formal reasons. The idea that people shouldn't be banned for content is somewhat popular and I tried following it, but it has since occurred to me that the places I've seen with no banning for content end up being a flavor of right-wing hostile that I don't like. We'll see how that plays out here.
I was patient with advancedatheist for a while, but he really doesn't like women, and shows it. Before I banned him, I decided that it was worth my ceasing to be moderator.
I hope I can notice it if any poster is that contemptuous of any demographic-- and if I fail to notice it, I have no doubt that I will be seeing complaints to draw it to my attention. While I'm here, I will not tolerate a pattern of such behavior, though I'm planning to be better about warnings.
I've seen concerns about LW turning into an echo chamber, but there's a tremendous amount to disagree about even if complaining about demographic groups is taken off the table. Also, an echo chamber in the sense of everyone agreeing with each other isn't the only way things can go wrong. You can also get very low information density because people are attacking each other repetitively..
I was one of those who said they didn't approve of banning for content. I don't know how others would take that, but I was referring to conceptual content; I think regularly showing hostility or contempt could definitely merit banning, but that is not an issue of conceptual content. Even if someone makes comparative statements about demographic groups, e.g. "Irish drink more alcohol on average than Romanians" (not that I know if that's true or not), that does not necessarily show any contempt for anyone. That is more a question of attitude, although perhaps you could infer that someone has such an attitude if he makes obviously false statements of that kind on a frequent basis.
I'm dubious that that constitutes abusing her power; AdvancedAtheist was highly and consistently downvoted for a long period of time before being banned.
That wasn't the reason she gave for banning him.
If we're doing the virtue ethical banning, then as long as we agree that the people in question deserved a ban, the specific reasons given for the ban aren't very important. The moderator may be reacting to a pattern that's clearly ban-worthy, but nonetheless hard to verbalize exactly, and thus misreport their real reason. Verbal reporting is hard.
It's reasonable for people to know why someone is banned because they want to know what might get them banned.
Yes, they are. They set the percedent for which other users get banned.
That's a big problem. By the verbal standard that Nancy used for banning advancedatheist, I and lots of people here are in danger of being banned. I just argued on SSC that it could be preferable for a country to limit how many refugees it takes in when they are fleeing the Holocaust, thus leaving the remaining ones to die horribly (if the country has taken in as many refugees as it can accommodate, this becomes a case of torture versus dust specks).
Of course, that would extend to banning people for supporting standard torture versus dust specks too.
It's an important part of rational discussion that we be able to say things that pattern-match to promoting horrible ideas.
There should be a difference between people who post the same controversial opinions over and over again like a broken record and people who write about a wide variety of topics and sometimes post controversial things, e.g. people like you. The latter should be allowed much more and they should not be banned even for the most extreme opinions, because they have a controversial idea because that's where their reasoning led them to, and not because they simply want to promote their popular pet idea here.
I think you misunderstand virtue-ethical banning. It's not about what you say, it's about who you are. "Precedents" are a deontological idea.
Yes, and in particular it matters which aspect of who you are is the one that got you banned?
This. If I read the ban announcement legalistically, I disagree with it. But if I read the offending post, together with multiple users' assurances that AA's posts were basically all like that--I don't want that in my garden.
I think there's been enough time and enough posts that Nancy could have figured out that she misreported her reason and said so, if that was in fact the case.
I haven't answered your objections to my style of moderation, but it isn't because I haven't been thinking about them. Unfortunately, I don't think I can manage the sort of clear boundaries I think you prefer.
The good news is that I'm extremely unlikely to want to ban you. You have a civil approach, and part of what gets people banned is lowering the tone or if you prefer, being a pain in the ass.
The hard thing is that there doesn't seem to be a good way to discuss the emotional effects of statements-- the only way to evaluate emotional effects is by what people say those emotional effects are, and in addition to whether you trust what people say about their emotions, language is ambiguous that there are frequently alternate interpretations, especially when the underlying question is how much of a welcome people feel in a venue. It might be more efficient to say that claims about emotional effect are entangled with implied claims about who's in charge and who matters.
The bad news is that I'm not at all sure I can formalize this, though my net gain in karma in this discussion suggests that I have an accurate sense of what LW is, even if it's possible that LW could be improved with a more open attitude about abhorrent viewpoints. (I don't think it would be an improvement, I'm just saying I acknowledge it's theoretically possible.)
Just getting a clearer idea of what is abhorrent and what isn't might help, but I really do think part of the problem is tone. There are policies which are vile no matter how abstractly and politely they're expressed (for example, slavery on a grand scale), but the amount of hatred added to policy adds an emotional sting.
I'm 85% sure that you're VoiceOfRa.
So what?
(EDIT: In case you don't know,
username2is an anonymous account that anyone can use, created after some jerk changed the password to theUsernameaccount formerly used for that purpose.)I'm well aware. It is therefore even more problematic if this account is abused --- note that there have been multiple confirmations that username2 has been used to downvote the same people that VoiceOfRa was downvoting before; in addition, VoiceOfRa has used the username2 account to start arguments with NancyLebovitz in a way that makes it look like a 3rd party is disagreeing with the decision, rather than VoiceOfRa himself. At the very least, it is better if everyone is aware of this situation, and ideally we would come up with a way to prevent such abuse.
The sudden very positive karma is extremely suspicious.
I was 85% sure at the time that username2's comment was posted. I'm now 98% sure for a variety of reasons.
I'm only 75% sure that the upvotes on "username2"/VoiceOfRa's comments above are from sockpuppets.
Given that her comment announcing her decision has 31 upvotes, people seem to disagree with you on this being an abuse of power.
More precisely: Net score of +31, 84% positive. So p/(p+n)=0.84 or 0.16p=0.84n and p-n=31, so (1-0.16/0.84)p=31, so +38-7.
In the comment that got him banned, Advancedatheist said:
just after he implied that lack of sexually available women was a viable explanation for two cases of mass murder.
I don't think it's "abuse of power" to obstruct the dissemination of such abhorrent views, especially at a website that has world-improvement as one of its central goals.
Is it an abhorrent view to turn away people fleeing the Holocaust? To eat babies? To kill a person for their organs? To divert a trolley to kill a person in order to save someone else? To state that some populations have higher IQ than others? To suggest that divorce is harmful to children?
The truth of a view is more important than whether or not it's abhorrent. I agree with entirelyuseless in that I endorse banning advancedatheist because he had a long string of low-quality posting but do not endorse banning him because of the content of that comment by itself.
Do you have any idea how many LW users that would apply to? Come to think of it, looking through polymathwannabe's recent history the highest quality content appears to be the open threads he initiates.
This illustrates the effect size of the action. It's one of a few things that seem to me to have the potential of changing the current situation, although it's likely useless on its own, and it's not obvious whether the change would be for the better. A few years ago I maintained a list of users whose comments I was subscribed to (via rss), and two other lists, marked "toxic" and "clueless". Getting rid of those users might make lesswrong a better place, if it won't scare away the rest.
It would certainly be for the worse if the banning was selectively enforced based on whether the mod in question liked the opinion being expressed.
I don't see a certainty in this. Policies have downsides. It's not clear how significant a bit of systematic injustice and bias would be compared to the other effects.
I'm much more tolerant of clueless than toxic, but even then there is a limit.
Amen. But the LW Terms of Use state:
This case went beyond LW's usual attitude toward debate; this was explicit advocacy of violence, which should always be treated as Serious Business.
Did you mean for the "advocacy of violence" link to go to https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Deletion_policy#Hypothetical_violence_against_identifiable_targets instead?
It seemed that one applied to the Wiki only, so I didn't use it.
As much as I am a feminist and find Advancedatheist's views insane and super-creepy, “we need to restore a healthy patriarchy where women can't get sexual experience until marriage” is not an advocacy of violence. Maybe he wants to restore patriarchy via peaceful means.
It's hard (at least for me -- YMMV) to read "can't get" (emphasis added; as opposed to e.g. "don't get") in a way that doesn't imply the threat of violence (broadly construed) against women who do try to get sexual experience before marriage. Then again, by such standards proposals to e.g. ban a particular drug would also count as advocacy of violence, so probably EY had something less broad in mind.
Or discussion of any laws whatsoever.
I meant the part where he implied that lack of sex justified mass murder.
I've read his Reddit comment. It doesn't seem like he's justifying (as in saying it's OK) mass murder, just claiming mass murder will continue if patriarchy is not restored. I get how you feel about AA, but you're stretching.
I believe the intent of EY's ban on violence was violence against identifiable individuals. Discussion and advocacy of violence against collective groups (the canonical example being supporting specific wars) is OK.