naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
17d ago
I think that glazing an individual user in this fashion in a modhat comment is inappropriate and reflects badly on the moderation.
I think what you're saying here is that my explicit endorsement of Dean is a bad look and makes you feel like you might not get a fair shake at some future point should you disagree with the wrong person. If I have understood you correctly, then you have failed to understand the foundation, or the moderation system, or maybe both.
I am not an impartial arbiter tasked with tone-policing the forum. My task is to cultivate "a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases." To that end, I wield exactly one carrot: AAQCs. I have two sticks: warnings and bans. Community sentiment (via reports) drives both. The community also has a small carrot (upvotes) and a small stick (downvotes).
This is a reputation economy: the more carrots you have, the less likely you are to get the stick. As we often remind people: that does not mean carrots are a perfect defense against sticks! But for example a user with many carrots might get a warning where a user with no carrots would get a ban. People who contribute to the good of the community are deliberately favored. We have never made the slightest secret of this, but everyone has to learn it for the first time sometime, so maybe today is your day.
Yes, I will freely admit that this sentiment is coloured by the circumstance that I cannot stand this particular user.
I appreciate the candor, so in turn I will freely admit that your comparing moderation here to Putin's Russia gave me a good laugh. It also helped me to calibrate on your sense of proportionality, in a way that was probably not beneficial to your aims.
naraburns
nihil supernum
17d ago
I don't know about video games, but I think this point is often misunderstood.
Rockefeller didn't start by asking for 39 drops of solder. He asked for 38. When that wasn't enough, he asked for 39.
Yeah, that's explained right up front in the linked article.
Only by cutting live tissue can you be sure that all the fat is truly gone. If you haven't experienced at least some problems due to cutting too many people, then you haven't cut deeply enough.
That's certainly the MBA way. It is my growing suspicion, however, that if you've successfully cut all the fat, you have deprived your organization of something essential to its lasting and meaningful success--maybe it's a margin of error, maybe it's "play in the joints," I've seen many metaphors and probably none entirely captures the phenomenon, but it seems clear to me that corporate hyper-efficiency is objectionably likely to generate short-term numbers-go-up at long term expense to the organization, its people, and even often the general public.
naraburns
nihil supernum
18d ago
I think there is a lot of truth to what you say, but that part of (say) Intel's or Boeing's problems seems less applicable to the question of what video game companies are doing.
naraburns
nihil supernum
18d ago
Wow, so the ban on talking about Israel even includes sub-comments?
You haven't been banned from talking about Israel. It was just something you are pushing me toward contemplating.
The rest of your comment is sufficiently repetitious, uncharitable, etc. that I can see it was a mistake to attempt to have a productive dialogue with you concerning your bad behavior.
The threats or whatever are so lame.
My apologies. I will just go straight to a ban next time. Cheers.
I value his presence here highly.
His own AAQC record suggests that you are not the only one! Which is why I would like him to not decide to get himself banned by pulling this shit.
naraburns
nihil supernum
18d ago
Assume that you are Bioware executive - which will worry you more - that I have Dragon Age Veilguard pirated for 72 hours or that I haven't bother actually running it after I downloaded it?
Presumably, the executive is more worried about you not giving them money than not playing a game they probably don't even care about.
Squeezing maximum revenue out of minimum productivity is the name of their game. The pursuit of "efficiency" started in an intelligent place--"if 39 drops of solder is sufficient for these cans, then 40 is a waste"--but not everyone is smart enough to grasp the difference between cutting fat, and cutting flesh. It's often a lot more complicated than "how many drops of solder," and "being a trusted brand for the foreseeable future" is what (long) shareholders want--not what MBAs are trained to deliver. The modal executive doesn't care if the company goes out of business, the modal executive cares about KPIs. If the company goes out of business, "I made the numbers go up" is how the executive gets a new job.
Boeing, Intel, etc. are in trouble because they became pay pigs for MBAs instead of contenting themselves with keeping up their status as the best actual producers of important goods in their respective industries. Video game companies are much the same.
naraburns
nihil supernum
18d ago
Just say “fine, there is no evidence of Hamas employing preteen soldiers in recent years. Dean lied.”
There is no evidence of Hamas not employing preteen soldiers in recent years. Does that mean you are lying?
As far as I can see, Dean never specifically claimed that Hamas "definitely employed specifically preteen soldiers within the last X years," where X is whatever you want it to be. At most, Dean made general comments about the fact of Hamas employing child soldiers in the past (which they clearly have) being meaningful to Israel's military reaction (which is plausible, whether or not you would prefer they act differently). You are setting up your own goalposts (not unlike a statistician only writing about terrorism in America beginning January 2002) and then getting annoyed that Dean repeatedly declined to play your game. "Dean won't play on my terms" is not logically equivalent to "Dean lied," and to assert it that way is obnoxious and antagonistic.
According to the NYT Opinion team
That is not a trustworthy source, on my read. See? Two can play this stupid game. It's better if they don't, so that is why I'm telling you to knock it off. If you don't like the evidence provided to you, you can say, "well I'd prefer to see something clearer/stronger/whatever," but you cannot follow the comment to an AAQC roundup and start shitting on the process. It's obnoxious.
Just make a special rule on TheMotte that posters aren’t allowed to criticize Israel too much.
I'm not getting after you for criticizing Israel. I'm getting after you because you are grousing about someone else getting an AAQC, and you're doing it by breaking rules about charitable reading, responding to what people have actually written, etc. You're also attempting to rules-lawyer both that post and my moderation, which is obnoxious. That it also happens to be your hobby-horse topic is simply context. You even pulled the stupid language games trick here--"my last top-level post" throws in a completely unnecessary qualifier to determining whether you're a little too focused on something for the community's comfort. It attempts to set the goalposts in the place most beneficial to your preferred outcome. I'm not stupid; I can see what you're still doing, even after I've told you to knock it off.
I understand that it would not be a pleasant experience to put effort into making a top level post trashing Israel, only to have someone with a long history of excellent posts on military matters come along and utterly eviscerate your work--and furthermore, to do it to the overwhelming approval of the audience. So I'm actually gritting my teeth and being extra patient with you about this: stop it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
18d ago
The PDF I provided explicitly mentions children under 15, and elsewhere distinguishes between "children" and "adolescents," both of which Hamas has recruited in its history, in some cases quite recently. But one of the reasons for me to not get into the substance with you is that you have shown no inclination to actually accept evidence when it is provided to you. I anticipated you would do that, and now you have done it, so there is evidently no reason to continue to attempt to meet your demands. You apparently will not accept any evidence even when it is provided to you (as an aside, you do not seem similarly inclined to demand precise evidence when Hamas makes dubious claims--interesting!).
I think that, at best, you have actually failed to understand what Dean's post was really about. What you identify as its "heart" seems non-central on my reading. I suspect that you are doing something worse, though: I suspect that you are demanding rigor in isolation, in order to excuse your own uncharitable engagement.
Well, you are under no obligation to like Dean's post, or to accept his or my evidence of anything. You are under no obligation to like or agree with any of this. What you are under some minimal obligation to do, is not to engage in ways that degrade discourse here. The way you have chosen to grouse about this particular AAQC does not meet that threshold.
Moreover, about a year ago, I warned you that your engagement on the topic of Israel was verging into "single-issue poster" territory. It's clearly something you care about a lot, for reasons I cannot fathom. I am hesitant to impose a topic ban on you, but I am pretty protective of the AAQC process, and the discussion we're having right now is doing a lot to persuade me that I should simply ban you from discussing Israel anymore.
is this really the standard you want on themotte
Yes. Dean is an excellent poster with an absolutely stellar history of making quality contributions to the Motte. He is probably in the top 5 userbase favorites. You, too, have made some good posts in the past, which is one of the reasons I haven't banned you yet. But if you're gonna rain on the AAQC parade any time your ox gets gored, I'll count it against you.
naraburns
nihil supernum
18d ago
I’m surprised you can get a quality contribution for an empirical claim that you flatly refuse to supply evidence for.
You are welcome to respond to AAQCs, here or elsewhere, but grumping about someone else's award because their comment doesn't reinforce your preferred narrative is obnoxious at best.
I could find zero evidence from any organization that Hamas utilized pre-teen child soldiers in the past decade.
This is a mod-hatted warning, and we generally don't dip into substance on that, but Google gave me this (PDF warning) pretty readily, and it was far from the only thing Google gave me on Hamas child soldiers. I have no particular opinion on the reliability of the sources etc. and I'm not going to get into it with you, but your emphasis on "pre-teen" and the way you referenced "the past decade" while quoting Dean referencing "the last few decades" suggest very strongly to my mind that you are not engaging charitably, or even just honestly.
naraburns
nihil supernum
18d ago
Are the AAQC's not reviewed? I assumed mods looked at the reports and used discretion to make a cut.
Yes, something like 200-300 comments are nominated each month. Most of them are plausibly "quality." I read all of them, but the curation process is primarily driver by user sentiment--nominations are the number one thing, nobody gets an AAQC without at least one other user nominating them (and the mods rarely nominate anyone).
After user sentiment has been accounted for, the selection involves a lot of throwing stuff out before opting stuff in; I toss out obviously rule-breaking posts, or stuff that was clearly nominated as a joke. Eventually I get down to a reasonable number of posts to read them over again and think about what each one does. I try to get through the queue weekly but realistically I end up doing most of the work at the end of each month.
I have always regarded the AAQC process as a very important "carrot" for the community, and one of the best things to come out of the old SSC subreddit. I don't do nearly as much content moderation or community participation as I used to, for what are probably pretty predictable life-related reasons. But it's important to me that the AAQCs get done, which I suppose is why I have now been curating them for almost four years. (For contrast: when I took over, counting the AAQC reports from the SSC subreddit, the AAQC report had existed for about 3.5 years.)
But I would not be able to curate them at all if Zorba hadn't created a bespoke queuing system for the process. I think people underestimate just how much our little community depends on the technical prowess of a few key, committed individuals. The work I do, could be done by just about anyone; what makes me useful is that I am willing to actually and consistently do it. The work Zorba does, I wouldn't even know how to begin doing.
I disagree because if the vote on the side you actually like cannot win, not only are you not getting what you want, but often moving the country in the opposite direction.
I honestly don't understand how anyone could actually believe this. Sure, it's a common argument. But the only effect it has en masse is to ensure that people who don't like either party, never have any impact at all. And responding as if I just didn't understand the math is insane, because the whole point is that if you understand math at all, you already know that your vote is exceedingly unlikely to matter.
I'm sorry if I sound like a broken record, but I've lost track now of how many people I have to remind of this:
Your vote is more than 99.9% likely to make no difference at all.
The idea that your vote might bring about your preferred policies is mathematically absurd. For the same reasons, the idea that your vote might "mov[e] the country in the opposite direction" is also absurd. Indeed, it is more absurd, since the major American political parties agree on more than the disagree on (e.g., neither is monarchist, neither is communist [yet], etc.). Whether you vote, or do not vote, and who or what you vote for, will very nearly never alter the outcome of an election.
"But if enough people believe that..."
It doesn't make any difference! Yes, strategically, you want as many people who agree with you, to believe their vote makes a difference and to cast it accordingly. Yes, strategically, you want as many people who disagree with you to believe their vote makes no difference and thus stay home from the polls or vote in a way that does not otherwise hurt your desires. But statistically, if a lot of people understand that their vote doesn't matter, they are very likely to be more-or-less evenly distributed across both "sides!" Furthermore, you probably have no influence over the voters of either "side" anyway, so talking about voting in this manner is an exercise in pure imagination; it is a power fantasy. Now, granted: if you're Donald Trump, or you're Kamala Harris, or you're Taylor Swift, or even if you're maybe Scott Alexander, and you have the power sway voting blocs? Sure, this is a great piece of rhetoric, a potentially useful lie to tell, etc. I don't deny that major political parties (and their partisans!) have every reason to peddle this claptrap.
But as a matter of fact, everyone has some actual reason to vote (or not) as seems best to them, and virtually no one has any reason to vote as a bloc (if that's not what actually seems best to them)--with the exception of vanishingly rare edge cases where their one vote actually makes a difference. This sometimes happens at the local level, so the fewer people there are voting in a given election, the more actual reason you have to cast your vote strategically. But also: in such cases, it's virtually guaranteed that you are actually voting as seems best to you, and not merely casting a vote to prevent the greater of two evils from taking office. (Many local elections are lucky to get two whole candidates in the first place.)
If making a difference in politics matters to you, then you need to secure political office for yourself, or become famous enough that a lot of people take their cues from you--ideally, many many thousands. At which point you will have some actual reason to tell this lie. (Just be careful not to fall for your own marketing--it's not your vote that matters, it is your influence over many votes!) Until then, the vast majority of people who say/believe the "you must vote for one of the two viable candidates" lie are merely someone else's useful tool.
naraburns
nihil supernum
20d ago
But all this is entirely beside the point. If it seems best to you that you should vote for a major party candidate, then do it! And if the emergent pattern is a "two party system," okay, that's the emergent pattern! What's completely bonkers is telling people that
if you dislike Trump more than Harris you must support Harris and vice versa
That's just bullshit, and someone declining to vote for either is much more likely to have a positive effect, insofar as it has any effect at all, than forcing oneself to pick a "lesser of two evils" instead.
When I am arguing against the efficacy of individual strategic partisanship, "but then a group following this advice might cause the wrong party to win!" is not a meaningful response. Yes, if one side is collectively strategic and another isn't, then that other will lose the election. But (presumably) you don't have any control of either side, collectively, and your defection or cooperation will basically never make any difference, so you have no compelling reason to behave as if it it would. If everyone could be counted upon to behave as I am suggesting, it would actually be good for our election processes. If they can't be so counted upon, then you lose nothing by behaving better anyway.
naraburns
nihil supernum
20d ago
If one side in the election all suddenly came to this realisation and freely discussed and acknowledged this fact, while the other still maintained the fantasy that 'every vote matters', then side B would win a landslide, and in a sense they've almost willed their fantasy into being.
Indeed. And if everyone were to suddenly come to this realization all together, and realize that everyone else had reached this realization, then we'd almost certainly elect many more "third party" candidates. This is why I always push back against the "you must pick one of these two" argument: because it is false, and we'd all be better off if everyone treated it as false. Far better for people to simply vote to express what they think is genuinely best, than to imagine themselves strategically selecting a particular outcome.
What I mean is that both for democracy at large and for your preferred candidate, it's pretty important that the general proposition that every vote matters is considered to be true, even if it isn't.
So close! It's pretty important for the Republican and Democrat parties that the general proposition that every vote matters is considered true, even though it isn't. Democracy at large is better off without building a consensus around falsehoods.
naraburns
nihil supernum
20d ago
If you're not voting with reference to the outcome, why bother going at all?
What are you talking about? I didn't say people should vote without reference to the outcome. I said people should vote as seems best to them.
If you think your vote will affect the outcome, you're probably just bad at math. What do you think it means to vote "with reference to" the outcome? Here's my take: a vote is your opportunity to express a preference to the public concerning how the public should be run. There is presumably some outcome that you desire, and voting is a system we have in place to allow you to express that (or not). So of course you vote "with reference to" the outcome, if you decide to vote at all--you just don't vote in a way that implies you actually have some control over the outcome. If instead of expressing your desire, you try to influence the outcome in a strategic way, then again: you're probably just being bad at math. It's not a big deal, you being bad at math is fine, and even your imagining that your vote matters to the outcome is a relatively harmless delusion.
But if you cast your vote because you think it will influence the outcome, then you'll influence the outcome equally well by staying at home and throwing darts at a picture of Donald Trump, and letting the people who actually care about public discourse do the voting.
naraburns
nihil supernum
21d ago
I'm not persuaded that Trump or his allies believed that what they were doing was assembling fake electors. Just as I suspect the people trying to recruit faithless electors (or the Representatives declining to certify) did not, for even an instant, regard themselves as attempting to "steal" the election.
This is not the sort of thing that people generally think of in a point-by-point tit-for-tat. Rather, the dirtier the other side plays, the more justified one feels about playing dirty. The particulars are less important than the trend, because it is the trend and not the particulars that point toward what is likely to come next.
Obergefell was/is a very plausible extension of previous fourteenth amendment jurisprudence
Yeah, no, not even remotely. Obergefell was an unusually vapid decision even for Kennedy. He should have retired to write poetry, because he was apparently so tired of doing jurisprudence he forgot to include any in Obergefell. At best, it raises the idea that because marriage is rooted in history and tradition (which is what makes it a cognizable right), same sex marriage must also be rooted in history and tradition. This is absurd on its face.
suffice it to say conservative courts have been just as willing to impose on the states
It's okay for the federal government to impose on the states, when the Constitution clearly authorizes it. But it's probably only fair to note that I also hate stuff like Commerce Clause jurisprudence; my concerns about Constitutional Law are admittedly far out of step with the legal profession and the practical reality that substantial portions of the Constitution are functionally dead letter.
There doesn't seem to be a notable political valence to legislating from the bench.
But there is a noticeable political valence to respecting precedent and history. Less today than in the past, I'll grant, but when the precedent is really bad (and Roe was really bad, even Ginsberg regarded it a poor decision despite supporting its result), what else can you do?
naraburns
nihil supernum
21d ago
But I'd argue that fake electors are much worse
You and a lot of other people! But that's one of the main reasons why norm violations are bad: they provide excuses for others to escalate. By declining to clearly and unequivocally condemn the faithless elector scheme, Democrats created a reason for Republicans to begin thinking seriously about ways to preserve victory in the face of electoral defeat.
Treating every conflict as the most important conflict ever and buying into the narrative that "whatever bad thing my side does is justified, because the other side is even worse" locks us all into a race to the bottom. Regardless of Tuesday's outcome, I have no confidence at all that the result will be a cooling of the culture war divide.
naraburns
nihil supernum
21d ago
Both are predictions based on knowledge, but reflect very different observations.
But two things can be true at the same time.
I do not think that either political party is engaged in organized attempts to "steal" elections. And yet election-influencing prospiracies arise with alarming regularity, whether that be in the form of lawsuits, robocalls, social media posts, or whatever. We even have hard evidence of such prospiracies arising in the context of elected officials and government employees (Trump campaign wiretapping, Strzok) and even rising to the level of full-blown conspiracies (Watergate).
None of that precludes the possibility that Harris is also sufficiently appealing, or Trump sufficiently revolting, for her to manage a "genuine" electoral victory. I find myself basically persuaded by the big city numbers and the suburbia polls that Kamala can pull off an electoral victory. But I am not a pollster! Math is not my thing! I would not encourage anyone to make bets on anything I predict, ever; I'm far too reflexively skeptical to ever feel very sure about anything, even ridiculous things. So I also have to think about the possibility that I've been misled by the polls. It certainly wouldn't be the first time!
What all that other stuff does preclude is any ability in me to feel highly confident about the results-as-eventually-reported. This is the argument Clinton (IIRC) initially brought out when Trump in 2016 started making noise about stolen elections. My memory is that she (or maybe it was one of her supporters) correctly observed that the outcome of the vote is just part of what's important; the other part is that people have to believe it wasn't rigged. Well, this painted her into a bit of a corner when she lost, and it took her a little while to reverse course and get in on the "Trump is not a legitimate president" narrative.
But eight years later we're all living in "broken window" territory. Democrats* tried to actually steal the 2016 election, via Russian dossiers and faithless elector schemes and votes against certification and throwing riots and spurious impeachment attempts. Republicans* largely followed suit in 2020. If you think your opponent is likely to play dirty, then you're a little more likely to play dirty, and if your opponent knows you're likely to escalate, then they prepare to escalate. Whether we're talking about nuclear war, rioting and looting, or election shenanigans, the logic is the same.
* "Not all..."
De-escalation is hard.
naraburns
nihil supernum
21d ago
If you’re a “bellwether voter”, it could be the case that by deciding to vote, you resolve reality so that others like you have also voted and your preferred candidate gets in.
Sure, but if anything this would appear to strengthen my case. If you don't vote for Jill Stein because you don't think she can win, then you're collapsing the waveforms where everyone who wanted to cast a protest vote actually did so; in so doing, you could very well be collapsing the waveforms where Jill Stein actually wins.
Obviously if you’re a two-boxer this is superstitious nonsense!
It's definitely superstitious nonsense, but isn't that noumena in a nutshell?
naraburns
nihil supernum
21d ago
What's "high?" What's "stolen?"
I think it is a little more likely than not that Harris pulls off an electoral victory without anyone stuffing ballot boxes, and I think she does this by virtue of corporate news media having become the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. This is why Bezos is getting such pushback on seeking to gain media credibility outside the blue tribe: news no longer exists to be credible, it exists to build consensus for your tribe and punish the outgroup. Does that count as "stealing" an election? My inclination is to say no! But when you add to that the political influence of teachers unions over indoctrinating children, the moneyed influence of woke capital, the cultural influence of Hollywood, the behind-the-scenes influence of government employees... at some point it seems like the idea that any election is the result of rational discourse or democratic consensus just becomes laughable in a way that discourages the appellation "legitimate."
Those same forces (news media, schoolteachers, woke capital, Hollywood, "deep state") are additionally committed to preventing a Trump inauguration even if he wins electoral victory, and so I think it is at least somewhat likely that, conditional on a Trump electoral victory, there will again be significant efforts to prevent his inauguration.
I feel like you are confusing several separate issues. Nothing I've done in this thread is aimed at "protecting a user from criticism." Coffee_enjoyer was breaking the rules and obnoxiously axe-grinding. His interpretation of Dean's post was bad on a rule-breaking level, and additionally I was annoyed that he had brought that obnoxiousness to the AAQC thread, specifically. If anything, it is coffee_enjoyer whose AAQCs were operating to protect him, here.
Separately, everything I said about Dean being a good poster was in direct response to coffee-enjoyer's obnoxious, overwrought, and rhetorical "is this the kind of posting you want!?" The answer was "yes, that's the point of the AAQCs, these are the kinds of posts we want." I was trying to find a way to help coffee_enjoyer understand why he was being moderated. Ultimately, I seem to have failed to find such a way; coffee_enjoyer seems to me far more interested in being angry about the disagreement between him and Dean (and, by extension, my moderating him over his approach), than in understanding that the problem is not the substance, but in the uncharitable and antagonistic nature of his engagement.
Your complaints are not at that level, but your candor over your distaste for Dean suggests to me that you are making a similar mistake: allowing animus toward a user to blind you to the fact that this is not ultimately about the user, but about the rules. In your little chart:
You've left out my quite explicit point that AAQCs are not a bar to banning. Users cannot get away with "more extreme posts" indefinitely. Some of our best users, along with our worst, have, eventually, eaten bans--always, after deciding that they no longer wished to follow the rules, even perfunctorily. That's genuinely a problem for us! It's something the mod team talks about with alarming regularity. It's really, really frustrating to take someone with years of quality contributions, including former community moderators, and hand them a 366 or a perma or whatever. We don't want to do that! If this was about picking favorites or even picking preferred positions, Hlynka wouldn't be banned. Certain alts still kicking around here probably would be banned. But ultimately, no matter what percentage of the community is on "your side," if you're not going to follow the rules, you're going to get banned.
I can see why you might think that; it's not entirely wrong. But we do engage in a fair bit of "affirmative action." We cut people some slack when they get dogpiled and lash out. We try to give sufficient breathing room to heterodox views. Moderation is adaptive and qualitative. But like AAQCs, just having a minority view is not a perfect shield. The rules will still apply, if less quickly or harshly.
In the end, we can't maintain this space at all if we worry too much about what might or might not "drive users away." One person's final straw is someone else's welcoming hearth. I've been moderating the Motte for more than five years, and I honestly never believed it would last as long as it already has. So I'm afraid I find myself entirely unmoved by your concerns. My goal is not to build this space into anything in particular. I have no KPIs. I just serve the foundation to the best of my ability, until the time comes when that's no longer needed, or wanted, or necessary.
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