Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
Stagnant is fine; decaying is bad. The Motte is decaying. My suggestion was to stop banning good quality longtime posters just because the Nazi contingent starts diligently reporting their every plausibly inflammatory statement, but the mods seem to disagree.
Which longtime posters were banned recently? I don't even know, there used to be a weekly thread about who got banned in the last week.
All I can think of was Hiynka and he's a far-out third (fourth?) positionist calling 80% of the political spectrum progressives.
FarNearEverywhere (sort of).
Ymeskhout doesn’t really count either.
You can filter the mod log like so and look for your favorites!
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Not a bannable offense. In fact, plausibly true, given some conceptual understanding of those words and the concepts underlying many people's positions. Kinda funny that this is what comes top-of-mind when thinking about why he was banned. Really bolsters jkf's claim.
He perpetually misrepresented his opponent and refused to engage with points actuality made, and he was snotty while doing it.
His average quality of engagement was low.
I read through the various comments cited for the ban, and I didn't really see much of this. I saw a more direct, "I think you're 'hiding your power level'." I don't think I've seen any clarity from the mods on whether stating such beliefs are against the rules.
Here, I think he did so in a way that was actually kind of reasonable. He openly and clearly stated that he rejected the underlying framework that led to the point being made. He gave reasons why he rejected it. This is good comment behavior, even if it really pisses off some of the people who have their entire underlying framework rejected.
This is probably the most accurate claim. Poor aesthetics. Oof for a permaban.
I think any commenter that continues to engage in discussion is going to end up with a low average, depending upon how "engagement" is defined. All long comment threads, for the sake of not-taking-infinite-time result in some amount of paring down, dropping some things that feel incidental, etc. I've had plenty of experience of times when I've repeated a point that I thought was significantly not incidental, calling out that it was dropped, perhaps on grounds that they thought it was incidental, but that I thought it was not. It is only after a couple/few repeated refusals (without explanation) that you can essentially build a pattern that they're simply ignoring a point because it's inconvenient, rather than due to believing that it's incidental or because they reject the underlying framework of the point.
Kind of hilarious that even Darwin came to his defense on this topic of dropping some points in the interest of time and trying to get to the crux, considering that he was a prime example of someone who would do the precise thing I'm contrasting - repeatedly refuse to engage at all with a repeatedly-stated point that was simply inconvenient (among other bad commenter things that he did).
He would not accept that many of us are color-blind meritocracy fans and recognize the factual reality of HBD. That combo just broke his brain. Perpetually misrepresenting the views of one’s opponents when explicitly corrected is shitty and intolerable behavior.
He would avoid dealing with the concrete evidence provided for the reality and utility of IQ, and its correlation to racial groups. He would make deluded attacks on academia—where IQ is not so popular a metric—and fail to acknowledge the contradiction. This is not denying the underlying framework. It’s being retarded and illogical. Several people who don’t like HBD pointed this out at the time.
If he had been consistently retarded but polite on the IQ issue, he wouldn’t have caught the ban and his average comment quality would have been good. Civility and order break down when those with status consistently and flagrantly violate rules and norms and the mods’ hands were forced.
Personally, I don’t care whether he caught a forever ban or just a really long one. Redemption is nice when you can get it.
To be completely honest, as someone who doesn't really participate in the IQ/HBD wars, this mostly sounds like regular petty whining that all sorts of people have lists of for their pet issues. When I've looked at the actual comments people cite for their similar claims, my statements hold.
Well lots of people, including the mods, saw it differently.
Lots of people see things lots of ways. All hail the mods and all that. As for me and my house, we will read the comments that people cite to justify the way they see things.
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Implying someone is "hiding their power level" (i.e. concealing their true beliefs) is not in itself cause for a ban. It is, once again, more about tone (how you say it) than about the specific accusation. Are you trying to engage someone or are you just trying to "call them out" or bait them into flaming back?
Once more: Hlynka's ban wasn't any one post (even if it was one post to which his permaban was eventually attached). It was a pattern of behavior going back years in which he would continually behave in an antagonistic manner, we would tell him to please stop doing that, and he would (sometimes explicitly) tell us that he was not going to stop doing that because he thought his principles and how he thought the Motte should be run were more important than Zorba's policies or our wishes. And you know, fair enough. In a sense I respect that he stood on his principles. But he did so knowing we were going to ban him, because we told him we were going to ban him if he didn't stop flagrantly violating the rules and all but thumbing his nose at us. In his calmer moments he would even tell us that he understood why we kept modding him (but that he wasn't going to stop doing what he was doing).
A long term good poster and someone with a lot of respect in the community absolutely refused to abide by the rules. Eventually, after many, many bans of escalating severity and pleading with him to knock it off or go touch grass, he got banned for good because we were tired of this dance (and of people asking us why Hlynka got to get away with so much).
Hlynka committed "Suicide by janny."
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Indeed not, but deciding that rules are beneath you and that Charity requires too much effort, and then acting on that belief, is. My understanding is that Hlynka was neither surprised by nor in disagreement with his ban.
That doesn't mean that it was good for the state of the community.
It's not clear how not banning him would be good for the community either. I'm not sure "good for the community" is on the table.
I miss him badly, and it's absurd to me that he's gone and I'm a mod. I originally wrote the above when I was expecting to be banned myself in relatively short order, and conversations with Hlynka fundamentally changed my perspective for the better.
It's usually pretty clear which users are heading for a ban, and I've been trying for a while now to find ways to engage with them constructively to try to stop that from happening, on the theory that the right conversation might be able to turn things around for them the way it did for me. Sometimes it sorta-kinda works. Sometimes it doesn't; I'm still frustrated that I never got to finish my arguments with fuckduck9000. In any case, the universal constant is that no one is happy with the results.
Indeed -- and if nobody on the mod team is prepared to consider the reason that long-time users are ending up in this downward spiral, it will pick up steam until the place is of no interest to anyone.
I think it's a separate issue at work, but on the other side of the aisle it might be worth considering that the new scene seems to have driven off darwin -- so attracting new posters of diverse viewpoints is probably a non-starter without some serious changes made.
So what do you think we should have done about Hylnka? Honest question, because we warned (and warned and warned and warned and warned and warned and warned and warned and warned and warned ....) him, going back to the old subreddit, giving him far more chances after multiple bans than almost anyone else in the history of the Motte has ever been given. And we took a lot of flack for that (because as much as you may like and miss him, and like @FCfromSSC, I really liked him and really, really wanted him to stop doing things requiring us to ban him also), he was equally hated by many, and a lot of people thought (with some justification) that he was getting away with way too much that no one else would get away with. So should we have just let him keep going forever after telling him, explicitly, multiple times, "If you keep doing this, we are going to have to ban you, we don't want to do that, stop doing this pretty please?"
Yes, banning Hylnka was (IMO) a loss for the community. I also don't see what other choice we had.
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I just linked my best assessment of the reason. What's yours? What's wrong and what should we do about it?
I'm on record arguing at length that Darwin was one of the worst bad actors this community has ever had, and one of the conditions I gave for joining the mod team was that I'd never be asked to mod him or to be involved in mod decisions about him in any way. Why do you think he left? More generally, what are the serious changes you think should be made?
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How has your perspectrve changed for the better?
He forced me to confront the hate in my heart, and reminded me that it is my own responsibility to reject it rather than embracing it. He did this in a way that probably no one else, here or in real life, could have done. That's about the best, shortest description I can provide across the inferential gap.
I crave insights. What should I know, or how should I look at things, to have the same effect?
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Particularly considering the source...
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The mods have always had the problem that their number one overarching goal is to minimize shade, never to maximize light. Thus the steady stream of bans for many of the best contributors starting from the old reddit days.
Depends what you consider "best contributors." A lot of the best contributors are also the spiciest ones - i.e., the ones who write long polemics about how their outgroup absolutely sucks donkey balls. And people who share their feelings about that outgroup stand up and cheer, and get very upset that someone who writes so eloquently about how their hated outgroup sucks donkey balls gets banned. But the thing about those people is that it's usually not the essays about their outgroup sucking donkey balls that gets them banned (because they take great care to write those in a Motte-appropriate fashion). It's the fact that their seething hatred of their outgroup and anyone who would defend them leaks everywhere, so while the sucking-donkey-balls essays get AAQCs, their snippy, condescending, and antagonistic posts directed at people who disagree with them eventually get them banned.
Now if you think we should just let people who write really good donkey-ball-sucking polemics get a pass for insulting everyone they disagree with right and left, that would be one way to "maximize light." But it would also maximize heat.
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