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.
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Notes -
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?
@Primaprimaprima, you asked for it, here it is.
how do you have the same impact on others?
A person is wrong. Why are they wrong? Could be a lot of things. Maybe its their values, maybe they've got bad information, maybe their reasoning is off, maybe they're just malicious. Hard to say. And from the other side, someone is telling you you're wrong, maybe any or all of these are true about that person. Meaningful dialog requires common ground and credibility. Without that, there isn't really much point.
I was a Blue for a number of years, and the Blue habits of thought die hard. I once had a discussion with a family member, who is probably best described in tribal terms as a Christian, about torture and the classic "terrorist with a ticking time bomb" scenario. I argued that obviously you should torture the terrorist, because it's worth it to save the lives of everyone else on the plane. He pointed out that you can't actually "save" a life; all humans die sooner or later. I'd been arguing about these sorts of Utilitarian scenarios for years, and I had honestly never thought about it that way.
And this is where the inferential gap starts becoming visible. Both Blues and Reds can recognize that you can't "save" a life, but the understanding of what that actually means is fundamentally incompatible. The Blue understanding, in my own experience, would be something along the lines of "of course, you dummy, this is why we have QALYs, you totally need to account for the differential age and health circumstances, etc, etc, of the various passengers." The Red understanding would be closer to:
...And I have zero confidence that the above communicates anything across the gap, any more than it did last time I tried. I could say that the Blue understanding is of a variable in a system, ultimately under our control, and that the Red understanding is an encounter with something vast and utterly beyond us, something that demonstrates that our aspirations to control are a childish pretense. I could say that for Blues, the problem is that your math might be wrong, and that for Reds, the problem is that you think you're in control, that your accounting of the variables actually correspond to reality in some meaningful way such that you can do math with them. I could say that Reds have a fundamental belief that death is deeply natural and that Good Deaths exist, and Blues, to a first approximation, view death itself as a pure negative and see death, at best, as a lesser evil in exigent circumstances.
And saying any of those things, I would expect Blues to disagree vociferously on all counts and throw out all sorts of reasons why I was wrong and uncharitable. And maybe they're right; all I can say is that I was deep, deep blue for many years, and the above is my best analysis of how I used to think and how I perceived other Blues thinking, even back when I agreed with them. I maintain that Blue thinking is founded on the assumption that systemic control is possible, and Red thinking is founded on the assumption that it is not.
All this to say, after spending years talking to Blue Tribe Rationalists, I was thinking like a Blue Tribe rationalist. I was thinking in terms of systemic control, doing my utilitarian calculations, shutting up and multiplying, mapping out the structure of "social conditions". For a given utility function, how do we maximize utility in the face of hostile actors? If they do this, then game theory implies we should do that, then they do such and we do so-and-so, and at every step what matters is the result. I argued with a lot of people, and all of them argued from within a similar frame, but argued that my variables were wrong or my math was wrong, and I found their arguments profoundly unpersuasive, and often increasingly radicalizing.
Hlynka rejected the whole frame. Unlike any of my other opposites, he made a solid argument that he shared my core values and my understanding of the facts, but that the calculations I'd built atop these were bullshit. He communicated, effectively, that all my appeals to game- and systems-theory were just obfuscation of the reality of my own individual choices. No one makes anyone else do anything, ever. All our actions are chosen, and we are each personally accountable for those choices. The point isn't the end result, because nothing ever ends: our choices are the only result that matters. In my case, I was choosing to embrace and nurture hatred, and I needed to stop doing that. I had forgotten all this, and he reminded me.
The funny thing is, he didn't even make this argument explicitly. I asked him what he thought we should do, given the situation. I was expecting another unpersuasive argument about how moderation would maximize the utility function better than my preferred strategy of extremism, and I was prepared to poke holes in that argument as I had dozens of times before. But his brief answer ignored such calculation entirely, and simply focused on what was the right thing to do, regardless of the results. His answer drew on many things I valued but had been ignoring for a long time, and by modelling what a better answer looked like according to my own values, he changed my mind. That changed my behavior in my conversations here and in a number of other ways not immediately visible through my interactions here.
That's the best description I can provide.
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Particularly considering the source...
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