This a post that started in response to the question posed by @Amadan in regards to what should be done about Hylnka, and my thoughts in regards to the parent post about the state of the Motte.
The state of the Motte
So I'm a relative newcomer to the space and only lurked on /r/themotte occasionally, so I don't have a strong opinion on Hlynka one way or the other. I don't like him, I don't hate him, because I don't really know him.
But if you believe banning Hlynka is a net negative, that goes to reason that maybe there are some aspects of the rules that need consideration taken into account. I'm going to give my naive take since I haven't seen anyone else really answer the question recently regarding what should be done.
Perhaps there is an optimal ratio of good posts to bad posts that get some leeway. Or put another way, you get a pass for every "x" amount of good posts. Let's start with an extreme example. If someone makes 100 AAQC contributions to 1 ban-worthy post, I personally would rather want them to be allowed to keep posting even if they make 50 ban-worthy posts. I think to a certain extent, the mods already do this by gut feeling, which is why they have been lenient with Hylnka for so long. But because the rules don't allow for this, they don't have a good enough justification to allow for it. In the end, they became a slave to the rules. That being said in my opinion, the rules are actually really lenient and flexible, and I have seen the mods be plenty lenient. A place like Reddit nowadays will just perma ban you, most bans here are for a day or a week.
The more often you post, the more likely it is that one of your posts will be inflammatory or say something that people don't like and report you for. It's not ideal for people to just post and then not respond to people's responses, otherwise it's not that different from posting an article from an outside source. The controversial ideas are the most exciting. It's why the culture war stuff is the most popular. But controversial ideas are the ones that generate the most heat. The person proposing or defending the controversial idea will have many, many people piling on them. It's not easy being on the defending on, even if you deserve it.
Conversations on forums and the internet are weird. Human beings don't engage in conversation like this in the real world. Expecting people to be civil 100% of the time is an unrealistic expectation, especially in a place where your ideas are constantly attacked and challenged. People argue politics with their own family all the time, and these discussions can get heated, but at the end of the day, they still get together to eat at the same table. If someone garners enough goodwill in the community and makes good contributions, does it not stand to reason that they should be given more leeway? Even in our courts, where no man is above the law, the punishment is often adjusted based on the circumstances of the crime. At the same time, a forum means you can take the time to formulate your thoughts before hitting "post". I've seen some posts where people say they wrote this long post, it somehow got deleted, and then they realized how angry/inappropriate/inflammatory they were being and thus were able to write something of higher quality instead.
Are man made for rules, or rules made for man? Do the rules today really serve both sides of the ideas proposed by this place? To optimize for light, and to minimize heat? The common sentiment I see is that currently the enforcing of the rules minimizes heat, but doesn't optimize for light.
How do the people who wanted Hylnka banned feel now that he's gone from space? Do they feel the motte better now or worse for it? Do you genuinely want to see all these long-time posters banned? Why? Is it because you think they are bad for the community? Why do you think that? Are you using the rules for a personal vendetta, or are you genuinely trying to help make the Motte a place where people with opposing viewpoints can come together to discuss ideas to seek the truth? If all the people with opposing viewpoints are banned, how can you achieve that?
You aren't obligated to respond to someone. If they attack you in the comments just block them so you don't have to read it. Should the average user really be concerned with how others might interpret someone's statement? If the concern is how other potential newcomers may feel about the community, is that a valid concern today? When @Armin asked about the state of the Motte, most people agreed it's stagnant or decaying. The newcomers are not really coming.
Where are the people with counterpoints?
For the time I have spent here, I don't think I got any serious challenge from someone across the political aisle from me. I have gotten a few people challenging my ideas which I am immensely grateful for since they helped find the flaws in my thinking, but if I look back on them those don't tackle my core set of beliefs and were over relatively minor things. The one person who I did challenge @guesswho never responded to my response to his ideas almost 4 months ago and he's been gone for a month now. In other words, I have yet to be challenged on my core fundamental beliefs. To be honest, part of me is scared to even have that debate. It's uncomfortable. I'm fairly certain I will take it personally. Maybe the rules make more sense in that kind of environment. But my feeling, and based on reading what a lot of other people have posted, is that environment is long gone. The rules were built for different populations.
Every once in a while you get people from the opposite side of the political aisle, call everyone here nazis/far-right in an inflammatory manner and they get banned. I think their general sentiment is correct, though - this place is currently filled with moderates and people on the right political, and very few on the left. When I make a low-effort comment that would align with the red-tribe, I get tons of upvotes. When I see someone from the opposite side make a high-effort comment, it gets many downvotes. Now upvotes and downvotes don't mean much regarding the truth or quality of the post, but they do reveal the general user sentiment response to it.
Every community is composed of several groups - the mods, the prolific posters, people who post occasionally, people who mostly just upvote/downvote, and the lurkers. Forget about the lurkers, their opinions don't matter. In my opinion, smaller communities like the Motte can exist mainly due to the relationship between the mods and the prolific posters. I don't mean to sound rude but the prolific posters are abnormal. Most users post only occasionally. Most of us only respond to top-level posts and rarely make any ourselves. But the prolific posters have an insane output rate. Many of them have an insane high-quality output rate. Because their output is so high, they tend to be able to dictate the general flow of ideas. In other words, they're the ones that form the core of the community. They're the ones that make most of the AAQC posts. They're the ones whose ideas people will recall and remember the most.
As many others have said, each time a prolific user is banned, you lose a small piece of the community. To maintain or grow a community, you need more such people to come in to fill in the gap. But these people, because they're so abnormal, are rare to come by. For the people who have been here a very, very long time, has the void been filled? As much as the vision and the rules help shape a place, it's ultimately the people that form a community.
Solutions - What should we do?
Having said all that, I do agree with the mod's vision that the rules are what have helped make the Motte into this unique space on the internet. I don't believe in making big sweeping changes to existing communities because once you make those big changes it's no longer the same community. I think people have mentioned how other offshoots from the culture war communities from the SSC days have failed to survive to the degree the Motte has. That indicates to me the rule does have value in them.
My proposal
Here's my modest proposal: Once a month (or longer, maybe twice a year) users on the forum are allowed to propose unbanning someone. Maybe limit who can make these proposals so not just anyone can propose and abuse the system. Then the community can vote to allow someone back in. If a certain threshold is met (for example 60%), then the user is unbanned. If for example, 90% of the community would rather want someone to keep posting even if they make the occasional inflammatory comment, should they deserve to be permanently banned? After all, they said were mean words, they didn't kill anyone, they didn't incite violence, they didn't harass people.
This is an extremely minor change that I think could be implemented. Maybe it's a dumb idea and won't result in anything. Maybe it'll make things worse. The person likely won't come back. But maybe it could be the start of stopping the motte from stagnating.
Of course, like I said, I'm naive in this. I don't really know the history, or the people who have come and gone. I can read and read about but I will never truly understand it. Some of you guys have been around this space for over a decade. Maybe all this has already been discussed and thought about and tried by people multiple times. But this community is still new and exciting stuff to me, and I wish I could get to experience even a little bit of that magic of the past. If I think this place is better than many other places online now, just how much better was the Motte in the past for people to lament the state it is in today?
Criticizing is easy. Pointing out problems is easy. Complaining is easy. Coming up with solutions is hard. Coming up with good solutions is almost impossible. I'm sure the mods have thought about this plenty, and people on the forum too, but I don't really see the full discussions. There's got to be at least 1 person in this place that would have a good idea.
Solutions from other people
Some other ideas I've seen other people propose:
- Just don't ban long-time high-quality posters. They get a free pass for being here so long and continuing to contribute to the community.
- Have a separate, no modding no rules thread.
- Stop (or minimize) tone policing. If there is an argument, in line with the tone policing, then that gets a free pass.
My dumb solutions
To help generate more discussion, I'm just going to throw whatever comes to my head here in this list, whether they are good or bad or feasible or not:
- If you get banned for inflammatory comments but have made good contributions before, you are limited to just posting top-level comments for a period of time, but you are not allowed to respond. If you break the rules to try to continue a previous conversation you get banned.
- If a conversation gets inflammatory it gets pushed into a black-box so nobody else can see it, or it auto collapses and you have to opt in to see it
- Allow users that would have been banned to keep communicating, but users must opt-in into an "I want to see everything" option and they no longer have the rights to request moderation once opted in. All conversations starting from these banned users and subsequent child posts get hidden unless you opt in.
- If you are banned, you must steelman your opposition point of view to an acceptable level to the person you were being antagonist against in order to get unbanned ahead of the ban timer
- Every 1 AAQC counters 1 bannable offense
- A converse to the community unban option - a decision of whether or not to ban of a prolific high-value contributor gets pushed to the community.
Let's have a discussion.
What do you, fellow Mottizens, think? I see a lot of complaining and only a few people have provided some ideas for a solution. This discussion about the moderation and state of this site has been popping up across multiple threads every week. How about the community actually get together and discuss the merits of actual proposed solutions, as well as provide their own solutions, instead of having fights with the mods every time someone gets moderated? Worst case scenario, at least all the discussion is now centralized for a place to reference for the future.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
We are bogging down in semantics about what constitutes a 'tribe'. I think on a fundamental level of how you feel the world operates (by divine plan) you're in the same group as those rural baptists. If you also agree with their stances on wedge issues and are socially conservative then you're absolutely in their wheelhouse. It is like a family, you may not like your relatives, but they are still your relatives, not mine.
I'd categorise 'relatives' differently, I think? My relatives are not the people I agree with. My relatives are something closer or more intuitive than that. I'd say it's more about where I instinctively feel at home, or what feels natural to me, and that means that things like language or custom count for more than agreement on any specific issue.
That said, you are correct that this is a semantic dispute. We would presumably both agree that in terms of custom or background, I fit with other well-educated middle-class suburban people in knowledge careers, even though in terms of ideas or substantive metaphysical beliefs, I probably fit in better with other groups.
I think custom is a better way to define the boundaries of 'tribe', and closer to the way Scott defined it in his original essay, but you can make words mean anything you like, so that's up to you, I guess.
(For what it's worth, I'm not downvoting you - I don't downvote conversations that I'm enjoying, and I don't downvote just because of disagreement. I only downvote if I believe the Motte would be better off if that post didn't exist, and you've certainly not hit that point for me.)
That divergence in beliefs and culture doesn't cause some cognitive dissonance? Even if it does I suppose it is manageable if the benefits to you are there.
Ah, maybe I am looking at this the wrong way. It could be a huge benefit to the ego! When one is with PMC folks you get to feel morally and culturally (wedge issues) superior and when one is with your religious followers you get to feel cognitively and culturally (art, science, tech, literature) superior. I might have to try this on for size.
Well, that's a very uncharitable way of putting it. I'm not trying to feel superior to anyone. Nor do I feel like I'm being hypocritical in any way.
Perhaps, I wasn't trying for that tone. Just seems like you want it both ways. The urbane sophisticate with the strengthened faith of a revivalist preacher. I just don't see how you square that circle. A cursory examination of reality should show a person with the introspection and intelligence you clearly do posses that there is no "God" with a capital G out there, let alone the one you're lucky enough to believe in, I will say the sheer audacity to believe or claim to believe is commendable.
I'm certainly not trying to claim a special genius or anything - on the contrary, I think the implication that being Blue Tribe is desirable or preferable to being Red Tribe is probably just prejudice or tribal bigotry. I'm just trying to be honest about being firstly a believer and secondly from a stereotyically Blue Tribe background.
As for the other half, I'm not particularly inclined to debate theism with you in this moment. If you're an atheist, well, good for you, I suppose? I disagree, and would gently suggest that if you think that atheism is so obvious that any halfway intelligent person should immediately conclude it's true, you might benefit from a little bit more intellectual humility. I'm not going to argue that theism in general or Christianity specifically is definitely true, but I would suggest that a sufficient number of undeniably intelligent and introspective people have believed that you shouldn't be surprised. Again, theism might be untrue, but it is not so obviously untrue that any intelligent and reflective person would automatically realise that. There are too many intelligent theists out there for it to be so.
At one point there was no real explanation for many phenomena, plus life can be hard and unfair in the here and now, humans like to see patterns and meaning in things, they also fear death and promising peasants their reward is in the afterlife not in this one was such a great idea! Religion really ticked all the boxes!
It is only natural that past humans created religious stories wherever they lived when events took place beyond their understanding. That smart people believed in gods or pretended to is no mystery, there was no real alternative. We have that alternative now. Most smart religious people are indoctrinated well before any critical thinking sets in, it becomes a part of who they are and they feel "off" without it, even if they leave the the church the brain pathways for religious belief are set and they tend to wander back later in life or find a similar thinking system to fill the hole.
If you taught no religion to a smart kid and when they turn 18 ask them to believe in all kinds of crazy magic and make pretend it is true, they would look at you like you're nuts. Imagine aliens come to live here from Sigma Tau and are asked if they have heard about their lord and savior Jesus Christ? They would laugh you out of the galaxy, and be right to do so.
Smart religious people post all these convoluted diatribes that miss the forest for the trees and put forth esoteric metaphysical apologetics to backfill their already "felt" conclusion that god is real. The truth is rather more simple, none of the thousands of religions that have cropped up over human history are even a little bit True with a capital T, yours isn't any different. The universe is a physical system that can be entirely explained by natural laws that we can discover.
FCfromSSC already covered much of what I would want to - that what you take as obvious is not actually obvious. It may seem clear to you that the universe is merely a physical system, but that's actually a potentially contentious judgement, based on priors that you learned and assimilated when you were a small child. Part of the value of philosophy, not to mention theology, is that it teaches you to identify and question some of those priors. Is the universe a physical system, construed such as to eliminate any possibility of the existence of God? (Also, define 'physical', 'system', and 'God'.) The answer to that question is not obvious. Not as much as you suggest. And considering that a very large number of undeniably intelligent people have taken different views to you on it, I think it would be appropriate to take a more humble approach here. Again, you might be right, but you're not obviously right, in a way that admits of no rational questioning.
Two other side points, I think.
Firstly, I think you rely too much on a kind of appeal to incredulity here. This person hypothetically raised in ignorance of major religions wouldn't believe in 'all kinds of crazy magic'? That doesn't seem obvious to me. People often idiosyncratically come to believe all sorts of strange things. If someone were raised in the absence of any existing religious dogma, that doesn't necessarily mean they would become a hard-headed atheist. They might embrace all sorts of superstitions. Lots of people are plenty superstitious as it is, even people who aren't particularly religious.
Of course, you might mean that this hypothetical person was raised with some kind of specific education against superstition of religion (maybe they were taught rationality, critical thinking, the scientific method, etc.), but what that basically rounds to is "if someone were taught my point-of-view as a child they would agree with me". Quite possibly so! But how is that different to someone who was taught a different point-of-view, such as a religious one? The argument-from-childhood-indoctrination proves too much.
Secondly, I'm not sure what the relevance of aliens here is? Evangelising aliens might be an interesting question, but what makes it in principle different to the first contact between representatives of a religious tradition and people unfamiliar with it? Matteo Ricci or Francis Xavier had to explain Christianity to people who had never heard of it before, and the Chinese or Japanese did not automatically laugh their heads off. The ideas were taken seriously, and some people converted. Aliens don't seem any different. I'm sure any actually-existing aliens would be quite unusual and religious dialogue with them would require us to do a lot to try to understand their nature, biology, culture, mode of thought, any existing religious or spiritual beliefs, and so on. I do not see any reasonable justification for assuming that aliens would all be Dawkins-like atheists. I have no idea what aliens would believe, if anything, and neither do you, or even whether or not aliens might exist. I do not think we can draw any conclusions from the hypothetical beliefs of hypothetical beings.
Religious apologists love to stack up the false complexity and try to lose you in the weeds. What it boils down to is that you and FC believe in magic, and non-reproducible phenomenon, all with no evidence.
There zero hard proof that any God or gods influence has ever come into this world in any form. If there is no impact from there existence (which there isn't) then the point is moot anyway; it isn't on me to disprove fantastical claims, they are prima facie nonsense, like claiming the sun is made of milk. Meanwhile, there are trillions of testable events proving my world view correct every second that passes.
Religion, with all of its contradictions and nonsense leads you to some pretty weird places if you actually believe, even modern internet christianity https://www.themotte.org/post/1032/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/220208?context=8#context
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This is a statement of faith, and a pretty remarkable one. We cannot entirely explain the universe through natural laws, and there is no evidence that we will ever be able to. When this is demonstrated to you, you decide to go talk about something else, and then go right back to your determinism of the gaps.
This is one of the reasons I'm confident betting that Aliens don't exist, specifically because they would not mesh well with my conception of God and Christianity. Ditto for brain read/write and the harder forms of superintelligent AI. This should be an absurd method of reasoning, opening me up to all sorts of exploits... and yet, Aliens, in fact, do not appear to exist, and neither does brain read/write, and neither does hard superintelligent AI, and much effort continues to be expended trying to explain away these surprising facts. Despite this, you are reasoning as though they do exist, and that their existence is the basis for your conclusions. You seem to reason from fictional or nonexistent evidence quite frequently when it comes to this general subject.
And yet, adult conversions to various religions are a thing that happens. I suppose the next argument would be that the converts aren't smart because they disagree with you?
One could just as easily flip this around and say that indoctrination to Materialism sets the brain pathways such that they never really feel comfortable with religion. But in any case, this is an entirely unfalsifiable just-so story. You are not pointing to evidence here. You cannot actually demonstrate the specific "brain pathways" you refer to. You've just made up a story where you're right and anyone who disagrees is just stupid and brainwashed, because doing so is maximally-flattering to your own biases.
I get that you believe Materialism is obvious, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is stupid. I get that you don't like seeing this belief rigorously interrogated, and feel that people should simply agree with your obviously correct views. The problem is that your obviously correct views do not, in fact, appear to be correct, and are quite easy to poke holes in. A modicum of epistemic humility would put you in a much more defensible position, but until you figure out how to manage that, I'm going to continue poking.
Poke away! I don't see where you proved that observable reality is actually faith based or where I changed the subject in that long chain of well trod ground; I believe in determinism and cause and effect and physics and materialism. These are all real things. Belief in G(g)od(s) and the thousands of religions of history have produced no actionalable technology or revealed any truth about the universe whatsoever, it is fantastical stories that sometimes teach some ok life lessons and sometimes lead to human sacrifice; no different from Grimm's fairy tales any other fiction, except that some portion of humanity takes them seriously. Materialism and hard science have opened up the universe to us and will continue to do so.
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