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 -
I really am not doing it to offend. It is just like telling someone any fact about the world when they are mistaken, if you say rain is caused by a rain god, you should be corrected and taught about the hydrological cycle.
I'm not doing any of this to delight or revel in my fedora shaped superiority complex. Rain is not caused by a rain god, that can't be disputed in any rational way, it is the same with all religions, and they are all equally 100% wrong about the shape of reality.
I don't understand why they get to make outrageous false claims with impunity but I'm somehow the bad guy here.
No one on the internet has ever convinced any opponent that they are right, the best they can ever do is play to the audience a bit.
Religion isn't disputed by any rational person, it is dismissed out of hand; that comes across as rude here apparently.
The world operates in a certain way, that is indisputable; whatever that way is, is inside the bounds of what is possible, we call those laws of nature etc...by definition nothing can exist outside of a system that describes everything. There can't be anything supernatural. Literally and figuratively, if there were angels and demons we could quantify them and they would just be one more explained phenomenon.
This entire site is based on an explicit rejection of this paradigm; we believe that this form of "debate" is unproductive and that actual good-faith debate is both possible and worthwhile.
Following the "play to the audience" paradigm is AFAICT the primary reason you keep getting whacked; if theMotte allowed you and others like you to behave in this way, the purpose of this site would be destroyed. You cannot ask a price for joining that the community literally abandon its raison d'être; that is absurd and the community will expel you rather than pay it.
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Put it this way - do you think there's any chance you're going to convince me, or alter my views here? Am I going to read your posts and go, "Oh my gosh! You're right! Everything I believe is ridiculous and false!"
Sometimes I think it's best to ask ourselves questions like, "What's the point of this conversation?", or "What am I going to achieve in this conversation?" In this case, my hope is that I might be able to show you that religious people aren't necessarily stupid, dogmatic, or malevolent. I doubt I can convince you that God exists, but maybe I can show you that it's possible to be religious and at the same time thoughtful, humane, rational, kind, and so on. If you come away from this conversation thinking, "Olive may believe some absurd things, but he's a smart guy and I enjoyed talking to him", I will rate that Mission Accomplished.
Maybe that's optimistic. I don't know. But I think it's a more achievable goal than the scales falling from your eyes.
Likewise in reverse. Okay, you're an atheist and you think that all religions are false, including my own. I have registered this fact. What now? I don't think you're really making arguments in favour of that claim, which might convince me or a bystander? It feels to me like you're engaging in social shaming, or perhaps meta-debate - that is, trying to argue that religious people should be shamed and put outside the circle of people who get to engage in rational dialogue here. Is that a fair characterisation?
My only goal has been to point out that religion or god should not be taken as the baseline truth of the world, I often see it assumed to be true as themotte becomes more and more religious. I also personally am confused as to how smart, curious, and eloquent people can believe in god, with all the logical compromises, weirdness and broken thought processes that would cause for me. My conclusions as to their thinking and motivations would seem to be insulting to the believer in some way, so I shall refrain from speculating on them here.
I don't think I've asserted anywhere that it should be the baseline view, or that you or anybody else must adopt it. I'm quite conscious that it's a minority view. On the Motte and in rationalist or rationalist-adjacent spaces in general, it's a small minority. In the West more generally, Christianity has been declining for decades and I expect it to continue doing so.
However, none of that suggests to me either that Christianity is wrong, that I should not adopt a Christian worldview, or that I shouldn't be treated with the same respect due to anyone who makes a good-faith if fallible attempt to understand the world.
Religious belief or claimed religious belief is not a minority view, not on themott or in the US in general. Most people, when asked, describe some kind of belief in a higher power, even as they don't attend church or act by any of the strictures of their claimed belief system.
It has been made clear to me in plain language by the powers that this should not be considered a rationalist space and I should not be trying to approach it as such, so I am no longer going to do so.
I would also add this isn't really much to do with you personally or how you conduct yourself, people just happened to pile on in this particular thread for some reason.
I don't have survey results for the Motte, of course, but I suspect they would be similar to the general ACX results, where the results were 49.5% atheist-not-spiritual, 11.1% atheist-and-spiritual, and 19.6% agnostic, which gives a total of 80.2% in the rough atheist basket. I would guess that the Motte's ratio is probably similar. I firmly believe that atheists are the majority here. If you don't notice them, I suspect it's just because most atheists don't talk about being atheists most of the time.
It's true that Christians remain a majority in the US for now. I said that it's "been declining for decades", which is true, not that it's a minority.
At any rate, I would not stress about being made to conform to a religion. That's definitely not going to happen to you in the Motte. There are places where I think the Motte is aggressively groupthinky (mainly related to the political left), but Christianity isn't one of them.
Re: rationalism, I'd suggest that it's better to think of rationalism as a methodology, rather than a set of approved positions that one must hold.
I would only disagree with this comment insofar as we don't have data for themott and I'm sure it is quite divergent from ACX by now and very different.
I would be extraordinarily surprised if the Motte were anything other than majority-atheist.
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Whatever you and I think about religion, you surely know that "I believe in a creator" or "I think the Bible is divinely inspired" has a lot more nuance and room for discussion and falsifiability (or lack thereof) than "Rain is caused by the Rain God." You chose the latter example because it sounds silly - like something obviously only primitive tribesemen believe. Almost no one today believes rain is caused by rain gods (except in a very abstract sense) - not even religions that still, theoretically, include "rain gods" (e.g., Shinto or Hinduism, for example). They all have much more complex and nuanced views of the spiritual world than that, and you are refusing to engage with that because it's easier and more satisfying to hurk hurk about rain gods.
The only thing more tiresome than Christians with "Lord, Lunatic or Liar?" apologetics or quippy Bible verses is atheists who think they are very seriously explaining to children that they should stop believing in fairy tales and honestly don't understand why everyone just doesn't get Recked by Facts and Logic.
This is a butload of sneering in my direction. Are you sure your ingroup is who you think it is? All the supernatural explanations for phenomenon are equally stupid, rain, hail, death, afterlife, whatever you pick!
Religious believers using more obfuscation and nonsenses due to advancing scientific knowledge is a defense of my point of view, not a triumph of the theists.
I don't think you are an atheist anymore. If you can't get wrecked by facts and logic then what is the point of even talking on a rationalist forum?
If you want a good model of a way to productively argue against Christianity or religion, look through the comments of @To_Mandalay in this thread.
I don't expect you to reach that level of argumentation, because he knows more. But it's very possible to argue far more capably than you have.
In general, you'll get a lot more accomplished if you understand that you're interacting with people who are smart, and so will be at least somewhat responsive to reason, and who often look at things differently than you do, and might even look at things differently than what your perception of their beliefs is.
You've said you want a rationalist forum, where people are responsive to facts and logic. Well, maybe try making arguments with facts and logic, then. And don't be surprised when they respond by debating whether what you consider facts and logic are sound, that's how dialogue works.
And, of course, be polite, not dismissive. If you couch things in "X,Y, and Z seem to me to be the case, and so A should follow," that'll be received a lot better, and you can have a much better conversation than by saying that A is true, and everyone who doesn't see that is dumb or intellectually dishonest or something, while in the company of those who don't see that. It'll often be better to ask probing questions as to why they think something is true than to state outright that it's obviously false.
That won't stop downvotes, because people disagree, and you've acted badly enough for long enough that their gut reaction is to react to you in a hostile manner, but it'll help.
Here's something that seems to be saying some of the same sorts of things as you have, but would be a better comment:
I hope you can see why that's a much better comment: it takes the commenter seriously, it makes arguments that the reader might (or might not) find persuasive, it invites further conversation. This is more productive than your usual comments, which are closer to
Though they are saying similar sorts of things, the first is clearly better. I'm not saying that you need to copy my personal style, not everyone here interacts the same way, but that's clearly better than what you have often been doing.
(My own response to that hypothesized comment would be to pull out Pascal's wager, argue that a God is pretty plausible for first-cause reasons and fine-tuning reasons, and argue that, if God exists, miracles are a lot less improbable. But concede that other Christians usually don't have the same rational reasons. And then we could go on from there. Others would probably respond differently. I'm more rationalistic than the average Christian and probably also the average Christian mottizen.)
I don't think you can "argue against religion" effectively as it isn't a rational belief system that can be swayed by such things, all you can do is plant the seeds and hope someday they grow.
Well, your other response to me was completely fine in my book. I guess this was just to say that your seed-planting goes better when you engage with people in a manner that respects them, so thanks for doing that.
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Who do you think is my ingroup? Because I don't define either my ingroup or my outgroup by their religious beliefs or lack thereof, or at least not just by that.
Do tell. Why do you think that? Because I am able to talk to believers without sneering?
First of all, as we have often pointed out, this is not a "rationalist forum." It is certainly rat-adjacent, because of our history, but many people here - maybe even most, by now - do not identify themselves as "rationalists."
I'll also note that you haven't "wrecked" anyone with facts and logic - in fact, to the degree that you have argued against religion, you haven't offered any facts or logic. Just repeated assertions that you are right because you say so and anyone who thinks differently is a dum-dum.
You're pretty terrible at making the case for atheism, frankly. If you meant to bring the principles of the Motte to bear on the question of religion, you haven't even attempted it yet.
So anyway, we have atheists, and agnostics, and religious believers of various faiths and political slants. And everyone needs to be civil to one another, even if some of them believe the others are going to burn in hell or believe in ignorant fairy tales.
Right now you've got no less than three mods very patiently trying to explain to you why your attitude is going to get you banned, and your response continues to be "But I'm right lol!"
No one can make you change your behavior. We can only inform you what the consequences will be if you don't, and then apply them.
This is on purpose, the religious offer no facts or logic, nor is their belief system predicated on such. It is entirely a waste to try to argue someone out of something they didn't argue themselves into. They offer no proof and so can be dismissed without care or consequence, the same way you would someone claiming to have a flying fire breathing unicorn in their garage, just one you can't see or experience or test in any way.
Hitchens's razor -"what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence"
To do otherwise gets you the gish gallop by way of mountains of religious texts and apologetics.
I should be able to assert that they are entirely incorrect wherever religion (with no proof or basis in reality) is brought up as if it is true. The same way one should be able to dismiss any fantastical claim that the author provides no proof for. I will be super polite about it going forward.
I look forward to your future engagement being entirely unlike your past participation, then.
Well then respectfully prepare to have your mind blown.
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This is a pretty hearty endorsement of forced correction of "wrong think" coming from someone who, I presume, really likes to talk about their belief in free thinking.
And this is the problem with edgey online Atheists. They're obsessed with getting people who disagree with them to agree with them. It really is an inverted evangelical style fervor.
Because it doesn't matter if someone is making outrageous false claims. You can respond with contradictory evidence or simply choose not to respond. Responding by saying that the claim itself being outrageous is inherently disqualifying is not only contrary to an open discourse, it amounts to in-group based censorship.
See..see that's happening right here. "Anybody who is smart won't believe X. So anyone who believes X isn't qualified to discuss topic y,z,a,b,c etc..."
This entire forum is based on disputing how the world operates. I don't know how I can help you here, my guy.
No, the burden of proof is on the maker of said fantastical claim, if you don't provide any evidence of the rain god or your invisible flying unicorn that we just can't see or hear, or test in any way. Then yes I can call it outrageous and dismiss it out of hand. It isn't censorship, it is common sense and common courtesy to the rest of the world not to engage with that kind of thing.
Is there a way in which someone could disagree with you that you would see as valid?
Yes, actual repeatable, testable proof in a controlled setting of what they claim.
Can you help me understand what you mean by 'proof' and what qualifies as proven in such a controlled setting?
Hitting a pool ball.
How would you define poof for non materialist causal relationships?
There is no such thing in reality. If you could prove one it would then be reality.
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My guy! Maybe you can call me retarded again. That seems like your preferred way to establish a dialog.
Only he didn't, and instead he wrote an actual argument in some detail. And you've just dismissed it by sneering, haven't you? I mean, let's make that an actual question. Do you think that this is a reasonable, productive response to his message?
He did, it was the last time I tried to have a conversation with him. He literally was modded for it. Just because you agree that I'm retarded, doesn't change the reality.
Apologies, I entirely believe that he called you a retard before. My point was that he is not calling you a retard now, so bringing it up and claiming that's how he communicates is sort of pointless, when that is in fact not how he's communicating in the conversation you're currently in.
I don't, in fact, think you're a retard. I do think you're possibly drunk, given past interactions, but I'm certainly grumpy from the week I've had and maybe that's what's up with you as well.
Correct on both counts haha, he just tossed a "my guy" in there at the end as a clearly derogatory pot shot, hence my reaction.
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