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Sir_Pings_a_Lot  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   3744 thread views

Am I an acceptable poster for theMotte.org?

Hi, I'm a long time reader of Slate Star Codex and I used to post on the Reddit forum until I got banned. There are a few reasons that I believe I got banned.

  1. Uncharitably claiming that Leftist censorship was a threat to the rationalist community

  2. Advocating for violence

  3. Not being kind

I understand why all of these things could have been a problem on the Reddit community, but I would like to know if they're still going to be a problem here, since I don't want to invest a lot of time creating a profile and having good-faith discussions with people if I'm only going to be banned again. Here are the reasons that I think these three issues shouldn't be a problem anymore.

  1. I was right, and everybody who disagreed with me was wrong. The fact that the community had to move here proves it. I'm not expecting an apology but I think that time has proven me correct on that score.

  2. Violence is a completely justifiable response to tyranny. While calls to violence may be against Reddit rules (and the community was right to ban me from Reddit because my rhetoric could have caused problems for the mods) there are no such rules here. In fact, rdrama (which helped set up this offsite community, and whom you should all be grateful to) actively encourages calls to violence. If a rational and logical case can be made for violence then I think there is no good reason not to hear that case out. If you're forced to censor people you disagree with because you're unable to make a stronger case for pacifism over violence in the open marketplace of ideas, then you should question whether your pacifism is actually a worthwhile philosophy.

  3. Kindness and truth are different terminal values. If you optimize for kindness then it is self-evident that you will have to sacrifice truth at some point. Obviously the Reddit community has chosen kindness as its terminal value, but I'm hoping that this offsite community is enlightened enough to choose truth.

I'm linking to a few articles from my Substack here so you have a few examples of my style of writing and can make a better judgement about whether I would be a good fit for the offsite community. I'm also on rdrama where my username is sirpingsalot. If you think I'm not a good fit for the offsite either, then no hard feelings - I'm happy to take my ideas to more sympathetic communities instead. I just don't want to put in the effort of investing time and energy here if I'm only going to get banned again for the same reasons.

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Is @ZorbaTHut the moderator who would make a ruling here? If so, then yes, I would appreciate if he could weigh in.

So (ping @Amadan, obviously) I think this is one of those complicated bits where you may not like the outcome.

I think having an official rule for "no calls to violence" is perhaps obsolete. We don't need it, we're not on Reddit anymore. New world! Everything has changed!

But that doesn't mean calls to violence are okay. They've just moved from being "not OK because our hosting site says so" to "mostly not okay as an offshoot of the rest of the rules".

For example, we have

Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.

and

Don't attempt to build consensus or enforce ideological conformity.

and

Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

A lot of calls-to-violence are going to break one or more of these, and a lot of the calls-to-violence that don't break those are going to end up hitting Egregiously Obnoxious ("no, we are not okay using this as an admitted recruiting ground for terrorists, knock it off".)

So if you want to say "well, in my opinion, the best way to solve this issue is actually some level of violence, in this specific way", then okay, maybe I side-eye you a bit but let it pass. But if you're going with something more like "we should kill all the [outgroup], who's with me" then that's a quick trip to bantown.

And given that you quoted three reasons you got banned, one of which isn't even a thing that we'd ban for so you're probably doing the arrested-for-wearing-a-baseball-cap thing, and clearly have absolutely no plans to change for two of them, I admit I'm more than a bit skeptical that you're going to be providing the carefully-measured "call to violence" that we'd allow.

tl;dr:

Taking your post literally, you're fine and won't be banned! Also, I give it around ten-to-one odds that you'll end up banned.

I guess my summary is:

Kindness and truth are different terminal values. If you optimize for kindness then it is self-evident that you will have to sacrifice truth at some point. Obviously the Reddit community has chosen kindness as its terminal value, but I'm hoping that this offsite community is enlightened enough to choose truth.

that you've misunderstood things. We've chosen discussion as our terminal value. This requires some level of kindness in that people a strata that they can disagree on. This does not require kindness in the sense that entire concepts are banned, because then they couldn't be discussed. However, that does not mean truth wins; you can always come up with a sufficiently antagonistic way to say something true so that you'll end up banned.

Well, no, any one of us mods can make a ruling about whether a post breaks the rules. And there is no "ruling" to be made about whether you can post here. You are welcome to post; whether you think it's worth your time is up to you. If you're hoping Zorba will contradict me and say "No, actually, we'll change the rules just for you," I suppose that's possible, but I doubt it.

I asked him to weigh in because he's better at explaining his intentions for the sub and why the rules are the way they are.

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