banned
Throwaway05
24d ago
I'm not an expert on the history of soviet mental health treatments lol but as part of my brief lit review for that comment I did spot that the soviets banned it first, they also had a history of misappropriating mental health stuff for political reasons (see: sluggish schizophrenia).
Secret police with a picture of a stethoscope duct taped to their head is a bit different than the medical establishment going about their regular or irregular business.
Now the choice of death, lobotomy, or locked up and the key thrown away is a tough one but I think when people hear lobotomy that's not quite what they are thinking. Many people then and now are more okay with locking people up and forgetting them than seeing lobotomized people around (which we do do chemically now). This isn't "wrong" per se, but it's not generally fully explored by the people advocating it.
Throwaway05
24d ago
This is by no means super important but usually when you guys ban someone you put the length of the ban in the mod tag comment, didn't see one here but he does have the "user was banned for this comment" flag.
Not sure if in error or what but wanted to call attention.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
24d ago
even I've been permabanned from /r/slatestarcodex of all places, because I've been too discourteous commenting on Kevin Bird's successful cancellation of the "eugenicist" Stephen Hsu
Oh, I thought you were banned for using Russian punctuation, ((saying something like this.))
Nobody is firing professors yet. And no, they'll go to industry, not China. Might actually help with productivity.
but even if they remain aligned it's risky to outsource your brainpower and key industries, TSMC being the most obvious example.
At the end of the day this is all a massive, embarrassing bluff, a shit test. A bunch of true believer wokesters in the humanities, with lukewarm STEM intellectuals in tow, are pretending to be the irreplaceable brain of the United States, basically holding the nation hostage. Well, as Lenin said, «intelligentsia is not the brain of the nation, it's its shit», and for all the evils of the Soviet Union it did go to space, and failed through its retarded economic theory (endorsed by many among this very American intelligentsia, surprisingly), not Lenin's anti-meritocratic views.
This movement has, through manipulating procedural outcomes, appropriated funds for (garbage) research that gave their mediocre allies jobs and their commissars more institutional power, delegitimized (potentially very useful) research they didn't like, canceled White and "White-adjacent" academics they didn't like, created a hostile atmosphere and demoralized who knows how many people whose views or ethnicity they didn't like, and now they are supposed to have infinite immunity for their exploitation of the norms of academic freedom and selective enforcement of regulations, because they might throw a hissy fit. And they aren't even delivering! US universities have been rapidly losing their dominance for over a decade! Of top 10 academic institutions, 8 are Chinese already! (Here's a more rigorous, in my view, ranking from CWTS Leiden).
Come to think of it – as a distant echo of these folks' institutional dominance, even I've been permabanned from /r/slatestarcodex of all places, because I've been too discourteous commenting on Kevin Bird's successful cancellation of the "eugenicist" Stephen Hsu (Trace was there too, hah; gave me a stern talking to, shortly before the ban). Now Stephen Hsu is doomposting 24/7 that the US will get brutally folded by China on science, industry and technology. At worst, you might accelerate this by a few months.
It is known I don't like Trump. I don't respect Trump and Trumpism. But his enemies are also undeserving of respect, they are institutionalized terrorists (and many trace their political lineage to literal terrorists), and I can see where Americans are coming from when they say "no negotiation with terrorists". And even then, this is still a kind of negotiation. It's just the first time this academic cabal is facing anything more than a toothless reprimand. Let's see if they change their response in the face of this novel stimulus.
If anything, it is disappointing to me that this pendulum swing is not actually motivated by interest in truth or even by some self-respect among White Americans, it's a power grab by Trump's clique plus panic of Zionists like Bill Ackman who used to support and fund those very institutions with all their excesses and screeds about white supremacy – before they, like the proverbial golem, turned on Israel in the wake of 10/7. But if two wrongs don't make a right, the second wrong doesn't make the original one right either. I have no sympathy for the political culture of American academia, and I endorse calling their bluff.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
25d ago
Ok fair. I'm just a big softie and I get sad when people get banned. But I appreciate the job you do.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
26d ago
It will straight up try to lie to me about how certain language features work.
I have also had this experience. Learning a new language and I couldn't tell whether my code was right or not. Claude Opus 4 spent an hour saying "oh sorry my previous code was wrong," and then give me slightly-rewritten copy of the same thing which had the same problem - it crashed on some function. Finally I suggested an environment setup issue and turned on search and it figured it out (a function it was using was deprecated two years ago). But the number of times it told me "oh you're right, I was wrong, here's a fix", and for the fix to not fix the issue was incredibly frustrating.
I had a similar loop with GPT-o3 a few weeks later, where it just made up academic references in my new (to me) sub-subfield. I swore at it, and had the chat banned for inappropriateness :)
This is awakening me to a sort of Gell-Mann amnesia effect: if the LLMs are this wrong and this stubborn in areas where I can test its output, where else is it wrong? Can I trust it in the rough analysis of a legal situation? In a summary of the literature on global warming? In pulling crime stats? I'm inclined to think it shouldn't be trusted for anything not either harmless or directly verifiable.
Markass
26d ago
Why else would they entertain weird nonsense from a stranger unless they're getting something out of it?
It's not just currency. They can want the approval of adults, the satisfaction of curiosity, or simply somebody to talk to. Many groomed kids have a tumultuous home life and are extremely lonely, for example. My point being that it shouldn't be thought of in pure economic terms, so predators doing this to children is (or should be) unacceptable and predator catchers finding predators this way is (or should be) acceptable.
If this was the immovable force you assert it is we wouldn't have this problem, since in that case children would always listen to authority figures that tell them not to do this.
Again, it's oversimplified to think this way. Being impressionable goes both ways. Sure, some will listen to authority figures and not do this. But some will not, for many reasons such as a preconceived distrust of authorities, being curious thinking "what could go wrong", or simply not knowing of the dangers.
And this is unique to online gaming... how, exactly?
It's not. But Roblox is uniquely refusing to ban predators when people report them.
The mitigations around it can't be solved for through technological means alone.
Yes, but you can just ban predators who are reported to do this. You can at the very least also not ban people who find predators and get them arrested in real life.
While it may be true that Roblox should ban people more frequently, that wouldn't actually fix their PR problem
It's not just "ban people more frequently", it's not banning people who find predators too. I feel like the latter is the biggest cause of their recent PR problem. Their tendency to not ban predators has been reported and documented before but it hasn't caused a huge media circus. Going after people who find predators is just a huge WTF moment.
I do agree that it's impossible to rid platforms of pedophiles before they strike but I'm willing to bet a lot of money that if Roblox suddenly reversed course, unbanned Schlep and started banning reported pedophiles, that their PR problem would virtually disappear overnight.
Markass
27d ago
Sure, you could go full Club Penguin and make the service as useless for actual communication as you can
You don't need to do this. You just need to ban pedophiles when people report them. Which Roblox seems to be refusing to do.
they foul up any actual investigation
This doesn't make sense to say when Schlep (the banned "vigilante") has gotten multiple pedophiles arrested in real life.
intentionally antagonize existing users
I'm not aware of any instances of this happening.
"Wow, how horrible, people are willing to give you free Vbucks if you send them nudes"
To my knowledge, none of the investigations involved the bait sending nudes of a child to a predator for currency. I would assume you were just throwing this out as an example but then you spend a lot of words elaborating on exchanging nudes for Vbucks. In any case, it is extremely oversimplified to think that children are being sexually exploited only because they're being paid to do so.
your power is gone as soon as the victim reaches for that "off" switch (unless other conditions are met)
That "unless other conditions are met" is doing a lot of work in this sentence. In most cases it's not as simple as blocking the predator precisely because of conditions like: the fact that minors are easily impressionable and manipulated into doing what predators want them to, the perpetrator has gotten their nudes and is threatening to send them to family and friends unless they do what they want. The 764 sextortion cases show that these conditions hold quite frequently.
Markass
27d ago
Roblox has posted two separate responses to the vigilante bannings and none of them come close to saying they're just as bad as the predator.
The second says:
Similar to actual predators, they often impersonated minors, actively approached other users, then tried to lead them to other platforms to have sexually explicit conversations (which is against our Terms of Use).
I don't know how else to read this besides "'vigilantes' are similar to predators". It sounds like a defense attorney arguing that the cop who impersonated a drug buyer is just as bad as an actual drug buyer, on the sole basis of their actions being superficially similar.
It makes sense that people breaking the terms of service should be banned regardless of what their intention was behind it
Unless it updated recently to ban "vigilantes", this is quite a novel interpretation of the terms of service.
if they let this go on, knowing about it, doesn't that open them up to liability in the same way that NBC was potentially going to be held liable for the guy who killed himself on To Catch a Predator before they settled?
Liability for what? The "vigilante" they banned, Schlep, didn't do anything remotely near what NBC did to Bill Conradt. Schlep was just somebody who collected evidence and reported pedophiles to law enforcement.
Arguably, Roblox has just as much liability if not more for the pedophiles they do know about but never ban. Schlep and other so-called "vigilantes" have consistently reported them to Roblox, but they refuse to act in most cases, even if the pedophile has been arrested, and only rarely actually bans them if there is a highly publicized video made about them. Remember that Louisiana's lawsuit isn't the only one Roblox is facing as a result of their refusal to ban pedophiles.
Recently, when I saw this first come up on reddit there was a comment that talked about how robust the child safety controls are for Roblox, now.
Consider the fact that there is an arbitrary limit of 100 games that parents can block for their child before they can't block any more games. This isn't sufficient to prevent their child from being exposed to sex games because there are way more than 100 sex games on the platform and Roblox seemingly does nothing to ban them.
But there's probably (potentially) going to also be a similar problem for any kid that goes on the internet without any supervision or guidance at all.
If the platform they visit actually bans pedophiles when they are reported, there will be much less of a predator problem compared to Roblox.
Markass
27d ago
I am... skeptical, let's say... that the people "working for free to rid their platforms of predators" should be allowed to do that, because I suspect there are many, many more vigilantes (and aspiring vigilantes) out there doing real and serious harm, than actual child-snatching pedos.
The "vigilante" that Roblox recently banned is Schlep, and I take issue with him being described as a vigilante. It implies that he is imposing justice on the pedophiles himself, when he is not. All he is doing is collecting evidence and reporting them to law enforcement, as he should. He also reports them to Roblox, but Roblox has consistently refused to ban the predators from their platform, even after they've been arrested, until he makes widely publicized videos about them.
plural
28d ago
Roblox has posted two separate responses to the vigilante bannings and none of them come close to saying they're just as bad as the predator. Not even the PCGamer article you're linking to even intimates that. It makes sense that people breaking the terms of service should be banned regardless of what their intention was behind it and anyway if they let this go on, knowing about it, doesn't that open them up to liability in the same way that NBC was potentially going to be held liable for the guy who killed himself on To Catch a Predator before they settled?
I'm not sure about the ID thing, the reason, I've been led to believe, why it's hard for Roblox to police who is actually underage or not is because of COPPA where they can't legally ask for more information from a user that has identified as under 13 unless they get their parents permission. Also, the online Safety Act shutting down that hamster forum was because it has additional requirements not related to age like submitting some kind of safety report on their website and making sure there was no possibly illegal content on the site or be subject to a fine and they opted to shut down rather than risk having to possibly be subject to a fine (or deal with writing a report, maybe).
Recently, when I saw this first come up on reddit there was a comment that talked about how robust the child safety controls are for Roblox, now. You can filter content by maturity or by sensitive topics (political/culture war things), you can hide microtransactions, only allow certain players you designate to join their server and not allow them to join other servers, DMs are not possible to anyone under 13, you can limit their playtime, you can also go through and look at what your kid has been playing, who they've been playing with, their recent public and private chat history. This is just from making a Roblox account and linking it to your kids' account.
I'm not saying there's not a problem but the predators go to Roblox because it has their prey. So, naturally, it has a predator problem. But there's probably (potentially) going to also be a similar problem for any kid that goes on the internet without any supervision or guidance at all.
Markass
28d ago
So Roblox is getting a lot of press lately, and it's been very negative. They're ostensibly a place for kids, but it's been known for years that pedophiles and child predators are on their platform, they keep grooming and raping minors, and barely anything is done about them if ever. Lately they banned Chris Hansen 'To Catch A Predator' style stings, banned and sent a C&D to someone who has gotten multiple pedophiles arrested using those stings, and defended their ban by *checks notes* saying "vigilantes" are just as bad as predators. As a result, they're being sued by the Louisiana attorney general, and even Chris Hansen is getting involved (by making a documentary).
It's too early to tell what the outcome of all this will be, but some people are concerned about potential government overreach, especially with recent pushes for mandatory online ID verification (and we all know people doxing themselves like that never goes wrong) and other laws passed in the name of children's online safety (like the UK's Online Safety Act, which proved to be too burdensome for a hamster forum to continue operating). Especially because Roblox isn't the only platform with a predator problem that isn't getting better.
I think that ID verification is bad, but pedophiles are also bad. My take (if slightly conspiratorial) is that people in positions of power are deliberately letting the pedophile problem grow out of control so they can justify implementing draconian ID verification measures. The public sees this false dichotomy between letting pedophiles run rampant and ID verification, and chooses ID verification as the lesser of two evils, when that's far from the case. Roblox (and Discord) had people working for free to rid their platforms of predators, and all they had to do was let them be. Yet they deliberately went out of their way to ban anybody who got pedophiles arrested, meanwhile doing little to the pedophiles themselves. It's a huge WTF moment and makes you wonder what the end goal is.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
30d ago
This is not the sort of engagement we are looking for here. You are a brand-new account, and do not appear to understand the rules here or the intent behind them. Banned for a day; please familiarize yourself with the rules linked in the sidebar before engaging further.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Do the votes look like they track response quality
Partially.
or do we simply have a large American gun-owning population that vehemently downvotes anything that might be the slightest bit critical of their god-given constitutional right
Before you had us look, I would have assumed so (for a loose enough definition of "large") ... but now that I look, I note that "In the counterfactual world where the US had banned guns ten years ago, I don't think that all of the people who killed themselves with firearms in our world would have instead hanged or drowned themselves. In fact, I don't think that even 50 or 25% of them would have done so." is currently sitting at +17, -0.
I've definitely seen too many downvotes here, including in that thread, that appear to be more for disagreement than for low quality, but it's more subtle and less voluminous than you're suggesting.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1mo ago
If the slippery slope principle worked on guns, then banning military-grade weaponry would have resulted in banning all guns. But it hasn't.
They're still working on it. Maryland banned semi-automatic AR-15s, for instance, and many other states (including New Jersey of course) keep banning classes of guns.
Are you saying, "you lack empirical evidence" or "I have empirical evidence to the contrary."
There is no empirical evidence that "a gun-- and especially a small gun-- is worse that useless" in a any particular self-defense situation.
a country that only bans small, concealable weapons, most would-be robbers still have access to larger weapons and would go for those over the hassle of finding a black market and buying a perfect pistol. That would in turn shrink the size of the black market and make pistols even harder to acquire.
Or, this simply isn't true; it's a gun-banner just-so story. Or, worse, they cut down the long guns so they're concealable enough, and now you've got would-be robbers with more lethal weapons.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1mo ago
My issue is claiming, without precise data, whether or not MSMs should be blanket banned from blood donation. I believe I am qualified to make a decision here, if I were to dive deeper into said numbers and do a principled cost-benefit analysis. However, what would the point be? I'm sure more qualified people have already done so. Blood is always in acute shortage, and everyone is desperate to get as much of it in stock as they can without compromising safety more than it helps.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
I initially thought the move was a mistake, but it was a sizable quality-of-life improvement to not have to worry about the sub being banned every time I saw a particularly spicy comment.
If Sloot or anyone else wishes to object to the policy of castrating or killing "Lotharios", they are as free to make their case as those in favor. I think the ludicrous nature of such a policy is sufficiently evident that arguing against it is a waste of my time; others who judge differently are free to discuss as they will. We allow people to make foolish and even insane arguments here, because we are not interested in accepting responsibility for policing which ideas/positions/ideologies are good and which are not.
What we do not allow is commenters using their posts to directly attack each other, or wind each other up. It seems obvious to me that this is what @Sloot did, and doing so is a violation of several rules here.
It's also worth pointing out that the interpretation of the rules that I am applying here is the reason @Sloot has not himself been banned up to this point. He routinely makes comments that could be described as "petty" and "mean", as well as "advocating hardline policies". He usually does so from behind a level of abstraction similar to that employed by @thejdizzler above, which helps a great deal to keep him on the right side of the line.
birb_cromble
1mo ago
Last week, I spoke briefly about the SIG P320, also known as The Gun That Goes Off By Itself.
Since then, there has been a new development in the case that serves as a flashpoint for the current events that surround it.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/air-force-announces-arrest-related-201251351.html
Since then, the investigation has progressed and an individual has now been arrested on suspicion of making a false official statement, obstruction of justice, and involuntary manslaughter,
Allegedly, the event that caused multiple government agencies and private ranges to ban the use of the P320 and its variants is being investigated as a case of manslaughter rather than an Uncommanded Discharge.
This sequence of events is interesting to me, as it seems to be a very concrete example of several trends I've noticed in group thought, regardless of the context or subculture.
- The old thing is always good. The new thing is always bad.
- Taboos are quick to be implemented, and slow to be repealed: generally functioning as a ratchet.
- There will always be a subset of the population who will continue to believe something, and take refutation of their stance as proof that they are actually right.
With respect to the first point, it's interesting to look back in history. When striker fired pistols first became popular in the form of the Glock, people frequently complained that they were unsafe, with terms like "Glock leg" and "Glocknade" embedding themselves in the lexicon. Even the Beretta M9, looked upon favorably now, was an object of fear, with whispered rumors that the slide would fly off and put a hole through your skull. In both cases there was a kernel of truth to the aspersions, much like how a pre-2018 P320 was not drop safe.
On the second point, my local rod and gun club banned the P320 after the air force did the same. Multiple members have asked for clarification, and the board is pointedly not offering a response. This behavior appears in multiple domains, with sexual misconduct accusations being the most immediate comparison that comes to mind.
The third point reminds me of a book I read a few years ago, titled "When Prophecy Fails". It chronicles the lives of cult members after a rapture-like event does not occur at the specified time. A fraction of the believers harden their resolve and decide that the lack of a rapture only proves that the prophecy was right after all. In the case of the SIG Uncommanded Discharge, I have had extended family members claim that SIG and the DOD are conspiring to frame the arrested Airman to keep their contracts intact.
Regardless of how the story develops long term, the current environment is interesting to observe, if nothing else.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1mo ago
A lot of that isn't just Zorba being sensible and incorporating a lot of feedback, but also Reddit actively backsliding.
I usually use both TheMotte and Reddit on my phone. They banned all the custom apps, or pay walled them. I use a modded Reddit apk, but the experience is just abysmal.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1mo ago
If they don't, they get banned, so the problem deals with itself.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1mo ago
To be honest, I don't actually recall any instances in which someone we knew to be a previously permabanned member came back, was identified, but was behaving well enough that the mods decided not to ban the new account for ban evasion. Possibly it happened before I became a mod, but as far as I know, it's kind of like the case of "We'd consider it if a permabanned member petitioned us to unban him": to date an entirely theoretical policy.
You don't think there's religious people who don't believe in evolution that are on your side of the left-wing/right-wing divide?
I agree with your general proposition that political alliances can not be split so easily to begin with and to blame you for the beliefs and actions of the religious evolution denier would be silly, but I also believe that of the many groups and factions that compose "the left".
Likewise I have been presented with tons of examples from leftists about conservative institutions and powerful elites censoring and oppressing people. Heck some examples are ironic, like a school that tried to ban Harry Potter due to depictions of witchcraft back in the 90s. That's of course a funny example, but there's plenty that aren't so funny.
The FCC's rules against "indecency" prohibiting even swearing. The radio stations that banned the Dixie chicks for opposing the Iraq war. Even now the director of the United States Office of Management and Budget has expressly said he wants to ban pornography through back door methods.
So I have evidence from both sides, strong evidence of both sides. Both of them yelling "we didn't start the fire" as they both throw Molotovs.
Good news, you can know you didn't start the fire if you don't throw molotovs and side with principled free speech organizations like FIRE.
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