naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
but when I'm replying to someone who says something broad like 'The memes are turning out to be correct' without being specific as to which ones, I'm required to take a bit of a leap if my comment is to be something other than "Please post some clear sources so that I may engage with what you said."
If you're "required to take a bit of a leap" you'll often be better off just not. If you decide to take that leap anyway, then you need to come with the most charitable and steelmanned take you can muster. If someone else in the thread is giving a worse take, then take it up with them.
Really this a good illustration of why we have the rules that we have, and why in general the best approach to rule-breakers is to not respond to them. The comment you responded to really needed more, but taking "a bit of a leap" instead of just asking for more was actually a worse violation of the rules than the low effort comment itself. These things have a way of spiraling rather quickly out of control--one person keeps to the letter of the law, but violates the spirit, the next person crosses the bright line, but only slightly, this makes someone else feel like they are being good community police by slapping them down... and pretty soon we're 15 comments deep into a snarky back-and-forth.
Remember that the goal here is to engage with the best ideas of people with whom you disagree. If someone says something genuinely bad, there's a certain extent to which the mod team will interpret that as offering their own shady thinking up for examination and critique! But when you take it on yourself to impute a certain view to others, you need to do better than you managed this time.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
I can't discern him breaking any rules, or you explicitly accusing of breaking him of any rules, apart from the subjective "wildcard rule" about obnoxiousness.
Are you not reading carefully, or are you just reading selectively? Look at my mod comment again. I first said
grumping about someone else's award because their comment doesn't reinforce your preferred narrative is obnoxious at best
That's the wildcard rule, applied not for what he said, but for grumping about what someone else said--so you mischaracterized my criticism in exactly the same way that coffee_enjoyer mischaracterized it, by suggesting it is about my "taste" rather than about coffee_enjoyer's insistence on his own taste being the proper determinant of quality. So right from the starting gate, you have demonstrated that you don't know what you're talking about.
Then you said
someone who only ran afoul of that rule
but this is clearly an unforced error. In my very first mod comment I also wrote:
your emphasis on "pre-teen" and the way you referenced "the past decade" while quoting Dean referencing "the last few decades" suggest very strongly to my mind that you are not engaging charitably, or even just honestly
"Be charitable" is a very clear rule. Coffee-enjoyer broke it, as I demonstrated by mentioning how he broke it, and I said all of that quite clearly. So the rest of your comment fails to land entirely; I'm sure you can think of some other reason to criticize my moderation, and yet at this point it seems that your real goal is just that--to criticize my moderation, regardless of anything I have actually said or done. By your own logic, at this point it seems like you should probably just recuse yourself from criticizing my moderation approach.
I will address your parting question anyway:
Do you imagine there is any argument or evidence at all that could persuade you to change your current approach to moderation, or is it a matter of either having to take your ride to wherever it leads or getting off?
I imagine there are many such arguments and evidence; I hardly imagine myself to be a paragon of human judgment. But as you have not presented any such arguments or evidence--as you indeed failed to even notice the rather explicit rule breaking I spelled out in my initial post--what is it you expect me to change?
That is, is there some specific change you have in mind? You mention recusal but actually the whole mod team does recusals pretty often, calling for others to come in and handle stuff they don't think they can be impartial about. However it's basically never about topics, because the whole mod team has opinions on just about everything. If we recused ourselves from topics we happen to know and care about, none of us could moderate anything! Rather, usually mods will recuse themselves from dealing users who get under our skin (or are just particularly under our skin on a given day). You mentioned darwin; back in the day, I recused myself from moderating him a lot.
So beyond that, what "argument or evidence" do you think you have in mind, that you think should change moderation policies here? Sometimes you write as if you think people should be moderated more ("Plenty of completely normal posts these days would have been moderated 5 years ago...") but your argument in this case is that coffee_enjoyer, at least, should be moderated less. As far as I can tell, you are engaged in the same special pleading that nearly all rules-lawyers and mod-critics bring to us, as if we'd never seen it before: "why don't you moderate my enemies more, and my friends less?"
And once it is recognized that that is the substance of the question being asked, well, it kind of answers itself, doesn't it?
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
Well,
Moderation is adaptive and qualitative.
Rules-lawyering and grudge-litigating are rarely beneficial to anyone on any side of the issue. I notice, however, that you have posted multiple AAQCs, and received no warnings at all, over the past nine months. I would like to say this with all sincerity--not as a taunt, or an inducement for you to now behave as a frustrator--but that's exactly the outcome we wanted to see. You're still here, you're not perma-banned, you make quality posts. Thank you.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
They've represented an alternative to the tides of mass opinion AND to the Cathedral.
That seems like a nicely succinct way of saying it talks with crowds but keeps its virtue, and walks with kings but keeps the common touch.
Retaining the "common touch" doesn't mean "to be the modal person." It means retaining an ability to relate to, and communicate with, people of no particular importance. Some examples of having lost the "common touch" in policy debates might be, say, pushing new identity terms on people who don't want them, or pretending that student loan forgiveness isn't a handout to the wealthy.
I don't know what I said to inspire such tenacious contrarianism in you, but like... at minimum, you could try disagreeing with me without putting words in my mouth.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
This is low effort and unnecessarily antagonistic, please don't post like this.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
So it would at least be good to specify the viewpoint from which you're judging a particular claim as inflammatory.
As with all rules, it's the viewpoint of the best judgment of the moderators.
I personally don't think there's anything inflammatory at all about "women love a killer".
That's why I referenced the specific/general rule there, rather than the inflammatory one.
Is no one allowed to post under the assumption that HBD is true unless they include a link to a list of HBD 101 resources laying out the supporting evidence?
That depends largely on the tone of the post. A factual and charitable but non-inflammatory post that leads a person toward uncomfortable conclusions is a very different thing than a meticulously-researched-and-linked post that paints whole groups of people in demeaning or derogatory ways using needlessly hostile language.
In this particular case, I would point out for example that while drawing comparisons between urban crime today and literally barbaric behavior in the ancient world is different in tone than straight up referring to a group as "barbarians." The objection might be--"well yeah, but if it quacks like a duck..." and I am totally sympathetic to wanting to resist the pejorative treadmill. Fortunately, the rules are not self-enforcing, and the mod team is comprised of reasonable individuals doing their best to prevent this from becoming a community where one particular sort of person just comes to vent their spleen.
The most we can do is our best.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
There is not nearly enough effort backing up your substantive point, here. Please engage with effort, charity, and an eye toward writing like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Why shouldn't I just assume that you're some basket-weaver taking a shit on the streets of Calcutta, or fresh from participating in a gang rape in some rural village?
Because that would be unnecessarily antagonistic, which is against the rules.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Hard to say. Maybe?
The decision to drop an official warning is not made on the basis of any hard-and-fast criteria. We let, honestly, a lot slide. There's only so much time in the day, and depending on what else is in the mod queue, the applicable standards may flex. Our approach is, in other words, inescapably conditional, adaptive, and imperfect.
Ultimately, if you're trying to get away with just enough badness in a post that you won't get called on it... odds are pretty good you won't get called on it. Until, of course, you do. Like driving over the speed limit, most of the time you'll get away with it, but if you do it a lot, you raise the odds of facing consequences for that.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Low effort swipes at your outgroup are not permitted. Don't post like this please.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
By the only metric you seem to care about
In context this appears to be, at best, an incredibly hostile non sequitur. Too antagonistic, don't do this please.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
This seems unnecessarily heated and low effort. Please don't post like this.
Here’s my summary of your posts.
You know we have a rule where you're supposed to respond (at least, first) to the things other people have actually said, before trying to impute things to them.
Looking over your user history, I want to think that someone who has received warnings against low effort posting from Zorba, Amadan, and myself, then been banned by both Amadan and myself for continuing to make low effort posts, might stop making low effort posts.
If you can think of a way to encourage yourself to not make low effort posts, please share it with us when you return from your two week ban. Others should note that the length of this ban is a question of steady escalation for repeat behavior, not a comment on how bad this particular comment is in comparative terms.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
Nah, he apparently went through peak trans recently, but otherwise this is perfectly in character.
Although the mod team is, in general, comparatively thick-skinned, this is still not the sort of response we ever, ever want to see here in the Motte. It is low effort and antagonistic, all heat and no light, sweeping where it should be specific (the fuck is "peak trans" in this context?) and specific (i.e. personal) where it should be more sweeping.
This is a bad comment. Don't post like this.
Yes, we should leave it at that, because, yet again, you have failed to explain why this one specific numerical minority must be protected from "mob rule" and others don't
What reason would I have to explain that? I have explicitly stated my position upthread that rural voters are not the only "numerical minority" that must be protected from mob rule. Let's have a look at just one recent example:
And, there are lots of groups in the numerical minority; bookkeepers are a minority of voters; do they get a veto?
Well, yes!
Where I said "I should probably leave it at that" in my previous post, I first deleted a paragraph where I laid out an argument that you are either being disingenuous, or have a serious reading comprehension issue. Then I thought--no, that's too much heat, not enough light, I'm just going to drop it.
With this comment, though, I just don't see any totally non-antagonistic way to describe your persistent and repeated mischaracterization of my view. I get that the thread is unwieldy, and you and I are both getting a lot of comments from a variety of people. So I want to be charitable about this, but like--if you're going to whine that I've "failed to explain" some position, you should probably be pretty confident that it's my actual position, and not a position I have repeatedly stated that I do not hold, right here in this thread! But no--here you are, arguing against some imaginary version of me you've concocted in your head.
Speaking of which--
I am willing to bet that I am far more opposed to mob rule than you are, because I have never seen you stand up for the rights of those you disagree with, which is something I do routinely.
If there were any plausible way to take that bet, I'd certainly do so--not least because I'd be shocked if you could personally identify the class of "people I disagree with" to even 50% accuracy. Conversely, I would not deign to comment on how often you stand up for the rights of people you disagree with, because I don't know you, and it would be idiotic to think that just because someone is (say) colossally disingenuous and reliably partisan in an online forum, that must be their whole personality.
Furthermore, probably most of us are bad at tracking good deeds, unless they are really substantial. My honest inclination is to say "I've never seen you actually demonstrate real care about civil liberties in ways that might undermine your apparent politics," but the truth is, if I had seen you do that, I probably wouldn't remember. There are too many users here for me to reliably remember each one's quirks and hangups, so I try to just approach every discussion with fresh eyes. Still, for whatever it's worth: you've never given me the impression that you are the tiniest bit interested in defending civil liberties in any broadly principled way.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
Lesbianism is more political than biological anyway.
Your comment is a bit... curt, I guess I want to say, given the strength of its claims. To much heat, not enough light. Which is not to say there's no light there, but if you're going to assert that lesbianism is "more political than biological," that seems like the sort of thing you should say with evidence, at least a bit. You didn't even hyperlink the idiom--some amount of shibboleth-slinging is bound to crop up in any community, but still it would be better to speak a bit more plainly.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
If it's your intention to discourage people from giving viewpoints you disagree with that's fine, just say so.
This is not my intent, and by suggesting that it is my intent, you are actually breaking the same rule I just warned you against breaking. This is the absolutely predictable refrain of people who do not want to accept that they have broken the rules: "Oh, the mod is just biased against my views." Don't do this; it's not just uncharitable, it's almost comically boring.
it seems that the low-effort comment which I "should've ignored" was expressing a genuine sentiment that lots of people see reflected as true and impactful
Then take it up with them. I don't know how to be clearer about this. You explicitly tagged the fact that you were making assumptions about what anti_dan meant by "the meme" and you also tagged your own assumptions as tracking "very outlandish." The way you responded tells me that you were being uncharitable, and further suggest that at some level you even knew that you were being uncharitable.
And the thing is--for all I know, anti_dan believes exactly what you said. The problem here is not about substance. It's about approach. Generally speaking, just don't put words in people's mouths. No, not even if you think it's necessary; better to shut your own mouth than put words into someone else's. But in those cases where it really does just seem unavoidable, well, then--you need to do a better job attributing beliefs to people in ways that do not strike you as outlandish. You need to steelman their position. If you're not going to do that, then you just don't get to put words in people's mouths.
As for any other people who might actually be taking outlandish positions explicitly, like--okay! They've painted the target on their own backs. So take it up with them.
I'm not "remembering" anything, much less misremembering--I literally just went and checked, because your claim seemed plausible to me, but proved on examination to be wrong. You said:
Had it been CWR that opened first after the Culture War got booted off of SSC, it'd be the big dog.
My first thought was to check the subreddit creation dates. But as you suggest, it occurred to me that a subreddit may be created but not "opened." So I went looking for the original roundup dates, and CWR "opened" and was running CW threads basically immediately when SSC started having conversations about the split. It opened first, several months before TheMotte. When the roundup was "booted," CWR was already open and running, for the express purpose of being the new location. Everyone could have gone there.
Everyone didn't. The vast majority followed Zorba's team.
And it doesn't really matter very much to me who was first, or why people ultimately moved, beyond the claims I've already made and against which you have presented no counterevidence (only speculation). But it does seriously damage your credibility, in my view, to maintain your position here, in the face of strictly factual evidence against your claim. It's okay to be wrong, everyone's wrong sometimes. But not everyone is rational enough to update their beliefs in the light of contradictory evidence.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
CWR and The Schism aren't the dominant forums because they came after in response to specific complaints. Had it been CWR that opened first after the Culture War got booted off of SSC, it'd be the big dog.
That's an interesting claim. Are you aware that /r/CultureWarRoundup was created five years ago, while /r/TheMotte was only created three years ago? Perhaps more importantly, the earliest thread on /r/CultureWarRoundup is dated to the "Week of November 19, 2018." I am less sure about this, but as far as I can tell the earliest CW thread on /r/TheMotte is dated to the "Week of February 11, 2019."
In other words, the calendar says your explanation fails. What do you suppose explains your mistake?
I agree that the community matters, network effects matter, and not everyone followed Zorba (or baj, or Cheeze) specifically--but the community clearly had the choice between CWR and TheMotte from the inception of the Motte at latest, and the community mostly chose the one with Zorba at the helm. The Schism is... something else, really, but if we treat it as the post to CWR's pre, then the Zorba-maintained Motte is neither the oldest nor the newest iteration of the post-r/SSC culture war community. It's just the biggest.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Are you saying that to live a valuable life you need to only do what is "reasonable" as in the bare minimum of not harming others? Or "reasonable" as in "make the world a better place but you can spend moderate/reasonable costs and don't have to spend severe/unreasonable costs"?
More like the latter. Contractualism is the view that we should never violate a principle of action that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced, general agreement. In practice, we want to be able to justify our actions to others within our moral community. A principle like "always act to make the world a better place" seems reasonably rejectable; not only will I rarely have any idea which of my actions will "make the world a better place," even if I have a very good idea that it would actually make the world a better place to torture a certain innocent child, I have compelling reasons to not do that. In particular, innocent children have a weighty interest--a right--to not be tortured, and making the world a little or even a lot better for millions of people is not sufficient to overcome such interests.
Of course most choices are not so stark. There is often value in doing more than is strictly required of you, but even so it's very important to notice the difference between what is optimal and what is obligatory. If morality required us to always do the optimal thing, it would be impossibly demanding. Very likely no one would ever actually do the "right" thing, on such a view--there are simply too many unknowns. It is much more reasonable to expect people to act in ways they can justify to others. Deliberately making the world a worse place is not generally something we can justify to others. But it's not hard to justify to others, say, spending some time chatting about politics on the Internet, provided your other immediate obligations have been met and you find this sort of activity interesting or relaxing or fun. Is it the optimal way to spend your time? Perhaps not! But you are not actually under a moral obligation to spend your time optimally. So long as posting on Internet forums does not violate a principle of action that no one could reasonably reject, it's permissible.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
Yes, but humans are also biologically selected for certain patterns of collective action - thats part of normal evolution for a social species.
...did you even look at the link, maybe? Or read what I wrote about reductionism not being useful in the context of this conversation? You're not saying anything I don't know, but perhaps more importantly, you're not saying anything you shouldn't anticipate me knowing. In the end, we're presumably all just subatomic particles doing what subatomic particles do! Your question was "why is it egregorian and not just normal evolution" and my answer was "because evolution describes biological patterns and arrangements, while egregores describe social patterns and arrangments." Your response appears to be "nah those aren't different things" but they are at least as different as diamond and graphite, for which we have different words despite their consisting of the same atomic substrate.
Maybe it would just be simpler to point out that British-descended humans in Britain, America, and Australia clearly share "normal evolution" in common--but not egregorian memespace?
Or maybe I just don't understand your question at all.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
It's highly relevant, because I am trying to figure out what the actual infraction is, and one of the ways I'm going to do that is by comparing what I did to seemingly similar behavior from others.
No, don't compare yourself to unmoderated comments; we don't (can't) moderate every rules violation, because we don't even see most of them. Most of the time, a comment has to get reported first.
So you're saying that if I'd sprinkled in a few hedging words, there wouldn't be a problem? Or if I'd specified "Republicans" and "Democrats"?
"Republicans" and "Democrats" is probably still too general, because those are not meaningfully homogeneous groups beyond the fact of their group membership. You need to specify to a meaningful degree. "People who believe in God" is a very general group, but you can say some things about them in a permissible way. And I definitely didn't say "sprinkle in a few hedging words and there won't be a problem," I said something more like "hedging and honest self report can be mitigating factors, provided the rest of your comment isn't too blatantly terrible in other ways."
That is me characterizing the pattern of thinking I am talking about, as exemplified in the excerpt I quoted.
But first, you never say "suppose someone thinks that..." and second, your characterization slips into weak man territory. Remember, you opened with:
This epitomizes general differential expectations of conservatives and liberals. Conservatives are regarded (and to a shocking degree, regard themselves)
So this sets the expectation that you think that conservatives (as well as liberals) think, concerning conservatives:
FEMA death camps, Birtherism, Jewish Space Lasers, etc... They're dumb, they're ignorant, they can't help themselves and we shouldn't expect anything of them.
It's impossible to tell, from your comment, whether you include yourself in "conservatives" or "liberals" so it's impossible to tell, from your comment, whether you are hiding your own views behind a neutral "some people think" point of view, or what. If you're going to run with a "some people think" argument, then you need to be either steel manning it, or proactively providing evidence of what those "some people" actually think.
I'm never going to apologize for seeking clarity. Or maybe put a little differently: if I'm an autist at heart, then telling me I'm being too autistic is like telling a bird it is being too feathery. Like, look around you. If you have a problem with rationalists, you've come to a funny part of town...
Looks like a motte-and-bailey to me. "What? No! I just meant me, personally--I don't mean literally no one should care about the outgroup I'm railing against and weak-manning right here in the thread. What kind of monster do you take me for?" Uh huh. Try pulling the other one.
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