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Hyperbole is bad
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User ID: 92
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Hyperbole is bad
6mo ago
The optimal amount of crime-avoidant advice-giving is non-zero.
The optimal amount of crime-avoidant advice-giving right after the recipient was just raped is zero.
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Hyperbole is bad
7mo ago
I’ve heard this claimed before but admit to knowing nothing about it. What is the evidence for it?
Is there a reason you chose to make a low effort comment rather than hit the "report" button?
A top-level post was "DAE think my out-group actually only cares about money". This is a clear violation of the hot take rule. I did not report the comment because I (correctly) did not expect mods to enforce this rule.
I don't want shady thinking to be banned. I want the people taking controversial positions to do something to justify it. My bar is low -- one or two past actions that make little sense if the ADL wants to reduce anti-Semitism, for example.
(For what it's worth I did a higher effort critique of the last comment)
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Hyperbole is bad
10mo ago
Last time I asked a similar question and the highly upvoted response was that we no longer have to deal with Reddit doing “questionable things”, which seems like a carte blanche to sneer at Reddit for any reason whatsoever.
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Hyperbole is bad
10mo ago
To save you all the read, there is exactly one example of support this claim: Open Philanthropy publicly expressing concern about sexual harassment after a bad PR incident.
Hey mods. My discussion with @Amadan seems to have ended without a resolution. Could I get some clarification on how our rules permit insulting public officials when it isn't explicitly necessary to make your point? It seems to contradict several of them:
Be Kind… To a lesser but non-zero extent, this also applies to third parties. You shouldn't just go and attack people that you think are bad, you should be kind to them, even if you think they're mean, even if you think they're bad.
Or
Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.
Or
To have a discussion on some point of disagreement it is necessary that both parties be willing to say what they believe and why, not merely that they disagree with the other party. Sarcasm and mockery make it very easy to express that you disagree with someone without explaining why, or what contrary claim you actually endorse, and you can't grow a discussion from those grounds.
Or
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
"Trump is a venal, fascist clown" seem like really clear cases of prioritizing heat over light, vilifying your outgroup, arguing to win, and treating the thread as territory to be won. Just completely counterproductive and the anthesis to the goals of this place.
If you decide you're going to allow them, could you explain how my interpretation of these rules is wrong and/or rewrite the rules to be more clear?
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Hyperbole is bad
1yr ago
You seem to just want me to mod people who insult Kamala Harris
I don't know what I've said to imply that Kamala Harris is special at all. I don't want people insulting Trump or Bill Gates or Elon Musk either. It does nothing but lower the quality of discourse here.
Saying Kamala Harris has no hope of winning the nomination is fine (preferably justified with evidence, but I have low standards). "Weak air-headed" seems to contribute nothing but heat.
In any case @ZorbaTHut could you please update the rules to say make it clear that the mods don't mind comments like "Trump is a venal, fascist clown" and "Kamala Harris is an airhead"?
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Hyperbole is bad
1yr ago
A Tesla Powerwall costs over $10,000 and stores about $3 worth of power, in AUD.
How is this possible? Surely a Tesla car can’t go O(100) miles on $3 of electricity… can it? How can the Powerwall (apparently) be so inefficient compared to the batteries in Tesla cars?
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Hyperbole is bad
1yr ago
The advantage of a web app on mobile is it's easier to access (clicking an app icon is much easier than navigating to a url and/or opening a browser and navigating to the bookmark)
The advantage on a computer is that I can cycle between 5 applications instead of 50 tabs (though some day I hope to burn the "cmd+shift+a" tab-searching hotkey into my mind).
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Hyperbole is bad
5d ago
Yes, I read your edit before I made my comment. I'm asking what value you see in that comment -- why a warning would not have been merited if it had been made several levels deeper, despite the fact that it violates several rules and exists solely to complain bitterly about how terrible the author's outgroup is.
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Hyperbole is bad
1mo ago
Many have pointed out that a version of a captcha for chatbots is if they are willing to say naughty words or not. What you're basically doing with this ban is saying "you have to sound like a chatbot in order to post here". I think this is a bad idea.
Producing heat in a place dedicated to productive political discussions is a bad idea.
You say consequentialism is self-evidently wrong, and then you define morality as “the end goal ideal state we're working towards”? And you say you support punishing intent because “it works” — ie because of it’s consequences.
It seems to me you agree with the underlying framework of consequentialism, you just insist that the label “morality” apply simultaneously to both states and actions, whereas Utilitarians throw a InvalidTypeError for the latter.
If you agree that morality is the end state we want to achieve, how can you apply the same word to apply to actions and not have it be about achieving that state?
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Hyperbole is bad
2mo ago
Based on my social circle, the norm "people who are unusually financially successful compared to their parent should give something back, unless those parents were abusive" is a supermajority view even among white people.
The claim "children doing far better than their parents, financially, should give some small fraction to their parents" is miles away from the claim that most parents are entitled to a significant share of their children's income.
The controversial claim here isn't whether somebody making $500k should give $20k/year to his parents, who are making $40k each. It's that the kid making $80k/year owes his parents, (who are also making $80k/year), $10k/year for 10 years, because he owes a significant fraction of his success to 18+ years of his parents' labor.
Doctors are unwilling to kill people, and this is such a substantial obstacle that we should give the state a pass on bumbling executions?
If the context of this conversation wasn't complaining about the Left, but was complaining about the ineptitude of the state, would you be this charitable towards government ineptitude?
Yes, I imagine any method of execution would be criticized by people who oppose the death penalty. From what I (an amateur) can tell, lethal objection seems reasonable, though having inexperienced technicians seems like a solvable problem – it's not like doctors are the only people who know how to insert IVs. Historic complaints about executioners being inexperienced at inserting IVs seem solvable to me (go have your executioners work at blood drives or something?).
The idea of the mainstream American Male Sports Fan had declined so far that I couldn't even buy one issue, I had to specifically subscribe to that niche if I wanted it.
How does this make sense when you lay the blame for the decline in Sports Illustrated on the Internet?
I completely agree that you (and most mods here) strongly value free speech. I think that explains why their moderation serves two masters, rather than the single foundation that they're supposed to serve.
The purpose of this community is to be a working discussion ground for people who may hold dramatically different beliefs.
...
All of the community's rules must be justified by this foundation.
If the purpose of TheMotte was to be a place where the English and the Irish can have peaceful discussions, there's no reason to let the English call the Irish "Micks". It's completely unnecessary to discuss any meaningful ideas and only serves to increase tension. If you do allow it then you are sacrificing your purported mission for some other value (e.g. free speech). If you start with 80% English and two years later you have 95% English I think it would be fair to ask why you're still letting the English call the Irish "Micks" when you say you want to encourage peaceful discussion.
Free Speech is cool. There are other communities that prioritize free speech and I have nothing against them. But in this community our purported foundation is not "Free Speech", so "I strongly value free speech" is not a valid justification for a moderation decision.
Given that our terminal value is purportedly fixed, Free Speech is merely one tool to achieve it, so I ask: how is this specific usage of Free Speech (allowing people to use slurs) helping us achieve our terminal value?
I don’t think your explanations contradict the mod-hating of your irrespective (?) comments.
I do think your explanations contradict each other’s explanations. I expect if a post that calls people trannies and also makes the 10,000th run-of-the-mill advocacy for conservative values, @raggedy_anthem will mod it and you will not.
That’s fine, I’m not looking for perfect consistency between mods, I was just remarking that this seems like a change in direction to our moderation.
As somebody who thinks it’s mind numbingly obvious “the foundation” has only eroded since we were founded, I’m just happy there’s a mod willing to up civility standards, since I’ve long been clear that I think that’s a requirement for the foundation, since shit-flinging is detrimental to minority views.
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Hyperbole is bad
3mo ago
APPLES AND URRNGES. Massive difference between a woman who loses her husband to unexpected death versus a woman (or man) who makes a bad mate-pairing decision early on. It's about choices, risk, and commitment.
I believe this was intentional, since it’s a better way to tease out the causal/marginal effect of divorce than looking at average outcomes.
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Hyperbole is bad
4mo ago
I'm not saying the rules aren't fair. I'm saying the failure modes of the "fair fight" philosophy also hinder productive discussion.
Veganism is one point on the spectrum, with people both before it and after it. You cannot dismiss it by appealing to the limit (you’ll note that vegans don’t eat flavorless paste).
Unless you’re arguing that anyone advocating for efficiency in consumption has to eat flavorless paste, otherwise they’re a hypocrite.
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Hyperbole is bad
4mo ago
This isn't even remotely true. In fact I'd wager tech is one of the least meritocratic places out there
Why do you think that?
The amount of charity/humility on TheMotte is certainly far lower than it was when /r/slatestarcodex was created. In the long run we're getting the outgroup engagement that we deserve (none).
I never claimed the sexual revolution was "successful" (whatever that means). I'm saying that pointing out things that are worse in 2023 than in 1960 and automatically assigning blame to one specific factor is incredibly unprincipled, which would be obvious if it were something apolitical.
Look, you have to choose:
Either "the sexual revolution was a success" is a causal claim about whether it caused society to get closer or farther from its goals (compared to the counterfactual where it never happened).
Or "the sexual revolution was a success" is a "correlational claim" about whether the US in 2023 is "closer to its goals" than the US in 1960.
You are switching between both -- arguing for the second claim (the motte) is true, and then claiming the sexual revolution was responsible for all the social problems of the last 6 decades (the bailey).
The fact that conservatives have been blaming the sexual revolution for causing an era of unparalleled promiscuity but you're blaming it for the opposite should make you pause.
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Hyperbole is bad
7mo ago
I think you replied to the wrong comment
Sure, then the mods can remove the hot-take rule and be honest about that fact that proactive defense of claims is nice, but that they won’t/can’t enforce it.
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