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Hyperbole is bad
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User ID: 92
Be Kind
Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.
Be charitable.
Do not weakman in order to show how bad a group is.
Leave the rest of the internet at the door.
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
I don't understand how this is even borderline. Where is the light / analysis / value that's overriding the negatives?
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Hyperbole is bad
14d ago
Advocating for race-conscious policies so that racial groups with lower crime rates don't need to deal with the consequences of living in a high-crime environment seems like an extremely narrowly scoped argument. Should men between the ages of 15 and 25 be excluded from low-crime neighborhoods too?
Focusing on race, rather than gender, income, age, or (heck), criminality seems rather odd -- where's the post advocating for banning all felons from your city?
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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.
It’s doesn’t matter what I think. “The group of people who don’t like gay people” is a valid set of people to talk about. Referencing that group is allowed, and people are welcome to argue how large it is.
Referencing that group in a deliberately inflammatory way should not be allowed.
I’m sure there are awkward edge cases you can catch me up with, but the existence of edge cases doesn’t justify ignoring the non-edge cases.
“Tranny” exists as an inflammatory way to say “transgender person”. It is not an edge case and not defensible.
The people who use it are using it to demonstrate their disdain for transpeople which is not “writing like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion”.
When avoiding a derogatory term makes discussion more difficult you will have a leg to stand on. “Tranny” doesn’t, yet you insist on sheltering under free speech.
So I ask: how is this specific usage of Free Speech (allowing people to say “tranny”) helping us achieve our terminal value?
All of the community's rules must be justified by this foundation.
Yes, it takes judgement to decide what speech to allow. But here’s a simple heuristic:
If a word drives some people away and is unnecessary for communicating ideas, then modding its usage helps one aspect of the foundation and doesn’t hurt the other.
“Tranny” drives away certain perspectives and makes no ideas easier to communicate. So how is allowing it helping achieve the foundation?
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Hyperbole is bad
4mo ago
OP claimed
only 10% of divorces actually result in any actual alimony paid.
Is this wrong?
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Hyperbole is bad
4mo ago
This doesn’t address OP’s primary complaint, which is lack of evidence.
In a society where everyone was raised from birth to be vegan it’d be equally obvious a chicken is worth more than 0.1% of a human and anyone who said otherwise would be considered morally abhorrent.
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Hyperbole is bad
5mo ago
If it was people being less afraid of and having more sex it's a failure. Younger generations are having a lot less of it and are more neurotic about it than ever.
A heck of a lot has changed between 1960 and 2023 and ascribing every social failure to "the sexual revolution" requires either a lot of work or a lot of caveats.
Blaming computers/phones/porn and the accompanying incessant optimizations designed to steal our attention away from all other aspects of life seem far more responsible to me for your first three points.
I guess I assumed at least one mod had seen a 6-day old, second level comment and the 10th highest comment of the week. If I was wrong, mea culpa.
I assumed one of you had seen it, but, given your policy of not banning people for saying mean things about politicians, chose not to ban a comment that was merely insulting a politician.
I can only be grateful at what must be the best possible outcome for me. Moderation certainly seems less insane than my past conversations with mods has made it seem. It kind of seems like the real disagreement wasn’t with banning such comments, it was whether to ban them as “boo outgroup” or “uncharitable/unkind”. I will only be reporting such comments as “boo outgroup” going forward.
(Though to be clear, is “Trump is a venal fascist clown” a violation of the “boo outgroup” rule?)
Fortunately I’m not particularly interested in arguing for a specific rule, since fundamentally the reason these comments are harmful is they make productive and diverse discussion more difficult.
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Hyperbole is bad
10mo ago
If there is blatant culture warring in this thread that isn't being modded, that's a mod problem.
even Economics, which promises much when it comes to explanatory power, comes up sorely lacking
What do you mean by this? What do you want from the field of economics?
Our understanding of economics is enormously better than it was 80 years ago. In my opinion what makes Economics respectable is that, of all the social sciences, they're the ones who bother to create models (or, at least, ones that are more complicated than linear regression), and then go through the work of trying to see if those models match reality. If they fail, it's mostly because systems with many humans are really complicated -- they're hard to model, hard to experiment on, and it's hard to measure what we care about (but it seems really unfair to blame Economists' intelligence/motivation/personal failings for that).
I'd go so far as to say that Economics majors care more about well-defined modeling than most STEM majors.
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Hyperbole is bad
10d 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.
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).
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Hyperbole is bad
7mo ago
IMO the right lens here is that American waiters have the valuable "capital" of living in America -- where there are high-earning consumers willing to pay for their labor.
In contrast, there's nothing more valuable about unionized workers compared to non-unionized workers (except their ability to rent seek).
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Hyperbole is bad
9mo ago
why would you want to depress native fertility by importing a bunch of low-skilled workers
This is the first time I've heard this claim. Is there empirical evidence to support this?
2. TIME article from disillusioned women in EA making questionable claims of sexual assault (to which the CEO of Open Phil replied, not the organization itself, as you suggest)
I didn't really see much of a difference, but I guess I can see how some people could.
1. The widespread admonishment of Nick Bostrom among EAs after his comment on factual group differences was leaked
5. Highlights two cause areas (global dysgenic trends and the power laws of crime) that are ignored by EA as taboo.
A social taboo against talking about HBD is not feminization. It was the de facto state of society well before the rise of modern feminism and woke culture. Take a random sample of men at the gym or in an MMO and start talking about how Black people are genetically inferior and let me know how it goes. HBD is not something all men secretly believe and want to talk about (if not for those pesky women!).
Though while we're on the topic, imo the general state of HBD has been the same since at least 2013 (when I started reading about it) -- basically: "Some of EAs believe in HBD and some EAs are uncomfortable with talking about it, and some EAs support strong social norms against talking about it", which should already seem strikingly different from how its talked about in the normal population.
3. Open Phil making donations towards criminal justice causes without any evidential basis for their effectiveness
Open Philanthropy's funding for criminal justice reform has been significant since at least 2016, went down in 2020 (when George Floyd died), and then separated from OpenPhil in 2021 because they weren't as effective as global health.
As we wrote in 2019, we think the top global aid charities recommended by GiveWell (which we used to be part of and remain closely affiliated with) present an opportunity to give away large amounts of money at higher cost-effectiveness than we can achieve in many programs, including CJR, that seek to benefit citizens of wealthy countries. Accordingly we’re shifting the focus of future grantmaking from our Global Health and Wellbeing portfolio (which CJR has been part of) further towards the types of opportunities outlined in that post — specifically, efforts to improve and save the lives of people internationally (including things like distributing insecticide-treated bednets to prevent the spread of malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa, and fighting air pollution in South Asia).
-- OpenPhil
Those don't seem like the actions of an ideologically compromised organization.
4. A highly upvoted post on the EA forum titled “I’m a 22-year-old woman involved in Effective Altruism. I’m sad, disappointed, and scared.” This post then goes on to critique EA for placing too much emphasis on rationality and not enough on emotion.
I'll admit I missed this (my mistake for posting while at the gym). While I don't think "highly upvoted post on a forum" is great evidence (or I'd prove that EA is okay with Bostrom), it should certainly qualify to be included in a "summary of evidence".
Those rules already exist.
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.
Does every statement need a citation? No, but we need some standards to prevent literal for-it’s-own-sake mockery.
and it doesn't make interaction with the police any safer as the police still has guns.
It’s funny that this is obvious to you. I think it makes total sense the increasing the likelihood that someone has a gun makes police more jumpy. You might be interested in this graph I made in 2021
Edit: found the other version of my graph with slightly different axes if it's interesting to anyone: link
"We show that if we make an effort to reconstruct the CPI of Okun’s era [1970s]—which would have had inflation peak last year around 18%, we are able to explain 70% of the gap in consumer sentiment we saw last year."
I'm really confused at why this is supposed to be compelling. Can't you say this about any two things that changed by roughly the same size?
But maybe that's because I'm confused by what the units on "user sentiment" are in this tweet. Without that, it's not even clear why you'd expect "user sentiment" to be linearly related with inflation — if the gap between inflation metrics was higher, would he be saying this explained 110% of user sentiment?
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?).
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Hyperbole is bad
3mo ago
Bad word. "Doesn't like gay people" communicates the exact same thing but with less heat.
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.
I agree it'd be nice to have a "job in your field" statistic. It'd be nice if OP would provide one before baselessly claiming that one gender is delusional.
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