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Hyperbole is bad
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User ID: 92
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
4mo 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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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
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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
8mo ago
Yes and apparently adding a ton of non-IQ signal will magically make this test a better proxy for IQ.
Sure. But that's before you've made a system that rewards grip strength with social outcomes. As soon as you do that, the correlation with IQ would become greater, as people with higher IQs interested in better social outcomes would then try to optimize for grip strength and be more effective at optimizing for it.
You're conjecturing that grip strength and conscientiousness are positively correlated (citation?) and that conscientiousness and IQ are positively correlated (seems contentious at best after some Googling). Take every concern I had with using terribly-correlated variables and square it because you're not even talking about a direct connection anymore.
I don't think you really comprehend how weakly these traits are connected, and how relying on interactions between those traits makes that even worse. Yes, many good traits are correlated (a.k.a. the halo effect), and yes, people who deny this are worth refuting. But to go the opposite direction and just see these traits as interchangeable proxies for each other is crazy.
Suppose you published the entire SAT answer key a week before the test. Conscientious students would memorize it and completely destroy the other students, but nobody would dare to claim that this improves the correlation of the test with IQ! This is because the SAT is already a good proxy!
For any decent metric adding in confounding factors make it worse and the only reason you can conjecture the opposite is because grip strength is such a terrible metric to begin with.
The average SAT score is 520 on each test. The average Harvard admit has an average in the low 700s (white admits average 745 and African Americans average 704). The standard deviation on each test is around 100. This puts African American Harvard admits around 1.8 standard deviations above average.
And you think social incentives will transform your 3%-above-random-chance signal into something competitive?
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Hyperbole is bad
9mo ago
You’re insulting anyone who thinks ai is not more significant than the steam engine or electricity.
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Hyperbole is bad
9mo ago
I believe it’s 4. I reported what I assume is the fifth as low effort yesterday but, while mods have modded a more recent top level comment as low-effort, they have not modded that one, so I’m guessing it’s fine.
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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11mo ago
We don't like anyone doing top-level posting that is overwhelmingly copy-pasted
I'm not necessarily criticizing this ban, but what's the justification behind this? Why does it matter if something insightful came from a user here or from an outside thinker (assuming the poster agrees with what they're sharing)?
Is the idea that this is a way to prevent spamming, by raising the required time commitment to make a top-level post?
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Hyperbole is bad
11mo ago
I guess I wasn’t clear. I’m not saying people actually upvote those links, in saying that they should.
The first paragraph is an explanation of why I disagree with your claim that Amadan answered my questions. Everything else is a response to the rest of what you wrote.
There are things that are bad but also not worth moderating. Insulting politicians falls into this category. I never said it was good for triggering discussion, I didn't say it was good at all. I specifically said it was bad.
I didn't say you loved the first comment, but you're defending it by appealing to the discussion that follows it, which I think is fairly summarized as "it can trigger good discussion".
There are two failure modes of moderation. One failure mode is not moderating enough and the place descends into a hell hole. The other failure mode is moderating too much, and the place goes silent (or turns into an echo-chamber of moderator-approved content).
You and @ZorbaTHut are both going to the "true positives / false positives" argument. I can't say I can complain, since that does ultimately seem like the disagreement. It also makes further discussion seem mostly moot -- any false/true positive discussion is ultimately quantitative and it's unlikely any of us can come up with meaningful data.
I can only say that "don't say mean things" was the default civility norms while I was growing up, it's second nature to me, it's what I expect from my friends, it's what my elementary school teachers expected of me, and I struggle to put myself in the shoes of somebody who would rather be silent than have to talk about politics without insulting their enemies. I think people do it because they can get away with it. If you think we risk losing valuable discussion then I guess further discussion isn't likely to be fruitful.
I'm not even convinced we'd gain more Kamala Harris supporters in the discussion. After all, we'd be enforcing the rule accross the political spectrum. So there would be 'no insulting Trump' rules as well.
I sort of agree. There are lots of forces that drive out Kamala Harris supporters, and drive-by insults are basically the lowest hanging fruit that doesn't endanger good discussion. Probably more significant are anti-woke dogpiles, but barring absolutely crazy ideas it's much harder to moderate that. But low hanging fruit is still low hanging fruit, it's a continuum not a binary, etc.
Politicians insult each other all the time. There is a problem in the news where repeating someone else's slanderous remarks isn't slander. We would have the same problem here.
I would literally prefer "[Trump says Kamala Harris is an airhead](https://foo.bar) " over the current state. I'm not trying to solve all civility problems here. I think this is one particular problem with an easy solution, and the more inconvenient it is to wage drive-by culture war the better.
Insults vs opinions are a thin line. "I hate Trump" vs "I hate how Trump looks like a fascist clown and has ruined the image of the presidency" vs "Trump is a fascist clown". All these statements are sort of expressing a similar thing...
The mods (i.e. the three that have discussed it publicly) seem pretty united on the stance that "it's just my opinion" is a sensible defense.
For me, this is just "one man's modus ponens" and I'll easily bite the bullet: if you're insulting somebody, it's relevant to your point or you're booing outgroup. That's true if it's a factual claim and it's true if it's your opinion.
I don't think the "opinion/fact" axis is the right way to think about this.
The problem with "Kamala is an air-head" isn't that people might mistake it for a fact and get misinformed. It's that the goal is to be insulting (i.e. waging culture war, demonstrably showing you couldn't care less about Kamala Harris supporters, etc.).
I take your argument as roughly
Right now the rules have false negatives, but if we change them to fix those false negatives, we'll end up having false positives
And true/false positive debates are ultimately quantitative and we can't even express the tradeoffs we believe in, let alone actually argue whether we're on one side or another (i.e. what does "every 1% increase in censorship" even mean?).
That said, I think there's a pretty clear alternative which is the Victorian Sufi Buddha Lite policy: if you're going to say something mean about somebody, it should be necessary and true.
This has always been my preferred philosophy for moderation, and it's also puzzled me why it's never been part of TheMotte moderation (given our ancestry). After these discussions I'm guessing the moderators here agree it's too restrictive for discussion.
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Hyperbole is bad
1yr ago
feel like Amadan answered most of your questions in that thread
Frankly I disagree. There was no argument at all for why "Kamala Harris is an airhead" offers anything positive at all to the community, nor for how it doesn't break the rules. Just "we're not gonna do it", "it's not part of The Norms", etc.
The purpose of enforcing "don't call Kamala Harris an airhead" isn't to protect Kamala Harris' feelings, is to prevent people who do support her from seeing red and manning the battle-stations or, alternatively, from doing so until it's blatantly clear how lopsided this place is against her and they all decide to leave.
The argument of "but it can trigger good discussion" proves way too much (it justifies nearly anything), and is particularly unpersuasive when you can trigger the exact same discussion with far less heat by saying (e.g.) "I disagree with Trump's political goals, and his decisions have repeatedly backfired". "Trump is a facist clown" is clearly intended to fire a shot in Culture War (do you disagree?) and should be modded as such.
Somebody (not sure if ZorbaTHut, TracingWoordgrains, Scott, or someone else) once wrote a great post on how "free speech" is decidedly not the same thing as maximizing good discussion, and insulting Trump or Harris seems like a pretty clear case of prioritizing free speech for it's own sake. I'm really skeptical there are people that (1) we want hear from and (2) who couldn't maintain elementary civility standards if they actually cared to.
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.
I am disputing the concrete claim that you made that
[reducing gun ownership] doesn't make interaction with the police any safer as the police still has guns.
You still have provided no evidence that that claim is true.
If you don't want to talk about that claim any more that's fine, but please stop implying that I've ever said
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That reducing gun ownership will turn the US into Japan
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That reducing gun ownership will drop fatal police shootings to zero
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That reducing gun ownership will make life better for US citizens
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.
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