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Notes -
RIP James Watson
And so we lose one of the 20th Century pioneers of DNA research. He made it to a nice and comfortable 97 so at least he got to live a full life. His contributions were undeniable but we are all aware of what happened to him in his later years when his awards and honours got stripped because he talked to liberally about HBD. Back then I interpreted all this as yet another example of "Woke gone mad" left wingers who couldn't attack the argument so decided the best shot was to attack the man himself.
Other than the HBD stuff I thought he was a perfectly normal retired scientist, a bit wacky maybe but that's almost obligatory if you have a Nobel prize.
However I have very recently (in the last hour after news of his passing broke) learned that there's more to the sorts of things that Watson said than merely "respectable" HBD. For example there's this quote:
and this:
and this:
and then there's this:
This new knowledge has made me reevaluate my views on him. Now my new provisional views on him are that he clusters with Brian Josephson: academically brilliant but kooky in the head:
except that Watson's views were even more corrosive to modern civil society than Brian's. The more you know, as they say...
This is a well-crafted piece, let's break it down:
I'll leave it to the gallery to decide if OP simply has natural talent at this, or is a trained and well-polished master baiter, but, from me, kudos.
I want to sincerely thank you for taking the time to do this.
As I noted in my last ban for Count (and elaborated upon in subsequent discussion), he's very good at what he does (trolling). In a forum where people are largely acting in good faith, and where assumptions of good faith are both recommended (it's in the rules) and generally believed, he's the best at mimicking the surface traits of fact-based discussion.
Now, we could just warn and ban him with the bare minimum of effort, but that's generally a last resort. So any formal action usually requires a lot of explanation. That can get very tiresome, even burdensome.
And note that this effort isn't for the sake of Count. We know he's a troll, and the only reason he's around is because he contributes just enough to not be clearly net negative. We don't bother with the lengthy explainers for his sake, but we consider them necessary for everyone else, particularly newcomers to our forums, or those who aren't quite as jaded and get confused as to why seemingly innocuous or borderline posts get hit so hard. In a way, Count benefits from the existence of the people he seeks to rile up.
I'll bookmark this, just in case I need a proper analysis of his nonsense that isn't written solely by myself. Thanks again.
Oh come on, I can't believe this, every time I make a top level post we get people going "5 secret and esoteric knowledge reasons why BC is actually trolling even when he says he's sincere" that there's no good response to other than going "no" because with text anyone can make up anything to support their viewpoint and make it sound plausible (see your average literary analysis magazine or Scott's Recent Anti-Christ lecture).
You just did exactly this to James Watson. You have no right to complain about it.
Ah, but he has every right to play the part of the fool by complaining about it.
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I think it only takes a very quick glance at this forum and past moderation activities to realize that us mods have very little in common with the good Cardinal. We warn sparingly, and hand out bans even more so.
As is regrettably necessary, mod decisions usually revolve around matters of opinion, not the kind of objective fact that can be analyzed under a microscope. Yet, the average Mottizen attracts little such censure.
The last time I had to ban you, I even went to the trouble of rewriting your post to demonstrate a version that used inflammatory language to only the minimum extent necessary:
https://www.themotte.org/post/2269/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/348561?context=8#context
So I am confident that it isn't the content, but the user presenting it and the way it's presented that's an issue.
At this point, you have the following options:
Keep doing whatever it is you are doing, till someone less amused by your antics permabans you.
Write something of actual quality to counterbalance things (you are in fact capable of doing this, look at your Alawite writeup, it won an AAQC). Or, if you're going to keep actual intellectual effort at what it is, phrase things in a more neutral manner.
As it is, my stance is that your current post isn't quite bad enough to warrant another ban, but has supersensitized my receptors such that a second offense will definitely result in a ban.
Honestly, I'm not sure any expression of sincerity will make up for past actions. Finding Christ or Allah right at the noose might do good things for your immortal soul, but it'll take a great deal more to make us not consider you a bad actor.
I'm not interested in debating your character with you, though I might with other people who genuinely don't understand our stance. What is within your control is your behavior, such that you may delay or deny the looming banhammer.
If you can't? Well, you'll certainly break out of the loop of samsara, for better or worse.
In fairness, people have been saying “the forum will die because you’re banning all the interesting people” for at least 5 years now.
On the other hand, we actually have banned some interesting people, and the forum is worse for their absence.
Okay buddy - you and @ABigGuy4U - I am calling your bluff. Who are the people we have permabanned who actually made the forum worse for their absence?
The only one I can think of is @HlynkaCG and he is extremely debatable - for every Hlynka-stan who misses him, there is someone who was screaming at us to ban him for years. And I've already written several times about how we did everything we could, short of just literally saying "The rules don't apply to Hlynka," to avoid having to permaban him.
Every other permaban I can think of might have been in some cases an "interesting" person, but they were interesting in the sense that they wrote high-effort screeds spitting high-effort venom, and the people upset that we banned them approved of the direction they were spitting.
Go on, tell me who on this list was a valuable contributor who you think should be granted amnesty?
We do not casually permaban people, and we let even the most belligerent and obnoxious people, if there is even a shred of redeeming quality in their posts, have multiple chances before we pull the trigger.
I personally don't find @BurdensomeCount's contributions very interesting, though I will say his trolling has gotten less blatant. I just skimmed the OP because it was the usual uninteresting BC sneering. He mostly gets away with it because he's toned down the celebratory triumphalism about enjoying the fruits of immigrating to the UK which he looks forward to being conquered by his people who will punish the white supremacist natives in good time. It was those kinds of posts that got him banned before.
"50% of the forum loves them and 50% hates their guts" is practically the definition of an interesting poster. If there's unanimous agreement that someone is a good contributor, then they may indeed be a "good" poster, but there's a cap on how interesting they can be.
My suggestion has always been that bans are capped at a length of one year, except in incredibly egregious cases (e.g. spam bots, or the person launched cyberattacks on the forum or something). I don't expect that this suggestion will ever actually be implemented, but it is a possibility nonetheless.
Hlynka is the primary example of course, also fuckduck9000, AhhhTheFrench, AlexanderTurok.
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Looks like @fuckduck9000, banned for this, was banned for something far less inflammatory than stuff that barely merited a warning in this very thread.
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Depends on the point of view. Some people that I expect others to think were "interesting" really only had a few interesting ideas, ran out of them and got banned once their manner of conversation outweighed the reiteration of their ideas.
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What's interesting about posting try-hard "provocative" top level posts, and ignoring literally everyone who points that out several of the premises are wrong?
Three of the top level comments this week devolved into long threads that were entirely just navel-gazing about Motte rules and decorum. Then this one comes along and it just immediately turns into an inquisition about whether it’s bait with no actual substantive discussion of the topic. I don’t know much about James Watson and I would have liked some actual discussion about his life, work and pet theories regardless of who started the thread. If the “bait” is so fine grained that you need a fifty page analysis about it whether or not it’s bait, it’s effectively become a pointless distinction. Meanwhile the discussion gets slower and more sclerotic every week and there are fewer and fewer top level posts.
Whatever gave you that idea? Literally everything he posts in top level is bait. Watson was a subject of past culture war debate, and the rat-sphere was sympathetic to him, so he attacked him because he wanted to own the chuds. It's as simple as that. If you think that's uncharitable, then the fact that he refuses to adress responses that show he's just plain wrong, proves it.
I'm not here to serve as entertainment. Letting people rile others up for shits and giggles, because you find the conversations "sclerotic" would just shit this place up. You can literlly just go on over to rdrama if you're so bored.
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I appreciate your thanks, though having slept on it I do feel like trolling back at him and to some extent backseat modding wasn't the ideal good-citizen-of-themotte response to give BC. But whomst among us is the perfect mottizen?
I'm touched you think your work was trolling. If only Count shared that definition!
Don't worry about it. While we raise an eyebrow at armchair psychoanalysis of the average Mottizen (or people someone has a grudge with), I doubt any of us would object here when it's Count in question.
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Richelieu could also find treason in six lines written by a traitor, but he didn't feel it was necessary to mention that.
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Damn I genuinely learned something from this lmao
Kind of makes me want to shitpost more, there's so much unexplored skill ceiling. You've put me on to some new tech.
Feels like when I first figured out how to wave dash.
Study rhetoric! Preferably with a Classical flavour to it, though of the moderns I recommend Leo Strauss, HL Mencken, and Keith Johnstone's Impro. As Rousseau said, "man is the chief instrument of man", and rhetoric is how one accesses that instrument. Not entirely unlike wavedashing life, honestly.
I second the recommendation to study rhetoric, changed my life for the better and won me a bunch of prizes back in the day.
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Great breakdown. His trolling sometimes gets me, but it's artful enough that I can't truly be mad. And he's pretty witty sometimes.
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Trust me, I'm not a leftoid baiting. You'll notice the conspicuous absence of any mentions of Rosalind Franklin in my post, which would be the number 1 point anybody of a left wing persuasion would attempt to make here.
Instead I fully and freely acknowledge that Rosalind Franklin has been massively overrated, the narrative about how Watson and Crick somehow "stole" her work (never mind the fact that it's very unlikely she would even understand the implications of the images she produced, it's very non trivial to go from this to realizing it implies DNA has a double helix structure) is completely discredited and her contributions were nowhere near those of the people who actually got the Nobel prize.
No, I don't think you're a leftoid baiting - mate, I wouldn't have chosen to make that post if I didn't know your posting well.
Plus, mentioning Franklin would be poor baitcraft. You'd get written off as a leftoid and not get nearly as much attention as doing the former rightoid schtick.
Some people here, including yourself, seem to have developed the view that I'm some sort of evil genius who has nothing better to do than spend my free time honing the art of the bait and trying those skills out on the people here like some sort of lab experiment. The truth is a lot more mundane (as life often is): everything I say is certified 100% organic and genuine with no artificial preservatives or colouring.
You may not be an evil genius but inadvertently (or not... OooOoOOOooOo) you're quite good at poking the hornets nest here
I like it, please continue
So, previously, in response to justawoman, I wrote that there's a distinct stage in the decline of forums where their dynamic becomes increasingly dominated by people coming in to argue with "the forum", which they see as an amorphous outgroup blob. The paradigmatic example to me is all the incels (not in the lib sense, actual incels) going to 4chan's /fit/ to argue with /fit/izens about how self-improvement is impossible and nobody will ever get laid except Chad. It may be true that, in certain respects - perhaps on particular issues, perhaps in response to particular arguments, or perhaps, perhaps often, in response to obviously bad posts which cloak themselves in those issues and arguments - themotte can summon a hornet's nest. This is bad. It is bad to poke the hornet's nest, bad to summon the hornets, bad to be a hornet. If you do this, you are degrading the space and the community. Even though many people come here and see what they want to see, themotte is not a monolithic rightoid hiveblob, but to troll it as if it is a monolithic rightoid hiveblob is to summon that hiveblob out of the future as an entirely natural defense mechanism. If you like this dynamic in a community, I invite you to move on, and instead visit the beautiful imageboard of /pol/, where anyone can play 128D dramatard chess with whatever outgroupblob they choose to envision.
While what you say is 100% true, the unfortunate truth is that The Motte has been slowly but steadily shifting in a "monolithic rightoid hiveblob" direction.
It is not one, and one of the reasons I like to state my opinions and then get dogpiled by the hiveblob is to prevent it from becoming one (as long as I am here, it can't be one by definition).
But as someone who considers themselves a pragmatic centrist with (classical, not contemporary) liberal characteristics, I do find this place increasingly frustrating. So like it or not, it's cathartic to see some seethe and cope from the gang.
What would you say are the 3 main Left and 3 Right beliefs that position you on the centrist chair?
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I feel like one of those famous artists who puts certain elements in his painting because they look good to him there full stop only for art critics 100 years later to write essays on how "the contrast between the bright cerulean blue of the sky and the complementary colour muted orange of the Autumn hilltop is a very clever trick employed by the artist to enhance the strikingness of the image for the viewers eye" etc. etc. going out to 20 pages of "analysis" when such a thought had never even crossed the artist's mind in the first place.
I'm just giving my genuine honest views but some people here choose to interpret that as me playing 6D chess with time travel...
To be fair
And
Are the same thing. The artist might not be able to articulate why they like the elements, but they have an excellent eye for what looks good, it's what makes them an artist. So they make shit that looks good to them, and then everyone else goes "holy fuck this looks great, how?" and then break it down
Applying this example to here. You write things that you think are interesting and expressive. Your honest views are interesting, and incidentally what you find interesting is also excellent The Motte chum in the water.
Please keep sharing your interesting ideas, I very much like them
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Nah I think you're an asshole but I think you're earnest in your beliefs, which makes you the fun kind of asshole to debate with
This isn't debating, though. Bartender_Venator's post is not debating with BurdensomeCount - it's deflecting by making a post entirely about the person himself. It is a very well-polished deflection, but it is nonetheless a deflection.
I disagree. @Bartender_Venator was doing effective debating, which can be seen for how he maneuvered BurdensomeCount into falling into the same debate trap twice.
The debate-appropriate response to bad faith framing arguments is to note their use rather than engaged in desired debate on the terms set by the accusation. When the initial presenter is approaching with a potential motte and bailey argument when the rhetorical bailey is itself trying to insinuate and argue over a connotation, and thus assume the conclusion that the insinuation is valid basis to start discussion, the appropriate response is to challenge the argument's paradigm in the first place.
Note that Bartender_Venator's breakdownn isn't an ad hominem argument that BurdensomeCount's argument is an invalid troll argument is wrong because he is a shit-stiring troll, repeat troll troll troll. He didn't try and justify a charge of trolling based on past BurdensomeCount troll efforts to establish a pattern of history, or even linking to the rather direct mod analysis on BurdensomeCount's trolling style. Bartender_Venantor is targeting the argument, claiming that argument-level deicisions reveal bad faith, and letting the implications of that argument critique pain BurdensomCount.
Specifically, Bartender shifted the debate from any debate over the characters Count wanted attention provoked towards to a meta-structure review of how BurdensomeCount's argument was structured. He identified and contrasted both obvious and subtle methods that were used to lead the audience to a conclusion or conflict without actually committing BurdensomeCount to making certain arguments. Bartender noted various points where Burdensome could have added elements that would have earned charity/good faith credit (could explain his reasoning), but also notes the implications- and thus potential reasons- for why they are absent. These coincide with argument structure decisions that could, in isolation, have innocuous reasons, but coincidentally happen to have overlapping / reinforcing thematic effects consistent with trolling. While Bardtender does end off with the passive-aggressive accusation by very conspicuously drawing attention to the lack of a personal accusation ('I'll leave it to the gallery'), the core of the argument for why the audience should find that creidble is how a characterization of Count's argument-structure stand on its own as evidence of good or bad faith on Count's part.
Note in turn that BurdensomeCount did not actually contest Bartender's characterization of his argument in any respect.
If Bartender made had made an ad-hominem debate attack, that would have been an easy winning move. If the original original argument structure was sound, or at least defensible, it would have undercut Bartender's critique and any implicit judgement on good faith. Burdensome could have strengthened the foundations of his argument by providing additional justification for suspect design inclusions, he could have added to the foundation by taking Bartender's invitation for elaboration. Burdensome could even asked for audience forgiveness, claimed he was trying to keep his wordcount down, that it might have distracted, or so on.
Instead Count attempted a suspiciously specific deflection of a personal characterization that wasn't made ('I'm not leftoid baiting'), and then tried to change the subject via a rhetorical concession ('Instead I fully and freely acknowledge') to a topic that had nothing to do with the structural analysis of his argument or Bartender's position. This might work in troll-format motte-and-bailey where the bailey is arguing about the subject of nominal discussion, and the motte is falling back to 'well a more reasonable characterization of the topic was this.' But it was also a a transparently plebian attempt to change the topic, even as he couldn't resist not giving an actual denial that he was baiting.
Which, is why the motte-and-bailey retreat failed on its face. Count's intended motte no longer had value because both motte and bailey were now the bailey to Bartender's position- that the argument structure itself was bad faith. Count's attempted fallback still left him within this bailey that Count was more interested in not-making arguments in able to troll a conflict rather than defend a relevant position.
Count made it even easier for Bartender to draw attention to Count's penchant at rheotorical sleights of hand ('I don't think you're a leftoid baiting') and attempts to reframe the argument. Not only does it make Bartender look better at understanding Count's argument than vice versa, as Count didn't dispute Bartender's correction, it also makes Count's subsequent retreat to a persecution defense another validating example of abandoning the previous arguments. In this way, Count not only gave validity to the initial critique, but practically turned it into a prediction.
Which is how Bartender's argument works on multiple levels. He was not only able to describe Count's conduct in mechanical terms that Count didn't dispute, but do so in ways that Count's own nature led him to validate, even after they were explicitly pointed out. Add to it that Count's response also aligns to rather direct style call-outs from months ago, a style which many posters know, and Count comes across less as some sort of genius, evil or otherwise, and more like someone whose predictability is part of the charm they are clearly getting humored for.
Thank you, Dean, I appreciate your thoroughness. It's a surprising pleasure to have a post analyzed and explicated like this.
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And yet at no point does Bartender even attempt to criticise Count's point. That's the issue. The top-level post is, essentially, arguing that James Watson was a kook - someone who held not merely weird or unusual views, but views that are essentially bigoted, judging entire people because of inherited characteristics that do not reliably cluster with the traits he ostensibly cared about.
Bartender cedes this entire issue. Bartender accuses Count of trolling or baiting, and argues that Count's various points are carefully chosen to provoke the Motte. But at no point does Bartender defend Watson, or argue that the points Count chose should not be relevant to a judgement of him, or that the points Count chose are out of context and unrepresentative, or try anything else similar. The closest Bartender comes to an actual argument is suggesting that the comparison between Watson and Josephson is ill-chosen, but since that comparison is not necessary for Count's criticism of Watson to land, it hardly suffices as much of a rebuttal.
I don't think the top-level post here is great. I think Count would benefit from doing more work to explicitly stitch together an argument. Count's post ought to link those quotes together into a worldview, show more compelling evidence as to the general worldview that Watson held, and then indicate why that worldview is wrong. I'll even grant that there's a bit of consensus-building in the top-level post, which is against Motte rules, though I also think that Bartender and some of those around him are trying to consensus-build in the other direction.
But just as an argument? Count puts forward at least the sketch of an argument against James Watson's character. Bartender does not engage with that argument in favour of accusing Count of trolling. Well, that's as may be. But it means that the argument around Watson slips past. Bartender is arguing about Count, but he is not arguing with Count.
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I'm glad that someone remembers the time and effort I spent in analyzing Count. Almost seems worth it, though I'm never getting that lunch break back.
That's the rub. High effort trolls like Count demand similarly high effort in specifically litigating their many sins of omission or commission. I would be entirely fine with "haha, very funny, but we know what you're up to" as a ban message, but as I've mentioned here, those who aren't closely following his trajectory tend to be alarmed and request clarification.
I suppose one can draw parallels to reality. Are the police in SF worried about the reaction of fent users, or are they worried about the concerns raised by otherwise perfectly law abiding citizens?
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I think you would very much like to believe that's how people see you here, and I can see how you might have read that into my sarcasm. I just think you spend too much time on arrdrama, enjoy shit-stirring for the sake of it (possibly picking your views based on that, I can't say, but would be many such cases), and lower the tone of this otherwise pleasantly autismal establishment.
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