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Believe it or not, "Americans" is also a category of people you aren't allowed to just say "You're a bunch of demons" about. Criticize American culture, foreign policy, and whatever else you hate about America and Americans, sure. But when you want to criticize a group you have to ground it in specific behaviors and traits, not just label everyone in the group as crazystupidevil. (Yes, I'm sure you don't literally think every single American is crazystupidevil , but that's beside the point.)
You've gotten a lot of slack because you've been around a while and as unwilling as you are to claim "emiitus" status, we do weigh positive contributions against negative ones. But something has happened to you, and lately your contributions are far more negative than positive,.and you repeatedly curl your lip and bark angrily when told to chill.
I'm giving you 90 days in liueu of a permaban. Being perfectly honest, I personally don't care whether or not you come back. I got @KMC snapping at me for "driving off the regulars," but the problem is, some regulars have never contributed anything but shit. And others stop contributing anything good. Emeritus status only goes so far.
I was inclined to go lighter on him, but then you already acted and I remembered that Dase had specifically rejected special consideration and demanded that he be treated like the average user.
So be it. He can take his ball to Twitter if he's unwilling to play along with rather basic civility standards.
It's Twitter that has fried his brain. Like many he has succumbed to the pattern where he spends his time quote tweeting the most deranged examples of his outgroup which the algorithm recognizes and then serves him more of. He's built a machine that serves him almost nothing but idiocy that he can happily dunk on. He's built up a heuristic where he pattern matches any argument made to something stupid he's seen on twitter posted by someone who he didn't need to use any intelligence to dismantle; his wit and charity have atrophied from disuse.
I didn't want to get into his Twitter, but yes, I agree. After he became a reasonably big name and a sort of authority on AI/ML (which is justifiable), the boost in popularity only encouraged him to spout far less technically grounded hot-takes on topics like politics.
Twitter moderation is not The Motte's moderation (lol, lmao). I know I code-switch a little when switching context, I'm more polite and formal on LessWrong than I would be here. But most of the time, I speak exactly as I would on our platform.
That's the thing. Some people are innately in tune with our ethos, our rules don't strike them as unreasonable because they're inclined to act that way by default. Others don't agree, on an instinctual level, but follow the rules because of the value the forum provides them.
This is hardly a binary, on one hand we have we have consistently polite effort posters, and on the other side trolls and shitposters. I hope I land pretty left on that spectrum.
And now that I contemplate it, the main reason that I lurk and rarely comment or post on my Twitter account is because the pressure towards being concise or dropping zingers isn't my style at all. I could probably do it, but I don't want to. You can do long-form text and intelligent analysis there with some success, but it's clearly not the default.
So we have Dase, who is clearly smart and talented, but has an abrasive personality, displays clears impatience for those he considers fools, and holds a few rather questionable and strongly held opinions. When he started here, with minimal X clout, he was in an environment that encouraged the the good stuff and came down strongly on the bad.
But X? The negative feedback mechanism is nowhere near as strong. Some of his insults and hot takes took off, or caused him no real harm. And sometimes, he does have a point when he's mad, the number of idiots or hostile interlocutors here is not zero, let alone on X.
Further, he's shifted mostly to posting there, only rarely visiting our site. I don't begrudge him for this, not at all. But that makes the relative impact of a ban or a warning far less meaningful to him. He knows he can pivot to X completely (and I doubt he's the kind to make an alt and scurry back, he's too proud for that).
In other words, we're less important to him than we used to be, our validation and our negative feedback means less, and he's got a fallback at hand. Shame, I like him despite all of that, and that includes tolerating him despite his anti-Indian bias. I wish he'd clean up his act, I can't defend him anymore.
What’s his X handle?
Is it public knowledge? I don't know. I figured it out by accident while using X normally.
I'm quite loathe to share by default, even if I don't think he minds. If you really want it, I can DM you.
Edit: This wasn't intended to be an offer to DM it to everyone who asks.
DM me please too
I would like to, but I already felt uneasy about the potential dox, and Dase has specifically edited his post to ask me not to share further, albeit not because he seems concerned about doxxing. I'm sorry about that.
Man that edit was not great.
It concerns me greatly that so many people who survived Wokeness and COVID without breaking are collapsing in response to our usual once every decade or so Middle Eastern idiocy.
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