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@Amadan, I'd appreciate some mod feedback on whether there's an appropriate way to reply to this, if you have time.
So far, georgioz has yelled "FUCK YOU" at me, called me simple and stupid multiple times, created strawmen of my position (including misattributing quotes from other users to me), and repeatedly evaded requests to just explain his position by insinuating that I can't read.
You gave him a one-day ban for the "FUCK YOU".
You then also gave me a one-day ban for responding to him with condescension and snark. (Subjectively, less condescension than he was throwing at me.) Which... fair enough, I guess, in isolation. I could've been a bit less patronising. (Though the most patronising thing I said, "ok buddy", is a phrase you yourself have also used in this thread.) There are also a few places where I'm being blunt and direct (e.g. calling a phrase "nonsense") for the sake of trying to clarify the conversation, but that could be read as part of a pattern of condescension, even when that's not the intent.
But a one-day ban for "FUCK YOU" + you're simple/stupid + condescension, and a one-day ban for being condescending in return, doesn't seem proportionate. After @naraburns banned me a month ago for responding to bait with too much heat, I've tried to learn that lesson (which required me to get over a lot of frustration at that ban). This time, I didn't escalate even after being told "FUCK YOU" -- I just said "excuse me?" -- but I still get the same ban?
I'm pretty sure that If I said "FUCK YOU" to Amadan out of nowhere, I'd get much more than a one-day ban.
Now georgioz is continuing the conversation. I think there are actually useful things to discuss here, which is why I kept trying to get him to explain his position. But I'm getting the same attacks:
I don't think we are symmetrically "behaving terribly". I'm asking georgioz to explain his positions in his own words, which is kind of the entire point of this place. In return, he keeps pointing me to wikipedia and telling me I can't read.
This isn't symmetric.
So, is there actually a way I can respond to this, that doesn't require me to be a punching bag? There are actually interesting discussions we can have around this. I want to have them. I'm trying to elicit that discussion (though yes, in a way that was too snarky). But it seems that I have to just accept being told "FUCK YOU", and being told I'm simple and stupid, and that I can't read; and that if I condescend at all in return, we're both "behaving terribly".
I'm frustrated because I did actually put effort into trying to make the conversation go somewhere useful. Yes, I could've (and should've) been less condescending. But if I'm going to be told I'm behaving terribly, regardless of how much effort or heat or aggression each person is putting in, it all just feels a bit pointless.
I'm not Amadan, but you tagged me, so I will point out that we actually tend to give much longer bans for straight up "fuck you"-type posts. In this case, Georgioz has an almost completely uninterrupted moderation record of several AAQCs. Because this is a reputation economy, we're much more likely to look at a user with a good record and say, "okay, not sure what's happening here, this person does not usually behave this way, maybe they are having a bad day" and we assign a lighter penalty than we normally would. If the behavior continues, the penalties do escalate!
The other half of this is that other people's bad behavior is never an excuse. The best way to respond will always be to respond within the remit of the rules; the second best thing to do is to not respond. When others are baiting you, dogpiling you, etc. remember that the goal is light, not heat, and responding to heat with heat only compounds the problem. We want to encourage discussion and we try to be reasonable about the fact that sometimes even productive discussions get a bit heated, but at some point we have to step in.
In this particular case, the penalties were light for both of you, which seems like the right call to me. These were "cool off" bans. But the length in part reflected your respective posting histories. This is the third time you've been moderated for letting people draw (or bait) you into a heated exchange. This is interesting to me in part because it suggests on the one hand that you are basically rule-abiding, which is great! But you seem to take other people's bad behavior as an excuse to respond in kind, but it's not.
More generally, this advice probably applies as much in life as on the Motte: if someone drops a "FUCK YOU" in your direction, unless you have an extremely solid plan for rapid de-escalation, you are almost certainly best off to disengage immediately.
EDIT: Looks like Amadan responded while I was thinking about this, so, there you go.
I appreciate you taking the time to respond. And I basically agree with the stance as you've described it.
I just object to stuff like this:
You previously correctly called me out for this, and I modified my behaviour to not do this. When georgioz said "FUCK YOU", I didn't respond in kind.
I took your previous advice, as incredibly frustrating as that was. But you're still treating my behaviour as if I'm just going maximum heat in response to bait, which I'm not.
I agree with the reputation system, but it's absurd that it stretches to treating "FUCK YOU" + "you are stupid and simple and can't read" (not a quote) as equivalent to some calm, reactive condescension.
What I am trying to communicate is that the length of the ban is not strictly determined by the specific offense, so you are drawing a false equivalence in your perception of the ban lengths in this case. They are incommensurable.
Basically, you seem to be saying "georgioz got off light!" And we are saying, "yeah, he's a really good poster normally, so we let him off light this time, hopefully he was just having a bad day."
Or maybe instead you're saying, "I was punished too heavily!" Maybe so? But you admit you were engaged in condescension, despite it being reactive, and reactivity is exactly what you've been moderated for in the past. It's true that we frown heavily on telling other users to "fuck off." But that doesn't mean we don't frown on users for less vulgar ad hominem attacks.
I would just encourage you to not read too much into the precise length of anyone's bans, yours or others. It's not a science. It's just feedback.
I was previously modded for reacting with excessive heat.
When georgioz says "FUCK YOU", and I overlook it with nothing more than an "excuse me", I'm clearly not doing the same kind of reactivity as you've previously called out. I'm demonstrating a pretty significant level of restraint and non-reactivity.
(Also, "ad hominem"? I was condescending, but I didn't substitute insult for argument.)
No, I'm not. I am criticising the kind of moderation policy that leads to this outcome. People are absolutely going to compare bans, and it's unreasonable to just declare that it's some kind of fallacy to do so.
No, you know exactly what I'm saying: these bans are absurd and unjust, relative to each other. Declaring the two incommensurable doesn't retroactively change what I'm saying.
Reputation should only go so far. If someone can scream "FUCK YOU" at me, and tell me I'm simple and stupid and illiterate, it's a crappy moderation policy that gives me the same punishment for not being an unlimited punching bag.
Well yes, that too!
I agree that you showed some restraint. But you still wrote a rule-breaking post, and that's what counted against you here.
Ad hominem literally translates "to the man." Its use here identifies your excessive focus on georgioz and his characteristics, to the detriment of your engagement with the substance of your argument. When we talk about ad hominem in the context of moderation, it is not an academic critique of your grasp of informal reasoning, but rather a suggestion that you should spend less time casting aspersions on your interlocutor and more time addressing the substance of your discussion.
(Fun fact: I am a philosophy professor. I make my living, in part, teaching both formal and informal reasoning!)
I see. Well, it's an unforced error to insist on things that "I know" when I have not told you that I know them; as a rule, I am not hiding the ball on that. I can be mistaken. We can disagree. But I'm not pretending, and now you're making the same mistake with me as you made with georgioz.
But now that you've spelled it out more clearly, okay! You don't like the way we moderate based in part on reputation, as it sometimes leads to results that offend your sense of fair play. Your complaint has been noted. In hopes of managing your expectations: so far, the moderation team does not agree with your position on the matter, and has no plans to adjust our moderation approach in response to your complaints at this time.
No, this isn't what I said. I absolutely think reputation should be a factor. I'm suggesting that in this case, it's being used excessively.
That's my point! My comments were full of addressing the substance of the discussion.
I'm fairly sure you don't actually know that I had an excessive focus on georgioz and his characteristics. I suspect you're assuming it from a light skim of the conversation, without really reading what I was saying in detail.
Which is reasonable! I know that reading through the comments in detail is a massive chore for mods. I don't expect you to do it. But now you're telling me that I was fixated on georgioz, and spending lots of time throwing insults and aspersions at him, and that's not true.
Fair enough; I retract that. I felt it was reasonable that you would've understood that my complaint was the relative length of the bans -- otherwise I don't see why you'd bring up their supposed incommensurability -- but if you're telling me that wasn't clear, I accept that.
Sure. At the risk of making another unforced error: I strongly doubt you're saying this to manage my expectations. I think you're doing a little snarky put-down.
And that's fine! It's even kind of funny; from your perspective, I am being a pain. But we could maybe be a little more consistent on whether being condescending is against the rules or not.
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Sure, I am willing to go there and just restate the useful discussion. Please just explain your position again, I will do the same in the following positions:
Everybody including secular materialists, Bayesian Big Yud rationalists, relativists and everybody else engages in presuppositions.
All my arguments were asking for philosophical justification of beliefs. I was specifically arguing against the naive "math is self-evident" argument that you presented, which turned the argument to "it is evident to me" as opposed to found that argument on something. I was using internal critique to find your foundation of why you believe the assertions that you make.
This ties to ability of anybody to make universal claims. I specifically wanted to use internal critique if your position. Is it mathematical realism in the vein of Gödel, Kantor, Penrose or Tegmark? Or is it nominalist in the vein of philosopher Harty Field or earlier Quine (who later became mathematical realist) or even Hilbert with his formalism or weird blend of mathematical anti-realism like Yudkowsky or Joscha Bach? We could never go there in our discussion, because I was not able to relate what universal claim is, how Hume or Descartes tried to wrestle with it.
Which leads me to the topics that we had. Asserting that 2+2 equals 4 is just lower level assertion. Again, there needs to be justification for it let's say in terms of "Justified True Belief" standard or some other standard such as nominalism, which is inherently relative. Again, these are not some stupid ideas that georgioz on The Motte said, they were discussed between top philosophers - including modern philosophers of science and Math like Kantor for centuries.
I had constant whiplash where you demanded plain English but at the same time claimed to have knowledge of Gödel and his proofs sufficient to understand it.
Anyways, I challenge you again - what is your underlying presupposition, your metaphysics, epistemology and to lesser extent ethics:
What is the nature of reality, visible (e.g. matter, energy, planets, galaxies) and invisible (math, logic, abstract concepts). How do they exist? Why do they exist?. It takes more then a baby eating alien Yuskowsky story, or just claiming - "here, I wrote number 2 on paper as an example of existence of numbers". This is the purview of ontology. As long as you say "standard numbers exist", there is a question of "how they exist" or "why they exist". And this is not just some word game. There are 150 IQ people who disagree about nature of these things. If they can have disagreements, why cannot we rehash these modern debates here?
The nature of epistemology. What is knowledge, what is "Truth" and how can we justify something as true vs not-true. Be it My name is stoatherd and I know it to 2+2=4 to all there exists is just matter and energy. These are all dogmatic claims, that need to have some justifications. Secular atheists make fun of let's say Christians that they believe in made-up unjustified entities such as God or Angels or whatnot. Now the ball is in your court, how do you justify your beliefs and how and why are they better? Why and how do you posses the knowledge of the Truth and everything else?
Also I do not like ad hominess and other rhetorical tactics, but I will meet you where you are at. I also claim that this specific game is asymmetrical but from secularist point of view. It is considered a standard argument to say that "HAHAHA, stupid Christians believe in unproven and unjustified fairy-tales". Only to then act all indignant when in turn somebody asks them about their fairy tale cosmology and empiricist dogmas that one should take on face value. If you show basic philosophical respect, then I will show the same back.
I think there are basically two assumptions that one kinda has to make in order to have a philosophical discussion:
No Cartesian Daemon fucking with our ability to do logic and philosophy.
The world exists - not necessarily "for real", but still as a whole. If we are brains in jars being fed simulated sense data, the simulation does at least model Earth and thus it is possible to deduce things about the simulation.
You need assumption #1 because if there is such fuckery, then it fatally undermines any attempt to search for philosophical truths, so what's the point?
You need assumption #2 because if the world doesn't exist, you (or from your perspective, I) probably don't exist and the discussion would again appear pointless. Also, because a deus deceptor even restricted from directly messing with our ability to do philosophy closes off huge swathes of questions to anything beyond "well, I dunno".
You do not actually need assumption #2, though, to prove that 2 + 2 = 4. Proof:
2 + 2 = 2 + (1+1) = (2 + 1) + 1 = 3 + 1 = 4.
First step is the definition of 2, second step is the associative property of addition, third step is the definition of 3, fourth step is the definition of 4. All of these are axioms (as is the transitive property of =). Maths is only ever asserted to be true with respect to some set of axioms; sure, this isn't true in Tropical but we're not talking about Tropical. Either my ability to do logic is being fucked with, or 2 + 2 = 4, no empiricism required.
Yeah, I basically gave up on arguing with philosophers (sorry, @naraburns!) after an extremely frustrating exchange in which a philosopher (actual Ph.D. in philosophy) would not stop answering every claim I made about what we can observe or think we know about reality with basically: How do you know God/Cartesian demons/the Matrix aren't fucking with you so you only think you know things? Well, fuck, I guess philosophy is pointless if we can't possibly make any statements about reality because we can't prove we're not living in a simulation.
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There's no contradiction there. I was asking for plain English because I think you are tripping yourself up using complicated phrases.
I'll do an analogy. Imagine you ask someone why the sky is blue, and they say: "Quantum decoherence causes the eigenfunction to scatter the ket vector of that wavelength". All of those are real words, and have real technical meanings. But the person saying that sentence is confused, and they're not giving a true or even meaningful explanation.
So a good approach is to ask that person: "Can you please explain what you mean in simple English?" If they have a coherent idea in mind, then they can go: "Sure! Basically, we can think of each atom as a cloud, and when a wave of light passes through that cloud, it interacts with ..." and so on.
I have sufficient knowledge of Godel and his proofs. I just think you're invoking him wrongly, and in order to argue that point, I'm trying to pin down exactly what you mean.
As I said before, I don't know what you mean by "how" a thing exists. What kind of answer does that question even invite? What do you mean?
You're presupposing that these things do exist, or that it's simple to declare that they do exist, which I think requires a bit more of a rigorous definition of "exist".
Let me split your entities into two categories: Type A (physical arrangements of matter/energy -- galaxies, planets, houses, apples, trees, etc), and Type B (everything else).
It's easy to answer why Type A things exist: because of the laws of physics acting on the prior state of the universe. A planet exists because a bunch of cosmic dust existed before it, and then gravity compacted it.
Why do Type B things exist? e.g. the universe, numbers, justice?
That's a confusing question, because the word exist was invented to describe Type A things. The meaning of "exist" concerning Type A things is clear: if you ask "does an apple exist?", you're asking whether a certain physical arrangement is present in the same universe as you. So there's a clear implicit meaning of "exist" concerning Type A things.
But when you start saying "numbers exist" or "the universe exists", it's not clear what that means. So before I can answer why these things exist, I need an explanation of what you mean by something like "numbers exist" or "the universe exists". (This is a similar issue to when you say "modal collapse": I think you're unintentionally smuggling a very complicated idea into the simple word "exists", and it needs to be broken down into simpler words.)
The possession of an accurate model of a portion of reality.
The nounified version of the adjective "true". A claim is true if it accurately represents reality.
If a claim accurately models reality, then it is true to the extent that it does so. That's what "true" means.
We can be mistaken about calling a thing true, in the same way that we can be mistaken about literally anything.
They aren't. I verify my username by repeated observation and evidence. This is the same process I use to verify 2+2=4.
I haven't claimed "all there exists is just matter and energy". I'm entirely open to the idea of there existing additional things. But either they interact with the physical world, in which case they are physical; or they don't, in which case this is a very exotic use of the word "exist" that needs defining.
Observation and testing. They are better because they work. I'm fine with that not being considered "justification"; I'll just enjoy my beliefs working.
I... don't?
I have some knowledge. Some of my knowledge is presumably wrong; I don't know which parts. I don't have complete knowledge of everything. These sentences are true of everyone.
I am not doing this, and I'd prefer if you didn't do it either.
Dude, I haven't done this. If you think I've done this, please point to where.
It seems other people haven't shown what you consider "basic philosophical respect", and you're using that as an excuse to be disrespectful to me. I don't think that's great.
It is not easy and definitely not an explanation. You just assert: "Laws of physics exist". It is a presupposition. What are these laws, why do they exist and how do they exist? Moreover how do you know that they exist? Are they uniform or do they break sometimes? Are they omnipresent and unchanging and eternal? On its own this is an outrageous statement on par of saying that "God exists".
You said that you are empiricist. You know, that no amount of evidence can prove a thing. That is the core observation of Quines Undeterminism of scientific theory. There are number of alternative theories that can explain things. This is rooted in age old sceptical tradition from Hume and Descartes. Maybe you are suffering from schizoid mental illness, or there is Carthesian Demon feeding you false information and you falsely think that you are stoatherd. Moreover you filter which evidence to examine and accept into your web of beliefs as any other schizoid person who sees everything as a proof for his own personal conspiracy theory.
Okay so I can say that God and unicorns work for me and thus they exist. Or you may object and have some outside criterion on what is "useful" and what "works" means. Then I would challenge you to either state that dogmatic yardstick, or ground it in pragmatism itself.
No, I didn't.
Good thing I didn't make that statement, then.
As I keep saying, you need to explain what this question means.
No, I didn't. You inferred that.
Sure, in the sense that literal 100% proof of anything is impossible.
Ok, then show me the unicorn.
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It wasn't the "Ok buddy" or the "Excuse me?" that earned you a timeout. You both got modded in the context both of how you are talking to each other and your respective histories.
It looks to me like you're both getting unnecessarily heated and insulting. No mod want to go through a thread and measure how many insult-units each poster scored and when to achieve "symetricality."
If you think @georgioz is being a jerk and you can't respond without getting pissed off, back off. What do you want, for me to reban him for longer so you feel justice has been done? We don't automatically assume two people fighting are equally guilty, but two people fighting and both being nasty about it, like I said, doesn't require a careful weighing and measuring of who's being the biggest ass. So both of you either chill out or continue at your peril.
Yeah, and I recognise that it's a chore. I understand looking at the general tenor of the conversation and dropping bans based on that, rather than litigating stuff line by line.
But I object to telling me I'm "behaving terribly" without reading the thread. And given how egregiously rude "FUCK YOU" is, it's pretty galling for you to just declare we're behaving equally, when we're not.
No.
georgioz has just reignited the argument, using the exact same kind of condescension and ad hominem that you just banned me for.
I'm fine with you either banning him or not banning him for that comment. But I suspect that if I reply to him, I'm going to be held again to a much higher standard, and get slapped with a ban unless I just let his insults slide. (Despite the fact that the "respective histories" argument should suggest that the guy who said "FUCK YOU" should probably be held to a higher standard if he immediately starts condescending again.)
I did read the thread, and I didn't say you behaved "equally" terribly. I decided you were both being unnecessarily antagonistic and needed to step away.
Everything else is asking me to judge fine gradations of offense. No, you are not being held to a higher standard. Both of you need to chill.
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