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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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When a moderator says to you:

All of this is to say: whatever you are up to, you have attracted the attention of the mods, and while this post in itself is borderline (you basically repost the article with minimal commentary), you are starting to look like a bad actor. Whatever game you are playing, start being upfront and stop looking like someone who's not posting in good faith (and is likely a previously banned poster).

And not even a day later you again repost identitarian bait, with minimal commentary, as a top-level post, I have to assume you have opted to ignore the warning.

I want to emphasize: in absolute terms, this post is "not bad." It's not great, it does challenge both "speak plainly" and "avoid low-effort participation," as well as "make your point reasonably clear and plain" (though this post is in that regard maybe a slight improvement on the last one). That it does those things as a top level post is an aggravating factor. The CW thread is not a dumping ground for posts other people have written on topics that are maximally inflammatory. It's a place to test your thinking, which to a great extent demands that you do some thinking in an open and public way. Gradually accruing the annoyance of the sub by being a one-note piano while evading effortful engagement with others is, if nothing else, egregiously obnoxious.

So let's start the banning at 48 hours.

Maybe my reading comprehension is trash, but how is “I'd like to push back against the contention that Jewish overrepresentation among leftist movements is related to activists being Jewish per se” not speaking plainly?

The idea that some people (eg @Fruck) have suggested is that this poster is claiming to be against antisemitism while also thinly-veiled hmmposting links to internet antisemitism in a way that encourages users to click on them and to conclude from them that the post was ‘wrong’ and the far-right position on the issue ‘right’.

This is a relatively complex form of baiting and a violation of the ‘speak plainly’ rule, although it’s not uncommon online. Still, I’m ambivalent on a ban unless the mods have better proof the poster is trolling or being sneaky.

In a DM conversation they asked me what my political leaning was, and when I responded something like "far-right but not fascist" they responded with a "I don't talk to fascists", so yeah it's some sort of bait considering OP is explicitly talking to fascists.

It is an instance of the thing Zorba(?) said a while ago (paraphrased) "if the trolls are forced to contribute interesting pieces and/or make composed, reasonable arguments in service of trolling, then we've already won"

It is an instance of the thing Zorba(?) said a while ago (paraphrased) "if the trolls are forced to contribute interesting pieces and/or make composed, reasonable arguments in service of trolling, then we've already won"

This slogan falls to Goodhart's Law. The things that trolls produce to satisfy a requirement for interesting posts will never be the kind of things that an interesting post requirement is actually meant for. (Especially not cumulatively. We wouldn't, without trolls, get eight conversations about Jews in a row, even if each post could have been individually posted sincerely and led to a single interesting conversation about Jews.)

There's also the problem that people's ability to detect disruptive posts isn't perfect. And you're not going to get reasonable arguments, you're going to get arguments that are just close enough to reasonable that they won't be immediately thrown out.

This slogan falls to Goodhart's Law.

I agree with your points, but this doesn't seem to have much to do with Goodhart's Law. The target already is interesting, well-composed, reasonable posts. There's nothing about this situation where a measure becomes a target, since the measure already is the target. What's the difference between an interesting post and a post which appears interesting but actually isn't? Seems like an impossibility; either a post is interesting or it is not.

It's Goodhart's law because you don't actually want "interesting posts", you want interesting posts that don't encourage above normal noise. But you can't measure that, you can only measure interesting posts.

Twitter optimizes for engagement. It's terrible.

We can measure how inflammatory a post is as easily as measuring how interesting it is. Really these vague measures--interesting, well-composed, reasonable, more light than heat, etc.--seem to hold up well against Goodhart's law. We all can tell which posts meet those standards and which don't, and there's not much of a way to fake that.

The bigger issue is when posts don't meet the standard, but do pass some lower "minimal effort to not be seen as an obvious troll" standard. The latter takes a lot less work than producing good posts and you still get to stand on your soapbox and shout incessantly about whatever your pet topic is. You did mention something similar with "arguments.... just close enough to reasonable that they won't immediately [get] thrown out."

But you can't measure that, you can only measure interesting posts

You can just ban people for making bad posts, the mods just don't think that's fair.