Lol, I mean, kind of fair, but mass-downvoting is still against the rules and we’ll take moderation action against people who do (though writing angry comments isn’t).
If the designers of Petrov Day are allowed to offer arbitrary 1k-karma incentives to generals to nuke people, but the citizens are not allowed to impose their own incentives, that creates an obvious power issue. Surely ‘you randomly get +1k karma for nuking people’ is a larger moderation problem than ‘you get −1k karma for angering large numbers of other users’.
Such is life under a government. We have the monopoly on violence.This does unfortunately often imply power issues, but probably still better than anarchy and karma wars in the streets.
Accepting a governmental monopoly on violence for the sake of avoiding anarchy is valuable to the extent that the government is performing better than anarchy. This is usually true, but stops being true when the government starts trying to start a nuclear war.
Have you watched Les Miserables? Watching it completely changed the vibe of this song for me, such that it pretty much makes the opposite point now than it did before.
I have. I think that overall Les Mis is rather more favorable to revolutionaries than I am. For one thing, it wants us to ignore the fact that we know what will happen when Enjolras’s ideological successors eventually succeed, and that it will not be good.
(The fact that you’re using the word ‘watched’ makes me suspect that you may have seen the movie, which is honestly a large downgrade from the musical.)
Ahem, as one of LW’s few resident Frenchmen, I must interpose to say that yes, this was not the Big Famous Guillotine French revolution everyone talks about, but one of the ~ 2,456^2 other revolutions that went on in our otherwise very calm history.
Specifically, we refer to the Les Mis revolution as “Les barricades” mostly because the people of Paris stuck barricades everywhere and fought against authority because they didn’t like the king the other powers of Europe put into place after Napoleon’s defeat. They failed that time, but succeeded 15 years later with another revolution (to put a different king in place).
Victor Hugo loved Napoleon with a passion, and was definitely on the side of the revolutionaries here (though he was but a wee boy when this happened, about the age of Gavroche).
Later, in the 1850s (I’m skipping over a few revolutions, including the one that got rid of kings again), when Haussmann was busy bringing 90% of medieval Paris to rubble to replace it with the homogenous architecture we so admire in Ratatouille today, Napoleon the IIIrd had the great idea to demolish whole blocks and replace them with wide streets (like the Champs Elisées) to make barricade revolutions harder to do.
Final note: THANK YOU LW TEAM for making àccénts like thìs possible with the typeface. They used to look bloated.
That’s not quite true. Les Mis starts in 1815, but the book spans decades and the revolution is in 1832, a short-lived uprising against the king who got in power two years before, in the 1830 revolution against the dynasty the other European powers restored after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815.
Ah right, the decades part—I had written about the 1930 revolution, commune, and bourbon destitution, then checked the dates online and stupidly thought “ah, it must be just 1815 then” and only talked about that. Thanks
This is a leak, so keep it between you and me, but the big twist to this years Petrov Day event is that Generals who are nuked will be forced to watch the 2012 film on repeat.
It doesn’t have to be mass-downvoting in the sense of one user downvoting a mass of post/comments. Rather a mass of users downvoting a few comments each. 150 citizens * 10 downvotes each more than wipes out the 1000 karma victory bonus.
I can assure you that past LessWrong users have explored a large fraction of the space of possible ways to coordinate and facilitate mass-downvoting. I can also assure you that we have plenty of experience nevertheless identifying those patterns and moderating people in response.
To be clear, I wasn’t trying to suggest that citizens could break the rules without getting caught. I was suggesting that they could disincentivize nuking without breaking the rules. If coordinated, distributed, mass downvoting is also disallowed, then we would have to come up with some other incentive.
Anti-moderative action will be taken in response if you stand in the way of justice, perhaps by contacting those hackers and giving them creative ideas. Be forewarned.
Are you trying to prime people to harass the generals?
Besides, it’s not mass downvoting, it’s just that the increased attention to their accounts revealed a bunch of poorly written comments that people genuinely disagree with and happen to independently decide are worthy of a downvote :)
Are you trying to prime people to harass the generals?
Genuinely not sure what you are referring to. I think it’s reasonable to be a bit annoyed at generals who get you nuked, but I mean, if someone starts going overboard we will also moderate that.
Besides, it’s not mass downvoting, it’s just that the increased attention to their accounts revealed a bunch of poorly written comments that people genuinely disagree with and happen to independently decide are worthy of a downvote :)
Well, in that case, it’s not moderation for downvoting, it’s just increased attention from the moderators re-evaluating the degree to which someone is genuinely contributing positively to the site, and happen to independently decide someone is worthy of some moderation warnings :P
You’re suggesting angry comments as an alternative for mass retributive downvoting. That easily implies mass retributive angry comments.
As for policing against systemic bias in policing, that’s a difficult problem that society struggles with in many different areas because people can be good at excusing their biases. What if one of the generals genuinely makes a comment people disagree with? How can you determine to what extent people’s choice to downvote was due to an unauthorized motivation?
It seems hard to police without acting draconically.
Lol, I mean, kind of fair, but mass-downvoting is still against the rules and we’ll take moderation action against people who do (though writing angry comments isn’t).
If the designers of Petrov Day are allowed to offer arbitrary 1k-karma incentives to generals to nuke people, but the citizens are not allowed to impose their own incentives, that creates an obvious power issue. Surely ‘you randomly get +1k karma for nuking people’ is a larger moderation problem than ‘you get −1k karma for angering large numbers of other users’.
No, wait, that was the wrong way to put it...
Such is life under a government. We have the monopoly on violence.This does unfortunately often imply power issues, but probably still better than anarchy and karma wars in the streets.
Accepting a governmental monopoly on violence for the sake of avoiding anarchy is valuable to the extent that the government is performing better than anarchy. This is usually true, but stops being true when the government starts trying to start a nuclear war.
Have you watched Les Miserables? Watching it completely changed the vibe of this song for me, such that it pretty much makes the opposite point now than it did before.
I have. I think that overall Les Mis is rather more favorable to revolutionaries than I am. For one thing, it wants us to ignore the fact that we know what will happen when Enjolras’s ideological successors eventually succeed, and that it will not be good.
(The fact that you’re using the word ‘watched’ makes me suspect that you may have seen the movie, which is honestly a large downgrade from the musical.)
Isn’t Les Mis set in the second French Revolution (1815 according to wikipedia) not the one that led to the Reign of Terror (which was in the 1790s)?
Ahem, as one of LW’s few resident Frenchmen, I must interpose to say that yes, this was not the Big Famous Guillotine French revolution everyone talks about, but one of the ~ 2,456^2 other revolutions that went on in our otherwise very calm history.
Specifically, we refer to the Les Mis revolution as “Les barricades” mostly because the people of Paris stuck barricades everywhere and fought against authority because they didn’t like the king the other powers of Europe put into place after Napoleon’s defeat. They failed that time, but succeeded 15 years later with another revolution (to put a different king in place).
Victor Hugo loved Napoleon with a passion, and was definitely on the side of the revolutionaries here (though he was but a wee boy when this happened, about the age of Gavroche).
Later, in the 1850s (I’m skipping over a few revolutions, including the one that got rid of kings again), when Haussmann was busy bringing 90% of medieval Paris to rubble to replace it with the homogenous architecture we so admire in Ratatouille today, Napoleon the IIIrd had the great idea to demolish whole blocks and replace them with wide streets (like the Champs Elisées) to make barricade revolutions harder to do.
Final note: THANK YOU LW TEAM for making àccénts like thìs possible with the typeface. They used to look bloated.
That’s not quite true. Les Mis starts in 1815, but the book spans decades and the revolution is in 1832, a short-lived uprising against the king who got in power two years before, in the 1830 revolution against the dynasty the other European powers restored after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815.
Ah right, the decades part—I had written about the 1930 revolution, commune, and bourbon destitution, then checked the dates online and stupidly thought “ah, it must be just 1815 then” and only talked about that. Thanks
“second” laughcries in french
This is a leak, so keep it between you and me, but the big twist to this years Petrov Day event is that Generals who are nuked will be forced to watch the 2012 film on repeat.
Eeeesh. I know I’ve been calling for a reign of terror with heads on spikes and all that, but I think that seems like going a bit too far.
It doesn’t have to be mass-downvoting in the sense of one user downvoting a mass of post/comments. Rather a mass of users downvoting a few comments each. 150 citizens * 10 downvotes each more than wipes out the 1000 karma victory bonus.
I can assure you that past LessWrong users have explored a large fraction of the space of possible ways to coordinate and facilitate mass-downvoting. I can also assure you that we have plenty of experience nevertheless identifying those patterns and moderating people in response.
To be clear, I wasn’t trying to suggest that citizens could break the rules without getting caught. I was suggesting that they could disincentivize nuking without breaking the rules. If coordinated, distributed, mass downvoting is also disallowed, then we would have to come up with some other incentive.
Anti-moderative action will be taken in response if you stand in the way of justice, perhaps by contacting those hackers and giving them creative ideas. Be forewarned.
Are you trying to prime people to harass the generals?
Besides, it’s not mass downvoting, it’s just that the increased attention to their accounts revealed a bunch of poorly written comments that people genuinely disagree with and happen to independently decide are worthy of a downvote :)
Genuinely not sure what you are referring to. I think it’s reasonable to be a bit annoyed at generals who get you nuked, but I mean, if someone starts going overboard we will also moderate that.
Well, in that case, it’s not moderation for downvoting, it’s just increased attention from the moderators re-evaluating the degree to which someone is genuinely contributing positively to the site, and happen to independently decide someone is worthy of some moderation warnings :P
You’re suggesting angry comments as an alternative for mass retributive downvoting. That easily implies mass retributive angry comments.
As for policing against systemic bias in policing, that’s a difficult problem that society struggles with in many different areas because people can be good at excusing their biases. What if one of the generals genuinely makes a comment people disagree with? How can you determine to what extent people’s choice to downvote was due to an unauthorized motivation?
It seems hard to police without acting draconically.