> When these rules are written down, people will start to assume that if something isn’t in the rules, it must be allowed, particularly if it would have been easy to put it in the rules if they had wanted to. So more people may end up doing things that you don’t want.
A related thing that can happen here is that the people who would otherwise do forbidden things, will now do the closest-possible permitted thing.
Like, everyone likes saying numbers between 0 and 1. Most of your users like numbers close to 0, like 0.1 and 0.03. A few like numbers close to 1, like 0.95. Basically no one says numbers between 0.3 and 0.7.
Team Low convinces you that high numbers are bad, and pushes you to ban people from saying them. You agree, and pick a fairly arbitrary cutoff, say 0.6. You figure it doesn’t matter much exactly where the cutoff is, there’s a whole range of numbers that are basically functionally identical because nobody uses them.
But now you’ve got a lot of people saying 0.6, and Team Low isn’t very happy about that (0.6 is still pretty high), and Team High aren’t very happy either (you’ve banned their favourite numbers).
It’s not just that any toy not banned will be assumed safe. It’s that toys will suddenly start edging as close as possible to the safety limits. If you say “food weights must be within 3% of what’s on the packaging”, then they’ll be 3% below.
LARPs (live-action roleplay) have a rule 7: “don’t take the piss.” This allows enforcers to punish people for that kind of “closest-possible permitted thing.” (an extension of the “don’t take the piss” rule is “if you have to ask if you’re taking the piss, you are”).
If we port this back to the moderator’s dilemma, this would entail giving the moderator more power to use judgements or to be capricious (and an acceptance of that by the people posting). This gives great power to the moderators, and can easily be abused (that’s roughly how Chinese government censorship works); but if the moderators are reasonably trustworthy for that particular forum, and if they are known to be capricious, this can work very well.
> If you say “food weights must be within 3% of what’s on the packaging”, then they’ll be 3% below.
I would guess that setting this sort of regulation takes this into account, and the process for devising it must be accordingly more complicated.
The way the regulatory agency ought to get this number (note: I have no relevant background or experience, so this is all wild guessing) might look something like:
- Estimate the cost to the supplier of determining the weight of a package as a function of average accuracy. For example, it may cost $0.01 per package to determine the weight with a standard deviation of 1%, $0.04 for std dev of 0.5%, etc.
- Estimate the cost to the consumer of inaccurate package weights (which could just be linear, as in a package which is 3% underweight may be 3% undervalue, but for large inaccuracies and certain products—like medicine—can be different).
- Find some balance between costs to the supplier (taking into account, perhaps, that such costs may be different for large suppliers with enough throughput to easily absorb the fixed cost and small suppliers which will face a daunting up-front cost) and the consumer (taking into account, perhaps, that some consumers may be more sensitive than others to inaccuracies).
In such a case, the average inaccuracy wouldn’t be 3%; if the supplier had the capability to calculate their weights so exactly that every package was no more or less than 3% underweight, the regulatory agency would presumably insist on 0% inaccuracy. Instead, the supplier would pick an inaccuracy between 0% and 3% such that they would be certain that enough of their packages would be less than 3% inaccurate.
Any supplier which did not do so wisely might get away with it for a time, but would eventually put out a sub-par product and presumably be penalized for it. Even a self-interested person will build a margin of error to ensure that they are never found to be noncompliant. These margins may be different for different suppliers—if the agency makes regulations with the intent of keeping barriers to entry low, it will allow a wider margin of error so as not to exclude potential suppliers without affordable access to super-precise measurement technology, allowing suppliers with it to choose an inaccuracy which is allowed by regulation but still safe for them. While more difficult, a remedy to this issue may be to additionally regulate on intent (e.g. an internal email saying “let’s aim for 2% inaccuracy, we can get away with it” would be evidence of wrongdoing) or known ability (e.g. holding suppliers with better measurement capability to a higher standard).
To return to forum posting: rational trolls will not break every unwritten rule while perfectly respecting all of the written ones, because they likely can’t be precise enough to do so consistently. Irrational trolls will try, fail, and be punished for it. Some trolls are better at staying close to the line without crossing it than others; moderators may want to hold these folks to higher standards or simply add a provision to punish those they believe to be acting within the rules but without good faith.
This is a good comment. I wonder how much regulator agencies do do that kind of thinking. It’s the sort of “here’s an interesting problem someone had, and here’s the interesting solution” story that I’d be interested in reading about, and would weakly expect to reach high visibility in my social circles if someone wrote an article about it. So I guess this is weak evidence that they don’t do that? But I’m certainly not confident one way or the other, and I’m interested in learning more.
You’re right about the forum trolls; the 0.6 line is likely to cull some of them, and permitting an amount of arbitrariness in moderation will help cull others. I think the thing I’m trying to point at is still a relevant thing to keep in mind, but it’s not as clear-cut as I described.
>I wonder how much regulator agencies do do that kind of thinking.
They might do (civil services are generally more careful than you’d expect), or it may emerge as they adjust their rules in response to what companies do.
I find this easier to parse from a non-neutral perspective: If all bad comments are (currently) overtly bad, you might think we could ban overt bad comments and win at moderation. But in fact, once the ban is in effect, the bad commenters might switch to covert bad comments instead.
The ban isn’t necessarily wrong, but this effect has to be considered in the cost-benefit analysis.
>If you say “food weights must be within 3% of what’s on the packaging”, then they’ll be 3% below.
How about “within 3%, and with an average no lower than the printed weight”? That seems it would work for a lot of different levels of precision on the part of the company.
That’s the correct solution for food weights, but this is sort of beyond philh’s point, which is just that those you govern will adapt their behavior to the rules you put in place.
> When these rules are written down, people will start to assume that if something isn’t in the rules, it must be allowed, particularly if it would have been easy to put it in the rules if they had wanted to. So more people may end up doing things that you don’t want.
A related thing that can happen here is that the people who would otherwise do forbidden things, will now do the closest-possible permitted thing.
Like, everyone likes saying numbers between 0 and 1. Most of your users like numbers close to 0, like 0.1 and 0.03. A few like numbers close to 1, like 0.95. Basically no one says numbers between 0.3 and 0.7.
Team Low convinces you that high numbers are bad, and pushes you to ban people from saying them. You agree, and pick a fairly arbitrary cutoff, say 0.6. You figure it doesn’t matter much exactly where the cutoff is, there’s a whole range of numbers that are basically functionally identical because nobody uses them.
But now you’ve got a lot of people saying 0.6, and Team Low isn’t very happy about that (0.6 is still pretty high), and Team High aren’t very happy either (you’ve banned their favourite numbers).
It’s not just that any toy not banned will be assumed safe. It’s that toys will suddenly start edging as close as possible to the safety limits. If you say “food weights must be within 3% of what’s on the packaging”, then they’ll be 3% below.
LARPs (live-action roleplay) have a rule 7: “don’t take the piss.” This allows enforcers to punish people for that kind of “closest-possible permitted thing.” (an extension of the “don’t take the piss” rule is “if you have to ask if you’re taking the piss, you are”).
If we port this back to the moderator’s dilemma, this would entail giving the moderator more power to use judgements or to be capricious (and an acceptance of that by the people posting). This gives great power to the moderators, and can easily be abused (that’s roughly how Chinese government censorship works); but if the moderators are reasonably trustworthy for that particular forum, and if they are known to be capricious, this can work very well.
> If you say “food weights must be within 3% of what’s on the packaging”, then they’ll be 3% below.
I would guess that setting this sort of regulation takes this into account, and the process for devising it must be accordingly more complicated.
The way the regulatory agency ought to get this number (note: I have no relevant background or experience, so this is all wild guessing) might look something like:
- Estimate the cost to the supplier of determining the weight of a package as a function of average accuracy. For example, it may cost $0.01 per package to determine the weight with a standard deviation of 1%, $0.04 for std dev of 0.5%, etc.
- Estimate the cost to the consumer of inaccurate package weights (which could just be linear, as in a package which is 3% underweight may be 3% undervalue, but for large inaccuracies and certain products—like medicine—can be different).
- Find some balance between costs to the supplier (taking into account, perhaps, that such costs may be different for large suppliers with enough throughput to easily absorb the fixed cost and small suppliers which will face a daunting up-front cost) and the consumer (taking into account, perhaps, that some consumers may be more sensitive than others to inaccuracies).
In such a case, the average inaccuracy wouldn’t be 3%; if the supplier had the capability to calculate their weights so exactly that every package was no more or less than 3% underweight, the regulatory agency would presumably insist on 0% inaccuracy. Instead, the supplier would pick an inaccuracy between 0% and 3% such that they would be certain that enough of their packages would be less than 3% inaccurate.
Any supplier which did not do so wisely might get away with it for a time, but would eventually put out a sub-par product and presumably be penalized for it. Even a self-interested person will build a margin of error to ensure that they are never found to be noncompliant. These margins may be different for different suppliers—if the agency makes regulations with the intent of keeping barriers to entry low, it will allow a wider margin of error so as not to exclude potential suppliers without affordable access to super-precise measurement technology, allowing suppliers with it to choose an inaccuracy which is allowed by regulation but still safe for them. While more difficult, a remedy to this issue may be to additionally regulate on intent (e.g. an internal email saying “let’s aim for 2% inaccuracy, we can get away with it” would be evidence of wrongdoing) or known ability (e.g. holding suppliers with better measurement capability to a higher standard).
To return to forum posting: rational trolls will not break every unwritten rule while perfectly respecting all of the written ones, because they likely can’t be precise enough to do so consistently. Irrational trolls will try, fail, and be punished for it. Some trolls are better at staying close to the line without crossing it than others; moderators may want to hold these folks to higher standards or simply add a provision to punish those they believe to be acting within the rules but without good faith.
This is a good comment. I wonder how much regulator agencies do do that kind of thinking. It’s the sort of “here’s an interesting problem someone had, and here’s the interesting solution” story that I’d be interested in reading about, and would weakly expect to reach high visibility in my social circles if someone wrote an article about it. So I guess this is weak evidence that they don’t do that? But I’m certainly not confident one way or the other, and I’m interested in learning more.
You’re right about the forum trolls; the 0.6 line is likely to cull some of them, and permitting an amount of arbitrariness in moderation will help cull others. I think the thing I’m trying to point at is still a relevant thing to keep in mind, but it’s not as clear-cut as I described.
>I wonder how much regulator agencies do do that kind of thinking.
They might do (civil services are generally more careful than you’d expect), or it may emerge as they adjust their rules in response to what companies do.
I find this easier to parse from a non-neutral perspective: If all bad comments are (currently) overtly bad, you might think we could ban overt bad comments and win at moderation. But in fact, once the ban is in effect, the bad commenters might switch to covert bad comments instead.
The ban isn’t necessarily wrong, but this effect has to be considered in the cost-benefit analysis.
>If you say “food weights must be within 3% of what’s on the packaging”, then they’ll be 3% below.
How about “within 3%, and with an average no lower than the printed weight”? That seems it would work for a lot of different levels of precision on the part of the company.
That’s the correct solution for food weights, but this is sort of beyond philh’s point, which is just that those you govern will adapt their behavior to the rules you put in place.
That may be enough: https://xkcd.com/810/