Downvoted for drama-queening. I have previously participated in forums which had supplementary IRC channels. In all cases it was expressly stated that airing a chat drama in a public forum is a bannable offense on the forum. This is a purely consequentialist approach. People filter what they say in private much less than what they say in public, so misunderstandings happen and tempers flare, then settle, usually just as quickly. Dragging an issue to a public forum makes it last much longer than warranted, drags in people who lack context and are unfamiliar with IRC dynamics and generally makes the forum a worse place.
An extreme case: what if everything you say was logged and someone with a grudge could make some particularly unflattering snippets accessible to the general public?
So, if you have issues with gwern or someone else on #lesswrong, PM him and talk it over, or do it in the channel, not here, where people unfamiliar with the situation get “concerned” and request an apology.
Dragging an issue to a public forum makes it last much longer than warranted
Contrary hypothesis: Stuffing an issue back into the closet, and shaming people for seeking help, makes problems last much longer than otherwise. What kind of evidence would lead us to favor one hypothesis over the other?
Also: “Drama” is just people being upset. Telling people they’re bad for expressing their upset means that problems don’t get fixed. Maintaining an illusion that everything is perfectly all right, when actually people are upset but disallowed from complaining, does not seem to be a recipe for a healthy community. It also seems to be a recipe for developing false beliefs about how happy the community is, on the part of the people who are causing the unhappiness. For instance, they may mistakenly come to believe that upset people are joking, nonserious, or unimportant.
Contrary hypothesis: Stuffing an issue back into the closet, and shaming people for seeking help, makes problems last much longer than otherwise. What kind of evidence would lead us to favor one hypothesis over the other?
It’s not a contrary hypothesis, I never suggested “Stuffing an issue back into the closet”, as you can read right there in my comment:
So, if you have issues with gwern or someone else on #lesswrong, PM him and talk it over, or do it in the channel
Feel free to read my comment again, now without the desire to strawman it.
Hmm … if you think “stuffing an issue back into the closet” is unfair, what do you think of “drama-queening” in retrospect? The former was intended as an echo of the latter, including the — rather odd, considering the topic — undertones.
Drama-queening in this case is complaining loudly to an inappropriate audience and escalating the issue out of proportion. A simple private message to gwern would have cleared things up pretty quickly.
It’s true that with all the information available now, a simple private message would have cleared it up. It’s also true, though, that with all the information available now, simply not saying those specific lines would have avoided the whole issue in the first place. It was not realistic to expect either party to have known that at the time.
It isn’t reasonable to expect someone who feels they have been insulted, and who has already responded in public with complaints like “what a disgusting thing to say”, and observed everyone fail to care, to go PM the person- the very high status person- with a direct complaint. As far as they’re concerned, they already tried complaining and the person didn’t care. There would be no reason for them to expect this to be productive, and it would likely feel very intimidating. No one in the channel seemed a reasonable source for help; the operators were presumably fine with it, gwern being one of them.
Considering the situation myself, with the knowledge that one would actually have in the situation, the only reasonable alternative to asking for help on Less Wrong itself is leaving the channel, and we should be glad they didn’t take that option, because if they did, we not only lose them, but never know why, and lose the chance to reduce the odds of this happening in future.
And as far as gwern was concerned, he was just joking and startling was playing along. He didn’t recognise that this was actual offence at the time, and that’s not something he can be blamed for either. Double illusion of transparency never stopped being a thing.
This mess did not arise because either party was an idiot, and advice and reactions to it are going to need to be more complex than “should have just done the obvious thing, stupid”. There are some good results already. The clarification to those around now that the people in the channel do not collectively-or-in-general endorse the views, which were originally said as a joke, is at the least a good thing. This should also at least result in some updating on the probable meaning of other people’s responses.
Avoiding misunderstandings like this happening again is not an easy problem. To an extent I’d expect events like this to be an ongoing cost of operating a community where jokes of that nature are accepted. One shouldn’t expect moderation policy debates to be one-sided. But I think we can do better. The ombudsman idea is interesting. Another is anyone in the channel saying something which clarifies the situation when someone seems like they might be insulted; I feel kinda guilty for not doing this myself when the first quoted event happened (I’m Namegduf there), since I was around at the time and talked to at least one other person who was genuinely bothered by it. There’s useful discussion to be had there.
Downvoted for drama-queening. I have previously participated in forums which had supplementary IRC channels. In all cases it was expressly stated that airing a chat drama in a public forum is a bannable offense on the forum. This is a purely consequentialist approach. People filter what they say in private much less than what they say in public, so misunderstandings happen and tempers flare, then settle, usually just as quickly. Dragging an issue to a public forum makes it last much longer than warranted, drags in people who lack context and are unfamiliar with IRC dynamics and generally makes the forum a worse place.
An extreme case: what if everything you say was logged and someone with a grudge could make some particularly unflattering snippets accessible to the general public?
So, if you have issues with gwern or someone else on #lesswrong, PM him and talk it over, or do it in the channel, not here, where people unfamiliar with the situation get “concerned” and request an apology.
Contrary hypothesis: Stuffing an issue back into the closet, and shaming people for seeking help, makes problems last much longer than otherwise. What kind of evidence would lead us to favor one hypothesis over the other?
Also: “Drama” is just people being upset. Telling people they’re bad for expressing their upset means that problems don’t get fixed. Maintaining an illusion that everything is perfectly all right, when actually people are upset but disallowed from complaining, does not seem to be a recipe for a healthy community. It also seems to be a recipe for developing false beliefs about how happy the community is, on the part of the people who are causing the unhappiness. For instance, they may mistakenly come to believe that upset people are joking, nonserious, or unimportant.
It’s not a contrary hypothesis, I never suggested “Stuffing an issue back into the closet”, as you can read right there in my comment:
Feel free to read my comment again, now without the desire to strawman it.
Hmm … if you think “stuffing an issue back into the closet” is unfair, what do you think of “drama-queening” in retrospect? The former was intended as an echo of the latter, including the — rather odd, considering the topic — undertones.
Drama-queening in this case is complaining loudly to an inappropriate audience and escalating the issue out of proportion. A simple private message to gwern would have cleared things up pretty quickly.
It’s true that with all the information available now, a simple private message would have cleared it up. It’s also true, though, that with all the information available now, simply not saying those specific lines would have avoided the whole issue in the first place. It was not realistic to expect either party to have known that at the time.
It isn’t reasonable to expect someone who feels they have been insulted, and who has already responded in public with complaints like “what a disgusting thing to say”, and observed everyone fail to care, to go PM the person- the very high status person- with a direct complaint. As far as they’re concerned, they already tried complaining and the person didn’t care. There would be no reason for them to expect this to be productive, and it would likely feel very intimidating. No one in the channel seemed a reasonable source for help; the operators were presumably fine with it, gwern being one of them.
Considering the situation myself, with the knowledge that one would actually have in the situation, the only reasonable alternative to asking for help on Less Wrong itself is leaving the channel, and we should be glad they didn’t take that option, because if they did, we not only lose them, but never know why, and lose the chance to reduce the odds of this happening in future.
And as far as gwern was concerned, he was just joking and startling was playing along. He didn’t recognise that this was actual offence at the time, and that’s not something he can be blamed for either. Double illusion of transparency never stopped being a thing.
This mess did not arise because either party was an idiot, and advice and reactions to it are going to need to be more complex than “should have just done the obvious thing, stupid”. There are some good results already. The clarification to those around now that the people in the channel do not collectively-or-in-general endorse the views, which were originally said as a joke, is at the least a good thing. This should also at least result in some updating on the probable meaning of other people’s responses.
Avoiding misunderstandings like this happening again is not an easy problem. To an extent I’d expect events like this to be an ongoing cost of operating a community where jokes of that nature are accepted. One shouldn’t expect moderation policy debates to be one-sided. But I think we can do better. The ombudsman idea is interesting. Another is anyone in the channel saying something which clarifies the situation when someone seems like they might be insulted; I feel kinda guilty for not doing this myself when the first quoted event happened (I’m Namegduf there), since I was around at the time and talked to at least one other person who was genuinely bothered by it. There’s useful discussion to be had there.