This poll is BROKEN! Abandon it and do it properly!
The Karma sink comment is brilliant (and harmless fun) but the extra comments on the “Yes” and “No” answers don’t just bias perception they outright make the poll unanswerable in the current form.
No. He’s entertaining even when at his trolliest.
I would vote for a plain “No.” but he is most decidedly not entertaining even when at his trolliest. He is boring, repetitive and banal when at his trolliest. It shouldn’t be assumed that people who oppose mod influence believe Will’s trolliest crap is entertaining—or vice versa.
It shouldn’t be assumed that people who oppose mod influence believe Will’s trolliest crap is entertaining—or vice versa.
I’ll agree wtih all of that. I couldn’t figure out how to vote in this poll on seeing this comment (and I am not an idiot or a newbie). I don’t read Will much and I imagine this little jaunt of his says a lot more about Will than about other parts of the world that I am interested in. I don’t KNOW that that is the case, but I don’t assign a high enough probability to taking value from figuring it out to go about reading all his posts.
You don’t appreciate the drama even a little? (Only a little surprised.)
I didn’t mind this thread. This wasn’t you at your trolliest! At least, at the start. If I did think it was particularly trollish I wouldn’t have responded conversationally.
Yeah, it’s a subtle point, but I’m explicitly not trolling here, in the motivational sense of the word. But of course it’s trolling in the descriptive sense. I’ve made a few trollish comments but they’re intended as jokes in the spirit of the community.
For me it is the drama that draws me in. I am sort of hoping that by coming for the drama, I will actually find a pony in the room, that is, find some deeper more enlightening point to your little walkabout.
Because Will had explicitly threatened to use sockpuppets for various purposes, he could have used them to manipulate the poll, too. Therefore I vote by means of this comment. The vote: ban him. Reasons:
I find nothing entertaining in trolling or intentional obscurity, it’s pure noise.
WN’s behaviour threatens the credibility of others who engage him. (There isn’t much left of his own.) And he’s good at attracting attention.
Not banning him would help to establish a norm that trolling and other uncooperative conduct is accepted here.
First and foremost, I want LW be a haven of sanity in the stormy waters of the internet. Please don’t let seemingly sophisticated nonsense enter with a pretext of entertainment. I am afraid he could attract similarly crazy people; one Newsome is manageable, but ten of them would seriously damage the site.
By the way, this is the first time I endorse banning someone from an internet discussion forum.
Because Will had explicitly threatened to use sockpuppets for various purposes, he could have used them to manipulate the poll, too.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t, and I’ve never done similarly. I have three sockpuppets. One is a joke account I’ve never used. I made it recently. The other has my identity attached to it already—I’ve made about five comments with it. And the third is for completely anonymous comments. I rarely use the second or the third, and I never use them for voting.
I also haven’t voted on the poll with this account, and I only voted on one comment on this post. In general I just don’t vote much, mostly because I forget about the option.
one Newsome is manageable, but ten of them would seriously damage the site.
Which is a reason to treat me nicely—it’s not hard to multiply myself by ten. Luckily, I’m the only Will Newsome in the world currently, so I don’t think you have much to worry about.
Yes, and I’m sort of okay with being banned, but I’d like a month’s warning. During that month I’d make sure I’d deleted and edited various comments and so on.
But I haven’t thought through the question of banning carefully enough, and banning is hard to reverse.
As long as you aren’t producing too much noise in the 30-day period, I don’t see why the mods wouldn’t grant this request. A temporary ban could be another option worth considering.
There might also be a clever software solution. I know Louie who works with the code base. If I write up some Python they might implement it. Something that automatically hides or collapses my contributions for people who haven’t voted on my stuff an people who have more downvotes than upvotes. The same code could be used in future similar situations.
Wei Dai’s Power Reader script has features along these lines that I find useful during those brief periods when troll-feeding takes over the recent-comments list. Of course, the automatic part is important, admittedly.
For my own part, I don’t find your contributions less useful than the median.
Of course anybody with an ounce of self control can simply avoid a thread they don’t want to read anymore.
Motley Fool has an “ignore” feature to ignore the posts/comments of a particular user. I actually would not like to see that here. I’d rather have moderation. Even with the ignore feature, you still wind up seeing a lot of stuff related to the stuff you are ignoring as OTHER people quote it and comment on it. Of course Motley Fool boards aren’t as tree like as this group. But since this is so tree like, all I need to do is leave a particular discussion and never click on it again, I don’t need you or Louie to Python me into not realizing that that is what I am doing.
It depends what mod intervention consists of. If you mean banning him, I do not think that is called for at this time. If you mean telling him to stop his antics and warning him that he’s headed towards a ban if he continues, that sounds like a good idea. Posts (and comments) that are intentionally obscure, made merely for one’s own entertainment, or otherwise trollish are not welcome here, and since the community’s downvotes and critical comments haven’t gotten through to him it would be good to have a mod convey that message.
since the community’s downvotes and critical comments haven’t gotten through to him it would be good to have a mod convey that message.
What do you mean “haven’t gotten through to me” in this case? You mean, haven’t successfully deterred me? Because clearly I understand them and their significance, and additional measures, like a warning, wouldn’t change that fact—it’d just make me more antagonistic.
CLARIFICATION: I do not have ACCOUNT DELETION powers. As far as I know, those powers don’t exist. I have comment/post banning powers and post editing powers. If I started moderating Will, I would be banning excess downvoted comments, not shooing him away wholesale.
I can’t decide on a poll option, so here’s my opinion: I don’t want to see a lot more of Will_Newsome’s trolling; I think it damages the site. But just banning him feels like leaving a fascinating mystery unresolved. I want to understand Will’s motives, and his insights about simulation, and whatever scary idea he came up with. If there’s some way to talk this out in good faith, let’s try to do that first. But banning is preferable to endless obfuscated confusion.
Yes, but moderation is about making the site what it should be for a variety of people, not just me and people who are unshy enough to talk to me directly, or just mods. So I want information. I wield the ban button, but I’m not going to use it as a site customization tool for Alicorn in particular.
What would a mod do? I can create endless sockpuppets from endless proxies. That’s not a solution, I’ll just see it as an uncalled-for attack and heighten my antagonism, escalating any conflicts. Don’t be rash.
What would a mod do? I can create endless sockpuppets from endless proxies.
It takes you from being an established user associated with a real person that many of us have met in person to just a little vandalism to be ignored.
What makes Will_Newsome trollishness significant is that all else being equal a lot of us want to talk to Will_Newsome, which bipasses our better judgement and makes threads like this more disruptive than they otherwise would be.
Oh so he should be banned because he has established a reputation (sorry will, yes it would appear you have established credibility) and is now spending it on something you don’t like.
Yogi Berra once said about a certain restaurant that nobody goes there anymore because it is too crowded. Ban the restaurant! Ban Yogi Berra!
You know what else is a possible username? WillNewsome. NillWoosome. It’ll be pesky deleting all those accounts and posts, if I do decide to troll the fuck out of everyone.
Did you know “Will Isaac Newsome” is a constructed name? Look at the initials: WIN. There are a lot of things you don’t know about me.
You know what else is a possible username? WillNewsome. NillWoosome. It’ll be pesky deleting all those accounts and posts, if I do decide to troll the fuck out of everyone.
Yes, you could be a pest. You are probably also resourceful enough to escalate to the level of criminal behavior up to and including multiple assassinations of prominent lesswrong users if you really wanted to. The fact that someone is physically possible of doing undesirable things to you at a cost to themselves isn’t always a good reason to comply to their demands.
The fact that someone is physically possible of doing undesirable things to you at a cost to themselves isn’t always a good reason to comply to their demands.
It is, however, always a good reason to consider complying with their demands. And to consider compromise. And to consider whether your position is emotionally driven by our natural values of winning and slapping down challengers, and not rationally aligned with many of your other values.
Are you trying to trick me? Karmassassinating prominent LW users would have absolutely no effect. Karma’s not a scarce resource. I’m not dumb.
My demand’s simple, and I’ve claimed that I’m unlikely to make any similar demand in the future, given that I’m unlikely to make any similarly extreme post in the future. I’m a contributor to this community with over 6,000 karma. It’s not a “don’t negotiate with terrorists” situation here.
Are you trying to trick me? Karmassassinating prominent LW users would have absolutely no effect. Karma’s not a scarce resource.
Assassinations. Nothing to do with karma. The context was you threatening vandalism. You are capable of that. You are capable of an entire spectrum of applications of force against lesswrong and those associated. You don’t need to persuade me (or anyone with half a clue) that you are capable of doing harm—it is taken for granted.
It is also unremarkable. I could use force against most people I meet, at great expense to myself. Many of them could do the same against me. A strategy of just doing what people say because they threaten to use costly force is a bad strategy in such circumstances.
My demand’s simple, and I’ve claimed that I’m unlikely to make any similar demand in the future, given that I’m unlikely to make any similarly extreme post in the future.
That makes a big difference. As does the fact that your “threat” is somewhat similar behavior to what can usually be expected of folks in those circumstances regardless of any precommitment to use force.
I’m a contributor to this community with over 6,000 karma.
This kind of thing matters more prior to declaring your intent to get what you want through power and the threat of punishment.
It’s not a “don’t negotiate with terrorists” situation here.
No, the payoff matrix in that scenario is typically a bit different (incentive to take hostages, etc.)
What the fuck are you both talking about? You need to lay off Will, and Will (apparently) needs regular psychological relief, or something. I’m not the most stable individual myself, so I understand how it feels when going for “as crazy as possible” seems like a path to enlightenment at the moment, or a way to make others understand you, or something else that’s desirable.
Nevertheless, he’s a valuable contributor with many fascinating comments, and even talking about banning him is utter nonsense. No goddamn way.
“What the fuck?” indeed! It isn’t especially complicated. Read the context and if you still can’t understand say nothing or ask nicely.
You need to lay off Will
What? I’m not attacking Will. Will was talking to Alicorn about banning and I was making gratuitous analysis of the practical implications of that sort of threat after already having declared a “No” to any moderator influence. Elsewhere in the thread I have been directly answering the questions Will asked, candidly, to the best of my ability . Will was pushing for more answering and speculation about his reasoning, not less.
I’m not the most stable individual myself, so I understand how it feels when going for “as crazy as possible” seems like a path to enlightenment at the moment, or a way to make others understand you, or something else that’s desirable.
I’m sorry to hear that. For what it is worth I’m not either. But in this case your “understand how it feels” amounts to either confused mind projection or intrusive, patronizing other optimization.
No, the answer Will is trying to make us speculate about regarding “Why am I trying to appear as non-credible as possible?” is not “because I want to make others understand me” (p > 0.9). At times Will has even speculated that not being easy to understand is actually something he may be morally obliged to do (assuming I recall correctly).
Nevertheless, he’s a valuable contributor with many fascinating comments, and even talking about banning him is utter nonsense. No goddamn way.
That’s fine—assuming you are directing your comment to Alicorn and not myself (which doesn’t seem likely).
No, the answer Will is trying to make us speculate about regarding “Why am I trying to appear as non-credible as possible?” is not “because I want to make others understand me” (p > 0.9). At times Will has even speculated that not being easy to understand is actually something he may be morally obliged to do (assuming I recall correctly).
Yeah, yeah, I understand that, I just didn’t name it. (Is there even a term for something like that? Self-abasement intended to channel a certain role, all for truth’s sake?) And I only skimmed through your comments, sorry; I feel awfully embarrassed to look at people being chided, and I assumed you were doing just that to Will, although I saw that you weren’t talking about a ban.
That’s fine—assuming you are directing your comment to Alicorn and not myself (which doesn’t seem likely).
I was directing that part to her, since she’s the one who can decide whether to ban a user, not you :)
And I only skimmed through your comments, sorry; I feel awfully embarrassed to look at people being chided, and I assumed you were doing just that to Will, although I saw that you weren’t talking about a ban.
Thank you for your level headed reply! I understand the aversion to reading embarrassing interactions—I even struggle not to look away or cringe when I encounter such stimulus on TV.
For some reason chiding Will is something that almost seems like a category error, just not making sense as something to do, given the way he orients himself and responds to that kind of stimulus. It does make sense to analyze his actions or to, say, declare an intent to combat actions through trivial applications of power but not chiding per se.
I think it is the fact that Will actively positions himself as someone who doesn’t operate by community standards and actively defies public will and so chiding him according to those standards he already knows he doesn’t operate by makes no sense. On the other hand it feels natural for my remnant former-Christian self to chide Will according to Christian standards and doctrine, which are approximately shared between myself up through to my early twenties and Will as he professes now.
On the other hand it feels natural for my remnant former-Christian self to chide Will according to Christian standards and doctrine, which are approximately shared between myself up through to my early twenties and Will as he professes now
Though I don’t think you really have a lot of information there—I haven’t talked much about any religious beliefs I may or may not have. For what it’s worth I’ve shifted towards thinking the Catholics are pretty evil, just not for the reasons people always complain about, which are mostly reasons fabricated by Protestants and Enlightenment propagandists.
Also I was never Christian, so though I’ve read much of my Bible and a lot of theology, I have very little understanding of the religion as it is practiced.
Well, priors of course always suggest against organizational goodness. And the Catholics have historically done much good. But their conception of God can be frightening, and many people learn to worship their God. They also don’t have any mechanism by which they could update—their entire belief system is structured around the idea that God wouldn’t let them go astray. If God is as important as they claim, then it’s easy for them to be evil by their own lights. “Discernment isn’t about telling right from wrong, it’s chiefly about telling right from almost right.”
There are other reasons more speculative, they’re in my comments from the last few months, use Wei Dai’s tool, search for Catholic. If you want.
Thank you for the response. Though checking your comment history you still preferred Catholics as recently as mid April (citing them as a new possible group to join).
If I were to join any phyg, it’d be the Dominicans. SingInst might be my second choice, but you can’t join them, you can only join the Rationalist Conspiracy these days. And I’ve already left SingInst’s Journeyman circle or whatever, there’s no going back after that. But I’m damn glad I was a Visiting Fellow for two years.
What do you think of the Greek Othordox? Nassim Taleb endorses them for aesthetic reasons and for the fact that their understanding of God is Apophatic primarily and thus doesn’t intrude on real world near beliefs.
I have no opinion. If they’re at all like Russian Orthodox folk then I probably like them somewhat. But I’m only really into the Catholics, and that’s mostly because they seem massively undervalued, not because I think they should be the arbiters of truth and justice. But they think God should be the arbiter of truth and justice, and I agree with them about that, and agree with them that that’s an extremely important fact about the world that should shape how we live our lives.
Will (apparently) needs regular psychological relief, or something.
Why do you say that? Clearly all of this drama and so on was explicitly intended. And I’ve remained calm the whole time. People close to me can attest that I’ve been psychologically healthy for the past many months. Do you think there are any clear indicators that I need psychological relief, other than that I’m explicitly trying to lose credibility? Do you think trying to lose credibility is always a strong sign of incorrect beliefs or psychological problems? If so, to what extent is that because it’s merely correlated with other, generally undesirable traits?
I was going to say about how I’m sorry, didn’t mean any insult, how I saw and heard some evidence for that judgment around here before… but ah, screw it, everyone can plainly see that I’m trying to act like an RPG hero, negotiating conflicts with the most authority and Deep Wisdom that his (my) dialogue options allow. ;)
I fully admit to being schizotypal by nature, leaning towards schizoaffective. So do take that into account. But I too have taken into account.
Interestingly, part of the definition of schizophrenia has been manipulated by intelligence agencies. Don’t take my word of course, look it up. If I recall specifically the parts about conspiracies at least. But I didn’t look closely into the issue. It’s not incredibly relevant.
You are being oppositional. Whether it is for reasons recreational, delusional, psychological, educational, or other is something I wonder about but do not know.
I have a friend who is bipolar (manic depressive.) I was around when he had a break that put him (voluntarily) in the psych ward taking drugs that risked doing permanent nerve damage and made his mind, he said, feel like scrambled eggs, just because he thought this gave him a better chance of ever ’coming back.”
I didn’t know where he was headed in the weeks before, even though his wife did. I thought SHE was crazy, until he went over the wall.
I doubt that is what is going on with you, but how would I know?
Whether it is or not, talk of banning you seems ludicrous to me.
Whether it is or not, your deliberately provoking the more fascist among us to talk of banning you seems ludicrous as well. Presumably you think you have a good reason to do this. I don’t know what your reason is, and it doesn’t matter whether I would agree that it is a good reason or not, I don’t consider blowing raspberry’s at people with fascist instincts should be a bannable “offense,” it should rather be well within the bounds of conversation. IMHO.
Mwengler, please stop throwing the word “fascist” around. Will_Newsome is a contributor to a website who has recently started to annoy the other contributors and arguably to lower the quality of the community. Open discussions are being had as to whether it would be best for the community to prevent him from causing further disturbance by means of a temporary or permanent ban. This is no more repressive than what any other website does. We’re not talking about banning “dissent” or “independence”, we’re talking about banning annoying comments with a high noise level. If you don’t support a ban, that’s fine, but please don’t make unwarranted comparisons to oppressive governments. They distort the facts and lower the tone of the conversation.
A strategy of just doing what people say because they threaten to use costly force is a bad strategy in such circumstances.
What do you think of a strategy of just NOT doing what people say because they threaten to use costly force in such circumstances? By my reading you seem to favor it.
For me, making the implicit explicit should NEVER be punished, and should often be rewarded. Will’s crime here from my point of view is “not playing nice.”
wdrifid’s reaction is that of a police state, it seems to me. Even the APPEARANCE of independence must be suppressed. No challenge to power is trivial enough to be ignored and allowed.
These evil sorcerers, dugpas, they call them, cultivate evil for the sake of evil and nothing else. They express themselves in darkness for darkness, without leavening motive. This ardent purity has allowed them to access a secret place of great power, where the cultivation of evil proceeds in exponential fashion. And with it, the furtherance of evil’s resulting power.
In fact, I commit to causing a lot of headaches for LessWrong and you if you try to delete my account without a month’s warning. (Causing headaches for you will be limited to the channel of LessWrong—I’m not threatening you with outside-LessWrong influences in any way. I swear to that.) The actions I will undertake will not be illegal in any way, I’ll make sure of that, so don’t plan on taking legal action.
I’m perfectly okay with you deleting this post, though, but I’d prefer you didn’t.
And remember, I explicitly noted that you won’t see posts like this one again.
Also remember, the majority of my Discussion posts are upvoted, very few are downvoted. Look at my profile to check this fact.
In fact, I commit to causing a lot of headaches for LessWrong and you if you try to delete my account without a month’s warning. (Causing headaches for you will be limited to the channel of LessWrong—I’m not threatening you with outside-LessWrong influences in any way. I swear to that.)
My immediate response was to think “Ahh, screw that. Ban!” Given the caveat in the parenthesis however, his declaration gives only a tiny amount of information along the “threat to do harm” front. I more or less expect people banned from a site to be inclined to do detrimental things to that site if they can. That being the case, this threat falls just short of stating the obvious and so I can abandon the initial outraged defiance.
This is a poll. Is Will Newsome sufficiently noisy (in both senses of the word) that mod intervention is called for? Permalink to karma sink.
This poll is BROKEN! Abandon it and do it properly!
The Karma sink comment is brilliant (and harmless fun) but the extra comments on the “Yes” and “No” answers don’t just bias perception they outright make the poll unanswerable in the current form.
I would vote for a plain “No.” but he is most decidedly not entertaining even when at his trolliest. He is boring, repetitive and banal when at his trolliest. It shouldn’t be assumed that people who oppose mod influence believe Will’s trolliest crap is entertaining—or vice versa.
I’ll agree wtih all of that. I couldn’t figure out how to vote in this poll on seeing this comment (and I am not an idiot or a newbie). I don’t read Will much and I imagine this little jaunt of his says a lot more about Will than about other parts of the world that I am interested in. I don’t KNOW that that is the case, but I don’t assign a high enough probability to taking value from figuring it out to go about reading all his posts.
You don’t appreciate the drama even a little? (Only a little surprised.)
I didn’t mind this thread. This wasn’t you at your trolliest! At least, at the start. If I did think it was particularly trollish I wouldn’t have responded conversationally.
Yeah, it’s a subtle point, but I’m explicitly not trolling here, in the motivational sense of the word. But of course it’s trolling in the descriptive sense. I’ve made a few trollish comments but they’re intended as jokes in the spirit of the community.
This little exchange was actually one of the most entertaining for the week!
Interestingly I haven’t been assassinated yet. Has that habit died off?
Yeah… Personally I haven’t had anyone professionally killed in at least 30 years.
For me it is the drama that draws me in. I am sort of hoping that by coming for the drama, I will actually find a pony in the room, that is, find some deeper more enlightening point to your little walkabout.
No. He’s entertaining even when at his trolliest.
Especially when at his trolliest.
Yes. Please quiet the madness.
Because Will had explicitly threatened to use sockpuppets for various purposes, he could have used them to manipulate the poll, too. Therefore I vote by means of this comment. The vote: ban him. Reasons:
I find nothing entertaining in trolling or intentional obscurity, it’s pure noise.
WN’s behaviour threatens the credibility of others who engage him. (There isn’t much left of his own.) And he’s good at attracting attention.
Not banning him would help to establish a norm that trolling and other uncooperative conduct is accepted here.
First and foremost, I want LW be a haven of sanity in the stormy waters of the internet. Please don’t let seemingly sophisticated nonsense enter with a pretext of entertainment. I am afraid he could attract similarly crazy people; one Newsome is manageable, but ten of them would seriously damage the site.
By the way, this is the first time I endorse banning someone from an internet discussion forum.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t, and I’ve never done similarly. I have three sockpuppets. One is a joke account I’ve never used. I made it recently. The other has my identity attached to it already—I’ve made about five comments with it. And the third is for completely anonymous comments. I rarely use the second or the third, and I never use them for voting.
I also haven’t voted on the poll with this account, and I only voted on one comment on this post. In general I just don’t vote much, mostly because I forget about the option.
I disagree with a ban.
Which is a reason to treat me nicely—it’s not hard to multiply myself by ten. Luckily, I’m the only Will Newsome in the world currently, so I don’t think you have much to worry about.
Wouldn’t being banned help you with your goal of reducing your credibility?
Yes, and I’m sort of okay with being banned, but I’d like a month’s warning. During that month I’d make sure I’d deleted and edited various comments and so on.
But I haven’t thought through the question of banning carefully enough, and banning is hard to reverse.
As long as you aren’t producing too much noise in the 30-day period, I don’t see why the mods wouldn’t grant this request. A temporary ban could be another option worth considering.
There might also be a clever software solution. I know Louie who works with the code base. If I write up some Python they might implement it. Something that automatically hides or collapses my contributions for people who haven’t voted on my stuff an people who have more downvotes than upvotes. The same code could be used in future similar situations.
Wei Dai’s Power Reader script has features along these lines that I find useful during those brief periods when troll-feeding takes over the recent-comments list. Of course, the automatic part is important, admittedly.
For my own part, I don’t find your contributions less useful than the median.
Of course anybody with an ounce of self control can simply avoid a thread they don’t want to read anymore.
Motley Fool has an “ignore” feature to ignore the posts/comments of a particular user. I actually would not like to see that here. I’d rather have moderation. Even with the ignore feature, you still wind up seeing a lot of stuff related to the stuff you are ignoring as OTHER people quote it and comment on it. Of course Motley Fool boards aren’t as tree like as this group. But since this is so tree like, all I need to do is leave a particular discussion and never click on it again, I don’t need you or Louie to Python me into not realizing that that is what I am doing.
Yeah, and I wouldn’t sockpuppetly cause disruption during such a ban.
It depends what mod intervention consists of. If you mean banning him, I do not think that is called for at this time. If you mean telling him to stop his antics and warning him that he’s headed towards a ban if he continues, that sounds like a good idea. Posts (and comments) that are intentionally obscure, made merely for one’s own entertainment, or otherwise trollish are not welcome here, and since the community’s downvotes and critical comments haven’t gotten through to him it would be good to have a mod convey that message.
What do you mean “haven’t gotten through to me” in this case? You mean, haven’t successfully deterred me? Because clearly I understand them and their significance, and additional measures, like a warning, wouldn’t change that fact—it’d just make me more antagonistic.
CLARIFICATION: I do not have ACCOUNT DELETION powers. As far as I know, those powers don’t exist. I have comment/post banning powers and post editing powers. If I started moderating Will, I would be banning excess downvoted comments, not shooing him away wholesale.
(Thanks for making the clarification. I was very worried.)
I’m in favor of mod intervention lest anyone else waste as much time as I have scratching their head trying to figure out what this thread is about.
I can’t decide on a poll option, so here’s my opinion: I don’t want to see a lot more of Will_Newsome’s trolling; I think it damages the site. But just banning him feels like leaving a fascinating mystery unresolved. I want to understand Will’s motives, and his insights about simulation, and whatever scary idea he came up with. If there’s some way to talk this out in good faith, let’s try to do that first. But banning is preferable to endless obfuscated confusion.
Making moderation decisions based on a poll is a horrible idea.
Maybe. But moderation isn’t a democracy.
Yes, but moderation is about making the site what it should be for a variety of people, not just me and people who are unshy enough to talk to me directly, or just mods. So I want information. I wield the ban button, but I’m not going to use it as a site customization tool for Alicorn in particular.
I would rather see it used as a site customization tool for Alicorn than see it not used in instances like this.
Might I suggest consulting our benevolent dictator as well?
On the other hand dictators and tyrants who do stuff people particularly don’t like get killed.
On the gripping hand, as far as I can tell you’re not particularly taken with the idea of this moderator poll either. So why the appeal to emotion?
What would a mod do? I can create endless sockpuppets from endless proxies. That’s not a solution, I’ll just see it as an uncalled-for attack and heighten my antagonism, escalating any conflicts. Don’t be rash.
It takes you from being an established user associated with a real person that many of us have met in person to just a little vandalism to be ignored.
What makes Will_Newsome trollishness significant is that all else being equal a lot of us want to talk to Will_Newsome, which bipasses our better judgement and makes threads like this more disruptive than they otherwise would be.
Oh so he should be banned because he has established a reputation (sorry will, yes it would appear you have established credibility) and is now spending it on something you don’t like.
Yogi Berra once said about a certain restaurant that nobody goes there anymore because it is too crowded. Ban the restaurant! Ban Yogi Berra!
You know what else is a possible username? WillNewsome. NillWoosome. It’ll be pesky deleting all those accounts and posts, if I do decide to troll the fuck out of everyone.
Did you know “Will Isaac Newsome” is a constructed name? Look at the initials: WIN. There are a lot of things you don’t know about me.
Yes, you could be a pest. You are probably also resourceful enough to escalate to the level of criminal behavior up to and including multiple assassinations of prominent lesswrong users if you really wanted to. The fact that someone is physically possible of doing undesirable things to you at a cost to themselves isn’t always a good reason to comply to their demands.
It is, however, always a good reason to consider complying with their demands. And to consider compromise. And to consider whether your position is emotionally driven by our natural values of winning and slapping down challengers, and not rationally aligned with many of your other values.
Are you trying to trick me? Karmassassinating prominent LW users would have absolutely no effect. Karma’s not a scarce resource. I’m not dumb.
My demand’s simple, and I’ve claimed that I’m unlikely to make any similar demand in the future, given that I’m unlikely to make any similarly extreme post in the future. I’m a contributor to this community with over 6,000 karma. It’s not a “don’t negotiate with terrorists” situation here.
Assassinations. Nothing to do with karma. The context was you threatening vandalism. You are capable of that. You are capable of an entire spectrum of applications of force against lesswrong and those associated. You don’t need to persuade me (or anyone with half a clue) that you are capable of doing harm—it is taken for granted.
It is also unremarkable. I could use force against most people I meet, at great expense to myself. Many of them could do the same against me. A strategy of just doing what people say because they threaten to use costly force is a bad strategy in such circumstances.
That makes a big difference. As does the fact that your “threat” is somewhat similar behavior to what can usually be expected of folks in those circumstances regardless of any precommitment to use force.
This kind of thing matters more prior to declaring your intent to get what you want through power and the threat of punishment.
No, the payoff matrix in that scenario is typically a bit different (incentive to take hostages, etc.)
What the fuck are you both talking about? You need to lay off Will, and Will (apparently) needs regular psychological relief, or something. I’m not the most stable individual myself, so I understand how it feels when going for “as crazy as possible” seems like a path to enlightenment at the moment, or a way to make others understand you, or something else that’s desirable.
Nevertheless, he’s a valuable contributor with many fascinating comments, and even talking about banning him is utter nonsense. No goddamn way.
Up voted for best thread summary.
“What the fuck?” indeed! It isn’t especially complicated. Read the context and if you still can’t understand say nothing or ask nicely.
What? I’m not attacking Will. Will was talking to Alicorn about banning and I was making gratuitous analysis of the practical implications of that sort of threat after already having declared a “No” to any moderator influence. Elsewhere in the thread I have been directly answering the questions Will asked, candidly, to the best of my ability . Will was pushing for more answering and speculation about his reasoning, not less.
I’m sorry to hear that. For what it is worth I’m not either. But in this case your “understand how it feels” amounts to either confused mind projection or intrusive, patronizing other optimization.
No, the answer Will is trying to make us speculate about regarding “Why am I trying to appear as non-credible as possible?” is not “because I want to make others understand me” (p > 0.9). At times Will has even speculated that not being easy to understand is actually something he may be morally obliged to do (assuming I recall correctly).
That’s fine—assuming you are directing your comment to Alicorn and not myself (which doesn’t seem likely).
Yeah, yeah, I understand that, I just didn’t name it. (Is there even a term for something like that? Self-abasement intended to channel a certain role, all for truth’s sake?)
And I only skimmed through your comments, sorry; I feel awfully embarrassed to look at people being chided, and I assumed you were doing just that to Will, although I saw that you weren’t talking about a ban.
I was directing that part to her, since she’s the one who can decide whether to ban a user, not you :)
Thank you for your level headed reply! I understand the aversion to reading embarrassing interactions—I even struggle not to look away or cringe when I encounter such stimulus on TV.
For some reason chiding Will is something that almost seems like a category error, just not making sense as something to do, given the way he orients himself and responds to that kind of stimulus. It does make sense to analyze his actions or to, say, declare an intent to combat actions through trivial applications of power but not chiding per se.
I think it is the fact that Will actively positions himself as someone who doesn’t operate by community standards and actively defies public will and so chiding him according to those standards he already knows he doesn’t operate by makes no sense. On the other hand it feels natural for my remnant former-Christian self to chide Will according to Christian standards and doctrine, which are approximately shared between myself up through to my early twenties and Will as he professes now.
Though I don’t think you really have a lot of information there—I haven’t talked much about any religious beliefs I may or may not have. For what it’s worth I’ve shifted towards thinking the Catholics are pretty evil, just not for the reasons people always complain about, which are mostly reasons fabricated by Protestants and Enlightenment propagandists.
Also I was never Christian, so though I’ve read much of my Bible and a lot of theology, I have very little understanding of the religion as it is practiced.
Explain.
Can you share why you think the Catholic Church is evil?
Well, priors of course always suggest against organizational goodness. And the Catholics have historically done much good. But their conception of God can be frightening, and many people learn to worship their God. They also don’t have any mechanism by which they could update—their entire belief system is structured around the idea that God wouldn’t let them go astray. If God is as important as they claim, then it’s easy for them to be evil by their own lights. “Discernment isn’t about telling right from wrong, it’s chiefly about telling right from almost right.”
There are other reasons more speculative, they’re in my comments from the last few months, use Wei Dai’s tool, search for Catholic. If you want.
Thank you for the response. Though checking your comment history you still preferred Catholics as recently as mid April (citing them as a new possible group to join).
If I were to join any phyg, it’d be the Dominicans. SingInst might be my second choice, but you can’t join them, you can only join the Rationalist Conspiracy these days. And I’ve already left SingInst’s Journeyman circle or whatever, there’s no going back after that. But I’m damn glad I was a Visiting Fellow for two years.
What do you think of the Greek Othordox? Nassim Taleb endorses them for aesthetic reasons and for the fact that their understanding of God is Apophatic primarily and thus doesn’t intrude on real world near beliefs.
I have no opinion. If they’re at all like Russian Orthodox folk then I probably like them somewhat. But I’m only really into the Catholics, and that’s mostly because they seem massively undervalued, not because I think they should be the arbiters of truth and justice. But they think God should be the arbiter of truth and justice, and I agree with them about that, and agree with them that that’s an extremely important fact about the world that should shape how we live our lives.
Dang! Not Alfred E Newman, but rather John Henry Newman. Obviously. Duh.
Thank you for clarifying your position against banning Will.
It sure isn’t how most of your comments read.
This might be informative:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/a61/not_insane_unsane/5wjy
Why do you say that? Clearly all of this drama and so on was explicitly intended. And I’ve remained calm the whole time. People close to me can attest that I’ve been psychologically healthy for the past many months. Do you think there are any clear indicators that I need psychological relief, other than that I’m explicitly trying to lose credibility? Do you think trying to lose credibility is always a strong sign of incorrect beliefs or psychological problems? If so, to what extent is that because it’s merely correlated with other, generally undesirable traits?
I was going to say about how I’m sorry, didn’t mean any insult, how I saw and heard some evidence for that judgment around here before… but ah, screw it, everyone can plainly see that I’m trying to act like an RPG hero, negotiating conflicts with the most authority and Deep Wisdom that his (my) dialogue options allow. ;)
You need more paragon points before that will work.
Can it wait a little bit? I’m in the middle of some calibrations...
ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL OF THREAD. CHAOTIC ORGANIC ROLE PLAY WAS DEGRADING THE SIGNAL TO NOISE RATIO.
I fully admit to being schizotypal by nature, leaning towards schizoaffective. So do take that into account. But I too have taken into account.
Interestingly, part of the definition of schizophrenia has been manipulated by intelligence agencies. Don’t take my word of course, look it up. If I recall specifically the parts about conspiracies at least. But I didn’t look closely into the issue. It’s not incredibly relevant.
You are being oppositional. Whether it is for reasons recreational, delusional, psychological, educational, or other is something I wonder about but do not know.
I have a friend who is bipolar (manic depressive.) I was around when he had a break that put him (voluntarily) in the psych ward taking drugs that risked doing permanent nerve damage and made his mind, he said, feel like scrambled eggs, just because he thought this gave him a better chance of ever ’coming back.”
I didn’t know where he was headed in the weeks before, even though his wife did. I thought SHE was crazy, until he went over the wall.
I doubt that is what is going on with you, but how would I know?
Whether it is or not, talk of banning you seems ludicrous to me.
Whether it is or not, your deliberately provoking the more fascist among us to talk of banning you seems ludicrous as well. Presumably you think you have a good reason to do this. I don’t know what your reason is, and it doesn’t matter whether I would agree that it is a good reason or not, I don’t consider blowing raspberry’s at people with fascist instincts should be a bannable “offense,” it should rather be well within the bounds of conversation. IMHO.
Mwengler, please stop throwing the word “fascist” around. Will_Newsome is a contributor to a website who has recently started to annoy the other contributors and arguably to lower the quality of the community. Open discussions are being had as to whether it would be best for the community to prevent him from causing further disturbance by means of a temporary or permanent ban. This is no more repressive than what any other website does. We’re not talking about banning “dissent” or “independence”, we’re talking about banning annoying comments with a high noise level. If you don’t support a ban, that’s fine, but please don’t make unwarranted comparisons to oppressive governments. They distort the facts and lower the tone of the conversation.
What do you think of a strategy of just NOT doing what people say because they threaten to use costly force in such circumstances? By my reading you seem to favor it.
For me, making the implicit explicit should NEVER be punished, and should often be rewarded. Will’s crime here from my point of view is “not playing nice.”
wdrifid’s reaction is that of a police state, it seems to me. Even the APPEARANCE of independence must be suppressed. No challenge to power is trivial enough to be ignored and allowed.
Will Newsome as a name always puts me in mind of Will Noisome and sometimes puts me in mind of Alfred E. Newsome.
That would be Alfred E. Newman. If you weren’t making a deliberate joke about the name, Will Newsome might be turning himself into a memetic plague.
These evil sorcerers, dugpas, they call them, cultivate evil for the sake of evil and nothing else. They express themselves in darkness for darkness, without leavening motive. This ardent purity has allowed them to access a secret place of great power, where the cultivation of evil proceeds in exponential fashion. And with it, the furtherance of evil’s resulting power.
They say that the fights in academia are so vicious because the stakes are so small.
I think you may be missing that this thread is more than a little like that.
That’s a little harsh on LessWrong. Some have good intentions.
In fact, I commit to causing a lot of headaches for LessWrong and you if you try to delete my account without a month’s warning. (Causing headaches for you will be limited to the channel of LessWrong—I’m not threatening you with outside-LessWrong influences in any way. I swear to that.) The actions I will undertake will not be illegal in any way, I’ll make sure of that, so don’t plan on taking legal action.
I’m perfectly okay with you deleting this post, though, but I’d prefer you didn’t.
And remember, I explicitly noted that you won’t see posts like this one again.
Also remember, the majority of my Discussion posts are upvoted, very few are downvoted. Look at my profile to check this fact.
My immediate response was to think “Ahh, screw that. Ban!” Given the caveat in the parenthesis however, his declaration gives only a tiny amount of information along the “threat to do harm” front. I more or less expect people banned from a site to be inclined to do detrimental things to that site if they can. That being the case, this threat falls just short of stating the obvious and so I can abandon the initial outraged defiance.
I don’t understand your comment. That’s probably okay though.
Karma sink. WILL NEWSOME IS THE SIMULATOR-GOD!
FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH MY OWN OPINION IS THAT THAT’S INCREDIBLY UNLIKELY.