1:1 he is, but I don’t object to him making a clean start as long as he behaves himself this time around. The recent downvote “abuse” doesn’t actually sound that egregious to me.
I also would not object to a clean start. However, I think any systematic downvoting of a user’s old comments, regardless of the scale, is abuse. This is not only likely to drive new people away from the community, it is prima facie evidence that the perpetrator is mindkilled.
Neoreactionaries come to the rationalist blogosphere because we are the only people on the internets who are willing to engage them in debate. This is because we have a community standard that tells us to listen to people as long as they are arguing in good faith and appear to have acceptable epistemic standards. However, when they turn discussions into “wars” and use not only their arguments but also their downvotes as soldiers, they are violating the very community standards that brought them in.
The rationalist blogosphere can either call them on it, or risk turning into an outpost of of their “dark enlightenment”.
Neoreactionaries come to the rationalist blogosphere because [...]
Isn’t it possible—likely, even—that some of them are in the rationalist blogosphere because, as well as being neoreactionaries they are in fact rationalists? Just as some other participants in the rationalist blogosphere are socialists, Buddhists, polyamorists, or members of any other not-completely-bugfuck-crazy group you might care to mention?
Framing the issue in terms of dangerous invaders messing up our territory is tempting, but I don’t like the look of some other things it pattern-matches to, and I’m not sure it isn’t just plain factually wrong. And the moral and practical implications of the behaviour we’re talking about don’t really depend on where the neoreactionaries in and around the LW community came from.
I agree with this. I did not intend to imply that all neoreactionaries are non-rationalists or that they are all mindkilled. I understand that my comment could be interpreted that way, and I apologize for this. My criticism was intended to apply only to the subset of participants who try to shut out other contributors by downvoting their old comments, or by using other dirty discussion tactics that turn arguments into war. These people exist on both ends of the political spectrum.
I am convinced that many neo-reactionaries have made a huge contribution to Less Wrong, and I very much appreciate their presence here. Politically, I am very strongly in favor of enlightenment values, but I also appreciate seeing arguments against my values stated in their strongest possible and purest form. This allows me to create a much better model of my opponents, and gives me a much clearer view of the failure modes of my own political philosophy. Because of these discussions, I have accepted that neo-reactionaries have important things to say about several current political issues (though I reject their overall philosophy)
The fact that I can engage with these arguments in the rationalist blogosphere but not at my academic institution (where similar discussion would be shut down immediately with extreme prejudice, regardless of the quality of the arguments), is very telling both about the current state of academia, and about the importance of forums like Less Wrong
While your explicit claims may be true, I think we should be careful about framing civility problems in terms of ideology, if only because such seems like it could exacerbate the problem.
10:1 s/he isn’t Eugene Nier.
1:1 he is, but I don’t object to him making a clean start as long as he behaves himself this time around. The recent downvote “abuse” doesn’t actually sound that egregious to me.
I also would not object to a clean start. However, I think any systematic downvoting of a user’s old comments, regardless of the scale, is abuse. This is not only likely to drive new people away from the community, it is prima facie evidence that the perpetrator is mindkilled.
Neoreactionaries come to the rationalist blogosphere because we are the only people on the internets who are willing to engage them in debate. This is because we have a community standard that tells us to listen to people as long as they are arguing in good faith and appear to have acceptable epistemic standards. However, when they turn discussions into “wars” and use not only their arguments but also their downvotes as soldiers, they are violating the very community standards that brought them in.
The rationalist blogosphere can either call them on it, or risk turning into an outpost of of their “dark enlightenment”.
Isn’t it possible—likely, even—that some of them are in the rationalist blogosphere because, as well as being neoreactionaries they are in fact rationalists? Just as some other participants in the rationalist blogosphere are socialists, Buddhists, polyamorists, or members of any other not-completely-bugfuck-crazy group you might care to mention?
Framing the issue in terms of dangerous invaders messing up our territory is tempting, but I don’t like the look of some other things it pattern-matches to, and I’m not sure it isn’t just plain factually wrong. And the moral and practical implications of the behaviour we’re talking about don’t really depend on where the neoreactionaries in and around the LW community came from.
I agree with this. I did not intend to imply that all neoreactionaries are non-rationalists or that they are all mindkilled. I understand that my comment could be interpreted that way, and I apologize for this. My criticism was intended to apply only to the subset of participants who try to shut out other contributors by downvoting their old comments, or by using other dirty discussion tactics that turn arguments into war. These people exist on both ends of the political spectrum.
I am convinced that many neo-reactionaries have made a huge contribution to Less Wrong, and I very much appreciate their presence here. Politically, I am very strongly in favor of enlightenment values, but I also appreciate seeing arguments against my values stated in their strongest possible and purest form. This allows me to create a much better model of my opponents, and gives me a much clearer view of the failure modes of my own political philosophy. Because of these discussions, I have accepted that neo-reactionaries have important things to say about several current political issues (though I reject their overall philosophy)
The fact that I can engage with these arguments in the rationalist blogosphere but not at my academic institution (where similar discussion would be shut down immediately with extreme prejudice, regardless of the quality of the arguments), is very telling both about the current state of academia, and about the importance of forums like Less Wrong
While your explicit claims may be true, I think we should be careful about framing civility problems in terms of ideology, if only because such seems like it could exacerbate the problem.