I’m interested to know if anyone would have considered voting this up if the attempted rape portion of the metaphor had been omitted and the story had been ended just before then?
I wouldn’t upvote this in any case, as it doesn’t belong here as it stands.
With some thorough editing, and a lot of boiling down, it could turn into an insightful discussion of the blind spot so many people have where social needs are concerned; that education or internet are something like a basic human right, but sexual satisfaction, which is far more primal and necessary to us, isn’t. It’s a necessary blind spot in ideologies which treat needs as rights to be satisfied by other people, because it’s full of ugly truths about those ideologies.
But I doubt the insightful post would be received well, either. Perhaps I overestimate people, but I suspect most people have an inkling of the currents running under the surface, here.
Interestingly, there appears (at least in my local cultural circle) that being attended by human caretakers when incapacitated by age, is supposed to be a basic right. Hence, there must be some other reason—and not just the problem about rights being fulfilled by other persons, why the particular example assumed to underlie the parable, is reprehensible to many people.
There is another reason. In social-standing friendly language, “Sex is sacred”.
For the less socially-friendly approach… sex is clearly not sacred, and the issue isn’t the idea of sex being a right, as one can readily see by looking at people who can complain about involuntary celibacy without much social risk, and do so. I’m not going to name the ugliness, both because it’s broad and ill-defined—a patch of area defined more by what a set of ideologies fail to say, than what they explicitly name—but also because it’s something you have to see for yourself to believe.
As I write this, the parent comment is at −1 despite the fact that it simply answers a question someone asked. There is something very strange about the voting in this post’s comments.
Someone downvoted your comment as well. Elsewhere in the thread, username2 asserted that Nancy could not be trusted as a moderator. I am pretty sure that comment was negative before, now it is at +4 with 55% positive. So that looks like some kind of vote manipulation.
There are some comments on this post where I wonder about vote manipulation because they seem to have changed score rapidly, some considerable time after posting.
TheAltar’s comment upthread, and my comment on it, don’t seem like examples of that. I think they may be unreasonable downvotes but not improper ones, if you see what I mean. (My reading of the situation is that there are some people on LW who have a strong aversion to anything suggestive of “social justice”, and that that’s responsible for a lot of the downvotes here. E.g., someone suggests that one bit of the OP is endorsing rape or complaining about people getting punished for rape; vocal opposition to rape is a Social Justice Thing and therefore bad in these people’s eyes[1]; and then anything that engages with that without condemning it—e.g., TheAltar’s comment—is guilty by association.)
[1] How could anyone have a problem with vocal opposition to rape? Well, the idea is that the word “rape” gets attached to things that are not rape (e.g., in phrases like “rape culture”, “rape apologist”, etc.) and then those things can get smacked down almost as if they were actual rape, even if they don’t remotely deserve it.
This is a behaviour I have often observed on the scores of comments from Eugine_Nier/Azathoth123/VoiceOfRa/The_Lion. (And, I think, more generally on the scores of “neo-reactionary-friendly” comments[1].) It’s tempting to attribute this to Eugine’s socks, but it could also be that there are a few people of a particular political persuasion who happen to read LW only every few days, and happen to do so in sync.
It might perhaps be worth noting that Lumifer called out Old_Gold as Eugine redivivus practically as soon as he appeared. Make of that what you will.
[1] I don’t like this terminology; perhaps someone can suggest something better. I mean comments that say highly negative things about groups that traditionally have low status but that more recently one is supposed to be positive about and understanding of: those who are female, black, gay, poor, transgender, etc.
I suspect it’s because infrequent old members like myself only check the site every couple of days. I didn’t upvote because the fable was good; I upvoted because I felt the author was being unfairly penalized by the downvoting.
I think it might sense to simply login into username2 to delete any posts made with the account that one doesn’t want to see. Especially in cases like that there no reason to allow Eugine to use the account to make posts about how Nancy isn’t to the trusted.
I don’t think I like the precedent of encouraging people to delete one another’s comments, even though when they’re made via username2 there’s obviously nothing stopping anyone doing so.
I don’t consider the ability of people to post annonymous vile comments via the username2 an important factor of the community. I think community works best when people are accountable for their actions.
You again try to change the subject instead of honestly engaging with content. You labeled deleting comments in the above case as “community should be burned”.
I don’t consider those comments an important part of the community and if the cost of preventing Eugine from continuing to post is getting rid of them that’s a price I’m willing to pay.
You again try to change the subject instead of honestly engaging with content. You labeled deleting comments in the above case as “community should be burned”.
Have you ever noticed I don’t behave this way towards, say, Gwern?
I respond in kind. Be honest and straightforward, and that’s the way I’ll play. Engage in slippery equivocation, and, well...
I don’t consider those comments an important part of the community and if the cost of preventing Eugine from continuing to post is getting rid of them that’s a price I’m willing to pay.
You don’t consider it a price, as you’ve just made clear, so arguing that you’re willing to “pay” that price is disingenuous. Eugine isn’t your reason for doing something you don’t want to do, Eugine is your excuse for doing something you want to do.
Eugine isn’t your reason for doing something you don’t want to do, Eugine is your excuse for doing something you want to do.
Consitency in enforcing a bannning decions against Eugine is the impetus for the action.
Then I looked at other consequences of the action and I don’t think they are hurtful for the community.
Consitency in enforcing a bannning decions against Eugine is the impetus for the action. Then I looked at other consequences of the action and I don’t think they are hurtful for the community.
By all means, put it up for a vote, propose it to the rest of the community. See if the community agrees with you that the anonymous account should be shut down to avoid these kinds of issues.
Somebody with your attitude has previously killed the anonymous account by changing the password. The community didn’t agree then, and created a new one. Engaging in sabotage of the account’s purpose is no better, and perhaps worse, because it’s far harder to recover from. You don’t get to decide for the community what is and isn’t harmful for the community; you’re not even a leader, much less a king.
There is a difference between a single known account and a free-for-all, however. (I personally care neither way; the implication that ChristianKI knows what is best for the community, and would force his/her views upon everyone else, however, irritates me.)
Somebody with your attitude has previously killed the anonymous account by changing the password.
Actually I did put up the question of deleting the old account up for a vote and myself didn’t change the password. Afterwards someone did change the password.
In a case like that I’m not sabotating the features of the account by using them. There no vote indicating that some of those are supposed to be used while others don’t.
You don’t get to decide for the community what is and isn’t harmful for the community; you’re not even a leader, much less a king.
The question of what’s harmful is a factual one. It’s not a leadership decision. Deciding what to do does happen to be a leadership decision. In the case of deleting posts everybody of the username2 account everybody has the right to do so. That’s how the account is constructed.
If you disagree with a particular post, feel free to vote it down or argue against it. Till now you haven’t provided an argument why you think my position is wrong besides the strawman of it buring the community.
I’ll dryly note that as soon as I started being specific again, you started equivocating again. You’re not worth the time of arguing with.
For the audience, as I no longer have sufficient respect for my opponent to address him directly:
If ChristianKI’s goal is to prevent Eugine Nier from posting/commenting, this solution fails immediately for reasons that are transparent: Eugine can simply create another account.
Assuming my respected opponent has half a brain cell to him, that motive is off the table as an explanation. He’s stated he sees no value in having an anonymous account, and moreover he called for the deletion of the last one; it’s clear his true motive has nothing to do with Eugine Nier. He asserts his own views and values as being objectively true (“The question of what’s harmful is a factual one.”), equivocates when challenged, is disingenuous about his motives, and promotes sabotage of what the community as a whole regards a useful institution.
Given his attitude towards the use of administrative function to “improve the community” without regard for long-term consequences or precedent, personally I think it would be poetically appropriate to ban him, but I fear that I do, in fact, care about long-term consequences and precedent, so cannot actually advocate that course of action.
So I suggest anybody so inclined to, instead, laugh quietly to themselves over this self-important blowhard. Yes, I’m aware of the irony of my stating that, particularly in that context, so I encourage everybody to laugh at me, as well, because this entire post, and the response to it, is eminently farcical, and deserves to be laughed at.
I’ve seen the votes fluctuate and some posts with odd points counts. The karma amounts do seem to be balancing out into what I would generally expect from LW users over time though.
(The entire thread has slowly moved from −22 to −17 which seems odd.)
I can see a reference to rape in the second to last paragraph if I squint real hard and look at it through rape-colored glasses, but when I take the glasses off or stop squinting it simply doesn’t look like rape anymore.
Many LWers are careful enough to notice when even the slightest signaling towards a hot button issue crops up. This is just a good idea as a form of basic social hygiene since people in other environments have very powerful reactions to even the slightest of comments made towards those topics and can easily put you into an Enemy category or become much less comfortable around you for the foreseeable future.
Much of the annoyance at this thread was the fact that it included a signalling towards that at all since it’s a substantial faux pas. This is especially true if the story was meant to have a different purpose as the writer later claimed.
In my experience, people who are not the likely victims of a kind of danger are much less likely to spot the warning signs of that danger than those who are. Women spot potential-rape more frequently, the same way that soldiers that have been stationed in the middle east are more likely to spot potential IEDs—not every discarded thing on the road is an IED, and not every “man roughly handling a women” is a potential rape… but some are… and some women have gotten better at spotting the latter due to either being trained to do so, or having had the experience themselves...
In other words… just because many people didn’t see it for a potential-rape… doesn’t mean it can’t easily be interpreted as pattern-matching on exactly that kind of situation.
To some extent, it doesn’t even matter that it was not the original intent of the author to represent rape. It was close enough that it was a plausible interpretation (specious or no) for those who know what to look for.
I expect the author has learned something about how people can interpret things even when they are unintended...
Interestingly, and vaguely related, there’s an ongoing debate about the Cumberbatch Sherlock Holmes series: apparently many women interpret the relationship between Holmes and Watson as containing a lot of sexual tension… and a lot of men (and the writer(s)) think that idea is rubbish.… it all has to do with how close they stand to each other, and the way they are portrayed to gaze at each other.
IMHO the ‘attempted rape’ claim is far more interpretation than substance—an interpretation that is specious at best.
I’ll admit that I’d missed that part when I first read the post, I only noticed it after I went through the comments section
While almost everyone who commented interpreted it that way, I think it’s also worth pointing out that at least one person in the comments thread missed the metaphor completely.
I’m interested to know if anyone would have considered voting this up if the attempted rape portion of the metaphor had been omitted and the story had been ended just before then?
I wouldn’t upvote this in any case, as it doesn’t belong here as it stands.
With some thorough editing, and a lot of boiling down, it could turn into an insightful discussion of the blind spot so many people have where social needs are concerned; that education or internet are something like a basic human right, but sexual satisfaction, which is far more primal and necessary to us, isn’t. It’s a necessary blind spot in ideologies which treat needs as rights to be satisfied by other people, because it’s full of ugly truths about those ideologies.
But I doubt the insightful post would be received well, either. Perhaps I overestimate people, but I suspect most people have an inkling of the currents running under the surface, here.
Interestingly, there appears (at least in my local cultural circle) that being attended by human caretakers when incapacitated by age, is supposed to be a basic right. Hence, there must be some other reason—and not just the problem about rights being fulfilled by other persons, why the particular example assumed to underlie the parable, is reprehensible to many people.
There is another reason. In social-standing friendly language, “Sex is sacred”.
For the less socially-friendly approach… sex is clearly not sacred, and the issue isn’t the idea of sex being a right, as one can readily see by looking at people who can complain about involuntary celibacy without much social risk, and do so. I’m not going to name the ugliness, both because it’s broad and ill-defined—a patch of area defined more by what a set of ideologies fail to say, than what they explicitly name—but also because it’s something you have to see for yourself to believe.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I thought it was very bad[1] even aside from the attempted-rape bit.
[1] I mean in quality rather than morally, though the attempted-rape part (at least) is horrible morally too.
I can’t find it—where IS the rape part?
2nd to last paragraph.
As I write this, the parent comment is at −1 despite the fact that it simply answers a question someone asked. There is something very strange about the voting in this post’s comments.
Someone downvoted your comment as well. Elsewhere in the thread, username2 asserted that Nancy could not be trusted as a moderator. I am pretty sure that comment was negative before, now it is at +4 with 55% positive. So that looks like some kind of vote manipulation.
There are some comments on this post where I wonder about vote manipulation because they seem to have changed score rapidly, some considerable time after posting.
TheAltar’s comment upthread, and my comment on it, don’t seem like examples of that. I think they may be unreasonable downvotes but not improper ones, if you see what I mean. (My reading of the situation is that there are some people on LW who have a strong aversion to anything suggestive of “social justice”, and that that’s responsible for a lot of the downvotes here. E.g., someone suggests that one bit of the OP is endorsing rape or complaining about people getting punished for rape; vocal opposition to rape is a Social Justice Thing and therefore bad in these people’s eyes[1]; and then anything that engages with that without condemning it—e.g., TheAltar’s comment—is guilty by association.)
[1] How could anyone have a problem with vocal opposition to rape? Well, the idea is that the word “rape” gets attached to things that are not rape (e.g., in phrases like “rape culture”, “rape apologist”, etc.) and then those things can get smacked down almost as if they were actual rape, even if they don’t remotely deserve it.
EphemeralNight and Old_Gold’s posts seem to have jumped up in votes massively in the last 1-2 days when they were both in the negative iirc.
Old_Gold seems to be Eugine. (My subjective probability is about 70% at this moment.)
EphemeralNight behaves quite differently. If I had to guess, I’d guess that Eugine used his sockpuppets to upvote him.
This is a behaviour I have often observed on the scores of comments from Eugine_Nier/Azathoth123/VoiceOfRa/The_Lion. (And, I think, more generally on the scores of “neo-reactionary-friendly” comments[1].) It’s tempting to attribute this to Eugine’s socks, but it could also be that there are a few people of a particular political persuasion who happen to read LW only every few days, and happen to do so in sync.
It might perhaps be worth noting that Lumifer called out Old_Gold as Eugine redivivus practically as soon as he appeared. Make of that what you will.
[1] I don’t like this terminology; perhaps someone can suggest something better. I mean comments that say highly negative things about groups that traditionally have low status but that more recently one is supposed to be positive about and understanding of: those who are female, black, gay, poor, transgender, etc.
I suspect it’s because infrequent old members like myself only check the site every couple of days. I didn’t upvote because the fable was good; I upvoted because I felt the author was being unfairly penalized by the downvoting.
Doubtful. The differences are large, one-sided, and occurred in a cluster. They also don’t match LW’s general leanings for voters.
I think it might sense to simply login into username2 to delete any posts made with the account that one doesn’t want to see. Especially in cases like that there no reason to allow Eugine to use the account to make posts about how Nancy isn’t to the trusted.
I don’t think I like the precedent of encouraging people to delete one another’s comments, even though when they’re made via username2 there’s obviously nothing stopping anyone doing so.
Do you think it’s fine if Eugine continues to say whatever he wants to say with the username2 account?
Do you think the community should be burned down to ensure Eugine has nowhere to hide?
I don’t consider the ability of people to post annonymous vile comments via the username2 an important factor of the community. I think community works best when people are accountable for their actions.
Then say that instead of blaming the resident bogeyman for your preferences.
You again try to change the subject instead of honestly engaging with content. You labeled deleting comments in the above case as “community should be burned”.
I don’t consider those comments an important part of the community and if the cost of preventing Eugine from continuing to post is getting rid of them that’s a price I’m willing to pay.
Have you ever noticed I don’t behave this way towards, say, Gwern?
I respond in kind. Be honest and straightforward, and that’s the way I’ll play. Engage in slippery equivocation, and, well...
You don’t consider it a price, as you’ve just made clear, so arguing that you’re willing to “pay” that price is disingenuous. Eugine isn’t your reason for doing something you don’t want to do, Eugine is your excuse for doing something you want to do.
Consitency in enforcing a bannning decions against Eugine is the impetus for the action. Then I looked at other consequences of the action and I don’t think they are hurtful for the community.
By all means, put it up for a vote, propose it to the rest of the community. See if the community agrees with you that the anonymous account should be shut down to avoid these kinds of issues.
Somebody with your attitude has previously killed the anonymous account by changing the password. The community didn’t agree then, and created a new one. Engaging in sabotage of the account’s purpose is no better, and perhaps worse, because it’s far harder to recover from. You don’t get to decide for the community what is and isn’t harmful for the community; you’re not even a leader, much less a king.
You cannot “shut down” anonymous accounts while maintaining open registration of new accounts.
Anyone can create a new account and make its password be known.
There is a difference between a single known account and a free-for-all, however. (I personally care neither way; the implication that ChristianKI knows what is best for the community, and would force his/her views upon everyone else, however, irritates me.)
Actually I did put up the question of deleting the old account up for a vote and myself didn’t change the password. Afterwards someone did change the password.
In a case like that I’m not sabotating the features of the account by using them. There no vote indicating that some of those are supposed to be used while others don’t.
The question of what’s harmful is a factual one. It’s not a leadership decision. Deciding what to do does happen to be a leadership decision. In the case of deleting posts everybody of the username2 account everybody has the right to do so. That’s how the account is constructed.
If you disagree with a particular post, feel free to vote it down or argue against it. Till now you haven’t provided an argument why you think my position is wrong besides the strawman of it buring the community.
I’ll dryly note that as soon as I started being specific again, you started equivocating again. You’re not worth the time of arguing with.
For the audience, as I no longer have sufficient respect for my opponent to address him directly:
If ChristianKI’s goal is to prevent Eugine Nier from posting/commenting, this solution fails immediately for reasons that are transparent: Eugine can simply create another account.
Assuming my respected opponent has half a brain cell to him, that motive is off the table as an explanation. He’s stated he sees no value in having an anonymous account, and moreover he called for the deletion of the last one; it’s clear his true motive has nothing to do with Eugine Nier. He asserts his own views and values as being objectively true (“The question of what’s harmful is a factual one.”), equivocates when challenged, is disingenuous about his motives, and promotes sabotage of what the community as a whole regards a useful institution.
Given his attitude towards the use of administrative function to “improve the community” without regard for long-term consequences or precedent, personally I think it would be poetically appropriate to ban him, but I fear that I do, in fact, care about long-term consequences and precedent, so cannot actually advocate that course of action.
So I suggest anybody so inclined to, instead, laugh quietly to themselves over this self-important blowhard. Yes, I’m aware of the irony of my stating that, particularly in that context, so I encourage everybody to laugh at me, as well, because this entire post, and the response to it, is eminently farcical, and deserves to be laughed at.
First, I don’t think Eugine is posting as username2. He has zero problems making new accounts and is not shy about expressing his view through them.
Second, a price you are willing to pay or the price you’re willing that everyone pays?
I’ve seen the votes fluctuate and some posts with odd points counts. The karma amounts do seem to be balancing out into what I would generally expect from LW users over time though.
(The entire thread has slowly moved from −22 to −17 which seems odd.)
I can see a reference to rape in the second to last paragraph if I squint real hard and look at it through rape-colored glasses, but when I take the glasses off or stop squinting it simply doesn’t look like rape anymore.
Many LWers are careful enough to notice when even the slightest signaling towards a hot button issue crops up. This is just a good idea as a form of basic social hygiene since people in other environments have very powerful reactions to even the slightest of comments made towards those topics and can easily put you into an Enemy category or become much less comfortable around you for the foreseeable future.
Much of the annoyance at this thread was the fact that it included a signalling towards that at all since it’s a substantial faux pas. This is especially true if the story was meant to have a different purpose as the writer later claimed.
This is a horrible thing to do from a rationality stand-point since it amounts to pre-mindkilling yourself.
IMHO the ‘attempted rape’ claim is far more interpretation than substance—an interpretation that is specious at best.
In my experience, people who are not the likely victims of a kind of danger are much less likely to spot the warning signs of that danger than those who are. Women spot potential-rape more frequently, the same way that soldiers that have been stationed in the middle east are more likely to spot potential IEDs—not every discarded thing on the road is an IED, and not every “man roughly handling a women” is a potential rape… but some are… and some women have gotten better at spotting the latter due to either being trained to do so, or having had the experience themselves...
In other words… just because many people didn’t see it for a potential-rape… doesn’t mean it can’t easily be interpreted as pattern-matching on exactly that kind of situation.
To some extent, it doesn’t even matter that it was not the original intent of the author to represent rape. It was close enough that it was a plausible interpretation (specious or no) for those who know what to look for. I expect the author has learned something about how people can interpret things even when they are unintended...
Interestingly, and vaguely related, there’s an ongoing debate about the Cumberbatch Sherlock Holmes series: apparently many women interpret the relationship between Holmes and Watson as containing a lot of sexual tension… and a lot of men (and the writer(s)) think that idea is rubbish.… it all has to do with how close they stand to each other, and the way they are portrayed to gaze at each other.
I’ll admit that I’d missed that part when I first read the post, I only noticed it after I went through the comments section
While almost everyone who commented interpreted it that way, I think it’s also worth pointing out that at least one person in the comments thread missed the metaphor completely.