What’s missing from the fable is the idea that sex also has costs and risks for women, not to mention that women have preferences which are as important to them as sexual preferences are for men. The last bit isn’t all that’s wrong with the post.
This is the moderator speaking—I want an answer for how you could think it was reasonable to leave out female preferences.
At the same time, there are real problems with the way that men who are bad at attracting women are treated. Not all of those problems come from feminism.
This is the moderator speaking—I want an answer for how you could think it was reasonable to leave out female preferences.
I find this request to have worse implications than the post itself, because if this request is serious, it destroys discourse. Normally when discussing a topic, one must leave things out. Requiring people to justify leaving things out amounts to “every person is banworthy”.
Everyone is “banworthy”, in the sense that the moderators have the power to ban anyone for any reason and so far as I know there are no defined limits on their actions.
This particular post
is in no way actually on topic for LW
appears to have been the last straw in leading one long-standing contributor to give up on LW
fits right into an anti-LW narrative that’s already not so uncommon (“LW has become a sinkhole of racists and sexists and fascists, because the site’s supposedly rational norms give no way to make them unwelcome but they make everyone else feel unwelcome”)
seems at the end to be trying to imply that it’s unjust for rapists to be punished, if they feel frustrated and upset and the person they rape wasn’t very nice to them
and I think some kind of moderator action in response is eminently reasonable. Personally I’d have gone for “This article is not suitable for LW because [...]; I will wait two days so that anyone who wants to preserve what they’ve written can take a copy, and then delete it; further attempts at posting this sort of thing may result in a ban”.
(I think Nancy was right to ask “what about women’s preferences?” and right to apply a bit of moderatorial intimidation, but I don’t think the two should have gone together.)
Your reasons amount entirely to “The hecklers want to veto this” and “I don’t like this content”. We’ve had worse than this before.
I’m not serious very often, particularly here, but I am entirely serious when I say this: If you think the prohibitions on political discourse exist to prevent this content, you do not understand the prohibitions on political discourse; they exist to prevent these responses.
Your reasons amount entirely to “The hecklers want to veto this” and “I don’t like this content”.
That is plainly untrue.
The second and third things I said about this post kinda-sorta pattern-match to “the hecklers want to veto this” … provided you take care not to look too carefully. (One person found it the last straw and is leaving. Does that mean he “wants to veto” it? No, it means he’s gone. It fits into an anti-LW narrative that encourages people to stay away. Does that mean the people saying mean things about LW “want to veto” it? No; actually, they’re probably glad it’s there because it gives them another stick to beat LW with.)
The first and fourth kinda-sorta pattern-match to “gjm doesn’t like this content”, but again only if you take care not to look carefully. I gave specific reasons why I think it’s bad, and it is to those rather than to the fact that I don’t like this post that I appealed. Would you collapse all criticism into “X doesn’t like this content”? If so, then classifying a particular bit of criticism that way conveys zero information. If not, why does what I wrote deserve to be so collapsed?
We’ve had worse than this before.
So what?
If you think the prohibitions on political discourse exist to prevent this content, [...]
I didn’t say anything about “the prohibitions on political discourse”. In particular, when I say this is in no way on topic for LW, I don’t mean ”… because of the prohibitions on political discourse”. I mean it’s simply not on topic here. It isn’t about rationality (the notional main subject here), nor is it a discussion topic particularly suited to “refining the art of human rationality” (as the LW header has it). It isn’t about AI (the main focus of the people who pay for LW). It isn’t, to judge from all the downvotes, something LW users as a whole want to discuss here.
I’m going to be ruder than I usually am, and tell you that you only have one true argument here: That this is harmful to Less Wrong. Your perception, which you fairly plainly state, is that this is harmful to your identity group. Should I link you to the appropriate material about identity and mindkilling? Should I note the irony in the situation?
This is not Orphan amusing himself. This is Orphan telling you that this path will lead to ruin. Less Wrong will survive a user’s unpopular opinion if it deserves to survive at all, but it certainly will not survive a precedent of content-based mindkilled moderation.
This is not your Final Exam in rationality; there are no final exams in rationality in the real world. But this is -an- exam. Rationalize your prechosen answer or humor your teachers’ passwords at your peril.
you have only one true argument here: That this is harmful to Less Wrong.
Almost any argument that something should be subject to moderatorial action on Less Wrong can be summarized that way. Even so, you have managed to be incorrect: it is not harmful only to Less Wrong. In the (admittedly not very likely) event that some reader is inspired by it to think as the author seems to, that will be harmful to them (because it will mess up their relations with women) and potentially to any women they may encounter (for the same reason). And while that hypothetical reader can ipso facto be considered part of “Less Wrong”, those women can’t.
Your perception, which you fairly plainly state, is that this is harmful to your identity group.
You just made that up. (I’m not even sure what my “identity group” even is; I can’t think of any plausible candidate for which what you say applies.) I certainly haven’t “fairly plainly” stated what you claim I have.
content-based mindkilled moderation
How about content-based non-mindkilled moderation?
Do you consider that no one could have a serious problem with this material other than by being mindkilled?
Constructing a memetically safe space is … dangerous.
Sure. It’s just as well no one is proposing to do that.
The situation here is as follows. The OP is really bad, for several different reasons. Nancy made a comment that rather vaguely suggested that she might invoke her moderatorial powers somehow if the author didn’t justify some of what he wrote. But now you’re pointing to one of the things I say is bad about the OP and saying “it would be bad to ban people for just this”. Yup, it would, but no one was suggesting that.
I never suggested anything like “constructing a memetically safe space”. You might want to consider the possibility that some of the ridiculousness is of your own making.
If you can’t keep from commenting on things that are immaterial to the matter at hand in your arguments, you can’t complain when other people assume that the things you comment on are material to the matter at hand to you, and treat your arguments as such.
Even so, you have managed to be incorrect: it is not harmful only to Less Wrong. In the (admittedly not very likely) event that some reader is inspired by it to think as the author seems to, that will be harmful to them (because it will mess up their relations with women) and potentially to any women they may encounter (for the same reason). And while that hypothetical reader can ipso facto be considered part of “Less Wrong”, those women can’t.
Your argument proves too much.
How about content-based non-mindkilled moderation?
That would require the participants be not-mindkilled, which you clearly are, since you think moderating bad literature is a good idea.
Do you consider that no one could have a serious problem with this material other than by being mindkilled?
I find it badly written, but that’s not a moderation-worthy offense. It presents no serious argument and poses no threat of inspiration. It’s about as noteworthy as the average teenage goths’ poetry describing what dying would feel like, and cringeworthy for about the same reasons.
I’m forcing this conversation into two positions, in case you haven’t noticed: Either you concede it’s terrible but harmless and not -worth- moderating, or you now argue that it’s actually dangerous.
Do please go ahead and show what it proves that shouldn’t be proved.
since you think moderating bad literature is a good idea
I do wish you’d stop saying false things about what I think.
I’m forcing [...]
You seem very fond of boasting of how you’re manipulating this and forcing that and dark-artsing the other. I feel about this roughly the way you feel about Gleb T’s writing.
Either you concede it’s terrible but harmless and not -worth- moderating, or you now argue that it’s actually dangerous.
Nope. What I actually say is: (1) it’s probably harmless, but that doesn’t suffice to make it not worth moderating, and (2) there is a small but nonzero chance that someone takes it more seriously than it deserves and ends up harmed by it.
(Unless you are adopting a very broad definition of “harm” according to which, e.g., something that is merely boring and unpleasant and irrelevant is “harmful” because it wastes people’s time and attention. In that case, I would argue that the OP is harmful. Of course that’s not the same as “dangerous” and yes, I did notice that you opposed “harmless” to “dangerous” as if the two were one another’s negations.)
On #1: well-kept gardens die by pacifism and while Eliezer is there arguing mostly for energetic downvoting of bad material, I suggest that the same arguments can justify moderator action too. If someone is contributing a lot of low-quality material and nothing valuable, maybe it’s OK to ban them. If something posted is low-quality and irrelevant and liable to bring Less Wrong into disrepute, maybe it’s OK to delete it. If someone is persistently obnoxious, maybe it’s OK to ban them. None of this requires that the thing being sanctioned be dangerous.
On #2: people can be inspired by the unlikeliest things. (I went to a rather good concert once where one of the better pieces of music was a setting of what may be the worst poem I have ever read, firmly in teenage goth territory.)
You seem very fond of boasting of how you’re manipulating this and forcing that and dark-artsing the other. I feel about this roughly the way you feel about Gleb T’s writing.
If I were going to boast, it would be about how you changed your mind on multiple things simultaneously to avoid the obvious feint—and apparently didn’t notice. Your arguments at this point are so weak as to fall apart at the touch; “probably harmless” and “small but nonzero chance of harm” are such a weak standard of evidence for moderation that nothing would be permitted to be discussed here. It would be much harder to prove your prior version proved too much—but you did the work for me.
But go on and keep thinking that what I’m doing is boasting.
I didn’t argue at all there. I pointed out that your position changed in anticipation of an objection you expected me to raise, to forestall the objection from having merit.
The argument, you see, is already over. You played your part, I played mine, and the audience is looking for a new show, the conclusion for this one already having played out in the background.
If the article lead an respected LW member to leave it’s harmful to LW. It’s a quite simple argument. If you can’t see that harm it might be you who’s mindkilled.
You can argue that the harm isn’t big enough to justify censorship of the post but claiming that no harm is caused to the community is plain wrong.
If the article lead an respected LW member to leave it’s harmful to LW.
Granting concessions to anybody who threatens to leave the table is a harmful strategy.
It’s a quite simple argument.
The world is complex. Simple arguments are generally wrong.
If you can’t see that harm it might be you who’s mindkilled.
Unlikely, given both that I’m taking a position against overreaction, and have insulted our guest of honor multiple times throughout this thread. You’re the one with an emotional stake in this; my emotions started with concern, but at this point have settled on “amused” given that I don’t rate there being any real danger of moderation.
I downvoted Nancy. Nancy! I’ve never downvoted Nancy, she always has a cool head.
You can argue that the harm isn’t big enough to justify censorship of the post but claiming that no harm is caused to the community is plain wrong.
Anyone who leaves over this post isn’t worth having in the first place. You, at least, argue your point, defend the community. Richard just declared the community shit and left.
He might be wrong, or he might be right—it doesn’t matter. As the community exists, he didn’t provide value. Any harm that was done, to create a community such that this trivial nonsense caused him to leave, long predates this trivial nonsense.
Or, to put it another way—the issue isn’t that this post exists. The issue is that nothing existed to make it worth it to Richard to read posts like this. It’s not like the community is overrun with poor content, that you have to sift through to find the good stuff. It’s not like anybody will confuse this heavily-downvoted post with “the good stuff.” There isn’t any good stuff. There’s just people competing with one another to prove who can be the most outraged over bad literature.
You know what a good community would have done with this post? Downvoted it and moved on to the next thing.
This post isn’t a problem because it’s bad. This post is a problem because it’s the most exciting thing that’s happened here this week.
Granting concessions to anybody who threatens to leave the table is a harmful strategy.
You illustrate a classic example of being mind-killed, confusing questions with each other. You confuse factual questions with strategic considerations and consider the strategic considerations to be more important than the veracity.
Whether or not it’s a good strategy to grant concessions for threatening to leave is irrelevant to the factual question of whether leaving is harm.
Everyone is “banworthy”, in the sense that the moderators have the power to ban anyone for any reason and so far as I know there are no defined limits on their actions.
That’s similar to saying that cops have the power to shoot anyone for any reason. There’s some truth in it, in one sense, but in another sense, it’s quite untrue.
Jiro’s argument is, in effect, that if the moderators can threaten to ban someone if they don’t justify the holes in their analogies then they can threaten to ban anyone. That’s true, but no truer than the fact that they can (in any case) threaten to ban anyone. In either case, the scenario to worry about is unreasonable moderators; and if we have unreasonable moderators they can threaten to ban, or ban, as they please even without this precedent.
(I should maybe remark that Nancy didn’t in fact threaten to ban anyone; she didn’t make any specific threat. I’m not sure that actually makes anything better, but this discussion is developing somewhat as if she’d said in so many words “answer or I ban you”, which she didn’t say.)
The issue isn’t whether a threat to ban was made explicitly or not (the only moderator powers are to ban and to delete posts, as far as I know, therefore “I ask as a moderator” implies “I have a gun in my hand, give me a reason to not use it”). The issue is whether moderators are in charge of policing posts and comments on the basis of “does it offend my sensitivities”.
The EphemeralNight’s post was compared, justifiably in my opinion, to bad adolescent goth poetry. Do you think that “I want an answer for how you could think it was reasonable to leave out female preferences” is, in any way, an adequate response to bad goth poetry?
“I have a gun in my hand, give me a reason to not use it”
It could also be “I have a gun: you might want to consider keeping on the right side of me lest I use it later”.
does it offend my sensitivities
As you can see from (e.g.) Richard Kennaway’s comment, the votes on Nancy’s question, etc., it is by no means only Nancy’s sensitivities that are at issue here.
an adequate response to bad goth poetry
Whether something is as badly written as bad goth poetry is an entirely separate question from whether it should be judged as if it is bad goth poetry.
Your list of reasons seem to me to be the very reason we have karma. Why does this post deserve moderation in a system where karma sends the message about the community’s desire for more of the same?
I’m not certain whether it does. The obvious disadvantages of moderator action are (1) effort and (2) heavy-handedness (real or perceived). The advantages of moderator action are (3) to make it more explicit that this sort of stuff is not wanted around here and (4) to get rid of it more thoroughly so that, e.g., people are less likely to stumble across it in search engine results and there’s no danger that future trolls with sockpuppet armies will vote it up out of spite[1].
I’m not sure how those weigh up against one another, and indeed it’s not hard to cook up arguments that #2 is actually a good thing (“sending a message”) or that #4 is actually a bad thing (all else being equal, destroying even low-quality information is sad). But on the whole I think #3 and #4 are advantages, which is why moderator action is at least worth considering.
[1] This isn’t as crazy a scenario as it sounds. There is at least one LW user strongly suspected of using sockpuppets for upvoting, generally hostile to Nancy, unsympathetic to (let’s say) “women’s causes”, and known to be untroubled by scruples about what’s considered acceptable behaviour on LW...
Fair enough. I don’t follow the personalities here, so the situations where someone engages in sock-puppetry would totally escape my notice. My priors incline me to preferring good speech as the remedy for bad speech.
And those are legitimate reasons to ban him. And none of them are “we require that posts don’t leave out how the humans feel, and if you do leave that out you should get banned”. I agree that we should ban him. I’m just saying we need to be careful about what justification we give for banning him.
Do you have any idea how much is covered by the requirement “you can’t ignore humans in your posts”, or can be spun as covered by it? “In your torture versus dust specks example, tell me why we should ignore the feelings of the person actually suffering the torture. You can’t just dispassionately compare them and ignore that you’re saying a human being should suffer”. “What? You oppose the minimum wage? Tell me why you left out anything about the poor person who starves to death because of your policy.”
I’m just saying we need to be careful about what justification we give for banning him.
I agree. See the last sentence of what I wrote.
Do you have any idea how much is covered [...]
Yes. It would be bad if it became the norm that any time anyone makes an analogy that doesn’t match the thing it points at in every detail, or made an argument that failed to consider the preferences and feelings of some people, the moderators of LW demanded that they justify themselves.
We should not have that norm, and I have not (so far as I can tell) suggested that there should be one.
Precisely because of the unusual badness of the thing Nancy was responding to (and, perhaps unlike you, I think that does have a lot to do with its apparent indifference to women’s feelings), I don’t think there’s any way to get from “a moderator challenges EphemeralNight on these grounds here” to “moderators issue similar challenges to everyone who posts anything that can be claimed to neglect anyone’s feelings”.
Incidentally, I think the challenges you mention in your second paragraph are (without the element of moderatorial intimidation) reasonable challenges. The answers might be, respectively, “We absolutely shouldn’t ignore the feelings of the person suffering the torture; they are a very big deal. But we also shouldn’t ignore the feelings of the people suffering the dust specks, which are indeed small in isolation but add up to a lot because of the unthinkably colossal number of people involved.” and “I didn’t intend to leave out anything about the poor person who starves to death because their pay is too low; I just say that we should also consider the poor people starving to death because they have no pay at all as a result of the minimum wage.”. (I do not necessarily endorse TORTURE over SPECKS or disapprove of a minimum wage; the point is that you can do so without ignoring anyone’s feelings, and that if you were ignoring anyone’s feelings then that would be a strike against your position.)
This post is of a quality that it harms the community by driving valuable people away. As such I think it does make sense to ask the author to justify his choices.
If we want a LW 2.0 where the people who left LW come back I don’t think that’s compatible with allowing posts like this.
That’s what the downvote system is for, and it is working perfectly fine. Moderation is for abusive behaviors.
As for Richard, if he’s going to be offended that a heavily-downvoted post exists, well, good riddance. You want a good culture, it doesn’t start by putting the Heckler’s Veto on a shrine and worshipping it.
I don’t think Richard is the only one driven away by posts like this. In general people who are willing to have their public identities linked to this website are more likely driven away because they don’t want to be associated with that kind of content.
It furthermore produces a climate unwelcoming to women.
After a certain point, no one wants to be associated with all the content + comments occurring and everyone generally feels unwelcome and judged. This is the worst case scenario for a discussion and a very strong reason to not have political discourse here.
I think it’s one thing to allow every position to be argued. It’s another thing to allow any position to be proposed with a story while the author tries to escape arguing for it.
NancyLebovitz requests here that the author argues for the position he takes.
Yes, but if you want to get that technical, the correct form depends on the gender of the latin word for “parable”. The two options are parabola (which has the “parable” meaning only in late Latin, I think) and fabula ( == fable, e.g. Aesop’s). Luckily, both are feminine so non gratae is correct.
Although you can make an argument that the English word “parables” has the neuter gender and so it still should be non grata :-)
That’s not what I said. I think that when it comes to emotionally charged topics it’s important to focus on on explicit discussing of arguments.
Post shouldn’t be banned because just because they spread a certain opinion or just because they use a certain style but posts that do voice problematic opinions in a non-fact based style shouldn’t be here.
Remind me, why do you think you’re entitled to answers? And what makes your perspective on what’s included in a piece of fiction and what is not anything special?
If we are going into the “some animals are more equal than others” direction, this will end badly and soon.
OK, trying to be fair to the original poster, since it appears that he doesn’t plan on responding directly in public. Please take this in the nature of “even the devil deserves an advocate” and an exercise in resisting the fundamental attribution error. It’s also informed by the thought that the implication that someone is actually advocating rape is an exception claim, so must be supported by exception evidence. And it’s informed by a cussed refusal to be mind-killed.
Take a look at the quantity of words. About half of the piece happens before the foreign girls show up. That seems to be a metaphor for people who can’t get sex through the types of relationships that the median person has. The second half is almost entirely given over to the foreign girls arriving, trafficking in branch-lifting, and getting prohibited from the community, with the result that the protagonist is vilified. That seems to be a metaphor for prostitution, its illegalization, and the effects on someone found to be buying the services of a prostitute.
Then we get one awful sentence. I’m not justifying it if it means what others have read it to mean, and I’ll come back to it at the end.
If by leaving out female preferences, you are referring to just that one sentence, I tend to agree with you that the one sentence is reprehensible if intended. But I don’t think that criticism is fair for any of the rest. The first half of the piece is showing the effect of preferences (female in context, but not gendered by necessity). When you make a point, it doesn’t have to be perfectly balanced, especially if your goal is to draw attention to some aspect that you believe has had has had insufficient attention. The second half of the piece actually respects some female preferences. Specifically, it respects the preferences of those who prefer to be sex workers. It points out one of the negative effects of oppressing those preferences (by ejecting the foreign girls). Again, it isn’t balanced, but I don’t really think it has to be. Finally, it points out the oppressive rationale for the oppressive act (of ejecting the foreign girls).
Then it goes off the rails with a single sentence. The piece would have been far more effective if the native girl speaking near the end had imprisoned him for paying a foreign girl to lift the burning branch. The sentence is far from clear to me. I’m not certain that its author really recognized that the metaphor would be to rape. To some degree, it is fair to say, “too bad, that’s the risk you take in writing in metaphor!” But it’s also fair for us to ask whether one sentence should be taken as such significant evidence of vile character, and whether some other meaning was intended. Specifically, putting a girl under the branch hasn’t been how the boys get out from under the branch throughout the rest of the story, so it’s not the established metaphor for sex. It could be that the point here was not forcing the girl to lift the branch (which would be metaphorical rape). It could be that the point was to subject girls to being under the branch (which would be metaphorical undesired celibacy). It’s not a great metaphor that way, either, because the boys got under the branches in the first place by some strange freak of nature. (“Oh, I didn’t see that burning branch falling on me, so now I’m stuck”?) But it might have been intended as “see how you like it.” That itself is an unattractive kind of position, but it is quite different from rape.
One final point is that I didn’t interpret the criticism here as being directed to feminism. I took it to be directed toward government messing around in things where it ought not and towards the ideal of sex as an expression of romantic love. I read it that one solution that was rejected in the first half was essentially “friends with benefits”—something that I doubt would find universal condemnation among feminists, and certainly not among most feminists before the 1980′s. But the danger with metaphors is that the reader brings more to them than the reader brings to a straightforward statement.
And that’s pretty much exhausted my store of charitable interpretation, with apologies to those who would prefer that this mind-killing comment thread simply die a quiet death.
What’s missing from the fable is the idea that sex also has costs and risks for women, not to mention that women have preferences which are as important to them as sexual preferences are for men. The last bit isn’t all that’s wrong with the post.
This is the moderator speaking—I want an answer for how you could think it was reasonable to leave out female preferences.
At the same time, there are real problems with the way that men who are bad at attracting women are treated. Not all of those problems come from feminism.
I agree with others that this is not an appropriate use of moderator demands.
I find this request to have worse implications than the post itself, because if this request is serious, it destroys discourse. Normally when discussing a topic, one must leave things out. Requiring people to justify leaving things out amounts to “every person is banworthy”.
Everyone is “banworthy”, in the sense that the moderators have the power to ban anyone for any reason and so far as I know there are no defined limits on their actions.
This particular post
is in no way actually on topic for LW
appears to have been the last straw in leading one long-standing contributor to give up on LW
fits right into an anti-LW narrative that’s already not so uncommon (“LW has become a sinkhole of racists and sexists and fascists, because the site’s supposedly rational norms give no way to make them unwelcome but they make everyone else feel unwelcome”)
seems at the end to be trying to imply that it’s unjust for rapists to be punished, if they feel frustrated and upset and the person they rape wasn’t very nice to them
and I think some kind of moderator action in response is eminently reasonable. Personally I’d have gone for “This article is not suitable for LW because [...]; I will wait two days so that anyone who wants to preserve what they’ve written can take a copy, and then delete it; further attempts at posting this sort of thing may result in a ban”.
(I think Nancy was right to ask “what about women’s preferences?” and right to apply a bit of moderatorial intimidation, but I don’t think the two should have gone together.)
Your reasons amount entirely to “The hecklers want to veto this” and “I don’t like this content”. We’ve had worse than this before.
I’m not serious very often, particularly here, but I am entirely serious when I say this: If you think the prohibitions on political discourse exist to prevent this content, you do not understand the prohibitions on political discourse; they exist to prevent these responses.
That is plainly untrue.
The second and third things I said about this post kinda-sorta pattern-match to “the hecklers want to veto this” … provided you take care not to look too carefully. (One person found it the last straw and is leaving. Does that mean he “wants to veto” it? No, it means he’s gone. It fits into an anti-LW narrative that encourages people to stay away. Does that mean the people saying mean things about LW “want to veto” it? No; actually, they’re probably glad it’s there because it gives them another stick to beat LW with.)
The first and fourth kinda-sorta pattern-match to “gjm doesn’t like this content”, but again only if you take care not to look carefully. I gave specific reasons why I think it’s bad, and it is to those rather than to the fact that I don’t like this post that I appealed. Would you collapse all criticism into “X doesn’t like this content”? If so, then classifying a particular bit of criticism that way conveys zero information. If not, why does what I wrote deserve to be so collapsed?
So what?
I didn’t say anything about “the prohibitions on political discourse”. In particular, when I say this is in no way on topic for LW, I don’t mean ”… because of the prohibitions on political discourse”. I mean it’s simply not on topic here. It isn’t about rationality (the notional main subject here), nor is it a discussion topic particularly suited to “refining the art of human rationality” (as the LW header has it). It isn’t about AI (the main focus of the people who pay for LW). It isn’t, to judge from all the downvotes, something LW users as a whole want to discuss here.
I’m going to be ruder than I usually am, and tell you that you only have one true argument here: That this is harmful to Less Wrong. Your perception, which you fairly plainly state, is that this is harmful to your identity group. Should I link you to the appropriate material about identity and mindkilling? Should I note the irony in the situation?
This is not Orphan amusing himself. This is Orphan telling you that this path will lead to ruin. Less Wrong will survive a user’s unpopular opinion if it deserves to survive at all, but it certainly will not survive a precedent of content-based mindkilled moderation.
This is not your Final Exam in rationality; there are no final exams in rationality in the real world. But this is -an- exam. Rationalize your prechosen answer or humor your teachers’ passwords at your peril.
Almost any argument that something should be subject to moderatorial action on Less Wrong can be summarized that way. Even so, you have managed to be incorrect: it is not harmful only to Less Wrong. In the (admittedly not very likely) event that some reader is inspired by it to think as the author seems to, that will be harmful to them (because it will mess up their relations with women) and potentially to any women they may encounter (for the same reason). And while that hypothetical reader can ipso facto be considered part of “Less Wrong”, those women can’t.
You just made that up. (I’m not even sure what my “identity group” even is; I can’t think of any plausible candidate for which what you say applies.) I certainly haven’t “fairly plainly” stated what you claim I have.
How about content-based non-mindkilled moderation?
Do you consider that no one could have a serious problem with this material other than by being mindkilled?
Is that reductio ad absurdum applied to basilisks..? X-D
Constructing a memetically safe space is… dangerous.
Sure. It’s just as well no one is proposing to do that.
The situation here is as follows. The OP is really bad, for several different reasons. Nancy made a comment that rather vaguely suggested that she might invoke her moderatorial powers somehow if the author didn’t justify some of what he wrote. But now you’re pointing to one of the things I say is bad about the OP and saying “it would be bad to ban people for just this”. Yup, it would, but no one was suggesting that.
Actually, no. I’m pointing to one of the thing you say is bad about OP and saying “You’re being ridiculous. Stop digging.”
I never suggested anything like “constructing a memetically safe space”. You might want to consider the possibility that some of the ridiculousness is of your own making.
If you can’t keep from commenting on things that are immaterial to the matter at hand in your arguments, you can’t complain when other people assume that the things you comment on are material to the matter at hand to you, and treat your arguments as such.
Fortunately, I am not complaining about that.
Your argument proves too much.
That would require the participants be not-mindkilled, which you clearly are, since you think moderating bad literature is a good idea.
I find it badly written, but that’s not a moderation-worthy offense. It presents no serious argument and poses no threat of inspiration. It’s about as noteworthy as the average teenage goths’ poetry describing what dying would feel like, and cringeworthy for about the same reasons.
I’m forcing this conversation into two positions, in case you haven’t noticed: Either you concede it’s terrible but harmless and not -worth- moderating, or you now argue that it’s actually dangerous.
Do please go ahead and show what it proves that shouldn’t be proved.
I do wish you’d stop saying false things about what I think.
You seem very fond of boasting of how you’re manipulating this and forcing that and dark-artsing the other. I feel about this roughly the way you feel about Gleb T’s writing.
Nope. What I actually say is: (1) it’s probably harmless, but that doesn’t suffice to make it not worth moderating, and (2) there is a small but nonzero chance that someone takes it more seriously than it deserves and ends up harmed by it.
(Unless you are adopting a very broad definition of “harm” according to which, e.g., something that is merely boring and unpleasant and irrelevant is “harmful” because it wastes people’s time and attention. In that case, I would argue that the OP is harmful. Of course that’s not the same as “dangerous” and yes, I did notice that you opposed “harmless” to “dangerous” as if the two were one another’s negations.)
On #1: well-kept gardens die by pacifism and while Eliezer is there arguing mostly for energetic downvoting of bad material, I suggest that the same arguments can justify moderator action too. If someone is contributing a lot of low-quality material and nothing valuable, maybe it’s OK to ban them. If something posted is low-quality and irrelevant and liable to bring Less Wrong into disrepute, maybe it’s OK to delete it. If someone is persistently obnoxious, maybe it’s OK to ban them. None of this requires that the thing being sanctioned be dangerous.
On #2: people can be inspired by the unlikeliest things. (I went to a rather good concert once where one of the better pieces of music was a setting of what may be the worst poem I have ever read, firmly in teenage goth territory.)
If I were going to boast, it would be about how you changed your mind on multiple things simultaneously to avoid the obvious feint—and apparently didn’t notice. Your arguments at this point are so weak as to fall apart at the touch; “probably harmless” and “small but nonzero chance of harm” are such a weak standard of evidence for moderation that nothing would be permitted to be discussed here. It would be much harder to prove your prior version proved too much—but you did the work for me.
But go on and keep thinking that what I’m doing is boasting.
You are, not for the first time in this thread, arguing against things I have not said.
I didn’t argue at all there. I pointed out that your position changed in anticipation of an objection you expected me to raise, to forestall the objection from having merit.
The argument, you see, is already over. You played your part, I played mine, and the audience is looking for a new show, the conclusion for this one already having played out in the background.
You got me there!
If the article lead an respected LW member to leave it’s harmful to LW. It’s a quite simple argument. If you can’t see that harm it might be you who’s mindkilled.
You can argue that the harm isn’t big enough to justify censorship of the post but claiming that no harm is caused to the community is plain wrong.
Granting concessions to anybody who threatens to leave the table is a harmful strategy.
The world is complex. Simple arguments are generally wrong.
Unlikely, given both that I’m taking a position against overreaction, and have insulted our guest of honor multiple times throughout this thread. You’re the one with an emotional stake in this; my emotions started with concern, but at this point have settled on “amused” given that I don’t rate there being any real danger of moderation.
I downvoted Nancy. Nancy! I’ve never downvoted Nancy, she always has a cool head.
Anyone who leaves over this post isn’t worth having in the first place. You, at least, argue your point, defend the community. Richard just declared the community shit and left.
He might be wrong, or he might be right—it doesn’t matter. As the community exists, he didn’t provide value. Any harm that was done, to create a community such that this trivial nonsense caused him to leave, long predates this trivial nonsense.
Or, to put it another way—the issue isn’t that this post exists. The issue is that nothing existed to make it worth it to Richard to read posts like this. It’s not like the community is overrun with poor content, that you have to sift through to find the good stuff. It’s not like anybody will confuse this heavily-downvoted post with “the good stuff.” There isn’t any good stuff. There’s just people competing with one another to prove who can be the most outraged over bad literature.
You know what a good community would have done with this post? Downvoted it and moved on to the next thing.
This post isn’t a problem because it’s bad. This post is a problem because it’s the most exciting thing that’s happened here this week.
You illustrate a classic example of being mind-killed, confusing questions with each other. You confuse factual questions with strategic considerations and consider the strategic considerations to be more important than the veracity.
Whether or not it’s a good strategy to grant concessions for threatening to leave is irrelevant to the factual question of whether leaving is harm.
A”good strategy” means “a strategy which harms us the least”. It’s not the leaving that is being considered harm, it;s the granting of concessions.
It might very well be that both leaving and granting concessions are harm on a factual level.
If the OP wouldn’t have posted neither or those harmful things would have happened. The post produced harm.
That’s similar to saying that cops have the power to shoot anyone for any reason. There’s some truth in it, in one sense, but in another sense, it’s quite untrue.
Jiro’s argument is, in effect, that if the moderators can threaten to ban someone if they don’t justify the holes in their analogies then they can threaten to ban anyone. That’s true, but no truer than the fact that they can (in any case) threaten to ban anyone. In either case, the scenario to worry about is unreasonable moderators; and if we have unreasonable moderators they can threaten to ban, or ban, as they please even without this precedent.
(I should maybe remark that Nancy didn’t in fact threaten to ban anyone; she didn’t make any specific threat. I’m not sure that actually makes anything better, but this discussion is developing somewhat as if she’d said in so many words “answer or I ban you”, which she didn’t say.)
The issue isn’t whether a threat to ban was made explicitly or not (the only moderator powers are to ban and to delete posts, as far as I know, therefore “I ask as a moderator” implies “I have a gun in my hand, give me a reason to not use it”). The issue is whether moderators are in charge of policing posts and comments on the basis of “does it offend my sensitivities”.
The EphemeralNight’s post was compared, justifiably in my opinion, to bad adolescent goth poetry. Do you think that “I want an answer for how you could think it was reasonable to leave out female preferences” is, in any way, an adequate response to bad goth poetry?
It could also be “I have a gun: you might want to consider keeping on the right side of me lest I use it later”.
As you can see from (e.g.) Richard Kennaway’s comment, the votes on Nancy’s question, etc., it is by no means only Nancy’s sensitivities that are at issue here.
Whether something is as badly written as bad goth poetry is an entirely separate question from whether it should be judged as if it is bad goth poetry.
Your list of reasons seem to me to be the very reason we have karma. Why does this post deserve moderation in a system where karma sends the message about the community’s desire for more of the same?
I’m not certain whether it does. The obvious disadvantages of moderator action are (1) effort and (2) heavy-handedness (real or perceived). The advantages of moderator action are (3) to make it more explicit that this sort of stuff is not wanted around here and (4) to get rid of it more thoroughly so that, e.g., people are less likely to stumble across it in search engine results and there’s no danger that future trolls with sockpuppet armies will vote it up out of spite[1].
I’m not sure how those weigh up against one another, and indeed it’s not hard to cook up arguments that #2 is actually a good thing (“sending a message”) or that #4 is actually a bad thing (all else being equal, destroying even low-quality information is sad). But on the whole I think #3 and #4 are advantages, which is why moderator action is at least worth considering.
[1] This isn’t as crazy a scenario as it sounds. There is at least one LW user strongly suspected of using sockpuppets for upvoting, generally hostile to Nancy, unsympathetic to (let’s say) “women’s causes”, and known to be untroubled by scruples about what’s considered acceptable behaviour on LW...
Fair enough. I don’t follow the personalities here, so the situations where someone engages in sock-puppetry would totally escape my notice. My priors incline me to preferring good speech as the remedy for bad speech.
And those are legitimate reasons to ban him. And none of them are “we require that posts don’t leave out how the humans feel, and if you do leave that out you should get banned”. I agree that we should ban him. I’m just saying we need to be careful about what justification we give for banning him.
Do you have any idea how much is covered by the requirement “you can’t ignore humans in your posts”, or can be spun as covered by it? “In your torture versus dust specks example, tell me why we should ignore the feelings of the person actually suffering the torture. You can’t just dispassionately compare them and ignore that you’re saying a human being should suffer”. “What? You oppose the minimum wage? Tell me why you left out anything about the poor person who starves to death because of your policy.”
I agree. See the last sentence of what I wrote.
Yes. It would be bad if it became the norm that any time anyone makes an analogy that doesn’t match the thing it points at in every detail, or made an argument that failed to consider the preferences and feelings of some people, the moderators of LW demanded that they justify themselves.
We should not have that norm, and I have not (so far as I can tell) suggested that there should be one.
Precisely because of the unusual badness of the thing Nancy was responding to (and, perhaps unlike you, I think that does have a lot to do with its apparent indifference to women’s feelings), I don’t think there’s any way to get from “a moderator challenges EphemeralNight on these grounds here” to “moderators issue similar challenges to everyone who posts anything that can be claimed to neglect anyone’s feelings”.
Incidentally, I think the challenges you mention in your second paragraph are (without the element of moderatorial intimidation) reasonable challenges. The answers might be, respectively, “We absolutely shouldn’t ignore the feelings of the person suffering the torture; they are a very big deal. But we also shouldn’t ignore the feelings of the people suffering the dust specks, which are indeed small in isolation but add up to a lot because of the unthinkably colossal number of people involved.” and “I didn’t intend to leave out anything about the poor person who starves to death because their pay is too low; I just say that we should also consider the poor people starving to death because they have no pay at all as a result of the minimum wage.”. (I do not necessarily endorse TORTURE over SPECKS or disapprove of a minimum wage; the point is that you can do so without ignoring anyone’s feelings, and that if you were ignoring anyone’s feelings then that would be a strike against your position.)
This post is of a quality that it harms the community by driving valuable people away. As such I think it does make sense to ask the author to justify his choices. If we want a LW 2.0 where the people who left LW come back I don’t think that’s compatible with allowing posts like this.
That’s what the downvote system is for, and it is working perfectly fine. Moderation is for abusive behaviors.
As for Richard, if he’s going to be offended that a heavily-downvoted post exists, well, good riddance. You want a good culture, it doesn’t start by putting the Heckler’s Veto on a shrine and worshipping it.
I don’t think Richard is the only one driven away by posts like this. In general people who are willing to have their public identities linked to this website are more likely driven away because they don’t want to be associated with that kind of content. It furthermore produces a climate unwelcoming to women.
After a certain point, no one wants to be associated with all the content + comments occurring and everyone generally feels unwelcome and judged. This is the worst case scenario for a discussion and a very strong reason to not have political discourse here.
Not allowing posts which don’t pass some arbitrary threshold that smells of social justice will drive more people away.
I think it’s one thing to allow every position to be argued. It’s another thing to allow any position to be proposed with a story while the author tries to escape arguing for it.
NancyLebovitz requests here that the author argues for the position he takes.
I haven’t noticed any attempts to escape. I would like to suggest they are products of your imagination.
He escaped into the medium of a parable.
/rolls eyes
So, parables are now non grata on LW? Perhaps you’d like to revise the Sequences and take all parables out of it, too?
I think the plural is non gratae. (SCNR.)
Yes, but if you want to get that technical, the correct form depends on the gender of the latin word for “parable”. The two options are parabola (which has the “parable” meaning only in late Latin, I think) and fabula ( == fable, e.g. Aesop’s). Luckily, both are feminine so non gratae is correct.
Although you can make an argument that the English word “parables” has the neuter gender and so it still should be non grata :-)
I was thinking of feminine parabola, but...
:-)
That’s not what I said. I think that when it comes to emotionally charged topics it’s important to focus on on explicit discussing of arguments.
Post shouldn’t be banned because just because they spread a certain opinion or just because they use a certain style but posts that do voice problematic opinions in a non-fact based style shouldn’t be here.
How about you start with Three Worlds Collide, then?
Could someone just revoke Nancy’s moderator powers already? It’s becoming increasingly clear that she can’t be trusted with them.
Remind me, why do you think you’re entitled to answers? And what makes your perspective on what’s included in a piece of fiction and what is not anything special?
If we are going into the “some animals are more equal than others” direction, this will end badly and soon.
OK, trying to be fair to the original poster, since it appears that he doesn’t plan on responding directly in public. Please take this in the nature of “even the devil deserves an advocate” and an exercise in resisting the fundamental attribution error. It’s also informed by the thought that the implication that someone is actually advocating rape is an exception claim, so must be supported by exception evidence. And it’s informed by a cussed refusal to be mind-killed.
Take a look at the quantity of words. About half of the piece happens before the foreign girls show up. That seems to be a metaphor for people who can’t get sex through the types of relationships that the median person has. The second half is almost entirely given over to the foreign girls arriving, trafficking in branch-lifting, and getting prohibited from the community, with the result that the protagonist is vilified. That seems to be a metaphor for prostitution, its illegalization, and the effects on someone found to be buying the services of a prostitute.
Then we get one awful sentence. I’m not justifying it if it means what others have read it to mean, and I’ll come back to it at the end.
If by leaving out female preferences, you are referring to just that one sentence, I tend to agree with you that the one sentence is reprehensible if intended. But I don’t think that criticism is fair for any of the rest. The first half of the piece is showing the effect of preferences (female in context, but not gendered by necessity). When you make a point, it doesn’t have to be perfectly balanced, especially if your goal is to draw attention to some aspect that you believe has had has had insufficient attention. The second half of the piece actually respects some female preferences. Specifically, it respects the preferences of those who prefer to be sex workers. It points out one of the negative effects of oppressing those preferences (by ejecting the foreign girls). Again, it isn’t balanced, but I don’t really think it has to be. Finally, it points out the oppressive rationale for the oppressive act (of ejecting the foreign girls).
Then it goes off the rails with a single sentence. The piece would have been far more effective if the native girl speaking near the end had imprisoned him for paying a foreign girl to lift the burning branch. The sentence is far from clear to me. I’m not certain that its author really recognized that the metaphor would be to rape. To some degree, it is fair to say, “too bad, that’s the risk you take in writing in metaphor!” But it’s also fair for us to ask whether one sentence should be taken as such significant evidence of vile character, and whether some other meaning was intended. Specifically, putting a girl under the branch hasn’t been how the boys get out from under the branch throughout the rest of the story, so it’s not the established metaphor for sex. It could be that the point here was not forcing the girl to lift the branch (which would be metaphorical rape). It could be that the point was to subject girls to being under the branch (which would be metaphorical undesired celibacy). It’s not a great metaphor that way, either, because the boys got under the branches in the first place by some strange freak of nature. (“Oh, I didn’t see that burning branch falling on me, so now I’m stuck”?) But it might have been intended as “see how you like it.” That itself is an unattractive kind of position, but it is quite different from rape.
One final point is that I didn’t interpret the criticism here as being directed to feminism. I took it to be directed toward government messing around in things where it ought not and towards the ideal of sex as an expression of romantic love. I read it that one solution that was rejected in the first half was essentially “friends with benefits”—something that I doubt would find universal condemnation among feminists, and certainly not among most feminists before the 1980′s. But the danger with metaphors is that the reader brings more to them than the reader brings to a straightforward statement.
And that’s pretty much exhausted my store of charitable interpretation, with apologies to those who would prefer that this mind-killing comment thread simply die a quiet death.