First, a general comment on your versions, sorry: you tend to use big words, scientific jargon, and too few examples.
Compare your pitch with the following (intentionally oversimplified) version:
“So, I hear you care about rationality. What’s that about?”
It’s about figuring out what you really want and getting it. If you are at a game, and it’s really boring, should you walk out and waste what you paid for the tickets? If you apply for a position and don’t get it, does it help to decide that you didn’t really want it, anyway? If you are looking to buy a new car, what information should you take seriously? There are many pitfalls on the road to making a good decision; rationality is a systematic study of the ways to make better choices in life. Including figuring out what “better” really means for you.
It’s about figuring out what you really want and getting it. If you are at a game, and it’s really boring, should you walk out and waste what you paid for the tickets? If you apply for a position and don’t get it, does it help to decide that you didn’t really want it, anyway? If you are looking to buy a new car, what information should you take seriously? There are many pitfalls on the road to making a good decision; rationality is a systematic study of the ways to make better choices in life. Including figuring out what “better” really means for you.
Makes it sound great, but what are the real world benefits? I’ve been rational for years and it hasn’t done anything for me.
15 comments and −120 karma? Okay, at this point I may begin immune response against trolling (delete further comments, possibly past comments, as and when I get around to seeing that they were made).
I also remind everyone: Please do not respond at length to trolls, attention stimulates their reward centers.
I’m not so sure he’s a troll. He very well might be, but at least he made this comment which is at 4 karma right now. His more recent comments seem better than his previous ones, too. p(troll) seems pretty high, but not so high that I would support a ban, comment deletions, etc. at this point.
Most of his comments are essentially saying “you are wrong”. Once he was right in saying that, many times he was wrong. He probably knows a lot of facts about many topics, and he expresses with very high certainty; unfortunately the quality of his comments does not match this certainty, and he seems very immune to feedback. Low karma just proves he is right.
He is very negative towards others. Almost all his comments contain something like: “Your work is wrong.” “I never said anything like this” “I never flamed anyone.” “spelled wrong” “I have no such delusions.” “it hasn’t done anything for me.” “it’s definitely going to do more harm than good.” “I already explained why it’s not possible.” “There is practically no chance” “It’s a misconception” “This idea is based on a whole range of confusions and misunderstandings” “just another example of people not understanding” It’s like his only point in discussions is to show that everyone else is wrong, but it’s often him who is wrong. Did he make some useful contribution? I don’t see any.
And then the—“You are trying to submit too fast. try again in %i minutes.” and “You do not have enough karma to downvote right now. You need 1 more point.”—just make me want to scream. (Though the fact that he does not have enough karma to downvote makes me happy. I guess he was going to downvote those who disagree with him. I am happy that LW karma system does not allow him to make dozen sockpuppet accounts and start a downvoting war.)
Maybe the guy is not having fun, maybe that’s just what he honestly is… but anyway his comments seem like optimized to create mental suffering in others, certainly in me. I have left websites where people like this became frequent. If this kind of behavior becomes tolerated on LW, I will either write some GreaseMonkey plugin that will remove all his comments from the page, or I will simply stop reading LW. In theory I am reading this site for information, not for positive emotion, but I am just a human… if this site will give me negative emotion too often, I will stop reading it.
I tried to give him the benefit of doubt, and answered his comment seriously, but now I feel it was totally not worth doing. This is my worst experience on LW so far. Though this mostly means that I did not have bad experiences on LW so far. :) But I prefer it to stay this way.
I tend to agree with you. I think I just have a higher threshold for banning. As such, I would like to see him actively ignore our suggestions before entirely dismissing him, which is not sure is something he’s done yet.
Less Wrong isn’t some kind of human right that we need to go beyond reasonable doubt to withdraw from someone; it’s an online community run by an enlightened dictator, and if you want to keep your well kept garden, you have to accept some collateral damage.
I am extremely wary of this kind of thinking. Partly because using power is a slippery slope to abusing power, and each time you use the banhammer on a maybe-troll it gets a little bit easier to use it on the next maybe-troll.
Not just because of that, but also because when other people come to a community full of self-purported rationalists, and they see someone who does not obviously and immediately pattern match as a troll receiving the banhammer for presenting community-disapproved opinions in what seems superficially to be an adequately calm and reasonable manner, that sets off the ‘cult’ alarms. It makes us look intolerant and exclusionary, even if we aren’t.
It’s fine for places like the SA forums to throw the banhammer around with reckless abandon, because they exist only for fun. But we have higher goals. We have to consider not just keeping our garden tidy, but making sure we don’t look like overzealous pruners to anybody who has a potentially nice set of azaleas to contribute.
Slipper slopes work in both directions. Each time you don’t strike down injustice, it becomes a bit easier to walk by the next time. I’d sooner have Marginal Value > Marginal Cost than Marginal Value < Marginal Cost and a lower Average Value.
Bad impressions work in both directions. When other people come to a community full of self-purported rationalists, and they see someone presenting stupid, low-status, incendary comments and being treated as worthy of respect, it makes LW look stupid, low-status and incendary because of the Representativeness Heuristic.
Obveously there is a continuum between anarchy and banning everything, and both extremes are local minima. The issue is to judge the local gradient
Upvoted for valid point. I agree, but I think there is enough of a difference between ‘being treated as worthy of respect’ and ‘not being banned’ that we can probably ride in the middle ground comfortably without any significant image damage.
On consideration, though… maybe I’m prejudiced against banning because of the sense of finality of it. I guess it’s not hard to make a new account.
I’m still opposed to deleting past comments though, because deleted comments make a mess of the history.
Well he hasn’t commented recently, so I’m guessing he either took our advice and made a new account, or just left the site, neither of which I would attribute to troll behaviour. (Or Eliezer is deleting his posts as promised, which would, obviously, weaken that hypothesis.)
Are you enjoying wasting your time on this website?
You have 15 comments and a grand total of −120 karma. That is a strong indication that you are doing something wrong. To save you some time: the standard response is “I’m being censored! You’re an Eliezer-cult! All these downvotes are just because you’re scared of the Truth!”.
What you are doing is not fitting into the community norms of discussion, like research and linking/referring to specific sources (anyone can say “I’ve done research!”, but that doesn’t mean that you have). (I’ll pre-empt another common whinge: yes, in most cases, Wikipedia is an acceptible reference to use on LW).
The parent comment might not be particularly bad; but your history (and your username) puts you very close to “troll”, and that makes the parent comment look like a pattern-matched response (rather than a genuine question) which is the reason I downvoted.
To save you some time: the standard response is “I’m being censored! You’re an Eliezer-cult! All these downvotes are just because you’re scared of the Truth!”.
I never said anything like this and I never invoked Eleizer. I don’t understand why you’re telling me off for something I didn’t do. Look at my post history if you don’t trust me.
What you are doing is not fitting into the community norms of discussion, like research and linking/referring to specific sources
It only makes sense to do so when making a claim. Yet people on this site have refused to back up their own claims with citations because apparently “I’m not worth bothering with”.
but there are almost never flame wars
I never flamed anyone. The only guy who is calling people names “like troll for example” is you (well now that you’ve done it others are following your lead too, well done..).
Are you enjoying wasting your time on this website?
Not really, I didn’t expect to get rejected so harsly. I’ve read all the sequences twice and been rational for years so I don’t know what the problem is. What’s the point of all this meta discussion, why is everyone trying to drag me into these metadiscussions and brand me as a troll after I passed 100 downvotes. We should get back onto the actual topic.
You are trying to submit too fast. try again in 6 minutes.
One of the problems is that you say things like “I’ve been rational for years”. Sorry. No, you haven’t. EY hasn’t been rational for years. You may have been an aspiring rationalist, but that’s a far cry from actually being rational. When you say things like that it is extremely off-putting because it sounds self-congratulatory. That’s something that this community struggles with a lot, and we typically heavily downvote things that are that way because they send very bad signals about what this website is. Beyond that, when it’s said by someone with the username “911truther”, it implies an element of “You’re not rational unless you’re a truther too”, which mean it or not, is how it comes across.
Secondly, and this relates, your username. It’s inherently political, which brings up all of our opposition to politics every time you make a post. That’s not a good thing, and it will be very difficult for anyone on this site to take you seriously. If two different people wrote two articles that were of exactly equal caliber, and one was named BobSmith, and the other was named Obama2012, I would anticipate at least 2-3 times the upvoting on the former and 2-3 times the downvoting on the latter. And 9/11 is so much more of a polarizing issue. The vast, vast majority of people here disagree with you. But roland, despite being wildly downvoted every time he brings up 9/11, actually manages positive karma, because it’s not inherently brought up every time he posts. I can not recommend strongly enough that you delete your account and create a new username if you wish to continue on this site. If you’re a 911 truther, I would not suggest lying about that, but choosing that as the phrase by which you identify yourself is not a very effective strategy for being taken seriously on this site.
Thirdly, the great grandparent to this isn’t a terrible comment. I agree with you there. I likely would have upvoted it had it been made by a different username, since I didn’t think it deserved that level of downvoting (but not because I thought it was particularly wonderful in and of itself).
Yet people on this site have refused to back up their own claims with citations because apparently “I’m not worth bothering with”.
I found this claim difficult to believe, so I looked it up. For the record:
911truther: Freezing things makes water expand and burst the fragile parts of your brain.
gwern: Freezing canard: proof you have not read the cryonics literature. Instant downvote.
911truther: If “the cryonics literature” (presumably explaining why freezing does not destroy the brain) actually exists why don’t you link to it?
gwern: Because spending the time to look up references solid enough that they cannot be glibly rejected indicates that I think someone is worth educating, that I can educate them, or it’s a sign of respect.
None of those three are true. So if you think you are right, you are free to bring your own references to the table.
I do wish we could discourage the attitude displayed here by gwern. It’s pure ego to respond in this way to someone you deem a “troll”. It certainly won’t change their mind, and it will only spur them to comment more. Either ignore them completely after downvoting, or be polite in your reply. One might justify these posts as important to make sure that 911truther knows why he’s being downvoted, but the aggression in them is entirely counter-productive and, frankly, is quite rude.
For the record, I do think people are a little over-eager to accuse someone of being a “troll” (I think it is much more probable that 911truther is simply ignorant) although I think moderation is warranted in this case.
I never said anything like this and I never invoked Eleizer. I don’t understand why you’re telling me off for something I didn’t do. Look at my post history if you don’t trust me.
I know you didn’t invoke Eliezer, but that is a common statement by people who find themselves downvoted a lot, so I was pre-empting it (if you were not going to do that, I apologise and that sentence should be considered removed from my quote, however the rest still stands). The only reason I said that, was because I looked at your post history and saw this one:
[...] If you look at my user page (http://lesswrong.com/user/911truther) it’s blatantly obvious that someone is systematically downvoting everything I post multiple times. I don’t claim to be persecuted but clearly there is an attempt to censor me. Frankly it just proves that I’m right, if I was wrong people could easily disprove me.
For the rest:
People have been providing links and citations to back up their claims. (Several of the replies in this thread)
I wasn’t implying that you flamed anyone, just that dissent is part of this website, and it is treated with respect.
Dismissing accusation of “troll” with uncheckable and irrelevant claims of rationality is not the right way to do it.
First, a general comment on your versions, sorry: you tend to use big words, scientific jargon, and too few examples.
Compare your pitch with the following (intentionally oversimplified) version:
“So, I hear you care about rationality. What’s that about?”
And doing that is going to instantly turn people off.
.
Makes it sound great, but what are the real world benefits? I’ve been rational for years and it hasn’t done anything for me.
15 comments and −120 karma? Okay, at this point I may begin immune response against trolling (delete further comments, possibly past comments, as and when I get around to seeing that they were made).
I also remind everyone: Please do not respond at length to trolls, attention stimulates their reward centers.
I’m not so sure he’s a troll. He very well might be, but at least he made this comment which is at 4 karma right now. His more recent comments seem better than his previous ones, too. p(troll) seems pretty high, but not so high that I would support a ban, comment deletions, etc. at this point.
Most of his comments are essentially saying “you are wrong”. Once he was right in saying that, many times he was wrong. He probably knows a lot of facts about many topics, and he expresses with very high certainty; unfortunately the quality of his comments does not match this certainty, and he seems very immune to feedback. Low karma just proves he is right.
He is very negative towards others. Almost all his comments contain something like: “Your work is wrong.” “I never said anything like this” “I never flamed anyone.” “spelled wrong” “I have no such delusions.” “it hasn’t done anything for me.” “it’s definitely going to do more harm than good.” “I already explained why it’s not possible.” “There is practically no chance” “It’s a misconception” “This idea is based on a whole range of confusions and misunderstandings” “just another example of people not understanding” It’s like his only point in discussions is to show that everyone else is wrong, but it’s often him who is wrong. Did he make some useful contribution? I don’t see any.
And then the—“You are trying to submit too fast. try again in %i minutes.” and “You do not have enough karma to downvote right now. You need 1 more point.”—just make me want to scream. (Though the fact that he does not have enough karma to downvote makes me happy. I guess he was going to downvote those who disagree with him. I am happy that LW karma system does not allow him to make dozen sockpuppet accounts and start a downvoting war.)
Maybe the guy is not having fun, maybe that’s just what he honestly is… but anyway his comments seem like optimized to create mental suffering in others, certainly in me. I have left websites where people like this became frequent. If this kind of behavior becomes tolerated on LW, I will either write some GreaseMonkey plugin that will remove all his comments from the page, or I will simply stop reading LW. In theory I am reading this site for information, not for positive emotion, but I am just a human… if this site will give me negative emotion too often, I will stop reading it.
I tried to give him the benefit of doubt, and answered his comment seriously, but now I feel it was totally not worth doing. This is my worst experience on LW so far. Though this mostly means that I did not have bad experiences on LW so far. :) But I prefer it to stay this way.
I tend to agree with you. I think I just have a higher threshold for banning. As such, I would like to see him actively ignore our suggestions before entirely dismissing him, which is not sure is something he’s done yet.
Less Wrong isn’t some kind of human right that we need to go beyond reasonable doubt to withdraw from someone; it’s an online community run by an enlightened dictator, and if you want to keep your well kept garden, you have to accept some collateral damage.
I am extremely wary of this kind of thinking. Partly because using power is a slippery slope to abusing power, and each time you use the banhammer on a maybe-troll it gets a little bit easier to use it on the next maybe-troll.
Not just because of that, but also because when other people come to a community full of self-purported rationalists, and they see someone who does not obviously and immediately pattern match as a troll receiving the banhammer for presenting community-disapproved opinions in what seems superficially to be an adequately calm and reasonable manner, that sets off the ‘cult’ alarms. It makes us look intolerant and exclusionary, even if we aren’t.
It’s fine for places like the SA forums to throw the banhammer around with reckless abandon, because they exist only for fun. But we have higher goals. We have to consider not just keeping our garden tidy, but making sure we don’t look like overzealous pruners to anybody who has a potentially nice set of azaleas to contribute.
Slipper slopes work in both directions. Each time you don’t strike down injustice, it becomes a bit easier to walk by the next time. I’d sooner have Marginal Value > Marginal Cost than Marginal Value < Marginal Cost and a lower Average Value.
Bad impressions work in both directions. When other people come to a community full of self-purported rationalists, and they see someone presenting stupid, low-status, incendary comments and being treated as worthy of respect, it makes LW look stupid, low-status and incendary because of the Representativeness Heuristic.
Obveously there is a continuum between anarchy and banning everything, and both extremes are local minima. The issue is to judge the local gradient
Upvoted for valid point. I agree, but I think there is enough of a difference between ‘being treated as worthy of respect’ and ‘not being banned’ that we can probably ride in the middle ground comfortably without any significant image damage.
On consideration, though… maybe I’m prejudiced against banning because of the sense of finality of it. I guess it’s not hard to make a new account.
I’m still opposed to deleting past comments though, because deleted comments make a mess of the history.
This is how trolling works.
Well he hasn’t commented recently, so I’m guessing he either took our advice and made a new account, or just left the site, neither of which I would attribute to troll behaviour. (Or Eliezer is deleting his posts as promised, which would, obviously, weaken that hypothesis.)
I say just ban him.
I wonder if downvotes have gone from a punishment to a reward at this point.
I hope you’ll treat me fairly as a person and actually read and try to understand my comments instead of jumping to conclusions based on my “score”.
Your best way to be taken seriously would be just to create a new account without making any reference to this one, and, well, not act like a troll.
Huh. Come to think of it, on the Internet there IS a second chance to make a first impression. (a good argument to always using handles). Noted.
.
Are you enjoying wasting your time on this website?
You have 15 comments and a grand total of −120 karma. That is a strong indication that you are doing something wrong. To save you some time: the standard response is “I’m being censored! You’re an Eliezer-cult! All these downvotes are just because you’re scared of the Truth!”.
Please don’t use it, because it is not true: e.g. two links you’ve already seen, people call Eliezer out on mistakes, naunced responses to “Yay for Eliezer/rationality/SI!”-type posts. Part of the reason I like LW is precisely because people do disagree, but there are almost never flame wars: the disagreement means that people actually think about what they believe and even change their minds!
What you are doing is not fitting into the community norms of discussion, like research and linking/referring to specific sources (anyone can say “I’ve done research!”, but that doesn’t mean that you have). (I’ll pre-empt another common whinge: yes, in most cases, Wikipedia is an acceptible reference to use on LW).
The parent comment might not be particularly bad; but your history (and your username) puts you very close to “troll”, and that makes the parent comment look like a pattern-matched response (rather than a genuine question) which is the reason I downvoted.
I never said anything like this and I never invoked Eleizer. I don’t understand why you’re telling me off for something I didn’t do. Look at my post history if you don’t trust me.
It only makes sense to do so when making a claim. Yet people on this site have refused to back up their own claims with citations because apparently “I’m not worth bothering with”.
I never flamed anyone. The only guy who is calling people names “like troll for example” is you (well now that you’ve done it others are following your lead too, well done..).
Not really, I didn’t expect to get rejected so harsly. I’ve read all the sequences twice and been rational for years so I don’t know what the problem is. What’s the point of all this meta discussion, why is everyone trying to drag me into these metadiscussions and brand me as a troll after I passed 100 downvotes. We should get back onto the actual topic.
You are trying to submit too fast. try again in 6 minutes.
One of the problems is that you say things like “I’ve been rational for years”. Sorry. No, you haven’t. EY hasn’t been rational for years. You may have been an aspiring rationalist, but that’s a far cry from actually being rational. When you say things like that it is extremely off-putting because it sounds self-congratulatory. That’s something that this community struggles with a lot, and we typically heavily downvote things that are that way because they send very bad signals about what this website is. Beyond that, when it’s said by someone with the username “911truther”, it implies an element of “You’re not rational unless you’re a truther too”, which mean it or not, is how it comes across.
Secondly, and this relates, your username. It’s inherently political, which brings up all of our opposition to politics every time you make a post. That’s not a good thing, and it will be very difficult for anyone on this site to take you seriously. If two different people wrote two articles that were of exactly equal caliber, and one was named BobSmith, and the other was named Obama2012, I would anticipate at least 2-3 times the upvoting on the former and 2-3 times the downvoting on the latter. And 9/11 is so much more of a polarizing issue. The vast, vast majority of people here disagree with you. But roland, despite being wildly downvoted every time he brings up 9/11, actually manages positive karma, because it’s not inherently brought up every time he posts. I can not recommend strongly enough that you delete your account and create a new username if you wish to continue on this site. If you’re a 911 truther, I would not suggest lying about that, but choosing that as the phrase by which you identify yourself is not a very effective strategy for being taken seriously on this site.
Thirdly, the great grandparent to this isn’t a terrible comment. I agree with you there. I likely would have upvoted it had it been made by a different username, since I didn’t think it deserved that level of downvoting (but not because I thought it was particularly wonderful in and of itself).
I found this claim difficult to believe, so I looked it up. For the record:
I do wish we could discourage the attitude displayed here by gwern. It’s pure ego to respond in this way to someone you deem a “troll”. It certainly won’t change their mind, and it will only spur them to comment more. Either ignore them completely after downvoting, or be polite in your reply. One might justify these posts as important to make sure that 911truther knows why he’s being downvoted, but the aggression in them is entirely counter-productive and, frankly, is quite rude.
For the record, I do think people are a little over-eager to accuse someone of being a “troll” (I think it is much more probable that 911truther is simply ignorant) although I think moderation is warranted in this case.
Was this before or after the other links in other conversations?
I know you didn’t invoke Eliezer, but that is a common statement by people who find themselves downvoted a lot, so I was pre-empting it (if you were not going to do that, I apologise and that sentence should be considered removed from my quote, however the rest still stands). The only reason I said that, was because I looked at your post history and saw this one:
For the rest:
People have been providing links and citations to back up their claims. (Several of the replies in this thread)
I wasn’t implying that you flamed anyone, just that dissent is part of this website, and it is treated with respect.
Dismissing accusation of “troll” with uncheckable and irrelevant claims of rationality is not the right way to do it.
Rational compared to who?