We sent PDV a message saying we were worried about him causing a lot of unnecessary conflict on the site, and that if that trend continues, it probably makes most sense to restrict his ability to comment in some ways, and if that doesn’t help, ban him. (In general, we try to reach out to people privately first, before giving them a public warning, since I think there are a lot of weird status dynamics that come into play with a public warning that makes it both more stressful for us and the person we are talking to).
If PDV is open to that, I would be happy to share the whole conversation we had with him here.
The following is in no way a comment on this specific moderator-user interaction (about which it is not my place to speak), but a general comment about approaches to moderation:
Asking someone, even in private (perhaps especially in private) to accept some sort of punishment (such as restrictions on commenting), or informing them that you’re going to apply corrective measures and that they might then get back into your good graces (in order to avoid further sanction), also involves a lot of—as you put it—“weird status dynamics”.
In general, the approach you describe—though I understand some of the reasons why it appeals to you (some of which are indeed perfectly noble and praiseworthy reasons)—essentially sets you up as a “corrective” authority. There are some quite unfortunate status/etc. implications of such a relationship.
Also important to mention here: If there would be a representative poll of the user base of LW2.0 that does indeed show that people prefer having moderators warn them in public as opposed to send them PMs, then I would totally switch to that policy.
Yes, I agree with this. There are definitely costs to both, though I expect on average the problems to be weaker if we privately message people than if we publicly warn them (and that people when polled would prefer to be privately messaged over being publicly warned).
And yes, in some sense the moderators (or at least the admins) are a “corrective authority”, though I think that term doesn’t fully resonate with my idea of what they do, and has some misleading connotations. The admins are ultimately (and somewhat inevitably) the final decision makers when it comes to decide what type of content and discussion and type of engagement the site incentivizes.
We can shape the incentives via modifications to the karma system, or the ranking algorithm, the affordances to users on the site, the moderation and auto-moderation features available to other users, or direct moderation action, but overall, if we end up unhappy (and reflectively unhappy, after sufficient time to consider the pros and cons), then we will make changes to the site to correct that.
I think there are some forms of governance that put us less directly or more directly into the position of a corrective authority, and I do generally prefer to avoid that framing since I think it has some unnecessary adversarial aspects to it. I think the correct strategy is for us to take individual moderator action when we see specific problems or low-frequency problems, and then come up with some kind of more principled solution if the problems happen more frequently (i.e. define transparent site-and-commenting guidelines, make changes to the visibility of various things, changes to the karma system, etc.), though I think individual moderation action from us will be something that I will always want to keep available (and is something that is generally more transparent than other interventions, which I prefer, all else equal).
Much of what you say here is sensible, so this is not really to disagree with your comment, but—I’m not sure my meaning came across clearly, when I said “corrective authority”. I meant it in opposition to what we might call “selective authority” (as in “authority that selects”—as opposed to “authority that corrects”). Though that, too, is a rather cryptic term, I’m afraid… I may try to explain in detail later, when I have a bit more time and have formulated my view on this concisely.
PDV, I like you and often agree with you and am on your side about the circling thing, so I hope you will take this in the sense it is meant, but I agree with gworley. In particular, I think you often tend to escalate arguments you’re part of, sometimes to the point of transforming them into demon threads even though they didn’t have to be. That’s a good trait to have sometimes: it’s what lets you point out that the emperor has no clothes. But I get the feeling that you’re not deploying it particularly tactically, and you’d probably do better at advancing your goals if you also deescalated sometimes.
If I can be direct since you often are, at least for myself I appreciate that you disagree, but I really dislike the way you do it. In particular you are often unnecessarily confrontational in ways that end up insulting other people on the site or assume bad faith on the part of your interlocutors.
For example you already did this in the comments on this post when you replied to Oli to say he was wrong about his own motivation. I think it’s fair to point out that someone may be mistaken about their own motivations, but you do it in a way that shuts down rather than invites discussion. Whatever your intended effect, it ends up reading like your motivation is to score points, in your own words, “in a way trivially predictable by monkey dynamics”, and makes comments on LW feel like a slightly more hostile place.
I’m in favor of you being able to participate because your comments have at times proved helpful, and calling out that which you disagree with is important for the health of the site, but only if you can do so in a way that leads to productive discussion rather than threatening it.
When you remove someone who says the truth but does so in an inconvenient way, you shift the Overton window of required politeness over toward the “maximally non-confrontational” side of the spectrum. Then, next time, you say the same sort of thing that you’re now saying to PDV, to the next-most-confrontational person. You keep going until no one can say that the emperor has no clothes, except in such oblique terms that a dogwhistle is a bomb siren by comparison.
You might as well say that when you don’t criticize people for saying the truth in an unproductive way, then you shift the Overton window of required politeness over toward the “maximally confrontational” side. Next time, you give a pass to someone who sprinkles their comments with irrelevant insults. You keep going until you’re 4Chan.
Given that spaces other than 4Chan that have disagreements exist, I think it’s possible to put a fence on the slippery slope.
You might indeed say exactly that, which is why it’s important to differentiate between (a) criticizing people, (b) downvoting people, and (c) banning people. (Not that ‘mere’ criticism is problem-free—not at all! But very different dynamics result from these approaches.)
Or, to put it another way: given that spaces other than 4chan that have disagreements exist, we can conclude that people do, indeed, criticize people for saying the truth in an unproductive way.
In short: one person’s modus tollens is another’s modus ponens.
Edit: Or, to put it another way: of course it’s possible to put a fence on the slippery slope. And the way you build that fence is by doing exactly the thing that you’re implying we don’t need to do! (That being “don’t ban commenters who say the truth but in an incovenient way”, in one direction; and “do criticize people for being unnecessarily uncivil”, in the other direction.)
Too little politeness is clearly unfortunate. Too much politeness is… possibly somewhat annoying? (Certainly not a huge problem.)
Too much truth is an oxymoron (there can never be too much truth; the optimal amount of truth is also the maximum possible amount of truth). Too little truth is catastrophic.
Therefore, to ban truthful people for being insufficiently civil is to court catastrophe; meanwhile, to fail to ban insufficiently civil people who are truthful is… somewhat unfortunate, at best.
Truth, in short, is the object. Civility is an additional desideratum (however important of one it may be). Losing the former makes the latter irrelevant.
This model assumes that truth and politeness are in a simple tradeoff relationship, and if that were true I would absolutely agree that truth is more important. But I don’t think the territory is that simple.
Our goal is not just to maximize the truth on the website at this current moment, but to optimize the process of discovering and sharing truth. One effect of a comment is to directly share some truth, and so removing comments or banning people does, in the short term, reduce the amount of truth produced. However, another effect of a comment is to incentivize or disincentivize other posters, by creating a welcoming or hostile environment. Since those posters may also produce comments that contain truth, a comment can in this way indirectly encourage or discourage the later production of truth.
The downstream effects of the incentivization/disincentivization of comments containing truth will, I think, often swamp the short-term effect of the specific truth shared in the specific comment. (This has some similarities to the long-termist view in altruism.)
This analysis explains why 4chan is not at the forefront of scientific discovery.
What specific contribution is banned? Is there a link to the threatened PDV-banning?
(It occurs to me that that might be read as a coded way of accusing you of lying. That is not in any way my intention.)
We sent PDV a message saying we were worried about him causing a lot of unnecessary conflict on the site, and that if that trend continues, it probably makes most sense to restrict his ability to comment in some ways, and if that doesn’t help, ban him. (In general, we try to reach out to people privately first, before giving them a public warning, since I think there are a lot of weird status dynamics that come into play with a public warning that makes it both more stressful for us and the person we are talking to).
If PDV is open to that, I would be happy to share the whole conversation we had with him here.
The following is in no way a comment on this specific moderator-user interaction (about which it is not my place to speak), but a general comment about approaches to moderation:
Asking someone, even in private (perhaps especially in private) to accept some sort of punishment (such as restrictions on commenting), or informing them that you’re going to apply corrective measures and that they might then get back into your good graces (in order to avoid further sanction), also involves a lot of—as you put it—“weird status dynamics”.
In general, the approach you describe—though I understand some of the reasons why it appeals to you (some of which are indeed perfectly noble and praiseworthy reasons)—essentially sets you up as a “corrective” authority. There are some quite unfortunate status/etc. implications of such a relationship.
Also important to mention here: If there would be a representative poll of the user base of LW2.0 that does indeed show that people prefer having moderators warn them in public as opposed to send them PMs, then I would totally switch to that policy.
I would love to see such a poll be conducted.
Yes, I agree with this. There are definitely costs to both, though I expect on average the problems to be weaker if we privately message people than if we publicly warn them (and that people when polled would prefer to be privately messaged over being publicly warned).
And yes, in some sense the moderators (or at least the admins) are a “corrective authority”, though I think that term doesn’t fully resonate with my idea of what they do, and has some misleading connotations. The admins are ultimately (and somewhat inevitably) the final decision makers when it comes to decide what type of content and discussion and type of engagement the site incentivizes.
We can shape the incentives via modifications to the karma system, or the ranking algorithm, the affordances to users on the site, the moderation and auto-moderation features available to other users, or direct moderation action, but overall, if we end up unhappy (and reflectively unhappy, after sufficient time to consider the pros and cons), then we will make changes to the site to correct that.
I think there are some forms of governance that put us less directly or more directly into the position of a corrective authority, and I do generally prefer to avoid that framing since I think it has some unnecessary adversarial aspects to it. I think the correct strategy is for us to take individual moderator action when we see specific problems or low-frequency problems, and then come up with some kind of more principled solution if the problems happen more frequently (i.e. define transparent site-and-commenting guidelines, make changes to the visibility of various things, changes to the karma system, etc.), though I think individual moderation action from us will be something that I will always want to keep available (and is something that is generally more transparent than other interventions, which I prefer, all else equal).
Much of what you say here is sensible, so this is not really to disagree with your comment, but—I’m not sure my meaning came across clearly, when I said “corrective authority”. I meant it in opposition to what we might call “selective authority” (as in “authority that selects”—as opposed to “authority that corrects”). Though that, too, is a rather cryptic term, I’m afraid… I may try to explain in detail later, when I have a bit more time and have formulated my view on this concisely.
Ah, yes. That changes the framing.
Calling out obvious groupthink and bullshit. Which is depressingly common with increasing regularity.
PDV, I like you and often agree with you and am on your side about the circling thing, so I hope you will take this in the sense it is meant, but I agree with gworley. In particular, I think you often tend to escalate arguments you’re part of, sometimes to the point of transforming them into demon threads even though they didn’t have to be. That’s a good trait to have sometimes: it’s what lets you point out that the emperor has no clothes. But I get the feeling that you’re not deploying it particularly tactically, and you’d probably do better at advancing your goals if you also deescalated sometimes.
If I can be direct since you often are, at least for myself I appreciate that you disagree, but I really dislike the way you do it. In particular you are often unnecessarily confrontational in ways that end up insulting other people on the site or assume bad faith on the part of your interlocutors.
For example you already did this in the comments on this post when you replied to Oli to say he was wrong about his own motivation. I think it’s fair to point out that someone may be mistaken about their own motivations, but you do it in a way that shuts down rather than invites discussion. Whatever your intended effect, it ends up reading like your motivation is to score points, in your own words, “in a way trivially predictable by monkey dynamics”, and makes comments on LW feel like a slightly more hostile place.
I’m in favor of you being able to participate because your comments have at times proved helpful, and calling out that which you disagree with is important for the health of the site, but only if you can do so in a way that leads to productive discussion rather than threatening it.
When you remove someone who says the truth but does so in an inconvenient way, you shift the Overton window of required politeness over toward the “maximally non-confrontational” side of the spectrum. Then, next time, you say the same sort of thing that you’re now saying to PDV, to the next-most-confrontational person. You keep going until no one can say that the emperor has no clothes, except in such oblique terms that a dogwhistle is a bomb siren by comparison.
Is this really what you want?
You might as well say that when you don’t criticize people for saying the truth in an unproductive way, then you shift the Overton window of required politeness over toward the “maximally confrontational” side. Next time, you give a pass to someone who sprinkles their comments with irrelevant insults. You keep going until you’re 4Chan.
Given that spaces other than 4Chan that have disagreements exist, I think it’s possible to put a fence on the slippery slope.
You might indeed say exactly that, which is why it’s important to differentiate between (a) criticizing people, (b) downvoting people, and (c) banning people. (Not that ‘mere’ criticism is problem-free—not at all! But very different dynamics result from these approaches.)
Or, to put it another way: given that spaces other than 4chan that have disagreements exist, we can conclude that people do, indeed, criticize people for saying the truth in an unproductive way.
In short: one person’s modus tollens is another’s modus ponens.
Edit: Or, to put it another way: of course it’s possible to put a fence on the slippery slope. And the way you build that fence is by doing exactly the thing that you’re implying we don’t need to do! (That being “don’t ban commenters who say the truth but in an incovenient way”, in one direction; and “do criticize people for being unnecessarily uncivil”, in the other direction.)
I fail to see why we cannot both speak to what we think is true and do so in a civil way.
We can, of course. We should. But consider:
Too little politeness is clearly unfortunate. Too much politeness is… possibly somewhat annoying? (Certainly not a huge problem.)
Too much truth is an oxymoron (there can never be too much truth; the optimal amount of truth is also the maximum possible amount of truth). Too little truth is catastrophic.
Therefore, to ban truthful people for being insufficiently civil is to court catastrophe; meanwhile, to fail to ban insufficiently civil people who are truthful is… somewhat unfortunate, at best.
Truth, in short, is the object. Civility is an additional desideratum (however important of one it may be). Losing the former makes the latter irrelevant.
This model assumes that truth and politeness are in a simple tradeoff relationship, and if that were true I would absolutely agree that truth is more important. But I don’t think the territory is that simple.
Our goal is not just to maximize the truth on the website at this current moment, but to optimize the process of discovering and sharing truth. One effect of a comment is to directly share some truth, and so removing comments or banning people does, in the short term, reduce the amount of truth produced. However, another effect of a comment is to incentivize or disincentivize other posters, by creating a welcoming or hostile environment. Since those posters may also produce comments that contain truth, a comment can in this way indirectly encourage or discourage the later production of truth.
The downstream effects of the incentivization/disincentivization of comments containing truth will, I think, often swamp the short-term effect of the specific truth shared in the specific comment. (This has some similarities to the long-termist view in altruism.)
This analysis explains why 4chan is not at the forefront of scientific discovery.