I am not a community organizer, but if I was, I would just edict the MAD rule : if any dispute can’t be reasonably settled (in a way that would escalate to a panel), both the plaintiff and the defendant are kicked out of the community. The ratio of assholes to victims being low (hopefully), frame it as a noble sacrifice from the victim to keep the rest of the community safe (whoever is the actual victim here). “Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make”.
True, you’re slightly disincentivizing the reporting of true abuses (but not so much, since you’re saving a lot on the trauma of investigation). But you’re also heavily disincentivizing both false accusations and “I’m a good manipulator so I’m confident I will be able to get away with it”. Add to it the man-hours saved, and I’m pretty confident it is a net gain — as long as you can enforce it.
As a bonus, if a dispute end up with community bans, you can be reasonably sure that the plaintiff was the victim. But of course, that only works if you don’t go from that observation to concluding “therefore the victim is un-banned”. A noble sacrifice, really, in service of both community and truth. A sacrifice nonetheless.
This is how adults deal with fights among children. The adults don’t care who started it, who did what to whom, justice, fairness, or anything at all but getting them to stop bothering the adults.
There are a bunch of problems with this even if implemented in good faith, but an obvious attack is that you convince a friend external to the community to (meet the minimum qualifications for membership and) accuse your target. This gets your target and your friend banned without investigation, but of course your friend does not care about getting banned.
both the plaintiff and the defendant are kicked out of the community
This is unironically a great idea. It doesn’t hinge on annoying questions of evidentiary standards, mens rea, seriousness of the charge, conflicts of interest etc. The idea that you can take anyone down, no matter how influential or powerful, if you’re willing to go down with them really appeals to me.
Disagreement votes don’t lower your karma, do they? I (strongly) disagreed, but I don’t want to even marginally contribute to you getting rate limited. Either way, I have now more than evened it out.
I’ve never been rate-limited, not even on EAforum where I get downvoted a lot, so I worry more about the social status/brand reputation loss from people seeing my comments with any kind of negative karma attached to them.
I am not a community organizer, but if I was, I would just edict the MAD rule : if any dispute can’t be reasonably settled (in a way that would escalate to a panel), both the plaintiff and the defendant are kicked out of the community. The ratio of assholes to victims being low (hopefully), frame it as a noble sacrifice from the victim to keep the rest of the community safe (whoever is the actual victim here). “Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make”.
True, you’re slightly disincentivizing the reporting of true abuses (but not so much, since you’re saving a lot on the trauma of investigation). But you’re also heavily disincentivizing both false accusations and “I’m a good manipulator so I’m confident I will be able to get away with it”. Add to it the man-hours saved, and I’m pretty confident it is a net gain — as long as you can enforce it.
As a bonus, if a dispute end up with community bans, you can be reasonably sure that the plaintiff was the victim. But of course, that only works if you don’t go from that observation to concluding “therefore the victim is un-banned”. A noble sacrifice, really, in service of both community and truth. A sacrifice nonetheless.
This is how adults deal with fights among children. The adults don’t care who started it, who did what to whom, justice, fairness, or anything at all but getting them to stop bothering the adults.
It is not a way to deal with adults.
There are a bunch of problems with this even if implemented in good faith, but an obvious attack is that you convince a friend external to the community to (meet the minimum qualifications for membership and) accuse your target. This gets your target and your friend banned without investigation, but of course your friend does not care about getting banned.
This is unironically a great idea. It doesn’t hinge on annoying questions of evidentiary standards, mens rea, seriousness of the charge, conflicts of interest etc. The idea that you can take anyone down, no matter how influential or powerful, if you’re willing to go down with them really appeals to me.
Yeah, you probably can’t.
I think this is a mistake; it’s easy to twist people out of shape such that they take themselves down and one of your enemies.
This is prevalent in elite human systems e.g. among corporate executives, and it’s instrumentally convergent so smart psychos will discover opportunities for it here too, and it’s also highly exploitable by tech companies and intelligence agencies if anyone working there ever decides they’d like AI safety out of the way.
You’re right that this would open up new avenues for inter-elite conflict. That’s the tradeoff for sharply curbing elite abuse of the less powerful.
I think this was good commentary, and I would never have noticed the exploit without it. For the record, I upvoted.
Disagreement votes don’t lower your karma, do they? I (strongly) disagreed, but I don’t want to even marginally contribute to you getting rate limited. Either way, I have now more than evened it out.
I’ve never been rate-limited, not even on EAforum where I get downvoted a lot, so I worry more about the social status/brand reputation loss from people seeing my comments with any kind of negative karma attached to them.
Suicide bombing?