For the record, I view the fact that I commented in the first place, and that I now feel compelled to defend my comment, as being Exhibit A of the thing that I’m whining about. We chimps feel compelled to get in on the action when the fabric of the tribe is threatened. Making the banning of a badguy the subject of a discussion rather than being an act of unremarked moderator fiat basically sucks everybody nearby into a vortex of social wagon-circling, signaling, and reading a bunch of links to figure out which chimps are on the good guy team and which chimps are on the bad guy team. It’s a significant cognitive burden to impose on people, a bit like an @everyone in a Discord channel, in that it draws attention and energy in vastly disproportionate scope relative to the value it provides.
If we were talking about something socio-emotionally neutral like changing the color scheme or something, cool, great, ask the community. I have no opinion on the color scheme, and I’m allowed to have no opinion on the color scheme. But if you ask me what my opinion is on Prominent Community Abuser, I can’t beg off. That’s not an allowed social move. Better not to ask, or if you’re going to ask, be aware of what you’re asking.
Sure, you can pull the “but we’re supposed to be Rationalists(tm)” card, as you do in your last paragraph, but the Rationalist community has pretty consistently failed to show any evidence of actually being superior, or even very good, at negotiating social blow-ups.
nods I do agree with this to a significant degree. Note that one of the reasons for the frontpage/personal distinction is to allow people to opt-out of a lot of social-drama stuff, and generally create a space (the frontpage) in which you don’t have to keep track of a lot of this social stuff, and can focus on the epistemic content of the posts.
For the record, I view the fact that I commented in the first place, and that I now feel compelled to defend my comment, as being Exhibit A of the thing that I’m whining about. We chimps feel compelled to get in on the action when the fabric of the tribe is threatened. Making the banning of a badguy the subject of a discussion rather than being an act of unremarked moderator fiat basically sucks everybody nearby into a vortex of social wagon-circling, signaling, and reading a bunch of links to figure out which chimps are on the good guy team and which chimps are on the bad guy team. It’s a significant cognitive burden to impose on people, a bit like an @everyone in a Discord channel, in that it draws attention and energy in vastly disproportionate scope relative to the value it provides.
If we were talking about something socio-emotionally neutral like changing the color scheme or something, cool, great, ask the community. I have no opinion on the color scheme, and I’m allowed to have no opinion on the color scheme. But if you ask me what my opinion is on Prominent Community Abuser, I can’t beg off. That’s not an allowed social move. Better not to ask, or if you’re going to ask, be aware of what you’re asking.
Sure, you can pull the “but we’re supposed to be Rationalists(tm)” card, as you do in your last paragraph, but the Rationalist community has pretty consistently failed to show any evidence of actually being superior, or even very good, at negotiating social blow-ups.
I agree that the attention sinkhole is a problem.
nods I do agree with this to a significant degree. Note that one of the reasons for the frontpage/personal distinction is to allow people to opt-out of a lot of social-drama stuff, and generally create a space (the frontpage) in which you don’t have to keep track of a lot of this social stuff, and can focus on the epistemic content of the posts.