His current rudeness is quite transparent, really. Sure, he’s making LW users aware of the hellban, but he’s also purposely being as obnoxious as possible while doing it.
There nothing problematic with a moderator actually trying to enforce moderting decisions. Given that past attempts didn’t work, it makes sense to use other measure like this.
I am posting this so that we can have a transparent discussion about moderation, something at least one moderator apparently doesn’t want.
Given your lack of any justifications of your actions or engaging in criticism it seems like you don’t really like transparency either.
Exactly. Eugine/Azathoth/Ra/Lion was already sufficiently transparentlybanned in 2014.
He either didn’t get the memo, or he pretends to be dumb for the sake of scaremongering, or maybe he actually is delusional. I don’t care which one; the outcome is the same.
If a moderator hellbanned The_Lion, that was an error in judgment. Obviously, someone who uses alternate accounts to upvote his own posts was going to notice.
I think an interesting aspect here is that Eugine/Azeroth/Ra/Lion is a neoreactionary and believes in a strong hierarchy. Well, the mods are above you in the heirarchy, so respect their authority!
How can one worry about a mod abusing their power in an online forum, and yet not worry about a monarch abusing their far greater power in a monarchy?
and believes in a strong hierarchy. Well, the mods are above you in the heirarchy, so respect their authority!
LOL. NRx are not stupid :-)
Without going into the NRx approach, let me point out that even entirely traditional feudal power structures made power conditional on responsibility. The lord had power over his serfs and vassals, but he also had to protect them and aid them. A lord who abandoned his responsibilities abandoned his claim to power as well.
However, I have read the basics of Moldbug, for instance, and I gather that there is this idea of ‘exit > voice’ that if one does not like the way things are done, they should leave rather than try to change the system, and then the ruler will consider modifying their behaviour if large numbers of people leave.
OTOH, I’m not saying that all Nrxers believe this.
A lord who abandoned his responsibilities abandoned his claim to power as well.
The problem is, how do you enforce this? If you have a shareholder—based neocameral government, then the shareholders could hold a vote of no confidence. But in an absolute monarchy, if the monarch goes crazy, you’re screwed.
Exit and voice are both important, actually, and they can’t even be cleanly separated. One tool that seems invaluable in making hierarchies work well in real-world institutions (as in firms) is the takeover bid, and that clearly requires some kind of “voice”. (Demotist politics is supposed to serve the same function, except that it doesn’t really work—it diminishes advantages and expands drawbacks, compared to infrequent takeovers.) If The_Lion were to post here simply to make his case that the site is being severely mismanaged and point users to a better alternative, this would seem to be quite compatible with formalist principles.
they should leave rather than try to change the system, and then the ruler will consider modifying their behaviour if large numbers of people leave.
The first question is whether the current moderators can in any meaningful sense be considered “rulers”.
The problem is, how do you enforce this?
Who is “you”? I think you’re assuming the “unconditional obedience no matter what” attitude, and that just wasn’t how it worked. If the monarch goes crazy you depose him, if necessary via raising an army and having a bit of of a war. If it’s just a mere baron or something like that, you petition his lord, and if the lord winks in the right way, why, you just go torch his castle.
The first question is whether the current moderators can in any meaningful sense be considered “rulers”.
I think its more the case that whoever actually owns LW (MIRI? EY?) is the ruler, but at some point they delegated some power to the mods.
If the monarch goes crazy you depose him, if necessary via raising an army and having a bit of of a war.
A lot of what Moldbug says is dependent upon the idea, even if just for a thought experiment, that the monarch has absolute power and cannot possibly be deposed.
OTOH, if the monarch does not have absoute power, well, any system which depends on actual wars to get rid of a crazy monarch is … not somewhere I’d be entirely happy about living. One of the arguments against democracy is that having elections every four years imposes costs, in terms of politicians spending time campaigning rather than running the country, not to mention the time and money other people spend campaigning. But those costs are tiny compared to the cost of fighting civil wars.
NRx would inquire about how do you get rid of a crazy Cathedral X-)
A ‘tyranny of the majority’ is a concern about democracy. However, there are still limits—its possible that a majority could subscribe to an insane ideology, but rather unlikely that a majority of people could have a psychotic episode when they vote. A single leader is far more heavy tailed in distribution, they could be a genius or insane.
Cathedral is all about manufacturing consent and so election results, but let’s get more specific.
Leaving aside the traditional example of Hitler’s coming to power why don’t we consider a bit more recent phenomenon—Mr. Putin. He seems to be genuinely popular and even though the Russians fudge their elections (I suppose they just can’t help it), I would bet that Mr.Putin would actually win a fair election in Russia without any problems.
So how does he fit into your picture of democracy?
But those costs are tiny compared to the cost of fighting civil wars.
Are you sure about that? In well-run polities, civil wars are vanishingly rare; the implied threat of civil war is what’s more relevant, in most cases. The costs of demotist politicking may be smaller at any given time, but they add up quickly.
(All that said, democracies do seem to be a lot more peaceful than autocracies, and this is a huge efficiency gain. But there might be further gains on the table by moving things towards a formalist/NRX direction. Especially since modern democracies need a lot of oligarchy/aristocracy in practice if they are to actually function—this is what we call ‘the Cathedral’.)
Cynical hypothesis: neoreactionaries believe in a strong hierarchy and look back with fondness on historical periods when there has been one—but when they look either forward or back they imagine themselves near the top of the hierarchy, and it’s from that perspective that they judge it to be good.
I think an interesting aspect here is that Eugine/Azeroth/Ra/Lion is a neoreactionary and believes in a strong hierarchy. Well, the mods are above you in the heirarchy, so respect their authority!
OTOH, an nrx might argue that the strength of the authority must be continually tested by fighting it. Their ideal society is a struggle of all against all, all the time. Respect is but the acknowledgement of another’s greater power, to be granted for only so long as they actually have it, and only to their face, as a polite ritual. They would argue that this is the essential nature of all society, and that only the weak pretend otherwise, the weak being everyone but them and their heroes from history. The strong do what they will and the weak bear what they must. Strength is the only real virtue, all others being but idle amusements of the leisure that only strength can provide.
I don’t think most nrxers do believe this, and one who did certainly would be a hypocrite to accuse a mod of abusing their power—if there is no morality but the will to power, then how could a mod, or anyone else, abuse their power?
if there is no morality but the will to power, then how could a mod, or anyone else, abuse their power?
Accusations of abuse would simply be a move in the power struggle. Nothing is true, all is a lie.
I don’t think most nrxers do believe this
I am extrapolating outrageously, of course. Or, to continue in this vein, those that don’t believe this are merely fellow-travellers and wannabe nrxs, beta foot-soldiers to be exploited by Those Who Know the truths that lesser beings fear, hide from, and hide from themselves the fact that they are hiding.
Accusations of abuse would simply be a move in the power struggle.
That’s always true, though, isn’t it? Most political conflicts are to some extent power struggles.
Nothing is true, all is a lie.
Or maybe an accusation of ‘abuse’ only becomes true ex-post-facto, as the pre-existing power structure is successfully overturned in some way. Since ‘power’ is often complex and has a multi-level structure, this must always be seen as a definite possibility.
Is it actually a tenet of neoreaction that “there is no morality but the will to power”? That doesn’t appear to me to be the position Eugine has espoused.
(There’s certainly some commonality in sentiment between NRx and Nietzsche, but that’s not the same question.)
[EDITED to add:] No, wait, I’m an idiot; skeptical_lurker wasn’t in fact saying or presuming that NRx as such embodies any such idea, and in fact sayx explicitly that most don’t. Excuse me.
It’s weird how many of the banned comments have around zero points with a lot of votes both ways, balancing out. They are not as one-sidedly awful as is sometimes the case, so it’s plausible that there might be a non-sock-puppet faction that votes up negative-points comments that pass spellchecking or some such criterion that ignores content. In either case, it’s a bad thing.
The_Lion is (at least) the fourth incarnation of an LW user who has been around for some time. Why the fourth incarnation? Because the other three got banned for abusing the karma system. There is also some reason to suspect that The_Lion has also been using sockpuppet accounts to vote up his own comments (but so far as I know all there is here is suspicion, whereas the karma-abuse—downvoting hundreds of old comments from users who have annoyed him, usually by differing from him politically—has been verified).
A hellban is something moderators can do on some forums, where a user’s posts or comments are visible to them but invisible to everyone else. Hellbans are most often applied to (actual or suspected) spammers and other generators of very low-quality stuff. The idea is that if you just make them unable to post, they’ll just make another account, but if you quietly make what they post invisible to everyone else, they may not notice.
It appears that someone hellbanned The_Lion, probably more on account of his comments about black people than of his other activities (there is reason to think he’s been engaging in the same sort of karma-abuse as The_Lion as he did as Eugine_Nier, Azathoth123 and VoiceOfRa, but hellbanning won’t do much to stop that).
This was never going to work well for someone active and paying attention, and especially not for someone with a lot of sockpuppets. (Of course that’s easy to say in hindsight.) The hellban has apparently been undone now.
Between the imposition and the lifting of the hellban, the user behind The_Lion noticed the hellban, made a new account, used it to post new copies of all his comments, and posted this complaint.
Easy to say in foresight, too, if you spend a tiny bit of time thinking about it.
Hellbans were designed explicitly for spammers who do not care about up/downvotes, responses, etc. They are very obviously not going to work for someone who receives responses to his posts all the time and especially for someone with sockpuppets.
A hell ban is a colloquial term for a ban that prevents the user from knowing that they’re banned; their comments appear as normal to themselves, but are invisible to everyone else.
It’s designed so that the person so afflicted doesn’t notice they’ve been banned. It has a striking limitation, however; it doesn’t work on people who have alternate accounts who regularly, ahem, go look at their main accounts comments, since they’ll see that their comments aren’t there.
The comments are still banned, so it’s unclear what you are talking about (maybe they were banned, unbanned and banned again?). If the account’s posting rights were previously revoked and then given back, it’s implausible Eliezer could be the one giving you the posting rights, right in the middle of this post. It’s strange how the parent comment got 40 upvotes (and 20 downvotes), seems too many for a sane manual sockpuppet farm. Anti-moderation faction?
Anyway, banning the copies of banned comments posted as The_Lion2. Neutral on the original moderator’s decision, but against such workarounds.
The other comments suggest at most 10-15 upvoting sockpuppets, so either they obsessively registered many new ones to upvote this particular comment since posting it, or upvoting of past discussions was kept at a moderate level. A priori manual sockpuppets seem more likely, and given how carefully the banned comments were restored from The_Lion2 account, this person is sufficiently diligent to pull it off in manual mode.
Seems unlikely to me. For a few days his comments showed up on his Overview page but not in their original context or in my inbox, whereas when I delete my own comments without admin powers, they no longer show up in my Overview page either.
It’s not just offensive comments from this account, but also the fact that he was banned a few times in the past, and keeps returning with new accounts. And now probably with an army of sockpuppets.
He should be banned even without saying anything offensive, as an enforcement of the previous ban. However, if he only could abstain from his typical behavior, there is a good chance he would be ignored. But he seems unable to do even that.
Thanks for bringing these to our attention. I never saw these posts till now. I clicked on one and noticed that it has been deleted. I like it when distasteful comments remain in place and the community has the opportunity to show that they don’t approve of it with karma and comments rather than to have an administrator deal with it.
I reckon the administrators did it for PR purposes which seems petty. If StormFront hasn’t been shut down because of racially awkward content I don’t see LW risking anything of much consequence. I don’t know exactly who the administrative team are but I hope their experienced rationalists who have thought their decision through rather than reacting in a knee-jerk fashion.
The most potentially racist thing I can see here is:
is evidence against blacks in general being good at science.
That could in reference to someone elses perspective. The rest, which seem offensive particularly when grouped with other quotes insuinuating the same thing, could be innocent and incidental if taken seperately. If they were retained in context, I could instead infer whether or not TheLion is in fact biggoted in addition to being manipulative.
edit: I’m going to take a risk posting this to get a better idea for the rules. I’ll preface this by saying that I’m both black AND asian, so I feel somewhat more comfortable doing this than others here may: ‘They boil and skin, yes SKIN dogs alive in some Asian countries. In Korea there is a belief that pain makes animals taste better!’. Are claims like this equally, less or more repungant and why? Is it calling to attention a ″vice″ before making a repungant claim? Is it historic presedence (e.g. using words related to animals or tribes to deride black people vs the relative acceptability of criticising asians for dog eating)
It wasn’t so much the racism, as the completely assinine, dogmatic, insulting-to-everyone-involved, divorced-from-reality manner in which he went about it. At least his previous incarnations didn’t sound like a Klansman got drunk and decided to go trolling (Heck, some of his stuff in his original form was downright reasonable, and when it wasn’t, he still came across as the more rational person in the conversation at times, even if you disagreed with his conclusions).
He was originally banned for abusing the voting system to try and remove his political opponents from the conversation. So far as I could tell, his next two bans were because he could not resist doing the same thing. As the_lion and the_lion2, he escalated to just being a caricature of a straw white supremecist (who still abused the voting system).
I almost want to explain this as some twisted minuscule version of radicalizing they with nothing to lose, except in this case the ultimatum was abundantly clear: stop using downvotes as a political weapon, or get banned. The “Hellban” post was a blatant “You will never stop me, fools!” to anyone familiar with the history.
I agree that quality of his comments dropped significantly after he was banned for the first time. I think that Eugene_Nier’s comments weren’t worse than LW average, that’s why when he was banned some people expressed regret. But later he mostly tried to make every discussion into discussion about his favorite topics and push his opinions and was no longer interested in exchange of ideas.
I like this line of reasoning. Eugene sounds like a real name. If it’s attached to his IRL identity, the loss of face value could be enough to have immense interest in discrediting the place that he was discredited. That’s a tremendous sunk cost. I can’t think of any easy solution to that kind of problem :/
I’m fairly sure I remember seeing a comment from Eugine_Nier saying “no, it’s not my real name, just a pun on engineer”. But I can’t find it now. Anyway, if that’s right then I think this explanation doesn’t work.
(But a person can resent being publicly criticized, punished, etc., even if there aren’t “real life” consequences.)
He’s here, at the end of the day, because he’s interested in improving his rationality and helping others do the same. It’s only dogmatic till it’s corrected—it just gives us a model of lots of people out there who we will be interacting with day to day, and he’s already interested in rationality so he’s probably more sincere than many of them. Insults take two to tango: including one person who gets offended.
This may be just mind projection fallacy but: Some people learn at a different pace than others. I know my writing doesn’t express it and I’m not sure how I can but I feel a tear at my eye writing this after reading your point about being divorsed from reality. I’ve said this before: If LessWrong administrators/mods hadn’t tolerated me when I was really quite mentally ill (and occasionally, since then) I might have offed-myself or locked up by now. I continue to be immensely greatful for people who stood up for me and gave me the courage to keep trying to improve. Imagine thinking of his political maneuvering and vote abuse as if he was a little child for a moment. It’s childish. It really has not been a big deal to me at all. Who here can honestly say they care that much about bits of karma? When was the last time you checked someone’s user page for how much karma they have to use that appeal to authority to analyse something they’ve posted? We knew for a long time ‘politics is the mind killer’. This shouldn’t all be so suprising. If you’re getting in markedly ideological political debates on LessWrong you’re doing it wrong!.
I feel uncomfortable even defending him because I fear some kind of backlash against me: maybe a claim I’m a sock puppet for him or something. That’s not a healthy community feeling. I may be alone in that feeling, so if that’s not the case please point this out someone (or if you don’t feel this at all, please point it out too).
This is a super charitable reading of him, and I’m not sure whether to congratulate you for proving capable of it, or simply to call it naivete. We’re mostly about being able to change one’s own opinion; that’s what we call rationality. Whereas he already “knows” that the truth is NRx, and what he calls “rationality” is simply whatever path you take to go from your current beliefs to NRx. Obviously people can’t disagree for valid reasons, “it is known” that they disagree because “the truth” makes them feel uncomfortable, or they’re brainwashed by the liberal media, or they’re simply inferior in intelligence or rationality. This is literally every post he has made lately.
You can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped. Hanlon’s razor and all that, but malice is a thing, and he has exhibited quite a bit of it in the past. I don’t really think his own behavior is causing him distress. I think he just doesn’t hold himself to the moral standard of having to be fair and kind to opponents.
P.S. I check people’s karma all the time, in case you were wondering. Mostly when a user seems fishy and I want to check the community consensus on him. It’s useful information.
P.P.S. We know you, Clarity. You wouldn’t get mistaken for an Eugine sockpuppet if you tried. You’re just different brands of crazy. :-P
To revise Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to an enormous complicated System full of conflicting incentives getting stuck in a weird equilibrium. When that weird equilibrium is crushing people in its gears, don’t attribute that harm to a conspiracy of evil powerful people who planned it all and profit from it. There is no master plan behind the US medical system, it’s just an enormous complicated thing that got stuck. Even if there’s a billionaire or politician benefiting from the current setup, they didn’t cunningly plan for the US medical system to be dysfunctional, and they couldn’t make anything be different by choosing otherwise. Conspiracies of evil people plan how to profit from the System’s current stuck state. They don’t decide where it gets stuck.
-EY the other day
Never
And yet it is you who knows the truth of his guilt. I say the best way is to ‘put him on trial’. If you will. I want to see him pressured to explain himself totally and under threat that if here lies, he could be banned (like perjury) and that if we have reasonable doubt that he may be innocent, he is free.
P.P.S. We know you, Clarity. You wouldn’t get mistaken for an Eugine sockpuppet if you tried. You’re just different brands of crazy. :-P
Whereas he already “knows” that the truth is NRx, and what he calls “rationality” is simply whatever path you take to go from your current beliefs to NRx.
I assume that NRX does contain some genuine insight about the real world, even though some or perhaps even most of it may be quite wrong. Anyway, there are a lot of folks out there who have made up their mind already and are not going to be convinced otherwise, much like Eugine or The_Lion or whoever. LW is plenty resilient enough to deal with such people—and indeed, this is a key requirement if it is to be successful.
Alternate hypothesis: NRx stole some genuine insights from other branches of political thought (eg public choice theory, moral drift) & passed them off as original to NRx.
We’re mostly about being able to change one’s own opinion; that’s what we call rationality.
No, rationality is the ability to change one’s opinion on the basis of evidence. Screaming about how “outrageous” what someone said is doesn’t constitute evidence.
I’d certainly grant that you could well be correct in your impressions. After all, it’s odd for him to go from this to this week’s spree of what looks a lot like trolling, seemingly over getting a rule against his voting strategies enforced.
I think Eugine used to be here because he was interested in improving his and others’ rationality. I’m not sure he still is. And his trajectory doesn’t seem to be in the direction of improvement.
I don’t think there’s much risk of anyone thinking Clarity is a Eugine sockpuppet, and it looks to me as if people agreeing with or defending Eugine get pretty much the amount of backlash you’d expect for the opinions themselves, without extra for Siding With The Enemy.
(Incidentally, AIUI Eugine_Nier is not his actual name but a pun on “engineer”; but “Eugine” is the nearest thing we have to an actual name for him so it’ll have to do.)
I was thinking of a specific comment I wrote multiple replies to before successfully restraining myself with the realization that it was blatant flame-bait. I do not claim that the basic point (“groups x y and z produce fewer successful people on average than groups u v and w”, and “mediocre success gets signal-boosted among disadvantaged groups”) is false. I do claim that the way the_lion conducted himself during the discussion rapidly stopped including a willingness to engage with facts or use enough clarity to make some of his claims falsifiable, and the phrasing implied a deliberate attempt to provoke outrage (which I should note was mostly avoided; it is regrettable that a couple people succumbed to the temptation anyway.)
It wasn’t so much the racism, as the completely assinine, dogmatic, insulting-to-everyone-involved, divorced-from-reality manner in which he went about it.
Wow nice list of more-or-less vacuous insults. Interesting how the only non-vacuous one among them “divorced-from-reality” appears to be false.
The_Lion had 20+ sockpuppet accounts which he was using to upvote his comments, which makes it difficult for the community to show that they disapprove of his comments. A karma score of +8, 61% positive doesn’t look like massive disapproval to a casual reader, even if it means that 15 people downvoted it and no one upvoted it besides Eugine.
In brief, The_Lion wrote that there are no successful black people, and when people raised some of the obvious counterexamples he disputed each of them, and called the group of them “dancing bears.”
In brief, The_Lion wrote that there are no successful black people, and when people raised some of the obvious counterexamples he disputed each of them, and called the group of them “dancing bears.”
Hahahaha
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity
I see no evidence that anyone gave into anything, the comments are still banned. Maybe something else that stopped working for some reason started working now, but not the hidden comments.
Please ip ban this asshat and everyone who’s ever upvoted his comments.
So you are asking to IP ban me?
That ought to be amusing… :-)
Not to mention that you seem to believe that one should vote on the author of the comment and not on the comment itself. So, for example, if I dislike Alice, I properly should go and downvote every single comment of hers. Oh, wait...
Yes every single upvote would be a little extreme, but it shouldn’t be too hard to narrow down people who have given him dozens of upvotes and flag them as probable sockpuppets.
Do you seriously believe you can hide your past rudeness by attempting to reframe the discussion in terms of “transparency”?
His current rudeness is quite transparent, really. Sure, he’s making LW users aware of the hellban, but he’s also purposely being as obnoxious as possible while doing it.
That’s Eugine as usual. :(
You’re one of those people who believes any opinion that disagrees with yours constitutes “rudenness” aren’t you.
There nothing problematic with a moderator actually trying to enforce moderting decisions. Given that past attempts didn’t work, it makes sense to use other measure like this.
Given your lack of any justifications of your actions or engaging in criticism it seems like you don’t really like transparency either.
Exactly. Eugine/Azathoth/Ra/Lion was already sufficiently transparently banned in 2014.
He either didn’t get the memo, or he pretends to be dumb for the sake of scaremongering, or maybe he actually is delusional. I don’t care which one; the outcome is the same.
If a moderator hellbanned The_Lion, that was an error in judgment. Obviously, someone who uses alternate accounts to upvote his own posts was going to notice.
Nancy, let me know if I can help.
Sounds to me like they were trying to do something good and useful, and merely ran into technical limitations.
To the craven spider Azathoth/Eugene/The_Lion,
May your living humors rot on your body. Your pathetic attempts at sockpuppet-upvoting your own posts will not succeed.
I think an interesting aspect here is that Eugine/Azeroth/Ra/Lion is a neoreactionary and believes in a strong hierarchy. Well, the mods are above you in the heirarchy, so respect their authority!
How can one worry about a mod abusing their power in an online forum, and yet not worry about a monarch abusing their far greater power in a monarchy?
LOL. NRx are not stupid :-)
Without going into the NRx approach, let me point out that even entirely traditional feudal power structures made power conditional on responsibility. The lord had power over his serfs and vassals, but he also had to protect them and aid them. A lord who abandoned his responsibilities abandoned his claim to power as well.
In practice, of course, things varied :-D
Nothing that leaks to /pol/ ever stays “not stupid” for long.
Yeah, but notice how NRx are already sneering at the “more populist” Alt-Right :-/
I never said they were stupid!
However, I have read the basics of Moldbug, for instance, and I gather that there is this idea of ‘exit > voice’ that if one does not like the way things are done, they should leave rather than try to change the system, and then the ruler will consider modifying their behaviour if large numbers of people leave.
OTOH, I’m not saying that all Nrxers believe this.
The problem is, how do you enforce this? If you have a shareholder—based neocameral government, then the shareholders could hold a vote of no confidence. But in an absolute monarchy, if the monarch goes crazy, you’re screwed.
Exit and voice are both important, actually, and they can’t even be cleanly separated. One tool that seems invaluable in making hierarchies work well in real-world institutions (as in firms) is the takeover bid, and that clearly requires some kind of “voice”. (Demotist politics is supposed to serve the same function, except that it doesn’t really work—it diminishes advantages and expands drawbacks, compared to infrequent takeovers.) If The_Lion were to post here simply to make his case that the site is being severely mismanaged and point users to a better alternative, this would seem to be quite compatible with formalist principles.
The first question is whether the current moderators can in any meaningful sense be considered “rulers”.
Who is “you”? I think you’re assuming the “unconditional obedience no matter what” attitude, and that just wasn’t how it worked. If the monarch goes crazy you depose him, if necessary via raising an army and having a bit of of a war. If it’s just a mere baron or something like that, you petition his lord, and if the lord winks in the right way, why, you just go torch his castle.
I think its more the case that whoever actually owns LW (MIRI? EY?) is the ruler, but at some point they delegated some power to the mods.
A lot of what Moldbug says is dependent upon the idea, even if just for a thought experiment, that the monarch has absolute power and cannot possibly be deposed.
OTOH, if the monarch does not have absoute power, well, any system which depends on actual wars to get rid of a crazy monarch is … not somewhere I’d be entirely happy about living. One of the arguments against democracy is that having elections every four years imposes costs, in terms of politicians spending time campaigning rather than running the country, not to mention the time and money other people spend campaigning. But those costs are tiny compared to the cost of fighting civil wars.
Not that democracies are immune to civil wars.
The proper expression is probably “an absentee landlord”.
NRx would inquire about how do you get rid of a crazy Cathedral X-)
A ‘tyranny of the majority’ is a concern about democracy. However, there are still limits—its possible that a majority could subscribe to an insane ideology, but rather unlikely that a majority of people could have a psychotic episode when they vote. A single leader is far more heavy tailed in distribution, they could be a genius or insane.
Cathedral is all about manufacturing consent and so election results, but let’s get more specific.
Leaving aside the traditional example of Hitler’s coming to power why don’t we consider a bit more recent phenomenon—Mr. Putin. He seems to be genuinely popular and even though the Russians fudge their elections (I suppose they just can’t help it), I would bet that Mr.Putin would actually win a fair election in Russia without any problems.
So how does he fit into your picture of democracy?
Well, Putin isn’t doing anything particularly insane, is he? I’m not saying his policies are sensible, but he’s not making his horse a senator.
Are you sure about that? In well-run polities, civil wars are vanishingly rare; the implied threat of civil war is what’s more relevant, in most cases. The costs of demotist politicking may be smaller at any given time, but they add up quickly.
(All that said, democracies do seem to be a lot more peaceful than autocracies, and this is a huge efficiency gain. But there might be further gains on the table by moving things towards a formalist/NRX direction. Especially since modern democracies need a lot of oligarchy/aristocracy in practice if they are to actually function—this is what we call ‘the Cathedral’.)
Then you would need to add the societal and medical costs derived from having a perpetually stressed population.
Cynical hypothesis: neoreactionaries believe in a strong hierarchy and look back with fondness on historical periods when there has been one—but when they look either forward or back they imagine themselves near the top of the hierarchy, and it’s from that perspective that they judge it to be good.
OTOH, an nrx might argue that the strength of the authority must be continually tested by fighting it. Their ideal society is a struggle of all against all, all the time. Respect is but the acknowledgement of another’s greater power, to be granted for only so long as they actually have it, and only to their face, as a polite ritual. They would argue that this is the essential nature of all society, and that only the weak pretend otherwise, the weak being everyone but them and their heroes from history. The strong do what they will and the weak bear what they must. Strength is the only real virtue, all others being but idle amusements of the leisure that only strength can provide.
I don’t think most nrxers do believe this, and one who did certainly would be a hypocrite to accuse a mod of abusing their power—if there is no morality but the will to power, then how could a mod, or anyone else, abuse their power?
Accusations of abuse would simply be a move in the power struggle. Nothing is true, all is a lie.
I am extrapolating outrageously, of course. Or, to continue in this vein, those that don’t believe this are merely fellow-travellers and wannabe nrxs, beta foot-soldiers to be exploited by Those Who Know the truths that lesser beings fear, hide from, and hide from themselves the fact that they are hiding.
That’s always true, though, isn’t it? Most political conflicts are to some extent power struggles.
Or maybe an accusation of ‘abuse’ only becomes true ex-post-facto, as the pre-existing power structure is successfully overturned in some way. Since ‘power’ is often complex and has a multi-level structure, this must always be seen as a definite possibility.
Is it actually a tenet of neoreaction that “there is no morality but the will to power”? That doesn’t appear to me to be the position Eugine has espoused.
(There’s certainly some commonality in sentiment between NRx and Nietzsche, but that’s not the same question.)
[EDITED to add:] No, wait, I’m an idiot; skeptical_lurker wasn’t in fact saying or presuming that NRx as such embodies any such idea, and in fact sayx explicitly that most don’t. Excuse me.
BTW, IIRC some people have made the same point (not sure how seriously) on SSC after people complained that Scott had banned a few neoreactionaries.
I think Scott himself made that point when he banned them.
It’s weird how many of the banned comments have around zero points with a lot of votes both ways, balancing out. They are not as one-sidedly awful as is sometimes the case, so it’s plausible that there might be a non-sock-puppet faction that votes up negative-points comments that pass spellchecking or some such criterion that ignores content. In either case, it’s a bad thing.
Dear lion,
I don’t know what is going on. Let’s talk. Prefer Skype. PM me please.
Thnx.
I don’t like the name “hell ban”. It’s not really an accurate name. Hell implies pain and suffering to most people, no?
I think “ghost ban” is better. If you can see what is going on but they can’t see you, that’s more of a ghost ban.
I’ve heard “shadowban” quite a few times. I agree that “hellban” is an odd term.
I guess I agree, but we weren’t the ones who named it.
Ha. As if going along with the established terminology is thing at LW.
Congratulations on getting a “ban any new user posting the sort of stuff Eugine would post” moderation norm on the way I guess.
I got a reply to a post by TheLion2 with an edit saying a hell ban had been reversed
I don’t recall seeing TheLion around
Never heard of hell bans
Click on TheLions user and see this post and click on it
What is even going on here? The comments don’t seem to clarify.
The_Lion is (at least) the fourth incarnation of an LW user who has been around for some time. Why the fourth incarnation? Because the other three got banned for abusing the karma system. There is also some reason to suspect that The_Lion has also been using sockpuppet accounts to vote up his own comments (but so far as I know all there is here is suspicion, whereas the karma-abuse—downvoting hundreds of old comments from users who have annoyed him, usually by differing from him politically—has been verified).
A hellban is something moderators can do on some forums, where a user’s posts or comments are visible to them but invisible to everyone else. Hellbans are most often applied to (actual or suspected) spammers and other generators of very low-quality stuff. The idea is that if you just make them unable to post, they’ll just make another account, but if you quietly make what they post invisible to everyone else, they may not notice.
It appears that someone hellbanned The_Lion, probably more on account of his comments about black people than of his other activities (there is reason to think he’s been engaging in the same sort of karma-abuse as The_Lion as he did as Eugine_Nier, Azathoth123 and VoiceOfRa, but hellbanning won’t do much to stop that).
This was never going to work well for someone active and paying attention, and especially not for someone with a lot of sockpuppets. (Of course that’s easy to say in hindsight.) The hellban has apparently been undone now.
Between the imposition and the lifting of the hellban, the user behind The_Lion noticed the hellban, made a new account, used it to post new copies of all his comments, and posted this complaint.
Does that help?
Easy to say in foresight, too, if you spend a tiny bit of time thinking about it.
Hellbans were designed explicitly for spammers who do not care about up/downvotes, responses, etc. They are very obviously not going to work for someone who receives responses to his posts all the time and especially for someone with sockpuppets.
Yes, thanks gjm!
What a keen bean
A hell ban is a colloquial term for a ban that prevents the user from knowing that they’re banned; their comments appear as normal to themselves, but are invisible to everyone else.
It’s designed so that the person so afflicted doesn’t notice they’ve been banned. It has a striking limitation, however; it doesn’t work on people who have alternate accounts who regularly, ahem, go look at their main accounts comments, since they’ll see that their comments aren’t there.
It doesn’t even work on people who occasionally look at the forums while not logged in.
Update: Hell-bad revoked. Thanks, Eliezer.
+7 karma in 5 minutes, nice.
The comments are still banned, so it’s unclear what you are talking about (maybe they were banned, unbanned and banned again?). If the account’s posting rights were previously revoked and then given back, it’s implausible Eliezer could be the one giving you the posting rights, right in the middle of this post. It’s strange how the parent comment got 40 upvotes (and 20 downvotes), seems too many for a sane manual sockpuppet farm. Anti-moderation faction?
Anyway, banning the copies of banned comments posted as The_Lion2. Neutral on the original moderator’s decision, but against such workarounds.
Why would it be either manual or sane in this case?
The other comments suggest at most 10-15 upvoting sockpuppets, so either they obsessively registered many new ones to upvote this particular comment since posting it, or upvoting of past discussions was kept at a moderate level. A priori manual sockpuppets seem more likely, and given how carefully the banned comments were restored from The_Lion2 account, this person is sufficiently diligent to pull it off in manual mode.
Yes, that’s what happens.
You may want to adjust your beliefs to reality.
You really need to leard better excuses than “only following orders”.
Why on earth did they give into this? Please ip ban this asshat and everyone who’s ever upvoted his comments.
Alternative possibility: The_Lion was never shadowbanned, and just posted a bunch of things to make it look like he was.
Seems unlikely to me. For a few days his comments showed up on his Overview page but not in their original context or in my inbox, whereas when I delete my own comments without admin powers, they no longer show up in my Overview page either.
Very interesting. Have any moderators or admins weighed in on this?
What did The_Lion say that was so offensive?
It’s not just offensive comments from this account, but also the fact that he was banned a few times in the past, and keeps returning with new accounts. And now probably with an army of sockpuppets.
He should be banned even without saying anything offensive, as an enforcement of the previous ban. However, if he only could abstain from his typical behavior, there is a good chance he would be ignored. But he seems unable to do even that.
I agree. I was not aware this was Eugene_Nier.
Examples:
Thanks for bringing these to our attention. I never saw these posts till now. I clicked on one and noticed that it has been deleted. I like it when distasteful comments remain in place and the community has the opportunity to show that they don’t approve of it with karma and comments rather than to have an administrator deal with it.
I reckon the administrators did it for PR purposes which seems petty. If StormFront hasn’t been shut down because of racially awkward content I don’t see LW risking anything of much consequence. I don’t know exactly who the administrative team are but I hope their experienced rationalists who have thought their decision through rather than reacting in a knee-jerk fashion.
The most potentially racist thing I can see here is:
That could in reference to someone elses perspective. The rest, which seem offensive particularly when grouped with other quotes insuinuating the same thing, could be innocent and incidental if taken seperately. If they were retained in context, I could instead infer whether or not TheLion is in fact biggoted in addition to being manipulative.
edit: I’m going to take a risk posting this to get a better idea for the rules. I’ll preface this by saying that I’m both black AND asian, so I feel somewhat more comfortable doing this than others here may: ‘They boil and skin, yes SKIN dogs alive in some Asian countries. In Korea there is a belief that pain makes animals taste better!’. Are claims like this equally, less or more repungant and why? Is it calling to attention a ″vice″ before making a repungant claim? Is it historic presedence (e.g. using words related to animals or tribes to deride black people vs the relative acceptability of criticising asians for dog eating)
It wasn’t so much the racism, as the completely assinine, dogmatic, insulting-to-everyone-involved, divorced-from-reality manner in which he went about it. At least his previous incarnations didn’t sound like a Klansman got drunk and decided to go trolling (Heck, some of his stuff in his original form was downright reasonable, and when it wasn’t, he still came across as the more rational person in the conversation at times, even if you disagreed with his conclusions).
He was originally banned for abusing the voting system to try and remove his political opponents from the conversation. So far as I could tell, his next two bans were because he could not resist doing the same thing. As the_lion and the_lion2, he escalated to just being a caricature of a straw white supremecist (who still abused the voting system).
I almost want to explain this as some twisted minuscule version of radicalizing they with nothing to lose, except in this case the ultimatum was abundantly clear: stop using downvotes as a political weapon, or get banned. The “Hellban” post was a blatant “You will never stop me, fools!” to anyone familiar with the history.
I agree that quality of his comments dropped significantly after he was banned for the first time. I think that Eugene_Nier’s comments weren’t worse than LW average, that’s why when he was banned some people expressed regret. But later he mostly tried to make every discussion into discussion about his favorite topics and push his opinions and was no longer interested in exchange of ideas.
I like this line of reasoning. Eugene sounds like a real name. If it’s attached to his IRL identity, the loss of face value could be enough to have immense interest in discrediting the place that he was discredited. That’s a tremendous sunk cost. I can’t think of any easy solution to that kind of problem :/
I’m fairly sure I remember seeing a comment from Eugine_Nier saying “no, it’s not my real name, just a pun on engineer”. But I can’t find it now. Anyway, if that’s right then I think this explanation doesn’t work.
(But a person can resent being publicly criticized, punished, etc., even if there aren’t “real life” consequences.)
Here it is.
Well done!
He’s here, at the end of the day, because he’s interested in improving his rationality and helping others do the same. It’s only dogmatic till it’s corrected—it just gives us a model of lots of people out there who we will be interacting with day to day, and he’s already interested in rationality so he’s probably more sincere than many of them. Insults take two to tango: including one person who gets offended.
This may be just mind projection fallacy but: Some people learn at a different pace than others. I know my writing doesn’t express it and I’m not sure how I can but I feel a tear at my eye writing this after reading your point about being divorsed from reality. I’ve said this before: If LessWrong administrators/mods hadn’t tolerated me when I was really quite mentally ill (and occasionally, since then) I might have offed-myself or locked up by now. I continue to be immensely greatful for people who stood up for me and gave me the courage to keep trying to improve. Imagine thinking of his political maneuvering and vote abuse as if he was a little child for a moment. It’s childish. It really has not been a big deal to me at all. Who here can honestly say they care that much about bits of karma? When was the last time you checked someone’s user page for how much karma they have to use that appeal to authority to analyse something they’ve posted? We knew for a long time ‘politics is the mind killer’. This shouldn’t all be so suprising. If you’re getting in markedly ideological political debates on LessWrong you’re doing it wrong!.
I feel uncomfortable even defending him because I fear some kind of backlash against me: maybe a claim I’m a sock puppet for him or something. That’s not a healthy community feeling. I may be alone in that feeling, so if that’s not the case please point this out someone (or if you don’t feel this at all, please point it out too).
This is a super charitable reading of him, and I’m not sure whether to congratulate you for proving capable of it, or simply to call it naivete. We’re mostly about being able to change one’s own opinion; that’s what we call rationality. Whereas he already “knows” that the truth is NRx, and what he calls “rationality” is simply whatever path you take to go from your current beliefs to NRx. Obviously people can’t disagree for valid reasons, “it is known” that they disagree because “the truth” makes them feel uncomfortable, or they’re brainwashed by the liberal media, or they’re simply inferior in intelligence or rationality. This is literally every post he has made lately.
You can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped. Hanlon’s razor and all that, but malice is a thing, and he has exhibited quite a bit of it in the past. I don’t really think his own behavior is causing him distress. I think he just doesn’t hold himself to the moral standard of having to be fair and kind to opponents.
P.S. I check people’s karma all the time, in case you were wondering. Mostly when a user seems fishy and I want to check the community consensus on him. It’s useful information.
P.P.S. We know you, Clarity. You wouldn’t get mistaken for an Eugine sockpuppet if you tried. You’re just different brands of crazy. :-P
-EY the other day
And yet it is you who knows the truth of his guilt. I say the best way is to ‘put him on trial’. If you will. I want to see him pressured to explain himself totally and under threat that if here lies, he could be banned (like perjury) and that if we have reasonable doubt that he may be innocent, he is free.
I love this, thanks! :) haha
I assume that NRX does contain some genuine insight about the real world, even though some or perhaps even most of it may be quite wrong. Anyway, there are a lot of folks out there who have made up their mind already and are not going to be convinced otherwise, much like Eugine or The_Lion or whoever. LW is plenty resilient enough to deal with such people—and indeed, this is a key requirement if it is to be successful.
Alternate hypothesis: NRx stole some genuine insights from other branches of political thought (eg public choice theory, moral drift) & passed them off as original to NRx.
For me, that is far too low a bar for getting my interest.
No, rationality is the ability to change one’s opinion on the basis of evidence. Screaming about how “outrageous” what someone said is doesn’t constitute evidence.
I’d certainly grant that you could well be correct in your impressions. After all, it’s odd for him to go from this to this week’s spree of what looks a lot like trolling, seemingly over getting a rule against his voting strategies enforced.
I think Eugine used to be here because he was interested in improving his and others’ rationality. I’m not sure he still is. And his trajectory doesn’t seem to be in the direction of improvement.
I don’t think there’s much risk of anyone thinking Clarity is a Eugine sockpuppet, and it looks to me as if people agreeing with or defending Eugine get pretty much the amount of backlash you’d expect for the opinions themselves, without extra for Siding With The Enemy.
(Incidentally, AIUI Eugine_Nier is not his actual name but a pun on “engineer”; but “Eugine” is the nearest thing we have to an actual name for him so it’ll have to do.)
Well, that line certainly appeared to be projection on CAE_Jones’s part.
I was thinking of a specific comment I wrote multiple replies to before successfully restraining myself with the realization that it was blatant flame-bait. I do not claim that the basic point (“groups x y and z produce fewer successful people on average than groups u v and w”, and “mediocre success gets signal-boosted among disadvantaged groups”) is false. I do claim that the way the_lion conducted himself during the discussion rapidly stopped including a willingness to engage with facts or use enough clarity to make some of his claims falsifiable, and the phrasing implied a deliberate attempt to provoke outrage (which I should note was mostly avoided; it is regrettable that a couple people succumbed to the temptation anyway.)
Compare this:
with your claim above the he was “divorced-from-reality”.
You didn’t quote the second sentence fully:
It’s still the same idea: The Lion was wrong, and refused to be corrected.
Perhaps instead of “divorced from”, I should have said “adversarial to”?
Or maybe I should have just left it at “adversarial” and not bothered bringing up the relation to reality at all.
Wow nice list of more-or-less vacuous insults. Interesting how the only non-vacuous one among them “divorced-from-reality” appears to be false.
Gee, I wonder who this anon might be...
[deleted]
The_Lion had 20+ sockpuppet accounts which he was using to upvote his comments, which makes it difficult for the community to show that they disapprove of his comments. A karma score of +8, 61% positive doesn’t look like massive disapproval to a casual reader, even if it means that 15 people downvoted it and no one upvoted it besides Eugine.
In brief, The_Lion wrote that there are no successful black people, and when people raised some of the obvious counterexamples he disputed each of them, and called the group of them “dancing bears.”
Hahahaha
I see no evidence that anyone gave into anything, the comments are still banned. Maybe something else that stopped working for some reason started working now, but not the hidden comments.
I see no evidence that anyone gave into anything, the comments are still banned. I’m tempted to ban the thread starting comment as a probable lie...
So you are asking to IP ban me?
That ought to be amusing… :-)
Not to mention that you seem to believe that one should vote on the author of the comment and not on the comment itself. So, for example, if I dislike Alice, I properly should go and downvote every single comment of hers. Oh, wait...
Yes every single upvote would be a little extreme, but it shouldn’t be too hard to narrow down people who have given him dozens of upvotes and flag them as probable sockpuppets.
For anyone who understands SQL and has access to the backend database, figuring out the sockpuppets is a trivial task.
Your other comments still don’t show up in their original context or in my inbox (though they do in your overview page).
Meh, I’m going to reply to the The_Lion2 copies instead.