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
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