...as a small case study, the Effective Altruism forum has been impoverished over the last few years by not being lenient with valuable contributors when they had a bad day.
In a few cases, I later learnt that some longstanding user had a mental health breakdown/psychotic break/bipolar something or other. To some extent this is an arbitrary category, and you can interpret going outside normality through the lens of mental health, or through the lens of “this person chose to behave inappropriately”. Still, my sense is that leniency would have been a better move when people go off the rails.
In particular, the best move seems to me a combination of:
In the short term, when a valued member is behaving uncharacteristically badly, stop them from posting
Followup a week or a few weeks later to see how the person is doing
Two factors here are:
There is going to be some overlap in that people with propensity for some mental health disorders might be more creative, better able to see things from weird angles, better able to make conceptual connections.
In a longstanding online community, people grow to care about others. If a friend goes of the rails, there is the question of how to stop them from causing harm to others, but there is also the question of how to help them be ok, and the second one can just dominate sometimes.
I don’t think not banning users for first offences is necessary the highest bar I want to reach for. For instance, consider this comment. Like, to exaggerate this a bit, imagine receiving that comment in one of the top 3 worst moments of your life.
I value a forum where people are not rude to each other, so I think it is good that moderators give out a warning to people who are becoming increasingly rude in a short time.
At some point in the 90s or the 00s, the “whole of person” concept became popular in the US Natsec community for security clearance matters.
It distinguishes between a surface level vibe from a person, and trying to understand the whole person. The surface level vibe is literally taking the worst of a person and taking it out of context, whereas the whole person concept is making any effort at all to evaluate the person and the odds that they’re good to work with and on what areas. Each subject has their own cost-benefit analysis in the context of different work they might do, and more flexible people (e.g. younger) and weirder people will probably have cost-benefit analysis that change somewhat over time.
In environments where evaluators are incompetent, lack the resources needed to evaluate each person, or believe that humans can’t be evaluated, then there’s a reasonable justification to rule people out without making an effort to optimize.
Otherwise, evaluators should strive to make predictions and minimize the gap between their predictions of whether a subject will cause harm again, and the reality that comes to pass; for example, putting in any effort at all to succeed at distinguishing between individuals causing harm due to mental health, individuals causing harm due to mistakes due to unpreventable ignorance (e.g. the pauseAI movement), mistakes caused by ignorance that should have been preventable, harm caused by malice correctly attributed to the subject, harm caused by someone spoofing the point of origin, or harm caused by a hostile individual, team, or force covertly using SOTA divide-and-conquer tactics to disrupt or sow discord in an entire org, movement, or vulnerable clique; see Conflict vs mistake theory.
Prompted by a different forum:
I’m surprised by this. I don’t feel like the Forum bans people for a long time for first offences?
I don’t think not banning users for first offences is necessary the highest bar I want to reach for. For instance, consider this comment. Like, to exaggerate this a bit, imagine receiving that comment in one of the top 3 worst moments of your life.
I value a forum where people are not rude to each other, so I think it is good that moderators give out a warning to people who are becoming increasingly rude in a short time.
A factor here is that EA has historically had a mental health problem (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FheKNFgPqEsN8Nxuv/ea-mental-health-survey-results-and-analysis?commentId=hJweNWsmJr8Jtki86).
At some point in the 90s or the 00s, the “whole of person” concept became popular in the US Natsec community for security clearance matters.
It distinguishes between a surface level vibe from a person, and trying to understand the whole person. The surface level vibe is literally taking the worst of a person and taking it out of context, whereas the whole person concept is making any effort at all to evaluate the person and the odds that they’re good to work with and on what areas. Each subject has their own cost-benefit analysis in the context of different work they might do, and more flexible people (e.g. younger) and weirder people will probably have cost-benefit analysis that change somewhat over time.
In environments where evaluators are incompetent, lack the resources needed to evaluate each person, or believe that humans can’t be evaluated, then there’s a reasonable justification to rule people out without making an effort to optimize.
Otherwise, evaluators should strive to make predictions and minimize the gap between their predictions of whether a subject will cause harm again, and the reality that comes to pass; for example, putting in any effort at all to succeed at distinguishing between individuals causing harm due to mental health, individuals causing harm due to mistakes due to unpreventable ignorance (e.g. the pauseAI movement), mistakes caused by ignorance that should have been preventable, harm caused by malice correctly attributed to the subject, harm caused by someone spoofing the point of origin, or harm caused by a hostile individual, team, or force covertly using SOTA divide-and-conquer tactics to disrupt or sow discord in an entire org, movement, or vulnerable clique; see Conflict vs mistake theory.