I think the principle is something like, “if X socially harms Y, then Y is morally justified to pull analogous moves on X to make a point as long as this clearly causes only a fraction of the harm, maybe at most 10% something”. Which I recognize isn’t obvious; you could argue that X harming Y doesn’t give Y any permission to be less than maximally ethical. But that is not how most people assess things most of the time. People are generally not expected to be maximally nice to people who mistreated them. And given how humans work, I think that’s a norm that makes sense.
Kat framing the section as a negative example and explicitly telling people not to update reduces the reputational damage to a small fraction of what it would otherwise be (even though, as I said, I agree that it doesn’t remove it entirely). This looks to me like a high enough ethical standard given the context.
‘Kat framing the section as a negative example and explicitly telling people not to update reduces the reputational damage to a small fraction of what it would otherwise be ’
I think this is maybe part of the disagreement. I don’t think that the framing gets rid of most of the harm. People already know sometimes rumors are false or unfair, so just reminding people of this is not really adding much extra new information to the bare accusation itself.
I agree it can be okay/excusable to give in to the urge of taking digs at people who you think have unfairly harmed you. At the same time, I think it can make a big difference whether someone is doing this because of (1) or (2) of the following:
(1) they perceive situations like this as a social game about who manages to get the audience on their side, within which tactics like making insinuations about others’ character or repeating hearsay is fair game as long as it works / if the audience will think it’s okay/excusable/justified, etc.
or whether it’s
(2) while they’re pissed off and tempted to retaliate, they also feel strongly bound to a code of fairness where it’s only really okay to make bad insinuations if you’re very likely to be right, so they’re worried about saying the wrong thing, being biased, etc. I.e., they genuinely consider the possibility that they’re too emotionally invested and in the wrong themselves in the sense of feeling too much negativity about the other party and giving a distorted impression of them.
I interpret John G. Halstead’s point along the lines of “if they were doing (2) instead of (1), why does it look like they’re trying to have their cake and eat it? Why does it look like they’re simultaneously saying that accusations like that (which they chose to repeat/air publicly) are often about things that aren’t actually too bad or shouldn’t be trusted, but also saying that they mostly trust them and think they’re actually bad?”
No, but I think she would be morally permitted to verbally insult him after that, especially if it’s the first time she gets to respond.
My point was you should make norms that ask realistic things of people. It’s not realistic to expect people to be completely emotionally detached toward someone who harmed them. But it is realistic to expect them to keep retaliation to a minimum, which again, I think is the norm that most people actually apply to situations most of the time. And yes, if you construct an example where the initial harm is extreme, then the 10% figure I postulated doesn’t work anymore.
I think some of your recent comments raised valuable points but, unfortunately, too many do not follow Forum norms. Specifically, norms around assuming good faith, staying on topic, not being unnecessarily rude or offensive, and avoiding deliberate flamebait.
Also noting that this is your 14th comment on this thread, in a very short span of time, and your comments appear to be becoming increasingly rude.
This is a warning. I’ll note that this is your third warning — please be more mindful in the future. In order to avoid breaking norms going forward, please phrase your contributions in a more collaborative manner. Further norm violations could lead to rate-limiting or a ban.
(This was written in reply to the comment above, before your most recent comments)
It seems good to me if the forum team took more action here against this post, for example removing the section on Ben Pace that can clearly be interpreted as retaliatory. I don’t see why we would assume good faith for that part of the post.
The reaction here of the moderation seems a bit unbalanced.
I want to express ambivalence (actual ambivalence, not code for dislike) about this kind of moderation. I take it that if the same points had been expressed using different language, the mods would not have objected. But in my view, the inflammatory tone has discursive value—it signals a level of frustration and anger that is arguably appropriate, given the circumstances, and is difficult to communicate using more staid language.
I also wonder about the value-add of moderators intervening on these kinds of comments, given they tend to get downvoted anyways. And if they don’t, should the mods really be sanctioning them? (Do mods on other websites do this? My impression was that, e.g., the NYT just censors profanity and spam, and allows voting to do the rest.)
To give a little context for this comment, I read the Forum before I was involved in EA, and when I saw comments that were not phrased in a, uh, collaborative manner, my reaction was usually “wow, I’m glad someone is expressing their true feelings about this situation.” It made EA seem a bit more real, honest, and normal. I still basically feel this way. We all have emotional responses—especially to community events—and these emotions usually linger just below the surface of our neatly worded essays. (This is part of what feels off to me about the original post—it’s couched in niceties and formal language, but reads as biting and furious. I think the kind of moderation on display here encourages this kind of tone.)
I am sympathetic to the worry that a lot of online spaces are too rude, mean, unproductive, and so on, but I don’t think the Forum is going to descend into madness if the mods just allow democracy to do its thing here (though I’m not sure!). Conversely, I do think that tone-policing is hard to do even-handedly, and can contribute to weird and disingenuous discussions that I’m not sure are always a good thing, particularly when strong emotions may well be warranted.
Sorry, I don’t think I got this quite right in my initial comment; let me try again:
I think something really messed up is going on here, in that both Ben and Kat’s posts include some serious allegations that are supported by very limited evidence (like “anonymous person said X”). (Other allegations in these posts are supported by good evidence, like screenshots.) These accusations have the potential to seriously harm people’s professional lives, relationships, and mental health. And in both cases, the general message of both posts could be relayed without relying on the anecdotes that aren’t supported by good evidence.
The forum moderators have allowed this mudslinging to occur more or less unchecked. To the extent mods have been involved, their involvement has been limited to telling bystanders not to lose our heads. I think this is very bad! The evidentiary standards these posts are being held to wouldn’t come close to passing muster on Wikipedia (let alone in a newspaper or court). And there’s a reason for that: baselessly smearing people is bad. It is especially bad when the most plausible explanation for the behavior is vengeance. For the mods to then issue a warning for a take saying as much (packaged in combative language) while allowing the libel (packaged in Forum-y language) to go unchecked strikes me as exactly backwards, especially when Forum users can readily police the former (through voting), but cannot police the latter. Given the stakes of these kinds of posts for people’s lives, I really hope this situation prompts some kind of post-mortem about the evidentiary standards posts should be held to.
I don’t view the toe and murder comments as violating forum norms. They are a reductio of what I take to be an absurd argument. I think the comment about preposterous naivety is correct. The post itself obviously violates forum norms and the moderators are defending the post
For the record, my other warnings were for
discussing how someone credibly accused by multiple people of sexual misconduct repeatedly lied and isn’t permanently banned from the forum
-sharing true information about how Emile Torres has harassed me without sharing the supporting evidence for privacy reasons. The comment confirming the warning was heavily downvoted.
I think the principle is something like, “if X socially harms Y, then Y is morally justified to pull analogous moves on X to make a point as long as this clearly causes only a fraction of the harm, maybe at most 10% something”. Which I recognize isn’t obvious; you could argue that X harming Y doesn’t give Y any permission to be less than maximally ethical. But that is not how most people assess things most of the time. People are generally not expected to be maximally nice to people who mistreated them. And given how humans work, I think that’s a norm that makes sense.
Kat framing the section as a negative example and explicitly telling people not to update reduces the reputational damage to a small fraction of what it would otherwise be (even though, as I said, I agree that it doesn’t remove it entirely). This looks to me like a high enough ethical standard given the context.
‘Kat framing the section as a negative example and explicitly telling people not to update reduces the reputational damage to a small fraction of what it would otherwise be ’
I think this is maybe part of the disagreement. I don’t think that the framing gets rid of most of the harm. People already know sometimes rumors are false or unfair, so just reminding people of this is not really adding much extra new information to the bare accusation itself.
I agree it can be okay/excusable to give in to the urge of taking digs at people who you think have unfairly harmed you. At the same time, I think it can make a big difference whether someone is doing this because of (1) or (2) of the following:
(1) they perceive situations like this as a social game about who manages to get the audience on their side, within which tactics like making insinuations about others’ character or repeating hearsay is fair game as long as it works / if the audience will think it’s okay/excusable/justified, etc.
or whether it’s
(2) while they’re pissed off and tempted to retaliate, they also feel strongly bound to a code of fairness where it’s only really okay to make bad insinuations if you’re very likely to be right, so they’re worried about saying the wrong thing, being biased, etc. I.e., they genuinely consider the possibility that they’re too emotionally invested and in the wrong themselves in the sense of feeling too much negativity about the other party and giving a distorted impression of them.
I interpret John G. Halstead’s point along the lines of “if they were doing (2) instead of (1), why does it look like they’re trying to have their cake and eat it? Why does it look like they’re simultaneously saying that accusations like that (which they chose to repeat/air publicly) are often about things that aren’t actually too bad or shouldn’t be trusted, but also saying that they mostly trust them and think they’re actually bad?”
Right ok. So if Ben tried to murder kat, she would be permitted to cut off his arm?
No, but I think she would be morally permitted to verbally insult him after that, especially if it’s the first time she gets to respond.
My point was you should make norms that ask realistic things of people. It’s not realistic to expect people to be completely emotionally detached toward someone who harmed them. But it is realistic to expect them to keep retaliation to a minimum, which again, I think is the norm that most people actually apply to situations most of the time. And yes, if you construct an example where the initial harm is extreme, then the 10% figure I postulated doesn’t work anymore.
1 toe for ten toes?
I think some of your recent comments raised valuable points but, unfortunately, too many do not follow Forum norms. Specifically, norms around assuming good faith, staying on topic, not being unnecessarily rude or offensive, and avoiding deliberate flamebait.
Some examples:
Give. Me. A. Break.
if Ben tried to murder kat, she would be permitted to cut off his arm?
The preposterous naivety on show in discussions like this
Also noting that this is your 14th comment on this thread, in a very short span of time, and your comments appear to be becoming increasingly rude.
This is a warning. I’ll note that this is your third warning — please be more mindful in the future. In order to avoid breaking norms going forward, please phrase your contributions in a more collaborative manner. Further norm violations could lead to rate-limiting or a ban.
(This was written in reply to the comment above, before your most recent comments)
It seems good to me if the forum team took more action here against this post, for example removing the section on Ben Pace that can clearly be interpreted as retaliatory. I don’t see why we would assume good faith for that part of the post.
The reaction here of the moderation seems a bit unbalanced.
I want to express ambivalence (actual ambivalence, not code for dislike) about this kind of moderation. I take it that if the same points had been expressed using different language, the mods would not have objected. But in my view, the inflammatory tone has discursive value—it signals a level of frustration and anger that is arguably appropriate, given the circumstances, and is difficult to communicate using more staid language.
I also wonder about the value-add of moderators intervening on these kinds of comments, given they tend to get downvoted anyways. And if they don’t, should the mods really be sanctioning them? (Do mods on other websites do this? My impression was that, e.g., the NYT just censors profanity and spam, and allows voting to do the rest.)
To give a little context for this comment, I read the Forum before I was involved in EA, and when I saw comments that were not phrased in a, uh, collaborative manner, my reaction was usually “wow, I’m glad someone is expressing their true feelings about this situation.” It made EA seem a bit more real, honest, and normal. I still basically feel this way. We all have emotional responses—especially to community events—and these emotions usually linger just below the surface of our neatly worded essays. (This is part of what feels off to me about the original post—it’s couched in niceties and formal language, but reads as biting and furious. I think the kind of moderation on display here encourages this kind of tone.)
I am sympathetic to the worry that a lot of online spaces are too rude, mean, unproductive, and so on, but I don’t think the Forum is going to descend into madness if the mods just allow democracy to do its thing here (though I’m not sure!). Conversely, I do think that tone-policing is hard to do even-handedly, and can contribute to weird and disingenuous discussions that I’m not sure are always a good thing, particularly when strong emotions may well be warranted.
Sorry, I don’t think I got this quite right in my initial comment; let me try again:
I think something really messed up is going on here, in that both Ben and Kat’s posts include some serious allegations that are supported by very limited evidence (like “anonymous person said X”). (Other allegations in these posts are supported by good evidence, like screenshots.) These accusations have the potential to seriously harm people’s professional lives, relationships, and mental health. And in both cases, the general message of both posts could be relayed without relying on the anecdotes that aren’t supported by good evidence.
The forum moderators have allowed this mudslinging to occur more or less unchecked. To the extent mods have been involved, their involvement has been limited to telling bystanders not to lose our heads. I think this is very bad! The evidentiary standards these posts are being held to wouldn’t come close to passing muster on Wikipedia (let alone in a newspaper or court). And there’s a reason for that: baselessly smearing people is bad. It is especially bad when the most plausible explanation for the behavior is vengeance. For the mods to then issue a warning for a take saying as much (packaged in combative language) while allowing the libel (packaged in Forum-y language) to go unchecked strikes me as exactly backwards, especially when Forum users can readily police the former (through voting), but cannot police the latter. Given the stakes of these kinds of posts for people’s lives, I really hope this situation prompts some kind of post-mortem about the evidentiary standards posts should be held to.
I don’t view the toe and murder comments as violating forum norms. They are a reductio of what I take to be an absurd argument. I think the comment about preposterous naivety is correct. The post itself obviously violates forum norms and the moderators are defending the post
For the record, my other warnings were for
discussing how someone credibly accused by multiple people of sexual misconduct repeatedly lied and isn’t permanently banned from the forum
-sharing true information about how Emile Torres has harassed me without sharing the supporting evidence for privacy reasons. The comment confirming the warning was heavily downvoted.
Thanks for the feedback! I replied here since it’s unrelated to this post.