Moderation update: We have indefinitely banned 8 accounts[1] that were used by the same user (JamesS) to downvote some posts and comments from Nonlinear and upvote critical content about Nonlinear. Please remember that voting with multiple accounts on the same post or comment is very much against Forum norms.
(Please note that this is separate from the incident described here)
Was emerson_fartz an acceptable username in the first place? (It may not have had a post history in which case no one may have noticed its existence before the sockpuppeting detection, but that sounds uncivil toward a living person)
We have strong reason to believe that Torres (philosophytorres) used a second account to violate their earlier ban. We feel that this means that we cannot trust Torres to follow this forum’s norms, and are banning them for the next 20 years (until 1 October 2042).
LukeDing (and their associated alt account) has been banned for six months, due to voting & multiple-account-use violations. We believe that they voted on the same comment/post with two accounts more than two hundred times. This includes several instances of using an alt account to vote on their own comments.
LukeDing appealed the decision; we will reach out to them and ask them if they’d like us to feature a response from them under this comment.
As some of you might realize, some people on the moderation team have conflicts of interest with LukeDing, so we wanted to clarify our process for resolving this incident. We uncovered the norm violation after an investigation into suspicious voting patterns, and only revealed the user’s identity to part of the team. The moderators who made decisions about how to proceed weren’t aware of LukeDing’s identity (they only saw anonymized information).
Is more information about the appellate process available? The guide to forum norms says “We’re working on a formal process for reviewing submissions to this form, to make sure that someone outside of the moderation team will review every submission, and we’ll update this page when we have a process in place.”
The basic questions for me would include: information about who decides appeals, how much deference (if any) the adjudicator will give to the moderators’ initial decision—which probably should vary based on the type of decision at hand, and what kind of contact between the mods and appellate adjudicator(s) is allowed. On the last point, I would prefer as little ex parte contact if possible, and would favor having an independent vetted “advocate for the appellant” looped in if there needs to be contact to which the appellant is not privy.
Admittedly I have a professional bias toward liking process, but I would err on the side of more process than less where accounts are often linked to real-world identities and suspensions are sometimes for conduct that could be seen as dishonest or untrustworthy. I would prefer public disclosure of an action taken in cases like this only after the appellate process is complete for the same reasons, assuming the user timely indicates a desire to appeal the finding of a norm violation.
Finally, I commend keeping the moderators deciding whether a violation occurred blinded as to the user’s identity as a best practice in cases like this, even where there are no COIs. It probably should be revealed prior to determining a sanction, though.
I would prefer public disclosure of an action taken in cases like this only after the appellate process is complete for the same reasons, assuming the user timely indicates a desire to appeal the finding of a norm violation.
It does intuitively seem like an immediate temporary ban, made public only after whatever appeals are allowed have been exhausted, should give the moderation team basically everything they need while being more considerate of anyone whose appeals are ultimately upheld (i.e. innocent, or mitigating circumstances).
Moderation update: A new user, Bernd Clemens Huber, recently posted a first post (“All or Nothing: Ethics on Cosmic Scale, Outer Space Treaty, Directed Panspermia, Forwards-Contamination, Technology Assessment, Planetary Protection, (and Fermi’s Paradox)”) that was a bit hard to make sense of. We hadn’t approved the post over the weekend and hadn’t processed it yet, when the Forum team got an angry and aggressive email today from the user in question calling the team “dipshits” (and providing a definition of the word) for waiting throughout the weekend.
If the user disagrees with our characterization of the email, they can email us to give permission for us to share the whole thing.
We have decided that this is not a promising start to the user’s interactions on the Forum, and have banned them indefinitely. Please let us know if you have concerns, and as a reminder, here are the Forum’s norms.
We have strong reason to believe that Charles He used multiple new accounts to violate his earlier 6-month-long ban. We feel that this means that we cannot trust Charles He to follow this forum’s norms, and are banning him from the Forum for the next 10 years (until December 20, 2032).
We have already issued temporary suspensions to several suspected duplicate accounts, including one which violated norms about rudeness and was flagged to us by multiple users. We will be extending the bans for each of these accounts to mirror Charles’s 10-year ban, but are giving the users an opportunity to message us if we have made any of those temporary suspensions in error (and have already reached out to them). While we aren’t >99% certain about any single account, we’re around 99% that at least one of these is Charles He.
I find this reflects worse on the mod team than Charles. This is nowhere near the first time I’ve felt this way.
Fundamentally, it seems the mod team heavily prioritizes civility and following shallow norms above enabling important discourse. The post on forum norms says a picture of geese all flying in formation and in one direction is the desirable state of the forum; I disagree that this is desirable. Healthy conflict is necessary to sustain a healthy community. Conflict sometimes entails rudeness. Some rudeness here and there is not a big deal and does not need to be stamped out entirely. This also applies to the people who get banned for criticizing EA rudely, even when they’re criticizing EA for its role in one of the great frauds of modern history. Banning EA critics for minor reasons is a short-sighted move at best.
Banning Charles for 10 years (!!) for the relatively small crime of evading a previous ban is a seriously flawed idea. Some of his past actions like doxxing someone (without any malice I believe) are problematic and need to be addressed, but do not deserve a 10 year ban. Some of his past comments, especially farther in the past, have been frustrating and net-negative to me, but these negative actions are not unrelated to some of his positive traits, like his willingness to step out of EA norms and communicate clearly rather than like an EA bot. The variance of his comments has steadily decreased over time. Some of his comments are even moderator-like, such as when he warned EA forum users not to downvote a WSJ journalist who wasn’t breaking any rules. I note that the mod team did not step in there to encourage forum norms.
I also find it very troubling that the mod team has consistent and strong biases in how it enforces its norms and rules, such as not taking any meaningful action against an EA in-group member for repeated and harmful violations of norms but banning an EA critic for 20 years for probably relatively minor and harmless violations. I don’t believe Charles would have received a similar ban if he was an employee of a brand name EA org or was in the right social circles.
Finally, as Charles notes, there should be an appeals process for bans.
the relatively small crime of evading a previous ban
I don’t think repeatedly evading moderator bans is a “relatively small crime”. If Forum moderation is to mean anything at all, it has to be consistently enforced, and if someone just decides that moderation doesn’t apply to them, they shouldn’t be allowed to post or comment on the Forum.
Charles only got to his 6 month ban via a series of escalating minor bans, most of which I agreed with. I think he got a lot of slack in his behaviour because he sometimes provided significant value, but sometimes (with insufficient infrequency) behaved in ways that were seriously out of kilter with the goal of a healthy Forum.
I personally think the 10-year thing is kind of silly and he should just have been banned indefinitely at this point, then maybe have the ban reviewed in a little while. But it’s clear he’s been systematically violating Forum policies in a way that requires serious action.
The post on forum norms says a picture of geese all flying in formation and in one direction is the desirable state of the forum; I disagree that this is desirable.
Indefinite suspension with leave to seek reinstatement after a stated suitable period would have been far preferable to a 10-year ban. A tenner isn’t necessary to vindicate the moderators’ authority, and the relevant conduct doesn’t give the impression of someone for whom the passage of ten years’ time is necessary before there is a reasonable probability that would they have become a suitable participant during the suspension.
It makes a lot of difference to me that Charles’ behavior was consistently getting better. If someone consistently flouts norms without any improvement, at some point they should be indefinitely banned. This is not the case with Charles. He started off with really high variance and at this point has reached a pretty tolerable amount. He has clearly worked on his actions. The comments he posted while flouting the mods’ authority generally contributed to the conversation. There are other people who have done worse things without action from the mod team. Giving him a 10 year ban without appeal for this feels more motivated by another instance of the mod team asserting their authority and deciding not to deal with messiness someone is causing than a principled decision.
I think this is probably true. I still think that systematically evading a Forum ban is worse behaviour (by which I mean, more lengthy-ban-worthy) than any of his previous transgressions.
There are other people who have done worse things without action from the mod team.
I am not personally aware of any, and am sceptical of this claim. Open to being convinced, though.
Totally unrelated to the core of the matter, but do you intend to turn this into a frontpage post? I’m a bit inclined to say it’d be better for transparency, and to inform others about the bans, and deter potential violators.… but I’m not sure, maybe you have a reason for preferring the shortform (or you’ll publish periodical updates on the frontpage
In other forums and situations, there is a grace period where a user can comment after receiving a very long ban. I think this is a good feature that has several properties with long term value.
We have strong reason to believe that Charles He used multiple new accounts to violate his earlier 6-month-long ban.
These accounts are some of these accounts I created (but not all[1]):
Here are some highlights of some of the comments made by the accounts, within about a 30 day period.
Pointing out the hollowness of SBF’s business, which then produced a follow up comment, which was widely cited outside the forum, and may have helped generate a media narrative about SBF.
My alternate accounts were created successively, as they were successively banned. This was the only reason for subterfuge, which I view as distasteful.
I have information on the methods that the CEA team used to track my accounts (behavioral telemetry, my residential IP). This is not difficult to defeat. Not only did I not evade these methods, but I gave information about my identity several times (resulting in a ban each time). These choices, based on my distaste, is why the CEA team is “99% certain” (and at least, in a mechanical sense) why I have this 10 year ban.
We feel that this means that we cannot trust Charles He to follow this forum’s norms, and are banning him from the Forum for the next 10 years (until December 20, 2032).
I believe I am able to defend each of the actions on my previous bans individually (but never have before this). More importantly, I always viewed my behavior as a protest.
At this point, additional discussions are occurring by CEA[1], such as considering my ban from EAG and other EA events. By this, I’ll be joining blacklists of predators and deceivers.
As shown above, my use of alternate accounts did not promote or benefit myself in any way (even setting aside expected moderator action). Others in EA have used sock puppets to try to benefit their orgs, and gone on to be very successful.
Note that the moderator who executed the ban above, is not necessarily involved in any way in further action or policy mentioned in my comments. Four different CEA staff members have reached out or communicated to me in the last 30 days.
Moderation update: We have banned “Richard TK” for 6 months for using a duplicate account to double-vote on the same posts and comments. We’re also banning another account (Anin, now deactivated), which seems to have been used by that same user or by others to amplify those same votes. Please remember that voting with multiple accounts on the same post or comment is very much against Forum norms.
(Please note that this is separate from the incident described here)
We’re issuing [Edit: identifying information redacted] a two-month ban for using multiple accounts to vote on the same posts and comments, and in one instance for commenting in a thread pretending to be two different users. [Edit: the user had a total of 13 double-votes, most far apart and are likely accidental, two upvotes close together on others’ posts (which they claim are accidental as well), but two cases of deliberate self upvote from alternative accounts]
This is against the Forumnorms around using multiple accounts. Votes are really important for the Forum: they provide feedback to authors and signal to readers what other users found most valuable, so we need to be particularly strict in discouraging this kind of vote manipulation.
A note on timing: the comment mentioned above is 7 months old but went unnoticed at the time, a report for it came in last week and triggered this investigation.
If [Edit: redacted] thinks that this is not right, he can appeal. As a reminder, bans affect the user, not the account.
[Edit: We have retroactively decided to redact the user’s name from this early message, and are currently rethinking our policies on the matter]
Do suspended users get a chance to make a public reply to the mod team’s findings? I don’t think that’s always necessary—e.g., we all see the underlying conduct when public incivility happens—but I think it’s usually warranted when the findings imply underhanded behavior (“pretending”) and the underlying facts aren’t publicly observable. There’s an appeal process, but that doesn’t address the public-reputation interests of the suspended person.
It’s kind of jarring to read that someone has been banned for “violating a norm”—that word to me implies that they’re informal agreements between the community. Why not call them “rules”?
pinkfrog (and their associated account) has been banned for 1 month, because they voted multiple times on the same content (with two accounts), including upvoting pinkfrog’s comments with their other account. To be a bit more specific, this happened on one day, and there were 12 cases of double-voting in total (which we’ll remove). This is against our Forum norms on voting and using multiple accounts.
As a reminder, bans affect the user, not the account(s).
If anyone has questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out, and if you think we made a mistake here, you can appeal the decision.
Multiple people on the moderation team have conflicts of interest with pinkfrog, so I wanted to clarify our process for resolving this incident. We uncovered the norm violation after an investigation into suspicious voting patterns, and only revealed the user’s identity to part of the team. The moderators who made decisions about how to proceed aren’t aware of pinkfrog’s real identity (they only saw anonymized information).
It seems inconsistent to have this info public for some, and redacted for others. I do think it is good public service to have this information public, but am primarily pushing here for consistency and some more visibility around existing decisions.
Agree. It seems potentially pretty damaging to people’s reputations to make this information public (and attached to their names); that strikes me as a much bigger penalty than the bans. There should, at a minimum, be a consistent standard, and I’m inclined to think that standard should be having a high bar for releasing identifying information.
I think we should hesitate to protect people from reputational damage caused by people posting true information about them. Perhaps there’s a case to be made when the information is cherry-picked or biased, or there’s no opportunity to hear a fair response. But goodness, if we’ve learned anything from the last 18 months I hope it would include that sharing information about bad behaviour is sometimes a public good.
I would guess that most people engage in private behavior that would be reputationally damaging if the internet were to find out about it. Just because something is true doesn’t mean you forfeit your rights to not have that information be made public.
I think people might reasonably (though wrongly) assume that forum mods are not monitoring accounts at this level of granularity, and thus believe that their voting behavior is private. Given this, I think mods should warn before publicly censoring. (Just as it would be better to inform your neighbor that you can see them doing something embarrassing through their window before calling the police or warning other people about then—maybe they just don’t realize you can see, and telling them is all they need to not do the thing anymore, which, after all, is the goal.)
Frankly, I don’t love that mods are monitoring accounts at this level of granularity. (For instance, knowing this would make me less inclined to put remotely sensitive info in a forum dm.)
Writing in a personal capacity; I haven’t run this by other mods.
Hi, just responding to these parts of your comment:
I think people might reasonably (though wrongly) assume that forum mods are not monitoring accounts at this level of granularity, and thus believe that their voting behavior is private.
...
Frankly, I don’t love that mods are monitoring accounts at this level of granularity. (For instance, knowing this would make me less inclined to put remotely sensitive info in a forum dm.)
We include some detail on what would lead moderators to look into a user’s voting activity, and what information we have access to, on our “Guide to norms on the Forum” page:
Voting activity is generally private (even admins don’t know who voted on what), but if we have reason to believe that someone is violating norms around voting (e.g. by mass-downvoting many of a different user’s comments and posts), we reserve the right to check what account is doing this. If we suspect that someone is using multiple accounts to vote on the same post, we also reserve the right to check whether the accounts are related, and check their voting history.
...
The following information is accessible to moderators but will only be used to identify behavior such as “sockpuppet” accounts and mass downvoting, in situations where we have strong reason to believe that an account is used to get around a ban (or other restriction), or in the case of severe safety concerns. The moderators will not view or use this information for any other purpose.
The IP address a post/comment came from
The voting history of users
The identity of voters on any given post/comment
(In addition, note that moderators can’t just go into a user’s account and check their voting history even when we do have reason to look into that user. We require one of the Forum engineers to run some queries on the back end to yield this information.)
Finally, to address your concern about direct messages on the Forum: like a regular user, a moderator cannot see into anyone else’s messages.
Thanks for writing this! To clarify a few points even more:
moderators can’t just go into a user’s account and check their voting history even when we do have reason to look into that user. We require one of the Forum engineers to run some queries on the back end to yield this information.
I confirm this, and just want to highlight that
this is pretty rare; we have a high bar before asking developers to look into patterns
usually, one developer looks into things, and shares anonymized data with moderators, who then decide whether it needs to be investigated more deeply
If so, a subset of moderators gets access to deanonymized data to make a decision and contact/warn/ban the user(s)
On
like a regular user, a moderator cannot see into anyone else’s direct messages.
I confirm this, but I want to highlight that messages on the forum are not end-to-end encrypted and are, by default, sent via email as well (i.e. when you get a message on the forum you also get an email with the message). So forum developers and people who have or will have access to the recipient’s email inbox, or the forum’s email delivery service, can see the messages.
For very private communications, I would recommend using privacy-first end-to-end encrypted platforms like Signal.
Thanks; this is helpful and reassuring, especially re: the DMs. I had read this section of the norms page, and it struck me that the “if we have reason to believe that someone is violating norms around voting” clause was doing a lot of work. I would appreciate more clarification about what would lead mods to believe something like this (and maybe some examples of how you’ve come to have such beliefs). But this is not urgent, and thanks for the clarification you’ve already provided.
Yeah, this is a reasonable thing to ask. So, the “if we have reason to believe that someone is violating norms around voting” clause is intentionally vague, I believe, because if we gave more detail on the kinds of checks/algorithms we have in place for flagging potential violations, then this could help would-be miscreants commit violations that slip past our checks.
(I’m a bit sad that the framing here is adversarial, and that we can’t give users like you more clarification, but I think this state of play is the reality of running an online forum.)
If it helps, though, the bar for looking into a user’s voting history is high. Like, on average I don’t think we do this more than once or twice per month.
Thanks, this is also helpful! One thing to think about (and no need to tell me), is whether making the checks public could effectively disincentivize the bad behavior (like how warnings about speed cameras may as effectively disincentivize speeding as the cameras do themselves). But if there are easy workarounds, I can see why this wouldn’t be viable.
Just because something is true doesn’t mean you forfeit your rights to not have that information be made public.
I agree that not all true things should be made public, but I think when it specifically pertains to wrongdoing and someone’s trustworthiness, the public interest can override the right to privacy. If you look into your neighbour’s window and you see them printing counterfeit currency, you go to the police first, rather than giving them an opportunity to simply hide their fraud better.
Maybe the crux is: I think forum users upvoting their own comments is more akin to them Facetuning dating app photos than printing counterfeit currency. Like, this is pretty innocuous behavior and if you just tell people not to do it, they’ll stop.
It seems like we disagree on how bad it is to self-vote (I don’t think it’s anywhere near the level of “actual crime”, but I do think it’s pretty clearly dishonest and unfair, and for such a petty benefit it’s hard for me to feel sympathetic to the temptation).
But I don’t think it’s the central point for me. If you’re simultaneously holding that:
this information isn’t actually a big deal, but
releasing this publically would cause a lot of harm through reputational damage,
then there’s a paternalistic subtext where people can’t be trusted to come to the “right” conclusions from the facts. If this stuff really wasn’t a big deal, then talking about it publically wouldn’t be a big deal either. I don’t think people should be shunned forever and excluded from any future employment because they misused multiple accounts on the forum. I do think they should be a little embarrassed, and I don’t think that moving to protect them from that embarrassment is actually a kindness from a community-wide perspective.
I feel like this is getting really complicated and ultimately my point is very simple: prevent harmful behavior via the least harmful means. If you can get people to not vote for themselves by telling them not to, then just… do that. I have a really hard time imagining that someone who was warned about this would continue to do it; if they did, it would be reasonable to escalate. But if they’re warned and then change their behavior, why do I need to know this happened? I just don’t buy that it reflects some fundamental lack of integrity that we all need to know about (or something like this).
I think that posting that someone is banned and why they were banned is not mainly about punishing them. It’s about helping people understand what the moderation team is doing, how rule-breaking is handled, and why someone no longer has access to the forum. For example, it helps us to understand if the moderation team are acting on inadequate information, or inconsistently between different people. The fact that publishing this information harms people is an unfortunate side effect, after the main effect of improving transparency and keeping people informed.
It doesn’t even really feel right to call them harmed by the publication. If people are harmed by other people knowing they misuse the voting system, I’d say they were mainly harmed by their own misuse of the system, not by someone reporting on it.
I just don’t buy that it reflects some fundamental lack of integrity that we all need to know about
Then you needn’t object to the moderation team talking about what they did!
It’s about helping people understand what the moderation team is doing, how rule-breaking is handled, and why someone no longer has access to the forum.
It’s unclear to me that naming names materially advances the first two goals. As to the third, the suspended user could have the option of having their name disclosed. Otherwise, I don’t think we’re entitled to an explanation of why a particular poster isn’t active anymore.
There’s also the interest in deterring everyone else from doing it (general deterrence), not just in getting these specific people to stop doing it (specific deterrence). While I have mixed feelings about publicly naming offenders, the penalty does need to sting enough to make the benefits of the offense not worth the risk of getting caught. A private warning with no real consequences might persuade the person violating the rules not to do it again, but double-voting would surge as people learned you get a freebie.
“double-voting would surge as people learned you get a freebie.”
I just don’t see this happening?
Separately, one objection I have to cracking down hard on self-voting is that I think this is not very harmful relative to other ways in which people don’t vote how they’re “supposed to.” E.g., we know the correlation between upvotes and agree votes is incredibly high, and downvoting something solely because you disagree with it strikes me as more harmful to discourse on the forum than self-voting. I think the reason self-voting gets highlighted isn’t because it’s especially harmful, it’s just because it’s especially catchable.
If the mods want to improve people’s voting behavior on the forum, I both wish they’d target different voting behavior (ie, the agree/upvoting correlation) and use different means to do it (ie, generating reports for people of their own voting correlations, whether they tend to upvote/downvote certain people, etc), rather than naming/shaming people for self-voting.
I think it’s more that upvoting your own posts from an alt is (1) willful, intentional behavior (2) aimed at deceiving the community about the level of support of a comment (3) for the person’s own benefit. Presumably, most people who are doing it are employing some sort of means to evade detection, which adds another layer of deceptiveness. While I don’t like downvoting-for-disagreement and the like either, that kind of behavior presumptively reflects a natural cognitive bias rather than any of the three characteristics listed above. It is for those reasons that—in my view—downvoting-for-disagreement is generally not the proper subject of a sanctioning system,[1] while self-upvoting is.
I’ve suggested to the mods before that sanctions should sometimes be more carefully tailored to the offense, so I’d be open to the view that consequences like permanently denying the violator’s ability to vote and their ability to use alts might be more tailored to the offense than public disclosure. Those are the specific functions which they have demonstrated an inability to handle responsibly. Neither function is so fundamental to the ability to use the Forum that the mods should feel obliged to expend their time deciding if the violator has rehabilitated themselves enough to restore those privileges.
There could be circumstances in which soft-norm violative behavior was so extreme that sanctions should be considered. However, unlike “don’t multi-vote” (which is a bright-line rule for which the violator should be perfectly aware that they are violating the rules), these norms are less clearcut—so privately reaching out to the person would be the appropriate first action in a case like that.
Fair point about reputational harms being worse and possibly too punishing in some cases. I think in terms of a proposed standard it might be worth differentiating (if possible) between e.g. careless errors, or momentary lapses in judgement that were quickly rectified and likely caused no harm in expectation, versus a pattern of dishonest voting intended to mislead the EAF audience, and especially if they or an org that they work for stand to gain from it, or the comments in question are directly harmful to another org. In these latter cases the reputational harm may be more justifiable.
For reasoning transparency / precedent development, it might be worthwhile to address two points:
(1) I seem to remember other multivoting suspensions being much longer than 1 month. I had gotten the impression that the de facto starting point for deliberate multiaccount vote manipulation was ~ six months. Was the length here based on mitigating factors, perhaps the relatively low number of violations and that they occurred on a single day? If the usual sanction is ~ six months, I think it would be good to say that here so newer users understand that multivoting is a really big deal.
(2) Here the public notice names the anon account pinkfrog (which has 3 comments + 50 karma), rather than the user’s non-anon account. The last multi account voting suspension I saw named the user’s primary account, which was their real name. Even though the suspension follows the user, which account is publicly named can have a significant effect on public reputation. How does the mod team decide which user to name in the public notice?
pinkfrog: 1 month (12 cases of double voting) LukeDing: 6 months (>200 times) JamesS: indefinite (8 accounts, number not specified) [Redacted]: 2 months (13 double votes, most are “likely accidental”, two “self upvotes”) RichardTK: 6 months (number not specified)
Charles He: 10 years (not quite analogous as these are using alts to circumvent initial bans, included other violations) Torres: 20 years (not quite analogous as these are using alts to circumvent initial bans, included other violations)
(Written in a personal capacity, I did not check this with other moderators)
Thank you for the feedback! I didn’t want to go too off-topic, as this is unrelated to this post, so I’m replying here, but I want to quickly share some factual information for other readers.
The post itself obviously violates forum norms and the moderators are defending the post
You’re writing this in multiple comments. I want to make it clear that moderators did not endorse or “defend” (or symmetrically “attack”) the post as moderators. But of course, we do comment as users on parts we agree or disagree with (like any other user). Let us know if it’s not clear whether we’re commenting as users or as moderators.
As for your other warnings, I want to make sure other readers know that your last warning was not for discussing a specific topic, but for being uncivil and not constructive to the discussion. I agree that the situation in the first warning is less relevant to this case, apologies for bringing it up.
Just a quick note to say that we’ve removed a post sharing a Fermi estimate of the chances that the author finds a partner who matches their preferred characteristics and links to a date-me doc.
The Forum is for discussions about improving the world, and a key norm we highlight is “Stay on topic.” This is not the right space for coordinating dating. (Consider exploring LessWrong, ACX threads/classifieds, or EA-adjacent Facebook/Reddit/Discord groups for discussions that are primarily social.)
We’re not taking any other action about the author, although I’ve asked them to stay on topic in the future.
Around a month ago, a post about the authorship of Democratising Risk got published. This post got taken down by its author. Before this happened, the moderation team had been deciding what to do with some aspects of the post (and the resulting discussion) that had violated Forum norms. We were pretty confident that we’d end up banning two users for at least a month, so we banned them temporarily while we sorted some things out.
One of these users was Throwaway151. We banned them for posting something a bit misleading (the post seemed to overstate its conclusions based on the little evidence it had, and wasn’t updated very quickly based on clear counter-evidence), and being uncivil in the comments. Their ban has passed, now. As a reminder, bans affect the user, not the account, so any other accounts Throwaway151 operated were also affected. The other user was philosophytorres — see the relevant update.
Quick update: we’ve banned Defacto, who we have strong reason to believe is another sockpuppet account for Charles He. We are extending Charles’s ban to be indefinite (he and others can appeal if they want to).
We’ve banned Vee from the Forum for 1 year. Their content seems to be primarily or significantly AI-generated,[1] and it’s not clear that they’re using it to share thoughts they endorse and have carefully engaged with. (This had come up before on one of their posts.) Our current policy on AI-generated content makes it clear that we’ll be stricter when moderating AI-generated content. Vee’s content doesn’t meet the standards of the Forum.
If Vee thinks that this is not right, they can appeal. If they come back, we’ll be checking to make sure that their content follows Forum norms. As a reminder, bans affect the user, not the account.
Different detectors for AI content are giving this content different scores, but we think that this is sufficiently likely true to act on.
It’s hard to be certain that something is AI-generated, and I’m not very satisfied with our processes or policies on this front. At the same time, the increase in the number of bots has made dealing with spam or off-topic/troll contributions harder, and I think that waiting for something closer to certainty will have costs that are too high.
Moderation update: I’m indefinitely banning JasMaguire for an extremely racist comment that has since been deleted. We’ll likely revisit and update our forum norms to explicitly discourage this sort of behavior.
Moderation update: We’re issuing dstudiocode a one-month ban for breaking Forum norms in their recent post and subsequent behavior. Specifically:
Posting content that could be interpreted as promoting violence or illegal activities.
The post in question, which asked whether murdering meat-eaters could be considered “ethical,” crosses a line in terms of promoting potential violence.
As a reminder, the ban affects the user, not just the account. During their ban period, the user will not be permitted to rejoin the Forum under another account name. If they return to the Forum after the ban period, we’ll expect a higher standard of norm-following and compliance with moderator instructions.
You can reach out to forum-moderation@effectivealtruism.org with any questions. You can appeal this decision here.
I suggest editing this comment to note the partial reversal on appeal and/or retracting the comment, to avoid the risk of people seeing only it and reading it as vaguely precedential.
Strong +1 to Richard, this seems a clear incorrect moderation call and I encourage you to reverse it.
I’m personally very strongly opposed to killing people because they eat meat, and the general ethos behind that. I don’t feel in the slightest offended or bothered by that post, it’s just one in a string of hypothetical questions, and it clearly is not intended as a call to action or to encourage action.
If the EA Forum isn’t somewhere where you can ask a perfectly legitimate hypothetical question like that, what are we even doing here?
The moderators have reviewed the decision to ban @dstudioscode after users appealed the decision. Tl;dr: We are revoking the ban, and are instead rate-limiting dstudioscode and warning them to avoid posting content that could be perceived as advocating for major harm or illegal activities. The rate limit is due to dstudiocode’s pattern of engagement on the Forum, not simply because of their most recent post—for more on this, see the “third consideration” listed below.
More details:
Three moderators,[1] none of whom was involved in the original decision to ban dstudiocode, discussed this case.
The first consideration was “Does the cited norm make sense?” For reference, the norm cited in the original ban decision was “Materials advocating major harm or illegal activities, or materials that may be easily perceived as such” (under “What we discourage (and may delete or edit out)” in our “Guide to norms on the Forum”). The panel of three unanimously agreed that having some kind of Forum norm in this vein makes sense.
The second consideration was “Does the post that triggered the ban actually break the cited norm?” For reference, the post ended with the question “should murdering a meat eater be considered ‘ethical’?” (Since the post was rejected by moderators, users cannot see it.[2] We regret the confusion caused by us not making this point clearer in the original ban message.)
There was disagreement amongst the moderators involved in the appeal process about whether or not the given post breaks the norm cited above. I personally think that the post is acceptable since it does not constitute a call to action. The other two moderators see the post as breaking the norm; they see the fact that it is “just” a philosophical question as not changing the assessment.[3] (Note: The “meat-eater problem” hasbeendiscussed elsewhere on the Forum. Unlike the post in question, in the eyes of the given two moderators, these posts did not break the “advocating for major harm or illegal activities” norm because they framed the question as about whether to donate to save the life of a meat-eating person, rather than as about actively murdering people.)
Amongst the two appeals-panelist moderators who see the post as norm-breaking, there was disagreement about whether the correct response would be a temporary ban or just a warning.
The third consideration was around dstudiocode’s other actions and general standing on the Forum. dstudiocode currently sits at −38 karma following 8 posts and 30 comments. This indicates that their contributions to the discourse have generally not been helpful.[4] Accordingly, all three moderators agreed that we should be more willing to (temporarily) ban dstudiocode for a potential norm violation.
dstudiocode has also tried posting very similar, low-quality (by our lights) content multiple times. The post that triggered the ban was similar to, though more “intense” than, this other post of theirs from five months ago. Additionally, they tried posting similar content through an alt account just before their ban. When a Forum team member asked them about their alt, they appeared to lie.[5] All three moderators agreed that this repeated posting of very similar, low-quality content warrants at least a rate limit (i.e., a cap on how much the user in question can post or comment).[6] (For context, eight months ago, dstudiocode published five posts inaneight-dayspan, all of which were low quality, in our view. We would like to avoid a repeat of that situation: a rate limit or a ban are the tools we could employ to this end.) Lying about their alt also makes us worried that the user is trying to skirt the rules.
Overall, the appeals panel is revoking dstudiocode’s ban, and is replacing the ban with a warning (instructing them to avoid posting content that could be perceived as advocating for major harm of illegal activities) and a rate limit. dstudiocode will be limited to at most one comment every three days and one post per week for the next three weeks—i.e., until when their original ban would have ended. Moderators will be keeping an eye on their posting, and will remove their posting rights entirely if they continue to publish content that we consider sufficiently low quality or norm-bending.
We would like to thank @richard_ngo and @Neel Nanda for appealing the original decision, as well as @Jason and @dirk for contributing to the discussion. We apologize that the original ban notice was rushed, and failed to lay out all the factors that went into the decision.[7] (Reasoning along the lines of the “third consideration” given above went into the original decision, but we failed to communicate that.)
If anyone has questions or concerns about how we have handled the appeals process, feel free to comment below or reach out.
Technically, two moderators and one moderation advisor. (I write “three moderators” in the main text because that makes referring to them, as I do throughout the text, less cumbersome.)
The three of us discussed whether or not to quote the full version of the post that triggered the ban in this moderator comment, to allow users to see exactly what is being ruled on. By split decision (with me as the dissenting minority), we have decided not to do so: in general, we will probably avoid republishing content that is objectionable enough to get taken down in the first place.
I’m not certain, but my guess is that the disagreement here is related to the high vs. low decoupling spectrum (where high decouplers, like myself, are fine with entertaining philosophical questions like these, whereas low decouplers tend to see such questions as crossing a line).
We don’t see karma as a perfect measure of a user’s value by any means, but we do consider a user’s total karma being negative to be a strong signal that something is awry.
Looking through dstudiocode’s post and comment history, I do think that they are trying to engage in good faith (as opposed to being a troll, say). However, the EA Forum exists for a particular purpose, and has particular standards in place to serve that purpose, and this means that the Forum is not necessarily a good place for everyone who is trying to contribute. (For what it’s worth, I feel a missing mood in writing this.)
In response to our request that they stop publishing similar content from multiple accounts, they said: “Posted from multiple accounts? I feel it is possible that the same post may have been created because maybe the topic is popular?” However, we are >99% confident, based on our usual checks for multiple account use, that the other account that tried to publish this similar content is an alt controlled by them. (They did subsequently stop trying to publish from other accounts.)
We do not have an official policy on rate limits, at present, although we have used rate limits on occasion. We aim to improve our process here. In short, rate limits may be a more appropriate intervention than bans are for users who aren’t clearly breaking norms, but who are nonetheless posting low-quality content or repeatedly testing the edges of the norms.
Notwithstanding the notice we published, which was a mistake, I am not sure if the ban decision itself was a mistake. It turns out that different moderators have different views on the post in question, and I think the difference between the original decision to ban and the present decision to instead warn and rate limit can mostly be chalked up to reasonable disagreement between different moderators. (We are choosing to override the original decision since we spent significantly longer on the review, and we therefore have more confidence in the review decision being “correct”. We put substantial effort into the review because established users, in their appeal, made some points that we felt deserved to be taken seriously. However, this level of effort would not be tenable for most “regular” moderation calls—i.e., those involving unestablished or not-in-great-standing users, like dstudiocode—given the tradeoffs we face.)
I appreciate the thought that went into this. I also think that using rate-limits as a tool, instead of bans, is in general a good idea. I continue to strongly disagree with the decisions on a few points:
I still think including the “materials that may be easily perceived as such” clause has a chilling effect.
I also remember someone’s comment that the things you’re calling “norms” are actually rules, and it’s a little disingenuous to not call them that; I continue to agree with this.
The fact that you’re not even willing to quote the parts of the post that were objectionable feels like an indication of a mindset that I really disagree with. It’s like… treating words as inherently dangerous? Not thinking at all about the use-mention distinction? I mean, here’s a quote from the Hamas charter: “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.” Clearly this is way way more of an incitement to violence than any quote of dstudiocode’s, which you’re apparently not willing to quote. (I am deliberately not expressing any opinion about whether the Hamas quote is correct; I’m just quoting them.) What’s the difference?
“They see the fact that it is “just” a philosophical question as not changing the assessment.” Okay, let me now quote Singer. “Human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time. They are not persons… the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee.” Will you warn/ban me from the EA forum for quoting Singer, without endorsing that statement? What if I asked, philosophically, “If Singer were right, would it be morally acceptable to kill a baby to save a dog’s life?” I mean, there are whole subfields of ethics based on asking about who you would kill in order to save whom (which is why I’m pushing on this so strongly: the thing you are banning from the forum is one of the key ways people have had philosophical debates over foundational EA ideas). What if I defended Singer’s argument in a post of my own?
As I say this, I feel some kind of twinge of concern that people will find this and use it to attack me, or that crazy people will act badly inspired by my questions. I hypothesize that the moderators are feeling this kind of twinge more generally. I think this is the sort of twinge that should and must be overridden, because listening to it means that your discourse will forever be at the mercy of whoever is most hostile to you, or whoever is craziest. You can’t figure out true things in that situation.
(On a personal level, I apologize to the moderators for putting them in difficult situations by saying things that are deliberately in the grey areas of their moderation policy. Nevertheless I think it’s important enough that I will continue doing this. EA is not just a group of nerds on the internet any more, it’s a force that shapes the world in a bunch of ways, and so it is crucial that we don’t echo-chamber ourselves into doing crazy stuff (including, or especially, when the crazy stuff matches mainstream consensus). If you would like to warn/ban me, then I would harbor no personal ill-will about it, though of course I will consider that evidence that I and others should be much more wary about the quality of discourse on the forum.)
I’m pretty sure we could come up with various individuals and groups of people that some users of this forum would prefer not to exist. There’s no clear and unbiased way to decide which of those individuals and groups could be the target of “philosophical questions” about the desirability of murdering them and which could not. Unless we’re going to allow the question as applied to any individual or group (which I think is untenable for numerous reasons), the line has to be drawn somewhere. Would it be ethical to get rid of this meddlesome priest should be suspendable or worse (except that the meddlesome priest in question has been dead for over eight hundred years).
And I think drawing the line at we’re not going to allow hypotheticals about murdering discernable people[1] is better (and poses less risk of viewpoint suppression) than expecting the mods to somehow devise a rule for when that content will be allowed and consistently apply it. I think the effect of a bright-line no-murder-talk rule on expression of ideas is modest because (1) posters can get much of the same result by posing non-violent scenarios (e.g., leaving someone to drown in a pond is neither an act of violence nor generally illegal in the United States) and (2) there are other places to have discussions if the murder content is actually important to the philosophical point.[2]
By “discernable people,” I mean those with some sort of salient real-world characteristic as opposed to being 99-100% generic abstractions (especially if in a clearly unrealistic scenario, like the people in the trolley problem).
And I think drawing the line at we’re not going to allow hypotheticals about murdering discernible people
Do you think it is acceptable to discuss the death penalty on the forum? Intuitively this seems within scope—historically we have discussed criminal justice reform on the forum, and capital punishment is definitely part of that.
If so, is the distinction state violence vs individual violence? This seems not totally implausible to me, though it does suggest that the offending poster could simply re-word their post to be about state-sanctioned executions and leave the rest of the content untouched.
I’ve weak karma downvoted and disagreed with this, then hit the “insightful” button. Definitely made me think and learn.
I agree that this is really tricky question, and some of those philosophical conversations (including this one) are important and should happen, but I don’t think this particular EA forum is the best place for them, for a few reasons.
1) I think there are better places to have these often awkward, fraught conversations. I think they are often better had in-person where you can connect, preface, soften and easily retract. I recently got into a mini online-tiff, when a wise onlooker noted...
”Online discussions can turn that way with a few misinterpretations creating a doom loop that wouldn’t happen with a handshake and a drink”
Or alternatively perhaps in a more academic/narrow forum where people have similar discussion norms and understandings. This forum has a particularly wide range of users, from nerds to philosophers to practitioners to managers to donors so there’s a very wide range of norms and understandings.
2) There’s potential reputational damage for all the people doing great EA work across the spectrum here. These kinds of discussions could lead to more hit-pieces and reduced funding. It would be a pity if the AI apocalypse hit us because of funding cuts due to these discussions. (OK now I’m strawmanning a bit :D)
3) The forum might be an entry-point for some people into EA things. I don’t think its a good idea for this to be these discussions to be the first thing someone looking into EA sees on the internet.
4) It might be a bit of a strawman to say our “discourse will forever be at the mercy of whoever is most hostile to you, or whoever is craziest.” I think people hostile to EA don’t like many things said here on the forum, but we aren’t forever at the mercy of them and we keep talking. I think there are just a few particular topics which give people more ammunition for public take-downs, and there is wisdom in sometimes avoiding loading balls into your opponents cannons.
5) I think if you (like Singer) write your own opinion in their own book its a different situation—you are the one writing and take full responsibility for your work—on a public forum it at least feels like there is at least a smidgeon of shared accountability for what is said. Forms of this debate that has been going on for sometime about what is posted on Twitter / Facebook etc.
6) I agree with you the quote from the Hamas charter is more dangerous—and think we shouldn’t be publishing or discussing that on the forum either.
I have great respect for these free speech arguments, and think this is a super hard question where the “best” thing to do might well change a lot over time, but right now I don’t think allowing these discussions and arguments on this particular EA forum will lead to more good in the long run.
I think there are better places to have these often awkward, fraught conversations.
You are literally talking about the sort of conversations that created EA. If people don’t have these conversations on the forum (the single best way to create common knowledge in the EA commmunity), then it will be much harder to course-correct places where fundamental ideas are mistaken. I think your comment proceeds from the implicit assumption that we’re broadly right about stuff, and mostly just need to keep our heads down and do the work. I personally think that a version of EA that doesn’t have the ability to course-correct in big ways would be net negative for the world. In general it is not possible to e.g. identify ongoing moral catastrophes when you’re optimizing your main venue of conversations for avoiding seeming weird.
I agree with you the quote from the Hamas charter is more dangerous—and think we shouldn’t be publishing or discussing that on the forum either.
If you’re not able to talk about evil people and their ideologies, then you will not be able to account for them in reasoning about how to steer the world. I think EA is already far too naive about how power dynamics work at large scales, given how much influence we’re wielding; this makes it worse.
There’s potential reputational damage for all the people doing great EA work across the spectrum here.
I think there are just a few particular topics which give people more ammunition for public take-downs, and there is wisdom in sometimes avoiding loading balls into your opponents cannons.
Insofar as you’re thinking about this as a question of coalitional politics, I can phrase it in those terms too: the more censorious EA becomes, the more truth-seeking people will disaffiliate from it. Habryka, who was one of the most truth-seeking people involved in EA, has already done so; I wouldn’t say it was directly because of EA not being truth-seeking enough, but I think that was one big issue for him amongst a cluster of related issues. I don’t currently plan to, but I’ve considered the possibility, and the quality of EA’s epistemic norms is one of my major considerations (of course, the forum’s norms are only a small part of that).
However, having said this, I don’t think you should support more open forum norms mostly as a concession to people like me, but rather in order to pursue your own goals more effectively. Movements that aren’t able to challenge foundational assumptions end up like environmentalists: actively harming the causes they’re trying to support.
Just to narrow in on a single point—I have found the ‘EA fundamentally depends on uncomfortable conversations’ point to be a bit unnuanced in the past. It seems like we could be more productive by delineating which kinds of discomfort we want to defend—for example, most people here don’t want to have uncomfortable conversations about age of consent laws (thankfully), but do want to have them about factory farming.
When I think about the founding myths of EA, most of them seem to revolve around the discomfort of applying utilitarianism in practice, or on how far we should expand our moral circles. I think EA would’ve broadly survived intact by lightly moderating other kinds of discomfort (or it may have even expanded).
I’m not keen to take a stance on whether this post should or shouldn’t be allowed on the forum, but I am curious to hear if and where you would draw this line :)
Narrowing in even further on the example you gave, as an illustration: I just had an uncomfortable conversation about age of consent laws literally yesterday with an old friend of mine. Specifically, my friend was advocating that the most important driver of crime is poverty, and I was arguing that it’s cultural acceptance of crime. I pointed to age of consent laws varying widely across different countries as evidence that there are some cultures which accept behavior that most westerners think of as deeply immoral (and indeed criminal).
Picturing some responses you might give to this:
That’s not the sort of uncomfortable claim you’re worried about
But many possible continuations of this conversation would in fact have gotten into more controversial territory. E.g. maybe a cultural relativist would defend those other countries having lower age of consent laws. I find cultural relativism kinda crazy (for this and related reasons) but it’s a pretty mainstream position.
I could have made the point in more sensitive ways
Maybe? But the whole point of the conversation was about ways in which some cultures are better than others. This is inherently going to be a sensitive claim, and it’s hard to think of examples that are compelling without being controversial.
This is not the sort of thing people should be discussing on the forum
But EA as a movement is interested in things like:
Criminal justice reform (which OpenPhil has spent many tens of millions of dollars on)
Promoting women’s rights (especially in the context of global health and extreme poverty reduction)
What factors make what types of foreign aid more or less effective
More generally, the relationship between the developed and the developing world
So this sort of debate does seem pretty relevant.
I think EA would’ve broadly survived intact by lightly moderating other kinds of discomfort (or it may have even expanded).
The important point is that we didn’t know in advance which kinds of discomfort were of crucial importance. The relevant baseline here is not early EAs moderating ourselves, it’s something like “the rest of academic philosophy/society at large moderating EA”, which seems much more likely to have stifled early EA’s ability to identify important issues and interventions.
(I also think we’ve ended up at some of the wrong points on some of these issues, but that’s a longer debate.)
Do you have an example of the kind of early EA conversation which you think was really important which helped came up with core EA tenets might be frowned upon or censored on the forum now? I’m still super dubious about whether leaving out a small number of specific topics really leaves much value on the table.
And I really think conversations can be had in more sensitive ways. In the the case of the original banned post, just as good a philosophical conversation could be had without explicitly talking about killing people. The conversation already was being had on another thread “the meat eater problem”
And as a sidebar yeah I wouldn’t have any issue with that above conversation myself because we just have to practically discuss that with donors and internally when providing health care and getting confronted with tricky situations. Also (again sidebar) it’s interesting that age of marriage/consent conversations can be where classic left wing cultural relativism and gender safeguarding collide and don’t know which way to swing. We’ve had to ask that question practically in our health centers, to decide who to give family planning to and when to think of referring to police etc. Super tricky.
My point is not that the current EA forum would censor topics that were actually important early EA conversations, because EAs have now been selected for being willing to discuss those topics. My point is that the current forum might censor topics that would be important course-corrections, just as if the rest of society had been moderating early EA conversations, those conversations might have lost important contributions like impartiality between species (controversial: you’re saying human lives don’t matter very much!), the ineffectiveness of development aid (controversial: you’re attacking powerful organizations!), transhumanism (controversial, according to the people who say it’s basically eugenics), etc.
Re “conversations can be had in more sensitive ways”, I mostly disagree, because of the considerations laid out here: the people who are good at discussing topics sensitively are mostly not the ones who are good at coming up with important novel ideas.
For example, it seems plausible that genetic engineering for human intelligence enhancement is an important and highly neglected intervention. But you had to be pretty disagreeable to bring it into the public conversation a few years ago (I think it’s now a bit more mainstream).
This moderation policy seems absurd. The post in question was clearly asking purely hypothetical questions, and wasn’t even advocating for any particular answer to the question. May as well ban users for asking whether it’s moral to push a man off a bridge to stop a trolley, or ban Peter Singer for his thought experiments about infanticide.
Perhaps dstudiocode has misbehaved in other ways, but this announcement focuses on something that should be clearly within the bounds of acceptable discourse. (In particular, the standard of “content that could be interpreted as X” is a very censorious one, since you now need to cater to a wide range of possible interpretations.)
Ah, thanks, that’s important context—I semi-retract my strongly worded comment above, depending on exactly how bad the removed post was, but can imagine posts in this genre that I think are genuinely bad
I don’t like my mod message, and I apologize for it. I was rushed and used some templated language that I knew damn well at the time that I wasn’t excited about putting my name behind. I nevertheless did and bear the responsibility.
That’s all from me for now. The mods who weren’t involved in the original decision will come in and reconsider the ban, pursuant to the appeal.
In the post that prompted the ban, they asked whether murdering meat-eaters could be considered ethical. I don’t want to comment on whether this would be an appropriate topic for a late night philosophy club conversation, it is not an appropriate topic for the EA Forum.
I think speculating about what exactly constitutes the most good is perfectly on-topic. While ‘murdering meat-eaters’ is perhaps an overly direct phrasing (and of course under most ethical frameworks murder raises additional issues as compared to mere inaction or deprioritization), the question of whether the negative utility produced by one marginal person’s worth of factory farming outweighs the positive utility that person experiences—colloquially referred to as the meat-eater problem—is one that hasbeendiscussedherea numberoftimes, and that I feel is quite relevant to the question of which interventions should be prioritized.
I’d separate out the removal and the suspension, and dissent only as to the latter.
I get why the mods would feel the need to chart a wide berth around anything that some person could somehow “interpret[] as promoting violence or illegal activities.” Making a rule against brief hypothetical mentions of the possible ethics of murder is defensible, especially in light of certain practical realities.
However, I can’t agree with taking punitive action against a user where the case that they violated the norm is this tenuous and there is a lack of fair prior notice of the mods’ interpretation. For that kind of action, I think the minimum standard would be either clear notice or content that a reasonable person would recognize could reasonably be interpreted as promoting violence. In other words, was the poster negligent in failing to recognize that violence promotion was a reasonable interpretation?
I don’t think the violence-promoting interpretation is a reasonable one here, and it sounds like several other users agree—which I take as evidence of non-negligence.
Moderation updates
Moderation update: We have indefinitely banned 8 accounts[1] that were used by the same user (JamesS) to downvote some posts and comments from Nonlinear and upvote critical content about Nonlinear. Please remember that voting with multiple accounts on the same post or comment is very much against Forum norms.
(Please note that this is separate from the incident described here)
my_bf_is_hot, inverted_maslow, aht_me, emerson_fartz, daddy_of_upvoting, ernst-stueckelberg, gpt-n, jamess
Was emerson_fartz an acceptable username in the first place? (It may not have had a post history in which case no one may have noticed its existence before the sockpuppeting detection, but that sounds uncivil toward a living person)
It was not, and indeed it was only used for voting, so we noticed it only during this investigation
Moderation update:
We have strong reason to believe that Torres (philosophytorres) used a second account to violate their earlier ban. We feel that this means that we cannot trust Torres to follow this forum’s norms, and are banning them for the next 20 years (until 1 October 2042).
LukeDing (and their associated alt account) has been banned for six months, due to voting & multiple-account-use violations. We believe that they voted on the same comment/post with two accounts more than two hundred times. This includes several instances of using an alt account to vote on their own comments.
This is against our Forum norms on voting and using multiple accounts. We will remove the duplicate votes.
As a reminder, bans affect the user, not the account(s).
If anyone has questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out, and if you think we made a mistake here, you can appeal the decision.
We also want to add:
LukeDing appealed the decision; we will reach out to them and ask them if they’d like us to feature a response from them under this comment.
As some of you might realize, some people on the moderation team have conflicts of interest with LukeDing, so we wanted to clarify our process for resolving this incident. We uncovered the norm violation after an investigation into suspicious voting patterns, and only revealed the user’s identity to part of the team. The moderators who made decisions about how to proceed weren’t aware of LukeDing’s identity (they only saw anonymized information).
Is more information about the appellate process available? The guide to forum norms says “We’re working on a formal process for reviewing submissions to this form, to make sure that someone outside of the moderation team will review every submission, and we’ll update this page when we have a process in place.”
The basic questions for me would include: information about who decides appeals, how much deference (if any) the adjudicator will give to the moderators’ initial decision—which probably should vary based on the type of decision at hand, and what kind of contact between the mods and appellate adjudicator(s) is allowed. On the last point, I would prefer as little ex parte contact if possible, and would favor having an independent vetted “advocate for the appellant” looped in if there needs to be contact to which the appellant is not privy.
Admittedly I have a professional bias toward liking process, but I would err on the side of more process than less where accounts are often linked to real-world identities and suspensions are sometimes for conduct that could be seen as dishonest or untrustworthy. I would prefer public disclosure of an action taken in cases like this only after the appellate process is complete for the same reasons, assuming the user timely indicates a desire to appeal the finding of a norm violation.
Finally, I commend keeping the moderators deciding whether a violation occurred blinded as to the user’s identity as a best practice in cases like this, even where there are no COIs. It probably should be revealed prior to determining a sanction, though.
It does intuitively seem like an immediate temporary ban, made public only after whatever appeals are allowed have been exhausted, should give the moderation team basically everything they need while being more considerate of anyone whose appeals are ultimately upheld (i.e. innocent, or mitigating circumstances).
Moderation update: A new user, Bernd Clemens Huber, recently posted a first post (“All or Nothing: Ethics on Cosmic Scale, Outer Space Treaty, Directed Panspermia, Forwards-Contamination, Technology Assessment, Planetary Protection, (and Fermi’s Paradox)”) that was a bit hard to make sense of. We hadn’t approved the post over the weekend and hadn’t processed it yet, when the Forum team got an angry and aggressive email today from the user in question calling the team “dipshits” (and providing a definition of the word) for waiting throughout the weekend.
If the user disagrees with our characterization of the email, they can email us to give permission for us to share the whole thing.
We have decided that this is not a promising start to the user’s interactions on the Forum, and have banned them indefinitely. Please let us know if you have concerns, and as a reminder, here are the Forum’s norms.
Update: this user returned to the Forum yesterday to re-post the same piece. I’ve banned that account as well. Bans affect the user, not the account.
Moderation update:
We have strong reason to believe that Charles He used multiple new accounts to violate his earlier 6-month-long ban. We feel that this means that we cannot trust Charles He to follow this forum’s norms, and are banning him from the Forum for the next 10 years (until December 20, 2032).
We have already issued temporary suspensions to several suspected duplicate accounts, including one which violated norms about rudeness and was flagged to us by multiple users. We will be extending the bans for each of these accounts to mirror Charles’s 10-year ban, but are giving the users an opportunity to message us if we have made any of those temporary suspensions in error (and have already reached out to them). While we aren’t >99% certain about any single account, we’re around 99% that at least one of these is Charles He.
You can find more on our rules for pseudonymity and multiple accounts here. If you have any questions or concerns about this, please also feel free to reach out to us at forum-moderation@effectivealtruism.org.
I find this reflects worse on the mod team than Charles. This is nowhere near the first time I’ve felt this way.
Fundamentally, it seems the mod team heavily prioritizes civility and following shallow norms above enabling important discourse. The post on forum norms says a picture of geese all flying in formation and in one direction is the desirable state of the forum; I disagree that this is desirable. Healthy conflict is necessary to sustain a healthy community. Conflict sometimes entails rudeness. Some rudeness here and there is not a big deal and does not need to be stamped out entirely. This also applies to the people who get banned for criticizing EA rudely, even when they’re criticizing EA for its role in one of the great frauds of modern history. Banning EA critics for minor reasons is a short-sighted move at best.
Banning Charles for 10 years (!!) for the relatively small crime of evading a previous ban is a seriously flawed idea. Some of his past actions like doxxing someone (without any malice I believe) are problematic and need to be addressed, but do not deserve a 10 year ban. Some of his past comments, especially farther in the past, have been frustrating and net-negative to me, but these negative actions are not unrelated to some of his positive traits, like his willingness to step out of EA norms and communicate clearly rather than like an EA bot. The variance of his comments has steadily decreased over time. Some of his comments are even moderator-like, such as when he warned EA forum users not to downvote a WSJ journalist who wasn’t breaking any rules. I note that the mod team did not step in there to encourage forum norms.
I also find it very troubling that the mod team has consistent and strong biases in how it enforces its norms and rules, such as not taking any meaningful action against an EA in-group member for repeated and harmful violations of norms but banning an EA critic for 20 years for probably relatively minor and harmless violations. I don’t believe Charles would have received a similar ban if he was an employee of a brand name EA org or was in the right social circles.
Finally, as Charles notes, there should be an appeals process for bans.
I don’t think repeatedly evading moderator bans is a “relatively small crime”. If Forum moderation is to mean anything at all, it has to be consistently enforced, and if someone just decides that moderation doesn’t apply to them, they shouldn’t be allowed to post or comment on the Forum.
Charles only got to his 6 month ban via a series of escalating minor bans, most of which I agreed with. I think he got a lot of slack in his behaviour because he sometimes provided significant value, but sometimes (with insufficient infrequency) behaved in ways that were seriously out of kilter with the goal of a healthy Forum.
I personally think the 10-year thing is kind of silly and he should just have been banned indefinitely at this point, then maybe have the ban reviewed in a little while. But it’s clear he’s been systematically violating Forum policies in a way that requires serious action.
I have no idea if this was intentional on the part of the moderators, but they aren’t all flying in the same direction. ;-)
Indefinite suspension with leave to seek reinstatement after a stated suitable period would have been far preferable to a 10-year ban. A tenner isn’t necessary to vindicate the moderators’ authority, and the relevant conduct doesn’t give the impression of someone for whom the passage of ten years’ time is necessary before there is a reasonable probability that would they have become a suitable participant during the suspension.
It makes a lot of difference to me that Charles’ behavior was consistently getting better. If someone consistently flouts norms without any improvement, at some point they should be indefinitely banned. This is not the case with Charles. He started off with really high variance and at this point has reached a pretty tolerable amount. He has clearly worked on his actions. The comments he posted while flouting the mods’ authority generally contributed to the conversation. There are other people who have done worse things without action from the mod team. Giving him a 10 year ban without appeal for this feels more motivated by another instance of the mod team asserting their authority and deciding not to deal with messiness someone is causing than a principled decision.
I think this is probably true. I still think that systematically evading a Forum ban is worse behaviour (by which I mean, more lengthy-ban-worthy) than any of his previous transgressions.
I am not personally aware of any, and am sceptical of this claim. Open to being convinced, though.
can you give some examples of this?
Various comments made by this user in multiple posts some time ago, some of which received warnings by mods but nothing beyond that.
Totally unrelated to the core of the matter, but do you intend to turn this into a frontpage post? I’m a bit inclined to say it’d be better for transparency, and to inform others about the bans, and deter potential violators.… but I’m not sure, maybe you have a reason for preferring the shortform (or you’ll publish periodical updates on the frontpage
In other forums and situations, there is a grace period where a user can comment after receiving a very long ban. I think this is a good feature that has several properties with long term value.
These accounts are some of these accounts I created (but not all[1]):
anonymous-for-unimpressive-reasons
making-this-account (this was originally “making this account feels almost as bad as pulling a Holden,” but was edited by the moderators afterwards).
to-be-stuck-inside-of-mobile
worldoptimization-was-based
Here are some highlights of some of the comments made by the accounts, within about a 30 day period.
Pointing out the hollowness of SBF’s business, which then produced a follow up comment, which was widely cited outside the forum, and may have helped generate a media narrative about SBF.
Jabbing at some dismal public statements of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s, and malign dynamics revealed by this episode. (Due to time limitations, I did not elaborate on the moral and intellectual defects of his justifications of keeping FTX funding, which to my amazement and disappointment, got hundreds of upvotes and no substantive dissension).
In a moderate way, exploring (blunting?) Oliver’s ill-advised (destructive?) strategy of radical disclosure.
A post making EAs aware of a major article revealing inside knowledge of SBF within EA, and this post was on a net, a release of tension in the EA community.
Trying to alleviate concerns about CEA’s solvency, and giving information about the nature of control and financing of CEA.
Defending Karnofsky and Moskovitz and making fun of them (this comment was the only comment Moskovitz has responded to in EA history so far).
Discouraging EA forum users from downvoting out of hand or creating blacklists/whitelists of journalists.
My alternate accounts were created successively, as they were successively banned. This was the only reason for subterfuge, which I view as distasteful.
I have information on the methods that the CEA team used to track my accounts (behavioral telemetry, my residential IP). This is not difficult to defeat. Not only did I not evade these methods, but I gave information about my identity several times (resulting in a ban each time). These choices, based on my distaste, is why the CEA team is “99% certain” (and at least, in a mechanical sense) why I have this 10 year ban.
Other accounts not listed, were created or used for purposes that I view as good, and are not relevant to the substance of the comment.
The only warning received on any of my alternate accounts was here:
This was a warning in response to my comment insulting another user. The user being insulted was Charles He.
I believe I am able to defend each of the actions on my previous bans individually (but never have before this). More importantly, I always viewed my behavior as a protest.
At this point, additional discussions are occurring by CEA[1], such as considering my ban from EAG and other EA events. By this, I’ll be joining blacklists of predators and deceivers.
As shown above, my use of alternate accounts did not promote or benefit myself in any way (even setting aside expected moderator action). Others in EA have used sock puppets to try to benefit their orgs, and gone on to be very successful.
Note that the moderator who executed the ban above, is not necessarily involved in any way in further action or policy mentioned in my comments. Four different CEA staff members have reached out or communicated to me in the last 30 days.
Moderation update: We have banned “Richard TK” for 6 months for using a duplicate account to double-vote on the same posts and comments. We’re also banning another account (Anin, now deactivated), which seems to have been used by that same user or by others to amplify those same votes. Please remember that voting with multiple accounts on the same post or comment is very much against Forum norms.
(Please note that this is separate from the incident described here)
We’re issuing [Edit: identifying information redacted] a two-month ban for using multiple accounts to vote on the same posts and comments, and in one instance for commenting in a thread pretending to be two different users. [Edit: the user had a total of 13 double-votes, most far apart and are likely accidental, two upvotes close together on others’ posts (which they claim are accidental as well), but two cases of deliberate self upvote from alternative accounts]
This is against the Forum norms around using multiple accounts. Votes are really important for the Forum: they provide feedback to authors and signal to readers what other users found most valuable, so we need to be particularly strict in discouraging this kind of vote manipulation.
A note on timing: the comment mentioned above is 7 months old but went unnoticed at the time, a report for it came in last week and triggered this investigation.
If [Edit: redacted] thinks that this is not right, he can appeal. As a reminder, bans affect the user, not the account.
[Edit: We have retroactively decided to redact the user’s name from this early message, and are currently rethinking our policies on the matter]
[A moderator had edited this comment to remove identifying information, after a moderation decision to retroactively redact the user’s identification]
I guess it makes sense that people who disagree with the norms are more likely to do underhanded things to violate them.
Just quickly noting that none of the double-votes were on that thread or similar ones, as far as I know.
Do suspended users get a chance to make a public reply to the mod team’s findings? I don’t think that’s always necessary—e.g., we all see the underlying conduct when public incivility happens—but I think it’s usually warranted when the findings imply underhanded behavior (“pretending”) and the underlying facts aren’t publicly observable. There’s an appeal process, but that doesn’t address the public-reputation interests of the suspended person.
It’s kind of jarring to read that someone has been banned for “violating a norm”—that word to me implies that they’re informal agreements between the community. Why not call them “rules”?
pinkfrog (and their associated account) has been banned for 1 month, because they voted multiple times on the same content (with two accounts), including upvoting pinkfrog’s comments with their other account. To be a bit more specific, this happened on one day, and there were 12 cases of double-voting in total (which we’ll remove). This is against our Forum norms on voting and using multiple accounts.
As a reminder, bans affect the user, not the account(s).
If anyone has questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out, and if you think we made a mistake here, you can appeal the decision.
Multiple people on the moderation team have conflicts of interest with pinkfrog, so I wanted to clarify our process for resolving this incident. We uncovered the norm violation after an investigation into suspicious voting patterns, and only revealed the user’s identity to part of the team. The moderators who made decisions about how to proceed aren’t aware of pinkfrog’s real identity (they only saw anonymized information).
Have the moderators come to a view on identifying information? is pinkfrog the account with higher karma or more forum activity?
In other cases the identity has been revealed to various degrees:
LukeDing
JamesS
Richard TK (noting that an alt account in this case, Anin, was also named)
[Redacted]
Charles He
philosophytorres (but identified as “Torres” in the moderator post)
It seems inconsistent to have this info public for some, and redacted for others. I do think it is good public service to have this information public, but am primarily pushing here for consistency and some more visibility around existing decisions.
Agree. It seems potentially pretty damaging to people’s reputations to make this information public (and attached to their names); that strikes me as a much bigger penalty than the bans. There should, at a minimum, be a consistent standard, and I’m inclined to think that standard should be having a high bar for releasing identifying information.
I think we should hesitate to protect people from reputational damage caused by people posting true information about them. Perhaps there’s a case to be made when the information is cherry-picked or biased, or there’s no opportunity to hear a fair response. But goodness, if we’ve learned anything from the last 18 months I hope it would include that sharing information about bad behaviour is sometimes a public good.
I would guess that most people engage in private behavior that would be reputationally damaging if the internet were to find out about it. Just because something is true doesn’t mean you forfeit your rights to not have that information be made public.
I think people might reasonably (though wrongly) assume that forum mods are not monitoring accounts at this level of granularity, and thus believe that their voting behavior is private. Given this, I think mods should warn before publicly censoring. (Just as it would be better to inform your neighbor that you can see them doing something embarrassing through their window before calling the police or warning other people about then—maybe they just don’t realize you can see, and telling them is all they need to not do the thing anymore, which, after all, is the goal.)
Frankly, I don’t love that mods are monitoring accounts at this level of granularity. (For instance, knowing this would make me less inclined to put remotely sensitive info in a forum dm.)
Writing in a personal capacity; I haven’t run this by other mods.
Hi, just responding to these parts of your comment:
We include some detail on what would lead moderators to look into a user’s voting activity, and what information we have access to, on our “Guide to norms on the Forum” page:
(In addition, note that moderators can’t just go into a user’s account and check their voting history even when we do have reason to look into that user. We require one of the Forum engineers to run some queries on the back end to yield this information.)
Finally, to address your concern about direct messages on the Forum: like a regular user, a moderator cannot see into anyone else’s messages.
Hope this is helpful :)
Also writing in a personal capacity.
Thanks for writing this! To clarify a few points even more:
I confirm this, and just want to highlight that
this is pretty rare; we have a high bar before asking developers to look into patterns
usually, one developer looks into things, and shares anonymized data with moderators, who then decide whether it needs to be investigated more deeply
If so, a subset of moderators gets access to deanonymized data to make a decision and contact/warn/ban the user(s)
On
I confirm this, but I want to highlight that messages on the forum are not end-to-end encrypted and are, by default, sent via email as well (i.e. when you get a message on the forum you also get an email with the message). So forum developers and people who have or will have access to the recipient’s email inbox, or the forum’s email delivery service, can see the messages.
For very private communications, I would recommend using privacy-first end-to-end encrypted platforms like Signal.
Thanks; this is helpful and reassuring, especially re: the DMs. I had read this section of the norms page, and it struck me that the “if we have reason to believe that someone is violating norms around voting” clause was doing a lot of work. I would appreciate more clarification about what would lead mods to believe something like this (and maybe some examples of how you’ve come to have such beliefs). But this is not urgent, and thanks for the clarification you’ve already provided.
Yeah, this is a reasonable thing to ask. So, the “if we have reason to believe that someone is violating norms around voting” clause is intentionally vague, I believe, because if we gave more detail on the kinds of checks/algorithms we have in place for flagging potential violations, then this could help would-be miscreants commit violations that slip past our checks.
(I’m a bit sad that the framing here is adversarial, and that we can’t give users like you more clarification, but I think this state of play is the reality of running an online forum.)
If it helps, though, the bar for looking into a user’s voting history is high. Like, on average I don’t think we do this more than once or twice per month.
Thanks, this is also helpful! One thing to think about (and no need to tell me), is whether making the checks public could effectively disincentivize the bad behavior (like how warnings about speed cameras may as effectively disincentivize speeding as the cameras do themselves). But if there are easy workarounds, I can see why this wouldn’t be viable.
I agree that not all true things should be made public, but I think when it specifically pertains to wrongdoing and someone’s trustworthiness, the public interest can override the right to privacy. If you look into your neighbour’s window and you see them printing counterfeit currency, you go to the police first, rather than giving them an opportunity to simply hide their fraud better.
Maybe the crux is: I think forum users upvoting their own comments is more akin to them Facetuning dating app photos than printing counterfeit currency. Like, this is pretty innocuous behavior and if you just tell people not to do it, they’ll stop.
It seems like we disagree on how bad it is to self-vote (I don’t think it’s anywhere near the level of “actual crime”, but I do think it’s pretty clearly dishonest and unfair, and for such a petty benefit it’s hard for me to feel sympathetic to the temptation).
But I don’t think it’s the central point for me. If you’re simultaneously holding that:
this information isn’t actually a big deal, but
releasing this publically would cause a lot of harm through reputational damage,
then there’s a paternalistic subtext where people can’t be trusted to come to the “right” conclusions from the facts. If this stuff really wasn’t a big deal, then talking about it publically wouldn’t be a big deal either. I don’t think people should be shunned forever and excluded from any future employment because they misused multiple accounts on the forum. I do think they should be a little embarrassed, and I don’t think that moving to protect them from that embarrassment is actually a kindness from a community-wide perspective.
I feel like this is getting really complicated and ultimately my point is very simple: prevent harmful behavior via the least harmful means. If you can get people to not vote for themselves by telling them not to, then just… do that. I have a really hard time imagining that someone who was warned about this would continue to do it; if they did, it would be reasonable to escalate. But if they’re warned and then change their behavior, why do I need to know this happened? I just don’t buy that it reflects some fundamental lack of integrity that we all need to know about (or something like this).
I think that posting that someone is banned and why they were banned is not mainly about punishing them. It’s about helping people understand what the moderation team is doing, how rule-breaking is handled, and why someone no longer has access to the forum. For example, it helps us to understand if the moderation team are acting on inadequate information, or inconsistently between different people. The fact that publishing this information harms people is an unfortunate side effect, after the main effect of improving transparency and keeping people informed.
It doesn’t even really feel right to call them harmed by the publication. If people are harmed by other people knowing they misuse the voting system, I’d say they were mainly harmed by their own misuse of the system, not by someone reporting on it.
Then you needn’t object to the moderation team talking about what they did!
It’s unclear to me that naming names materially advances the first two goals. As to the third, the suspended user could have the option of having their name disclosed. Otherwise, I don’t think we’re entitled to an explanation of why a particular poster isn’t active anymore.
There’s also the interest in deterring everyone else from doing it (general deterrence), not just in getting these specific people to stop doing it (specific deterrence). While I have mixed feelings about publicly naming offenders, the penalty does need to sting enough to make the benefits of the offense not worth the risk of getting caught. A private warning with no real consequences might persuade the person violating the rules not to do it again, but double-voting would surge as people learned you get a freebie.
“double-voting would surge as people learned you get a freebie.”
I just don’t see this happening?
Separately, one objection I have to cracking down hard on self-voting is that I think this is not very harmful relative to other ways in which people don’t vote how they’re “supposed to.” E.g., we know the correlation between upvotes and agree votes is incredibly high, and downvoting something solely because you disagree with it strikes me as more harmful to discourse on the forum than self-voting. I think the reason self-voting gets highlighted isn’t because it’s especially harmful, it’s just because it’s especially catchable.
If the mods want to improve people’s voting behavior on the forum, I both wish they’d target different voting behavior (ie, the agree/upvoting correlation) and use different means to do it (ie, generating reports for people of their own voting correlations, whether they tend to upvote/downvote certain people, etc), rather than naming/shaming people for self-voting.
I think it’s more that upvoting your own posts from an alt is (1) willful, intentional behavior (2) aimed at deceiving the community about the level of support of a comment (3) for the person’s own benefit. Presumably, most people who are doing it are employing some sort of means to evade detection, which adds another layer of deceptiveness. While I don’t like downvoting-for-disagreement and the like either, that kind of behavior presumptively reflects a natural cognitive bias rather than any of the three characteristics listed above. It is for those reasons that—in my view—downvoting-for-disagreement is generally not the proper subject of a sanctioning system,[1] while self-upvoting is.
I’ve suggested to the mods before that sanctions should sometimes be more carefully tailored to the offense, so I’d be open to the view that consequences like permanently denying the violator’s ability to vote and their ability to use alts might be more tailored to the offense than public disclosure. Those are the specific functions which they have demonstrated an inability to handle responsibly. Neither function is so fundamental to the ability to use the Forum that the mods should feel obliged to expend their time deciding if the violator has rehabilitated themselves enough to restore those privileges.
There could be circumstances in which soft-norm violative behavior was so extreme that sanctions should be considered. However, unlike “don’t multi-vote” (which is a bright-line rule for which the violator should be perfectly aware that they are violating the rules), these norms are less clearcut—so privately reaching out to the person would be the appropriate first action in a case like that.
Fair point about reputational harms being worse and possibly too punishing in some cases. I think in terms of a proposed standard it might be worth differentiating (if possible) between e.g. careless errors, or momentary lapses in judgement that were quickly rectified and likely caused no harm in expectation, versus a pattern of dishonest voting intended to mislead the EAF audience, and especially if they or an org that they work for stand to gain from it, or the comments in question are directly harmful to another org. In these latter cases the reputational harm may be more justifiable.
For reasoning transparency / precedent development, it might be worthwhile to address two points:
(1) I seem to remember other multivoting suspensions being much longer than 1 month. I had gotten the impression that the de facto starting point for deliberate multiaccount vote manipulation was ~ six months. Was the length here based on mitigating factors, perhaps the relatively low number of violations and that they occurred on a single day? If the usual sanction is ~ six months, I think it would be good to say that here so newer users understand that multivoting is a really big deal.
(2) Here the public notice names the anon account pinkfrog (which has 3 comments + 50 karma), rather than the user’s non-anon account. The last multi account voting suspension I saw named the user’s primary account, which was their real name. Even though the suspension follows the user, which account is publicly named can have a significant effect on public reputation. How does the mod team decide which user to name in the public notice?
pinkfrog: 1 month (12 cases of double voting)
LukeDing: 6 months (>200 times)
JamesS: indefinite (8 accounts, number not specified)
[Redacted]: 2 months (13 double votes, most are “likely accidental”, two “self upvotes”)
RichardTK: 6 months (number not specified)
Charles He: 10 years (not quite analogous as these are using alts to circumvent initial bans, included other violations)
Torres: 20 years (not quite analogous as these are using alts to circumvent initial bans, included other violations)
Torres was banned for 20 years according to the link.
Corrected, thanks!
Reply to this comment from @John G. Halstead
(Written in a personal capacity, I did not check this with other moderators)
Thank you for the feedback! I didn’t want to go too off-topic, as this is unrelated to this post, so I’m replying here, but I want to quickly share some factual information for other readers.
You’re writing this in multiple comments. I want to make it clear that moderators did not endorse or “defend” (or symmetrically “attack”) the post as moderators. But of course, we do comment as users on parts we agree or disagree with (like any other user). Let us know if it’s not clear whether we’re commenting as users or as moderators.
As for your other warnings, I want to make sure other readers know that your last warning was not for discussing a specific topic, but for being uncivil and not constructive to the discussion. I agree that the situation in the first warning is less relevant to this case, apologies for bringing it up.
Just a quick note to say that we’ve removed a post sharing a Fermi estimate of the chances that the author finds a partner who matches their preferred characteristics and links to a date-me doc.
The Forum is for discussions about improving the world, and a key norm we highlight is “Stay on topic.” This is not the right space for coordinating dating. (Consider exploring LessWrong, ACX threads/classifieds, or EA-adjacent Facebook/Reddit/Discord groups for discussions that are primarily social.)
We’re not taking any other action about the author, although I’ve asked them to stay on topic in the future.
Moderation update:
Around a month ago, a post about the authorship of Democratising Risk got published. This post got taken down by its author. Before this happened, the moderation team had been deciding what to do with some aspects of the post (and the resulting discussion) that had violated Forum norms. We were pretty confident that we’d end up banning two users for at least a month, so we banned them temporarily while we sorted some things out.
One of these users was Throwaway151. We banned them for posting something a bit misleading (the post seemed to overstate its conclusions based on the little evidence it had, and wasn’t updated very quickly based on clear counter-evidence), and being uncivil in the comments. Their ban has passed, now. As a reminder, bans affect the user, not the account, so any other accounts Throwaway151 operated were also affected. The other user was philosophytorres — see the relevant update.
Quick update: we’ve banned Defacto, who we have strong reason to believe is another sockpuppet account for Charles He. We are extending Charles’s ban to be indefinite (he and others can appeal if they want to).
You can find more on our rules for pseudonymity and multiple accounts here. If you have any questions or concerns about this, please also feel free to reach out to us at forum-moderation@effectivealtruism.org.
We’ve banned Vee from the Forum for 1 year. Their content seems to be primarily or significantly AI-generated,[1] and it’s not clear that they’re using it to share thoughts they endorse and have carefully engaged with. (This had come up before on one of their posts.) Our current policy on AI-generated content makes it clear that we’ll be stricter when moderating AI-generated content. Vee’s content doesn’t meet the standards of the Forum.
If Vee thinks that this is not right, they can appeal. If they come back, we’ll be checking to make sure that their content follows Forum norms. As a reminder, bans affect the user, not the account.
Different detectors for AI content are giving this content different scores, but we think that this is sufficiently likely true to act on.
It’s hard to be certain that something is AI-generated, and I’m not very satisfied with our processes or policies on this front. At the same time, the increase in the number of bots has made dealing with spam or off-topic/troll contributions harder, and I think that waiting for something closer to certainty will have costs that are too high.
Update, we have unbanned Vee. We are new to using AI detection tools and we made a mistake. We apologize.
Moderation update:
I’m indefinitely banning JasMaguire for an extremely racist comment that has since been deleted. We’ll likely revisit and update our forum norms to explicitly discourage this sort of behavior.
Please feel free to get in touch with forum-moderation@effectivealtruism.org if you have any concerns.
Moderation update: We’re issuing dstudiocode a one-month ban for breaking Forum norms in their recent post and subsequent behavior. Specifically:
Posting content that could be interpreted as promoting violence or illegal activities.
The post in question, which asked whether murdering meat-eaters could be considered “ethical,” crosses a line in terms of promoting potential violence.
As a reminder, the ban affects the user, not just the account. During their ban period, the user will not be permitted to rejoin the Forum under another account name. If they return to the Forum after the ban period, we’ll expect a higher standard of norm-following and compliance with moderator instructions.
You can reach out to forum-moderation@effectivealtruism.org with any questions. You can appeal this decision here.
I suggest editing this comment to note the partial reversal on appeal and/or retracting the comment, to avoid the risk of people seeing only it and reading it as vaguely precedential.
Strong +1 to Richard, this seems a clear incorrect moderation call and I encourage you to reverse it.
I’m personally very strongly opposed to killing people because they eat meat, and the general ethos behind that. I don’t feel in the slightest offended or bothered by that post, it’s just one in a string of hypothetical questions, and it clearly is not intended as a call to action or to encourage action.
If the EA Forum isn’t somewhere where you can ask a perfectly legitimate hypothetical question like that, what are we even doing here?
The moderators have reviewed the decision to ban @dstudioscode after users appealed the decision. Tl;dr: We are revoking the ban, and are instead rate-limiting dstudioscode and warning them to avoid posting content that could be perceived as advocating for major harm or illegal activities. The rate limit is due to dstudiocode’s pattern of engagement on the Forum, not simply because of their most recent post—for more on this, see the “third consideration” listed below.
More details:
Three moderators,[1] none of whom was involved in the original decision to ban dstudiocode, discussed this case.
The first consideration was “Does the cited norm make sense?” For reference, the norm cited in the original ban decision was “Materials advocating major harm or illegal activities, or materials that may be easily perceived as such” (under “What we discourage (and may delete or edit out)” in our “Guide to norms on the Forum”). The panel of three unanimously agreed that having some kind of Forum norm in this vein makes sense.
The second consideration was “Does the post that triggered the ban actually break the cited norm?” For reference, the post ended with the question “should murdering a meat eater be considered ‘ethical’?” (Since the post was rejected by moderators, users cannot see it.[2] We regret the confusion caused by us not making this point clearer in the original ban message.)
There was disagreement amongst the moderators involved in the appeal process about whether or not the given post breaks the norm cited above. I personally think that the post is acceptable since it does not constitute a call to action. The other two moderators see the post as breaking the norm; they see the fact that it is “just” a philosophical question as not changing the assessment.[3] (Note: The “meat-eater problem” has been discussed elsewhere on the Forum. Unlike the post in question, in the eyes of the given two moderators, these posts did not break the “advocating for major harm or illegal activities” norm because they framed the question as about whether to donate to save the life of a meat-eating person, rather than as about actively murdering people.)
Amongst the two appeals-panelist moderators who see the post as norm-breaking, there was disagreement about whether the correct response would be a temporary ban or just a warning.
The third consideration was around dstudiocode’s other actions and general standing on the Forum. dstudiocode currently sits at −38 karma following 8 posts and 30 comments. This indicates that their contributions to the discourse have generally not been helpful.[4] Accordingly, all three moderators agreed that we should be more willing to (temporarily) ban dstudiocode for a potential norm violation.
dstudiocode has also tried posting very similar, low-quality (by our lights) content multiple times. The post that triggered the ban was similar to, though more “intense” than, this other post of theirs from five months ago. Additionally, they tried posting similar content through an alt account just before their ban. When a Forum team member asked them about their alt, they appeared to lie.[5] All three moderators agreed that this repeated posting of very similar, low-quality content warrants at least a rate limit (i.e., a cap on how much the user in question can post or comment).[6] (For context, eight months ago, dstudiocode published five posts in an eight-day span, all of which were low quality, in our view. We would like to avoid a repeat of that situation: a rate limit or a ban are the tools we could employ to this end.) Lying about their alt also makes us worried that the user is trying to skirt the rules.
Overall, the appeals panel is revoking dstudiocode’s ban, and is replacing the ban with a warning (instructing them to avoid posting content that could be perceived as advocating for major harm of illegal activities) and a rate limit. dstudiocode will be limited to at most one comment every three days and one post per week for the next three weeks—i.e., until when their original ban would have ended. Moderators will be keeping an eye on their posting, and will remove their posting rights entirely if they continue to publish content that we consider sufficiently low quality or norm-bending.
We would like to thank @richard_ngo and @Neel Nanda for appealing the original decision, as well as @Jason and @dirk for contributing to the discussion. We apologize that the original ban notice was rushed, and failed to lay out all the factors that went into the decision.[7] (Reasoning along the lines of the “third consideration” given above went into the original decision, but we failed to communicate that.)
If anyone has questions or concerns about how we have handled the appeals process, feel free to comment below or reach out.
Technically, two moderators and one moderation advisor. (I write “three moderators” in the main text because that makes referring to them, as I do throughout the text, less cumbersome.)
The three of us discussed whether or not to quote the full version of the post that triggered the ban in this moderator comment, to allow users to see exactly what is being ruled on. By split decision (with me as the dissenting minority), we have decided not to do so: in general, we will probably avoid republishing content that is objectionable enough to get taken down in the first place.
I’m not certain, but my guess is that the disagreement here is related to the high vs. low decoupling spectrum (where high decouplers, like myself, are fine with entertaining philosophical questions like these, whereas low decouplers tend to see such questions as crossing a line).
We don’t see karma as a perfect measure of a user’s value by any means, but we do consider a user’s total karma being negative to be a strong signal that something is awry.
Looking through dstudiocode’s post and comment history, I do think that they are trying to engage in good faith (as opposed to being a troll, say). However, the EA Forum exists for a particular purpose, and has particular standards in place to serve that purpose, and this means that the Forum is not necessarily a good place for everyone who is trying to contribute. (For what it’s worth, I feel a missing mood in writing this.)
In response to our request that they stop publishing similar content from multiple accounts, they said: “Posted from multiple accounts? I feel it is possible that the same post may have been created because maybe the topic is popular?” However, we are >99% confident, based on our usual checks for multiple account use, that the other account that tried to publish this similar content is an alt controlled by them. (They did subsequently stop trying to publish from other accounts.)
We do not have an official policy on rate limits, at present, although we have used rate limits on occasion. We aim to improve our process here. In short, rate limits may be a more appropriate intervention than bans are for users who aren’t clearly breaking norms, but who are nonetheless posting low-quality content or repeatedly testing the edges of the norms.
Notwithstanding the notice we published, which was a mistake, I am not sure if the ban decision itself was a mistake. It turns out that different moderators have different views on the post in question, and I think the difference between the original decision to ban and the present decision to instead warn and rate limit can mostly be chalked up to reasonable disagreement between different moderators. (We are choosing to override the original decision since we spent significantly longer on the review, and we therefore have more confidence in the review decision being “correct”. We put substantial effort into the review because established users, in their appeal, made some points that we felt deserved to be taken seriously. However, this level of effort would not be tenable for most “regular” moderation calls—i.e., those involving unestablished or not-in-great-standing users, like dstudiocode—given the tradeoffs we face.)
Seems reasonable (tbh with that context I’m somewhat OK with the original ban), thanks for clarifying!
I appreciate the thought that went into this. I also think that using rate-limits as a tool, instead of bans, is in general a good idea. I continue to strongly disagree with the decisions on a few points:
I still think including the “materials that may be easily perceived as such” clause has a chilling effect.
I also remember someone’s comment that the things you’re calling “norms” are actually rules, and it’s a little disingenuous to not call them that; I continue to agree with this.
The fact that you’re not even willing to quote the parts of the post that were objectionable feels like an indication of a mindset that I really disagree with. It’s like… treating words as inherently dangerous? Not thinking at all about the use-mention distinction? I mean, here’s a quote from the Hamas charter: “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.” Clearly this is way way more of an incitement to violence than any quote of dstudiocode’s, which you’re apparently not willing to quote. (I am deliberately not expressing any opinion about whether the Hamas quote is correct; I’m just quoting them.) What’s the difference?
“They see the fact that it is “just” a philosophical question as not changing the assessment.” Okay, let me now quote Singer. “Human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time. They are not persons… the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee.” Will you warn/ban me from the EA forum for quoting Singer, without endorsing that statement? What if I asked, philosophically, “If Singer were right, would it be morally acceptable to kill a baby to save a dog’s life?” I mean, there are whole subfields of ethics based on asking about who you would kill in order to save whom (which is why I’m pushing on this so strongly: the thing you are banning from the forum is one of the key ways people have had philosophical debates over foundational EA ideas). What if I defended Singer’s argument in a post of my own?
As I say this, I feel some kind of twinge of concern that people will find this and use it to attack me, or that crazy people will act badly inspired by my questions. I hypothesize that the moderators are feeling this kind of twinge more generally. I think this is the sort of twinge that should and must be overridden, because listening to it means that your discourse will forever be at the mercy of whoever is most hostile to you, or whoever is craziest. You can’t figure out true things in that situation.
(On a personal level, I apologize to the moderators for putting them in difficult situations by saying things that are deliberately in the grey areas of their moderation policy. Nevertheless I think it’s important enough that I will continue doing this. EA is not just a group of nerds on the internet any more, it’s a force that shapes the world in a bunch of ways, and so it is crucial that we don’t echo-chamber ourselves into doing crazy stuff (including, or especially, when the crazy stuff matches mainstream consensus). If you would like to warn/ban me, then I would harbor no personal ill-will about it, though of course I will consider that evidence that I and others should be much more wary about the quality of discourse on the forum.)
On point 4:
I’m pretty sure we could come up with various individuals and groups of people that some users of this forum would prefer not to exist. There’s no clear and unbiased way to decide which of those individuals and groups could be the target of “philosophical questions” about the desirability of murdering them and which could not. Unless we’re going to allow the question as applied to any individual or group (which I think is untenable for numerous reasons), the line has to be drawn somewhere. Would it be ethical to get rid of this meddlesome priest should be suspendable or worse (except that the meddlesome priest in question has been dead for over eight hundred years).
And I think drawing the line at we’re not going to allow hypotheticals about murdering discernable people[1] is better (and poses less risk of viewpoint suppression) than expecting the mods to somehow devise a rule for when that content will be allowed and consistently apply it. I think the effect of a bright-line no-murder-talk rule on expression of ideas is modest because (1) posters can get much of the same result by posing non-violent scenarios (e.g., leaving someone to drown in a pond is neither an act of violence nor generally illegal in the United States) and (2) there are other places to have discussions if the murder content is actually important to the philosophical point.[2]
By “discernable people,” I mean those with some sort of salient real-world characteristic as opposed to being 99-100% generic abstractions (especially if in a clearly unrealistic scenario, like the people in the trolley problem).
I am not expressing an opinion about whether there are philosophical points for which murder content actually is important.
Do you think it is acceptable to discuss the death penalty on the forum? Intuitively this seems within scope—historically we have discussed criminal justice reform on the forum, and capital punishment is definitely part of that.
If so, is the distinction state violence vs individual violence? This seems not totally implausible to me, though it does suggest that the offending poster could simply re-word their post to be about state-sanctioned executions and leave the rest of the content untouched.
I’ve weak karma downvoted and disagreed with this, then hit the “insightful” button. Definitely made me think and learn.
I agree that this is really tricky question, and some of those philosophical conversations (including this one) are important and should happen, but I don’t think this particular EA forum is the best place for them, for a few reasons.
1) I think there are better places to have these often awkward, fraught conversations. I think they are often better had in-person where you can connect, preface, soften and easily retract. I recently got into a mini online-tiff, when a wise onlooker noted...
”Online discussions can turn that way with a few misinterpretations creating a doom loop that wouldn’t happen with a handshake and a drink”
Or alternatively perhaps in a more academic/narrow forum where people have similar discussion norms and understandings. This forum has a particularly wide range of users, from nerds to philosophers to practitioners to managers to donors so there’s a very wide range of norms and understandings.
2) There’s potential reputational damage for all the people doing great EA work across the spectrum here. These kinds of discussions could lead to more hit-pieces and reduced funding. It would be a pity if the AI apocalypse hit us because of funding cuts due to these discussions. (OK now I’m strawmanning a bit :D)
3) The forum might be an entry-point for some people into EA things. I don’t think its a good idea for this to be these discussions to be the first thing someone looking into EA sees on the internet.
4) It might be a bit of a strawman to say our “discourse will forever be at the mercy of whoever is most hostile to you, or whoever is craziest.” I think people hostile to EA don’t like many things said here on the forum, but we aren’t forever at the mercy of them and we keep talking. I think there are just a few particular topics which give people more ammunition for public take-downs, and there is wisdom in sometimes avoiding loading balls into your opponents cannons.
5) I think if you (like Singer) write your own opinion in their own book its a different situation—you are the one writing and take full responsibility for your work—on a public forum it at least feels like there is at least a smidgeon of shared accountability for what is said. Forms of this debate that has been going on for sometime about what is posted on Twitter / Facebook etc.
6) I agree with you the quote from the Hamas charter is more dangerous—and think we shouldn’t be publishing or discussing that on the forum either.
I have great respect for these free speech arguments, and think this is a super hard question where the “best” thing to do might well change a lot over time, but right now I don’t think allowing these discussions and arguments on this particular EA forum will lead to more good in the long run.
Ty for the reply; a jumble of responses below.
You are literally talking about the sort of conversations that created EA. If people don’t have these conversations on the forum (the single best way to create common knowledge in the EA commmunity), then it will be much harder to course-correct places where fundamental ideas are mistaken. I think your comment proceeds from the implicit assumption that we’re broadly right about stuff, and mostly just need to keep our heads down and do the work. I personally think that a version of EA that doesn’t have the ability to course-correct in big ways would be net negative for the world. In general it is not possible to e.g. identify ongoing moral catastrophes when you’re optimizing your main venue of conversations for avoiding seeming weird.
If you’re not able to talk about evil people and their ideologies, then you will not be able to account for them in reasoning about how to steer the world. I think EA is already far too naive about how power dynamics work at large scales, given how much influence we’re wielding; this makes it worse.
Insofar as you’re thinking about this as a question of coalitional politics, I can phrase it in those terms too: the more censorious EA becomes, the more truth-seeking people will disaffiliate from it. Habryka, who was one of the most truth-seeking people involved in EA, has already done so; I wouldn’t say it was directly because of EA not being truth-seeking enough, but I think that was one big issue for him amongst a cluster of related issues. I don’t currently plan to, but I’ve considered the possibility, and the quality of EA’s epistemic norms is one of my major considerations (of course, the forum’s norms are only a small part of that).
However, having said this, I don’t think you should support more open forum norms mostly as a concession to people like me, but rather in order to pursue your own goals more effectively. Movements that aren’t able to challenge foundational assumptions end up like environmentalists: actively harming the causes they’re trying to support.
Just to narrow in on a single point—I have found the ‘EA fundamentally depends on uncomfortable conversations’ point to be a bit unnuanced in the past. It seems like we could be more productive by delineating which kinds of discomfort we want to defend—for example, most people here don’t want to have uncomfortable conversations about age of consent laws (thankfully), but do want to have them about factory farming.
When I think about the founding myths of EA, most of them seem to revolve around the discomfort of applying utilitarianism in practice, or on how far we should expand our moral circles. I think EA would’ve broadly survived intact by lightly moderating other kinds of discomfort (or it may have even expanded).
I’m not keen to take a stance on whether this post should or shouldn’t be allowed on the forum, but I am curious to hear if and where you would draw this line :)
Narrowing in even further on the example you gave, as an illustration: I just had an uncomfortable conversation about age of consent laws literally yesterday with an old friend of mine. Specifically, my friend was advocating that the most important driver of crime is poverty, and I was arguing that it’s cultural acceptance of crime. I pointed to age of consent laws varying widely across different countries as evidence that there are some cultures which accept behavior that most westerners think of as deeply immoral (and indeed criminal).
Picturing some responses you might give to this:
That’s not the sort of uncomfortable claim you’re worried about
But many possible continuations of this conversation would in fact have gotten into more controversial territory. E.g. maybe a cultural relativist would defend those other countries having lower age of consent laws. I find cultural relativism kinda crazy (for this and related reasons) but it’s a pretty mainstream position.
I could have made the point in more sensitive ways
Maybe? But the whole point of the conversation was about ways in which some cultures are better than others. This is inherently going to be a sensitive claim, and it’s hard to think of examples that are compelling without being controversial.
This is not the sort of thing people should be discussing on the forum
But EA as a movement is interested in things like:
Criminal justice reform (which OpenPhil has spent many tens of millions of dollars on)
Promoting women’s rights (especially in the context of global health and extreme poverty reduction)
What factors make what types of foreign aid more or less effective
More generally, the relationship between the developed and the developing world
So this sort of debate does seem pretty relevant.
The important point is that we didn’t know in advance which kinds of discomfort were of crucial importance. The relevant baseline here is not early EAs moderating ourselves, it’s something like “the rest of academic philosophy/society at large moderating EA”, which seems much more likely to have stifled early EA’s ability to identify important issues and interventions.
(I also think we’ve ended up at some of the wrong points on some of these issues, but that’s a longer debate.)
Do you have an example of the kind of early EA conversation which you think was really important which helped came up with core EA tenets might be frowned upon or censored on the forum now? I’m still super dubious about whether leaving out a small number of specific topics really leaves much value on the table.
And I really think conversations can be had in more sensitive ways. In the the case of the original banned post, just as good a philosophical conversation could be had without explicitly talking about killing people. The conversation already was being had on another thread “the meat eater problem”
And as a sidebar yeah I wouldn’t have any issue with that above conversation myself because we just have to practically discuss that with donors and internally when providing health care and getting confronted with tricky situations. Also (again sidebar) it’s interesting that age of marriage/consent conversations can be where classic left wing cultural relativism and gender safeguarding collide and don’t know which way to swing. We’ve had to ask that question practically in our health centers, to decide who to give family planning to and when to think of referring to police etc. Super tricky.
My point is not that the current EA forum would censor topics that were actually important early EA conversations, because EAs have now been selected for being willing to discuss those topics. My point is that the current forum might censor topics that would be important course-corrections, just as if the rest of society had been moderating early EA conversations, those conversations might have lost important contributions like impartiality between species (controversial: you’re saying human lives don’t matter very much!), the ineffectiveness of development aid (controversial: you’re attacking powerful organizations!), transhumanism (controversial, according to the people who say it’s basically eugenics), etc.
Re “conversations can be had in more sensitive ways”, I mostly disagree, because of the considerations laid out here: the people who are good at discussing topics sensitively are mostly not the ones who are good at coming up with important novel ideas.
For example, it seems plausible that genetic engineering for human intelligence enhancement is an important and highly neglected intervention. But you had to be pretty disagreeable to bring it into the public conversation a few years ago (I think it’s now a bit more mainstream).
Assuming we’re only talking about the post Richard linked (and the user’s one recent comment, which is similar), I agree with this.
This moderation policy seems absurd. The post in question was clearly asking purely hypothetical questions, and wasn’t even advocating for any particular answer to the question. May as well ban users for asking whether it’s moral to push a man off a bridge to stop a trolley, or ban Peter Singer for his thought experiments about infanticide.
Perhaps dstudiocode has misbehaved in other ways, but this announcement focuses on something that should be clearly within the bounds of acceptable discourse. (In particular, the standard of “content that could be interpreted as X” is a very censorious one, since you now need to cater to a wide range of possible interpretations.)
That is not the post in question. We removed the post that prompted the ban.
Ah, thanks, that’s important context—I semi-retract my strongly worded comment above, depending on exactly how bad the removed post was, but can imagine posts in this genre that I think are genuinely bad
Another comment from me:
I don’t like my mod message, and I apologize for it. I was rushed and used some templated language that I knew damn well at the time that I wasn’t excited about putting my name behind. I nevertheless did and bear the responsibility.
That’s all from me for now. The mods who weren’t involved in the original decision will come in and reconsider the ban, pursuant to the appeal.
In the post that prompted the ban, they asked whether murdering meat-eaters could be considered ethical. I don’t want to comment on whether this would be an appropriate topic for a late night philosophy club conversation, it is not an appropriate topic for the EA Forum.
I think speculating about what exactly constitutes the most good is perfectly on-topic. While ‘murdering meat-eaters’ is perhaps an overly direct phrasing (and of course under most ethical frameworks murder raises additional issues as compared to mere inaction or deprioritization), the question of whether the negative utility produced by one marginal person’s worth of factory farming outweighs the positive utility that person experiences—colloquially referred to as the meat-eater problem—is one that has been discussed here a number of times, and that I feel is quite relevant to the question of which interventions should be prioritized.
I’d separate out the removal and the suspension, and dissent only as to the latter.
I get why the mods would feel the need to chart a wide berth around anything that some person could somehow “interpret[] as promoting violence or illegal activities.” Making a rule against brief hypothetical mentions of the possible ethics of murder is defensible, especially in light of certain practical realities.
However, I can’t agree with taking punitive action against a user where the case that they violated the norm is this tenuous and there is a lack of fair prior notice of the mods’ interpretation. For that kind of action, I think the minimum standard would be either clear notice or content that a reasonable person would recognize could reasonably be interpreted as promoting violence. In other words, was the poster negligent in failing to recognize that violence promotion was a reasonable interpretation?
I don’t think the violence-promoting interpretation is a reasonable one here, and it sounds like several other users agree—which I take as evidence of non-negligence.