I would love to debate God and angels—if for no other reason that it is essentially a harmless debate. Maybe a little hell and a few deaths by the hand of religious fanatics, but nothing compared with total extinction of humans. Science says this is inevitable unless we deal with global warming—and scientists are frustrated and pissed that the message is not getting delivered.
This is the ultimate debate between the rational and delusional.
The carbon fuel industry-backed rhetorical and PR tactics have keep this issue from proper discussion.… (similar tactics from the tobacco industry “We are not really sure that tobacco causes cancer”) We are beyond discussion—and now trapped in rhetorical inaction. The tactics and the complicity of mass media means we are doomed by the denialism. Pity. This used to be a hell of a great civilization.
Yale University forestry school just posted an interview with Elizabeth Kolbert who played a major role in trying to bring the issue of climate change to the attention of the U.S. public. “Her award-winning series on climate change in The New Yorker in 2005 became the basis for her influential book, Field Notes From a Catastrophe, and she has traveled from Greenland to Alaska to the Netherlands reporting on the emerging impacts of global warming. ” http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2130
And the best discussion I have seen on the wrestling with the rhetoriticians :
Interesting—to my surprise, the comment was in line with my sympathies, while I’d expected it to run counter to them. I wonder how best to update given this evidence?
Come on… it was already in the negatives—it would just take a little nudge to push it below the threshold of anyone who doesn’t want to see bad comments. If it doesn’t contain illegal/dangerous material, a comment should not be deleted.
While it was clearly propaganda, the author did seem to believe it was to some extent on-topic.
Irrespective of this particular comment, as a rule of thumb outright removing comments that were probably submitted in good faith is harmful from a community standpoint. Among other things, it discourages judicious self-policing among the users, makes approval/disapproval seem more capricious and arbitrary, and is less scalable.
Assuming the goal is a user community-driven site, removal by administrative fiat should be reserved for blatantly disruptive comments: content-free trolling, flooding, &c. If, in your judgement, this comment crossed that line that’s fine; but I encourage you to be cautious about policy here and to err on the side of non-intervention.
You’re right—while I don’t think it was spam, by the usual definition (I don’t see a copy of that comment on every post, for example), spam is definitely a category of things worth deleting and/or developing a mechanism to block. So it’s on your judgement.
I composed this specifically for LessWrong—so how can this be spam ?
That is really unfair. Perhaps I should have spoken more directly to the use of rhetoric, but in the field of global warming, the big discussion now is rhetoric and the denial of reason.
I will say that my writing is passionate, direct, but not spam. Perhaps you need another category for rejecting an uncomfortable comment.
The problem with the comment was not that it was uncomfortable. It was that it was basically a rant and a bunch of links to sites about your particular political affiliation, which was not the topic of this post.
Even a discussion about how the global warming debate has devolved into mere rhetoric would be only tangentially related to this post and likely would have been voted down for being off-topic.
Bwahaha : rpauli now has karma 4294967286, which is 2^32 − 10, from which we can conclude that his actual karma score is −10, and that lesswrong encodes karma in unsigned 32-bit integers.
(Yes, I’m one of the theoretical python volunteers, I just haven’t got reddit to work right on my machine yet … but I’m nearly there!)
I would love to debate God and angels—if for no other reason that it is essentially a harmless debate. Maybe a little hell and a few deaths by the hand of religious fanatics, but nothing compared with total extinction of humans. Science says this is inevitable unless we deal with global warming—and scientists are frustrated and pissed that the message is not getting delivered.
This is the ultimate debate between the rational and delusional.
Oh...excuse me, you are a rhetorical “skeptic” ?? feel free to check: http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/denier-vs-skeptic/denier-myths-debunked/
The science is done. and most disturbing is why the news of a looming colossal crisis is not heard. Now scientists are getting disturbed by the human reaction… see “Climate change blues—how scientists cope” http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/articleALeqM5hfDbOOosZBSfIIlTutM5m42eWhCQ
The carbon fuel industry-backed rhetorical and PR tactics have keep this issue from proper discussion.… (similar tactics from the tobacco industry “We are not really sure that tobacco causes cancer”) We are beyond discussion—and now trapped in rhetorical inaction. The tactics and the complicity of mass media means we are doomed by the denialism. Pity. This used to be a hell of a great civilization.
Yale University forestry school just posted an interview with Elizabeth Kolbert who played a major role in trying to bring the issue of climate change to the attention of the U.S. public. “Her award-winning series on climate change in The New Yorker in 2005 became the basis for her influential book, Field Notes From a Catastrophe, and she has traveled from Greenland to Alaska to the Netherlands reporting on the emerging impacts of global warming. ” http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2130
And the best discussion I have seen on the wrestling with the rhetoriticians :
http://climateprogress.org/2008/09/30/why-scientists-arent-more-persuasive-part-1/ http://climateprogress.org/2008/10/13/why-scientists-aren%E2%80%99t-more-persuasive-part-2-why-deniers-out-debate-smart-talkers/ http://climateprogress.org/2009/02/16/abraham-lincoln-figures-of-speech-shakespeare/
This comment on global warming was outright banned for being completely off-topic.
Interesting—to my surprise, the comment was in line with my sympathies, while I’d expected it to run counter to them. I wonder how best to update given this evidence?
Downvoted nonethless.
Come on… it was already in the negatives—it would just take a little nudge to push it below the threshold of anyone who doesn’t want to see bad comments. If it doesn’t contain illegal/dangerous material, a comment should not be deleted.
While it was clearly propaganda, the author did seem to believe it was to some extent on-topic.
Crossed the line into spam IMO, but if anyone agrees with thomblake they can vote me down further and I’ll unban the comment and you can downvote it.
Irrespective of this particular comment, as a rule of thumb outright removing comments that were probably submitted in good faith is harmful from a community standpoint. Among other things, it discourages judicious self-policing among the users, makes approval/disapproval seem more capricious and arbitrary, and is less scalable.
Assuming the goal is a user community-driven site, removal by administrative fiat should be reserved for blatantly disruptive comments: content-free trolling, flooding, &c. If, in your judgement, this comment crossed that line that’s fine; but I encourage you to be cautious about policy here and to err on the side of non-intervention.
You’re right—while I don’t think it was spam, by the usual definition (I don’t see a copy of that comment on every post, for example), spam is definitely a category of things worth deleting and/or developing a mechanism to block. So it’s on your judgement.
I composed this specifically for LessWrong—so how can this be spam ?
That is really unfair. Perhaps I should have spoken more directly to the use of rhetoric, but in the field of global warming, the big discussion now is rhetoric and the denial of reason.
I will say that my writing is passionate, direct, but not spam. Perhaps you need another category for rejecting an uncomfortable comment.
The problem with the comment was not that it was uncomfortable. It was that it was basically a rant and a bunch of links to sites about your particular political affiliation, which was not the topic of this post.
Even a discussion about how the global warming debate has devolved into mere rhetoric would be only tangentially related to this post and likely would have been voted down for being off-topic.
Bwahaha : rpauli now has karma 4294967286, which is 2^32 − 10, from which we can conclude that his actual karma score is −10, and that lesswrong encodes karma in unsigned 32-bit integers.
(Yes, I’m one of the theoretical python volunteers, I just haven’t got reddit to work right on my machine yet … but I’m nearly there!)
s/64/32/g above.
Dammit!
… uh, I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Okay, comment’s back. We need two more downvotes to make it disappear for most users, so get minusy.