15 comments and −120 karma? Okay, at this point I may begin immune response against trolling (delete further comments, possibly past comments, as and when I get around to seeing that they were made).
I also remind everyone: Please do not respond at length to trolls, attention stimulates their reward centers.
I’m not so sure he’s a troll. He very well might be, but at least he made this comment which is at 4 karma right now. His more recent comments seem better than his previous ones, too. p(troll) seems pretty high, but not so high that I would support a ban, comment deletions, etc. at this point.
Most of his comments are essentially saying “you are wrong”. Once he was right in saying that, many times he was wrong. He probably knows a lot of facts about many topics, and he expresses with very high certainty; unfortunately the quality of his comments does not match this certainty, and he seems very immune to feedback. Low karma just proves he is right.
He is very negative towards others. Almost all his comments contain something like: “Your work is wrong.” “I never said anything like this” “I never flamed anyone.” “spelled wrong” “I have no such delusions.” “it hasn’t done anything for me.” “it’s definitely going to do more harm than good.” “I already explained why it’s not possible.” “There is practically no chance” “It’s a misconception” “This idea is based on a whole range of confusions and misunderstandings” “just another example of people not understanding” It’s like his only point in discussions is to show that everyone else is wrong, but it’s often him who is wrong. Did he make some useful contribution? I don’t see any.
And then the—“You are trying to submit too fast. try again in %i minutes.” and “You do not have enough karma to downvote right now. You need 1 more point.”—just make me want to scream. (Though the fact that he does not have enough karma to downvote makes me happy. I guess he was going to downvote those who disagree with him. I am happy that LW karma system does not allow him to make dozen sockpuppet accounts and start a downvoting war.)
Maybe the guy is not having fun, maybe that’s just what he honestly is… but anyway his comments seem like optimized to create mental suffering in others, certainly in me. I have left websites where people like this became frequent. If this kind of behavior becomes tolerated on LW, I will either write some GreaseMonkey plugin that will remove all his comments from the page, or I will simply stop reading LW. In theory I am reading this site for information, not for positive emotion, but I am just a human… if this site will give me negative emotion too often, I will stop reading it.
I tried to give him the benefit of doubt, and answered his comment seriously, but now I feel it was totally not worth doing. This is my worst experience on LW so far. Though this mostly means that I did not have bad experiences on LW so far. :) But I prefer it to stay this way.
I tend to agree with you. I think I just have a higher threshold for banning. As such, I would like to see him actively ignore our suggestions before entirely dismissing him, which is not sure is something he’s done yet.
Less Wrong isn’t some kind of human right that we need to go beyond reasonable doubt to withdraw from someone; it’s an online community run by an enlightened dictator, and if you want to keep your well kept garden, you have to accept some collateral damage.
I am extremely wary of this kind of thinking. Partly because using power is a slippery slope to abusing power, and each time you use the banhammer on a maybe-troll it gets a little bit easier to use it on the next maybe-troll.
Not just because of that, but also because when other people come to a community full of self-purported rationalists, and they see someone who does not obviously and immediately pattern match as a troll receiving the banhammer for presenting community-disapproved opinions in what seems superficially to be an adequately calm and reasonable manner, that sets off the ‘cult’ alarms. It makes us look intolerant and exclusionary, even if we aren’t.
It’s fine for places like the SA forums to throw the banhammer around with reckless abandon, because they exist only for fun. But we have higher goals. We have to consider not just keeping our garden tidy, but making sure we don’t look like overzealous pruners to anybody who has a potentially nice set of azaleas to contribute.
Slipper slopes work in both directions. Each time you don’t strike down injustice, it becomes a bit easier to walk by the next time. I’d sooner have Marginal Value > Marginal Cost than Marginal Value < Marginal Cost and a lower Average Value.
Bad impressions work in both directions. When other people come to a community full of self-purported rationalists, and they see someone presenting stupid, low-status, incendary comments and being treated as worthy of respect, it makes LW look stupid, low-status and incendary because of the Representativeness Heuristic.
Obveously there is a continuum between anarchy and banning everything, and both extremes are local minima. The issue is to judge the local gradient
Upvoted for valid point. I agree, but I think there is enough of a difference between ‘being treated as worthy of respect’ and ‘not being banned’ that we can probably ride in the middle ground comfortably without any significant image damage.
On consideration, though… maybe I’m prejudiced against banning because of the sense of finality of it. I guess it’s not hard to make a new account.
I’m still opposed to deleting past comments though, because deleted comments make a mess of the history.
Well he hasn’t commented recently, so I’m guessing he either took our advice and made a new account, or just left the site, neither of which I would attribute to troll behaviour. (Or Eliezer is deleting his posts as promised, which would, obviously, weaken that hypothesis.)
15 comments and −120 karma? Okay, at this point I may begin immune response against trolling (delete further comments, possibly past comments, as and when I get around to seeing that they were made).
I also remind everyone: Please do not respond at length to trolls, attention stimulates their reward centers.
I’m not so sure he’s a troll. He very well might be, but at least he made this comment which is at 4 karma right now. His more recent comments seem better than his previous ones, too. p(troll) seems pretty high, but not so high that I would support a ban, comment deletions, etc. at this point.
Most of his comments are essentially saying “you are wrong”. Once he was right in saying that, many times he was wrong. He probably knows a lot of facts about many topics, and he expresses with very high certainty; unfortunately the quality of his comments does not match this certainty, and he seems very immune to feedback. Low karma just proves he is right.
He is very negative towards others. Almost all his comments contain something like: “Your work is wrong.” “I never said anything like this” “I never flamed anyone.” “spelled wrong” “I have no such delusions.” “it hasn’t done anything for me.” “it’s definitely going to do more harm than good.” “I already explained why it’s not possible.” “There is practically no chance” “It’s a misconception” “This idea is based on a whole range of confusions and misunderstandings” “just another example of people not understanding” It’s like his only point in discussions is to show that everyone else is wrong, but it’s often him who is wrong. Did he make some useful contribution? I don’t see any.
And then the—“You are trying to submit too fast. try again in %i minutes.” and “You do not have enough karma to downvote right now. You need 1 more point.”—just make me want to scream. (Though the fact that he does not have enough karma to downvote makes me happy. I guess he was going to downvote those who disagree with him. I am happy that LW karma system does not allow him to make dozen sockpuppet accounts and start a downvoting war.)
Maybe the guy is not having fun, maybe that’s just what he honestly is… but anyway his comments seem like optimized to create mental suffering in others, certainly in me. I have left websites where people like this became frequent. If this kind of behavior becomes tolerated on LW, I will either write some GreaseMonkey plugin that will remove all his comments from the page, or I will simply stop reading LW. In theory I am reading this site for information, not for positive emotion, but I am just a human… if this site will give me negative emotion too often, I will stop reading it.
I tried to give him the benefit of doubt, and answered his comment seriously, but now I feel it was totally not worth doing. This is my worst experience on LW so far. Though this mostly means that I did not have bad experiences on LW so far. :) But I prefer it to stay this way.
I tend to agree with you. I think I just have a higher threshold for banning. As such, I would like to see him actively ignore our suggestions before entirely dismissing him, which is not sure is something he’s done yet.
Less Wrong isn’t some kind of human right that we need to go beyond reasonable doubt to withdraw from someone; it’s an online community run by an enlightened dictator, and if you want to keep your well kept garden, you have to accept some collateral damage.
I am extremely wary of this kind of thinking. Partly because using power is a slippery slope to abusing power, and each time you use the banhammer on a maybe-troll it gets a little bit easier to use it on the next maybe-troll.
Not just because of that, but also because when other people come to a community full of self-purported rationalists, and they see someone who does not obviously and immediately pattern match as a troll receiving the banhammer for presenting community-disapproved opinions in what seems superficially to be an adequately calm and reasonable manner, that sets off the ‘cult’ alarms. It makes us look intolerant and exclusionary, even if we aren’t.
It’s fine for places like the SA forums to throw the banhammer around with reckless abandon, because they exist only for fun. But we have higher goals. We have to consider not just keeping our garden tidy, but making sure we don’t look like overzealous pruners to anybody who has a potentially nice set of azaleas to contribute.
Slipper slopes work in both directions. Each time you don’t strike down injustice, it becomes a bit easier to walk by the next time. I’d sooner have Marginal Value > Marginal Cost than Marginal Value < Marginal Cost and a lower Average Value.
Bad impressions work in both directions. When other people come to a community full of self-purported rationalists, and they see someone presenting stupid, low-status, incendary comments and being treated as worthy of respect, it makes LW look stupid, low-status and incendary because of the Representativeness Heuristic.
Obveously there is a continuum between anarchy and banning everything, and both extremes are local minima. The issue is to judge the local gradient
Upvoted for valid point. I agree, but I think there is enough of a difference between ‘being treated as worthy of respect’ and ‘not being banned’ that we can probably ride in the middle ground comfortably without any significant image damage.
On consideration, though… maybe I’m prejudiced against banning because of the sense of finality of it. I guess it’s not hard to make a new account.
I’m still opposed to deleting past comments though, because deleted comments make a mess of the history.
This is how trolling works.
Well he hasn’t commented recently, so I’m guessing he either took our advice and made a new account, or just left the site, neither of which I would attribute to troll behaviour. (Or Eliezer is deleting his posts as promised, which would, obviously, weaken that hypothesis.)
I say just ban him.
I wonder if downvotes have gone from a punishment to a reward at this point.
I hope you’ll treat me fairly as a person and actually read and try to understand my comments instead of jumping to conclusions based on my “score”.
Your best way to be taken seriously would be just to create a new account without making any reference to this one, and, well, not act like a troll.
Huh. Come to think of it, on the Internet there IS a second chance to make a first impression. (a good argument to always using handles). Noted.