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Turgid Flagella posted:Additionally, are you doubting the accuracy with which issues of NATO history, US postwar colonialism and anti-Communist (which has become synonymous with anti-Russian) activity, or do you just not care to see it at all? This is probably an important distinction to make - if I'm going to go digging through hundreds of pages of The Jakarta Method for a relevant passage, it'd be nice to know the effort won't go towards being accused of "mining for SYQs" before I put in the actual effort to show that all of this is just an extension of the US's desire to be the monopolar superpower while nominally communist-aligned governments that were left economically teetering on the edge because unlike the US they'd been entrenched in the actual war for years rather than showing up at the end to drop nukes on civilian cities and take some concentration camps selfies at camps already liberated by Soviet forces The bolded, I simply don't care. What I want to see in the war thread is not a macroscopic view of post-WW2 international politics. Instead, I'm seeking to support a flowing conversation about the current state of the war and its tangible trajectory and effects in the short and medium-term future. As a spin-off thread from the EEPol, it has quite a few posters and readers for whom a clear view of what's going on is of consequence, myself including, which is what defines my motivations for volunteering to moderate it. gurragadon posted:Do you understand my larger issue that I'm using the ChatGPT thread to frame? The point is embarrassment isn't a good metric to shut down conversation in any case. I didn't think of it in a more general sense, in the context of your words, so I appreciate the follow-up. We'll have to respectfully agree to disagree here, I guess, as D&D should have some standards that are maintained, in my opinion.
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Mar 27, 2023 18:04
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socialsecurity posted:This seems odd to me, everyone wants mods to be more part of the community but them to also not moderate threads they post in? It sounds like the issue is that CZS appears to be moderating discussions in which they themselves are active participants in, and it comes in the form of probating/silencing their debate opponents. And yes, that has been frowned upon and discouraged for a long time now.
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Mar 27, 2023 18:05
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Fritz the Horse posted:please post about D&D moderation and avoid slapfights with other users. I was trying to illustrate that cincis modding of the Ukraine thread is great (I don't follow the ai threads) by the fact that the complaints are mostly a guy with a forever grudge about a pet topic and a genocide denier. I think having less weird people with monstrous opinions is a good way to encourage more normal, knowledgeable people to post here
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Mar 27, 2023 18:06
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cinci zoo sniper posted:I didn't think of it in a more general sense, in the context of your words, so I appreciate the follow-up. We'll have to respectfully agree to disagree here, I guess, as D&D should have some standards that are maintained, in my opinion. I guess the standards need to be clearly defined within ideological boundaries if we want to limit it by "embarrassment." I agree there should be standards in formatting, effort and sourcing when possible. But standards on ideas? That doesn't sit right with me in a debate and discussion forum unless were talking about clearly illegal things. gurragadon fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 18:08
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Discendo Vox posted:I don't want mods to be part of the community. I want them to moderate. It's a lot to ask for an unpaid volunteer position. I would just roll with it more.
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Mar 27, 2023 18:16
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Somaen posted:I was trying to illustrate that cincis modding of the Ukraine thread is great (I don't follow the ai threads) by the fact that the complaints are mostly a guy with a forever grudge about a pet topic and a genocide denier. I think having less weird people with monstrous opinions is a good way to encourage more normal, knowledgeable people to post here One person's facts being another person's bad faith genocide denial is an apt way to sum up D&D. It's a bad sub because posting basic factual information will get you marked as arguing in bad faith if it's a controversial topic. Gumball Gumption fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 18:30
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I think there are different expectations in other forums that don't work as well here. It's a bad look for a D&D mod to give someone a week off for continuing to disagree with them even if the mod thinks the disagreement is in bad faith.
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Mar 27, 2023 18:31
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Just my two cents, I think Cinci is doing great with the Ukraine thread. I don't really read other D&D threads much so can't comment on them. If folks want a NATO history thread, or a global superpower grand strategy thread or some such, why not make one? Genuine question.
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Mar 27, 2023 18:31
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Alright, gotta go, but someone from American timezone should hop on sooner rather than later.Thorn Wishes Talon posted:It sounds like the issue is that CZS appears to be moderating discussions in which they themselves are active participants in, and it comes in the form of probating/silencing their debate opponents. And yes, that has been frowned upon and discouraged for a long time now. I've not participated in the ChatGPT thread as a poster, cf. my explicit refusal to do so cited earlier in the thread. Just the default vibe check to help establish the preferred course of action. gurragadon posted:I guess the standards need to be clearly defined within ideological boundaries if we want to limit it by "embarrassment." I agree there should be standards in formatting, effort and sourcing when possible. But standards on ideas? That doesn't sit right with me in a debate and discussion forum unless were talking about clearly illegal things. There are no standards on ideas, but there are standards on facts, which is why your current thread lives, but the last one received attention (don't forget temporal relevance though). There was no active poster consistently making faithful representation of the facts of the situation. In other words, under the assumption that titles accurately reflect the underlying threads, “the Earth is flat” would be an embarrassment, whereas “I think the Earth is flat” and “Flat-Earthism” wouldn't. cinci zoo sniper fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 18:31
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cinci zoo sniper posted:Alright, gotta go, but someone from American timezone should hop on sooner rather than later. There are inherently standards on ideas if you are using embarrassment as a criterion, how else would you feel embarrassed about it? My opinions on AI are embarrassing to you, I don't care that they are embarrassing, and they are no less valid than your opinions on AI. The thread was embarrassing because it was talking about ChatGPT and AI technology in a way that a certain technical expertise didn't agree with. KillHour posted their credentials, they know what you know, they just came to a different conclusion. Edit: If the thread title was really issue you would have just changed the title instead of the thread being gassed. It's a red herring and not relevant to the conversation. gurragadon fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 18:42
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gurragadon posted:There are inherently standards on ideas if you are using embarrassment as a criterion, how else would you feel embarrassed about it? My opinions on AI are embarrassing to you, I don't care that they are embarrassing, and they are no less valid than your opinions on AI. The thread was embarrassing because it was talking about ChatGPT and AI technology in a way that a certain technical expertise didn't agree with. KillHour posted their credentials, they know what you know, they just came to a different conclusion. Again, this has nothing to do with what ideas you or anyone else has, and differences in ideas don't make a bad post. Not knowing what you (as a figure of speech) are talking about is a robust way to write a bad post, however, when you're trying to talk not about an idea (e.g., AI), but about something that is exists in the real world and is epistemologically falsifiable (e.g., ChatGPT). The thread was not deemed an embarrassment for talking about the concept of AI. It was found increasingly embarrassing for misrepresenting ChatGPT in the wrong place at the wrong time. Part of this misrepresentation was rooted in poor use of facts, and part in a poor command of the debate of it, e.g., anthropomorphization, in my subjective determination of the expertise and the credentials of the most active posters of the thread as dismissible. Most crucially, the thread was not shut down for being embarrassing. It would've been merely renamed. What got it shut down was the big meltdown KillHour chose to have, instead of reporting attacks on them and disengaging. Edit: gurragadon posted:Edit: If the thread title was really issue you would have just changed the title instead of the thread being gassed. It's a red herring and not relevant to the conversation. If the last page of the posts didn't happen, I would've renamed it a few days later. I guess what is coming poorly through is exactly how much weight (more than 50%) of the decisions I made came on the account of ChatGPT being this thing that an enormous amount of people is trying to find credible and practical information about, through the sewage of techno-futurism and crypto scammers doing a group job change. cinci zoo sniper fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 18:59
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Gumball Gumption posted:One person's facts being another person's bad faith genocide denial is an apt way to sum up D&D. It's a bad sub because posting basic factual information will get you marked as arguing in bad faith if it's a contributing topic. One person's facts is that an event in 1930 was caused by WW1, that ended about a decade earlier, and not the "expropriating food and grain" part. The problem is that there are other places for people into alternative facts, but they feel entitled to post here and being taken seriously for some reason
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Mar 27, 2023 18:59
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Somaen posted:One person's facts is that an event in 1930 was caused by WW1, that ended about a decade earlier, and not the "expropriating food and grain" part. The problem is that there are other places for people into alternative facts, but they feel entitled to post here and being taken seriously for some reason You can't have a space for academic discussion if you're also going to argue that legitimate academic discussions are alternative facts. D&D wants to pretend it's for academic debate and discussion while often having no idea what experts in those fields are talking about. The idea that the Holodomor was or was not an intentional genocide is still up for academic debate and saying that anyone who disagrees is a genocide denier and acting like it's on the same level as Holocaust denial is creating a space that stifles academic discussion while arguing that it isn't.
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Mar 27, 2023 19:08
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cinci zoo sniper posted:Again, this has nothing to do with what ideas you or anyone else has, and differences in ideas don't make a bad post. Not knowing what you (as a figure of speech) are talking about is a robust way to write a bad post, however, when you're trying to talk not about an idea (e.g., AI), but about something that is exists in the real world and is epistemologically falsifiable (e.g., ChatGPT). The thread was not deemed and embarrassment for talking about the concept of AI. It was found increasingly embarrassing for misrepresenting ChatGPT in the wrong place at the wrong time. Part of this misrepresentation was rooted in poor use of facts, and part in a poor command of the debate of it, e.g., anthropomorphization, in my subjective determination of the expertise and the credentials of the most active posters of the thread as dismissible. Not knowing about a topic is also the perfect opportunity to make a good post questioning what experts are saying. Good faith is assumed in this forum, also many things were posted about the consciousness of AI and people that were not epistemologically proven, but it was just taken as if it was. For instance, when responding to a question about something that was stated by consciousness by Noam Chomsky I was immediately accused of anthropomorphizing ChatGPT. My question had to do with the nature of consciousness and its relation to AI. I did nothing to misrepresent ChatGPT but it was part of the "anthropomorphizing" that technical experts just can't seem to stand. You have no right to dismiss KillHour as a poster, you partly have a right to dismiss my opinions because I've made it very clear I am a non-subject expert. Nobody was scamming anybody with misinformation in that thread, anybody reading it could easily see that posters that had a higher opinion on AI capabilities constantly hedged their posts by saying, not saying ChatGPT is anthropomorphic to try to please experts who were upset with any discussion of the future. The discussion of anthropomorphizing particularly upsets me because nobody can put forth a theory of when consciousness develops or how completely. I don't think ChatGPT is there and I've said it many times, but I've also said we might not know how close we are and I don't understand why that's not valid. Edit: I think you need to have more trust in the audience who are reading these threads. As you can see by people posting in this thread, they don't even agree with KillHour. There was no mass misinformation that couldn't be countered, it was a discussion with two different opinions.
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Mar 27, 2023 19:16
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My only real suggestion is that DV should be a mod since they have a lot of good ideas that would be cool to see implemented, like recruiting back in actual experts who could guide discussions. I like a lot of their earlier posts and with Fritz stepping back into an admin role it would be cool to see someone new and with obvious passion step up and be given a chance to implement some of those ideas.
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Mar 27, 2023 19:21
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Gumball Gumption posted:You can't have a space for academic discussion if you're also going to argue that legitimate academic discussions are alternative facts. D&D wants to pretend it's for academic debate and discussion while often having no idea what experts in those fields are talking about. The idea that the Holodomor was or was not an intentional genocide is still up for academic debate and saying that anyone who disagrees is a genocide denier and acting like it's on the same level as Holocaust denial is creating a space that stifles academic discussion while arguing that it isn't. It seems to me that if someone actually wanted to have that academic discussion they could start a thread for it. I don't think the topic itself is verboten, just the attempts to shoehorn it into a thread where it is, at best, tangential.
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Mar 27, 2023 19:27
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Gumball Gumption posted:You can't have a space for academic discussion if you're also going to argue that legitimate academic discussions are alternative facts. D&D wants to pretend it's for academic debate and discussion while often having no idea what experts in those fields are talking about. The idea that the Holodomor was or was not an intentional genocide is still up for academic debate and saying that anyone who disagrees is a genocide denier and acting like it's on the same level as Holocaust denial is creating a space that stifles academic discussion while arguing that it isn't. The person arguing that the holodomor was a consequence of the destruction of WW1, events separated by a decade, is not an academic. They are not anywhere near knowledgeable on the topic, they are simply repeating talking points and no knowledgeable person, let alone an academic, is going to waste time on debating them. There are legitimate high-end debates going on about the technical definitions, but the person who can't be bothered to learn the most basic things about the topic is not a part of that, they are simply denying an internationally recognized genocide on the internet. This behavior stifles discussion because intelligent people like to debate other intelligent people, or to educate people who are open to find out new things in a friendly manner -- why would someone use their time on "stalin did nothing wrong SHITLIB"? Somaen fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 19:34
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Somaen posted:The person arguing that the holodomor was a consequence of the destruction of WW1, events separated by a decade, is not an academic. They are not anywhere near knowledgeable on the topic, they are simply repeating talking points and no knowledgeable person, let alone an academic, is going to waste time on debating them. There are legitimate high-end debates going on about the technical definitions, but the person who can't be bothered to learn the most basic things about the topic is not a part of that, they are simply denying an internationally recognized genocide on the internet. This behavior stifles discussion because intelligent people like to debate other intelligent people, or to educate people who are open to find out new things in a friendly manner -- why would someone use their time on "stalin did nothing wrong SHITLIB"? Getting incredibly twisted over the when and not the salient argument of "was it malice or mismanagement" is just...incredibly on brand for this kind of discussion. You're using the fact that I got a largely immaterial detail wrong to completely discount that there is still academic debate on malice or mismanagement and get an extra dig in by claiming (by innuendo) that I'm too stupid to have the discussion. This is more stifling to any "academic" discussion that might occur because nobody wants to continue talking to someone that insults them!
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Mar 27, 2023 19:48
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VitalSigns posted:While this is open I have a few small pieces if feedback. Proof by contradiction doesn't run afoul of that guideline as long as you clearly state that is what you're doing, so that your line of logic can be followed and addressed by other posters. VitalSigns posted:-You shouldn't get probated for "assuming bad faith" if you merely point out a mistake someone is making, like strawmanning your argument. Strawmanning can, and often is, done unintentionally through misunderstanding, saying "hey X is a strawman my argument is Y" shouldn't be treated as an accusation of bad faith. If you believe someone is strawmanning your argument, you should assume they've simply misunderstood it and clarify. The normal definition of strawmanning includes intent, so it is a form of bad faith. VitalSigns posted:-Is sarcasm allowed or not, this rule is enforced especially inconsistently and seems to just come down to which side of the discussion the person moderating the thread comes down on. Which is partly human nature, a sarcastic quip from someone I agree with is clever and funny, a quip from someone I don't agree with is glib and unserious and annoying, I get that sure. But like either ban it and go zero-tolerance or don't. Punishing it selectively is just going to drive out differences of opinion because people with unpopular views get tired of being mocked while getting punished if they respond in kind. As with all non-serious posting, sarcasm is allowed if we find it funny or harmless, and punished if we are annoyed by it. You do it at your own risk.
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Mar 27, 2023 19:51
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You were the only person that even bring up the holpdomor so getting mad that people in this thread aren't experts seems incredibly counterproductive
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Mar 27, 2023 19:51
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cinci zoo sniper posted:Again, this has nothing to do with what ideas you or anyone else has, and differences in ideas don't make a bad post. Not knowing what you (as a figure of speech) are talking about is a robust way to write a bad post, however, when you're trying to talk not about an idea (e.g., AI), but about something that is exists in the real world and is epistemologically falsifiable (e.g., ChatGPT). The thread was not deemed an embarrassment for talking about the concept of AI. It was found increasingly embarrassing for misrepresenting ChatGPT in the wrong place at the wrong time. Part of this misrepresentation was rooted in poor use of facts, and part in a poor command of the debate of it, e.g., anthropomorphization, in my subjective determination of the expertise and the credentials of the most active posters of the thread as dismissible. For the record I think you generally do a good job of moderating and have kept threads on track, and you should dismiss most of the complaints against you in this thread. The ChatGPT thread, though, IMO saw you accidentally cross into the "chilling effect" zone which in my long experience here does not go very well and tends to inflame posters. I largely stopped reading it after a while so it wouldn't surprise me if it got worse and needed to be shut, but some of your earlier posts, again IMO, came across as trying to stifle discussion you disagreed with because you started attacking really hard, and having a blue star do that can come across as scary unless you actively assure posters that they are not at risk of punishment. You aren't the first mod to do this and you were at least providing substantive arguments for your position - another mod recently pulled a similar approach but with much more of a "don't disagree with my opinion" stance, which was much worse and the closest I've come to contacting Koos about mod behavior - but it's good to remember that active reminders/assurances of the separation of moderator duties from thread participation can go a long way in calming things down and avoiding unnecessary hostile response.
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Mar 27, 2023 19:53
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:Assuming good faith is part of D&D's rules (specifically, rule I.B.) , and mods should be required to follow them as well. Mods are not required, and indeed cannot be required, to assume good faith for the purposes of moderation (though they still should when arguing). This is because posting in bad faith is against the rules and needs to be moderated. The reason the rule exists is that when an accusation is made in the thread, the quality of the argument quickly lowers to posters attacking or defending each other in a way that's not interesting to read or conducive to healthy debate.
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Mar 27, 2023 20:04
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gurragadon posted:I would really like to hear Koos Group explanation for this? I'm not overly concerned with gassing threads for being "embarrassing," though if a thread has some sort of deep-seated issue that is preventing good debate and discussion from taking place, the fact that someone might see the thread and be less inclined to post in D&D as a result is something reasonable to take into consideration.
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Mar 27, 2023 20:08
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Discendo Vox posted:I don't want mods to be part of the community. I want them to moderate. 
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Mar 27, 2023 20:08
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Here's my actual feedback: 1.A.3. Don't repeat a point that has been rebutted without acknowledging the rebuttal. This demonstrates a lack of willingness to discuss and is also very frustrating for posters arguing with you. My opinion is that the thing that has driven off posters the most from D&D is a long standing failure to require that posters who are pretty clearly shown to be wrong actually be made to suck it up and admit they were wrong, apologize if necessary, and reassess their position. I think some people have tied their self-worth to the positions they take, and treat being wrong as attacks on themselves which must be fought against at all costs, which typically means a lot of goalpost shifting, spray-and-pray arguing, motte & bailey, whatever. Everyone is wrong at some point, and learning to accept that, reexamine your positions, and adjust as necessary is a critical part of being both effective at debate and, more importantly, effecting change in the world around you. My suggestion is that this rule get expanded a bit and be tied to extremely harsh punishments for failure, because few things shred the desire to discuss and debate like having a participant be clearly uninterested in both and preferring to just mindlessly proselytize. I do also recognize that this can be extremely hard at times, as many of the things discussed aren't in any way settled, but when someone gets clearly called out for something wrong that should by all accounts moderate their position then it should be expected. It may also result in weaponized "fact checking" which I feel moderators should hopefully recognize as a potential problem and push back on, but people interested in that are usually pretty obvious, and there's probably not much wrong with a poster being confronted with an error, publicly recognizing it, and noting that it doesn't seem to matter much in the overall argument, pushing the burden back onto the accuser.
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Mar 27, 2023 20:13
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Somaen posted:The person arguing that the holodomor was a consequence of the destruction of WW1, events separated by a decade, is not an academic. They are not anywhere near knowledgeable on the topic, they are simply repeating talking points and no knowledgeable person, let alone an academic, is going to waste time on debating them. There are legitimate high-end debates going on about the technical definitions, but the person who can't be bothered to learn the most basic things about the topic is not a part of that, they are simply denying an internationally recognized genocide on the internet. This behavior stifles discussion because intelligent people like to debate other intelligent people, or to educate people who are open to find out new things in a friendly manner -- why would someone use their time on "stalin did nothing wrong SHITLIB"? Yeah that's a good point, I'm not arguing that you should entertain that specific idiot but the same arguments are used for things that are a lot grayer. Really I should have used China as my example here, you can easily write fan fiction about how evil China is that is hard and loose with the facts and it really doesn't matter or get much mod pushback. USCE just had a fun quick jaunt into "ghost cities" an entirely made up xenophobic lie that's really just long term infrastructure projects. There is a divide between what D&D says it is and what it actually is and the ease with which you can lie if it backs up existing mod biases is a big part of it. DV being someone who wants to push for more accuracy is another reason I think they would make a good mod.
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Mar 27, 2023 20:17
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Koos Group posted:I'm not overly concerned with gassing threads for being "embarrassing," though if a thread has some sort of deep-seated issue that is preventing good debate and discussion from taking place, the fact that someone might see the thread and be less inclined to post in D&D as a result is something reasonable to take into consideration. Could you explain that? Deep-seated issues are usually related to one or more posters having strong opinions on a topic. It is a blessing and a curse to get rid of those posters. Sometimes a topic lives on life support until the next big thing comes around to bump it back into the general conversation and only the real dedicated people follow it. Edit: Sorry, explain how it would make people less inclined to post in D&D? I find I was MORE inclined to post in the ChatGPT thread than any of the regular ones. I understand you are not overly concerned with it but did you read the further discussion with CZS about why I believe it is a poor metric when ending a thread? It's clearly a directive from the site owner that I believe contradicts the point of a discussion forum. Why do you think it dosen't?
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Mar 27, 2023 20:17
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:Honestly cinci zoo sniper, you seem a bit too emotionally invested (and extremely strongly opinionated) It seems to me that the people complaining about CZS are too emotionally invested.
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Mar 27, 2023 20:25
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Zachack posted:Here's my actual feedback: I agree that a willingness to admit one is wrong is very helpful for keeping debate productive. That's why I always try to do it myself. If a poster is conclusively shown to be wrong about a specific fact, and doesn't even acknowledge it, that is demoralizing to the person who went to the trouble of debating them rigorously, and we try to punish it. I must also point out, however, that it is very difficult to apply this to broader arguments as opposed to very specific facts. While it would be nice for anyone to concede when their opponent crushes their position, it is not actually feasible because positions are often so deeply held. It's also very difficult to moderate this as a case of 1.A.3 because, as I'm sure anyone who's spent long enough time debating on the internet or elsewhere knows, it is possible to come up with some sort of argument for any position. gurragadon posted:Could you explain that? Deep-seated issues are usually related to one or more posters having strong opinions on a topic. It is a blessing and a curse to get rid of those posters. Sometimes a topic lives on life support until the next big thing comes around to bump it back into the general conversation and only the real dedicated people follow it. Examples of deep-seated issues might be an OP that frames a topic in a way that makes discussion difficult, a subject that the vast majority of posters are too invested in to debate in a civil manner, or a subject that is too vague to be rigorous or well-trod to be interesting. And in any of these cases posters would find a thread that's stupid, boring or frustrating and be less likely to read or contribute to D&D if they get an impression that it's like that. As for the ChatGPT thread in particular, I haven't read much of it. Based on what Cinci and posters here are saying, it seems like it may have been more reasonable to split it into a "technical" thread about ChatGPT or other AIs that contains specific and verifiable information for those curious, and a "philosophical" thread where one can discuss issues that are more hypothetical, or have to do with broad concepts and how they apply to AI. Koos Group fucked around with this message at 20:36 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 20:32
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Koos Group posted:Examples of deep-seated issues might be an OP that frames a topic in a way that makes discussion difficult, a subject that the vast majority of posters are too invested in to debate in a civil manner, or a subject that is too vague to be rigorous or well-trod to be interesting. And in any of these cases posters would find a thread that's stupid, boring or frustrating and be less likely to read or contribute to D&D if they get an impression that it's like that. Wouldn't most of those be handled in a better way than removing a well-established thread? OP's can be changed after the fact, if debate can't happen civilly then probations for not following that rule or thread bans, interesting is so vastly different to everybody that you as a moderator or anybody else have a right to close a thread for that. I have no interest in 99.9% of the threads on Something Awful and nobody has interest in everything. You can't split a thread between the hypothetical and the actual so easily when the hypothetical becomes actual so quickly. Anyway, the thread moves slow enough already that it would just die if it was split. Could you really explain what is an "embarrassing" thread and the process for determining one? This is a feedback thread, and I am giving you feedback that it should be clearly defined what that means. I don't need to know in relation to the ChatGPT thread, that thread was the reason I learned about the policy. I am curious about the policy itself. Also, I would think keeping threads more open to branching discussion as a whole to encourage people from other subforums to engage if that is a goal. People come in from different perspectives and if a forum feels closed off to their way of thinking they will not engage. People who don't engage don't get to enrich the conversation with their perspective and they also don't get the benefit of engaging with others.
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Mar 27, 2023 20:58
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Gumball Gumption posted:Yeah that's a good point, I'm not arguing that you should entertain that specific idiot but the same arguments are used for things that are a lot grayer. Really I should have used China as my example here, you can easily write fan fiction about how evil China is that is hard and loose with the facts and it really doesn't matter or get much mod pushback. USCE just had a fun quick jaunt into "ghost cities" an entirely made up xenophobic lie that's really just long term infrastructure projects. There is a divide between what D&D says it is and what it actually is and the ease with which you can lie if it backs up existing mod biases is a big part of it. DV being someone who wants to push for more accuracy is another reason I think they would make a good mod. this is illustrative of one annoyance I feel on China discourse in the forums the 鬼城 ghost city problem is taken fairly seriously in Chinese press itself. The infamous Ordos project that you seized upon was met with a heavy policy response in China once the problem was realized, including freezing additional new residential construction, offering heavy tax breaks to move, and outright moving whole industries, civil services, and schools into the new district quote:https://news.stcn.com/news/202209/t20220914_4857783.html quite obviously, freezing additional construction to add time to consume the existing housing glut is not the move of a municipal government merely pursuing a pre-planned growth trajectory I don't bring this up to pick on this particular point, but rather to highlight there is a certain outlook in some forum parts that uncritically takes the English-language Global Timesesque output (itself quite different from Chinese financial press) as itself a parallel narrative that is inviolably true and questioning it is xenophobia. It is, itself, a low information response to a low information take ronya fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 20:58
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cinci zoo sniper posted:It is a specific directive from Jeffrey, which in the current rendition of the private mod guidelines reads as follows: socialsecurity posted:This seems odd to me, everyone wants mods to be more part of the community but them to also not moderate threads they post in? Gumball Gumption posted:Yeah that's a good point, I'm not arguing that you should entertain that specific idiot but the same arguments are used for things that are a lot grayer. Really I should have used China as my example here, you can easily write fan fiction about how evil China is that is hard and loose with the facts and it really doesn't matter or get much mod pushback. USCE just had a fun quick jaunt into "ghost cities" an entirely made up xenophobic lie that's really just long term infrastructure projects. There is a divide between what D&D says it is and what it actually is and the ease with which you can lie if it backs up existing mod biases is a big part of it. DV being someone who wants to push for more accuracy is another reason I think they would make a good mod. I also suspect it would reignite a forum's war.
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Mar 27, 2023 21:17
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Having not seen a single thing from that thread, thus being a neutral observer, what was the embarrassing part of it? Because based on the likely origin of that rule, an "embarrassing thread" is one where the regulars develop huge in-group/out-group issues, radicalize each other into posting like crazy people, and then have huge meltdowns whenever someone comes in with a different opinion. Or if a dog-bricker gets permabanned for living up to their title. I think DV getting a chance to try out their vision would be a net good either way it shakes out. Either it works out and D&D becomes a place where you're more able to learn because we have experts here who can keep things in reality or it fails and we close the book on a thing people have wanted to try for a long time. They would be a good mod.
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Mar 27, 2023 21:20
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Gumball Gumption posted:I think DV getting a chance to try out their vision would be a net good either way it shakes out. Either it works out and D&D becomes a place where you're more able to learn because we have experts here who can keep things in reality or it fails and we close the book on a thing people have wanted to try for a long time. They would be a good mod. I agree here too, because I think if nothing else, it would help DV understand the extent of the actual labor he's expecting to be done by volunteer janitors. His constant aggrieved tone about how the moderators "refuse" to enforce the rules seems to give way to the conclusion that he thinks moderating a forum of this size, of this activity, with such deeply held convictions is something one can do with a minimal amount of time and effort investment, so let's see how he'd do it. Make him Koos for a month (with the exception of a forum ban simulating a  ban so as to make reversals after the 30 day period easier to implement) and see how it shakes out. Maybe he proves that all you need is 15 minutes with a laptop a day to make D&D a perfect intellectual saloon, maybe he cracks under the pressure of what he's asking others to do. Either way, it's a resolution to the arc.
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Mar 27, 2023 21:27
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100% legit I would like to see them have a chance to try their ideas and on paper I like their ideas.
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Mar 27, 2023 21:34
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Turgid Flagella posted:I agree here too, because I think if nothing else, it would help DV understand the extent of the actual labor he's expecting to be done by volunteer janitors. His constant aggrieved tone about how the moderators "refuse" to enforce the rules seems to give way to the conclusion that he thinks moderating a forum of this size, of this activity, with such deeply held convictions is something one can do with a minimal amount of time and effort investment, so let's see how he'd do it. Make him Koos for a month (with the exception of a forum ban simulating a
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Mar 27, 2023 21:48
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Having not seen a single thing from that thread, thus being a neutral observer, what was the embarrassing part of it? Because based on the likely origin of that rule, an "embarrassing thread" is one where the regulars develop huge in-group/out-group issues, radicalize each other into posting like crazy people, and then have huge meltdowns whenever someone comes in with a different opinion. Or if a dog-bricker gets permabanned for living up to their title. It was cinci zoo sniper posted:The thread was not deemed an embarrassment for talking about the concept of AI. It was found increasingly embarrassing for misrepresenting ChatGPT in the wrong place at the wrong time. Part of this misrepresentation was rooted in poor use of facts, and part in a poor command of the debate of it, e.g., anthropomorphization, in my subjective determination of the expertise and the credentials of the most active posters of the thread as dismissible. Or if I had to explain it to someone who doesn't know anything about the subject, like all 3 louder posters in the thread had a lacklustre grasp on the subject, and kept liberally mixing technical details with folklore. This in itself is not a problem, however that being the most “searchable” D&D thread about ChatGPT, a novel and highly sought after topic, was a concern, since the purpose of D&D is educational, and the thread had no warning signs, e.g., in the title, that it's just people chatting about whatever they think of AI in general, rather than treating ChatGPT and other modern LLM applications with some kind of consistent rigour. It did further not help, and, unfortunately, I have no delicate way of saying this, that the same posters weren't really the posters the D&D would send as its champions to a would-be RSF Grand Tournament. And so, I hatched a plan to see if I can get everyone to pull up (it failed as I had misjudged people's interests), and if not to then rename/move/close/gas the thread (in descending order of probability, settling on a rename as the least destructive option eventually). However, that plan also failed, since I was too slow to enact it before the thread just experienced a normally-thread-gassing meltdown with multiple people pulling the knives out and trying to shove the most active regular into a dumpster, as right or as wrong any of the involved goons was. As to why gas and not just probate my way through a meltdown – I couldn't see that bearing any lasting effect, as the target regular in question didn't distance themselves from the conversation quickly enough to not get branded as the goon whose interest in large language models boils down to a new age academic plagiarism instrumentation.
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Mar 27, 2023 21:54
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Discendo Vox posted:At this juncture, one of the actions needed is to actively re-solicit the groups of educated users that were driven out of the forum over the past 6 or so years. The lawyers, the scientists, the people who used to make discussion viable in greater detail. Per Bar Ran Dun's comment, we now face an active negative stereotype of DnD, continuously reinforced elsewhere, whenever there's an attempt to have someone from anywhere else on SA participate. I am going to be so egotistical as to assume that I might be one of the people you're referencing here. To be honest, I am not going to return to posting in D&D probably ever. It's not fulfilling. At the start of the pandemic, it felt good to be helpful with my small amount of insight as an epidemiologist. I was also glad to recruit so many goons into our COVID study we were running! Your data were super helpful. It was also great to have a group of educated laypeople to talk through the pandemic with early on--it was not a perspective I was getting at work. But it's also exhausting to have every single word of my posts nitpicked and taken in the worst bad faith angle possible. Man I just want a place to relax and talk about health news and politics with people I mostly agree with but the amount of vitriol I would get for some of my posts was too much for me to handle. People questioned my professional judgment and called me bad at my job. I got anonymous emails questioning whether I actually was an epidemiologist (which made me afraid I was going to get doxxed). At least one person (who was also an educated user who no longer posts, ironically) wrote me like a thousand word essay PM about how naïve and wrong I am. I am a scientist. I know we're well-reputed for being terrible communicators and I'm probably not an exception to that. I'm aware that I've said some stupid things or presented an argument horribly or even got into a little heated feud on a bad day. But people here are just so mean. I recognize it's the internet--people can be mean. I can handle it, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't want to have to handle it. There are other spaces now where I can have these sorts of conversations (Discords, subreddits, etc.) without feeling it being quite so mean.
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Mar 27, 2023 21:57
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Having not seen a single thing from that thread, thus being a neutral observer, what was the embarrassing part of it? Because based on the likely origin of that rule, an "embarrassing thread" is one where the regulars develop huge in-group/out-group issues, radicalize each other into posting like crazy people, and then have huge meltdowns whenever someone comes in with a different opinion. Or if a dog-bricker gets permabanned for living up to their title. Since some people are asking, this was essentially the conversation. This will be a long post, but it's a relevant subject and I think worth addressing. You can skim to the end for a summary. People had been posting about how ChatGPT works, internally, such as whether it "understands" what a haiku is, and if so what that means, or if it's functionally no different than the word suggestion on your iphone keyboard. Cinci posted a lengthy blog post that included both technical info, as well as discussing how similar the model is or isn't when compared to the human brain: Wolfram posted:Are our brains using similar features? Mostly we don’t know. But it’s notable that the first few layers of a neural net like the one we’re showing here seem to pick out aspects of images (like edges of objects) that seem to be similar to ones we know are picked out by the first level of visual processing in brains. People had already been discussing these possibilities, and this increased it. Cinci did not approve. The following posts are all direct replies to another. cinci zoo sniper posted:Lastly, a separate problem with this thread specifically is that the conversation at large is displaying significant gaps in understanding of the fundamentals of its titular subject – a poor command of debate (e.g., antropomorphization) and facts (e.g., how ChatGPT works) both. Which is to say that it is a failure of an educational thread, regardless of your anecdotal experience of it, and it will not be tolerated in D&D for much longer in its current form.b gurragadon posted:This is really a condescending statement. This thread has given me the most interesting things I've seen and read in a long time and it would be a real shame to just close it. I haven’t read a 3 hour article like that in forever. I learned a ton and found a lot of things to further read about from discussing ChatGPT with Baronash yesterday. cinci zoo sniper posted:The thing that I want to hammer in, and to hammer in hard, is not that D&D must all now get an AI degree from the local community college and stick strictly to the established professional terminology such as emergent abilities, but that what you're dealing with is a piece of math, and not a new life form, and thusly that mysticism is not quite befitting a rigorous conversation. Bar Ran Dun posted:Not sure you’re going to get away from some degree of mysticism in any conversation about if a thing has consciousness. cinci zoo sniper posted:The thing axiomatically does not have a consciousness. We don't debate if our microwaves have souls, and the reason that ChatGPT beeps more convincingly shouldn't reverse that. KillHour posted:I don't think that ChatGPT is any flavor of conscious, but I do think that a large enough neural net could be conscious. If you would like to ban that line of discussion, I'm going to demand that you prove otherwise conclusively. cinci zoo sniper posted:If this is the conversation that you want to have, I will need you to create a thread titled “prove to me that my slide rule is not sentient”, as this thread will be killed then. KillHour posted:I know you're a mod but "this thread I didn't start isn't having the conversation I want it to" is petty as gently caress. cinci zoo sniper posted:As a mod, I have an explicit duty to contain threads that are a persistent embarrassment to the subforum I watch, and the whole point of this debacle is to (ideally) stave off this thread from establishing itself as such. And my policy position on the question is such that much as we don't debate in D&D how the Iraq War would have played out if American soldiers had been able to spit 6 fluid ounces of hydrochloric acid at a 50-yard distance every 5 minutes, we will not be having a general purpose thread about ChatGPT engaging in substantial anthropomorphization of the software. If you want to make such posts in D&D, you will need to create a thread that leaves no doubt that the thread is about some system of belief, or to debate you personally, rather than about the factual nature of ChatGPT. Cinci can respond for themselves if the thread stays open, but it seems the embarrassing thing was having "a general purpose thread about ChatGPT engaging in substantial anthropomorphization of the software", and perhaps also that the conversation was "displaying significant gaps in understanding of the fundamentals of its titular subject". To me, this seems like overreach of the embarrassment clause. Also, the subject of splitting the thread was suggested by posters in the thread and CZS said it was off the table, and we had to either stop discussing the conceptual issues or have the thread closed. edit: Oh and yeah at the end it just turned to some dogshit discussion about whether the concept of education has any value where people were arguing in circles, at that point I admit it was too far gone. I guess CZS could have tried to probe instead of gas but I think they made a fair choice at that point. XboxPants fucked around with this message at 22:10 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 22:05
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Rosalind posted:I am going to be so egotistical as to assume that I might be one of the people you're referencing here. To be honest, I am not going to return to posting in D&D probably ever. It's not fulfilling. I posted here for years but finally about a year or so ago I gave up and left because I was sick of how people could be such massive jackasses all the time and there were absolutely no repercussions. It was exhausting and mentally draining. Leaving this site was the best thing I've ever done for my own mental health and I honestly advocate everyone else to leave too. This place is a shithole that can't be saved. I generally tried to be informative and effortful and I was faced with multiple posters PMing me threats, buying me aggressive and racist redtexts, following me around to other subforums, posting weird fantasies about me in their little clubhouses, etc.. The response from moderation and administration varied between "you deserved it" and "wow, we'll look into it" while never actually doing anything. The reason all these "experts" left is because they were basically chased off the site by an insanely toxic userbase that has complete run of the entire forum and will harass anyone they don't like. They are never coming back because honestly why the gently caress would they want to come back? Why would you want to make effort posts on a website where someone can "wink wink nudge nudge" threaten to doxx you based on the knowledge you've posted and then be cheered on for it by their sick little fanbases? This site is the worst I've ever seen and honestly it's all at Jeff's feet for being a loving coward who wants too badly to be liked to actually enforce anything. He lets himself get led around by the absolute worst posters on the site and makes Helldump look like a hugbox. Lowtax somehow was a better owner and god drat is that a low bar. If you want to actually fix this place, start out by permabanning the 20-30 people who are the ringleaders of all the harassment. Everyone knows who they are.
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Mar 27, 2023 22:18
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