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Maybe it’d be smarter to let this lie, but in the interests of redirecting from an unproductive discussion, I wanted to sketch out a set of circumstances which, IMO, would justify lifting the restriction and allowing AI talk more generally. And it’s based on chess-playing “AI.” I’m old enough to recall the first stage. Computer chess meant either very stupid moves, or somewhat stupid moves that took an hour to play. Casual chess players could still lose but grandmasters had nothing to worry about. Stage two saw chess programs massively improved. A world champion might or might not be able to beat it, and most development for regular play involved lowering the program’s skill so intermediate or worse players had a chance to win. Stage three, which is current, saw chess AI massively outstrip human players. Grandmasters might be able to draw the best programs some of the time, but they are rated around a thousand points higher than the best humans and definitely don’t take hours to play. I want to suggest that the tipping point isn’t being able to outplay humans, it is that human beings are now looking to chess programs to teach them how to play better chess. Grandmasters analyze their games using chess AI (as can regular players), and some newer grandmasters are trying to learn to “play like an engine.” At the same time, the engines can still be “surprised” by human moves, and because the key to winning human vs human chess has to do with many factors in addition to playing the best moves (dealing with nerves, recovering from inaccurate play, etc), the game cannot be considered “solved”. These other forms of AI are, I think, somewhere between stage one and stage two. They’re being hyped as stage two. I have seen no AI output within my own area of expertise (writing) which I could use to teach anyone good habits; usually the writing, when at essay length, is somewhere in the D to F range, though the grammar and diction are head and shoulders above previous programs. It sounds superficially well-written, but there’s usually very little underneath and overwhelmingly the AI cannot perform insightful analysis or even sustain a consistent argument across paragraphs. I don’t know where the art AI is; it might be useful in teaching techniques to digital artists, but I doubt an AI that has no relation to the physical world is going to develop a new brushstroke. At stage three, restricting AI discussion becomes impossible: you couldn’t sustain the Chess thread here if you banned any mention or usage of Stockfish or other chess programs and their game analysis. I tentatively suggest using similar guidelines to consider when the current policy should be loosened, but I’d be curious to hear other opinions.
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Jun 14, 2023 01:15
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Sickening posted:Should Toshimo be probed or even banned for going that hard in the paint? Yes and either have its merits I think nobody would fault anyone for either. I haven't look at what Toshimo has said recently, but I assume even they would eventually agree to as much. I don't think the specifics regarding Toshimo are at this point useful to discuss in the feedback thread, and doing so just amplifies the idea that it's about personal grudges and that this specific case is anything beyond a last-straw incident that reflects more broadly on TG moderation and a culture that's protecting toxicity and driving away participants. But I do want to engage in a general sense what I think are some common geek social fallacies and make an argument that, yes, TG needs a rethink in how the mods operate and needs to show more willingness to ban posters with a history of making GBS threads up threads without consideration for the number of total contributions they've made. Again, my addressing Sickening's claims above have nothing to do with Toshimo's specific case. I don't follow the MTG thread and I don't want to spend an hour doing research to make claims which I think are true in a general sense regardless of whether they do or do not apply in this specific case. And I don't see that as useful, anyway. On this occasion, and several previous ones, we've had people post here that they either lurk or left TG because of the degree to which bullying and abusive behavior exist within this forum. For myself, I can say this is the only part of SA I frequent where I will make a post and then skip reading the thread for up to a week, because I know several posters ITT might opt to respond in their unique ways and that will result in, at minimum, stress for me, and can result in a thread derail if I respond, and after multiple attempts to navigate such experiences I've concluded that it's pointless to ever engage or respond to those posters and I should wait until things go stale so that I feel no urge to respond. Usually, nobody responds to my posts and I took my break for no reason. But I suggest that it is a very bad sign for the health of this subcommunity that I feel the need to do this when posting here, and that so many other members of the community are being driven away or into silence by a small subset of posters in specific subforums. (Dwarf, I don't recall ever seeing any of the posters I have on my mental list showing up in the Gloomhaven/Frosthaven thread, though I can't speak for your others.) What's more, I bet most TG regulars could independently list 3-4 posters they think are toxic or bullying but who are very active in TG, and there'd be a lot of agreement on the names, especially if you differentiate between idle trolls and the active bullies. (We might disagree on where to draw that line, I suppose.) There's two, related, social fallacies at work here. The first is that amount of time within a community in some way mitigates toxic behavior or acts as a storehouse of "credit" that means the posters who have been here the longest deserve their bad behavior to receive more tolerance. That's completely false. An example would be a gaming society with that guy who has "issues" with women. Early in gaming, groups were overwhelmingly male, so most likely that kind of toxicity would have been tolerated, because men in their teens and twenties aren't always good about ejecting bullies and because while plenty of other members might have issues, nobody is being directly attacked unless they push back against the toxic behavior. So that one guy can silence new members who push back against the way he talks about women, because he was a co-founder and he's done so much and this other guy just showed up last week. He can use that "credit" to silence complaints, and after that, well, nobody is actually complaining, so he gets to stay. Then women interested in gaming show up to meetings. Most don't stay long. And because they left, they aren't there to complain about the bullying. They were new, anyway, and "obviously not serious gamers" if they left so quickly. Besides, the group used to be all men and that was normal, so there's nothing abnormal about it still being all men. That's just how things are. And, barring a huge and ugly fight or some action that's obviously beyond the pale (assault, say), the toxic guy's behavior helps to enforce the kind of group most likely to tolerate his behavior. Because, hey, that's just Gary, he's like that, he's been here for years, you get used to him. Whereas he's done incalculable damage to the group by driving off a huge number of probably non-toxic members who couldn't stand him. The second fallacy is to give credit for contributions to the community. And I think several of the more toxic posters in this community can rely on their non-toxic contributions to shield them from the consequences of their boundary-crossing. Because look at what the community would have lost had they not been around. But that's another falsehood: if one toxic poster contributed 5% of the total high-effort posts to TG, but drove away several hundred people over a decade from being TG posters, then they are responsible for the loss of every contribution those several hundred people might have made. Maybe most wouldn't have contributed much; maybe a few would themselves have been bullies and made the community worse. But if it's a choice between one poster making two great posts on Call of Cthulhu, or two posters making one great post each on Call of Cthulhu, I'd rather have the two posters, because they'll offer different perspectives and I'll learn more, but also because if neither of the two are bullies and the one poster is, the community is better with the two than with the one. For that matter, being the one poster who gets to make all the quality posts on something is a goal of some geek bullies, because it means anybody else's opinion is proven to be wrong. That's bad in many ways for TG. As for the grudges thing, when I was still thinking about this case as about Toshimo specifically and not about moderation in TG more generally, I had the same impression: look, a bunch of posters who don't get along with Toshimo are going after him while he's probated to try to get rid of him. But when I started thinking in terms of the general circumstances and not the specific, I saw that this wasn't a useful approach. Say I start posting somewhere on SA. I make a big effort-post initial contribution. Someone thanks me and amplifies what I just said. Someone else quotes the whole post and responds "You're an idiot." Maybe they add one more sentence to refute my post. The difference is obvious. How do I respond to the second poster? Maybe I just quit the thread. Maybe I argue back or get upset. If I stick around, I'm not going to be happy, and I'm going to be specifically unhappy at the person who responded like that. A few months later, I post again, and the same poster mocks what I wrote. Repeat three or four times; assume that at least some of the time, I argue back. Well, now, we're rivals, or we have grudges against each other, and I might be expected to argue that he should be banned from the thread (or the forum) and somebody else could reasonably say "well, Narsham and (X) hate each other, they're always arguing ITT." But of course if a bully picks on someone, and that someone doesn't back down or go away, that's a grudgin'! What matters is identifying the toxic or bullying posters, and these posters will obviously create grudges, because they are toxic and bullying. Mods can certainly consider "who started it," but if a Jewish poster on a forum complains about being constantly harassed by a Neo-Nazi poster, and the Neo-Nazi responds "he just has a grudge against me," I'd think that absent some exceptional set of circumstances, it's safe enough to think the Neo-Nazi should be the one ejected, and maybe he shouldn't have been left around as long as he was to begin with. "He argued back" is not a defense. Nor do I think the rap sheet is dispositive. I've reported one post in all my time here, and never reported someone for being rude or abusive or dismissive to me, personally, because "I can handle it." I can think of several posters in TG who follow a predictable pattern of just crossing the boundary, and then backing off if they receive push-back, but who will predictably cross the boundary again and again. That isn't someone learning to be a better poster, it's someone calculating how much they can get away with and constantly testing to maximize the level of being a jerk they can manage without punishment. If the mods reward that behavior, it will continue forever. Other posters seem to be mood-dependent: they will explode unpredictably, usually pretty far past the boundary, but they're "good contributors" the rest of the time and so can expect nothing past a probe, because it happens sometimes and they're getting the benefit of the doubt... again and again and again. Unsuccessful bullies go too far and get ejected from communities, so you can expect the successful ones to exhibit behaviors that allow people to keep extending them chances. If someone hasn't learned a lesson after months of trying, maybe they don't actually care to. I don't know the IKs very well, but all the TG mods and admins have impressed me, both here and when I encounter them in other SA spaces, with having good and considered judgment. I think you all need to exercise that good judgment more frequently and with less tolerance for bullshit. It's one thing to say "gee, this poster is usually really mild-mannered, something must have pissed them off, here's a cool-down sixer" and another to say "time to cool down this poster who runs hot all the time but let's stick with a sixer because maybe this is the year they change." This is a web forum, not loving Minesweeper. You need to disarm the explosives, not dance around them. Go to a three strikes policy, and start banning people. If we lose a few "borderline toxic" posters, isn't that better than all the potential good community members driven away over the years by people like that? The most careful bullies will have to go underground if they want to stay, and the others will either correct themselves or be gone. The low-key troublemakers will opt for discretion. The place will be nicer for everyone here, and more welcoming to those who might want to join in the future.
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Sep 12, 2023 17:28
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sebmojo posted:yes, there's a clear message from this thread that hostile posting is driving people away so report it, pm me if it's not being addressed, and if you are personally feisty please dial it back or there will be consequences. The issue for me, I think, beyond perceiving that "report" is for major issues only, is that my cycle of reaction to a bullying post doesn't lend itself to reporting it. On some level, I'm likely to start out provoked or pissed, either on my own behalf or on someone else's, and my typical response to that is either to compose a response but wait to post it until I can calm down and do an edit, or to just set the post aside. I wouldn't immediately report because I wouldn't trust that my own response is fair. But while I can take long enough (especially with my wall of text posting style) to cool off while composing a response, I don't leave a post sitting in my browser so I can come back in a few hours and hit "report." That may be about 40% "not wanting to make problems for admin volunteers" and 60% "wanting to err on the side of not reporting" but it's clear I should trust the mods to tell the difference between a report made unfairly and one made fairly. Plus maybe it's OK to hit "report" and say "this guy is being an rear end in a top hat toward me gratuitously" and let y'all decide if it deserves a sixer. Arivia posted:How do you want people to discuss past issues with moderation without providing examples and discussing them? You're seeing "old drama" and those affected don't get to participate because we're trying to engage in the basic building blocks of human communication. You're shutting down the actual discussion unilaterally. I'm another poster who thinks the sixers were a good idea. Discussing whether mods should shut down a particular kind of argument or not does not entail having the argument ITT, so even if that was the kind of back and forth that's OK, this isn't the right place for it. I mean, TG is a place where one poster can post pics of their cool Warhammer 40K paint job, and another can pick an argument about how they used the wrong unit colors... and both will remember and possibly restart the same argument years later. In this case, you and Xiahou were starting an argument about "bad system advice" and who was providing it, and everyone could tell the problem because you were replying to each other and amplifying the argument. Now, after the cool-down period compelled by the sixer, you're coming in with a new argument about the sixer, but while you initially package it as a general point about shutting down discussion, you're obviously responding to your discussion getting shut down because you were coming in hot and shooting from the hip. Which you're still doing in this post. I'm not mad at you for doing this or calling you a bad poster or suggesting anything beyond the sixer would be a good idea, I'm trying to help you see that you're getting in your own way here, muddying the very argument you're making it and turning an abstract good faith discussion into something personal and even aimed at you. I'm hopeful that multiple people posting in support of the sixers will help you get a different perspective. The sixers weren't about your argument, they were about that argument not fitting in this thread. If you want to have the good faith discussion, you'd be having it with the admins, mods, and IKs ITT, not with Xiahou (even if he tries to pick a fight with you: just report him and move on). If you want to complain about mods sixing people having a good faith discussion, maybe referencing the sixer you just ate ITT isn't the best way to go about it? Why not point us to some examples that you weren't involved with at all? It's hard to have an objective discussion about something that just happened to you, personally, so you can de-escalate and get some distance on the subject by making the discussion be about someone else. Besides Rutibex, who is gone already. Are there other posters still around who are like him?
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Sep 13, 2023 17:14
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Traditional Games: Near infinite resolution, remarkable amounts of lag
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Nov 3, 2023 00:38
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"You write a thank-you note to your Secret Krampus for that 1985 Avalon Hill game catalog right now, young lady!"
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Nov 22, 2023 20:22
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