@ACuriousMind I see. Interesting, not a bad point.
@vzn No, sure that's a game theoretic move on any human being's part. You want to be nice to person X because you wouldn't want person X to be not nice to you
It's much more likely that moral value systems are evolutionarily game theoretical, despite our friendly neighborhood Jordan Peterson claiming it's archetypal and religious.
@BalarkaSen Causation is tricky in this case: Even if empathy and cooperation are fitness-maximizing adaptations, the individual that is being empathetic and cooperative often isn't being like that because of some game-theoretic reasoning, but "because it feels right". Individuals are adaptation-executers, not fitness-maximizers.
@ACuriousMind Oh yeah I agree. I am proposing that, if you look at the moral value system of individuals over various groups and ethnicity and gender and so on, there's majorly some fundamental similarity between them. You'd be hard pushed to prove that, eg, the distribution of human beings believing in a solution to a certain moral dilemma that maximizes suffering for individuals is not isolated.
I'm claiming even though we're not consciously aware of it, our adaptive and intuitive value-system (so a system which is not like clock-work) has evolved over time through society and culture using a gradient-descent like algorithm (which is kinda like a stochastic clock-work)
I am not claiming anything conclusive about this hypothesis though. I just don't see any evidence pointing otherwise.
Gromov once said, as an answer to why a cheetah runs, that it does so to maximize entropy. Well, of course it doesn't know it's maximizing entropy....
The point is the value systems (or at least, those which are the winning strategies over long courses of time) are not individual creations, I guess.
Dragging this discussion back from the philosophical route, I suppose a proper discussion on the actual situation is on it's course? (@DavidZ, @rob). By which, I mean (1) A clarification on why I got mod-banned for 2 days after the event (2) How aggressive are the moderators going to be against "inappropriate" content in chat? The concrete gauge of aggressiveness of punishment vs inappropriateness is unclear, despite there being a "policy on the air" about being aggressive.
(3) How can we avoid being labelled a Bad Place, and why is that label relevant to the current situation? So far the only context in which @nitsua60's (very thorough) rule of thumbs apply seem to be moderators intervening the chat for inappropriate 4chan jokes. Is that why hbar is a Bad Place, because a fraction of the community makes 4chan jokes?
(I am not devaluing the criticism, just confused because to me what's happening is: When someone makes an inappropriate joke, instead of letting the community flag-ban it, the moderators engage in a conversation explaining their action of approving the flag - Why would you have to do that?? - and if someone protests - out of genuine interest or trolling - they freeze the chat and mark down the community as toxic. It seems, to me, the chaos is completely mongered by moderators. This is my perspective, and open to criticism.)
The side-discussion about the flag system and troll-flagging is stemming from the points made in the paranthesized comment: (a) It seems to me that the moderators usually explain their action of approving the flag because mishandling of flags happen, and they find themselves morally accountable for approving it (No idea if that's right, just how I interpret it). This is a drawback of the flag-system
(b) The users of the chat show an outrage - which should not happen - when anything whatsoever is flagged because of the paranoia caused by frequent ill-intentioned flagging (or at least, so it has been recognized among the users of the hBar and Mathematics: evolution of distrust et al).
I think that comprises a quick summary of what has come up in the conversations so far.
*Not 2 days, just a day. 0celo7 got the 2-day ban (for reasons which aren't quite clear to me either, but I understand I can only ask for motif behind my suspension and not other users).
@BalarkaSen For (1): You know what message/conversation you were suspended for, so I'm guessing you're asking about the length of the suspension (i.e. why not just the 30 min auto-suspension for flagging). I wasn't directly involved with any of this, but my post-mortem reading is that we're enforcing more stringently the idea of escalating suspensions.
It is long established that, on the main sites, subsequent suspensions get increasingly long, pretty much regardless of the severity of the offense. This is, to me, what happened here: A moderator took a look at your suspension history in chat, and applied an increased suspension.
For (2): I'm not sure how one could answer this question in general. The best I can do is "more aggressive than we often were in the past", but maybe you can be a bit more precise of what you're looking for as an answer here.
For (3): I think there are different reasons, depending on who's talking: Among moderators, the h bar has earned a bad reputation mainly because of poor reaction (along the lines of "Who ever made you the boss here?", or even outright insults/hostility) to non-physics mods coming in to moderate (whether in response to a flag or not) on multiple occasions.
Disjoint from this I think that the conversation in the h bar has often involved a brand of humour that is not particular well-suited to be understood by passers-by not knowing the people involved. Additionally I have observed (and also pointed out in these occasions) a certain kind of hostility - mainly trollish responses - towards newcomers trying to strike up a conversation about physics when certain regulars were having a conversation about something else.
@ACuriousMind No, I mean, aggressive on what basis? Aggressive how? What's the ban escalation algorithm (thanks @skull)? What is the cardinality of the suspension/flag log after which you're considered an unreasonable and untrustworthy user?
@BalarkaSen there are differences between game theory optimum behavior and psychology optimum behavior. encourage you to study them. consider the origins of game theory, it was invented by spy agencies to consider/ deconstruct the problem of MAD during the cold war. maybe not the best/ ideal/ really sensible ideology/ pov to work from. there are many aspects of human behavior that are not strictly rational but probably increase group stability/ cohesion, apparently the main problem involved here.
It seems to me that without a precise knowledge of the adjective "aggressive" that's been thrown around, chatting in SE is like playing a game without knowing the rules.
@BalarkaSen jbp is a lightning rod verging on gadfly increasing discomfort among many groups. you might consider one of his close ideological predecessors yiannopoulos and where he stands now.
@BalarkaSen Aggressive in the sense that repeated misbehaviour - even slight - will not be tolerated. In the past we've often let minor things slide with a simple warning (or deleting the messages but not suspending), this will now more often lead to kicks and suspensions. Escalation follows generally a similar pattern as on the main site (though starting lower at 1 day), but just like there is no pattern for the main site we would adhere to under any circumstance, neither is there for this.
And I'm afraid that the exact number of suspensions or incidents after which we give up on a user will always remain a matter of judgement on the part of the moderators. But let's say it like this: If a user appears in the top ten of most flagged users across the chat network, they should probably tread lightly.
@BalarkaSen quick googling, have you heard of the interesting key distinction of "cooperative vs noncooperative game theory"? seems like that might be getting to the crux of your observations/ pov/ reservations/ objections. psychologytoday.com/us/blog/feeling-smart/201506/…
@ACuriousMind Well, if that's an official answer, I hope you see (though I suspect there isn't anything you could do about it) why that's unhelpful, and there is no circumstances under which hBar can be saved from the same fate as that of Mos Eisley - it's like a player with low score in a game whose rules it doesn't know. It'll just be eliminated.
That being said I personally will slowly stop conversing in that chat, as I don't want to be banned purely based on the size of my suspension log, and I believe I get flagged by flaggers of ill-intention there.
@BalarkaSen am alarmed/ disappointed at the vague/ accusatory talk about possibility of deleting the room by multiple mods, driving some of my engagement toward "sorting it out," feel SE is penalizing participants of chat rooms that achieve "critical mass," a very difficult goal at times yet natural, whereas almost all are very low-activity on average.
@BalarkaSen It is official only in the sense that this is my understanding of the situation and the basis for how I moderate. My response here is not explicitly coordinated with other moderators - I felt you would not appreciate waiting for rather slow backchannel communication to reach some sort of agreement over who would respond in what way here.
@BalarkaSen not sure about gromovs idea there (hes a mathematician after all). in some other ways life (wrt "internal biology") is precisely about minimizing entropy.
@BalarkaSen I also understand your objection about the rules being "vague", and I once would have agreed with them. But making the rules more specific does not improve the situation, it just creates the opposite situation where we make ourselves powerless to combat certain behaviour because it does not technically run afoul of the rules.
As for your belief about "ill-intentioned flaggers", I've looked at several of the messages in your suspension history and you simply have an unfortunate tendency to trust that other people will gather not only that you're joking but also that you have no ill intent in doing so - the things you get flagged for often sound much like mockery and insults to people not party to your thought process behind them.
And I do not believe that h bar's fate is as unavoidable as you claim, as there are chatrooms that are both active and free from much of the drama around "Be Nice" or flags we have around herre, one of them, for instance, is the RPG chat that nitsua also moderates. What characterizes these rooms, foremost, in my view, is a willingness to be welcoming and to apologize if someone expresses displeasure at the current conversation:
In these rooms, the reaction to "Hey, can we switch topics?" is generically "sure", not "why?". The reaction to "that's a bit harsh" is generically "Hm, maybe it is, sorry" not "They deserved it". The reaction to someone with a question coming into the room is people engaging with them, not responses like "Why do you care, physics is garbage anyway". This is what Be Nice is about, and I do not feel that strict rules are necessary to understand this.
4
I don't think not knowing what the rules are will doom a room. What dooms a room is being repeatedly gently or not so gently being prodded to cease certain behaviour, and reacting with "but whyyyyy?" or "no, that's a stupid thing to ask" or any other deflection tactic.
@BalarkaSen think youre smart in many ways & it would be a net loss to the chat rooms if you dont participate at all any more. believe all this smoke masks a solvable problem. but not solvable with math. its a human/ social problem. admitting you have a problem is the 1st step to solving it (old narc anon literature quote sometimes misattributed to einstein!)
btw saw this comment by you awhile back & encourage you to talk to someone who cares about the sentiments expressed here, while it could be dismissed as ~½ joking, feel its possibly unintentionally revealing in various/ multiple ways.
I have no constructive comments to make on social lifes, unfortunately. Maybe that says I'm a useless fuckhead who reads math books and types vigorously into his keyboard sitting in his mother's basement, and so be it
@ACuriousMind Fair, I just think it's a bad moderation philosophy. a LOT of people agree, given the frequent outrage on the hbar when you suspend people. They are equally confused.
@ACuriousMind Well, that's your impression of what could potentially be a reasonable defense of the flags on such messages, not the flagger's. See, that's what I am speaking of: moderators deciding inappropriateness on behalf of other users.
@ACuriousMind The rules are being changed to cease different behaviors over the course of time, is my impression. Be Nice has been stretched infinitely often to consume behaviors which, to general conscience, are not offensive. The example you gave renders this message offensive. That's your interpretation, and it should get no specific value over infinitely many other interpretations you could pull out of that message
Except, you're a mod, so you get to decide that it does.
(Not you particularly, but that's the moderation philosophy from what I have experienced)
@vzn Well, I think the overly dramatic narrative is not helpful. I'll respond to your game theoretic comments elsewhere.
@BalarkaSen lol agreed theres a lot of drama around here lately, even mods referring to it, maybe a key/ helpful way to label the overall problem... o_O :P
@BalarkaSen This is a pernicious rabbit hole: If you're going down that road, every message has infinitely many interpretations and we can't ever act on the grounds of what someone else said because what privileges our understanding over that of anyone else? I mean, it is probably technically correct but considering all possible interpretations is a self-defeating strategy.
I think you're conflating my pointers of what Be Nice is about with what I would consider offensive to the point of deletion. And, by the way, I find your message...well, not offensive, but sort-of concerning - even joking about math being for nerds perpetuates a stereotype that does harm, e.g. by deterring people with negative views of "nerds" to shy away from math.
This is nothing grave, but it is not very welcoming, either. OF course, you mean it in a self-deprecating loking way, but the joke is still predicated on "nerds" having a negative connotation.
You decide on the most likely interpretation by observing how the chatters interpret it. If there's an offensive message, more users will flag it. This is why the flag system of SE is inherently broken; it gives an individual a monopoly over it by enabling the power to them to send it to the review queue by a single flag, and the reviewers then inevitable justify the flag biased towards the flagger, on any potential interpretation which could render it offensive, unwelcoming, not nice.
2
You certainly don't decide on the most likely interpretation by looking at it from the critical angle at which it becomes the most offensive, most unwelcome, and most un-nice.
Which is what you just did :P
So I don't think this conversation is going somewhere anytime soon.
@BalarkaSen the mods keep saying that the flag system is not "broken" in other rooms, some with high activity. think they have a point there. dont think repeatedly referring to it as "broken" is accurate/ constructive. btw that was a favorite "tactic" of 0celo7 also.
I have stated what I consider to be a perfectly constructive explanation. These rooms are outliers, as already pointed out before, which is why it's most apparent in these rooms.
I don't think there's any way to follow those recommendations (which I consider to be vague), at least on my behalf, hence my proposal to withdraw from hBar.
@BalarkaSen think the room dynamic is likely to be significantly different without 0celo7 around for a long time (given his "high impact"), suggest you give it a chance/ shot. eg votes/ comments on 0celo7s meta post are a place to leave your honest/ candid pov.
@BalarkaSen That, too, is a dangerous model - if a critical mass of people accumulates in a room that don't flag messages that would be considered clearly offensive elsewhere, the people who would flag these messages are not gonna hang around; they're just not gonna go there. This creates precisely the kind of pernicious "room culture" that SE does not want to see in its chats.
lol lets look & see what urban dictionary says, how about a lengthy chat discussion/ deconstruction? say, a few days long at least? :P urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Noob
@#%& geez fine whatever plz do try not to micromanage my words. anyway here is the researched link again that you just deleted. chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/13775/2017/5/18 ... a similar incident almost exactly 1yr ago involving 0celo7 and various other characters/ mods involved in the current conflict. with maybe some )( evolution because heather, defender of the downtrodden, is now a new moden on Quantum Computing. :)
^moderator
@ACuriousMind am backing you up repeatedly in here, think itd be great if you took that into acct with your reactions, would like to increasing stability of hbar, a shared goal, but as these conflicts basically sometimes reduce to, there is such a thing as SE mod overreach/ overreaction.
@ACuriousMind Sorry I forgot to respond to this in the course of events. This is a good point, and I could continue this discussion, but I don't see any potential use in that.
So I think I'll just take it as a good criticism of what I said, and won't try to respond to it.
@BalarkaSen sorry about that, I actually wound up being busier than I thought yesterday and didn't have much time to drop into chat. We might actually want to make a separate room to discuss your specific case.
@skull After a 1-year suspension, it goes on a case-by-case basis. Possible next steps include repeated 1-year suspensions, or an escalation to a longer suspension if the SE team decides that's appropriate.
@DavidZ No need to apologize, I was wrapping up the conclusions of the various discussions which happened in this room at various levels of abstractions and tangential (sometimes orthonormal) directions
Wasn't trying to push and nag particularly
I'm up for a separate room to discuss this issue if what has already been said has not exhausted what could be said about it.
@BalarkaSen Well, I'd leave that up to you. If you want more detail about what happened to you, specifically, I think it'd be best to make a separate room to discuss it. If not, that's fine. Also if you want to keep discussing moderation/chat rules/etc. in general (i.e. not involving any individual person's suspension), that's probably best kept here so everyone can benefit from it.
I think I get the gist of what happened to me from ACM's (educated, I'm sure) guesses. I don't approve of the policies behind it, but there's also, like, nothing to be done about it. So I don't see what is to be achieved from further conversations except a clearer idea about that particular suspension. I appreciate the thought, though.
I'm not going to continue to be active on hbar so I'll slowly stop talking about the meta babble here. If other wants to do it, that sounds constructive.
@BalarkaSen For the record, it is not in any way forbidden for the user to share moderator communication, privacy in that respect is a one-way street: We won't make any private communication public under most circumstances, but the users receiving such private messages are not under any such obligation
@JakeRose Typically when someone receives a chat suspension, some (or most or possibly all) of the content that prompted it will have been deleted from the transcript.
@JakeRose It sounds like you're coming from the position that moderation actions should be auditable by everybody, but that's not how things work around here.
@JakeRose Many sites' moderators (incl. physics) are in daily communication with members of the SE team; it's really easy for us to "sanity-check" our read on a situation, or our confusion, or our instinctual response.
@JakeRose Yeah. On the SE side there's, what, just a couple-hundred elected moderators? That's not too much for the "community team" of SE staff to be responsive to.
@JakeRose I can't know for sure, but my personal experience is that they tend to check in with the moderators whenever they receive a complaint that is not obvious nonsense. And conversely, they're usually pretty available when we ask for advice or double-checks in the backchannels.
@BalarkaSen On your #3 (and, btw, I find your critiques generally reasonable and probably better-thought-out than what I dashed off in the ten minutes I had), I'll say that I would love to see "regulars" in the room speaking up (using words) well in advance of the sorts of drama that crops up with, say, monthly-or-so frequency.
@JakeRose I'm not sure what you mean by that, but generally moderators are not passing judgement on the technical content of posts, i.e. we don't take moderation actions based on scientific disagreements or something
@BalarkaSen (and many others who may be interested): I have on occasion been pointed to the following post on "paradigmatic law" as a model for moderation. I wonder if it may spur some conversation that's not verging on a re-treading of themes we've already discussed.
Modern societies generally have opted for exhaustive law codes. That is, every action modern society wishes to regulate or prohibit must be specifically mentioned in a separate law. Under the expectations of this exhaustive law system, state and/or federal law codes run to thousands of pages and address thousands of individual actions by way of requirement or restriction or control or outright banning of those actions. By this approach, all actions are permitted that are not expressly forbidden or regulated. Thus it is not uncommon that criminals in modern Western societies evade prosec…
I suppose, as a general rule - and this may be me being inexperienced here, and I certainly don't have full knowledge of the situation - I feel like as a moderator, you have two big rules. 1) Be Nice. 2) Assume Good Faith.
When a situation occurs in which someone inadvertently comes across or offensive, yes, that user should be alerted to that reading of their message, and depending on how many times they have been warned, kicked or what-have-you, but always, always you should assume that they came into the situation with the best possible intentions. Sometimes those best intentions aren't really any kind of "good", and so that's a clear cut situation for both mods and users
but then other times the "best intentions" are a joke that fell flat, or something that needed context (the repeated curse of topology jokes in the hbar come to mind) and there's where the real problem arises.
It's up to each mod and site and room to decide what the balance is, and whether that meets SE standards.
for a while, it seems like the hbar has stuck with an "assume good faith policy" but then when an outsider saw a flag, they didn't, and thus hbar has been stuck with a bad reputation, because their balance is different from much of the network's.
And now the balance needs to be shifted, to account for that, I suppose, and also because sometimes those things need enough context that a random outsider gets a negative impression, which we don't want.
But the thing that confounds me: when something falls flat or comes across badly--whether intended in good spirits or out of ill will--why aren't there people in the room saing "whoa, there!" before flags are thrown?
@nitsua60 true, and i think that's where it falls back to the issue of troll flagging, and people who don't know what flags are for, or who dislike somebody so flag them, or whatever.
@nitsua60 lol interesting history/ philosophy there & does seem to relate to current angles under discussion/ thx for sharing... except, ofc you must realize, SE standards fit closer to the ancient law of Yahweh in that analysis/ dichotomy & doubt you really wanna go in that direction...! aka harsh/ vengeful god of the old testament o_O
so i think in general part of the problem is the flagging system itself. A good simple change would be: showing context in the flag bar, or making multiple people confirm the flag, or whatever.
and this has been hashed over time and time again, and nothing has happened, so.
@heather as a mod, am surprised to hear you refer to "troll flagging/ broken flag system", have you noticed that in any other chat room than hbar eg Quantum Computing room? esp now that you wear the mod hat?
@vzn Actually, that's what I'm saying. The SE model is explicitly the "ancient" one, not the "modern." Lay out some high-level principles, give some examples, and trust judges (staff, moderators, 10K users) to make reasonable judgments.
@heather Or people of good intent who are not being shown a better model.
@BalarkaSen I share your opinion that the flag system as it stands is broken on an abstract level and both can and has been abused by bad faith actors. But that does not mean that most or even a substantial fraction of flags are of such a kind. When I look at the list of recent flags across the network, two things strike me:
in the end, i think more needs to be done to acknowledge the fact that yes, of course Be Nice is important, but in terms of moderation, one also has to remember to Assume Good Faith, as much as possible (at least partly because else you'll become a grumpy old codger yelling at the internet).
@nitsua60 pt taken but theres a reason the old form of law was discarded in modern times. anyway the modern form has some advantages wrt that dichotomy. pros + cons.
@vzn no, not particularly. I don't hang out in a lot of busy chatrooms - mostly quiet ones like The Bookworm, or The Classical Channel, where there's never really any problems. I'm also pretty new to modding, so.
@vzn Assume Good Faith does not mean "nothing bad ever happens". Troll flagging does happen.
see also my full list of reasons:
> where it falls back to the issue of troll flagging, and people who don't know what flags are for, or who dislike somebody so flag them, or whatever.
and nitsua60's example:
> Or people of good intent who are not being shown a better model.
and i guess i must add an obligatory "take this all with a grain of salt, i'm a newer mod and i haven't been on SE nearly as long as some of these other folks" notice to all that i'm saying here.
@heather my take on "troll flagging" is that some ppls chat style tends to cause animosity & maybe some are anonymously attempting to use flagging as a retaliatory "gesture". otherwise not sure have really witnessed it myself, and over the years have seen some intermittent flagging, although lately am having the tendency to run if anything gets flagged.
@vzn This doesn't strike me as very helpful, just saying "yeah, but." What point are you making? Yes, the model was largely discarded. Why do you think that was? How does it relate to the current (chatroom) situation? What are the pros/cons you see, and how do they apply here?
I am following a training course and updating of fundamentals of modern physics at my university. I had any photocopies of a colleague (see images)
I think they are not very clear without a comment and without a detailed explanation. I kindly ask if there is anyone who can help me to understa...
@nitsua60 was not able to outline it all in a single chat line ok? am not trying to be helpful exactly (with every single line written here!), but not trying to be unhelpful either. my personal issue is to try to get away from the idea that mods are infallible and that all their decisions are beyond question, dont think it works out in some cases. think its a little )( bit different philosophy than what currently plays out on SE.
@nitsua60 with respect to your longer post, I like your thoughts here, and I think this is a very good set of points, however, I would like to point out several things: 1) the minute a judge becomes flawed, the whole system becomes flawed. 2) the opinion of the judge may vary drastically between judges. 3) judges in the times of the Hebrews had far more experience than a chat mod on SE. 4) if the evidence is incomplete, the whole system becomes flawed.
@nitsua60 yes this needs to be communicated some that basically any flags are regarded as a problem for SE mods and regulars need to figure out proactive ways/ contribute ways to decrease all flagging.
@nitsua60 I will make no further comments pertaining to the moderation system of hbar because I think at a concrete level that's equivalent to trying to get a dead horse to drag a cart.
At an abstract level, the immediate criticism to that essay seems to be that modern and postmodern moral codes have become tenfold more complicated than "ancient times" which were mostly morality based upon mythological or archetypal stories. With industrial revolution we seem to have dispensed with that as a
major influence of our morality, hence the requirement for a complicated, exhaustive laws, rules and regulations. Hence the need for pedants like Kurt Godel to be skeptic about the American constitution.
I don't know why our moral codes grew up to be so complicated over a short amount of time, though. It's an interesting question.
In any case, that's my skepticism (but not rebuttal) of an intuitionistic law code.
I am following a training course and updating of fundamentals of modern physics at my university. I had any photocopies of a colleague (see images)
I think they are not very clear without a comment and without a detailed explanation. I kindly ask if there is anyone who can help me to understa...
Backup Room – The h Bar
Backup Room – The h Bar