I’m not sure where else to talk about this because this sub is one of the few places where most people have an understanding of internet forum norms and how they go wrong.
Recent drama on Wikipedia occurred because the lead editor of Scots Wikipedia didn’t know Scots but wrote tens of thousands of articles by writing them English and using a dictionary to replace random words. This is very culturally damaging as it turns Scots into an object of amusement for English speakers, and it also means that much of the articles on Scots Wikipedia are complete garbage.
If you actually look at the talk pages on Wiki around this (vs the discussions on various Scottish subreddits), many people are defending the editor because based on their level of engagement/politeness, they were acting “good faith”, and would like them to continue working on the project in some capacity, rather than banning them and stripping them of editing privileges.A number of people don’t want to delete that person’s articles because of loss of “knowledge”.
Along with some other drama on MathOverflow(dude who was an obvious troll admitted to posting in bad faith, much to the surprise of the admins and power uses, who attacked anyone who pointed out that they weren’t worth engaging with. He was subsequently tempbanned for admitting to trolling, but not for his profile pic or anything he actually did or said.)
I realize how incredibly vulnerable much of the internet (and not just the SSC-adjacent parts of it) is to grift because of discussion norms involving “charity” and “good faith” that have never made sense in any kind of IRL discussion. Do people here have a sense of how these norms developed?
Jegus christ the people on mathoverflow are such dumbasses
I’m just speculating, but I think people are generally aware that text communication on the internet leads to more hostility than face-to-face conversation, and these norms are to some extent an attempt to compensate.
Maybe this is supposed to be serious but it’s fucking hilarious to me. What’s amazing is that if the guy had simply studied Scots for 9 years, he’d probably be near-fluent by now. Does dedicating that much time to working on the wiki never make you think that maybe you should actually learn the language?
I think it’s probably that you don’t really get anywhere just accusing everyone of arguing in bad faith.
With regards to rationalism, it originates in an early 2000s AI grift by Yudkowsky, a darker kind of such grift than most (facing competition when it came to credentials, the counter attack was to argue that other, better credentialed grifters, were gonna destroy the world).
All of their peculiar ways were ultimately derived from “gimme your money” (even if now serving different purposes such as self validation of some aggrieved incel entitlement). But the notion of good or bad faith is hardly applicable when the grifter truly believes that they should get your money.
And if anything, the original grift was cleaner than what it evolved into now.
Hey Dank, nice to see you ’round these parts.
I’m a bit sceptical of the possibility of giving some sort of general account of the development of these sorts of norms that’s somehow ‘community-independent’ or somesuch in such a way that it would still help us make sense of the reasons for which it’s taken up in the various communities that adopt them.
It strikes me as being likely (read: this is just basically just a WAG) that these norms tend to get adopted and cultivated in the communities that they do for reasons that ultimately boil down to the political economy of the communities in which they exist. Taking MathOverflow as an example, my experience of the place and its power-users is that they tend to hold the view (which I think is less popular among the younger generation of mathematicians, but ime is definitely still a view that plenty of folks in the mathematical community, particularly some prominent established mathematicians, hold) that politics and mathematics should be kept separate, essentially on the grounds that not doing so hinders mathematical progress and they wring their hands endlessly about missing out on the next Teichmuller just because of a little antisemitism (I gloss a bit obviously, but I assume that you’re familiar enough with this type of argument). My point here is that it seems to me that any account of why MO (or any other online community) adopts the stance that they do toward these things will inevitably have to make reference to the justifications that they give within their own community, which are recognised as holding weight there and that these are ultimately rather local things (e.g. to give an account of why these arguments are successful in shaping the political economy of MO, we need to know things about the history and sociology of mathematics and why various mathematicians find such arguments convincing, but these facts are unlikely to help us understand why Wikipedia editors adopt such a stance, which probably has to do with an entirely different set of cultural concerns).
All of this being said, I’d still be really interested in reading some sort of informed history/genealogy of these sorts of practices in online spaces, since it’s not hard to imagine that they might end up playing similar roles in various communities despite the differences in reasons offered for their adoption, but I’m not really aware of anything like that existing.
Online norms differ greatly from RL ones because of the structure and form of the medium.
Your thoughts are easily arranged and rearranged in writing; anonymity gives us protection and allows for easy concealment of motive; words must be taken literally because there is an absence of emotive context; etc etc.
Ive been communicating online for most of my life. In my experience, whether it takes place on IRC, AIM, Facebook, or any of the much newer platforms, the norms within any of these spaces are created ad hoc, and their existence is later rationalized.
In the case of the Wikipedia editor, you could consider this a structural problem within the editorial process (or lack thereof). Wikipedia’s structure as an essentially volunteer-driven dictionary is going to lead to these sorts of inevitable problems, which are exacerbated due to the lack of oversight and exposure common in small communities.
I know nothing of the MathOverflow community, but either ignoring or tolerating trolls is extremely common. Part of this is because of how common trolling is - it is exhausting as an unpaid moderator to constantly play whack-a-mole with them. Especially in large communities. It is one thing to prevent trolling, it is another to police it.
As for grifting… I believe online spaces are so vulnerable to this because critical thought is simply not a priority. Circling the ideological wagons and agreeing to terms for discussion always come first. Always. If you combine this with the ease of being disingenuous through the medium, you have an environment ripe for exploitation through grift.
Multiple smaller online communities I’ve been a part of have seen their local share of moderation-related drama. While it hasn’t played out exactly the same every time, the common thread is the people running the show ultimately are just some dudes whose expertise lies somewhere other than in community management, and turns out many of the things you might intuitively expect to be good policy just don’t work in practice. The typical mistakes there are focusing on superficial politeness over content and attempting to base all moderation action on objective rules to avoid being “unfair”.
Maybe I’m reaching and this stuff doesn’t generalise as well as I think, but it all feels very familiar. You have your community and it’s running smoothly with whatever it is you’re doing. Someone shows up who you don’t really like but who also isn’t doing anything overtly banworthy. What do you do? Do you find some technicality to complain about? Do you throw him out simply citing that you don’t like his face? Is that “fair” and do you have the guts to stand by that when someone inevitably complains? Most likely you grumble to yourself while avoiding direct conflict, which empowers the bad actor eventually normalising their behaviour, and then you have lost and if you later attempt to correct the course you’ll be met with complaints about punishing them for something that has now come to be seen as simply the way things are.
I think there are dimensions here that need to be considered.
A lot of these people sucked into the veneer-rationalist subculture are brought in by bad argumentation, and kept in by that same mechanism.
One characteristic that I see most regularly is the lack of the concept “I might be getting it wrong.”
If your grounding in argumentation is in a discourse centred around pure attack (thesis + negation = disproof) rather than a more balanced approach (thesis + thesis = synthesis) then you’re going to view every discussion as having precisely one right person and one wrong person. They’re essentially prepared to trounce or be trounced and change is bought about by forcing them down a dialectic path. Facts over feelings allows for the trampling of human rights because minorities don’t have statistical might on their side.
If you’re arguing with such a person, it can feel like bad faith when they’re incapable of conceding a single point but it’s not, that’s just what they’re trained to do. There are many actual and deliberate sophists who know they’re manipulating the discourse, but there are a lot who just don’t know any better.
I’ve seen capital A Atheist friends admit to me that gaining a new rationalist with a weak argument is still a win and that their discourse was about spectacle. I just don’t think that’s everyone.