As the original Moderation page has developed a bug so that permalinks no longer navigate to the appropriate comment, I thought I’d put up a page for continuing discussion on moderating issues. The Rules can be found there so anyone with an issue should check that they are familiar with them.
26th June 2015: the bug has now affected this page so there is now a new Moderation Issues page here.
hotshoe_,
That’s quite some disdain for a fundamental Enlightenment principle you have there. Tell me, who do you think should be able to control the speech of other people? Are you so free of bias and impervious to the siren call of power that you should have such responsibility? I think not. No one is or should.
Do you think that silencing people makes the bad thoughts go away? Isn’t it just possible that it drives those who think them out of sight, and more importantly out of any venue where those views might be challenged? I like my bigots out in the open where I can see them. Nazis marching in Skokie are less dangerous than Nazis plotting in secret.
Just to be clear, I’m not arguing that speech should not have consequences. Individuals should have recourse against bullying, slander, libel, and any other expression that has real world repercussions. That recourse must be against the abuse and results of dishonesty, not about the speech act itself. The power to preemptively prevent speech has been shown historically to entail too much risk of silencing legitimate views.
The answer to bad speech is good speech. Sometimes freedom is hard work.
I tend to skip over flame wars, so I don’t know what this is about, but I think there’s a qualitative difference between bullying a child and expressing political opinions in an adult forum.
petrushka,
I concur. Both children and free expression can be protected.
Just one more inflammatory post. The only internet forum I’ve been unable to tolerate is pharyngula. I posted there about three times and was greeted with such unremitting vevom I decided it was not the site for me. Kariosfocus is a prince by comparison. I don’t recall what the issue was, but I havent changed much.
Nice post, hotshoe. The libertarian view that states or societies or internet sites should do little but protect “rights granted to all by their creator” is harmful. As Everett Hall put it, “Freedom of thought and speech without available means of gaining information and methods of sound analysis, are empty. Protection and security are meaningless until there is something positive worth protecting.” Libertarian thinking gives states only negative obligations–protecting what people have “been endowed with.”
What I think is strange is that people who don’t actually believe in site moderation or Lizzie’s very minimal rules have been entrusted by Lizzie to implement them.
No ONE should, but everybody should. The idea that this well-intentioned “enlightenment” (i.e., 18th Century) principle should trump the demos has long been a comfort to the haves, and is becoming more of one with each new SCOTUS ruling. Money buys speech, which wins elections, and limiting it is simply not allowed.
Why do you think that repeating/spreading vicious lies does not have “real world repercussions”?
What does that mean? Can we bring back hotshoe’s 12-year-old neighbor with a lawsuit?
One could argue that untrammeled lying has been just as harmful. Think of Nazi and Bolshevik propaganda and what resulted from it. You consider only the suppression of speech that those rises to power produced. But what about the rises themselves? Weren’t they dependent on a steady spewing of lies? Principles are nice, but they’re also easy. The world is a complicated place, and good societies require an understanding of some of the complications. As Lizzie said, some lies should simply not be tolerated–freezepeach (to use hotshoe’s expression) be damned. Getting to the truth is a lofty goal, certainly. But the methods of reaching it are not obvious and there’s no reason to suppose that the best way involves any of Nozick’s unconstrainable “rights.”
Right, it’s not only hard, it’s complicated. And the point is that freedom is not always served by more freedom. Sometimes too much freedom leads to the end of liberty. It’s much more often the case that the answer to poor results of democratic actions (not a too powerful person stifling your rights, but the will of the people attempting to make things better for everybody by taking everyone’s desires into account), is (if not always, at least generally), more democracy.
Just out of curiosity why are you slamming me and not Lizzie? Or yourself, really? After all, you’re here on a moderated forum site, presumably you agree with or at least minimally tolerate the suppression of absolute free speech which is entailed by the admin here redacting links to people’s identities. As far as I know, nothing else has actually been censored, but this is not an absolutist free-for-all. Why do you accept the fact that Lizzie (or any of the admins) can be trusted to “control” the speech of other posters here, even to the tiny extent that they do?
And Lizzie wrote:
So I’d like to know if your principled stand for the fundamental Enlightenment is going to motivate you to leave rather than put up with being told that yes indeed some things are forbidden? Or to chastise Lizzie for her un–Enlightened stance, or to apologize to me for irrationally picking on me, or wait to see if any hypothetical Stormfronters appear here needing to be preemptively banned … or … whatever.
It’s just bizarre that you would choose to get up on your hind legs about the absolute principle of Free Speech when you’ve already agreed, in principle, to have your own speech limited here. Of course, it’s limited in a very specific way that you don’t expect will ever chafe you — I’m sure you don’t plan to ever break the rules against posting porn or links to anyone else’s real identity — so it’s easy for you to go along with the painless policy. But if it’s the principle that’s important as you claim? Am I missing something? Have you ever argued with Lizzie about your Free Speech right to post porn?
If not, why not?
Salvador has to be laughing. Right?
He probably justifies his behaviour by accusing you all (in that tiny part of his brain left over for rational thought) of “Lying-for-Darwin.”
Just think about it. How much of the debate actually assumes, implicitly or explicitly, that the other side is telling the truth?
The first problem with the current policy is that it asks us to overcome our nature without providing the means to do so. The second problem is that it asks us to replace our nature with a fiction.
Perhaps it is time to replace “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken” with “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be lying [this means you Salvador].”
ok, maybe I went too far with that one.
“I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be lying.”
For what it’s worth, I repeatedly appealed to the mods at UD.
Glen, perhaps you’ll just have to bite the bullet like I did.
Blogs are not the place to seek justice.
Yep, this is the complementary social argument to my more-personal argument.
Not only does some speech do real, physical, damage to vulnerable individuals, some speech does irreversible damage to democracy itself. It’s all very fine to say that the answer to lying political advertisements is more and better advertisements telling the truth — but there is in fact no way to get those potentially “better” ads into the public view. On the principle of Free Speech, we as a society cannot compel any media channel to sell ad space equally to “both sides” even if both sides are equally well funded. And in reality, regressive political views will always be better funded, because the 1%ers in every nation feel the need to protect what they’ve got from any progressive humanitarian redistribution or limitation on corporate power.
A Fortune500 executive can buy an election without breaking a sweat. An entire town of working-class folks cannot hope to buy a chance for their views to be heard, not even if they’re willing to sacrifice buying medicine or paying the utility bills this month. Oh sure, there’s cheap speech on Twitter. Wake me when tweets confirm the next Supreme Court justice and it turns out s/he isn’t a Fascist supporter of the oligarchy.
I don’t have any idea what the answer is. Contra Patrick, I don’t have any desire for the life-changing responsibility of making people tell the truth or else shut up. I joke with my family all the time that heads would roll “If I were king” but I cannot imagine enough wisdom to balance my ingrained love of individual freedom with the arguably greater good of collective sanity, health and happiness.
hotshoe_,
Hotshoe_
I’m not sure whether Patrick and you are disagreeing over two separate issues, the universal right to free thought and expression, with which I am very much in favour and which this site promotes or I wouldn’t want to be associated with, and the unfettered right to free speech which is a fine but impossible ideal, because it is so easily exploited by those with views that would/do impinge on the rights of others. Restricting the ability for anyone to promulgate hurtful or hateful ideas is a necessary consequence and I don’t consider it censorship. Where the boundary lies and who controls it is controversial as exemplified by the strong and varied views expressed here.
On my own defunct blog, I tried working with the one rule (apart from spam and porn) of “would I let my mother read that?” which worked tolerably well though I never had the level of traffic we get here.
Sorry (or maybe not) to have triggered this discussion but my initial problem was the scenario I indicated above:
It isn’t just a case of A saying the Earth is flat, B saying, no, it’s an oblate spheroid approximately, and A repeating the Earth is flat. It is specifically A saying B claims X, B saying no I don’t and A repeating B claims X.
Maybe it is such a rare occurrence that we don’t need a new rule. Maybe repetitions of A saying B claims X should just be moved to guano.
PS
If anyone has any idea how to fix the annoying page count bug, I (and others, I suspect) would appreciate it. I see the link from the “latest comments” gets out of step and adding 2 to the page number in the navigation window sorts it but still…
ETA 1 not 2
FWIW, I don’t think it’s rare at all. Pretty common, I think.
The universal/unfettered distinction you make is a good one, if “universal” is taken to mean “applies to everybody.” Patrick has said above that he’s ok with such fetters as have “real world repercussions” but I’m not sure what that means. He mentioned slander as an example. Maybe calling somebody an asshole is slander? I’ve called people here assholes. But I don’t think that’s actually harmful at all, and I take it that it comes with playing on boards like this. There are other types of board shenanigans (like misrepresentation through quote mining or out-of-context excerpting) that are much more unpleasant and hurtful, IMO. The people who like those kinds of games may never call anybody an asshole (and so wouldn’t embarrass you to have your mother read their posts). They may even wear little halos around as well as “Who…ME??” faces. They’re like the people at work who never call anybody names to their faces, but cause far more trouble by telling false tales. Sometimes they even get others fired. (Calling somebody an asshole doesn’t get the person so named fired, though it may get the name-caller in trouble).
Again, I don’t know the solution. Presumably, community members start to learn what people are really like, and ignore the cardboard halos. But I guess I don’t think throwing assholes out after a couple of warnings is such a bad thing. I’d do it myself, if I had a site, anyhow. I get that “No being an asshole here!” is a confusing, unspecific rule, though, and I realize that it’s not fair to ask moderators to implement it.
I’ve had so many altercations with keiths here that someone opened a thread specifically for it. I thought that, since there was some interest, there might be democratic result of an airing of the issues. A fairly thorough discussion of one of them resulted in two regulars saying that I was the one at fault for over-reacting. I disagreed, but banned myself (obviously only for a while) as a punishment, anyhow. Maybe occasional “asshole hearings” of that type could be useful. But there are already a surfeit of meta-threads here, and there’s a danger that “team-pressures” (which are extremely intense at this site) would just turn it into another pseudo-plebiscite on whose views on evolution more people agreed with.
So yeah, I don’t know. There probably isn’t a good solution.
Google
Sal Cordova bestiality
Evil.
Or we can refuse to be associated with a site that condones that behavior.
I’m waiting to see how it all shakes out, but I’m leaning toward leaving.
Agreed.
JonF,
JonF,
Not being too bright, as you know from my expounding on gravity, but I’m not clear if you are advocating a change in moderation policy or that a particular commenter be excluded
I stated what I would do were I Lizzie. I’d tell Sal he’s welcome to participate if and only if he acknowledges and apologizes for his egregious quote mining of other participants, and if he addresses at least one of the three fatal flaws I’ve identifed many times in his largely irrelevant criticism of K-Ar dating.
I’m pretty sure I’m not Lizzie, and she and other mods may be clever enough to come up with another satisfactory solution.
If the present situation continues I’m gone.
OK, that’s clear. Thanks.
http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2006/06/and-the-winner.html
That was me. I unfortunately my web page is gone. But I still have the data. VG
JonF,
Just a quick comment.
As I see it, JonF has done a fantastic job of responding to Sal’s posts and comments. My thanks.
No, I don’t know how to fix it.
I have gotten into the habit of: when the browser does not take me to a comment, I increment the “cpage=” number in the address bar, then try again. The “Design as the inverse …” thread seems to be off by two. This (“Moderation issues”) is off by one. It’s probably a race condition (timing bug) in the WordPress code.
Neil Rickert,
Sorry, should have mentioned that. Seconded!
Well, you can be pro Free Speech and still refuse to publish the stuff! That’s what is silly about ID cries of “censorship” when their papers aren’t published. Journals aren’t obliged to publish bad science in the interests of “Free Speech” (and it’s not like BIOcomplexity is pushed for space).
petrushka,
Any chance you could reprise it? Would it be too long as an OP? Belated congrats on your award, BTW; That site – Anointed One – wow!!!
Neil Rickert,
Bizarrely, the links to the latest “moderation issues” comments are working for me, at the moment.
By extension, are you suggesting that you are not obliged to to condone the publishing of PRATT comments? Or could we have a PRATT page where such comments could be consigned rather than guano or the sandbox? It could be open to comments so that PRATT “victims” could post supporting evidence if they were so inclined.
I hope to re-publish my findings, and this seems like the place to do it. It’s a bit outdated, but most of the offenders are still in business. Some of them are used as references by Sal.
My two cents is that it is acceptable to reopen refuted arguments if your arguments add something to the narrative. I do not object to people being wrong. (I would have to stifle myself.) I object to dishonesty, and quote mining is dishonest. If it is pointed out, the offender needs to acknowledge the offence or risk excommunication.
Certainly no working scientist would want to be associated with a colleague who manipulates quotations unethically.
There’s a difference between using a quote to support a view that the author disagrees with, and using the quote in a manner that deliberately mischaracterizes the meaning of the quote in its original context. For example, SETI might go all wall-eyed and spittle-mouthed at the thought of the ID community using their program and quoting their site as an example of establishing an operationalized definition of intelligence and searching for signs of intelligent design, but it’s still completely legitimate to use it as an example if a search for artifacts of ID.
Similarly, just because an ID advocate (or a YEC) uses a quote to support ID and the author would never in a million years support ID (or YEC), that doesn’t mean the quote was quote-mined. It may just mean the information contained in the quote also supports ID whether the author likes it or not.
EL said:
That’s what is silly about
IDTSZ cries of “censorship” when theirpaperscomments aren’t published or are redacted at UD.Journals aren’tUD isn’t obliged to publish and or keep published badsciencearguments in the interests of “Free Speech” (and it’s not likeBIOcomplexityTSZ is pushed for space).Your second definition is the definition of a quote mine.
1. Out of context.
2. Implying a position not intended by the original author.
There is another kind of lying that is so deliberate and pernicious that one wonders exactly why the perpetrators are given any credence anywhere. That would be altering the text of a quotation to mean something not intended by the original author.
In the current discussion, the perp would be Woodmorappe. One of Sal’s primary references.
This is a nice solution. I’d settle for the admission, apology, and promise not to do it again, though: it’s tough to expect folks to engage reasonably in arguments in areas in which they’re really not capable of much. Either way, such a rule would mean, I think, that one of the misrepresenters here would be gone, since that type will never admit a mistake or apologize for any position in which they’re invested. But….SO LONG! ONE DOWN!
Touche.
Oh? As it stands you have accused me of quote-mining you. Either substantiate those allegations or withdraw them and apologise.
Here is the allegation
And here is a link to the alleged quote mines: http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/?p=28071&cpage=6#comment-69367
Your move WJM.
walto,
I support Lizzie’s experiment here. Were I covering the costs, I wouldn’t have banned anyone, but I’m curious to see how her “assume good faith” rule works out. If she changes the rules so that comments are deleted rather than being moved to guano, or if she starts banning people for spurious reasons, I’ll resign as an admin. I don’t expect that to happen because she seems to me to understand, respect, and support the principle of freedom of expression.
walto,
I think it does. If those repercussions cannot be addressed with more speech, legal remedies should be available. See libel per se for good examples.
I don’t know the circumstances of the case she mentioned. I will note that the protection we afford children is greater than that we afford adults and childrens’ rights and responsibilities are correspondingly more restricted. It sounds like the protection failed tragically.
And you’re just the person to decide what constitutes lies and what should be tolerated? You might want to stop and think about how those provisions could be used against you should someone other than you and your fellow angels seize the reins of power.
We had to destroy the village to save it. And said without any apparent irony.
Democracy is a means to an end. Freedom is the end.
Petrushka said:
No, this is not necessarily a case of quote mining. Just because the author didn’t intend for his or her statement in a given context to support some other position, doesn’t mean his or her statement, in the original context, does not support that other position. You don’t get to have your cake and eat it, too; if what the author said, in context, supports an ID or YEC claim or position, then just because the author is anti-ID or anti-YEC doesn’t automatically make the IDist’s or YEC’s use of it “quote mining”.
There’s a difference between “I didn’t mean it that way” and “I don’t want what I said to be used to support something I don’t agree with.”
hotshoe_,
Lizzie’s site, Lizzie’s rules. I’m curious to see how her experiment turns out.
What got my dander up is the lack of respect for the principle of free expression being demonstrated by some people here. The desire to control what other people say, and by extension what other people can hear, is strong in some participants here. As I said, I consider that a character flaw.
Lizzie has some of the most minimal rules of any online forum other than Usenet and she strives to apply them fairly. It seems to me that she understands and values the principle. Until that changes, you’ll have the pleasure of my company.
JonF,
The site doesn’t condone anything. It provides a venue for wide-ranging, open discussion. Each participant is solely responsible for his or her comments. Each participant is also solely responsible for his or her reactions to others’ comments.
If you don’t like a particular participant or topic, don’t interact with them.
JonF,
Here’s my solution:
1) Provide references to your original statements and demonstrate that Sal quoted you dishonestly. If he continues to do so, point again at the proof.
2) Continue to request that he address the flaws you’ve identified whenever he comments in that thread.
The answer to bad speech is good speech.
Guess it’s just status quo.
Bye.
Umm, yeah, nope.
Kinda cute “turning the tables”, but WIlliam is misrepresenting the substance of the complaint about UD, no surprise.
If he wanted to construct a reasonably-honest analogy, he’d say something like “There’s no reason to complain about censorship when Nature invites you to author a paper and then, after it is submitted, deletes and adds material without notifying either the readers or the author what was changed (or why). There’s no reason to complain about censorship when Nature collects all the printed copies to physically remove every page originally written by a now-disappeared author, again without notifying either the readers or the author.”
UD can have whatever censorship policies they want (and how could I stop them, anyways, even if I wanted to); they can have hypocritical censorship policies where they reward raving paranoia like KF’s unprovoked attack on LIzzie while punishing those who try to calm him down; they can have hypocritical censorship policies where they lie about wanting non-IDists to contribute, edit or destroy those contributions, then lie about how the non-IDists are “too scared” to reply.
What they can’t have is an unchallenged false-equivalence between their malevolent censorship and what Lizzie is talking about.
I get that there are a few folks here at TSZ who are angry on principle that UD doesn’t allow free and open discussion. And if that were the only issue, then WJM’s “touche” comment might be apt. But honestly, that’s not the main issue and that makes WJM’s comment either spectacularly ignorant or dishonest.
William J. Murray,
Maybe – but that seems a bit vague. Creationists are sometimes off the hook because sometimes full context does not change meaning, I guess. But do you have an actual example of such a ‘legitimate-use’ non-quote-mining quote?
If William quoted Hitler and I attribute Hitler’s words to William, is that fair and honest?
William, when a writer sets up a problem to be addressed and then addresses it, it is dishonest to quote the setup and imply that is the author’s argument. This is not rocket science.
FWIW, I already responded to that above in one of the sections of my post that you cut.
I think what you’re actually expressing here is that the answer to over-simplification is additional oversimplification.
hotshoe_on said;
You mean like when Applied Mathematics Letters peer-reviewed and accepted for publication Granville Sewell’s A Second Look at the Second Law,
Which cost the journal an apology and $10,000?
At least when IDists “cry” about censorship, it’s the kind that actually violates professional standards and costs the censoring publication a public apology and ten grand.
Hey Alan Fox, were you banned from UD prior to going back on as Aurelio Smith?
Also, Patrick, maybe freedom is your “end.” It’s not my “end.” I like to be asked what my end is, and not have it simply assumed by a libertarian–that’s actually the point of democracy, and is something that you seem not be understanding at all.
Not that you care, but in my world the freedom to own guns isn’t the only freedom that civil societies need to curtail. I think there should be no freedom to own air, water, or broadband as well.
So there goes property along with speech.
Oh, snap!
If only the world were actually simple, it wouldn’t matter if we got our worship of god from the OT and our worship of Free Speech from the 18th century Enlightenment.
You could say, “Simple Solutions for Simple Minds”. 😉
Allan Miller said:
The first thing that comes to mind is the Lewontin quote about letting no divine foot in the door. IDists use it to point out the metaphysical bias; some have attempted to claim such a representation is quote-mining. The ideological bias, though, is clear given the context.