I sense a disturbance in the force.
This thread is for people to tell me what they think is going on, going wrong, and what they think we should do about it. I’m listening.
Lizzie
[Edit added 18.40 pm CET 20/08/2018 by Alan Fox]
As the comments have ballooned, Lizzie would very much like members to summarize their thoughts and suggestions into one statement and there is now a dedicated thread, “Summaries”, where they can be posted. Please just post one summary and please do not add other comments. You are welcome to comment on other people’s summaries in this thread. The idea of the “Summaries” thread is to make it easier for Lizzie to get your input. Comments judged by admins not to be summaries will move to guano.
Members who would rather keep their thoughts confidential are invited to use the private messaging system. Lizzie’s address is Elizabeth.
Agreed.
Rather than changing the rules, here is what I think will get more posts that reflect the standards you hint at and I understand EL to want based on the site rules.
First, post the way you want others to post.
Second, quickly stop engaging in exchanges with people who do not post that way.
Great advice, Bruce. Wish I could follow it!!
This is just want the internet is like. As far as the moderators are concerned, are they unfair and unprofessional? Of course they are – they’re human beings, and this is not their job – but they’re hardly as egregious or one-sided as many on other forums. Most people do not have the self-control necessary to click the ignore button, simply not read or respond to baiting, and conduct themselves in a civil manner. Without a professionally trained and paid moderator, a forum like this is really about the best one can reasonably hope for.
I hope we get a thread soon from you, Liz, about setting up rules and penalties that carry no moral judgement, from your tradition of civil disobedience. That sounds like a fun thread.
Update that the ‘other’ two Mods from TSZ, which is really a backhanded ‘miserable’ zone for Abrahamic theists the way apostate Lizzie set it up, have also gone over to Peaceful Science. I don’t consider Vincent a ‘real mod’ as he still doesn’t seem to have taken on the mantle officially in action.
Joshua indeed should be thankful while in attention-seeking mode for this ‘skeptic’ traffic being driven to his site from TSZ.
This moderation conversation is rather limited. Another important question is what you are ‘allowed’ to know about your dialogue partner(s) when dialoguing with them.
Notice the ‘title’ of each member at Swamidass’ version? It shows immediately something about the poster.
If people knew how god-hatred eats up keiths’ communication with others, before choosing to engage him, they might be less likely to do so given that vital piece of information to know about his ‘position’. That showed the way he accused Joshua of lying, yet refused to show precisely the supposed ‘lie,’ instead just using a weak ‘look at the link’ defense.
This site continues to validate the belief that atheists are the least trusted people in North America for a simple reason dealing with ethics and the feeling of ‘being watched.’ One might slip all the way into what Jordan Peterson is now regularly highlighting contra atheism in Dostoevsky’s well-known ‘anything goes’ logic as inescapable in the atheist worldview.
In any case, have you cut through the thick wool & excuses in the past months, Lizzie, or is it going to be philosophistry & spiritually unmusical neuromania again when you return?
It helps to use the ignore button. It spared me responding to thousands of comments, especially by Keiths, Mung, Entropy, Gregory (some names I’ve already forgotten).
If each post takes 5 minutes to read and respond and there are 3000 comments the ignore button filters out, that’s how many minutes spared?
3000 x 5 = 15,000 minutes
How many hours is that? 15,000 / 60 = 250 hours
TSZ seems to be largely a failed experiment in self governance and rules griping these days. It was better when we attacked problems, examined concepts. We’re all guilty.
Lizzie,
Let me share what I think is going right. Consider these threads, one is related to a peer-reviewed paper co-authored by a Creationist that was published in the journal of mathematical biology and led to a Keynote presentation at a secular international biology conference.
Threads at TSZ by Bill Basener and some threads regarding his paper:
Another discussion I thought was excellent and ground breaking:
As far as myself, personally for my own edification, learning, and extension of my thought process, I thought processes:
and this one which actually led to something now in print in a creationist book:
The summary is here:
Creationists are using some of my findings regarding Alu elements in their writings. Rupe and Sanford’s most recent book derived from some of the citations I found in my research on Alu elements.
Ok. But some are guiltier than others.As I said, when I first came here I was surprised at the acrimony. But that’s the culture, so I adapted. It’s always been offensive to me. You may remember when I tried to put my treatment out for a vote, I discovered that I was quite wrong about what is considered garbage here. (You and a couple of the current mods voted against me, IIRC.) In addition, my pleas for different sorts of rules, stuff that might make the place more civil, fell on deaf ears over the years (twice, I believe–and I’ll be offering no more drafts of rules changes). So this is what the folks here want, apparently. As Sal says, it’s got some redeeming features, and I’ve learned quite a bit here. So comfort isn’t everything, I guess.
walto,
Sorry Walto, I don’t recall that. Do you have a link?
I don’t. But I think it was back in the Plantinga fight days–or sometime around then. keiths prolly has it. Others could find it too, I think.
What happened was that I, being the cocky schmuck I am, was pretty sure that “impartial” viewers would see that the “argument” going on was off the rails. So I insisted that people take sides. Now it’s possible that I was just wrong and was soundly and fairly thumped in some purely philosophical debate. (God knows that has happened.) But what I believe really occurred was that I was a relative newbie and there was some fear that I might turn out to be a closet theist, so team spirit took over. keiths was a dependable theist-smasher, and that was mostly what people cared about. So I learned my lesson.
The patrick debacles were absolutely incredible to me. That’s moderation?
walto,
what annoys me the most Walto, is our inability to come together as a community. To the extent I’m part of the problem, I’m sorry.
Richardthughes,
Bah. If you were a part, you were a teensy-weensy part.
Compared to me, anyhow. Could never follow Bruce’s prescriptions.
I hope that whatever changes are applied to TSZ rules, they are going to be followed consistently by ALL admins for both sides of the spectrum/argument…
I feel that this issue has been brought up by many, but especially by ID supporters, as they have felt they have been treated unfairly and inconsistently vs materialists/evolutionists…
I have to give credit to keiths, who also has brought up this issue many times…
My personal experience here was that admins have succumbed to the pressure from the “holy trinity” with John H acting as a god to have my publishing privileges revoked and have my OPs censored before posting…
Why?
Because some of my OPs, but especially one, indirectly, may have had some embarrassing implications on the life work of the “holy trinity”, but especially on the birdie evolution speculations expert…
Everyone in the right frame of mind knows that…
After this embarrassing attempt to censor my OPs, I made up my mind to leave this blog as it reminded me of the censorship I was putting up with every day growing up under the communist regime…
I have come back…with vengeance… Well… a little bit of it 😉
BTW: admins job is not easy and Alan and Neil have worked their butts off… They, however, felt pressured to do things they may have not felt like doing…I don’t know…
glasnost!
гла́сность
perestroika
pieriestrojka
Apart from Lizzie, we have no female participants. That’s the sensible half of the population giving this place a miss.
patrick and keiths drove hotshoe away. That was a big loss, IMO.
walto
I failed there.
It’s nice to see you back, Elizabeth, despite the unfortunate circumstances. Before I respond to your post, I would like to request that you release keiths from moderation. I can see blocked comments he’s made in this thread and Moderation Issues. Fair play dictates that he should be able to respond in public to the people accusing him of breaking the rules.
I got an email from another TSZ member (not keiths, for the record) when all this started. Here’s what happened, based on my reading yesterday and today.
keiths published a post that arguably violated the rule about using TSZ as a peanut gallery. That rule, as you know, is not enforced often. There are many threads about the antics on Uncommon Descent. His post was not qualitatively different. It did claim that someone was behaving dishonestly, and provided reasons for that claim.
The response from Neil and the other moderators crossed several lines. First, the post was removed. Then it was restored, but with a disclaimer from the admins added (shades of UD’s loudspeaker in the ceiling). Comments were closed. Then keiths’ posting privileges were revoked. A rewrite from keiths that addressed Neil’s stated concerns was blocked. Neil moved comments from Moderation Issues to Guano. Alan suspended keiths’ account for 30 days. Now here you are.
Absolutely none of the actions taken by the admins are allowed by the rules. You’ve clearly declared, “it is a principle of this site that comments are not edited, deleted, or hidden.” There is nothing in the rules that allows admins to close comments on a thread. It is understood that comments in Moderation Issues are never moved to Guano.
While I personally no longer find it valuable to discuss Intelligent Design or other variants of creationism online, I do like knowing that there is a place on the ‘net where that topic can be argued in a forum where freedom of expression is explicitly supported. I’ve pointed several people here from other forums because TSZ was free of capricious “moderation” like that seen on Uncommon Descent. Apparently that is no longer the case.
I have a lot of respect for Alan’s intellect and hope to buy him a glass of wine the next time I’m in France. When I was participating here, I found DNA_Jock’s comments to be uniformly high quality. Somehow, despite being managed by these intelligent, thoughtful people, TSZ has slid down a slippery slope. Part of the issue is due to the rules not being aligned to the goals of TSZ, as I discussed in “TSZ is Broken” (http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/the-skeptical-zone-is-broken/). This has resulted in a history of bad decisions by the admins, myself included. Specifically:
1) Suspending the Frankie (Joe Gallien) account. I was and am uncomfortable with the decision we made. Using the anti-spam rule as justification for his suspension is too close to admins creating new rules for my taste. You chose to allow him to return to the site, it’s not up to anyone else to remove him for any non-bannable offense.
2) Placing Phoodoo in moderation. I didn’t make that decision, but neither did I challenge it. I should have. There was nothing rule-violating in his behavior, it was simply annoying. Annoyance is a small price to pay for free and open discussion. The Ignore button should be sufficient.
3) Throttling J-Mac’s posting privileges. As with Phoodoo, J-Mac was not violating any rules. Getting your approval to add a rule for the maximum number of posts per week, by any member, would have been the better choice.
This history of ad hoc use of admin privileges shows that TSZ needs clear rules that govern the admins as well as the other members. I’ll post my suggestions in my next comment.
“An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates his duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”
— Thomas Paine
This is my proposal for the official TSZ rules, leveraging as much existing material as possible. One major difference is the addition of clear rules for admins. We need to hold them to a higher standard — they should not be making up arbitrary rules. Another difference is the elimination of Guano. That alone will dramatically reduce the amount of meta-discussion.
**Goals**
My name is Elizabeth Liddle, and I started this site to be a place where people could discuss controversial positions about life, the universe and everything with minimal tribal rancour (pay no attention to the penguins….).
My motivation for starting the site has been the experience of trying to discuss religion, politics, evolution, the Mind/Brain problem, creationism, ethics, exit polls, probability, intelligent design, and many other topics in venues where positions are strongly held and feelings run high. In most venues, one view dominates, and there is a kind of “resident prior” about the integrity, intelligence and motivation of those who differ from the majority view.
That is why the strapline says: “Park your priors by the door”. They may be adjusted by the time you leave!
There are plenty of blogs and forums where people with like priors can hang out and scoff at those who do not share them. There’s nothing wrong with those sites, and I’ve learned a lot from them. But the idea here is to provide a venue where people with very different priors can come to discover what common ground we share; what misunderstandings of other views we hold; and, having cleared away the straw men, find out where our real differences lie.
**Bannable Offenses**
In order to legally protect the site owner, certain behaviors will result in an immediate, permanent ban:
* Advocating illegal activities.
* Posting NSFW (not safe for work) images or links to NSFW images.
* Posting material or links to material that risks the integrity of another member’s computer.
* “Doxing” or outing other members. This includes indulging in ad hominem speculations. This rule applies even if the person in question has published personal information elsewhere.
* Posting racist material.
* Editing, deleting, or hiding other members’ comments. If you have author permissions, you may find you have the technical ability to edit or move comments under your top level posts. Do not do so.
**Administrators**
Administrators (admins) help keep the site up and running. With four exceptions, they have exactly the same privileges as any other member of the TSZ community:
* Enforce the Bannable Offenses.
* Edit or delete posts or comments containing material constituting one of the Bannable Offenses.
* Restore material deleted by other participants.
* Pin particularly interesting posts to the front page, for as long as they are active.
It is a principle of this site that comments are not edited, deleted, or hidden. That restriction applies to admins as well as everyone else.
**Guidelines**
Reciprocating Bill summarized the expectations of TSZ participants succinctly:
By participating on this site, you agree to support the site’s goals. Some guidelines that aid in that are:
* Park your priors by the door.
* Assume other members of the community are participating in good faith, until evidence shows that assumption to be untenable. Be ready to re-extend the assumption when the person’s behavior has changed.
* Address the content of the post or comment, not the perceived failings of the author.
* Participate in good faith. Don’t quote mine, spam threads, repeat arguments that have been previously refuted a thousand times (PRATTs), troll, or otherwise disrupt the discussions.
* Expect to be challenged to support your claims.
* If you cannot or will not support your claims, either retract them or restate them as an unsupported opinion.
* Honesty and finding closer approximations to the truth are more important than civility, but there’s usually no reason we can’t have them all.
* Don’t post more than two OPs per week (or otherwise hog the front page).
* If you can’t restate an opponents’ argument, using your own words, in a form that is recognizable to your opponent, you don’t understand the argument. Fix that before continuing.
* If you can’t resist flaming someone, use Noyau.
* If you find you simply cannot get along with another member of the community, the Ignore button is your friend.
* The goals are more important than the guidelines.
* Be the change you want to see. TSZ is a site that values freedom of expression — use yours to improve the quality of the discussions.
Violating these guidelines will earn you the opprobrium mentioned by Reciprocating Bill.
“The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.”
— George Orwell
Just a few followups on my rule proposals.
Decisions about rule changes should be data driven. There are several proposals in this thread that are not. If you look through Moderation Issues, Guano, and the top two or three recent threads by volume, you’ll find that the greatest disruptions come not from discussing the topic but from meta-discussion of rules, who’s breaking the rules, what the rules should be, and whether or not the admins are fair. That’s a lot of overhead for very little benefit. It’s time to kill Guano.
For people who are constantly spamming threads, the AtBC approach of limiting them to a single thread is a possible approach. The ability to do so should be limited to yourself as owner of the site.
To directly address the immediate issue: Can keiths be abrasive? Obviously. Is he obnoxious on occasion? I can see why some people would think so. Is he a net value to TSZ? Absolutely. A greater threat to TSZ is the infestation of cranks and ineducable creationists that occurred since I left. Even with them, the answer to bad speech is good speech, not UD-style censorship.
Regrettably, I also think you need to remove Neil as an admin. He’s devoted a lot of time to the site, but he has a history of overreacting to situations and making things worse. Without Guano, there’s no need to replace him, but if you do, please select someone who has more respect for freedom of expression and less ego.
TSZ can pull out of this nosedive if you quickly undo the damage that has been done by over-enthusiastic admins (including me). I’d like to continue recommending this site, so I hope you don’t choose to side with the authoritarians.
He’s not going to deny that he broke the rules. So at best he could supply his “justifications” for doing so. “I called Mung a liar because he was lying.”
No, it didn’t. It didn’t say what statement Joshua made that was a lie, and when Alan asked for it his response was “go read the thread.”
It’s nice of you to show up to help your buddy, but it doesn’t help his case when what you say on his behalf can easily be seen to be untrue.
A quibble would be that if an experiment permits one to draw a conclusion about one’s hypothesis with confidence, then the experiment is not a failure.
But I do agree that the if the experiment is how I understand it be (as I posted earlier), then the right conclusion to draw is that that approach to rules and moderation won’t result in the desired outcome.
I’d like to see a list of examples of the sorts of comments that would be permissible under the guidelines that Patrick has proposed. Just so we all know what we’d be getting.
For example, if we take a trip through Guano, is there anything currently in Guano that would not be permissible under the new not rules.
And isn’t Patrick the one who was calling another member a child molester? Was Elizabeth around for that?
Classic patrick. Orwell and Paine no less. Maybe mention Trump and the head of the nra too. Get all your heroes in there.
Worst. Moderator. Imaginable. Power-hungry bully. (I wonder how he likes Paine’s views on agrarian justice. Or Orwell’s on regulation. Could he just be using their names to try to make himself look blameless? Would that be like him?
Hmmmm.)
so
Frankie/Joe
phoodoo
J-Mac
Add to that list me
and Gregory
Any non-theists we can add to that list?
There are a number of rules that exist, they may not be on the rules page, and they may not be written, but they exist nevertheless.
Elizabeth herself closed comments on threads. In my mind that’s enough to make it an action that the moderators are permitted to take.
Are there rules about mods endlessly bullying contributors? IIRC, patrick’s favorite rule was the one requiring assumptions of good faith. Loved that sucker (as well as a particular inane cartoon and a particular poster that tickled his fancy).
Those were his legacies.
I often expected better of contributors here, but of him (and a couple of others) never.
I just got a message from KeithS:
“…Could you do me a favor and mention in the Squawk Box and Moderation Issues threads that my account has been silently disabled, and that I can no longer log in?”
Please tell me this is some mistake?
“No question now what has happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Is this the same Patrick now at Peaceful Science? The one there seems much more a political animal, e.g. affiliated with FFRF.
I don’t think it is the same Patrick.
Richardthughes,
Not a mistake and not silent. Keiths’s account is currently suspended. I announced it in the moderation issues thread
Who are you sweetheart?
J-Mac,
He’s the worst excuse for a mod this place ever had. Bad as it may be now, it was 10 times worse when he was here.
No, because there would be no Guano under my proposal. That eliminates the vast majority of meta-discussion and significantly reduces the potential for admins to abuse their privileges.
I did not. Please either provide a link to where I did or retract your accusation.
Elizabeth pays the piper, so she calls the tune. There is no rule that explicitly allows admins to close comments and it goes against the site goals, so admins should not be doing it.
Editing OPs is against Elizabeth’s explicit guidelines, yet that was done. TSZ doesn’t need Barry Arrington-style administration.
Whom are you referring to? Patik?
Gregory,
I have never participated at Peaceful Science. I support many of FFRF’s goals, but I think they’ve exceeded their remit a couple of times recently.
Who’s your daddy?
To be sure, I utterly enjoyed the recent appearance of Barry here.
There is no rule that explicitly allows admins to do nothing about rule-breaking comments and it goes against the site goals, so admins should not be doing it.
I like the way you think!
I’ll come up with it or issue an apology. And I thought it was going to be a nice relaxing evening. 🙂
If I may ask, what would constitute TSZ being a success? How do you define success? No bickering? Polite behavior? Attracting quality participants? Embarrassing Uncommon Descent and Barry Arrington? Making fun of creationists? Bashing the Discovery Institute? Showing the superiority of evolutionary theory?
If the goal of the site was to invite creationists and IDist to participate with the expectation they wouldn’t show up because they were too afraid to be confronted, well, yes that pretty much failed.
As far as bashing Barry Arrington, a few IDists did that, not just the Darwinists here. But really, how much mileage can a community get out of bashing Barry? Although bashing Kairos Focus posts was pretty funny, but that ran out of gas.
You want to bash Trump? Well, at least one of the Darwinist here loves Trump and hate the left.
I’ll give one example, Dan Graur said, “If ENCODE is right, evolution is wrong.” The increasing sentiment in the biological community is “ENCODE is right.” It’s not too difficult to see the way I would play my end of the debate. There’s a billion dollars of research coming out of ENCODE and it’s associated projects. I just post on them here since it seems relevant. Would it be a failure at TSZ to discuss the success of ENCODE vs. Dan Graur (and Larry Moran, and others). I mean what if I defended my points and my opponents didn’t, as was the case on this thread:
http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/?s=alu&submit=Search
There was the 5,000+ comment thread on Common Design vs. Common Descent. I got the impression the creationists really liked the outcome. The Darwinists also claimed victory. So both sides were happy. Ok, does that define success for TSZ?
Maybe another way to ask the question. What thread here at TSZ is most like what Lizzie expected. I’d point to that monstrosity where both sides claimed victory and which for the most part was civil:
I thought the discussion of Thermodynamics was also a good and productive discussion:
So I invite the participants to nominate threads they view as a good model for what we should considered successful for TSZ. I think the one that got the most agreement and admiration was Joe Felsenstein’s:
So what discussion at TSZ would serve as a model discussion? If none, then, yes, there is a problem. Personally, I think this website became a success once the ignore button was added.
I’ll be in your neck of the woods in a couple of weeks. If you can’t find the link, you buy the first round.
You can wear a mask if you want so I don’t find out your secret identity. Don’t worry, it only feels kinky the first time.
Alan,
I think it would be only fair to suspend keiths’ suspension until he has had the opportunity to make his case in this discussion and Elizabeth has made some kind of decision.
Elizabeth,
Do you agree?
Who’s yours?
Patrick,
I think we ought to suspend the suspension of his suspension myself. Maybe indefinitely.
stcordova,
Haven’t you said more than once that you use or abuse TSZ for your own say, personal advantage ? Why would you write this after you had announced to everyone your true motives?