This thread seems to have gone in an unhelpful direction.
Questioning motivations is a hard point to make well. I'm unwilling to endorse that they are never relevant, but it immediately becomes personal. Keeping the focus primarily on the level of the arguments themselves is an approach more likely to enlighten and less likely to lead to flamewars.
I'm not here to issue a moderation warning to anyone for the conversation ending up on the point of motivations. I do want to take my moderation hat off and suggest that people spend more time on the object level....
Hey all, here’s a quick reminder of some relevant Forum norms, since this is a bit of a heated topic, and we might have some new users taking part:
- Be kind.
- Stay civil, at the minimum. Don’t sneer or be snarky. In general, assume good faith. We may delete unnecessary rudeness and issue warnings or bans for it.
- Substantive disagreements are fine and expected. Disagreements help us find the truth and are part of healthy communication.
- Mass downvoting - it’s a potentially bannable offence to downvote a user’s posts faster than you could read them.
- And just to seco
Mod here. It looks like this thread has devolved into a personal dispute with only tangential relevance to EA. I’m therefore locking the thread.
Those involved, please don’t try to resurrect the dispute elsewhere on this forum; we may issue bans if we see that happening.
Discussion of this topic can be heated or emotionally difficult for some. We would like to remind everyone to adhere to forum norms: be respectful, interpret others' comments charitably, and avoid personal attacks. Please don’t assume other people’s values or backgrounds.
As Richard notes at the end of the post, reproductive rights are an orthogonal conversation — you can be worried about low fertility rates and population decline without it affecting your view on abortion, contraception, or social conservatism.Â
However, some readers may come from cont...
We're issuing @NobodyInteresting a warning for the above comment. The comment does not meet the expectations for civility and engaging in good faith. I would not recommend a public warning for this comment on it's own (though I would downvote it for the above reasons, and recommend a discrete DM), but we have less tolerance for users who have not yet shown that they can engage productively.
The moderation team is issuing @Eugenics-Adjacent a 6-month ban for flamebait and trolling.
I’ll note that Eugenics-Adjacent’s posts and comments have been mostly about pushing against what they see as EA groupthink. In banning them, I do feel a twinge of “huh, I hope I’m not making the Forum more like an echo chamber.” However, there are tradeoffs at play. “Overrun by flamebait and trolling” seems to be the default end state for most internet spaces: the Forum moderation team is committed to fighting against this default.
All in all, we think the ...
We’re issuing Dubious Altruist a three-month ban. We previously warned them about repeatedly being uncivil and rude to other users, which is against our discussion norms. They recently published a comment that was clearly unnecessarily rude so we are following through with the warning we gave them.
As a reminder, the ban affects the user, not the account. During their ban period, the user will not be permitted to rejoin the Forum under another account name. If they return to the Forum, we’ll expect a higher standard of norm-following. If we see them continu... (read more)