We’re issuing Sabs a 1-month ban for breaking the norms repeatedly in the comment above, despite our warning 10 days ago. Specifically, we think that Sabs violated the following norms: 

• The comment above is unnecessarily insulting and harsh. 
• It was not helpful for good discourse. I don’t believe that speculating about mental illness in this way is appropriate unless there’s a good and stated reason for it.
• The comment deadnamed and misgendered Torres, and was not corrected after I pointed this out.^[1]

On the point brought up by some Forum users, that the comment is informative: extremely critical content — including fairly vague negative impressions of someone — can be very useful to surface. But I think it’s very important for us to uphold the Forum’s norms about kindness, civility, staying on topic, and honesty, especially when the typical reader might be predisposed to suspending them because of past experiences with someone involved. 

There was some discussion about this two years ago (again relating to Torres). Some relevant excerpts from Aaron’s comments from this thread: 

One complication in this situation is that [Torres] doesn’t have a good reputation among the Forum’s users, some of whom have had unpleasant personal interactions with [them] (myself included, several times over). But I don’t want our norms about personal accusations to depend on how popular or pleasant the targets are. If you were accusing me of calling you a Nazi, I’d hope you would link to evidence, and I want the same standard to hold for [Torres]. 

And

To the extent that someone’s problematic interpersonal behavior is being discussed on the Forum, I still believe we should try to actually show evidence. Many Forum readers are new to the community, or otherwise aren’t privy to drama within the field of longtermist research. If someone wants to warn the entire community that someone is behaving badly, the most effective warnings will include evidence. [...]

Imagine showing a random person from outside the EA community* (say, someone familiar with Twitter) [this comment] and [this comment], as well as the karma scores. That person might conclude “[commenter] was right and [Torres] was wrong”. They might also conclude “[Commenter] is a popular member of the ingroup and [Torres] is getting cancelled for wrongthink”.

And

While some users contribute more value to Forum discussion than others [...], I associate the pattern of “giving ‘valued’ users more leeway to bend rules/norms” with many bad consequences in many different settings.

1. ^{^}

   I think my original comment might have been unnecessarily ungenerous — it’s sometimes genuinely hard to track name and pronoun changes, and I should have more readily assumed that this was an honest mistake in Sabs’s original comment. However, the fact that they haven’t edited their original comment since I pointed the error out is concerning and makes the deadnaming and misgendering seem much more deliberate. 

Writing as a moderator. I think this comment is unnecessarily harsh and insulting, and also deadnames and misgenders Torres. It clearly violates Forum norms.

We generally assume that deadnaming or misgendering is an honest mistake, but given that the discussion around this post has been referring to Torres by their preferred name and pronouns, I find this less plausible.

I also find the focus on mental illness inappropriate.

Please correct the name and pronouns in this comment. I'll be discussing with the rest of the moderation about potential further action.

As a moderator, I think a previous version of this comment was rude and clearly violated many Forum norms. Another comment also violates Forum norms.

While I appreciate the edit, this is a warning, if you leave another comment like these, you will probably receive a ban.