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Moderators Suck

Someone posted fearfully to the philosophy stack exchange: http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/34452/are-great-philosophers-resting-sometimes-from-study
I know it's a funny question but I wanted to post it and I hope they don't close it.
I pointed out that mods terrorizing users is a problem. Shouldn't they change something? Unpredictably blocking people from asking questions is noticed and bothers potential participants.

A mod promptly deleted my question as "trolling" and said it was unreasonable. No details or arguments. (I posted it in the "meta" section for asking questions about the site, not in the regular section.)

Meanwhile my philosophy question about how to deal with non sequiturs was blocked. So was my question seeking quality criticism of Objectivism. And some other guy's question about how to be a philosopher. And my question about what philosophy questions people should ask and don't. What a stupid site.

Edit: My post asking what is trolling (since my post was deleted for trolling) was also deleted without answering. (Again asked in the appropriate meta section for questions about the site, not on the main site.)

Edit 2: Related thought:

ppl fake being patient and reasonable initially. then then they get fed up and get really nasty. this is way worse than if they'd just be mildly nasty the whole time consistently, instead of giving a fake first impression to set the tone wrong

Edit 3: I received a 7 day ban because
I get that you like Ayn Rand and Karl Popper... but that doesn't make any and every question about them fit here. I've tried discussing it with you, but you don't seem to want to hear it...
and something about replying to people in comments (mostly I replied to him, the moderator, who kept arguing with me in comments...) which is bad because they hate discussion.

one of the notable things about the ban, in my view, is that i'm banned for nothing in particular. the moderator was unwilling to point to any specific thing and say it was a bannable offense, and yet i'm banned.

Edit 4: After discussing with the moderator:

- there are no written criteria for bans in public
- he's unable to correctly answer simple questions like whether or not there are written criteria for bans in public
- he thinks banning people who don't follow the site ethos guidelines stuff (how much? what degree of disobedience gets a ban?) is objective and clear criteria that everyone should find clear without it needing to be stated
- they ban with no warning that a ban may be incoming

Edit 5: Meanwhile on the physics stack exchange someone decided to inform me that I don't know David Deutsch personally (I do) after flaming _The Beginning of Infinity_ without reading it b/c it's popular.

The lack of online discussion places that aren't completely awful is a big problem. There's FI and that's about it.

Elliot Temple on June 11, 2016

Messages (7)

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alampert22 at 1:52 PM on June 12, 2016 | #5857 | reply | quote

none of that solves the problem of the moderator making arbitrary decisions involving lots of stuff that is not written down in advance.

here's an indication of how stupid this moderator is.

i posted a philosophy question asking if there's any established techniques for dealing with non sequiturs in debates. if the other guy is making a non sequitur argument, and he thinks it's a good argument, what do you do?

he closed this.

in comments to some other guy who defended the question, the moderator said the question is too broad and opinion-based because using FORCE against people who say non-sequiturs is just as good as any other answer.


Anonymous at 4:52 PM on June 12, 2016 | #5863 | reply | quote

>the communication gap. There is a gap between my mind and the alien's mind. The gap consists of lack of shared knowledge, lack of shared assumptions, lack of background knowledge, and so on. And as a result, communicating is hard. It's hard to tell what is a communication, and hard to tell what communications mean. But it is possible for communications to cross the gap, and for beings who are very different to come to understand each other.

>The way communications bridge the gap is the same way all knowledge is created. We can phrase the problem like this: I want to create knowledge of which things from the alien are messages, and what they mean. I do this by imaginative conjectures and criticism of those conjectures to eliminate errors. Because this is the only known way to create knowledge, it's also the only known way to bridge the communication gap.

>All communication involves active knowledge creation by the participants which is how the difficulty of communication can be overcome.

>Communication is Hard by Eliot Temple

>http://fallibleideas.com/communication-is-hard


Anonymous at 7:05 PM on June 13, 2016 | #5891 | reply | quote

#5891: what's your point? why did you quote that?


Anonymous at 7:06 PM on June 13, 2016 | #5892 | reply | quote

that it is just a communication gap and that you have a method to address it.


Anonymous at 7:18 PM on June 13, 2016 | #5893 | reply | quote

these moderators don't want to address it, they want to shut down discussion :(


Anonymous at 7:53 PM on June 13, 2016 | #5895 | reply | quote

Want to discuss this? Join my forum.

(Due to multi-year, sustained harassment from David Deutsch and his fans, commenting here requires an account. Accounts are not publicly available. Discussion info.)