This is a public service announcement from Nasty Colman.

A policy is always good, but have there been any problems with, uh, anti-social behaviour?

I haven't noticed any.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

good breeding is*everything*

your uniform looks very smart

<znarque>

There are no blank spots on the map any more, anywhere on earth. You want a blank spot on the map, you gotta leave the map behind. Jon Krakauer

I support this policy. It is best to have something in place, so if we have problems with someone of this sort, we can know how to handle it. I hope it never happens, but best to be prepared...

Half the population is under the age of 18. Tanzania's future is NOW...join the 50% campaign!

What you might want to add is the decision-making process in step 2 & 3. Step one already has it - "approved by two or more front-pagers" - but in making a policy for future use it might be good to include it in 2 & 3 too.

Otherwise it is a good proposal.

When I was training to be an umpire an older hand gave me a bit of advice

"Never threaten to throw a bad actor out of a game.  If it's already at that stage, just throw them out".

I doubt that any bad actor will not have recognized that the people here are pissed by the time it gets to a warning stage.  When 2 front pagers agree, put them on the bench for a week straight away.

I've been on a couple of sites where some of the most frequent posters are obviously sociopaths. It's not so much their political outlook which is the problem, it's that they are so insistent (and persistent).

Several mature, thoughtful, posters have gone completely overboard when they found themselves engaged in repetitive discussions with these people. A good example (please don't comment on this topic) is that of the 9/11 conspiracy believers. I think Kos has a blanket prohibition on this topic, but on several other sites I've seen sane bloggers go berserk when confronted by these people. In one case the blogger was someone who was covered by debris on 9/11 and is thus already hyper-sensitized to the issue.

In cases like these the usual steps are ineffectual. These people are immune to logic, appeals to good behavior and feel a sense of their innate superiority which makes them insufferable to others. For these cases the only course of action is to limit their participation.

In the past I've suggested several ways to do this, but most blogging software doesn't seem to have this capability so banning ends up being the only option. For the record, options could be limiting the number of remarks made per day, or per thread and preventing them from starting topics of their own.

Fortunately the number of such individuals (on this site at least) seems extremely small. Unfortunately many of these sociopaths are now running the US government...

Policies not Politics
---- Daily Landscape

ET is an amazingly civil, tolerant, and thoughtful environment. This quality seems to be maintained largely through social pressure from established participants and self-selection by potential participants. These mechanisms make the question of banning mostly irrelevant to what goes on in the community....

But only "mostly". A few noxious outliers in the human spectrum will neither self-select themselves out nor respond to social pressure. They can damage the appearance of the community and the experience of participating. I see no reason why they shouldn't be tossed out, and I think that the proposed mechanism offers more procedural protection than an offender could expect.
-----------

However, it is wise to think carefully before constraining freedom of expression, even within a small, voluntarily assembled community. I will offer some thoughts which mostly express what I think we already think.

In considering what I see as our implicit standards, I see a distinction between freedom of adversarial expression that is intellectual, vs. forms that I would call "person-directed" and "raw-emotional" hostility.

"Person-directed" hostility obviously includes both name-calling and accusations of deliberate falsehood or bad motives. The latter, however, have no sharp line of demarcation to separate them from intellectually valid criticisms that I regard as acceptable if politely stated: for example, suggesting that a person's views seem to be aligned with a body of thought that includes specific, convenient untruths, or with one that advocates specific policies that don't stand up to moral examination.

By "raw emotional" hostility, I mean (for example) rants expressing ones hatred for something, as distinct from expression of reasons why one hates it.

The hardest judgements to make involve adversarial intellectual expression and the problem of classic trolling behaviour. In this area, a lone adversarial statement can seldom be judged as problematic, given that ET isn't a feel-good motivational site for political troops. Judgement of a commenter rests instead on a combination of three criteria:

1. Wrongness: The comments have adversarial content that is based on factual or ethical premises that are, by ET consensus, wrong.
   
2. Persistence: This content is expressed repeatedly, despite rejection, without new and plausible support.
   
3. Proportion: A large portion of the poster's comments are of this sort, with no balancing contributions of sufficient value.

Criterion (1) is risky because it favours echo-chamber disease. Criteria (2) and (3), however, can moderate (1) to a degree that makes this risk acceptable.


Words and ideas I offer here may be used freely and without attribution.

I know I've written this before but I'm going to keep saying it everytime this topic arises -- so get over it :-p

Posting here is a privilege not a right.

Have epistemological model of Complex Information environments. Will Travel.

skipping step 1 and going straight to step 2.

The point about crazies is that they're crazy. They want attention, and a warning counts as attention. I'd guess that anyone who gets a warning is most likely to respond by posting endless screeds about how persecuted they are.

So for the occasional crazies a public reprimand might temporarily decrease the signal to noise ratio, and will probably lead on to step 2 anyway. So I suspect step 1 is redundant in practice.

The only real reason for banning people is if their idea of debate is an endless stream of ad hominems and very little else. I don't much care what people believe as long as they can produce a coherent more or less reality-based argument to support their beliefs, and can express it without attacking anyone personally.

No one should be banned for believing the wrong things - only for not debating with civility.

NOBODY expects the Spanish inquisition!