Savant

"Something that worked well in one community I was in was there was a specific section that was unmoderated"

I mean we have that and Remy is in it. All his posts are automatically marked as offensive. You have to consent to seeing offensive posts to see anything he writes.

Sheep outnumber wolves by a ratio of thousands. No group that relies on destroying members of the outgroup can get too big and survive. People might "use" members of the outgroup, but they can't expect to kill the golden goose and survive. So everyone lives to fight another day, and then someone who was in the minority before becomes a member of the majority. 51% of congress can scheme, so it's best to prevent that, but 51% of the entire population of a country rarely coordinates well enough to abuse democracy. And in any other system, the risk is still there, the threshold for abuse is just much lower.

And once a minority group's survival is at stake, they'll coordinate to protect themselves while members of the majority will be split. There's a reason voting was like the last civil right given to minorities. Once they got that, it was pretty hard racists to take other political rights away from them without restricting voting in some way.

"it was always obvious that democracy is two wolves and sheep voting on whats for dinner"

People say this, but democracy is the only system where the sheep have a chance. If they outnumber the wolves, they win. Every other system ends up with like 1-10 wolves ruling 10,000 sheep. Additionally, most people contribute more to society by being alive and happy then by being dead, so it would be rare for a majority to democratically exterminate a minority. More likely they win on some issue that favors them, and then most members of the minority are in the majority on some other issue and win then.

The globally estimated ratio of sheep to wolves is 5,200 to 1. Similarly, I don't think a group that survives solely by eating/destroying members of the outgroup could survive as a majority. Once the predator group gets bigger than a small fraction, it will lose members.

The surveys dealt with all of this pretty comprehensively. The issue in my view is that the CoC has not been super consistent with surveys. I thought it wasn't a big deal cause we were just going off of surveys, but now we're using the CoC to ban people, so I'm gonna care more about the wording of it going forward. Regardless, I think this trial is a good opportunity for people to decide where the line is, and the CoC can reflect that so no one can complain. But if people vote to ban Remy and then vote for total free speech in the next survey, then I'm not sure what we do with that. Does Remy get unbanned cause now rage baiting is allowed?

The thing with core principles is it's easy to get people to agree in principle, but it's hard to agree on interpretation, and that ends up looking like 2-3 mods deciding what the law is. You may as well amend the constitution to say "only pass good laws" and leave the courts to figure it out.

I agree that there's a difference, but there's plenty of cases of other users saying things with the intent to offend and outright insulting each other. If we're allowing that but not allowing Remy to intentionally offend people because of his opinions, then we really are protecting some views more than others. And that's fine if people want that, but based on community surveys people have wanted more laissez-faire moderation, and that's been treated as the law for a while. So I feel like banning Remy here is an ex-post-facto penalty for something he really didn't have reason to believe was against the rules. He got penalized in the past for a specific violation of rules decided by the survey results but was never told he might be banned for something the survey results indicated was fine. The CoC is pretty broad, but since it was written, we've have multiple community surveys where users indicated they wanted offensive speech protected. Next survey is gonna need to include specific lines from the CoC, cause otherwise we're gonna have different documents saying different things.

"I would respect the position that this is a violation of Remy’s “free speech” a lot more if it comes attached with some nuance and the recognition of the price the rest of us have to pay for it"

In terms of offense, I think this price is mitigated by the ability to block offensive posts. And once Kohai is fine with me pushing my next update, people should be able to block an individual's posts as well. If the price you're referring to is some people leaving the platform, I see your point, though it's a bit difficult to measure the counterfactual. I know there's some people who would def leave if they thought the platform no longer respected their idea of free speech.

If I'm steel-manning their position, they're likely saying that freedom of speech is important as a principle to enable more discussion on a debate site, not that DebateCraft itself is legally bound to allow anyone on the platform. Myself, I would probably interpret the term "free speech" a bit differently depending on context; here, I get why people might see Remy as an exception since it's not his opinions they object to but the way he expresses them. But I do think the line between what an opinion is and how it is expressed an get a bit fuzzy.

You can now revote

>Reported Vote: Shoresy // Mod action: Removed
>Voting Policy: https://www.debatecraft.com/debates/vote-rubric
>Voted for: tie
>Reason for Decision: other
>Reason for Mod Action:
Request

---Shoresy's former vote---
Voted for: tie
Absolutely no ban.

Free speech that protects only comfortable speech is NOT free speech; it is permission granted by whomever the authoritarian is who happens to control the room. The entire point of this USA principle is that people are allowed to say things that offend us, anger us, challenge our values, or make us profoundly uncomfortable. Socrates understood this deeper principle more than two thousand years ago....

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

You cannot meaningfully examine your beliefs if every competing idea has first been scrubbed clean of anything disturbing.

That is especially true in debates. A debate that teaches the crowd only how to encounter approved opinions is not preparing them for real-world citizenship. It is preparing them for intellectual dependency and compliance. Put the difficult argument on DART. Let students read it, interrogate it, identify its assumptions, attack its evidence, and defend their objections. The answer to an ugly idea is not pretending the idea doesn't exist. It is giving the crowd enough knowledge and confidence to confront it. Critical thinking requires something to criticize, or it never exists.

Sure, I get there are reasonable boundaries for direct threats, targeted harassment, and genuinely unlawful conduct, but reducing discomfort alone as a virtue cannot be the standard. Once “this makes me uncomfortable” becomes sufficient grounds for suppressing an argument, whoever claims the greatest discomfort acquires a veto over everyone else's inquiry. Real education should demand something harder from us: hear the argument, examine it, challenge it, and decide whether it survives. If an idea is wrong, expose why it is wrong. If we're so afraid to examine it, we've allowed fear to discredit Socrates before the discussion has even begun.

If you don't want a ban, why did you vote for a tie instead of Con?

"There should be no mods."

Then how do we stop bots? Or spammers? Or people posting threats and other illegal stuff? Or remove votes that fail to meet the vote rubric?

I mean I don't think he will be banned anyway, but if he's willing to do more elaborate posts with more comedy, then I'm sure people would be less annoyed by him.

Yeah I agree. There's also a benefit to showing that you at least considered potential counterarguments, which is what I try to do. I mean I've had plenty of hot takes but people don't typically get offended by them.

You have a point about wylted not being banned, but I think people just find him more entertaining so they give him a pass. If more people thought you were funny you would probably get away with it, but I think you need to work on your material a bit. It's definitely a bias, but humor is subjective. I think you are trying to be something like RuckaRuckaAli, but I think Rucka does a better job on the comedy side of things beyond just ragebaiting.

At one point I think you made a post like "My friend is pregnant so I got her a coat hanger....so she can hang clothes for the baby." That was your best material imo, if your posts were more like that no one would be trying to ban you.

"given enough responses"

Yes, because you elaborate on your position and back it up. And I'm simply telling Remy to take all the elaboration it took to convince the AI and put it into his initial post.

AI has strict content standards and is not gonna easily agree with what he says. And I was saying to ask AI for counterarguments, not just tell it to agree. Also yes it's easier to convince AI but I don't think most of his arguments meet that bar yet.

"I already can convince Chat GPT of my positions."

Can you link to the chat? Because whatever arguments your using to convince AI have gotta be more nuanced than what you're posting here.

"What's my only option for engaging with them? Pointing out their hypocrisy (and not expecting them to change)"

They don't change because you don't try to make them understand WHY they are wrong. You reduce incredibly complicated issues into accusations of hypocrisy, which doesn't work as long as there are differences between the situations. Also your posts tend to address an unnamed hypocrite who never actually ends up responding to the post, which limits how much is actually being learned. Instead of saying "it's hypocritical to support x and not y," either make a post arguing that x is bad or a post arguing that y is good on its own terms.

Here's a tip: Before you make a post accusing people of hypocrisy, put it into ChatGPT and ask it to argue against you. For a few rounds. This is not advice I would give most people, but in your case you are failing to anticipate pretty common counterarguments that an AI would likely come up with. Assume any argument the AI makes is an argument a human will make, and address that argument in advance or steelman your case so the AI starts to see your point. If the AI misunderstands your case, clarify it until it doesn't. Until you can convince a chatbot, you don't have a shot convincing a human. Once you've exhausted all the responses an AI can give, then there's a point putting your argument in front of another actual human, and make sure to include all the clarification you had to give to the AI. If the AI refuses to discuss the sensitive topic cause you insist on putting it in rage-baity terms, use stansa or another uncensored model.

I made basically the same point in this post. You can judge for yourself whether it is less inflammatory.

https://www.debatecraft.com/forum/c/politics/posts/xn/gender-equality-seems-like-an-untestable-hypothesis?page=1

I think it might make people more understanding if you anticipated people's responses and how they were likely to read your post, and then clarified in your post what you meant or why you are using the definitions of terms that you are. Otherwise many people are not gonna get what your actual point is.

I oppose pushing Remy off the site if only because when I steelman his points, I can see some substance there occasionally even when I disagree with his overall conclusions. Now one could argue that not everyone will be able to dig into his points and extract the substance, but then I'd question whether someone is able to learn from arguments in general if they can't distinguish bad points from good points. I think debate kind of depends on the idea that we can identify a good argument when we see it. I'd rather Remy just make his points in a clearer and less inflammatory way, but I don't think that's gonna happen.

I also hypothesize that to really "solve" an issue or get close to finding the truth as possible, we would need to exhaust the tree of arguments and counterarguments as much as is feasible. That means we need to be aware of potential bad arguments, because if we avoid hearing those, then the tree isn't exhausted, the issue isn't solved, and someone can use them as an objection because we never bothered to develop responses to those bad arguments.

"Everyone that Kohai cited that finds me offensive is on the left"

Mag1cman is on the right, and so is Greatful I believe.

I mean the only similarity between the names is that they start with H, and they write pretty differently, so I would guess different people.

Was it this one? I believe it was Hurried4675, not Hyper.

http://web.archive.org/web/20260413213646/https://www.debateart.com/debates/5770-traditional-knowledge-justifiable-obtainability

Hyper debated with Novice? Couldn't find it on Wayback machine, but it didn't have all Novice's debates. How much of it do you remember?

That said, Hyper may have just gotten better. Have you read any of their newer debates?

https://www.debatecraft.com/users/Hyper/debates

Hyper and Alyssa are some promising newcomers whom I'd love to see go against Bones or whiteflame. Granted, I've only seen a few debates from them, but if they've had pretty strong performances.

I agree with your broader point, but Kohai did link to a bunch of Remy's posts in his first round.

Typically in edge cases like this, we discuss with each other before deciding whether to remove or not. I would say that behind Mikal, I tend to be the most laissez faire, followed by WF. Kohai has been wanting to take stronger action against Remy for a while, but nowadays, individual mods don't really go out of their way to unilaterally make these decisions on their own, hence the trial.

Kohai didn't accuse you of using AI, he was saying he used it.

Debates are easier when both sides are putting in effort to make their arguments understandable. You're expecting the Jewish people who read your post to do all the work of interrogating/cross-examining you to find out what you really mean when taking it at face value it just looks like you want to troll/harass them rather than having a debate.