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The point isn't that she's malicious. She's not. It's that she's smart and incredibly self-centered but is doing basically nothing with it apart from self-discovery, getting your attention, and trying to impose her moral framework (which she doesn't even fully believe herself btw) onto other people who are trying their best to do stuff.
It's just wasting everyone's time, she doesn't deserve the respect you are giving her and she isn't that important in the grand scheme of things, and I'm pretty sure she knows this and it's actually why she's doing it all.
Yes, that's an ad hominem. But what else can you do in this situation? 'Content-free slurs' were designed for this exact reason!
The point isn't that she's malicious. She's not. It's that she's smart and incredibly self-centered but is doing basically nothing with it apart from self-discovery, getting your attention, and trying to impose her moral framework (which she doesn't even fully believe herself btw) onto other people who are trying their best to do stuff.
It's just wasting everyone's time, she doesn't deserve the respect you are giving her and she isn't that important in the grand scheme of things, and I'm pretty sure she knows this and it's actually why she's doing it all.
Aella, it'd be great to get a reply to this but I doubt you'll bother because it's right.
Right -- in my opinion it's better if it's obvious!
No status games, and again there's a total double standard here, my account is literally anonymous zero-status and I am talking to a bunch of high-status people who are pulling their ~100K twitter followers into this thread.
And you're trying to insinuate you're not friends with her by devaluing my argument? This is just evasive, deceptive, deceitful. It's all wrong.
they identified him correctly and the things he says are optimized for manipulating the social hierarchy in his favor
I mean, if you can accuse any negative comment as doing that and ban their account (and really I am the only negative commenter) then I don't really understand how you can call this a rational forum. I would get more rational replies on reddit or even the street corner. My comments are legitimate and it sounds like you just find them convincing.
I think there is a bit of Geoff Anders in all of us. I seem to be the only one here happy to admit it.
I think you can go too far in enforcing civility on a forum. If users can brand-build on twitter (partly with a porn account), drive ~100K twitter followers to their post to upvote it, add an emotionally-salient personal narrative to their post, and influence ongoing moral issues in the community (with real consequences!), and dissenters get quietly blocked then I think you have probably gone too far.
And if Ad Hominems aren't legitimate, then why is it legitimate to add a salient personal narrative? Isn't that just an inverse ad hominem?
i would like less of this kind of dynamic.
Me too, but the community leaders (of which Aella is one) have legitimized it. I think the LW leadership is pretty diffuse and there isn't a clear power center (would Eliezer really come out criticizing Aella for influencing an ongoing issue like this? I doubt it.) so if anything it'll happen more often.
I don't really know what you can do here and I think the best thing is to actually slowly move your work off this forum and onto somewhere where you trust the moderation team (e.g. my original account blueiris was banned 6 hours ago without warning purely for the comments on this post). We're in a different world now.