From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Wed May 29 2002 - 10:02:40 MDT
Damien Broderick wrote:
> At 01:15 AM 5/29/02 -0400, Harvey Newstrom wrote: wrote:
>>>I don't understand why the topics of infanticide, racism and violence
>>>keep popping up. [...]
>>>What is this all about? There seems to be some sort of meme-war going on
>>>just underneath the surface. Someone seems to be trying to grab
>>>mind-space within the Extropian domain for other ideas.
>
> Nah, I don't think so, Harvey. I suspect a lot of it is akin to the Mensa
> or obese-sf-fan dynamic: a lot of self-aggregating rather smart people many
> of whom have not done nearly as well in life and love as they might have
> expected given their opinion that their luminous minds are the most
> wonderful thing about them, and who compensate for the dissing they get
> from their perceived inferiors by developing lofty and prickly theories of
> Us versus Them.
Having experienced both dynamics, I would suggest we may want to
institute similar policies as implemented by those groups' mailing
lists: tempbans. If you violate the posted list rules, *you do not get
to post PERIOD* for a certain time (a week is the usual, at least for
the first few or occasional infractions, mostly to force the person to
cool off when ve has become so emotionally involved ve can no longer act
rationally). Small steps, of course - we already have posted rules
regarding frequency of posting, so the small step would be simply to
enforce the already existing rules in this manner. That itself may
curb a lot of the problems we are seeing. If it does not, we can then
debate other solutions - say, also enforcing that threads stay on topic
for the Extropian list, and topics that descend into (or start off with)
off-topic status, the list admin issues a note saying it is off-topic
and further discussion will result in tempbans (and make sure it
actually does, or such warnings are useless). (Though, given the
membership of this list, I suspect that will be a strong debate - so I
would like to emphasize that all I'm suggesting *for right now* is to
enforce, with tempbans, the rules already in place.)
Again, I have seen the above used by the communities in question, and it
works for them. I see no relevant differences between them and us in
this issue.
Apologies if this has already been suggested, but as noted, many people
(including myself) are unable to read all the traffic on this list due
to the sheer volume. If this is already implemented...from what I
observe making it to the list, I would have to conclude it actually
isn't implemented to any siginificant degree (emphasis on warnings at
most + no meaningful enforcement => people are free to ignore warnings).
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