Sal

It’s especially disappointing because he chose to remove real science in favor of his own political bias.

That was not why I removed it. I removed it because I thought that many users reported it as racist/transphobic. If that many people report it as racist/transphobic, that is usually enough for me. The problem is that it was a comment to the post what was being reported, not the post itself, but I was processing the reports quickly and I made that mistake.

That said, since you brought up my political bias, I don’t mind stating my actual views openly.

Here are some biases that come to mind:

• I weigh a local community's interests much more heavily than a business interest
• anti-nationalism bias
• biased towards policies that aim to reduce global inequality and minimize environmental damage, even when they come at the expense of the local population
• biased towards immigration policies that provide mobility
• anti war, anti violence
• pro privacy
• pro drug legalization

When it comes to gender identity: To me, it is common sense that everyone deserves respect, medical professionals should be the ones deciding, based on the best available evidence, what care is appropriate for their patients, and people should be able to make their own informed choices. I want everyone to live their best possible life and if someone identifies in some way, then accepting that and treating them how they want to be treated takes minimal effort and is basic respect. So, I can appreciate that it is an important political issue, but it is just so frustrating that it is an issue at all. Political discussions around gender identity often start from assumptions that I reject, and so I don't see the point of engaging the discussion at that level. If you want to know my bias on that, it is: don't use politics to regulate how medical professionals can help people, and respect everyone. I’m sorry to people who care deeply about sports, world records, and gendered bathrooms, but to me those are secondary issues. Basic human dignity comes first. The edge cases, legal loopholes, medical malpractice or abuse, and sports regulations can be dealt with after that. What I often notice is that science gets pulled into debates that already rest on assumptions I reject.

An example that comes to mind is reading, many years ago, that gay penguins show that being gay is natural, and that this somehow supports the argument for gay marriage. I never liked that reasoning, and I find that having a back-and-forth about whether being gay is natural or not is counter-productive. This type of argument implicitly accepts an appeal to nature, which I reject.

So, the way I see it, what looks like a purely scientific disagreement is often not resolvable by science alone, because the actual disagreement lives underneath that, in different values and basic philosophical assumptions. It is extremely difficult to moderate a polarized discussion when science is used as if it could settle arguments that actually go much deeper, into values and what people think is right or wrong.

This is how I see it.

I just encountered the type of example that I often struggle with, and so that is a good opportunity to describe my train of thought.

If you open the !academia@mander.xyz community right now, this is what you will see:

Post #1 has 'Trump' in the title, which is causing Trump to be featured at the top of Mander's front page. Posts 2 and 3 are about a highly polarizing subject that has become politicized, and the fifth post is about the pentagon cutting federal funding - which is also highly political.

These are true:

• These posts are political
• These posts are highly relevant to an 'academia' community
• I have not been good at creating guidelines for the community, as the sidebar is empty

So, the options that come to my mind are:

1. Accept politics in general whenever relevant
2. If no one reports, then no one minds, so just let it go. If someone reports, remove it
3. Create some general rule that if 'White House' or 'Trump' is in a title, remove it. This at least keeps posts with ‘Trump’ in the title off Mander’s local page, which is a common source of annoyance for me, and I suspect for others as well.
4. Remove the Academia community because it is a spot where politics infiltrate. I do not like this solution because politics infiltrates on many valuable topics, not only one.
5. Define a set of guidelines that creates a perfect filter and make the effort to implement it fairly. This is difficult both at the design stage and the implementation.
6. Apply a very strong politics filter and if I can even smell a political angle, remove it. This approach likely invites pushback, which I cannot reply to with more 'that's the rule, have a nice day' unless I want to spend all my energy discussing. I have considered this because I think that, even if unpopular, there is a minority with whom this concept would resonate and so they would appreciate having that space.

There are many more options that I did not list. I just wanted to give you a concrete example of my reasoning.

I want topic communities to remain useful even when their subject intersects politics, but I also want Mander to be a space where political discourse does not continuously colonize unrelated interests. I don't know how to draw a boundary that is both predictable and enforceable.

They say it is edible but the whole growing out of the sack grossed me out on this one so I passed.

... Yeah, that is understandable. Great find! And I like the picture of the gills a lot

Bonus birbs

Yeah, I'm sorry. I usually try to not be this careless and it is very unlikely to happen again (at least this specific form of mistake. I am open to making new kinds of mistakes in the future).

Politics is a tricky subject and nebulously saying no politics isn’t a good strategy because everything is political.

For that reason, attempting to create a formal 'politics' filter is likely to be counter-productive. In general, I apply common sense, which is largely subjective by definition. The way I balance this is that I always err in the side of not removing things. Just want to emphasize that the reason used to mistakenly remove this post was not related to the general politics rule. I mistakenly thought that the post was reported by multiple people.

So I think a better goal would be to target the political behaviors that hurt people

My logic for setting the scope as I did is the following:

• The internet is flooded with posts about politics, and especially so with US-centered politics (and I am not from nor live in the US)
• Politics and topics that have become polarized by politics tend to be difficult to moderate

So, because my instance's focus is science and nature, I decided to make one of my instance's value propositions: If you choose this instance your Local feed will not have politics in it. Note, that, one has access to 'All' and one can also access the instance's communities from other instances. So, in my view, an instance that offers such a value proposition is a healthy component of the ecosystem - and easier for me to moderate.

I do agree that trying to come up with some better writing and guidelines that transmit the core idea while making it fairly enforceable would be good. I have said a few times in the past that I would do this, but I still don't really know how. So I keep reading what people suggest. Thank you!

Yes, of course! Moderators are gold. I need to make a better effort at recruiting.

Oh.

I checked the reports, and what I see is a sequence of 6 reports reporting hoohoohoot's comments. I do not have a vivid memory of the moment as I was just processing the back-log, but what must have happened is that In haste I interpreted this as 6 independent reports of the post, not noticing that the reports were of the comments, and so when I opened the post I was operating on what I mistakenly thought was a very high signal. I still did not want to claim 'transphobia' in my reason without verifying that, so, as I explained, I used the loophole as an excuse.

Usually, if this would really have been 6 independent reports of the same post, removing it would have been very likely the correct move. This contributed to why I was careless.

Here are 4 of them, I removed the names because these are not false reports:

You are right, I did not make the right call on this one.

I have been neglecting the instance very aggressively due to being busy this summer. I was scanning through the report backlog and this post was reported for 'transphobia'. I skimmed through, clicked on a whitehouse link that said "RESTORING BIOLOGICAL TRUTH TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT" in big letters, and instead of doing more due-diligence I applied a rule that I rarely apply as the discriminant to process it quickly. The rule being, as you mentioned, that the 'Science' community is meant to be for discussing science itself. It is a meta-community.

In practice, I stopped enforcing this rule for the most part, which means that in this case it was an excuse I used to process the report quickly without needing to validate whether I personally think it is 'transphobia' or not.

Sorry

Some things:

1. I make mistakes, if you send me message I will usually correct it or at least explain my reasons.
2. When I get reports such as 'transphobia' or 'racism', I automatically bias heavily my decision towards the reporter because I can easily miss something in my personal analysis.
3. Very often the explanation between 'why was A removed and B allowed to stay' is that A was reported and B was not.
4. My stated intention is to minimize politics and polarizing content, but this has proven difficult to achieve in practice

Hey, sorry for the slow response. Feel free to appoint me as a mod until someone else wants to fully take over so that you don't feel pressured to hold that spot for longer

Interesting... Good to hear!

Sorry, I am in the process of moving and have not been able to keep a close eye, and the disk filled up. I have increased the disk size now, but I see some errors with the images. I need to sleep now but in the morning if it is not fixed I'll figure out what is happening.