Timeline for Why was my dissenting viewpoint in a post about diversity censored?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
31 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Aug 22, 2020 at 15:27 | comment | added | Tim Campion | Just a note that in light of user "Patriot"'s words since I wrote this, I believe the situation has changed, and I now consider user "Patriot" to be a racist / troll who, as @NoahSnyder has said, doesn't have a place in decent society. | |
| Aug 19, 2020 at 18:56 | comment | added | Yemon Choi | @Lucia Glad no offence was taken, because I didn't view you as behaving on that thread like "a free speech absolutist", nor as "being a jerk". Doesn't mean I agree with you, of course :) | |
| Aug 19, 2020 at 15:58 | comment | added | S. Carnahan Mod | @Joël I agree with what you say about the inconvenience of losing upvote information, but the alternative is having 100+ comments that have almost nothing to do with ICM special lectures on a page that is specifically about ICM special lectures. | |
| Aug 19, 2020 at 15:57 | comment | added | Lucia | @YemonChoi: I'm sorry to see that comment. And I thought my views made me "an old-fashioned liberal" (well, old anyway!), not a "free speech absolutist" being a "jerk". (This is written tongue in cheek; I take no offense at all, and I don't believe any was intended.) | |
| Aug 19, 2020 at 15:43 | comment | added | Yemon Choi | @Joel I tend to find this only works if people will leave such comments, and they may not. For instance, despite comments I have made in this thread, my actual response was mostly "will the free speech absolutists stop being jerks about this" or, for the old school MOers, "oh god Harry just exercise the option of not blurting out whatever's at the top of your mind". But I did not think such comments would generate more light than heat and indeed in chat it seems that Clark and Harry are having a much more productive exchange than would occur in a comment thread | |
| Aug 19, 2020 at 15:35 | comment | added | Joël | @Yemon. Yes, I agree. But this defect is partially solved by the upvotes of other comments with opposed views. This is why it is particularly dishonest in a case like this to censor the comments defending one point of view and not the comments defending the opposing one. | |
| Aug 19, 2020 at 15:10 | comment | added | Yemon Choi | @Joël I respect your commitment to transparency/free speech but I have long felt that the problem with comment upvotes is that there are no comment downvotes (this used to drive me crazy on academia.SE as at least one user was fond of shooting from the hip in comments, and attracting upvotes just by a "ratchet" or "diode" effect) | |
| Aug 19, 2020 at 10:57 | comment | added | Joël | Moving the comments to chat has one inconvenient though: it destroys the information contained in the upvote of the comments. The only honest solution is to put back all the comments, without censorship, at their initial place. I do not believe in Carnahan's honesty, but I will change my mind if I am proven wrong. | |
| Aug 19, 2020 at 10:28 | history | edited | Joël | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 62 characters in body
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| Aug 18, 2020 at 11:16 | comment | added | Tim Campion | @NoahSnyder I'm not sure I agree that user "Patriot" has spent "most" of their time engaging in racist trolling. Yes, they initially had a racist avatar, but they seem to have accepted the mods' authority to do remove it. I also find their username to be unnecessarily politically charged. But when I look at their post history, I'm seeing on-topic, civil discussion for the past few years. So unless there's some pattern of making trollish comments and then deleting them (which would presumably be grounds for suspension), I just don't see it. | |
| Aug 17, 2020 at 18:13 | comment | added | Noah Snyder | @StevenGubkin: I really don't want to speculate in that direction, but if that's the case then that's honestly much worse. But I think that kind of speculation is pretty dangerous and usually leads to mistaken identifications, and if someone is using a sock puppet account inappropriately I trust the moderators and would discourage anyone else trying to do anything. | |
| Aug 17, 2020 at 15:31 | comment | added | Steven Gubkin | @NoahSnyder I am 100% behind you. I just want to point out the possibility that while the account Patriot has spent most of their time on racist trolling, it is likely that the human being behind that username has been doing more substantial mathematics through other accounts. | |
| Aug 14, 2020 at 4:46 | comment | added | Martin Sleziak | Although you have mentioned that the messages have been moved to chat, some users might have problem finding that room. (Especially since the room was frozen.) So it might be useful to include a link to the room which you have created: chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/111776 | |
| Aug 14, 2020 at 2:09 | comment | added | Noah Snyder | @YemonChoi: Most of us have most of participation here about math, but that's not true of Patriot who has spent the majority of their time here doing racist trolling and very little doing mathematics. I'm happy to respectfully disagree with you or Lucia and learn from your perspective, but as I said above Patriot is not a good faith participant who we should be seeking common ground with. | |
| Aug 14, 2020 at 0:19 | comment | added | Lucia | @YemonChoi: Agreed! | |
| Aug 14, 2020 at 0:06 | comment | added | Yemon Choi | @Lucia Thank you. For what it's worth, I must admit that my political beliefs probably lean a bit closer to Scott or Noah than to those who have disagreed with them, but mainly I wish that MO stuck to the things that might have a hope in hell of uniting us rather than providing another forum for us all to discover how much we disagree with each other | |
| Aug 14, 2020 at 0:01 | comment | added | Yemon Choi | @DavidWhite Also, and I say this with kindness intended at heart, it is quite possible for me to despise the racism in e.g. the UK without being fully on board with the language of diversity that I see trumpeted by the younger revolutionaries in online maths communities, not least because I get a touch grumpy about being POCsplained to. Not that I view you as having done so, but just to put "the math community still has some reckoning to do about diversity" in some global context | |
| Aug 14, 2020 at 0:00 | comment | added | Lucia | @YemonChoi: Thanks for the Mercutio reference. It would be wonderful to put that in a guide for newcomers to MO! | |
| Aug 13, 2020 at 23:54 | comment | added | Yemon Choi | @DavidWhite The existence of that comment thread was one of the main reasons why I decided not to engage (I'm not saying I would definitely engage with a dicsussion in chat, but that seemed much more suitable). Although I can't help pointing out that the comment thread mostly made me feel like Mercutio, R+J Act III Scene 1 | |
| Aug 13, 2020 at 21:34 | comment | added | Gerhard Paseman | Then delete them. I don't think you would appreciate my response. I think I'm done here. | |
| Aug 13, 2020 at 21:22 | comment | added | David White | It is perhaps partially my fault that the moderators did not move the comments to chat, because I asked them not to in an email. I felt the comment thread was helping to make the case that the math community still has some reckoning to do about diversity, and I feared that if it was all moved to chat then many would never see it. However, I trust the moderators to know best, and I respect their decision today to move it all to chat. | |
| Aug 13, 2020 at 21:13 | history | edited | S. CarnahanMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 139 characters in body
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| Aug 13, 2020 at 21:13 | comment | added | S. Carnahan Mod | @GerhardPaseman What, precisely, is "something like this"? Why is Noah Snyder's name even mentioned here? Your comments on this page and the corresponding MO page have been incredibly vague and unhelpful. | |
| Aug 13, 2020 at 21:01 | comment | added | S. Carnahan Mod | @Lucia I restored the moderator-deleted comments by hand. Other deleted comments were not transferred. | |
| Aug 13, 2020 at 21:01 | comment | added | Gerhard Paseman | I think the next time something like this happens, the first move is a moderator moving stuff to chat. I might disagree with the move, but if the rationale is to anticipate a flame war and move it away from the post, I and others are more likely to forgive and even applaud such preventative action. Deletion can still occur if needed. I apologize to Noah Snyder for continuing in this thread, and am willing to avoid chat rooms where he believes certain of his comments are needed. Gerhard "Trying To Restore Signature Humor" Paseman, 2020.08.13. | |
| Aug 13, 2020 at 20:58 | comment | added | Lucia | Thanks for moving all the comments to chat. Since this restores the comments of RP_, Patriot and others, it addresses all my concerns. | |
| Aug 13, 2020 at 20:33 | comment | added | Stefan Kohl Mod | I'd like to second @Lucia, and I think the real rationale behind deleting the comment was that it goes against the currently fashionable idea to introduce policies to specifically promote particular groups of people, and this also seems to be the reason why the deletion sparks such an amount of controversy. | |
| Aug 13, 2020 at 20:22 | comment | added | Lucia | Thanks for that response. Indeed it would have been better to remove all the comments to chat. I agree that the bar should be very low for irrelevant mathematical comments, but the discussion there was not mathematical. So perhaps different standards may apply? In any case, I strongly feel removing comments of this nature often backfires and ends up alienating people. Either political discussions should be avoided altogether (I would be very happy with that), or one must allow that others might have different/uncomfortable opinions. | |
| Aug 13, 2020 at 20:18 | comment | added | S. Carnahan Mod | @Lucia The comments in question were borderline to me, and I am in fact still a bit conflicted. On one hand, comments on MO are not really meant as a place for liberal democratic discourse, and the standard for deletion of non-mathematical comments is quite low, but on the other hand, the specific deletion of those two comments could give an impression of favoritism. I am much more in favor of moving all of the comments to chat, because they are a distraction from the point of Martin Hairer's question, and of MO itself. | |
| Aug 13, 2020 at 19:58 | comment | added | Lucia | I had read the comments by RP_ and by Patriot. I don't see what was so objectionable about these that they should be removed. Removing comments that one disagrees with does not fit with my ideas of liberal democratic discourse. I can understand if the comments were rude, or hateful, or distasteful, or ... ; but the comments that were removed were not in this category. | |
| Aug 13, 2020 at 19:42 | history | answered | S. CarnahanMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |