Rule Changes + New Restrictions

[Angrboda]

My word isn't law of course, but I have observed many different types of trolling and disruption as a moderator of close to 15 years on one of the premier irc / chat channels on EFNet. The dimension along which hypothesized trolls are measured on this forum, from what I see is a bit vertical, which makes me wonder sometimes whether you get the same variety here, or, instead, whether because your anti-trolling tools are limited to a very narrow range, the trolls all end up, to staff and members, looking like that proverbial nail that fits the hammer. One dimension along which trolls vary is that of intent, which itself has several different axes. A person who intends to disrupt a social activity often seems more culpable than one who, just by being born under a bad sign, brings the storm with them wherever they go. A couple other dimensions of that spectrum are, a) whether they are aware that they have the intent to disrupt, how conscious are they of their intention to disrupt if it exists; b) how much insight do they have into how what they want, what they are or are not aware of, and how they and others behave, how these all intersect to create discord (and what their contribution to it consists in); c) whether they want the discord to occur or not, whether they wish to avoid it, or seek it; d) whether they are invested in being good people so that they will seek to understand their behavior and amend it, or shrug their shoulders and carry on; e) how much the individuals cognitive and mental skills contribute for or against any of these (are they socially skilled? emotionally skilled?). There are more dimensions, but you get the point. At one end of the spectrums is the self-conscious troll trying hard to fuck you, using an awareness of both his own and others' psychology to control the process. Then if you imagine these dimensions as compass points you can leave that combined, self-conscious trolling from, you can go off in many directions. It's easy to develop the moral justification to ban the self-conscious troll for his moral transgressions; as you move away from that point, the transgressions become less purely moral, and bleed into simply being people with unfortunate traits of one kind or another. Once that happens, justificational efforts may be watered down by the lower strength of the elements of malevolence, hypocrisy, and so on. Speaking of "b)" how aware they are of it, in the treatment of the schizotypal disorders that a large segment of them have difficulty becoming aware that they have a mental illness. They are said to be anosognostic of their illness, with the term anosognosia referring to a pathological inability to recognize the possession of a trait which one self-evidently possesses. Being unaware that one's right arm is paralized despite good evidence, is an asognosia. In Anton-Babinski syndrome, a person is cortically blind due to damage to the visual cortex, but they are unaware that they are blind, and when challenged, will deny it and rationalize away counter-evidence. An interesting thing about anosognosia, if you take patients with tardive dyskinesia who are unaware of their abnormal mouth, lip, and tongue movements, you can raise their awareness of their symptoms by showing them videos of themselves and explaining it to them. However, once taught about their behavior, within weeks their awareness of it retreats back to their baseline where they are unaware of it. Traditionally, it has been viewed that such anosognosias were merely 'denial', being the conscious or unconscious choice to suppress awareness. However because of data such as that I've mentioned, psychology is shifting from viewing this lack of awareness as less a product of denial, and more the product of some specific brain pathology, an anosognosia, which prevents them from becoming aware even if they want to do so.

Which takes us a long way around to catfish. I guess my question is, what did he know, and when did he know it? I personally think that catfish was less trying to be disruptive than that he was poorly skilled in areas which would have contributed to his awareness, and thus had difficulty seeing himself as being the cause of such disruptions. The implications for the likely recurrence of his behaviors if true is rather obvious. Moreover, not knowing that he was causing things, he was still attracted to causing them because the disruptions and attitudes displayed toward him resulted in psychological and hormonal rewards, incentivizing him to repeat any behaviors which led him to that place.

So in sum, it's some times difficult to tell if someone is being a dick because they consciously want to do that, and are applying skills they've learned to that end, or, is a person a dick, just because they are a dick, and they can't help themselves? For the obvious reason that part of our moral judgements are based on empathy, whether they should or not, our intuitive judgements about how morally wrong, how culpable they are, and whether they are morally deserving of consequences for their behavior -- these contributions to the process of moral justification can be strengthened or weakened by our awareness, intuitively or self-consciously, of a troll such as catfish's potential inability to "see" what he's doing and why.

And even more, culture contributes to how such things are viewed and treated. On irc / chat, we have a saying, troll or tard, it doesn't matter. We justify on the basis of whether a person's behavior is or is likely going to cause disruption, and tend to ignore the psychological questions. This may, to my mind, be the best model for dealing with disruptive behaviors, as it simplifies assessment and judgement, and with simplification comes consistency and fairness. We lean that way in irc / chat, because storms develop and do damage over such a short window of time, time is of the essence, and leaning in that direction, we can act quicker and more effectively to staunch problem behavior. But it is human to want to forgive, to understand, to rehabilitate (as well as sadism to lengthen exposure to hostility against as 'punishment'). The longer time window available to act here may actually encourage these assessments to be weaker, less clear, and slower to develop.

So, what kind of dick was catfish? Was he a bad man who was intentionally causing trouble, or was he rather a person trapped by their own psychology, unable to escape the vicious vortex?

I tended to lean toward the latter, and thus I was often more willing to accomodate him, take time to help him through difficulty, or intercede in other ways to minimize disruption. That being said, coming from IRC, I also wasn't hesitant to bitch slap him when he deserved it, but I think that overasll, I took a kinder, more forgiving tack with him than many others would.