White Rabbit draft

 

Many's the time in the last decade I thought maybe we were getting close to what the Great Bard apocryphally referred to as 'int'resting times'. Of course, he never said this, but it would be really easy to believe he did, especially if you were vouchsafed this factoid by a trusted source.

Now, when we really are living in interesting times in the sense this phrase has found meaning in modern culture, this has become a particular problem.

For the avoidance of doubt, I don't mean it's a problem to believe Billy said something, but there's a real problem with believing things because of who said them, and the tide of disinformation currently racking up a burgeoning death toll is one that has us asking important questions.

Many are asking "how do I bring my (insert relative/friend here) back?"

This is not new territory for me. I've spent most of the last tumpty-tum years looking hard at beliefs and dogma and how they arise, better to understand how we think about things. In that time, some have said my writing played some part of them shedding their previously-held doctrines, so what's the secret sauce? How do I get back the person X was before they got into this?

The short answer is this: you don't.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, so let's be careful about what we mean here.

The first thing to note is that it wasn't anything I said or did. That seems to contradict the testimony already given, but it doesn't, because I didn't do any of the work. That's entirely done by the person shedding the dogma. I, and you, can only show the path. We can't make the decision to walk it. Still, there are bigger fish to fry here, so let's get to those.

Experiences like this are impactful; People who come out the other side of such experiences are not the people who went in. Not in the sense that no man crosses the same river twice, as the saying goes, but in the sense that trauma - and this really is trauma - changes you; changes the way you think and the way you see the world. In particular, it robs you of innocence, and that's always profound. It can make you grow, it can make you shrink, it can change you in all sorts of ways. These are formative experiences, in other words.

In fact, falling into these rabbit-holes is very much like addiction. IS addiction. And just like any kind of addiction, finding your way out requires first recognising there's a problem, and that's where the rubber really meets the road for our purposes. The experience of realising you're an addict is deep. In this particular setting, realising how easily they got inside your head can be quite frightening. It's not uncommon for people to feel violated and manipulated. Which is in many cases what happened, of course. We'll explore how they did this as we proceed, because it's a lot easier than you might think. 

Let me say this up front, because it's important: in studying this, I've been down some rabbit-holes and, despite being fully aware of all the dangers I'm talking about here, have still managed to find myself being sucked into modes of thinking that are really quite destructive of thought. This isn't something that's easy to protect yourself against, for reasons propagandists and apologists are fully aware of, and know how to play to full effect.

All that said, there are some strategies that can be effective in bringing somebody back from such thinking, but it requires patience and understanding. It's easy to provide somebody with factually correct information to counter their beliefs; it's much harder to ensure impact. 

One of the deepest issues is simply how protectionist we are of our beliefs. Our beliefs are the bricks in the walls that shield us in some respects, but they also shield us from viewing countering evidence. Fantasy author David Zindell once described beliefs as the 'eyelids of the mind', which is an apt metaphor; once we believe something to any real degree, we close our minds to the possibility that the belief is incorrect. We'll look at this in more detail shortly, but first I want to talk a bit about the nature of ideas and, in particular, some features of ideas not readily apparent, because understanding how ideas are constructed and grouped gives insight into what would be necessary to deconstruct them. The most important feature of ideas for our purposes here is something we're going to call 'mass'. 

Mass is exactly what you think it is. Indeed, we're going to be talking about physical forces a lot here because, as we'll see, it's almost the perfect metaphor for ideas. In physics, mass is a quantitative expression of an object's inertia, or 'resistance to acceleration', where acceleration refers to any change in velocity (speeding up, slowing down, changing direction). 

Ideas have this property. Certain ideas can have a large amount of mass and be very attractive. Individual ideas generally don't have large mass, but they can, and they get passed around, and become 'memes', in sensu Dawkins, who coined the term. 

The ideas with the largest mass are the really big ones, the ones that speak to momentous or historic events (tyranny, liberty), and especially those that have some intrigue in them (conspiracy), because who doesn't like a tale of skullduggery?

Here's the really important feature of the mass of ideas, though; it's cumulative. Once we accept an idea as true, whether it is or not, it attains some mass. For a single idea in isolation, it's usually trivial to shift belief by the simple application of countering evidence of greater mass (our internalisations of evidence are ideas, after all). Most are very accepting of countering evidence early on, but as consilient ideas - memes - accumulate, becoming complexes of memes, or memeplexes, the mass accumulates and the central idea becomes harder and harder to knock down. You end up employing that trick so beloved of creationists, picking away at minute bits of the edifice while ignoring the meat; the edifice itself. You can show any one individual belief in the edifice of belief to be false, and the believer can even shed the belief with almost no impact on the edifice at all. Getting to the core idea, then, can easily seem a Sisyphean endeavour.

I've termed this 'cognitive inertia', and it's incredibly difficult to shift. It's very much akin to the collective scientific inertia exposed by Kuhn, in which it requires the deaths of the dogmatic old guard to allow the revolutionary new ideas to come to the fore. In some ways, once a certain mass of ideas is attained, it behaves more like it's operating under magnetism than gravity, with attractive and repulsive elements to its behaviour*. There's a wonderful post by former creationist Glenn Morton who suggested how this might work by analogy with Maxwell's Demon, a thought experiment in thermodynamics.

Morton's demon was a demon who sat at the gate of my sensory input apparatus and if and when he saw supportive evidence coming in, he opened the gate. But if he saw contradictory data coming in, he closed the gate. In this way, the demon allowed me to believe that I was right and to avoid any nasty contradictory data. Fortunately, I eventually realized that the demon was there and began to open the gate when he wasn't looking.

So how does all this begin?

Let's start with Youtube, because it's a huge player in this market.

A video pops up in your recommended viewing. How it arrived there is complicated under the hood, but it's all driven by fairly straightforward processes controlled by algorithms. An algorithm is a set of instructions to carry out a task. In the case of how your feed is generated, there's a complex set of variables, but their basic principles are simple enough; a popular video with some 'tags' that match content you've seen before, for example, might pop up. That one alone can throw up some strange results, especially if videos aren't well tagged. We might watch some physics videos that, among their tags, have the word 'mass'. Generally speaking, you'll get mostly physics videos but, if somebody's mucked their tags up, by typing 'wave' in their tags instead of 'nave', you get a video about church architecture popping up in your feed seemingly at random, despite never having looked at such a video before.

But the thumbnail looks interesting, and suddenly you're hearing about the great nave at Norwich cathedral, and learning about the roof bosses and Walter Lyhart†. When you return to your feed, you suddenly see smatterings of videos about ecclesiastical architecture, or other videos by the same presenter. And, of course, the most popular videos get the most airing based on these and other algorithms. It's worth flagging those two concepts now; presenter and popularity. Both of these become important as we delve into disinformation.

For the most part, the process is fairly benign. This is trivially because there's not a whole lot of excitement, intrigue and controversy in topics like the minutiae of ecclesiastical and architectural symbology (though you wouldn't believe the carpet-biting kerfuffle this stuff caused in the mid-to-late 1600s), but some topics by their nature - child safety, for example - generate extreme depth of feeling; they have the potential to radicalise, and that's where the cooling device suffers a coprolitic barrage. When you start to accumulate a history of watching videos tagged with such topics, it quickly becomes your entire window on the world. You have embodied the bell jar.

Your feed is filled with the most popular videos on the topics and, because of the ubiquitous influence of the cult of celebrity, we find that it's filled with the most popular commentators on the subject. You get used to hearing them. You begin to trust them. You become familiar with their speech patterns. Some of the things they say are so succinct, so compelling, they can't not be true. They become quotable. Their quotes become slogans.

The names in the comments become familiar as well, and you begin to interact with them, backslapping each other for particularly witty takedowns, sharing your favourite quotes, further sloganising them. You might catch a livestream, and then it becomes a different level of involvement, because you can interact with the celebrities directly, as well as the familiar names in the chat. If a lot of people are tagging you because they recognise you from your comments, it's a good bet the host will spot you and mention you by name. That gives you the impression of being in the inner circle. The channel host might even make you a chat moderator if they like the cut of your jib, and then you have an actual position, and your name is highlighted in blue and you have power over other users in the chat. You become tribal, and you end up entirely occupying the thought-space of your tribe. Before you know it, you live in an echo chamber, wherein most of your sensory input is filtered. All your experiences are lensed through this view and nothing, even your personal interactions with those closest to you, is not coloured by it. It really can be quite intoxicating, and therein lies the danger.

Immediately we see the beginnings of what we'd rightly recognise as cult behaviour, and it's a cult we indoctrinated ourselves into, by the simple expedient of self-propagandising by algorithm. You're not likely to fall down a rabbit-hole into extremism via watching videos about church symbology, but there are some things that engender extremely strong reactions.

The most potent subjects for this are those involving our children; all ideas involving children have large mass. Because of course they do. It's the most foundational principle of our chosen evolutionary strategy, a strategy largely shared among social species, but massively protracted in humans because of the requirement to give birth while the skull is sufficiently small and plastic, leading to extremely long post-birth development.

The reasons for the effectiveness of such tactics are complex, rooted partially in that protracted post-birth development - particularly an evolutionarily advantageous gullibility as children - but also because the emotions associated with them are located almost at the opposite end of the brain from our social judgement. When we appeal to fear, we're triggering the amygdala, much closer to the brain stem, home of our lizard brain, where our 'fight or flight' responses are, our deepest primal instincts, quick-firing and primed for crisis. This in contrast to the cerebral cortex, where our higher level judgement resides, judgement of the sort that can override the more primal behaviours. 

One of the manifestations of these behaviours is causing a particular problem at the moment, though it isn't a new problem. I mention vaccines here only because they're both of particular moment now and also illustrative of something that drives us to think first of our children.

I won't relitigate the history of the anti-vaccine movement here, as it's been amply covered elsewhere, but it begins, of course, with children. It needn't remain there because, once the seed of fear is planted in fertile ground, it grows, and it attains mass, and its influence extends beyond its foundations and infects other areas of your thinking. One of the rare instance of an actually true truism is this; a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has its boots one. Certain ideas, because of their colossal mass, are almost impossible to stop once they get up to speed. When ideas of threats to the safety of our children are invoked, they accelerate to full velocity extremely rapidly. When Wakefield's fraudulent paper was published in The Lancet, he triggered a lie we're still trying to undo the damage of 23 years later during a global pandemic that, at the time of this writing, has claimed 4.4 million lives globally. Very many of the people currently refusing the vaccine can have their entire line of reasoning tracked back to that single fraudulent and shockingly-designed paper.

It's trivial to see how easy it is to self-propagandise, but there are some tools in the propagandist's arsenal that warrant special attention.

The first of these goes back to the notion of having a familiar host. What often makes somebody popular in general terms is the way they express ideas. That can be accidental but, in general, even then, there will be certain things about they way they express ideas that make them stick. This is propaganda central.

The first tool of the propagandist is the slogan. Slogans are extremely powerful, because they can encapsulate really enormous ideas in just a few memorable words. Speech writers and orators have known this for centuries, and work hard to punctuate their writings with rhetorical devices in exactly the same way I do and for the same reasons. Lest we forget, propaganda isn't a bad thing, it's simply material advocating for a position. All journalism is propaganda, even the unbiased stuff, because it's advocating for a position; the truth.

We use devices like alliteration, rhetorical triplets, rhymes, ebb and flow in metre, even occasionally throwing back to archaic language like "lest we forget" to imbue our thoughts with gravitas and to engender a sense of the lyrical or numinous in our readers. We use loan words and phrases to connect to the great orators of the past. We combine them in a short, sharp shock (sorry). And that's on the page. 

When speaking publicly, we have other devices and, more importantly, entirely other strategies. If we can see a particular bit of our message losing the enthusiasm of the crowd, for example, we can divert into something completely tangential with known support to lift them back up and then segue back into it, making the thing we were tepid about feel like the thing we were enthusiastic about all along. We know how to work a crowd. 

One of the things about working a crowd which may not be immediately obvious is how we respond to people who are good with crowds. In fact, a lot of that is simply about confidence. My professional background is as a performer, so I've developed a certain set of skills. I know, however, that many to most people really struggle with being the focus of attention in public in any measure, and the particular admiration we have for people who can speak confidently in front of strangers is just another smuggled bit of self-propaganda. You advocate internally for the speaker just on this basis. Any move toward sympathy with a speaker is self-propaganda.

This all begins to coalesce when we start to combine some of what's been discussed here. The popular voice whose most common expressions become familiar ways of thinking, the repetition of simple slogans, the sense of belonging and comradeship...

One of the more pernicious tools in the toolbox of the propagandist is something know as "agitprop", or "agitation propaganda". This takes many forms, the most direct having been made apparent in the several 'outings' of police personnel being directly involved in the escalation of the 2020 demonstrations. I was somewhat embedded in those demonstrations, having been virtually on the ground with many independent, syndicated and stringer journalists, in research for future material on how we think about authority, and I saw first hand how much of the violence was initiated by police without provocation. That doesn't matter, of course; when the mainstream media shows violence and fires and tell you it was protesters who did it, that's the story. The TV news rabbit-hole is, in most senses, even more problematic than any other news resource, not least because it's more insidious. It's a given that what you see is only what they want you to see, but they have the advantage of a degree of trust - self- propaganda again.

This notion of an agent provocateur, as it's known, an agent of the opposition within your own ranks only there to provoke the worst elements of your cohort to bring you within the influence of the law, is a well-worn tactic of law-enforcement. Actually placing an agent, though, isn't the worst. The worst damage is often done by words.

There are ways of weaponising language that aren't always obvious. A very clear example of this, once it's pointed out, is the commentary surrounding "taking the knee". This goes through several stages, so you have to look to unpick it, but it starts with a spurious connection between some of the founders of the US organisation "Black Lives Matter" and Marxism. In fact, the connection is so tenuous it hardly warrants mention. The sum total of it is that organisers had found some useful tips about organising and messaging in Bolshevik texts. Suddenly, taking the knee, which never had anything to do with this organisation or even the phrase "black lives matter" and in fact preceded both by decades, was associated with Marxism.

The most deeply ironic thing in that sad little episode is that this tactic, weaponising the language of your opposition by recasting it as the language of your enemy, is straight out of the Bolshevik playbook. In short, the weaponisers are using a tactic they're critiquing to critique it. Dafuq?

There's a particularly insidious for of this tactic known as 'dog-whistling', that's really come to the fore in recent times. It's always been there, but it's become almost the primary mode of political discourse in some circles‡. Dog whistles are really insidious, because they're perfectly reasonable sounding statements, but they carry hidden meaning "for those with ears to hear". The name, of course, comes from this notion that only those in on the secret can grasp the true meaning of what's being said. 

An example of a dog whistle is 'all lives matter'. Seems OK on the surface, and you could easily see it being uttered by perfectly reasonable people. However, when its's erected in the very specific context it has been, it has a pernicious hidden meaning, because it's trying to control the narrative. I'm not going to go any deeper on here, but see The Supremacy of History (long read), where I explore this dog whistle in detail, along with others and more propaganda tactics in a very specific context.

So what we've covered here, while not exhaustive, is just a cursory overview of some of the things influencing our descent into areas of the arcane. Before I move on to mitigations, there's one more feature of ideas that both highlights a difficulty and a potential strategy, and it's simply this: ideas - and complexes of ideas - evolve.

This fact alone raises some interesting problems, many of which are probably reasonably obvious, but there's one feature of evolving systems that throws a bit of a curve to results; stochasticity.

A stochastic system is a system in which future states are determined by initial conditions plus the outcome of one or more random variables. 'Random' here means 'statistically independent' rather than 'uncaused'. The term 'stochastic' has found increasing use of late outside systems thinking, in the phrase 'stochastic terrorism', which is an incredibly important term for our purposes, because it's an amalgam of propaganda and violence. In essence, stochastic terrorism is where inflammatory or aggressive language is used to demonise a target, leading to the entirely predictable act of somebody carrying out violence on members of the target group. The connection is obvious, because the inflammatory language is the initial conditions and the 'lone wolf' or violent actor is the random (statistically independent) variable.  

In biological evolution, there's a law, known as Dollo's law. Although its domain of applicability is very strictly evolutionary theory, it points us to something more broadly applicable to stochastic systems generally, especially stochastic systems composed of large numbers of variables. It states, in essence, that backwards evolution is not possible. The reason for this is that mutations are random, and for evolution to fully reverse would mean reversing every mutation in exact order and detail. The probability of such an event is so low that it's functionally impossible.

It is possible for populations to evolve forward into states that are more primitive††, such as blind cave fish losing their unused eyes because of economy and environment, but tracing exact ancestral pathways in reverse is somewhere in the region of a fully grown human walking through a wall. Possible in theory and inline with perfectly valid science, but with a probability so low that it isn't likely to happen at any time in the future history of the universe. 

Our memeplexes evolve as well, and this gives us some pointers to some of the difficulties

pattern seeking

DARVO

biases

cast their aims in terms of yours - i.e., attaining freedom through acquiescence

* In fact, there's good reason to suppose gravity has both attractive and repulsive characteristics. There are certainly repulsive solutions to general relativity, and this is in fact on of the leading candidates for dark energy, the force that's causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.

† Walter Lyhart was the architect who designed the nave at Norwich Cathedral. I didn't learn this from Youtube, but from my former English teacher who, at 4'9", was easily the largest man I ever knew, and who worked as a voluntary tour guide sat Norwich after retirement. He it was who had taught me about points of reference as aides memoire in teaching many years before. In this case, one of the roof bosses is a picture of a white hart lying down next to water - Walter Lyhart.

‡ It occurred to me some weeks ago that , here in the UK, we're pretty much being exclusively governed by dead cat** and dog whistle while avoiding the elephant in the room, a new veterinary form of government.

** A dead cat is a story thrown out to distract the public specifically to cover-up some political chicanery. The use of such tactics is referred to by many names, but the most common is 'burying the lead', which is a press term for hiding the really important news down behind an innocuous- or trivial-seeming headline.

†† In technical parlance, the term 'primitive' has a very specific definition, namely 'resembling ancestral form. I'm slightly misusing it here because, in fact, blind cave fish aren't really more primitive, because none of their ancestral forms had vestigial eyes and sockets.

Reciprocity: When You Fight Yourself

The last few days have seen some interesting activity in the world online 'rationalist' community. Much has been said, and much vitriol unleashed. I wanted to begin to put the record straight and, if possible, to find a way forward.

What follows is, to the very best of my knowledge, a true and accurate account of the events of the last few days.

I found my way to the Richard Dawkins forum in October 2008, having been engaged in the usual reality-denial discussions on Youtube for some time. What I found there was a vibrant, energetic community, extremely diverse, but largely galvanised under a common goal, namely the battle for rationality and the defence of valid science against some of the more pernicious assaults by those whose goal was to reach some kind of hegemony for superstitious nonsense. I was immediately hooked. Since that time, and largely because of the forum, I have gone from interested layperson, in scientific terms, to dedicated didact. It has been a steep learning curve for me, and the curve continues. I am constantly challenged in my understanding of the universe and the principles upon which it operates. The regulars at the forum have given me the kind of education that would normally cost huge amounts of money, all at no cost, and with an energy and love for the truth that few professional educators manage. I am not going to mention the names of those users whose input I have found so valuable, simply because the list is far too long and I am almost guaranteed to overlook some of them. I am deeply grateful to them all, in ways I can probably never express.

The forum provided a safe haven for those struggling to escape from their inculcated belief systems, and a guide to real critical thinking that is second to none. It represented, for me, a way that I could really make a difference in the fight against unreason.

There were some problems with the forum, mostly due to the sheer amount of traffic. The search function was disabled to reduce the strain on the servers, and posts were reduced to 10 per page, to reduce the large number of general errors experienced by users on the board. It was difficult, and the moderators had an even harder time. Even the simplest of moderation tasks, such as moving posts, splitting and merging threads, etc, took an age. Nonetheless, we persevered. We were assured that improvements were just around the corner. Not long ago, it was suggested that the forum was to be moved to a new, more suitable platform. This was met with optimism. Some users raised concerns about existing content being available for the new platform, and assurances were given that no content would be lost, and that it would be searchable. This last was deemed of critical importance, simply due to the vast amounts of peer-reviewed scientific material posted on the forum, and the ability to access it when required to provide solid evidence to debunk the claims of reality deniers. For about 8 months, the board has gone through periods of being close to unusable, and with no search facility. Nonetheless, we persevered, with one eye on the improvements that were 'coming'. The moderators released notices to the effect that the new platform would be available for the moderation team to test in plenty of time before it went live, in order to address any concerns and so that they were familiar with the platform and the demands that it would make of them in order to carry out their roles.


Two days ago, everything changed. First, an announcement was made:


Dear forum members,

We wanted you all to know at the earliest opportunity about our new website currently in development. RichardDawkins.net will have a new look and feel, improved security, and much more. Visits to the site have really grown over the past 3 1/2 years, and this update gives us an opportunity to address several issues. Over the years we've become one of the world's leading resources for breaking rational and scientific news and original content. We are focusing on quality content distribution, and will be bringing more original articles, video and other content as we grow.

The new RichardDawkins.net will have a fully-integrated discussion section. This will be a new feature for the site, similar to the current forum, but not identical. We feel the new system will be much cleaner and easier to use, and hopefully this will encourage participation from a wider variety of users.

We will leave the current forum up for 30 days, giving regular users an opportunity to locally archive any content they value. When the new website goes live, you are welcome to submit these posts as new discussions. The forum will then be taken down from the web. You will not loose your username on the new system.

The new discussion area will not be a new forum. It will be different. We will be using a system of tags to categorize items, instead of sub-forums. Discussions can have multiple tags, such as "Education", "Children", and "Critical Thinking". Starting a new discussion will require approval, so we ask that you only submit new discussions that are truly relevant to reason and science. Subsequent responses on the thread will not need approval—however anything off topic or violating the new terms of service will be removed. The approval process will be there to ensure the quality of posts on the site. This is purely an editorial exercise to help new visitors find quality content quickly. We hope this discussion area will reflect the foundation's goals and values.

We know that this is a big decision. We know some of you will be against this change. We ask that you respect our decision and help make this transition as smooth as possible.

We're confident that these changes will improve the site experience and we look forward to seeing what you do with the new system.

Many thanks again.

Josh Timonen,
Andrew Chalkley
The Richard Dawkins Foundation

Clearly, this is not what had been discussed in the preceding months. Indeed, from this, it is not at all clear just what form these changes will take, being rather nebulous as it is. A thread was started in the tech support area of the forum, in which users began to express some concerns. Some dissent was aimed at the moderating staff.

I should say at this point that I have been an active member on several fora, and moderator on three of them. The moderating staff at RDF have been far and away the best moderation team this commentator has ever experienced anywhere. They approached a very diverse membership with equanimity and tolerance, often in contentious and thankless circumstances. Doubtless they were like the proverbial ducks on occasion, paddling furiously beneath the surface, but projecting an air of calm and reason. I feel absolutely privileged to number most of them among my personal friends, and only regret that I hadn't occasion to get to know all of the team better. This was not an oversight on the part of either myself or the moderators I had little contact with, only that they oversaw areas of the forum that I rarely ventured into. As I say, it was an extremely diverse forum, covering many areas of thought and science.

As the questions began to come out, put mostly to the moderating staff, it became clear that they were as in the dark as the rest of us, and shortly afterwards the message that had been passed to the moderating staff was published in the thread. It read largely the same as the announcement made to the general forum, but with the inclusion of the following:

We know that this is a big decision. We know some of you moderators will be against this change. We ask that you respect our decision and help make this transition as smooth as possible. These decisions have all been approved by our organization, and we ask that you don't add to our work by causing trouble.

We will not be migrating moderator roles to the new discussion site. Again, we're sure this might come as a shock, and we hope you don't take it personally. We can't thank you enough for your contributions to the old forum. The new system will not require a large team of moderators, as the discussion area will be more focused. We encourage you to contribute to the new discussions area, and are welcome to flag inappropriate activity for review.

Please understand that this transition is going to be a lot of work for us. I'm sure as you read this, you will have a lot of questions and concerns. We also know that this is a change from what we had been discussing previously. This announcement does not require a response, but we wanted you to be aware. Please do not email Richard with complaints, we have discussed this transition thoroughly with him, and he is currently on tour in Australia and New Zealand. Please do not attempt to inflame the users, start any petitions, or "relocate" groups of users to a separate forum. Do not use any of the data held by the foundation (such as email addresses) through the control panel to cause any trouble. Any behavior of this kind will not be tolerated. We don't expect you to do these things, but we say all of this only to discourage any well-intentioned moves that would only frustrate the situation.

I have seen some condescending messages in my time, but this is right up there, and this directed at the moderating staff that had kept the forum going, in increasingly adverse circumstances, for some time. Not only the mere suggestion of the causing of trouble, but also the sheer coldness with which this dedicated team of individuals had been dismissed.

There is more history to this that I was not privy to, and I won't go over it here, as it is admirably and concisely addressed in the blog of Peter Harrison, former admin of the forum

Some dissenting voices were raised at this treatment of the team, and the members and moderators were clearly unhappy. I advocated calm from the off, but all dissenting posts were well within the rules of the forum. One of the moderators expressed his discontent at the rudeness of the dismissal, at which point the site admin, Josh Timonen, deleted his entire account, including all of his posting history. This consisted of some 12,000 posts, most of it high-quality dissemination of hard science, debunking reality-denial, and the presentation of important breakthroughs in science. 5 more prolific posters quickly followed into oblivion, representing an estimated 40,000+ posts, and including another 2 of the moderating staff. There was some talk about the moderators only carrying out the bare duties of deleting spam and so on. I am confident that this was just venting on the part of the staff, but of course I can't speak for them. A few posters began posting comments that were not exactly what you'd call nice, but still nothing that was not within the rules of the forum.


The thread containing the dissenting posts was also consigned to the aether, and the forum was then closed.

My first concern was making sure that people were informed about what was happening. I posted on several rationalist fora that I frequent occasionally, and two of them, league of reason, and rationalia, very kindly offered to accept members from RDF so that they would have somewhere to gather to discuss the issues arising from this chain of events. Most gathered at rationalia, as it was a forum run by current and ex-members at RDF, and were therefore known to many members, and I made a quick Youtube video to spread the word:



When the forum re-opened, it was as read only, and the following update had been added to the announcement:

Update: 2010-02-22 We had intended to leave the forum fully-funtioning for 30 days, but due to the inappropriate posts by some users and moderators, we have decided to leave the forum in a read-only state. You can still download and archive your posts and private messages, but the ability to enter new posts has been disabled. It's unfortunate that it had to come to this. We know that change can be difficult and sometimes frightening, but we are all very excited about the direction of the website and the future.

Now, I don't know what inappropriate posts are being referred to here, because I saw none, and I saw all of the posts in the thread in question. All were within the forum rules. I also note the tone of condescension aimed at the forum users. We are not afraid of change. Further, with the search facility having been disabled months before, a sacrifice to enable less error-prone service, the chances of actually being able to archive personal posts were between slim and none, especially for those of us whose post-counts were significant. My own post-count runs to just over 11,000 posts. Some of this is, of course, fairly trivial, but includes such things as an idiot's guide to general relativity, several elucidations of principles of evolution, and two submissions for the newly instituted monthly science writing competition. Those of us with such posting histories had no hope of possibly saving that content in 30 days, especially with no search function.

In an effort to save as much content as possible, a few people, myself included, tried some freeware website archiving software, in my case, wget. I left it running overnight, only to find in the morning when I came back to it that the forum had had several rickrolls embedded, as I understand (though I'm just a two-bit music producer, and webtech is well beyond my remit), to foil such software. The personal message floodgate had also been set very high, so that members could only send personal messages to other forum members every few hours.

In the 24 hours that followed, a lot of people said some regrettable things. Some insults were levelled at Josh, away from the forum. Richard the posted the following message:

A Message from Richard Dawkins about the website updates

Imagine that you, as a greatly liked and respected person, found yourself overnight subjected to personal vilification on an unprecedented scale, from anonymous commenters on a website. Suppose you found yourself described as an “utter twat” a “suppurating rectum. A suppurating rat’s rectum. A suppurating rat’s rectum inside a dead skunk that’s been shoved up a week-old dead rhino’s twat.” Or suppose that somebody on the same website expressed a “sudden urge to ram a fistful of nails” down your throat. Also to “trip you up and kick you in the guts.” And imagine seeing your face described, again by an anonymous poster, as “a slack jawed turd in the mouth mug if ever I saw one.”

What do you have to do to earn vitriol like that? Eat a baby? Gas a trainload of harmless and defenceless people? Rape an altar boy? Tip an old lady out of her wheel chair and kick her in the teeth before running off with her handbag?

None of the above. What you have to do is write a letter like this:

SNIP MESSAGE FROM JOSH AS ABOVE

You will notice that the forum has in fact been closed to comments (not taken down) sooner than the 30 days alluded to in the letter. This is purely and simply because of the over-the-top hostility of the comments that were immediately sent in. Note that there is no suggestion of abolishing the principle of a forum in which commenters can start their own threads. Just an editorial re-organization, which will include a change such that the choice of new threads will be subject to editorial control. Editorial control, mark you, by the person who, more than any other individual, has earned the right to the editor’s chair by founding the site in the first place, then maintaining its high standard by hard work and sheer talent. The aim of the letter is to describe an exciting new revamping of our site, one in which quality will take precedence over quantity, where original articles on reason and science, on atheism and scepticism, will be commissioned, where frivolous gossip will be reduced. The new plan may succeed or it may fail, but I think it is worth trying. And even if it fails, it most certainly will not deserve the splenetic hysteria that the mere suggestion of it has received.

Surely there has to be something wrong with people who can resort to such over-the-top language, over-reacting so spectacularly to something so trivial. Even some of those with more temperate language are responding to the proposed changes in a way that is little short of hysterical. Was there ever such conservatism, such reactionary aversion to change, such vicious language in defence of a comfortable status quo? What is the underlying agenda of these people? How can anybody feel that strongly about something so small? Have we stumbled on some dark, territorial atavism? Have private fiefdoms been unwittingly trampled?

Be that as it may, what this remarkable bile suggests to me is that there is something rotten in the Internet culture that can vent it. If I ever had any doubts that RD.net needs to change, and rid itself of this particular aspect of Internet culture, they are dispelled by this episode.

If you are one of those who have dealt out such ludicrously hyperbolic animosity, you know who should receive your private apology. And if you are one of those who are as disgusted by it as I am, you know where to send your warm letter of support.

Richard

Now, there is much to say about the above. Firstly, the comments aimed at Josh in the above were taken from rationalia, and were posted in the heat of the moment. There is much regret concerning these comments. It also needs to be said that the comments highlighted by Richard do not reflect the attitudes of the majority of those who came to rationalia to gather. Most of us, through all of this, are working hard to retain the rationality that we have won so hard in the cause.

I must also say clearly that the core membership of rationalia were in no way involved in any of those comments. All they did was to offer a place for the members of RDF to pitch their tents while they gathered their thoughts. They were very kind to do this, and our gratitude cannot be adequately expressed. No blame can or should be directed at them for any of the things said by the members of RDF that posted on their forum in, I might add, an area that they set up sepcifically for us to gather. They have been extremely hospitable, and I and they want it known that their respect for Richard, and for other commentors on his behalf, remains. Those members who made such comments must take responsibility for them, as we must all do for our actions.

It saddens me greatly that such a community that, only two days ago, were all pulling in the same direction against the common enemy that is unreason, can so suddenly be pulling against each other. Have our aims changed so much that we are willing to sacrifice that? It has been an extremely tesing and difficult time for us all, not least due to the severing of all lines of communication. This can never be a good thing, because only through discourse can reason reign. I am not, in any way, attempting to apportion blame, or deflect responsiblity. My part in this has been one only of attempting to ensure that the community does not go out with a whimper, which would make a lie of the strength that we have buit together.

So, what have we learned from this?

We have learned that communication is not always easy, but that it must continue come what may. I'm sure that all would agree with that. Sometimes, that comunication may not be entirely pleasant, but only through dialogue can understanding ever be reached.

We have learned that we are stronger together than we are apart, especially since we still share common goals, regardless of whether our visions of how to achieve those goals concur.

We have learned, above all else, that nobody is immune to irrationality.

And who is the winner in all of this?

The reality-deniers, of course! The cretinists, when they get wind of this, will be laughing their heads off at us.

I remain hopeful that lines of communication can once again be opened, and that we can move forward and once again take up arms together in the fight for reason and reality. This charge is bigger than all of us, and outweighs whatever differences and injustices we may feel lie between us.

I propose the following:

One of the senior moderating staff, or some other person who has earned some trust from both parties, should be elected to speak with Richard, if he is willing. Discussions should be entered into with regard to the future aims of the foundation. It would also be helpful if some clearer idea were given of precisely what the new discussion board will involve, and how the members who are still willing might be involved in delivering it. Apologies are warranted from both sides, but they must be given freely. I do not wish to dictate to anybody what they should do, but ultimately, if reason doesn't re-assert itself, all of our efforts have been for naught.

Let's see if we can't do that thing that we're all supposed to be good at, namely discourse in the pursuit of a common goal.

The future of the foundation, and the vision for achieving it, ultimately lies with Richard, and he must do what he sees as best meeting the aims of the foundation. However, given the effort that has been expended by so many people in the furtherance of the foundation's aims, it would seem wise to find some way to work together. Again, the goal is bigger than all of us and our personal feelings.

I would finally like to extend my gratitude to the following:

Richard Dawkins, for bringing us together.
PZ Myers, for his input and clear head.
Josh and Andrew, for their work.
The moderating staff, for theirs.
The members of RDF, for their allegiance and loyalty.
The members and staff of rationalia, for their hospitality and understanding.
The members and staff of the league of reason, for their hospitality.
And all of the above, for educating me.

Peace, brothers and sisters. My love and respect to you all.

And with that, I am finally going to go to bed, as I haven't slept properly since all this began. Let me know what you decide.

Tony Murphy (hackenslash)