Approval:

The assumption seems to be that people will be divided into two categories:

• Approved People
  
• Unapproved People

One thing that I noticed right away that really bothers me, but no amount of webmasterly mojo will ever be able to fix, is that people that I approve of don't approve of other people that I approve of.

If I start dividing things up based on who likes who, things become very dangerous.  I've talked to enough people here to be pretty confident in saying that for every person on the site (including me), there is at least one person who does not like them.  Dividing people up this way is a bad idea for all kinds of reasons.  The scariest is that it almost forces people to play politics.

It also forces people to group together. There is a huge difference between cliquishness and elitism. Being cliquish means joining a group so that you can feel like you are better than everybody else.  Being elitist means simply being better than everybody else. Being better comes with responsibility. If you are better than someone, then you are in a position of power, and if you abuse that power, then you are no longer better.  

The viciousness of the comments lately has been pretty disturbing.  I'm all in favor of vicious comments, but it's supposed to be "us against them" not "us against us". The attacks, the reactions to attacks, the assertions of status, the whiney questioning of status - All of these things demonstrate that people are ignoring their responsibility as someone who is better than everybody else. While some of the people here may annoy you or completely piss you off, that should not be what you base your interactions with them on.

While I don't subscribe to everything he had to say, Freud does describe this situation very nicely when discussing The Narcissism of Minor Differences.  He wrote, "it is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of strangeness and hostility between them."

What this means is that the more alike you are to someone else, the more the little things piss you off.  This is the reason that Christianity, Judiasm, and Islam have always been at each other's throats - yet don't seem too bothered by Buddists or Hindus.  

In another reference to the narcissism of minor differences Freud wrote, "It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness"

I believe this is the root of the problem. By making everybody a part of the same group, we have taken the focus off of the original point of the site and focused on our minor differences with the other memebers.  

"I lurked for a while before joining because I wanted to make sure that this was a place where ideas could be exchanged in an atmosphere of reasonable acceptance. Basically, if you do not actively prove yourself to be a hostile idiot (like billgates from way back when) you will be acknowledged and politely corrected when you get something wrong." - Rogue

"It used to be smart with a bit of social, now it's all social with no smart." - ickgirl

Originally, the site was a place for us to be better than everyone else.  Not by talking about how much better we are than those idiots, but by talking about Lucid Ideas in an effort to become better than everybody else. I think it's important for us to get back to that, since that is the value of this site. There are thousands of other sites where you can assert your leetness, but there are very few where you can talk about the kind of things that you used to be able to talk about here.

Everyone here, including and especially me (although more privately), has been guilty of slipping into the Unapproved People category based on all of this, so I decided it was the wrong approach altogether. If I divided things up this way, the site would no longer have any members, editors, or webmaster.  Looking at the site, I began to notice that the membership had already divided itself in another way, and that there really wasn't much sorting for me to do if I just defined the categories right.

Categories:

The way I see it, the people on this site are currently divided up into these categories. Pretty much everyone fits into at least one of them, and I don't have to be the one to decide who is who.

• Guests
  
• New members
  
• Harmless unremarkable members
  
• Pets
  
• Pantheon
  
• Noisy Idiots
  
• Brilliant People

The Guests don't matter, they're just watching us through glass.  

The New Members will probably lurk for a while and then show their colors. They need to be allowed to do this or we will never get new brilliant people or new chew toys. If you don't remember the BillGates troll, then you were a new member once, and you should treat the new members better than you were treated until they recategorize themselves.

The Harmless Unremarkable Members are the ones that keep people talking.  They don't really say anything that interesting, but they don't annoy anyone in the least.  They don't try to draw attention to themselves and don't get involved in politics or drama.  There are way fewer of these than you might think. Though they may not appear to contribute to the site, by keeping conversations going, they draw ideas out of the Briliant people, and are valuable.

Pets are people adopted by members of the Pantheon. They can get away with more than other people for short periods of time because someone has determined that they have potential. They are also a protected species. You don't fuck with the pets. Ever. Even a little bit. It is a very good idea to ask who's pet someone is before you bash ANYONE. If you haven't been asking, I strongly suggest you start. Now that cashmere has graduated from callei's Pet to Brilliant people, there are only 3 pets left that I am aware of, although this could change at any time.  If you don't know who they are, you may want to watch your step.

The Pantheon is people who have been on the site forever. Some of them are on the Titles and Duties page, but there are a few that aren't.  If you did not read the 59 people article when it first went up, then you are most likely NOT in the pantheon. While it's perfectly acceptable to bash members of the Pantheon, you deserve what you get.

What constitutes a Noisy Idiot is a matter of opinion. This is where there is the most disagreement. Just because someone bothers you doesn't mean they are a noisy idiot. Noisy Idiots don't post things that you can't stand, they post things that you can't understand. They post stuff like "I think so too", and stuff that boils down to "lookit me!".  These are the average people that like to think of themselves as being one of The Lucid, but will never be. These are the people that need to shuttup or go away.

Brilliant People is the other subjective one. What constitutes brilliant? Who decides? Brilliant compared to what? Brilliant in what way? This is difficult because there are brilliant people on the site who I can't STAND. But I can't call them Noisy Idiots no matter how much they annoy me. There are people that play drama games, lie (repeatedly and badly), pull power trips, and just generally piss me (and others) off. They still can't be lumped in with the Noisy Idiots though because they can think.

Bacause of the subjectiveness of the last two categories, I have decided to add another category to the ones that have formed themselves.  Probationary Members are the ones that are obviously Brilliant People but who are making themselves look like Noisy Idiots. There has to be some way of seperating the icky and annoying from the just plain stupid. Otherwise there will be too much temptation to put people we don't like into the stuipid category.  I figure if you are being warned to chill the fuck out, and you don't - that makes you an idiot, and I won't feel bad about recategorizing you. It may be cheap justification but it works for me. If you find yourself in this category, it is up to you to figure out what you're doing wrong and fix it, don't be asking us. This is your therapy and we are still not your shrinks.

Fire and Brimstone

So what does this all mean?  I know I mentioned fire and brimstone and people were expecting huge explosive changes.  Well it's time to remind you that Haoles don't know nothing 'bout Lava.  In Hawaii, there are a bunch of different words for lava - the way Eskimos have many different words for snow. The two main kinds of cooled lava are a'a (pronounced "Ah Ah", the noise you make when you walk on it with bare feet), and Pahoehoe (Pronounce it how you want, you're going to say it wrong anyway).  A'a is razor sharp, brittle, and is created by hot lava flying through the air explosively.  Pahoehoe is formed by lava flowing along the ground. It's smooth and hard and cools much faster on the outside than it does on the inside.  After an eruption, pahoehoe may seem perfectly safe to walk on, but can crack, plunging you through to the slow moving hot stuff below, and providing you with a very bad day.

These changes are going to resemble the Pahoehoe variety of brimstone far more than a'a.  While it may not seem dramatic enough, drama is what we are trying to avoid here. It should have the same effect but without leaving the site covered in sharp edges, while still providing us with the occasional entertainment of watching someone fall thru a thin spot and turn to cinder.

The main thing that's going to annoy people about this change is that I'm not telling everyone who is in which category. If you are a Probationary Member, you will know it. If you are part of the Pantheon, you should already know it. If you are a Pet, or Brilliant People, you will not be told anything, but nothing should change. If you are a Noisy Idiot, you will not be told anything, but please don't whine about the site not letting you do certain things. It's not broken.

The Metaphysics of Shmeng

I decided that I don't want to be the one responsible for deciding who gets to shut up. I don't want to constantly have people whining to me because they aren't allowed to post stuff. I know that's what would happen.  It would be way better, I think, to have the site do it.  Like any other intelligent Deity, I have decided to create laws of nature to do my work for me.

Technology that works best is technology that emulates nature. That was the conclusion I came to when trying to design the scripts to sort the membership of this site. Karma is the law of nature that I've decided to emulate here.

Here is a brief overview of Karma as I understand it.

The obvious part of Karma is that by doing bad things, you cause bad things to happen, and by doing good things, you cause good things to happen.  There are much subtler ways that this actually works though.

Balance is the state of having no karma, good or bad. This is the natural state of things and is how we are born into this world. By doing nothing, you can sometimes maintain a state of balance and never get any karma, bad or good.  In practice this is difficult though, since sometimes situations arise where doing nothing is wrong and will earn you bad karma.  So the only way to maintain balance is to either balance your good actions with your bad, or to not ever be in a position to decide whether to do something good or bad.

Intertia means the more mass you have the harder it is to change you status. This works for planets, cars, and karma. The larger the mass of Karma you have, the harder it is to change the balance.   If you have balanced karma, but no inertia, a single bad action can have disasterous effects on your karma. If you have a lot of inertia, a little bit of evil won't hurt you.

Having more karma means having more inertia, and whether something is good or bad determines which way that inertia gets pushed.  You can't improve your karma by just doing more. That just improves your inertia. Your karma can only be changed (good or bad) by the quality of your actions, not the quantity.  But the quantity controls how much damage or how much good a single action can do.

People with no karma are given a little bit of time to get used to things before their karma starts adding up.  When you start collecting bad karma, you will start getting slapped on the wrist. You'll get slapped harder and harder until you either notice and change, or the karma fairys knock your ass out.

While karma is a metaphysical thing, it is not the act of any deity (other than by creating it). It is a law of physics, much like gravity. While a deity can theoretically "bless" you, and take away some of your bad karma temporarily, she is about as likely to do this as she is to "bless" you by stopping you halfway down after you jump off a bridge.  Deitys may do this kind of thing for their pets from time to time, but most likely nobody else will see it.

One amusing thing about karma is that there's no way to see it. It can be measured, but only by the omnicient. Everyone else has to just guess. Some people just have a natural sense of where they stand, but for a lot of people it follows their ego and self esteem.  If you think pretty highly of yourself, it would be prudent to pay attention and watch for those little slaps on the wrist that continue to get worse. That's the only way you can really know where you stand. If you think you're icky, but nothing bad ever seems to happen to you, then you may be in better shape than you think.

One other thing worth noting is the concept of Decay. If people were just fucked when they got enough bad karma, they would never have a chance to grow or redeem themselves. Similarly, someone could store up a bunch of good karma and then just never do anything else, good or bad. They would continue to have good karma indefinately.  Decay means that over time, karma tends to move towards balance, if it doesn't get pushed in either direction.  So if you have a bad phase, and get a lot of bad karma really quick, the karma fairies may beat your ass - and for a while you won't be allowed to change your karma - but just by waiting, it will eventually return to a balanced state.  Keep in mind though that your inertia doesn't change, so when you are allowed to do things again, the natural pull of things will be back towards your original level of good or bad karma. It would be prudent to make sure you only collect good karma at this time.

Conclusion

I hope this clears up some of the confusion about what's going to happen on the site. I also hope it makes other things suitably vague. The karma scripts will be calculating stuff based on as many different parts of the site as I can write the code for. They will be a little inaccurate at first, but should improve as I add more sections. So far, they are accurate enough.

Now that the oracle has spoken, I'm curious how people interpret and respond.