From: crew@CS.Stanford.EDU (Roger Crew)
Subject: Re: Guilty-until-proven-innocent
Organization: Stanford University Computer Science Dept.
	<1992Jul17.160841.9366@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1992 09:20:56 GMT

In article <1992Jul17.160841.9366@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu> jmorrill@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (John M Morrill) writes:
>> If it is a case of false accusation, which does happen, I'm much more
>> likely to believe the accused if e is polite and understanding.  While
>> your message was not incredibly flaming, it did not carry the sort of
>> tone I'm looking for when someone's been accused of some high crime on
>> LambdaMOO.  You seem to be more upset that someone called you some
>> nasty names than that some earlier person had a worse fate inflicted
>> upon them.  Perhaps you are an innocent victim, an accident of
>> history.  But you need to take a deep breath and calm down.  Realize
>> that these people are reacting out of an earlier deeper hurt, and
>> don't make things worse for yourself.
> 
> So in the future, when being treated unfairly, don't you dare stand up
> and demand that you be treated fairly. Be subservient and play into the
> wizard/gods power trip.

*** BZZZT!  You lose.  The Car, The Boat, and The Vacation for Two 
***         in the Virgin Islands.  Sorry.  Thank you for playing.

This business of looking at someones attitude/tone is NOT a matter of
getting the ego stroked.  In fact, I (yeah, I'm another one of these evil
LambdaMOO wizards) tend to lose respect for someone the moment they start
fawning, but this has never been a big problem... :-)

First, a word about egos.  The following non-conversation was repeated a
number of times shortly after I was first granted a wizard bit.  Note that in
MOO this is simply a matter of an existing wizard flipping a bit and has 
nothing to do (as on LP) with playing up through n levels...

  Clueless-Person-Who-Probably-Meant-Well says, 
    "Oh wow, you're a wizard now.  Congratulations!"
  I almost reply, 
    "For what?  For happening to know Haakon [archwizard] in real life?
     For being in the right place at the right time when he decided he
     could use another pair of hands to hack on the core-db and help keep
     watch over the place to give him more time to do server hacking?  
     This is a BIG ACHIEVEMENT????  Give me a fucking break!!!"

Of course, actually saying this would not have been terribly polite and
in any case he meant well.  Perhaps earning someone's trust *is* an achievement
of some sort, but certainly nothing to give out medals for; anybody who is
in *any* kind of job at all has to do pretty much the same thing.  
Such should be (and I hope *is*) the norm rather than the exception.

For those of you who haven't actually administered a MUD, 
let me clue you in:

  MUDGod/Wizard == Janitor (people scream at you when the toilets overflow...)

The idea that I could get an ego boost out of lording it over some number of
helpless players is nothing short of LUDICROUS.  We're talking about the
joy of being a TINY FISH in an EVEN SMALLER POND, folks.  Anybody who does 
get off on this needs to have his head examined (actually, the operative word 
here is "pathetic")

Well okay, I *do* get a slight ego boost out of the fact that I'm helping
to build something (I'm in this for the hacking, basically) that at least a
few people find useful and fun.  If that's a power trip, then more people
should have power trips.

Now, to get back to yduJ's point above, which seems to have been missed 
entirely, let's try it another way:

  You, the wizard, are confronted with two streams of ASCII text.

  One of them is being reasonable, e.g., actually answering questions, 
    sticking to facts, etc...  perhaps displaying some indication that 
    s/he actually bothered to read the rules.

  The other displays all of the emotional maturity of an 8-year-old,
    ranting on, filling your screen with repetitious text, demanding 
    rights (*), making threats (**), not letting the other party get 
    a word in edgewise...

  Which one are you going to believe in the absence of other evidence?

This is a point of practical politics: for all that we in charge try to be 
fair, how one presents one's case makes all the difference in the world.

Keep in mind that this is not a court of law.  The innocent-until-proven-guilty
standard is based on the actual power of the courts & government and the
damage that they can do to individual lives.  The whole idea is you don't
inflict such damage until you're damned sure.  As MUD Wizards, we have no such
power; the worst punishment we can inflict is banishment from the MUD itself.
We are not in the business of depriving someone of life, liberty or the
pursuit of happiness (for anyone who claims LambdaMOO as his sole source of
happiness, the word "pathetic" comes to mind again for some reason...); the
standards of proof are thus significantly LOWER.  Never mind that none of the
evidence we see would ever hold up in a *real* trial in a *real* court of law.

Nor is slander really an issue given that players are essentially anonymous
and we don't share our site/registration information with other MUDs.  That
we might have someone/somesite blackballed has no impact on their being
able to play on other MUDs.

Add to this the following facts
 (1) letting an asshole run free has costs for us --- mainly that of driving
     away the players we actually do want to attract and encourage
 (2) We all have real lives; none of us are paid to do this --- 
     if there's a time conflict between giving someone a completely fair trial
     and some real life exigency, guess who loses.  You may call this "lazy" 
     if you like;  we'll see how *you* do with 2600 players...

and you'll see that there's some bias towards getting asshole problems (and
the kinds of VR-harassers (***) that yduJ was talking about clearly count as
assholes) settled quickly.  That an accusation is made is prima facie evidence
of a problem, even if it is on occasion the accuser that has the problem; thus
we need to hear from the accused --- if @newting him/her is the only way to
get a response, so be it.  Is this fair to the innocents?  Clearly not as fair
as it could be.  Note that locking an entire site for the sake of keeping an
asshole out isn't really fair either.  Such is life.  The innocents may
suffer, but I really doubt they're suffering *that* much.

(*) About demanding rights:  Never mind the premise that players have no
rights, I'll grant that coming down on someone for simply demanding rights
*is* oppressive.  There is however a difference between saying, "You know,
your rules don't say anything about X" or "This rule prohibits X, but I think
we should be allowed to do it because ..." and "nyaah, nyaah, I found this
loophole in your rules and you can't get me" or "I have the right to do this
because your rule doesn't explicitly prohibit it" (never mind that it
completely violates the intent of the rule).  And the context is important.
If you're trying to make a case for being the injured party, the fact that you
were employing technicalities is not going to inspire sympathy.

(**) About making threats:  I just don't understand why people do this.
Regardless of the credibility of the threat, it basically destroys any
sympathy we might have had for you.  In the event that there is any
credibility at all to your threat, you win an instant @toading and a 
permanent @redlist on your site, which in this case wouldn't be just 
your workstation but your entire school (funny how we never have trouble 
with people from .com sites).  Good move.

(***) About "VR-rape":  While I personally have trouble with the notion of
"VR-rape" and in fact I consider it a bad idea to use "rape" to refer to
anything other from an actual physical act, the notion of HARASSMENT 
(sexual or otherwise -- and I prefer not to draw a distinction) is relatively
straightforward.  yduJ and I may not agree on terminology, but we are agreed
that players on LambdaMOO shouldn't have to put up with this shit 
(i.e., if they don't want to --- some of them do; we leave them alone...)
--
Roger Crew      OBEY     MARRY AND REPRODUCE      CONSUME      STAY ASLEEP
Internet:  crew@CS.Stanford.EDU
LambdaMOO:  Rog