Proving Assertions

[sao]

Testimony is evidence. Telling the story in the first place counts, absolutely.

[Polk]

@sao Yup. And proof is the accumulation of evidence beyond which competing theories make any sense.

“He said, she said” is notoriously one of the hardest situations to prove anything in ever. In a MUSH or otherwise. There’s a reason that phrase is a cliche.

But all you can do is gather information and do the best you can.

[Roz]

@GF said in Proving Assertions:

@Roz said in Proving Assertions:

Wait, sorry, hold up. You’d be SUSPICIOUS of someone offering up logs of sexual harassment they experienced??

Suspicious might be too powerful a word on my part. I’m trying to say it would feel weird to me if someone preemptively lead with logs. It’s my general experience people are reluctant to expose themselves to that kind of scrutiny, unless that reluctance is on display in the post providing it.

Gonna be real, this general sentiment would make me less likely to report something.

[sao]

@Polk “he said, she said” is primarily the only evidence there is even in situations where there’s a lot more at stake than anything that happens in gaming. Credibility determinations are required to make judgments, that’s all there is to it. In a situation where there is genuinely only one person in each side of an argument that’s hard. But that’s relatively rare, because most people operate according to patterns of behavior.

[Polk]

@sao Yup. “Fortunately,” people tend to spread around their misbehavior and are found out.

[Herja]

A couple of the skills that are required in good staffing that I rarely see most people mention are the ability to do a vibe check and be okay with getting it wrong sometimes. Because you will occasionally get it wrong but most of the best staffers I have ever met have an ability to do a fairly accurate gut check. Hell, with one new staffer I brought on to Arx, one the big reasons I reached out to them was that I trust their ability to vibe check.

Some people are going to hate hearing that because we have been schooled to believe ‘innocent until proven guilty’ and that every accusation needs to be thoroughly investigated and all evidence used to ‘convict’ needs to be publicly available. But this isn’t a court of law and getting removed from a MUSH isn’t the end of the world. If all I have is a ‘he said, she said’ situation, then most of that decision is based on what I have seen from them IC and OOC and if there has been a pattern of behavior. I do ask for logs for context but I don’t insist on them. Almost every ban for predatory behavior on Arx was someone already flagged for watching by staff.

What it comes down to is if you trust staff judgment. If you have seen them getting it wrong more than getting it right or outright ignoring toxic behavior or not able to admit if they have gotten it wrong without having a meltdown over it, leaving the game is often the best option, but sunk cost fallacy can step in and make that really hard (hi, it me as well).

[shit-piss-love]

Vibe check is for real and can be done real quick. Most of your info about a new person in the very first meeting. Like take for example the flying monkey from that other thread who came in hot with vague info and a grey rock stance. Normally people who are contrite lead with, like, contrition.

[GF]

@Roz You’re right, and that’s something I need to work on. Thanks for calling me out on it.

[Roz]

@GF Hey, respect for the response.

[GF]

@Roz Thank you, but I hope I’d still be willing to interrogate myself whether or not I got praised for it. Everyone has prejudices, and it feels like everyone should be willing to be uncomfortable in the process of trying to overcome them.

[Pax]

@Pavel I don’t know if I can answer this. The scope of the assertion matters.

If someone wants to say, “you know, they have a McDonald’s in Nepal” – fuck it, pal, I’m inclined to believe you. No problem.

If they want to say, “you know, I actually threw a Molotov cocktail into the one McDonald’s in Nepal” – I don’t know man, something about that don’t really line up.

How much and what kind of proof I’d look for really depends on the size and complexity of the claim. Small claims, small evidence. Big claims, big evidence.

[Roz]

@Pax said in Proving Assertions:

If they want to say, “you know, I actually threw a Molotov cocktail into the one McDonald’s in Nepal” – I don’t know man, something about that don’t really line up.

I’d believe it coming from @helvetica.

[helvetica]

@Roz LOL. I can’t throw! I have Betty Spaghetti arms.

[Testament]

@Pax said in Proving Assertions:

If someone wants to say, “you know, they have a McDonald’s in Nepal” – fuck it, pal, I’m inclined to believe you. No problem.

I hate the fact that I felt obligated to look up if there was, in fact, a McDonalds in Nepal.

[tsar]

@Testament said in Proving Assertions:

@Pax said in Proving Assertions:

If someone wants to say, “you know, they have a McDonald’s in Nepal” – fuck it, pal, I’m inclined to believe you. No problem.

I hate the fact that I felt obligated to look up if there was, in fact, a McDonalds in Nepal.

Well???

[Testament]

@tsar Oddly, there is not. And I say ‘oddly’ if only because I expected them to be like Starbucks, literally everywhere.

[tsar]

@Testament said in Proving Assertions:

@tsar Oddly, there is not. And I say ‘oddly’ if only because I expected them to be like Starbucks, literally everywhere.

Thank you for googling this for me

[bear_necessities]

@Herja My gut’s been right about every creeper I sniffed out so far.

[Herja]

@bear_necessities I think the only time that I could say that I definitely got it wrong was when I ignored my instincts about a player and gave them an additional chance to be a creepy weirdo rather than just perma-ban immediately. I even knew as I was issuing the temp ban that they were just going to do it again and get the perm ban. And, I was right. It took them a whole ten days after the temp ban to earn the permanent one. I feel like I should have just issued a permanent and been done with it rather than giving them another chance to be weird.

[blu]

Interrogation, vibe checks, and conversations are important.

But I’ll be super honest—if I get multiple reports from multiple sources bringing me sexual harassment claims, gaslighting claims, or stalker claims, and we talk it through and everything clicks…

I’m not really going to give the offender the same time of day. I’ll give the person 10 minutes to get their affairs in order and ban them. The one convo I do not want to have is the “I was just joking!” or “I didn’t mean it like that!” or “You don’t know my side of the story!” We did that on Savage Skies with Khalid—which I guess cost us a lot because we didn’t let his cohort corner us with counter-interrogation that included us revealing our “sources.”

Maybe that could set me up for regretting a call later, but I haven’t so far.

Semi-aside—I have liked Ares report feature. Something doesn’t feel right, you just report the whole thing and it creates a request and Staff gets all the details.