Proving Assertions

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.

Pavel

@blu This thread is more about the forum than on games.

blu

@Pavel Oooh. I got caught-up thinking about cross-games a bit where a call on one game carries over into assumptions made in other games.

I think the whole—

@Pavel said in Proving Assertions:

This is about the forum in particular

—triggered my brain into think about how you make assertions about someone’s behavior (because I misread it as this is NOT about the forum in particularly, bad close-reading this morning).

In terms of the forum, what I’ve noticed is that usually, without fail, when someone comes onto the forum and makes a claim, it creates an open space for others to go, “OK, yeah. I experienced this, too.” We rarely have run into an issue where someone brings something up and the majority go “nah, didn’t have that experience.”

Collective experiences create a pattern of behavior, which I think can actually provide more “proof” than receipts. Ultimately, the they said/they said falls apart when one side of the scale outweighs the other.

This echoes @Pyrephox’s response.

In terms of the AOA thread, I took a few days saying something because I had a lot of anxiety around “time since” and “had no proof.”

Meg

i definitely look for discussion. the times where people have came and said outright lies or even biased versions of events, someone will usually pop up to give a log and correct.

if there are a lot of people saying the same thing, i also tend to give that more weight, especially if i know them and they have built a reputation here. meaning, they have some stake in not going around and putting out false claims.

for some things, i do put more weight into being able to read the logs. like, i know there’s been logs where someone has been ‘ugh, x is the worst!’ and then they post the log and it’s like, man, i wouldn’t want to play with either of you. etc.

but i don’t think anything needs to be ‘proved’ here. this is a place to air grievances, flag up behavior, and everyone can decide for themselves which warnings to heed and which to ignore.

Pavel

@Meg said in Proving Assertions:

but i don’t think anything needs to be ‘proved’ here.

Sure it does. It’s just done on an individual basis rather than consensus or whatever.