OP here. We have threads on Iran War motivations. That’s about the past. This is a thread about predicting the future. The path of oil prices is highly relevant to that. It is sometimes claimed that betting is a tax on bullshit. Nonsense: pushing people to state their opinions in the form of prediction is the real tax on bullshit. Implementing that leads you to objective variables like the price of oil.
What we don’t have yet is a thread entitled: “Piercing the fog of war: discussing controversies regarding what is happening with the Iran War.”
Descriptive controversies as opposed to normative controversies. Controversies regarding what is happening now on the ground, not what we should do.
Damn you to hell infinite scroll: damn you to hell!
I was a little dubious about moderator attempts to curb hijacks: it seemed to me to be a misguided attempt to curb rancor. But here’s the thing: I found it a lot easier to skim threads in vBulletin than in Discourse. So hijacks have a higher cost than they used to. I tentatively concluded that the best practice involved leaning towards thinly sliced thread design, ones with more restrictive purview. But I don’t buy that honestly, except as a hypothesis.
Anyway my intent with the prediction thread was to challenge the board to transform their opinions and perceptions into predictions that could be evaluated later. There’s a fair amount of wandering around in that thread, but I think the oil price predictions are central.
Note that the problem is that the writer must necessarily make compound forecasts: the price of oil will be the result of a lot of things. But sorting through that is in the nature of advancing human understanding: great natural experiments are all too rare.
So, please note that I didn’t say it was a hijack (see the word sidetrack above) and I didn’t use mod color. I saw the possibility coming, and so strove to specifically address your points while explicitly tying it back to how it applied to the Iran War (see the rest of the cited post).
Perhaps I was wrong in trying to incorporate my ‘nudge’ into an otherwise all poster-hat-on post. And I’m NOT denying your position that oil prices are absolutely a weapon that Iran is using to manipulate the outcomes and consequences of the war.
But talking about it without without talking how it affects your predictions or forecasts is drifting away from your own OP:
Which was what I was trying to do in the rest of the post you cited.
Again, I will fully accept the criticism that I mixed “business” and pleasure/posting in an unfair way. I was trying to keep it as informal as possible because I didn’t think it had in anyway risen to the level of a hijack.
Hm. Point taken, but I thought your comment deserved a reply, and that ATMB would be a more appropriate forum than Politics.
I don’t think putting in nudges is a bad thing.
A tightened hijack policy has similar downsides to hierarchical databases. In practice, lots of posts could be slotted into a number of different threads when you slice the threads thinly. Here, we have what could be called a sidetrack, except its outcome is a precondition for lots of other things. (If oil price spikes lead to recession, that’s going to affect diplomatic positioning of Iran and the US a lot.)
I don’t have any good answers here vis a vis hijack policy. I do think this is a decent example of how difficult the tradeoffs are. Luckily the consequences aren’t severe.
Since it was a legit concern about a moderator’s actions ATMB is the right place, though you can always feel free to DM me. I try to respond quickly! You are totally within your rights to politely criticize my actions as a moderator (or Pit me as a poster ).
I think the parsing of threads, especially in P&E/GD is the great strength and weakness of human moderation. We don’t robotically enforce the rules, and often make judgement calls. Which is why we’ll sometimes hint, sometimes type “mod-nudge”, use notes, warnings or more severe options. It’s always a judgement call, and sometimes we’ll be be over sensitive, or read the trends wrong (points to self).
This is one of the big reasons we opened up the HT thread option. We haven’t yet found an option to take into account how each poster and each mod is going to draw the line in granular detail, thus the current “all or nothing” option as a place to start from for at least putting a bit back under the OPs control.
So again, you did nothing wrong in (very politely in fact) questioning my reasoning. I fully accept we all are acting in good faith, and if anything, I was overreacting. Point taken as constructive criticism!
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