Zompist Bboard Again

I've banned Bob for a 5 day period.

He has been doxxing, harrassing, and threatening several members by PM. This is not acceptable, and he was strongly warned about it the first time it happened.

I hope he'll learn something and behave better. If not, well, my patience is running thin.

Thank you, this is very welcome, gives us some breathing space as a board for a few days.

A good decision. Applause!

When the ban expires, can you allow him to post in one thread only, or something like that?

Bob talked himself into a permaban.

This starts with his behavior in IMs. He has been insulting people, and more insanely, threatening people based on his "rich friends".

When he was banned for this, his first response was to deny it, then to insult and threaten me.

With someone like him, one sometimes wonders if he understands social skills. I don't think any more that that's the problem. He doesn't think that rules apply to him.

zompist wrote: ↑Mon Jul 20, 2020 6:34 pm Bob talked himself into a permaban.

Didn't take long. We'll see how he does in the Other Place.

Wasn't Bob an elaborate troll? I mean, with the profile pic, the 'BA in linguistics' routine, he couldn't have been serious, could he?

Ars Lande wrote: ↑Tue Jul 21, 2020 2:16 am Wasn't Bob an elaborate troll? I mean, with the profile pic, the 'BA in linguistics' routine, he couldn't have been serious, could he?

I’m almost certain he was serious. He certainly was willing to put time and effort into his various interests, as is obvious by his copious (albeit disorganised) writings; based on that alone, I would hardly call him a troll. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Vardelm got near the truth of it (although the relevant posts seem to be missing): Bob just wanted praise for his work, and when he didn’t get the praise he wanted, things got very ugly very quickly.

Who knows? He was way too prolific to be a troll though. Who has time to make all those super-long posts?

I cleaned up Pedant's thread; if there's any Bobbery in other threads feel free to point it out.

zompist wrote: ↑Tue Jul 21, 2020 2:40 am if there's any Bobbery in other threads

I think I may have a new favourite word!

EDIT: And, if I understand what it means correctly, here’s some more Bobbery: here here here (+ also possibly here, although that one seems unusually coherent)

bradrn wrote: ↑Tue Jul 21, 2020 2:34 am

Ars Lande wrote: ↑Tue Jul 21, 2020 2:16 am Wasn't Bob an elaborate troll? I mean, with the profile pic, the 'BA in linguistics' routine, he couldn't have been serious, could he?

I’m almost certain he was serious.

When he first showed up on the ZBB several years ago, I thought he was a troll as well. After a while, I came to the opinion that he's quite serious about everything he says.

bradrn wrote: ↑Tue Jul 21, 2020 2:34 am He certainly was willing to put time and effort into his various interests, as is obvious by his copious (albeit disorganised) writings;

zompist wrote: ↑Tue Jul 21, 2020 2:40 am Who knows? He was way too prolific to be a troll though. Who has time to make all those super-long posts?

I think Bob would do well to make shorter posts that are shorter and more focused. That would probably help him with his time issue as well as the reception to his content. Quality > quantity. If time really is a factor, I would post all of that to a blog or other website so that it's in one place, and then come here to provide links and a short commentary for anyone who's interested.

bradrn wrote: ↑Tue Jul 21, 2020 2:34 am I wouldn’t be surprised if Vardelm got near the truth of it (although the relevant posts seem to be missing): Bob just wanted praise for his work, and when he didn’t get the praise he wanted, things got very ugly very quickly.

You are probably referring to several posts I edited out (although quotes still remain). I was obviously very harsh with him, which I quite regret. Nothing is wrong with his general topics. If you are interested in Pakuni or Atlantean or whatever, have at it. However, the combination of constant listing of credentials, criticism of academics, self-praise, and expectation of compliments touches a raw nerve for me, and I would have done better to completely ignore it. Life is lessons, I suppose.

There's more Bobbery here too.

Vardelm wrote: ↑Tue Jul 21, 2020 7:56 am

bradrn wrote: ↑Tue Jul 21, 2020 2:34 am He certainly was willing to put time and effort into his various interests, as is obvious by his copious (albeit disorganised) writings;

zompist wrote: ↑Tue Jul 21, 2020 2:40 am Who knows? He was way too prolific to be a troll though. Who has time to make all those super-long posts?

I think Bob would do well to make shorter posts that are shorter and more focused. That would probably help him with his time issue as well as the reception to his content. Quality > quantity.

It’s possible that that would have helped, but I’m beginning to think that possibly nothing we could have suggested would have made a significant improvement to the quality of his posts. I think that, fundamentally, Bob needs to work on learning how to organise a written text in a way that is intelligible to a reader — if he can’t do that, then his posts will never improve much no matter how much guidance we give him. (e.g. when we asked him to stop making links-only posts, he just started copy-and-pasting stuff from Facebook; when we asked him to use one thread per topic, he made one thread per topic but then posted exactly the same stuff to both of them. To me, that suggests that he was trying to respond to our advice, but didn’t really understand how it would help or why we were asking him to do it, and so ended up doing it in a way that didn’t help us at all.)

If time really is a factor, I would post all of that to a blog or other website so that it's in one place, and then come here to provide links and a short commentary for anyone who's interested.

Um, wasn’t that exactly what he started out doing? Then we asked him to stop making links-only posts, and so he (eventually) stopped doing this.

bradrn wrote: ↑Tue Jul 21, 2020 8:51 am I think that, fundamentally, Bob needs to work on learning how to organise a written text in a way that is intelligible to a reader — if he can’t do that, then his posts will never improve much no matter how much guidance we give him.

True. This is difficult for a lot of people. They think that just because they have written something and it is intelligible to them, it will be so for everyone who reads. That's just not the case. Bob's posts often struck me as either 1st drafts or (and I think he may have even stated this) just his personal notes on the subject. That's just not going to pass muster, especially when you are writing it with notations that no one else is familiar with (IE different glossing). You're making people not only read your ideas and consider them, but also forcing them to .... wait for it.... decipher your notation systems. Communicating means considering who your audience is, and you need to communicate in ways that will help them understand your communications, not impede their understanding.

If Bob took less time writing about his own perceived merits and spend a little more on focusing his posts and writing them in a way that is much closer to accepted pratice, he would probably get more consideration of his work and ideas. People might still disagree, but at least it would be about the work and not his presentation, which I think would lead to less frustration on his part. I'm not sure this will ever happen though, regrettably.

bradrn wrote: ↑Tue Jul 21, 2020 8:51 am Um, wasn’t that exactly what he started out doing? Then we asked him to stop making links-only posts, and so he (eventually) stopped doing this.

True, but other people have done this and it works. I think it's the number of links, links to material that is still not much more than personal notes, the disorganization, and the amount of self-aggrandizing commentary that went along with it that was the problem.

All water under the bridge, friends. As I think back on it, there's nothing you can do to change either him or his style, as I think the cause is much deeper than anything we help with. He was like this 14 years ago when I first met him, and nothing about his style of posting or presentation has changed.

I see the ban has been made permanent, and that's for the best (good for the community, but I think best for Larry himself). I think underlying his interactions here is a certain frustration. For whatever reason he can't quite interact with others, and that's frustrating. When he doesn't get the praise, adulation, and earthly worship he so desperately craves, that's frustrating. People try to help him, and he can't quite figure out what's wrong, and that's frustrating. As we saw recently, this frustration boiled up into anger and he began resorting to rage-driven interactions.

This is new, and worrying.

Years ago, when he didn't get what he wanted from folks on Conlang-L and FrathWiki, he just went away quietly. Now he's gotten himself in trouble here and is well on the way to the same kind of response at the CBB. Public admonition & encouragement didn't work. Private warnings were responded to with very aggressive anger.

elemtilas wrote: ↑Tue Jul 21, 2020 12:15 pmI see the ban has been made permanent, and that's for the best (good for the community, but I think best for Larry himself). I think underlying his interactions here is a certain frustration. For whatever reason he can't quite interact with others, and that's frustrating. When he doesn't get the praise, adulation, and earthly worship he so desperately craves, that's frustrating. People try to help him, and he can't quite figure out what's wrong, and that's frustrating. As we saw recently, this frustration boiled up into anger and he began resorting to rage-driven interactions.

That's a good summary.

At least these days, the anger is turning into paranoia and lashing-out. I think it's a form of deflection: he can't accept that there's something wrong with how he behaves, so he thinks there's a conspiracy against him. That seems to be one reason he was trying to doxx people— he was convinced they were the very same people who he ran into in previous forums. Plus he's obsessed with ethnicity, which gives him another avenue of deflection— these people are mean because that's how (English, Americans, whatever) behave!

It's sad, but its gone from being not very social to being actively anti-social, and he just doesn't care to listen very hard on how to mitigate his behavior.

I think I got rid of the Bobbery people have pointed out.

If we all write novels, I suspect a common thread will be a character who jumps into other people's conversations and invariably turns them into discussions of himself, what he read last, how smart he is, how mean scholars in his field are to him, and some contentless affirmations about his hobby.

On his actual language posts, what was most frustrating was that almost all he did was translations. That's undoubtedly a lot of work, but a series of unglossed translations is about the worst way possible to show off a conlang.

FWIW, Moose thought Bob was on the spectrum. He may have had some of the symptoms, but the people I've known on the spectrum are not contemptuous of social skills; once they're aware of rules, they adapt.

zompist wrote: ↑Tue Jul 21, 2020 4:21 pm At least these days, the anger is turning into paranoia and lashing-out. I think it's a form of deflection: he can't accept that there's something wrong with how he behaves, so he thinks there's a conspiracy against him.

And I seem to be the ringleader!

That seems to be one reason he was trying to doxx people— he was convinced they were the very same people who he ran into in previous forums.

Well, that's one thing he's gotten right, then! We've crossed paths everywhere except FB! (And Reddit, but he went "researching" me there.)

Plus he's obsessed with ethnicity, which gives him another avenue of deflection— these people are mean because that's how (English, Americans, whatever) behave!

Indeed. That's new, too. I don't recall him ever bringing up ethnicity in this way before.

It's sad, but its gone from being not very social to being actively anti-social, and he just doesn't care to listen very hard on how to mitigate his behavior.

Indeed.

In my time in education I worked with a lot of kids on the spectrum, and Bob's writings reminded me of the rhetorical style I saw a lot from intelligent young people who were what they now call "neurodiverse." In particular I've seen students who excel at making coherent sentences but struggle with the pragmatic knowledge that is necessary to make coherent paragraphs and passages. Some students compensate for this by doubling down on a kind of aggressive overconfidence as a defense mechanism, which seems to describe Bob pretty well. But I skipped most of his posts, and I don't know him personally, so I'm hardly an expert. And at the time I had no idea he was harassing people in PMs, which of course has nothing to do with being on the spectrum, and is inexcusable.

Speaking anecdotally, and based mostly on the evidence of my own personal experience as a person with Asperger's and my limited exposure to other individuals on the spectrum, we generally seem to be aware that we're lacking something in the social skills department, particularly when we find ourselves doing something not generally considered acceptable in social situations through not knowing better and people immediately react badly, which I think is the main caus of anxiety about social situations, certainly for me - the fear that we're going to do something wrong and make people angry at us.