This constant barrage of self bans is interesting to me. Like I really don’t understand why you would ever do it but I feel like that falls on the lack of experience I have as a person. If you are frustrated with certain conversations why not just not partake in said convos? There are plenty of good resources and topics here that everyone can learn from without any hostility. Maybe it boils down to addiction? I’m just thinking out loud here as I hate seeing us lose frequent posters.
That makes the most sense to me. It’s certainly possible to just choose to not visit the site for any length of time you choose.
I guess some people don’t have the self-control to do that, so they ask for the self-ban. However, it seems like half the people who do the self-ban, just make another account and keep posting.
I guess the other explanation is the drama factor. Some people don’t want to leave as much as they want to tell people they’re leaving. Asking for a self-ban accomplishes that.
Maybe. I don’t think a single answer applies to every case though. It seems like it happens the most after arguments and bickering; especially the covid thread. I hope we try and find a way to alleviate it.
I think I was answering a different question than you were asking. I was more concerned with how people choose to leave for a period of tme and it seems that you’re more concerned with the why.
To put it another way, if instead of requesting self-bans, people just said, “I’m out” and never came back, or even just left without saying anything at all, then it sounds like you would think that is pretty much the same problem as requesting a self-ban.
It seems weird to me to describe a self-ban as a lack of self-control. It’s the exact opposite. A self-ban is an expression of self-control. Deleting an app from your phone or an ex from your contacts is self control. It’s a way of doing the thing you want to do.
“Why not just do X?” is kind of a weird thing to ask in any context. Why not work out and eat healthy and be a great dad and volunteer at the dog pound and learn a new language and … ?
I had a year to myself once and just smoked weed and watched Dr. Phil. Doing things is hard. Rearranging your surroundings (e,g, a self ban…) is a great way to nudge yourself toward doing the thing you actually want to do.
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The lack of self-control is the need for someone else to put something into place that you can’t circumvent. Someone with true self-control would just stop posting and would find no need to request a ban because they’re not going to post here in the first place. It would be a redundant waste of time. But for someone with less self-control, it is critical to prevent backsliding.
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Yeah. This is a really good post.
Im generally successful at avoiding candy, but mainly by ensuring i never have any in the house. If theres ever any around, at work or at home, ill eat it all. All.
Do i have good or bad self control if i hardly ever eat candy?
As described, your self-control is OK.
However, you are lacking compared to someone who doesn’t eat candy despite it being in the house or otherwise easily available.
This isn’t that complicated.
I don’t eat candy that’s in the house. Do I have more self-control than Rugby?
That’s not enough information and it’s impossible to get enough information to answer that question.
For the purposes of my comparison I was assuming someone who really liked to eat candy a lot (as Rugby seems to). Sorry for not being explicit about that. I thought it was implied. I was also limiting it to an evaluation of self-control with respect to candy eating.
I agree there are all sorts of other weird variables one could introduce (e.g. what if he has a house full of candy but is told that one piece has a deadly poison in it and he isn’t told which one), but I assume the broad strokes of my point were clear and not that controversial.
It’s only clear if you assume you can know how much someone else likes candy, which you can’t.
In an hypothetical case, you can assume whatever you want. I was assuming equal love of candy.
If you want to revise this to:
“If you had more self-control you could keep the candy in your house and still not eat it.” I think that would be correct, but you are suggesting that one person would have more self-control than another without even positing that they have the same intensity of desire for candy. But, what’s more important than your failure to posit that is that that thing is absolutely unknowable, so you can never compare two real people’s self-control.
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On the surface it sort of might seem like I’m the one playing some logic game, but that weird assumption was built into your statement, and it turned what was a discussion about real people into a very hypothetical discussion about some kind of abstract person with a measurable level of desire for candy.
Yeah, that sounds good.
As you proposed, think of it as Rugby is lacking self-control compared to a mental state where he could avoid candy if it were in the house, while having unchanged desire for candy. Now we’ve removed all the hypothetical stuff (at least mostly, I guess that mental state is hypothetical), and preserved the essence of what I was saying. Thanks for helping flesh that out.
You’re welcome. In light of that, do you know if Yadi has less self-control than anyone else?
I’m quite sure he has less self-control than a number of people (this is a massive favorite to be true). I just don’t know which people.
Ok, now I think that is semanticing. I said “anyone else”, not “everyone else”. And I was talking about something really happening in this thread. There was an implication that people doing what Yadi was doing are lacking in self-control. I’m not trying to say Yadi has more self-control than anyone on Earth, just that there’s not enough information to evaluate the amount of self-control someone has when you learn that they want to self-ban.
I’m really not seeing the semantiking. Think of it like this. There are two groups of people
- Group 1 gets fed up with unstuck and requests a self ban for a month
- Group 2 gets fed up with unstuck and just stops posting for a month
I’d say on average group 1 has less self control than group 2. And in this case, Yadi would be in group 1, so it would be safe to say that someone in group 2 probably has more self control than Yadi as there is probably someone in there who has a similar desire to post here.
I’m also assuming these two things are separate. It becomes tautological if you are going to say something like, “Well, since he needed a self-ban, we know that he liked posting here more than someone who didn’t need a self-ban”.