@pretzelattack1 said in #48:
> uh do cheaters have the same rights to confidentiality as other players? what if they lie about how often they cheat?
we don't much rights whether we cheat or not.
If someone says if you confess in an email, we will keep it confidential, and then goes public or even just spreads gossip to a few people, as far as I know it's legal, but unethical at a minimum. i'm not a fan of unethical behaviour. Once a person or company starts being unethical, the scale of the unethical behaviour often grows.
why is chess.com even asking for an email confession i wonder? i guess no need to wonder based on them sharing some of them to a news outlet.
Certainly, doesn't say much about the integrity of an organisation.
You also have to look at the situation as detailed in the e-mails; without presenting any evidence, the accused has the choice of (a) Privately confess or (b) Never play again. A rational person - especially if they considered the offence trivial - would just confess. This alone is a bit distasteful as it's essentially the choice giving to 17th Century witches. But to then release the 'pressured' confession, well that is most definitely untrustworthily. The same would be said if the accused released the e-mails.
Appears that Carlsen/Chess.com in order to uphold the integrity of chess are prepared to publicly display their own lack of integrity. This whole saga has the distinct tint of McCarthyism.
What concerns me is how far this McCarlsenism is going to spread as there is no way of proving one doesn't cheat - especially when the accuser has no need to present evidence. It's no big deal if the only consequence is being anonymously kicked of an on-line platform, but things like this have a habit of growing. Consider the currently farfetched possibly of being reported on an on-line platform by a 'bad loser' - of which there are plenty - and trigging an anti-cheating check and banned from OTB chess playing for the rest of your life for an incident that occurred ten years ago. Obviously, a bit farfetched but it's not hard to see the profits. Starting to feel risky playing on-line chess nowadays?!
However, you look at this saga, the way it has been handled has been dreadful for chess.
@AlexiHarvey
Really appreciate your posts. Deeply well written, thought out and insightful. I think it's been said by quite a number of people that -- a few dedicated, intelligent and so on and so forth people can do more than thousands and so forth, I just hope that the few dedicated people can make things better.
Everything you said is very true and I appreciate your posts (as an individual poster myself). The whole scenario is so horrendous atrocious and obscene, and I am just glad there are many like you with good sense, putting an effort to help clarify and rectify this situation.
Your statements are very clear and helpful and true. I understand these things by a process of "light-grasping" so to speak, just not holding onto any perception, and so on and so forth; and just understanding the nature of things. Like for instance Hans, our dear Hans, looking at his interviews it is for example *very clear* to see that he is telling the truth. If you are looking for a suave Orator in the Senate (think like Rome and stuff), -- No, that's not him. If you want someone explaining the very simple truth about what happened -- There you have it.
Above and beyond this the main issue I think is - -Well of course many things -- but the fractionizing of the chess world which has come about from the internet has been a bit of a big issue. To put this in a more philosophical way -- when several ideas for example, come together then they intermix and mingle, and so on and so forth. So does the lowest common denominator win from that, or does the highest? It's a mix of the two as it would seem -- but what I'm getting at is, that the "little pokes", the "little stabs" that people on the net -- or anywhere -- give each other are much more than it seems.
The "little negativities" and so forth. Of course -- in the last few years this has gotten better. But in the main thing that -- people who take to the shadows and take an absolute quest for power -- no matter who it is, unless they are *actually* an enlightened group, they will usually cause a lot more pain and suffering than is necessary. IF you tell one person -- just one person -- that they are meanginless, they have no rights, they have no value; they should not be heard - their voice should be silenced, and millions of other messages along this exact same negative vibrational frequency -- Literally if you tell one person, that will affect everyone; and if you tell person after person in an eternal line ------ Then it gets major. So that's what I mean when the "little negativities," build up. That's one place we have to fight this. There should Never be a "Shadow power council" but that's the way things have been going. And this blow up is the result of underwater, underground toxicity building up for quite a while.
The other main thing is the secondary streamers who give things like this a push. You have Hikaru who never tires of being wrong. To give an example: When Hikaru lost the chance to play Yan Nepomnyaschy (yep that's how he himself spells it, you may know it as Ian Nepomniachtchi) Erm-- anyway he kept saying "Magnus would have played for the W.C. if I had been his opponent." Well, no, that is obviously not true but he thought it was so very true. He said it over and over and over again, as his wont, and believed it to be the most remarkably true, completely clear and logical notion, and so of course that's why he repeated it dozens of times. Well -- No, obviously there's no chance of that and it's not a logical or sensible thing to think or say.
But again it just is what it is. Anyway in the current case he was similarly off-- only this time with an extremely heightened state of emotion he "roused the rabble" into an emotional frenzy. And other secondary streamers, with quite a few thousand or hundreds of thousands of viewers, get this same pitch and pick it up. They may be 1100 at chess (not a dig), but they join the chorus of pitch-fork burning group without any logic, without taking time and meditation.
Of course it's not new, as you mentioned. If we take a good look at many things of massive human interactions, they are often like this. People manufacture war and reasons for war, and this illogic, this wave of hostility and toxicity, is along the lines of that. But *it does not have to be;* it absolutely and certainly doesn't.
What's particularly odious about all of this -- as you mention how it's destructive for the chess community and so on and so forth -- is how much force is being applied to the completely wrong things. But I guess it's just a happenstance blow-up and it occurs and we should deal with it. To say that Magnus could easily put his voice behind Ukraine, Women's rights, or 25 million other probable causes, he could make a difference but instead he lost his perspective and just wants to magnify a misunderstanding of his own -- an inability of his own and failing of his own -- and throw his troubles in the face of every chess person on the planet.
It detracts from everything when things like this happen. So as mentioned, may peace bless the chess world. It certainly needs it. Again thank you for your clear, incisive and insightful posts Alexi. You write clearly, with purpose and intelligence and thought put behind it.
Take care.
Thank you for your kind response.
I am simply shocked that a business would release confidential e-mails to a news outlet to undermine an individual. The centre of the conflict is a harmless board game, but in business such action is something you most definitely do not do and is a far bigger infraction than an individual cheating. In the UK this would be instant dismissal for an employee, with great difficulty finding another job. The implication therefore is the action was sanctioned at a high level within the business. Further there has been no discussion on chess.com forums nor would I feel safe starting such a topic.
@h2b2
didn't you leave out a step? what if they lie about the confession? what do you do then? what if you had agreed not to publicly lie about your confession?
Anyways, either of them deserves to be banned, you know who!
@pretzelattack1 said in #55:
> didn't you leave out a step? what if they lie about the confession? what do you do then? what if you had agreed not to publicly lie about your confession?
I'm not sure what you're replying to or who you mean when you say "they"
I mean Hans and Dmitri. I think Hans lied again, about the extent and recency of his online cheating, and it put chess.com in the position of letting the lie go unchallenged or releasing evidence that it was a lie. you said
"if someone says if you confess in an email, we will keep it confidential, and then goes public or even just spreads gossip to a few people, as far as I know it's legal, but unethical at a minimum. i'm not a fan of unethical behaviour. Once a person or company starts being unethical, the scale of the unethical behaviour often grows."
see that is the concern of a lot of people, that Hans started being unethical, and rather than learning from his mistakes, kept getting more and more unethical, even trying to use chess.com's nondisclosure policy against it to exonerate himself. both Magnus and chess.com (especially Magnus) handled this situation poorly. both can be true, but a pattern of cheating needs to be addressed. Bridge had a cheating scandal and as far as I know has dealt with it, Poker has had several cheating scandals and it is a continuing problem.
rrr
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