Bryan Krause
Hi, I'm Bryan. I'm a PhD neuroscientist working in a university research position. In research I try to understand how brains change across states of consciousness, using anesthetics, psychedelics, and sleep as tools. My side gig is as a statistician, helping clinically-trained researchers with varied levels of experience in science.
I'm a moderator and regular contributor at Biology.SE and Academia.SE, and also answer and curate frequently on MedicalSciences.SE in addition to here. I am experienced with the moderating tools here and I'm an active contributor in mod-only spaces (the mod Team and Teachers Lounge chat).
The existing slate of moderators have done a great job; I'm running to add choice to this election, both for the existing mods to know that others are interested in running if they'd prefer to step down, and for members of the community. If elected, you can expect me to be active behind the scenes tracking some of our repeat troll visitors, and you can expect a softer hand towards closing questions than I have as a community member; I'm very conscious of the distinction between the "one vote of 5" vs. "unilateral" close power.
- How would you deal with a user who produced a steady stream of valuable answers, but tends to generate a large number of arguments/flags from comments?
(copied from my answer on the recent Academia.SE election)
These are some of the hardest cases for moderators to intervene in, though not all flags are created equal. I don't see chattiness in comments ("no longer needed" flags), for example, as a reason to escalate things unless it hits truly immense levels. Personal attacks, bigotry, harassment, etc, on the other hand, cannot be diluted to "acceptable" by otherwise good contributions.
I'd expect to discuss things with the rest of the moderator team in questionable circumstances, especially when there are patterns of behavior that just barely toe the line. Sometimes a cautioning message may be all that is needed; other times it may be necessary to escalate to suspension just like with any other user.
- How would you handle a situation where another mod closed/deleted/etc. a question that you feel shouldn’t have been?
(copied from my answer on the recent Academia.SE election)
Usually these cases are best discussed in private moderator chat; sometimes the other moderator made a mistake, sometimes they have other information that guided their decision that isn't obvious. I think on my time moderating Biology.SE the past couple of years this has come up at most once or twice and we quickly came to consensus. I don't think it's good for the site or the moderators themselves to start a ping-pong war over a closed question without having a conversation about it. If I made an edit to rescue a question that another moderator closed I'd want community votes or another moderator to make the decision to reopen.
- Many people consider psychological theories by (for example) Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to be pseudoscientific. Considering this meta discussion on the subject and this related meta discussion, how would you deal with a question based on what many consider to be pseudoscientific?
I've appreciated hearing the perspectives on others on these topics. Personally, I think the history of Freud and Jung have an unfortunate level of influence on modern psychology and psychiatry. I think it's unfortunate when users come here with questions about how the world works that show that their primary understanding of psychology comes from these misleading influences and a misplaced certainty about their conclusions. The same could be said by more modern writers in the "self-help" genre, including those that have academic credentials and yet write beyond their expertise, mix their personal opinion with fact, or mislead pop science readers to make themselves money.
That said, I think the site has come to a reasonable understanding of how these questions should be handled. There's certainly a relevance if nothing else to the history of psychology and the iterative process that has led to modern techniques in therapy. We can use comments to let people know when they are venturing into pseudoscience and ask for clarification of how exactly they expect their questions to be addressed and how it is founded. I think the close reason that requires users to make assumptions and motivations clear is sufficient - as long as users can make their questions well-motivated with references and make clear whether they're asking about the real world or the world according to, say, Freud, I think these questions can coexist here.
- We often get questions on sensitive topics, such as race, sex, sexuality, and neurodiversity. Sometimes these lead to controversy. How would you deal with such questions?
I think these issues are best served by a proper application of the old CoC's assumption of good intent. We should expect users asking on these topics to be respectful of others and to respond positively to suggestions that improve the language of their questions to be more inclusive. I think evidence that a user opposes these initiatives is a good reason to suspend assumptions about their good intent.
In the other direction, efforts to cite real literature and use the language used in science rather than internet comment sections are evidence that users have real questions on touchy subjects - we should be supportive of these efforts.
In the most serious cases, I'd opt to proactively remove questions that include bigoted speech but to include a comment explaining where the faults in the question are and ask that the question be flagged for moderator attention to undelete once those faults are addressed. Assuming good intent doesn't mean to take no action, but rather to let people fix the things that are offensive. We know that askers come here from all sorts of backgrounds and may not always be familiar with where the boundaries lie. The goal is to educate and reform where needed.
I'll add that there are a couple repeat users around the network whose behavior I am quite familiar with. These users are sometimes very good at making their content appear genuine; their history makes clear that they are not. These users feed on the discord that their questions produces; I think it's important for moderators to keep an eye on them and make sure our users focus their attention on the people truly here to participate.
- Some years ago, a site "reboot" was initiated and completed, that included a name change for the site. Looking at the site analytics (a disclaimer says I am not allowed to share specifics), major indicators such as Visitors and Active Users, New Users, Posts, and Votes, appear to have peaked somewhere between 2014-2017, and been in decline since. I am curious how you would envision the future of this stack?
I think there's always a difficult balance between quality and quantity on the smaller StackExchange sites. Personally, I would rather have a site with lower activity if it means keeping out low-quality questions. I don't think most of the question-answerer types that participate on sites like this one, MedicalSciences, and Biology want to participate on sites that are dominated by low-effort homework, self-help/personal medical questions, etc. There are other sites out there for those.
I also don't think most of the people that visit here with those low-quality questions are here to stay. We can offer them help with improving their question to fit our guidelines, but if they don't want to participate then we can't make them do so. I think it would be great if more of the seasoned users would ask their own questions, but in a small community it's hard to motivate that: most questions related to any of our own work are far closer to our own expertise than anyone else's on this stack; that's just how academic- and professional-level work goes.
I think we should keep in mind that the vision of StackOverflow and the sites that project spawned involved creating a Q&A repository. That means questions that are useful not just to the individual asking them, but to others that find those questions through Google search, etc. Questions that are answered here, even if they are few, are added to the history of answered questions that other people can stumble upon to find answers.
- In your opinion, what do moderators do?
I'll copy my answer from when I ran on Biology.SE, as I did also for the recent Academia.SE election:
"Moderators support the goals of the community. Moderators don't own or dictate to the community, they are ambassadors elected from the community to itself. Most of the actual day-to-day work they do is janitorial: mostly underappreciated when done well, but also a vitally important part of the infrastructure of the community and strongly missed when absent."
- A diamond will be attached to everything you say and have said in the past, including questions, answers and comments. Everything you will do will be seen under a different light. How do you feel about that?
(copied from my answer on the recent Academia.SE election)
I am comfortable with it. I won't always even agree with myself when reading something I've posted long ago, but I feel that everything I've said here has been with the goal of helping someone else somehow. I use my own name here because I feel my participation on this site is part of my professional life. I'm keenly aware of the weight the diamond puts on what a moderator writes, and I would be careful to delineate when I am speaking as a user with an opinion of no higher value to any other versus conveying policies of the site or decisions made by the community.
- In what way do you feel that being a moderator will make you more effective as opposed to simply reaching 10k or 20k rep?
I don't think the 10k/20k tools really compare to the role of a moderator, though I think this site differs from some others that have a stronger community moderation contingent. It's difficult to have enough experienced users review each post to close those that should be closed, for example. I think that therefore the community moderators here need to both be more active in the community than preferred under the SE model, and to interact with each other more to build community consensus among moderators.