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MrHen comments on The Nature of Offense - Less Wrong
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Comments (173)
Relevant to what standard? A comment's relevance reflects its usefulness to a section of the community/audience. If the comment is offending a portion of that audience, does it hinder its own relevance?
I think the whole gender hullabaloo has provided a decent enough answer to this question.
A lot of the petty, potentially offensive things I notice are particularly not-relevant snippets smashed into otherwise decent posts.
I think the 'relevance' is usually rather easy to discern -- it simply means that a comment attempts to contribute something to the subject under discussion. I added 'relevance' only as criterion for completeness' sake, because it could make an otherwise rational, intelligent comment still be out of place. In practice, irrelevant comments are not a problem on LW.
Offensiveness is orthogonal to relevance, I would think.
But my question stands -- is there any comment that is both relevant and rational, but should yet be considered offensive or inappropriate? The 'petty, potentially offensive' things can be countered with normal rational reasoning, pointing out e.g. stereotyping, without the much more ambivalent rule of "don't be offensive".
Relevant truths should be spoken, even if someone finds its offensive.