I can tell you all about equal pigs and newspeak but 'memory-holing' has not seemed to make as much of a cultural footprint - probably because as a phrase it is rather awkward fit. I wholeheartedly approve of Orwell in principle but actually reading either of his famous books sounds too much like highschool homework. :)

The essential problem is that with the (spectacular) deletion of the Forbidden Post, LessWrong turned into the sort of place where posts get disappeared. Those are not good places to be on the Internet. They are places where honesty is devalued and statements of fact must be reviewed for their political nature.

So it can happen here - because it did happen. It's no longer in the class "things that are unthinkable". This is itself a major credibility hit for LW.

And when a Roko post disappears - well, it was one of his posts that was disappeared before.

With this being the situation, assumptions of bad faith are going to happen. (And "stupidity" is actually the assumption of good faith.)

Your problem now is to restore trust in LW's intellectual integrity, because SIAI broke it good and hard. Note that this is breaking an expectation, which is much worse than breaking a rule - if you break a rule you can say "we broke this rule for this reason", but if you break expectations, people feel the ground moving under their feet, and get very upset.

There are lots of suggestions in this thread as to what people think might restore their trust in LW's intellectual integrity, SIAI needs to go through them and work out precisely what expectations they broke and how to come clean on this.

I suspect you could at this point do with an upside to all this. Fortunately, there's an excellent one: no-one would bother making all this fuss if they didn't really care about LW. People here really care about LW and will do whatever they can to help you make it better.

(And the downside is that this is separate from caring about SIAI, but oh well ;-) )

(and yes, this sort of discussion around WP/WMF has been perennial since it started.)

I wish I knew how to have a simple, high-content, low-politics conversation on the subject.

This is about politics. The censorship of an idea related to a future dictator implementing some policy is obviously about politics.

You tell people to take friendly AI serious. You tell people that we need friendly AI to marshal our future galactic civilisation. People take it serious. Now the only organisation working on this is the SIAI. Therefore the SIAI is currently in direct causal control of our collective future. So why do you wonder people care about censorship and transparency? People already care about what the U.S. is doing and demand transparency. Which is ludicrous in comparison to the power of a ruling superhuman artificial intelligence that implements what the SIAI came up with as the seed for its friendliness.

If you really think that the SIAI has any importance and could possible achieve to influence or implement the safeguards for some AGI project, then everything the SIAI does is obviously very important to everyone concerned (everyone indeed).

I wish I knew how to have a simple, high-content, low-politics conversation on the subject. Especially one that was self-contained and didn't leave me feeling as though I couldn't bow out after awhile and return to other projects.

I wish you used a classification algorithm that more naturally identified the tension between "wanting low-politics conversation" and comparing someone to Glenn Beck as a means of criticism.