- 7 weeks ago, I precommitted that censoring a post or comment on LessWrong would cause a 0.0001% increase in existential risk.
- Earlier today, Yudkowsky censored a post on less wrong
- 20 minutes later, existential risks increased 0.0001% (to the best of my estimation).
I haven't followed the whole thing, because I couldn't. How can I decide wether he is right or not. I don't know what was censored, and why. Reading the thread on academic careers just had some big holes where, presumably, things were deleted, and I couldn't reconstruct why.
Other forums have some kind of policy, where they explicitly say what kind of post will be censored. I'm not against censoring stuff, but knowing what is worthy of being censored and what isn't would be nice.
With the knowledge I currently have about this whole thing, I still feel slightly sympathetic for WaitingForGoedel's cause. The "Free Speech is important" heuristic that Vladimir Nesov mentioned in the other thread is pretty useful, in my opinion, and without knowing the reason for posts being deleted, I can't decide for myself wether it made sense or not.
I intend to stick around, anyway, because I don't feel very strongly about this issue, so I won't frustrate anybody, I hope. But an answer would still be nice.
I do know what was censored and why, and I think Eliezer was wrong to delete the material in question.
That's a separate issue from whether waitingforgodel's method of expressing his (correct) disagreement with the censorship is sane or reasonable -- of course it isn't.