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gjm comments on Who owns LessWrong? - Less Wrong
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I'm having trouble thinking of any halfway-plausible way that the legal facts could be relevant here. Surely (1) you wouldn't so much as consider taking legal action to get your preferred position on group selection enshrined in the LW wiki, and (2) you wouldn't expect Eliezer or anyone else to do so either? In which case, "what's the legal situation?" might be an interesting question, but it basically has nothing whatever to do with your dispute about group selection. In which case, mentioning that dispute at all seems like a total distraction.
Let me put it differently. What you wrote reads to me rather like this: "My wife and I just had an argument about who should put out the garbage. In a divorce, what exactly determines who gets custody of the kids?"
In this context, I think "legal facts" translates into "established formal rules". Not necessarily state enforced rules.
I think you have or almost have a point, but it is also true that back when divorce laws favored men more than they do now, men won more of the arguments about small things like who should put out the garbage because their negotiating position was stronger. Specifically, if the husband's best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA) is much more comfortable (for the husband) than the wife's BATNA is (for the wife) then the husband will tend to take most of the "surplus value" in any positive-sum transaction (and the wife will tend to pay most of the "deficit value" in any negative-sum transaction). The point is that even though divorce is extremely costly for either player ("cost" in the broad sense) it can still have a big influence on small things like who will put out the garbage.
Perhaps the point you wanted to make is that a participant who is comfortable with shades of gray and ambiguity about power relationships will tend to have more influence in this (egalitarian, non-authoritarian) community than a participant who feels the need to ask questions like "Who owns Less Wrong?"
I would be very interested in evidence that (1) this was true and (2) that was because of different divorce laws (rather than, e.g., because women's status was generally lower, leading to both effects).
In any case, supposing for the sake of argument that #1 and #2 are both correct, presumably the mechanism is the one you describe -- in which case what matters is not the facts about divorce law but the beliefs of the parties involved about those facts. In the present instance, it seems that what matters is not who actually "owns" the LW wiki, but Phil's and Eliezer's opinions about that.
I don't think Phil's questions seem much less weird in the light of all this.
So far as I can see, that has nothing whatever to do with the point I wanted to make. It's probably true, though.