= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on New censorship: against hypothetical violence against identifiable people - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (457)
Depends on exactly how it was written, I think. "The paradigmatic criticism of utilitarianism has always been that we shouldn't rob banks and donate the proceeds to charity" - sure, that's not actually going to conceptually promote the crime and thereby make it more probable, or make LW look bad. "There's this bank in Missouri that looks really easy to rob" - no.
Uncharitable reading: As long as taking utilitarianism seriously doesn't lead to arguments to violate formalized 21st century Western norms too much it is ok to argue for taking utilitarianism seriously. You are however free to debunk how it supposedly leads to things considered unacceptable on the Berkeley campus in 2012, since it obviously can't.
What abot pro-robbing banks in general?
Best way would be to construct the comment in a way that makes it least likely to seem bad when quoted outside of LW. For example we could imagine an alternative universe with intelligent bunnies and carrot-banks. Would it be good if a bunny robbed the carrot-bank and donated the carrots to charity?
If someone copied this comment on a different forum, it would seem silly, but not threatening. It is more difficult to start a wave of moral panic because of carrots and bunnies.
What about discussions which discuss flaws in security systems, generally? e.g. "Banks often have this specific flaw which can be mitigated in this cost-ineffective manner."?
If combined with a "Please write him and ask him to shut down!", sure. I think it's understood by default in most civilized cultures that violence is not being advocated by default when other courses of action are being presented. If the action to be taken is mysteriously left unspecified, it'd be a judgment call depending on other language used.
If there's a general policy against discussing violence on LW, and I can point to statements from the same timeframe of mine condemning such violence, it may help. It may not. Reporters are stupid. Your argument does not actually say why the anti-violence-discussion policy is a bad idea, and seems to be ad hominem tu quoque.