But the point of LW is not merely having a forum that is valuable to you for discussing weird topics. If you want Reddit, you know where to find it. The point of LW is advancing human rationality, and being a place where people air proposals of violence may get in the way of that. How would we tell?
Eliezer and other big names here have been on the receiving end of scandal-sheet gossip-mongering before and may be particularly sensitive to some of these issues. One thing that worries me about this proposal is that Eliezer may be conflating "LW has a bad reputation" with "I have to answer snarky, demeaning questions about foolish things people posted on LW more often than I'm comfortable with" or "People publish articles making fun of my friends and I wish to heck they would stop doing that." But I infer there is also evidence that Eliezer is withholding.
But it seems to me that the best way to have a good reputation is to actually be good. For instance, I would like it if people did not see LW as a place to air demeaning, privileged hypotheses (pun intended) about, say, race or gender — in part because many people's evidence standards for these topics is appallingly low; in part because it drives away members of the less-privileged sets (I would rather cooperate with women and defect against PUAs than vice versa; for one thing, there are more women). I would accept the same restriction on discussions of political economy (viz. libertarianism and socialism); although I've talked politics here it's not exactly an area where humans are renowned for being exemplary rationalists.
"is valuable to you for discussing weird topics"
"reddit"
pick one.
New proposed censorship policy:
Any post or comment which advocates or 'asks about' violence against sufficiently identifiable real people or groups (as opposed to aliens or hypothetical people on trolley tracks) may be deleted, along with replies that also contain the info necessary to visualize violence against real people.
Reason: Talking about such violence makes that violence more probable, and makes LW look bad; and numerous message boards across the Earth censor discussion of various subtypes of proposed criminal activity without anything bad happening to them.
More generally: Posts or comments advocating or 'asking about' violation of laws that are actually enforced against middle-class people (e.g., kidnapping, not anti-marijuana laws) may at the admins' option be censored on the grounds that it makes LW look bad and that anyone talking about a proposed crime on the Internet fails forever as a criminal (i.e., even if a proposed conspiratorial crime were in fact good, there would still be net negative expected utility from talking about it on the Internet; if it's a bad idea, promoting it conceptually by discussing it is also a bad idea; therefore and in full generality this is a low-value form of discussion).
This is not a poll, but I am asking in advance if anyone has non-obvious consequences they want to point out or policy considerations they would like to raise. In other words, the form of this discussion is not 'Do you like this?' - you probably have a different cost function from people who are held responsible for how LW looks as a whole - but rather, 'Are there any predictable consequences we didn't think of that you would like to point out, and possibly bet on with us if there's a good way to settle the bet?'
Yes, a post of this type was just recently made. I will not link to it, since this censorship policy implies that it will shortly be deleted, and reproducing the info necessary to say who was hypothetically targeted and why would be against the policy.