idiots repeatedly make up crap
Idiots make up crap. You probably can't change this. The more significant you are, the more crap idiots will make up about you. Idiots claim that Barack Obama is a Kenyan Muslim terrorist and that George Bush is mentally subnormal. Not because they have sufficient evidence of these propositions, but because gossip about Obama and Bush is thereby juicier than gossip about my neighbor Marty whom you've never heard of.
Idiots make up crap about projects, too. They say NASA faked the moon landing, vaccines cause autism, and that international food aid contains sterility drugs. It turns out that scurrilous rumors about NASA and the United Nations spread farther than scurrilous rumors about that funny-looking building in the town park which is totally a secret drug lab for the mayor.
But everyone else should be advised that any such 'hypothetical' would have been deleted from LW in accordance with our anti-discussing-hypothetical-violence-against-identifiable-actual-people policy."
How about treating the hypothetical as the stupidity it is? "Dude, beating up AI researchers wouldn't work and you're a jerk for posting it. There are a half dozen obvious reasons it wouldn't work, if you take five minutes to think about it ... and you're a jerk for posting it because it's stirring up shit for no good reason. Seriously, quit it. This is LW, not Conspiracy Hotline."
Idiots claim that Barack Obama is a Kenyan Muslim terrorist and that George Bush is mentally subnormal.
The important difference is that in these cases the given idiot is less famous than the person they make crap about.
Imagine an alternative universe where Barack Obama is just an unknown guy, and some idiots for whatever reason start claiming that he is a Muslim terrorist. I can imagine an anonymous phone call to the police, a police action with some misunderstanding, resulting with too many negative utilons for Mr. Obama.
In our universe, Mr. Obama has the advantage of being more famous than any such possible accuser. However, SIAI does not have the same advantage.
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.