Generally speaking, there's a lot of options grownups in real life resort to before they resort to violence, and I would have no problem with a post describing the fully generic considerations and how far you'd actually have to go down the decision tree before you got to violence, without any identifiables being named. People who honestly don't realize this would be welcome to read that post. I may be somewhat prejudiced by considering it completely obvious that jumping straight to violence as a cognitive answer and then blathering about your conspiracy on the Internet is merely stupid.
That ... doesn't seem to answer my question.
Perhaps an example is in order.
Someone lives in an area where there recently been a number of violent muggings. They are considering bringing a gun with them when they go out, in order to defend themself; they suspect they may be overestimating the danger based on news reports. So they decide to ask here if there are any relevant biases that may be coloring their judgement., and this leads into a general discussion of what chance there should be of encountering violent criminals before it becomes rational to arm yourself (and risk accidentally injuring or killing yourself or passersby.)
Does this help clarify my problem?
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.