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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on New censorship: against hypothetical violence against identifiable people - Less Wrong
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When you go on a first date with someone, would you tell them "hey, I've got this great idea about how I should [insert violence here] in order to [insert goal here]. What do you think?" Of course not, because whether or not this is a good idea, you are not getting a second date.
PR isn't inherently Dark Arts. It's about providing evidence to another party about yourself or your organization in a way which is conducive to further provision of evidence. If you start all your dates by talking about your worst traits first, you aren't giving your date incentives to stick around and learn about your best traits. If LW becomes known for harboring discussions of terrorism or whatever, you aren't giving outsiders incentives to stick around and learn about all the other interesting things happening on LW, or work for SIAI, etc.
This begs the question by assuming the proposed violence is a bad trait.
All I'm assuming is that a typical date will assume that people who talk about violence on the first date are crazy and/or violent themselves. This is an argument about first impressions, not an argument about goodness or badness.
You'd be amazed how many second dates I get...
That said, I don't think PR is Dark Arts, I just think it's an UNSPOKEN change in community norms, and... from a PR standpoint, this post is a blatantly stupid way of revealing that change.
Huh. Either the original post is bad because PR is bad, or this post is bad because it demonstrates bad PR. Lose/lose :)
If I would go to a date with a girl who believes in the necessity of a communist revolution I wouldn't judge her negatively for that political belief. There are character traits that I would judge much worse.
Okay, but 1) the fact that you post on LW is already evidence that you're not representative of the general population in various ways, and 2) communist revolution is at least an idea that people learn about in college, and it's not too unusual to hear a certain type of person say stuff like that. I had in mind the subject of the deleted post; if a typical person heard someone talking like that, their first reaction would be that that person is crazy, and with a reasonable choice of priors this would be a reasonable inference to make.
I haven't read the deleted post. If someone who knew what the case is about would write it to me via private message I would appreciate it.
The communist revolution is a classic example of an idea that involves the advocation of illegal violence against a specific group of people. There are certainly internet forums where that kind of political speech isn't welcome and will get deleted.
On LessWrong I think that's a position that should be allowed to be argued. Moldbuggian advocacy of a coup d'état should also be allowed.
Some people might think that you are crazy if you argue Moldbuggianism on a first date. At the same time I think that idea should be within the realm of permissable discourse on LessWrong.
If LW-compatible people are more welcoming of discussion of violence than the general population, then the bad PR would affect them less than it would other people, so we should care less about bad PR.