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MaximumLiberty comments on The Fable of the Burning Branch - Less Wrong
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Everyone is "banworthy", in the sense that the moderators have the power to ban anyone for any reason and so far as I know there are no defined limits on their actions.
This particular post
and I think some kind of moderator action in response is eminently reasonable. Personally I'd have gone for "This article is not suitable for LW because [...]; I will wait two days so that anyone who wants to preserve what they've written can take a copy, and then delete it; further attempts at posting this sort of thing may result in a ban".
(I think Nancy was right to ask "what about women's preferences?" and right to apply a bit of moderatorial intimidation, but I don't think the two should have gone together.)
Your list of reasons seem to me to be the very reason we have karma. Why does this post deserve moderation in a system where karma sends the message about the community's desire for more of the same?
I'm not certain whether it does. The obvious disadvantages of moderator action are (1) effort and (2) heavy-handedness (real or perceived). The advantages of moderator action are (3) to make it more explicit that this sort of stuff is not wanted around here and (4) to get rid of it more thoroughly so that, e.g., people are less likely to stumble across it in search engine results and there's no danger that future trolls with sockpuppet armies will vote it up out of spite[1].
I'm not sure how those weigh up against one another, and indeed it's not hard to cook up arguments that #2 is actually a good thing ("sending a message") or that #4 is actually a bad thing (all else being equal, destroying even low-quality information is sad). But on the whole I think #3 and #4 are advantages, which is why moderator action is at least worth considering.
[1] This isn't as crazy a scenario as it sounds. There is at least one LW user strongly suspected of using sockpuppets for upvoting, generally hostile to Nancy, unsympathetic to (let's say) "women's causes", and known to be untroubled by scruples about what's considered acceptable behaviour on LW...
Fair enough. I don't follow the personalities here, so the situations where someone engages in sock-puppetry would totally escape my notice. My priors incline me to preferring good speech as the remedy for bad speech.