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Maelin comments on Elevator pitches/responses for rationality / AI - Less Wrong Discussion
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Less Wrong isn't some kind of human right that we need to go beyond reasonable doubt to withdraw from someone; it's an online community run by an enlightened dictator, and if you want to keep your well kept garden, you have to accept some collateral damage.
I am extremely wary of this kind of thinking. Partly because using power is a slippery slope to abusing power, and each time you use the banhammer on a maybe-troll it gets a little bit easier to use it on the next maybe-troll.
Not just because of that, but also because when other people come to a community full of self-purported rationalists, and they see someone who does not obviously and immediately pattern match as a troll receiving the banhammer for presenting community-disapproved opinions in what seems superficially to be an adequately calm and reasonable manner, that sets off the 'cult' alarms. It makes us look intolerant and exclusionary, even if we aren't.
It's fine for places like the SA forums to throw the banhammer around with reckless abandon, because they exist only for fun. But we have higher goals. We have to consider not just keeping our garden tidy, but making sure we don't look like overzealous pruners to anybody who has a potentially nice set of azaleas to contribute.
Slipper slopes work in both directions. Each time you don't strike down injustice, it becomes a bit easier to walk by the next time. I'd sooner have Marginal Value > Marginal Cost than Marginal Value < Marginal Cost and a lower Average Value.
Bad impressions work in both directions. When other people come to a community full of self-purported rationalists, and they see someone presenting stupid, low-status, incendary comments and being treated as worthy of respect, it makes LW look stupid, low-status and incendary because of the Representativeness Heuristic.
Obveously there is a continuum between anarchy and banning everything, and both extremes are local minima. The issue is to judge the local gradient
Upvoted for valid point. I agree, but I think there is enough of a difference between 'being treated as worthy of respect' and 'not being banned' that we can probably ride in the middle ground comfortably without any significant image damage.
On consideration, though... maybe I'm prejudiced against banning because of the sense of finality of it. I guess it's not hard to make a new account.
I'm still opposed to deleting past comments though, because deleted comments make a mess of the history.