I'm started to feel strongly uncomfortable about this, but I'm unsure if that's reasonable. Here's some arguments ITT that are concerning me:
Does advocating gun control, or increased taxes, count? They would count as violence is private actors did them, and talking about them makes them more likely (by states).
Violence is a very slippery concept. Perhaps it is not the best one to base mod rules on. (more at end)
We're losing Graham cred by being unwilling to discuss things that make us look bad.
This one is really disturbing to me. I don't like all the self-conscious talk about how we are percieved outside. Maybe we need to fork LW, to accomplish it, but I want to be able to discuss what's true and good without worrying about getting moderated. My post-rationality opinions have already diverged so far from the mainstream that I feel I can't talk about my interests in polite society. I don't want this here too.
If I see any mod action that could be destroyed by the truth, I will have to conclude that LW management is borked and needs to be forked. Until then I will put my trust in the authorities here.
...Would my pro-piracy arguments be covered by this? What about my pro-coup d
I support censorship, but only if it is based on the unaccountable personal opinion of a human. Anything else is too prone to lost purposes. If a serious rationalist (e.g. EY) seriously thinks about it and decides that some post has negative utility, I support its deletion. If some unintelligent rule like "no hypothetical violence" decides that a post is no good, why should I agree? Simple rules do not capture all the subtlety of our values; they cannot be treated as Friendly.
It makes sense to have mod discretion, but it also makes sense to have a list of rules that the mods can point to so that people whose posts get censored are less likely to feel that they are being personally targeted.
If I see any mod action that could be destroyed by the truth, I will have to conclude that LW management is borked and needs to be forked. Until then I will put my trust in the authorities here.
I want to upvote these two sentences again and again.
What if you aren't sure if violence is the right thing to do? You obviously should want as many eyeballs to debug your thinking on that as possible no?
You do realize this argument generalizes to discussing many things beyond violence right? So if this is your true rejection I hope you've spent some time decompartmentalizing on this.
The thing is discussing desirability of violence and carrying out violence are not necessarily done by the same person. Indeed historically they usually aren't. This does not remove moral culpability but does provide some legal protection.
A friend and I once put together a short comic trying to analyze democracy from an unusual perspective, including presenting the idea that an underlying threat of violent popular uprising should the system be corrupted helps keep it running well. This was closely related to a shorter comic presenting some ideas on rationality. The project led to some interesting discussions with interesting people, which helped me figure out some ideas I hadn't previously considered, and I consider it to have been worth the effort; but I'm unsure whether or not it would fall afoul of the new policy.
How 'identifiable' do the targets of proposed violence have to be for the proposed policy to apply, and how 'hypothetical' would they have to be for it not to? Some clarification there would be appreciated.
EY has publicly posted material that is intended to provoke thought on the possibility of legalizing rape (which is considered a form of violence). If he believed that there was positive utility in considering such questions before, then he must consider them to have some positive utility now, and determining whether the negative utility outweighs that is always a difficult question. This is why I will be opposed to any sort of zero tolerance policy in which the things to be censored is not well-defined a definite impediment to balanced and rationally-considered discussion. It's clear to me that speaking about violence against a particular person or persons is far more likely to have negative consequences on balance, but discussion of the commission of crimes in general seems like something that should be weighed on a case-by-case basis.
In general, I prefer my moderators to have a fuzzy set of broad guidelines about what should be censored in which not deleting is the default position, and they actually have to decide that it is definitely bad before they take the delete action. The guidelines can be used to raise posts to the level of this consideration and influence their judgment on this decision, but they should never be able to say "the rules say this type of thing should be deleted!"
That's an... interesting way of putting it, where by "interesting" I mean "wrong".
If you genuinely can't see how similar considerations apply to you personally publishing rape-world stories and the reasoning you explicitly gave in the post then I suggest you have a real weakness in evaluating the consequences of your own actions on perception.
I could go off on how the idea is that there's particular modern-day people who actually exist and that you're threatening to harm, and how a future society where different things feel harmful is not that, but you know, screw it.
I approve of your Three Worlds Collide story (in fact, I love it). I also approve of your censorship proposal/plan. I also believe there is no need to self censor that story (particularly at the position you were when you published it). That said:
This kind of display of evident obliviousness and arrogant dismissal rather than engagement or---preferably---even just outright ignoring it may well do more to make Lesswrong look bad than half a dozen half baked speculative posts by CronoDAS. There are times to say "but you know, screw it" and "where by interesting I mean wrong" but those times don't include when concern is raised about your legalised-rape-and-it's-great story in the context of your own "censor hypothetical violence 'cause it sounds bad" post.
Fun Exercise
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
Consider what would have been covered by this 250, 100 and 50 years ago.
Bonus Consider what wouldn't have been covered by this 250, 100 and 50 years ago but would be today.
I see the point you're trying to make, but I don't think it constitutes a counterargument to the proposed policy. If you were an abolitionist back when slavery was commonly accepted, it would've been a dumb idea to, say, yell out your plans to free slaves in the Towne Square. If you were part of an organization that thought about interesting ideas, including the possibility that you should get together and free some slaves sometime, that organization would be justified in telling its members not to do something as dumb as yelling out plans to free slaves in the Towne Square. And if Ye Olde Eliezere Yudkowskie saw you yelling out your plans to free slaves in the Towne Square, he would be justified in clamping his hand over your mouth.
It wouldn't be dumb to argue for the moral acceptability of freeing slaves (even by force) however.
It wouldn't be dumb for an organization to decide that society at large might be willing to listen to them argue for the moral acceptability of freeing slaves, even by force. It would be dumb for an organization to allow its individual members to make this decision independently because that substantially increases the probability that someone gets the timing wrong.
Beware selective application of your standards. If the members can't be trusted with one type of independent decision, why they can be trusted with other sorts of decisions?
Would my pro-piracy arguments be covered by this? What about my pro-coup d'état ones?
Possibly. I hope not. I'm all for mod action, but not at the expense of political diversity.
As someone unfamiliar with your views, I can't tell whether this is sarcasm or not, especially because of the interrobang. Can you clarify? Is there anywhere on the internet where your views are concisely summarized? (Is it in any way associated with your real name?)
The levels can be hard to disambiguate so I sympathize. I'll write my opinions out unironically. You can find the full arguments in my comment history (I can dig links to that up too).
I'm assuming you are familiar with the arguments for efficent charity and optimal employment? If not I can provide citations & links. I don't think Sea Piracy as a means to funding efficient charity is obviously worse from a utilitarian perspective than a combo with many legal professions. It may or may not be justified, I'm leaning towards it being justified on the same utilitarian grounds as government taxation can be. If not cheating on taxes to fund efficient charity is a pretty good idea. Some people's comparative advantage will lay in sea piracy.
Violating copyright on software or media products in the modern West is in general not a bad thing. But indiscriminately pirating everything may be bad.
In the grandfather comment I was aiming for ambiguity and humour.
I mean, assuming that sea piracy to fund efficient charity is good, media piracy to save money that you can give to efficient charity is just obviously good.
media piracy to save money that you can give to efficient charity
Is so incredibly obviously good that I'm mystified no one is promoting it. I think the main reason is because it is "illegal".
I am asking in advance if anyone has non-obvious consequences they want to point out or policy considerations they would like to raise.
I'm not sure what's obvious for you. In an enviroment without censorship you don't endorse a post by not censoring the post. If you however start censoring you do endorse a post by letting it stand.
Your legal and PR obligations for those posts that LessWrong hosts get bigger if you make editorial censorship decisions.
I'm disappointed by EY's response so far in this thread, particularly here. The content of the post above in itself did not significantly dismay me, but upon reading what appeared to be a serious lack of any rigorous updating on the part of EY to--what I and many LWers seemed to have thought were--valid concerns, my motivation to donate to the SI has substantially decreased.
I had originally planned to donate around $100 (starving college student) to the SI by the start of the new year, but this is now in question. (This is not an attempt at some sort of blackmail, just a frank response by someone who reads LW precisely to sift through material largely unencumbered by mainstream non-epistemic factors.) This is not to say that I will not donate at all, just that the warm fuzzies I would have received on donating are now compromised, and that I will have to purchase warm fuzzies elsewhere--instead of utilons and fuzzies all at once through the SI.
This is similar to how I feel. I was perfectly happy with his response to the incident but became progressively less happy with his responses to the responses.
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
I'm dubious about this because laws can change. I'm also sure I don't have a solid grasp of which laws can be enforced against middle-class people, but I do know that they aren't all like laws against kidnapping. For example, doctors can get into trouble for prescribing "too much" pain medication.
Just because I think responses to this post might not have been representative:
I think this is a good policy.
On of the most challenging moderation decisions I had to do at another forum was whether someone who argues the position "Homosexuality is a crime. In my country it's punishable with death. I like the laws of my country" should have his right of free speech. I think the author of the post was living in Uganda.
The basic question is, should someone who's been raised in Uganda feel free to share his moral views? Even if those views are offensive to Western ears and people might die based on those views?
If you want to have a open discussion about morality I think it's very valuable to have people who aren't raised in Western society participating openly in the discussion. I don't think LessWrong is supposed to be a place where someone from Uganda should be prevented from arguing the moral views in which he believes.
When it comes to politics, communists argue frequently for the necessarity of a revolution. A revolution is an illegal act that includes violence against real people. Moldburg argues frequently for the necessity of a coup d'état.
This policy allows for censoring both the political philosophy of communism as well as the political philosophy of moldbuggianism.
Even...
I currently find myself tempted to write a new post for Discussion, on the general topic of "From a Bayesian/rationalist/winningest perspective, if there is a more-than-minuscule threat of political violence in your area, how should you go about figuring out the best course of action? What criteria should you apply? How do you figure out which group(s), if any, to try to support? How do you determine what the risk of political violence actually is? When the law says rebellion is illegal, that preparing to rebel is illegal, that discussing rebellion even in theory is illegal, when should you obey the law, and when shouldn't you? Which lessons from HPMoR might apply? What reference books on war, game-theory, and history are good to have read beforehand? In the extreme case... where do you draw the line between choosing to pull a trigger, or not?".
If it was simply a bad idea to have such a post, then I'd expect to take a karma hit from the downvotes, and take it as a lesson learned. However, I also find myself unsure whether or not such a post would pass the muster of the new deletionist criteria, and so I'm not sure whether or not I would be able to gather that idea - let a...
The "interesting" thing about violence is that it's one of the few ways that a relatively small group of (politically) powerless people with no significant support can cause a big change in the world. However, the change rarely turns out the way the small group would hope; most attempts at political violence by individuals or small groups fail miserably at achieving the group's aims.
Got it. Posts discussing our plans for crimes will herewith be kept to the secret boards only.
Deleting comments for being perceived as dangerous might get in the way of conversation. I think that if we're worried about how the site looks to outsiders then it's probably only necessary to worry about actual posts. Nobody expects comments to be appropriate on the internet, so it probably doesn't hurt us that much.
That's usual Yudkowskian overreaction he will likely get tired of implementing within a couple years or less.
Yes, a post of this type was just recently made.
Well then.
I've heard that firemen respond to everything not because they actually have to, but because it keeps the drill sharp, so to speak. The same idea may apply to mod action... (in other words, MOAR "POINTLESS" CENSORSHIP)
More seriously, does this policy apply to things like gwern's hypothetical bombing of intel?
Implying that whether his post should be censored hinges on the conclusion reached and not just the topic?
violence against real people.
Abortion, euthenasia and suicide fit that description, some say. For them and those who disagree with them this proposal may have unforeseen consequences. Edit: all three are illegal in parts of the world today.
I think this is an overreation to (deleted thing) happening, and the proposed policy goes too far. (Deleted thing) was neither a good idea or good to talk about in this public forum, but it was straight-out advocating violence in an obvious and direct way, against specific, real people that aren't in some hated group. That's not okay and it's not good for community for the reasons you (EY) said. But the proposed standard is too loose and it's going to have a chilling effect on some fringe discussion that's probably going to be useful in teasing out some of the consquences of ethics (which is where this stuff comes up). Having this be a guideline rather than a hard rule seems good, but it still seems like we're scarring on the first cut, as it were.
I think we run the risk of adopting a censorship policy that makes it difficult to talk about or change the censorship policy, which is also a really terrible idea.
I agree with the general idea of protecting LW's reputation to outsiders. After all, if we're raising the sanity waterline (rather than researching FAI), we want outsiders to become insiders, which they won't do if they think we're crazy.
"No advocating violence agains...
Censorship is particularly harmful to the project of rationality, because it encourages hypocrisy and the thinking of thoughts for reasons other than that they are true. You must do what you feel is right, of course, and I don't know what the post you're referring to was about, but I don't trust you to be responding to some actual problematic post instead of self-righteously overreacting. Which is a problem in and of itself.
Do wars count? I find it strange, to say the least, that humans have strong feelings about singling out an individual for violence but give relatively little thought to dropping bombs on hundreds or thousands of nameless, faceless humans.
Context matters, and trying to describe an ethical situation in enough detail to arrive at a meaningful answer may indirectly identify the participants. Should there at least be an exception for notorious people or groups who happen to still be living instead of relegated to historical "bad guys" who are almost universally accepted to be worth killing? I can think of numerous examples, living and dead, who were or are the target of state-sponsored violence, some with fairly good reason.
Your generalization is averaging over clairvoyance. The whole purpose of discussing such plans is to reduce uncertainty over their utility; you haven't proven that the utility gain of a plan turning out to be good must be less than the cost of discussing it in public.
Does the policy apply to violence against oneself? (I'm guessing not, since it's not illegal.) Talking about it is usually believed to reduce risk.
There's a scarcity effect whereby people believe pro-violence arguments to be stronger, since if they weren't convincing they wouldn't be censored. Not sure how strong it is, likely depends on whether people drop the topic or say things like "I'm not allowed to give more detail, wink wink nudge nudge".
It's a common policy so there don't seem to be any slippery slope problems.
We're losing Graham cred by being unwilling to discuss things that make us look bad. Probably a good thing, we're getting more mainstream.
I don't necessarily object to this policy but find it troubling that you can't give a better reason for not discussing violence being a good idea than PR.
Frankly, I find it even more troubling that your standard reasons for why violence is not in fact a good idea seem to be "it's bad PR" and "even if it is we shouldn't say so in public".
As I quote here:
if your main goal is to show that your heart is in the right place, then your heart is not in the right place.
Edit: added link to an example of SIAI people unable to give a better reason against doing violence than PR.
I appreciate the honesty of it. No one here is going to enact any of these thought experiments in real life. The likely worst outcome is to off-put potential SI donors. It must be hard enough to secure funding for a fanfic-writing apocalypse cult; prepending violent onto that description isn't going to loosen up many wallets.
The freaky consequences are not of the policy, they're of the meta-policy. You know how communities die when they stop being fun? Occasional shitstorms are not fun, and fear of saying something that will cause a shitstorm is not fun. Benevolent dictators work well to keep communities fun; the justifications don't apply when the dictator is pursuing goals that aren't in the selfish interest of members and interested lurkers; making the institute the founder likes look bad only weakly impacts community fun.
Predictable consequences are bright iconoclasts leaving, and shitstorm frequency increasing. (That's kinda hard to settle: the former is imprecise and the latter can be rigged.)
Every time, people complain much less about the policy than about not being consulted. There are at least two metapolicies that avoid this:
Avoid kicking up shitstorms. In this particular instance, you could have told CronoDAS his post was stupid and suggest he delete it, and then said "Hey, everyone, let's stop talking about violence against specific people, it's stupid and makes us look bad" without putting your moderator hat on.
Produce a policy, possibly ridiculously stringent, that covers most things you don't like, which allows people to predict moderator behavior and doesn't change often. Ignore complaints when enforcing, and do what you wish with complaints on principle.
Taking this post in the way it was intended i.e. 'are there any reasons why such a policy would make people more likely to attribute violent intent to LW' I can think of one:
The fact that this policy is seen as necessary could imply that LW has a particular problem with members advocating violence. Basically, I could envision the one as saying: 'LW members advocate violence so often that they had to institute a specific policy just to avoid looking bad to the outside world'
And, of course, statements like 'if a proposed conspiratorial crime were in fact good you shouldn't talk about it on the internet' make for good out-of-context excerpts.
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
The blasphemy laws of many countries fit this description - another possible unintended consequence.
I'm going to hit you with a stick unless you can give me an example of where that has been effective.
Do you really feel like LWers lack a sense of humor? LWers have posted some of the funniest things I've ever read. Their sense-of-humor distribution has heavy tails, at least.
Maybe something like "Moderators, at their discretion, may remove comments that can be construed as advocating illegal activity" would work for a formal policy - it reads like relatively inoffensive boilerplate and would be something to point to if a post like mine needs to go, but is vague enough that it doesn't scream "CENSORSHIP!!!" to people who feel strongly about it. The "at their discretion" is key; it doesn't create a category of posts that moderators are required to delete, so it can't be used by non-moderators as a weapon to stifle otherwise productive discussion. (If you don't trust the discretion of the moderators, that's not a problem that can be easily solved with a few written policies.)
Yeesh. Step out for a couple days to work on your bodyhacking and there's a trench war going on when you get back...
In all seriousness, there seems to be a lot of shouting here. Intelligent shouting, mind you, but I am not sure how much of it is actually informative.
This looks like a pretty simple situation to run a cost/benefit on: will censoring of the sort proposed help, hurt, or have little appreciable effect on the community.
Benefits: May help public image. (Sub-benefits: Make LW more friendly to new persons, advance SIAI-related PR); May reduce brain-eating discussions (If I advocate violence against group X, even as a hypothetical, and you are a member of said group, then you have a vested political interest whether or not my initial idea was good which leads to worse discussion); May preserve what is essentially a community norm now (as many have noted) in the face of future change; Will remove one particularly noxious and bad-PR generating avenue for trolling. (Which won't remove trolling, of course. In fact, fighting trolls gives them attention, which they like: see Cons)
Costs: May increase bad PR for censoring (Rare in my experience, provided that the rules are sensibly ...
Aside from the fact that "it might make us look bad" is a horrible argument in general, have you not considered the consequence that censorship makes us look bad? And consider the following comment below:
Got it. Posts discussing our plans for crimes will herewith be kept to the secret boards only.
It was obviously intended as a joke, but is that clear to outsiders? Does forcing certain kinds of discussions into side-channels, which will inevitibly leak, make us look good?
Consideration of these kinds of meta-consequences is what separates naive decision theories from sophisticated decision theores. Have you considered that it might hurt your credibility as a decision theorist to demonstrate such a lack of application of sophisticated decision theory in setting policies on your own website?
And now, what I consider to be the single most damning argument against this policy: in the very incident that provoked this rule change, the author of the post in question, after discussion, voluntarily withdrew the post, without this policy being in effect! So self-policing has demonstrated itself, so far, to be 100% effective at dealing with this situation. So where exactly is the necessity for such a policy change?
(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 seems to be a fully general argument against Devil's Advocacy. Was it meant as such?
Depends on exactly how it was written, I think. "The paradigmatic criticism of utilitarianism has always been that we shouldn't rob banks and donate the proceeds to charity" - sure, that's not actually going to conceptually promote the crime and thereby make it more probable, or make LW look bad. "There's this bank in Missouri that looks really easy to rob" - no.
Uncharitable reading: As long as taking utilitarianism seriously doesn't lead to arguments to violate formalized 21st century Western norms too much it is ok to argue for taking utilitarianism seriously. You are however free to debunk how it supposedly leads to things considered unacceptable on the Berkeley campus in 2012, since it obviously can't.
So you don't see value in discussions like these? Thought experiments that give some insights into morality? Is really the (probably barely any) effect on the reputation of LW because of those posts really more than the benefit of the discussion?
It has a net negative effect because people then go around saying (this post will be deleted after policy implementation), "Oh, look, LW is encouraging people to commit suicide and donate the money to them." That is what actually happens. It is the only real significant consequence.
Now it's true that, in general, any particular post may have only a small effect in this direction, because, for example, idiots repeatedly make up crap about how SIAI's ideas should encourage violence against AI researchers, even though none of us have ever raised it even as a hypothetical, and so themselves become the ones who conceptually promote violence. But it would be nice to have a nice clear policy in place we can point to and say, "An issue like this would not be discussable on LW because we think that talking about violence against individuals can conceptually promote such violence, even in the form of hypotheticals, and that any such individuals would justly have a right to complain. We of course assume that you will continue to discuss violence against AI researchers on your own blog, since you care more about making us look bad and posturing your concern, than about the fact that you, yourself, are the one has actually invented, introduced, talked about, and given publicity to, the idea of violence against AI researchers. 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."
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."
It has a net negative effect because people then go around saying (this post will be deleted after policy implementation), "Oh, look, LW is encouraging people to commit suicide and donate the money to them." That is what actually happens. It is the only real significant consequence.
This is where the rubber meets the road as far as whether we really mean it when we say "that which can be destroyed by the truth, should be." If we accept this argument, then by "mere addition" of censorship rules, you eventually end up renaming SIAI "The Institute for Puppies and Unicorn Farts", and completly lying to the public about what it is you're actually about, in order to benefit PR.
"Oh, look, LW is encouraging people to commit suicide and donate the money to them."
Well, are you?
idiots repeatedly make up crap about how SIAI's ideas should encourage violence against AI researchers, even though none of us have ever raised it even as a hypothetical,
True, but you have said things that seem to imply it. Seriously, you can't go around saying "X" and "X->Y" and then object when people start attributing position "Y" to you.
it would be nice to have the counter-counterargument, "Unlike this bad person here, we have a policy of deleting posts which claim Q->specific-violence even if the post claims not to believe in Q because the identifiable target would have a reasonable complaint of being threatened".
I would find this counter-counter-argument extremely uncompelling if made by an opponent. Suppose you read someone's blog who made statements which could be interpreted as vaguely anti-Semitic, but it could go either way. Now suppose someone in the comments of that blog post replied by saying "Yeah, you're totally right, we should kill all the Jews!".
Which type of response from the blog owner do you think would be more likely to convince you that he was not actually an anti-Semite: 1) deleting the comment, covering up its existence, and never speaking of it, or 2) Leaving the comment in place, and refuting it - carefully laying out why the commenter is wrong.
I know that I for one would find the latter response much more convincing of the author's benign intent.
Note: in order to post this comment, despite it being, IMHO entirely on-point and important to the conversation, I had to take a 5 point karma hit.... due to the LAST poorly thought out, dictatorially imposed, consensus-defying policy change.
Regardless of your intentions, I know of one person who somewhat seriously considered that course of action as a result of the post in question. (The individual in question has been talked out of it in the short term, by way of 'the negative publicity would hurt more than the money would help', but my impression is that the chance that they'll try something like that has still increased, probably permanently.)
The top comment in that thread demonstrates AnnaSalamon being either completely and utterly mindkilled or blatantly lying
This seems an excessively hostile and presumptuous way to state that you disagree with Anna's conclusion.
No it isn't, the meaning of my words are clear and quite simply do not mean what you say I am trying to say.
Well, taking your words seriously, you are claiming to be a Legilimens. Since you are not, maybe you are not as clear as you think you are.
It sure looks from what you wrote that you drew an inference from "Anna does not agree with me" to "Anna is running broken or disreputable inference rules, or is lying out of self-interest" without considering alternate hypotheses.
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
Eliezer, at this point I think it's fair to ask: has anything anyone has said so far caused you to update? If not, why not?
I realize some of my replies to you in this thread have been rather harsh, so perhaps I should take this opportunity to clarify: I consider myself a big fan of yours. I think you're a brilliant guy, and I agree with you on just about everything regarding FAI, x-risk, SIAI's mission.... I think you're probably mankind's best bet if we want to successfully navigate the singularity. But at the same time, I also think you can demonstrate some remarkably poor judgement from time to time... hey, we're all running on corrupted hardware after all. It's the combination of these two facts that really bothers me.
I don't know of any way to say this that ...
I don't know if we actually need a specific policy on this. We didn't in the case of my post...
Beware Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs.
I am for the policy, although heavy-heartedly. I feel that one of the pillars of Rationality is that there should be no Stop Signs and this policy might produce some. On the other hand, I think PR is important, and that we must be aware of evaporative cooling that might happen if it is not applied.
On a neutral note - We aren't enemies here. We all have very similar utility functions, with slightly different weights on certain terminal values (PR) - which is understandable as some of us have more or less to lose from LW's PR.
To convince Eliezer - you must show him a model of the world given the policy that causes ill effects he finds worse than the positive effects of enacting the policy. If you just tell him "Your policy is flawed due to ambiguitiy in description" or "You have, in the past, said things that are not consistent with this policy" - I place low probability on him significantly changing his mind. You should take this as a sign that you are Straw-manning Eliezer, when you should be Steel-manning him.
Also, how about some creative solutions? An special post tag that must be applied to posts that condone hypoth...
Two thoughts:
One: When my partner worked as the system administrator of a small college, her boss (the head of IT, a fatherly older man) came to her with a bit of an ethical situation.
It seems that the Dean of Admissions had asked him about taking down a student's personal web page hosted on the college's web server. Why? The web page contained pictures of the student and her girlfriend engaged in public displays of affection, some not particularly clothed. The Dean of Admissions was concerned that this would give the college a bad reputation.
Naturally the head of IT completely rejected the request out of hand, but was interested in discussing the implications. One that came up was that taking down a student web page about a lesbian relationship would be worse reputation than hosting it could bring. Another was that the IT staff did not feel like being censors over student expression, and certainly did not feel like being so on behalf of the Admissions office.
It's not clear to me that this case is especially analogous. It may be rather irrelevant, all in all.
Two: There is the notion that politics is about violence, not about agreement. That is to say, it is not about what we do whe...
Would your post on eating babies count, or is it too nonspecific?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ww/undiscriminating_skepticism/1scb?context=1
(I completely agree with the policy, I'm just curious)
That censorship because of what people think of LessWrong is ridiculous. That the negative effect on the reputation is probably significantly less than what is assumed. And that if EY thought that censorship of content for the sake of LW's image is in order he should've logically thought that omitting fetishes from his public OKCupid profile(for the record I've defended the view that this is his right) among other things is also in order as well. And some other thoughts of this kind.
Eliezer, could you clarify whether this policy applies to discussions like "maybe action X, which some people think constitutes violence, isn't really violence"? And what about nuclear war strategies?
Censorship is generally not a wise response to a single instance of any problem. Every increment of censorship you impose will wipe out an unexpectedly broad swath of discussion, make it easier to add more censorship later, and make it harder to resist accusations that you implicitly support any post you don't censor.
If you feel you have to Do Something, a more narrowly-tailored rule that still gets the job done would be something like: "Posts that directly advocate violating the laws of in a manner likely to create criminal liability will be deleted...
What if some violence helps reduce further violence? For example corporal punishment could reduce crime (think of Singapore). Note that I am not saying that this is necessarily true, just that we should not a priori ban all discussion on topics like this.
Counter-proposal:
We don't contemplate proposals of violence against identifiable people because we're not assholes.
I mean, seriously, what the fuck, people?
I'll restate a third option here that I made in the censored thread (woohoo, I have read a thread Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn't want people to read, and that you, dear reader of this comment, probably can't!) Make an option while creating a post to have it be only viewable by people with certain karma or above, or so that after a week or so, it disappears from people without that karma. This is based on an idea 4chan uses, where it deletes all threads after they become inactive, to encourage people to discuss freely.
This would keep these threads from showing up when people Googled LessWrong. It could also let us discuss phyggishness without making LessWrong look bad on Google.
Yes, and if we all put on black robes and masks to hide our identities when we talk about sinister secrets, no one will be suspicious of us at all!
If my browser displays it as text, I can copy it. If you try dickish JavaScript hacks to stop me from copying it the normal way, I can screenshot it. If you display it as some kind of hardware-accelerated DRM'd video that can't be screenshotted, I can get out a fucking camera and take a fucking picture. If I post it somewhere and you try to shut me down, you invoke the Streisand Effect and now all of Reddit wants (and has) a copy, to show their Censorship Fighter status.
tl;dr: No, you can't stop people from copying things on the Internet.
Are you kidding? Sign me up as a volunteer polyglot programmer, then!
Although, my own eagerness to help makes me think that the problem might not be that you tried to ask for volunteers and didn't get any, but rather that you tried to work with volunteers and something else didn't work out.
Maybe it's just that volunteers that will actually do any work are hard to find. Related.
Personally, I was excited about doing some LW development a couple of years ago and emailed one of the people coordinating volunteers about it. I got some instructions back but procrastinated forever on it and never ended up doing any programming at all.
Posts advocating or "asking about" violence against identifiable real people or groups should be deleted at the admins' discretion:
[pollid:374]
Posts advocating or "asking about" violation of laws that are actually enforced against middle-class people, other than the above, should be deleted at the admins' discretion:
[pollid:375]
This poll, like EY's original question, conflates two things that don't obviously belong together. (1) Advocating certain kinds of act. (2) "Asking about" the same kind of act.
I appreciate that in some cases "asking about" might just be lightly-disguised advocacy, or apparent advocacy might just be a particularly vivid way of asking a question. I'm guessing that the quotes around "asking about" are intended to indicate something like the first of these. But what, exactly?
It seems like this represents, not simply a new rule, but a change in the FOCUS of the community. Specifically, it used to be entirely about generating good ideas, and you are now adding a NEW priority which is "generating acceptable PR".
Quite possibly there is an illusion of transparency here, because there hasn't really BEEN (to my knowledge) any discussion about this change in purpose and priorities. It seems reasonable to be worried that this new priority will get in the way of, or even supersede the old priority, especially given the phrasin...
If there's a general policy against discussing violence on LW, and I can point to statements from the same timeframe of mine condemning such violence, it may help. It may not. Reporters are stupid. Your argument does not actually say why the anti-violence-discussion policy is a bad idea, and seems to be ad hominem tu quoque.
Everyone even slightly famous gets arbitrary green ink. Choosing which green ink to 'complain' about on your blog, when it makes an idea look bad which you would find politically disadvantageous, is not a neutral act. I'm also frankly suspicious of what the green ink actually said, and whether it was, perhaps, another person who doesn't like the "UFAI is possible" thesis saying that "Surely it would imply..." without anyone ever actually advocating it. Why would somebody who actually advocated that, contact Ben Goertzel when he is kn...
Why the explicit class distinction?
It would be prohibited to discuss how to or speed and avoid being cited for it. (I thought that this was already policy, and I believe it to be a good policy.)
It would not be prohibited to discuss how to be a vagrant and avoid being cited for it. (Middle class people temporarily without residences typically aren't treated as poorly as the underclass.)
Should the proper distinction be 'serious' crimes, or perhaps 'crimes of infamy'?
I don't have any principled objection to this policy, other than that as rationalists, we want to have fun, and this policy makes LW less fun.
Does advocating gun control, or increased taxes, count? They would count as violence is private actors did them, and talking about them makes them more likely (by states). Is the public-private distinction the important thing - would advocating/talking about state-sanctioned genocide be ok?
Regardless of whether you think censoring is net good or bad (for the forums, for the world, for SIAI), you have to realize the risks are far more on Eliezer than they are on any poster. His low tolerance responses and angry swearing are exactly what you should expect of someone who feels the need to project an image of complete disassociation from any lines of speculation that could possibly get him in legal trouble. Eliezer's PR concerns are not just of the forums in general. If he's being consistent, they should be informing every one of his comments on...
If the point was to "make a good impression" by distorting the impression given by people on the list to potential donors, maybe a more effective strategy is to shut up and do it, instead of making an announcement about it and causing a ruckus. "Disappear" the problems quietly and discretely.
This reminds me of the phyg business. Prompting long discussion threads about how "We are not a phyg! We are not a phyg!" is not recommended behavior if you don't want people to think you're not a phyg.
If combined with a "Please write him and ask him to shut down!", sure. I think it's understood by default in most civilized cultures that violence is not being advocated by default when other courses of action are being presented. If the action to be taken is mysteriously left unspecified, it'd be a judgment call depending on other language used.
I wouldn't have posted the following except that I share Esar's concerns about representativeness:
I think this is a good idea. I think using the word "censorship" primes a large segment of the LW population in an unproductive direction. I think various people are interpreting "may be deleted" to mean "must be deleted." I think various people are blithely ignoring this part of the OP (emphasis added):
...In other words, the form of this discussion is not 'Do you like this?' - you probably have a different cost function from peop
How about instead of outright censorship, such discussions be required to be encrypted, via double-rot13?
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.
Someone please send me a link via PM? Or perhaps the author could PM me? Not because the censorship of that class bothers me but because talking to wedrifid is not posting things on the internet, I'm curious and there are negligible consequences for talking to me about interesting hypothetical questions.
(Disregard the above is the post or comment was boring.)
tl;dr: tobacco kills more people than guns and cars combined. Should we ?
PS: fuck the police
Would it censor a discussion of, say, compelling an AI researcher by all means necessary to withhold their research from, say, the military?
Yes. This seems like yet another example of "First of all, it's a bad fucking idea, second of all, talking about it makes everyone else look bad, and third of all, if hypothetically it was actually a good idea you'd still be a fucking juvenile idiot for blathering about it on the public Internet." What part of "You fail conspiracies forever" is so hard for people to understand? Talk like this serves no purpose except to serve as fodder for people who claim that leads to violence and is therefore false, and your comment shall be duly deleted once this policy is put into place.
The overall emotional tone. The lack of calls to direct action. The encouragement to think about the effects of one's actions, with thinking including that you take an honest look at opposing points of view.
What would the response to this have been if instead of "censorship policy" the phrase would have been "community standard"?
laws that are actually enforced against middle-class people
Different countries can have very different laws. Are you going to enforce this policy with reference to U.S. laws only, as they exist in 2012? If not, what is your standard of reference?
As I commented elsewhere, if your goal is to prevent bad PR, it is not obvious to me that this policy is the right way to optimize for it. Perhaps you have thought this out and have good reasons for believing that this policy is best for this goal, but it is not clear to me, so please elaborate on this if you can.
So ... we can't discus assassination the president, that seems fine if unnecessary. But we can't debate kidnapping people and giving the ransom to charity without the "pro-" side being deleted? That seems like it will either destroy a lot of valuable conversations for minimal PR gain, or be enforced inconsistently, leading to accusations of bias. Probably both.
"anyone talking about a proposed crime on the Internet fails forever as a criminal"
I realize this isn't your TRUE objection, just a bit of a tangential "Public Service Announcement". The real concern is simply PR / our appearance to outsiders, right? But... I'm confused why you feel the need to include such a PSA.
Do we have a serious problem with people saying "Meet under the Lincoln Memorial at midnight, the pass-phrase is Sic semper tyrannis" or "I'm planning to kill my neighbor's dog, can you please debug my plot, I...
LessWrong attracts all sorts of people including would-be unabombers of varying level of dedication.
Why do you think LW attracts would-be unabombers?
(I seriously should've posted this question back when the thread only had 3 comments.)
I have no qualms about the policy itself, it's only commonsensical to me; my question is only tangentially related:
Do you believe "censorship" to be a connotatively better term than "moderation"?
"Reason: Talking about such violence makes that violence more probable,"
Does it? In some cases yes, and some cases no. Wacky people advocating violence can be smacked down by the crowd. Wacky violent loners need perspective from other people.
Talking about socially approved violence probably makes it more likely. Talking about socially disapproved violence might make it less likely.
The problem with these conversations are the generalities involved. We don't have examples of the offending material, and worse, the whole point is to hide the exampl...
I'd ask if there's any evidence of removal but... I can't imagine anything other than Eliezer saying "Yep, I deleted it" would do the trick.
Well, actually, does this software ALLOW deletions, or does deleted comment get replaced with a "Deleted Content" placeholder? Because if it's the latter, a link to that placeholder would be decent evidence :)
Do you have worked out numbers (in terms of community participation, support dollars, increased real-world violence, etc.) comparing the effect of having the censorship policy and the effect of allowing discussions that would be censored by the proposed policy? The request for "Consequences we haven't considered" is hard to meet until we know with sufficient detail what exactly you have considered.
My gut thinks it is unlikely that having a censorship policy has a smaller negative public relations effect than having occasional discussions that vio...
If virtualizing people is violence (since it does imply copying their brains and, uh, removing the physical original) you may want to censor Wei_Dai over here, as he seems to be advocating that the FAI could hypothetically (and euphemistically) kill the entire population of earth:
may at the admins' option be censored on the grounds that ... anyone talking about a proposed crime on the Internet fails forever as a criminal
I like it.
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.