I support censorship, but only if it is based on the unaccountable personal opinion of a human.
I think that there's the usual paradox of benevolent dictatorship here; you can only trust humans who clearly don't seek this position for selfish ends and aren't likely to present a rational/benevolent front just so you would give them political power.
In a liberal/democratic political atmosphere, self-proclaimed benevolent dictators are a rare and prized resource; you can pressure one to run a website, an organization, etc to the best of their ability. But if dictatorship were to be seen as the norm, and you couldn't easily fall back on democracy, rule by committee, anarchy, etc, and had to choose between a few dictators, then the standards of dictatorial control would surely plummet and it would be psychologically much more difficult to change the form of organization. So, IMO, isolated experiments with dictatorship are fine; overall preference for it is terribly dangerous.
(All of the above goes only for humans, of course; I have no qualms about FAI rule.)
P.S.: I googled for "benevolent dictator" + "paradox" and found an argument similar to mine.
Being governed by people instead of a system isn’t just dangerous, it suffers from a limited attention span, too. The Chinese oligarchy is, indeed, very effective. Beijing was cleaner for the Olympics and those pesky plastic bags are gone, but there is only so much bandwidth for the authorities to enforce regulation and address new concerns. Pollution is a serious problem in China that no one denies, but little is done so far. The people and the government are both troubled, but frankly, they have bigger fish to stir fry. Three hundred million people may be living middle class western lives, but that leaves another billion in a falling apart shack.
The Chinese have every reason to be proud of their beautiful country and amazing progress. There is much to enjoy and appreciate and, even if it pained me to admit it, their system works far better than I would like to give it credit. My worry for them is if it’s sustainable. Can those billion people rely on replacing great technocrats with new ones who also make the right decisions? Is it even possible for a system which depends on the vagaries of people to even effectively address all the concerns and needs of the people they govern and the society they guide?
But if dictatorship were to be seen as the norm, and you couldn't easily fall back on democracy, rule by committee, anarchy, etc, and had to choose between a few dictators, then the standards of dictatorial control would surely plummet and it would be psychologically much more difficult to change the form of organization.
Interesting. Do you think there are dictator-selection procedures that don't have either set of failure modes (selecting for looks/promises to loot the commons/lack of leadership, selecting for power-hungry tyrants)?
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.