It's not enough to show that the censorship policy could theoretically be used to stifle conversation we actually want here, the important question is whether it actually would be.
I think that's a very dangerous idea. This community is about developing FAI. FAI should be expected to act according to the rules that you give it. I think the policy should be judged by the way it would actually work if it would be applied as it's proposed.
There also the problem of encouraging group think: Advocating of illegal conduct gets censored when it goes against the morality of this group but is allowed when it's within the realms of that morality is bad.
This community should have consistent rules about which discussions are allowed and which aren't. Censoring on a case by case is problematic.
If you start censoring certain speech that advocates violence and avoid censoring other speech that advocates violence you also have the problem that you get more responsibility for the speech that you allow.
In the absence of a censorship policy you don't endorse a viewpoint by not censoring the viewpoint. If you however do censor, and you do make decisions not to censor specific speech that's an endorsement of that speech.
The way it's proposed is to be applied according to the judgment of a moderator. It makes no sense to pretend that we're beholden to the strictest letter of the rule when that's not how it's actually going to work.
What speech that advocates violence do you think would get a pass while the rest would get censored?
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.