For most people it doesn't really matter when they trade off better PR for not following higher values such as respecting free speech.
If you want to design a FAI that values human values, it matters. You should practice to follow human values yourself. You should take situation like this opportunities for deliberate practice in making the kind of moral decisions that an FAI has to make.
Power corrupts. It's easy to censor criticism of your own decisions. You should use those opportuniities to practice being friendly instead of being corrupted.
In the past there was a case of censorship that lead to bad press for LessWrong. Given that past performance, why should we believe that increasing censorship will be good for PR?
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
The first instinct of an FAI shouldn't be: "Hey, the cost function of those humans is probably wrong, let's use a different cost function."
A few days ago someone wrote a post about how rationalists should make group decisions. I did argue that his proposal was unlikely to be effectively implementable.
A decision about how the perfect censorship policy for LessWrong could look like could be made via Delphi.
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.