META: Deletion policy

Eliezer Yudkowsky

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Deletion_policy

This is my attempt to codify the informal rules I've been working by.

I'll leave this post up for a bit, but strongly suspect that it will have to be deleted not too long thereafter. I haven't been particularly encouraged to try responding to comments, either. Nonetheless, if there's something I missed, let me know.

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Deletion_policy

This is my attempt to codify the informal rules I've been working by.

I own the "everything-list" Google Group, which has no explicit moderation policy, although I do block spam and the occasional completely off-topic post from newbies who seemingly misunderstood the subject matter of the forum. It worked fine without controversy or anything particularly bad happening, at least in the first decade or so of its existence, when I still paid attention to it. I would prefer if Eliezer also adopted an informal but largely "hands off" policy here. But looking at Eliezer's responses to recent arguments as well as past history, the disagreement seems to be due to some sort of unresolvable differences in priors/values/personality and not amenable to discussion. So I disagree but feel powerless to do anything about it.

There is a large difference between running a private list and a more accessible forum associated with an organization (the logos on top).

14Emile13y

Interesting. A couple hypotheses: 1) Admins overestimate the effect that certain policies have on behavior (they may underestimate random effects, or assign effects to the wrong policy); just like parents might overestimate the effect of parenting choices, or managers overestimate the impact of their decisions ("we did daily stand-up meetings, and the project was completed on time - the daily stand-up meetings must be the cause!"). 2) Eliezer is more concerned about the public image of LessWrong (both because of how it reflects on CFAR and SIAI, and on the kind of people it may attract) than you are (were?) about the everything-list. For what it's worth I'm fine with moderation of stupid things like discussing assassinations, and of banning obnoxious trolls and cranks and idiots, and the main reason to refrain from those kind of mod actions would be to avoid scaring naive young newcomers who might see it as an affront against Sacred Free Speech. Your testimony of a case where you still have quality discussion with very light moderation makes me slightly less in favor of heavy-handed moderation. (I'm not sure that the moderation here is becoming "stronger" recently, as opposed to merely a bit more explicit)

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