You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Luke_A_Somers comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, July 2014, chapter 102 - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: David_Gerard 26 July 2014 11:26AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (370)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 29 July 2014 09:19:22PM *  0 points [-]

1) Countries are really big. There are multiple layers of sub-community, providing for much more diversity even in a country that isn't about diversity. LW is multiple orders of magnitude smaller than Britain even with lurkers counted, and if we only count the regulars, the same can be said of magical Britain.

2) Countries don't have a specific purpose. Websites often do (including this one, used in the example). On a website, simply going off-topic badly can be a bannable offense (not here, yes). A country trying to do that is farcical.

3) The example given above, that I was responding to, was about someone who was let in to LW, did some bad things, and was banned. This is the equivalent of exile. It was targeted and in response to an existing wrong. It was not done proactively for a broad category of people who had not done anything wrong.

4) Speaking of those people not doing anything wrong, "don't, won't, or can't accept [the community's norms]" might be a legitimate reason, but it was not the criterion applied in the example, even approximately.

Comment author: Azathoth123 30 July 2014 01:16:32AM 3 points [-]

Countries are really big. There are multiple layers of sub-community, providing for much more diversity even in a country that isn't about diversity.

Yes, but you still need standards for said sub-communities to be able to coexist.

It was not done proactively for a broad category of people who had not done anything wrong.

Depends on the website and the situation. Hacker News, for example, temporarily disables creating new accounts whenever it is linked to by a mainstream source. Also if a bunch of people from 4chan decided to show up here, I suspect you'd support proactive measures.

Speaking of those people not doing anything wrong, "don't, won't, or can't accept [the community's norms]" might be a legitimate reason, but it was not the criterion applied in the example, even approximately.

What example were you thinking of? In the example of immigration to the GB, if you listen to the complaints of the people against immigration, many of them amount to the above criterion.