At what point can one start talking about implications of a poll without it being a spoiler?

I don't know about any specific rule. The general idea is that people should see the poll first (so that they are not influenced how to vote), but I guess three days later it's fair game.

I don't know the actual reasons why my original Discussion post (...) was deleted

Voting means deciding whether members want the article or don't want the article. Your article was extremely downvoted. Like, one of the most downvoted articles ever; probably in the bottom 2%. So if there was any obvious community consensus about removing an article, it was about this one.

Meta: I think it would be more proper to become familiar with norms of a community first, and publish articles later. Comments like this seem to provide further evidence that you are actually not interested in LessWrong per se, just see it as a platform for your topic.

Survey results suggest considerable support in the community for discussing the topic in the Open Thread.

If you interpret "half of members don't want to disuss it at all, and the other half prefers keeping it in the open thread only" as a considerable support... well, I guess you were going to interpret almost any result positively.

A reasonable person might think it would be appropriate to repost that topic in the Open thread (I have the text of my original post).

I guess you are going to do it anyway; just let me say there is nothing "reasonable" about reposting a text that got karma below -20.

I also don't know what is supposed to happen here when half a community thinks something shouldn't be discussed and the other half is OK with it.

Well, if people have a strong desire to discuss something, they will. And each comment is upvoted or downvoted on its merits. Knowing that a large part of community does not want some topic either makes people comment less on it, or become extra careful when writing about it.

At this point I am no longer interested even in meta-discussions of this topic. Tapping out.

EDIT: Must... resist... trolling.

The results of the poll, at this moment... rot-13'd to prevent spoilers...

V cersre n frdhrapr bs negvpyrf - mreb; mreb creprag
V cersre bar negvpyr bayl - bar; frira creprag
V cersre ab negvpyrf, bayl n qvfphffvba va bcra guernq - svir; guveglfvk creprag
V cersre abg gb qvfphff guvf gbcvp ng nyy - svir; guveglfvk creprag
Fbzrguvat ryfr (cyrnfr rkcynva va n pbzzrag) - mreb; mreb creprag
V ershfr gb ibgr ba guvf gnobb gbcvp, whfg fubj zr gur erfhygf - guerr; gjraglbar creprag

That's pretty good for studies where we are counting "nations" to come up with our N.

Putting in effort in no way implies that you end up with the truth. If you want to know the truth you have to look into the underlying statistics. The underlying statistics don't care that it's hard to get data about multiple countries.

There no reason to look at countries. Crime statistics are available for US states. You have 50. Maybe you can also find data about pornography sales for each of those states. There's Google Trend data that you could use to find out how pornography distribution differs between US states. Google Trend data might even tell you something about the amount of child pornography in relation to other pornography.

You could add some sort of crime like theft to control for difference in the crime rate that aren't sex related.

You could also control against factors that people frequently use to explain changes in amount of sexual assault. I'm sure the literature on that topic will suggest a few ideas that you should control for.

When access to journal articles requires payment, citing them is problematic.

Usually journals have freely available abstracts of their articles.
There are also resources such as http://www.reddit.com/r/Scholar that provide access to articles for everyone.

Reading acadmic papers is a good way to increase one's understanding of how the world works, even if they aren't always perfect.

Other reputable organizations like the ACLU also support decriminalization without thinking about issues of increased demand.

The sounds like you want to think about the issue of increased demand because you already made up your mind about the issue.

I think the ACLU positions is that even if there is increased demand and thus more production the harm that it causes doesn't outweight the good of legalisation. Arguing such a position however needs analysis of the good that you create.

And outside of the justice system, everyone is free to use whatever data they have to update their beliefs and actions in whatever way seems justified by the data.

No they aren't. It happens to be legal to act on prejudice against celibate pedophiles. It is not legal to act on prejudice against people for their sex, race or the aspect of their sexual preference specific to whether they are attracted to males or females.

Be as prejudiced as you like. It's almost certainly socially beneficial to you. But you cannot pretend (here) that it is an obvious and natural implication of a generic legal right to do so. The right to discriminate is allowed in some cases (such as this one) but not others.

You see, where do I get this supposed knowledge that they are a "celibate pedophile"? Their own word? Why should I believe it? Why should I believe you?

Presumably you get the knowledge about the second word in the phrase from the same place you got the knowledge about the first word in the phrase. It does not seem to be a particularly unbelievable claim.

The supposed class of "celibate pedophiles"

Supposed class? What? The connotative claim here is that there are exactly zero people with a primary sexual attraction to prepubescent humans who have not and will not rape children.

makes about as much sense as "drunk drivers who have never had an accident".

Bullshit.

Note to JoshElders: I have a personal aversion to conversations riddled with the type of expression described by Frankfurt in the above linked essay. It seems abundantly clear to me that you directly engaging here with RichardKennaway or anyone similarly mindkilled will result in my exposure to such distasteful reasoning. It is likely that I would downvote both sides of such a conversation according to a "do not feed the moralizer" policy. I give you this information so you know the reason you would be getting downvoted is nothing to do with your sexuality and everything to do with the choice to provoke easily avoidable bullshit.

Folks, this is what "things you can't say" looks like. This is what a real social taboo looks like.

It looks to me more like what happens when someone uses "taboo" as a Power Word: Stun on a group of people with an excessive identity as rationalists. It's this, especially item #1, translated to discussion forums.

I notice that JoshElders original posting has gone. Good.

I've said pretty forthrightly that I believe he's just a troll, and I stand by that. But suppose I take him at his word. What is to be said? Sucks to be him, yay for not kiddle-fiddling (but he doesn't get any prize for that), and -- what? Certainly, there are discussions to be had about laws and mores around age, consent, and pornography. There are also places to have these discussions. LessWrong is not one of them.

LessWrong has a specific focus, without which it becomes merely MoreWrong and AveragelyWrong imagining they're LessWrong because they're posting on a site called LessWrong and have learned how to dress up as pretend rationalists. Nothing is made relevant to LessWrong just by being posted here. Framing discussions of whether the latest irrelevance should be here at all in terms of "exclusion", "taboo" and "open-minded" is somewhere between clueless and Dark Arts.

Typically in a community the people who care about a subject discuss it and those who don't do not. If a poll revealed that 90% of the community did not want the topic discussed but a small group kept discussing it, would that insulate the community from damage to any extent?

To an extent, but not enough to matter. The topic of child porn is one of the most socially toxic subjects out there, and even being peripherally associated with it can be a life-ending event. Careers have been destroyed, men have been unmade, and Bad Stuff Has Happened in the name of this topic. It does not have to make sense; it does not matter why. What matters is that it is so.

If for no other reason than self defense, I feel these discussions should be blackholed and discouraged with prejudice. We are a rationalist forum, with a specific goal, and the very presence of this topic risks our work. Again, it does not matter that it is unfair, it does not matter that it does not make sense: what matters is that it risks our work, in a nontrivial way.

Your goal is to discuss these topics. Our goal is to spread rationality. These two goals are in conflict for reasons beyond the control of either party, reasons which may or may not make sense but which nevertheless are powerful enough to unmake both of us.

I will not help you in your goal, as it conflicts with mine. I will encourage LW against helping you with your goal, as I feel it conflicts with and is damaging to theirs.

And finally, I recommend you push your agenda on a different forum. I would prefer you not return until you are willing to contribute positively to the core mission of LW - that core mission being the spread and improvement of rational thought processes in the general population. As it stands right now, I feel you have contributed net negative utility to the core mission of LW with your posts, and it disturbs me that you seem unable to see that or understand why.

Given how easy it is to make copies in this day and age, I don't think that's a necessary link -- but you're probably right. My assumption in any case is that a given child porn image is consumed thousands of times, so the effect on the consumer end would dwarf the effect on the producer end.

This argument is easy to turn on its head (just goes to show how easy these kinds of arguments are to make). If copying cp is easy, the same item is more difficult to sell multiple times. This creates an incentive to produce more material, because nobody is going to buy material that is easy to copy for free. Old material is more available for copying than new material. As was already argued, producing cp creates more abuse. In any case, there's always going to be demand for novelty.

My assumption in any case is that a given child porn image is consumed thousands of times, so the effect on the consumer end would dwarf the effect on the producer end.

That assumes there is a non-negligible inhibiting effect on the consumer end. I don't think this has been established. I realize you think the Diamond research is good evidence for this, but I'm not so sure. I admit I haven't perused that research in any detail, but as far as I can tell, their claims are based on very basic correlations between time series. Moreover, in each case the time series in question change monotonically in the same direction (greater availability of child porn as time goes on, and fewer cases of child sex abuse as time goes on). So it's not even like there are ups and downs in the two time series that track each other. The researchers also don't offer examples of countries with the opposing trends (less access to child pornography coupled with increased child sex abuse), or even offer control data from countries with no change in child porn availability. Drawing straightforward causal conclusions from this research is questionable.

Would you be any more comfortable thinking that I as a person participate more broadly under another identity? I'm not saying whether I do or not, but I'm asking.

I would be more comfortable if I had reason to believe this. I don't like the idea of this forum becoming a haven for well-spoken advocates of taboo causes (in fact I'm unhappy with the extent to which it already is something of this sort), especially taboo causes I think are taboo for good reason. If there were evidence that you were participating in the forum out of a general interest in rationality rather than just because you think rationalists would be a receptive audience for your cause, I'd be less perturbed by your posts.

To clarify, I am opposed to its production, which I think should remain illegal. I am opposed to criminal sanctions for the possession of child pornography. I suspect I would find much of it (both real and virtual) disgusting and revolting. It is advocacy for the consumers to the extent of not wanting them to face years in prison. It is definitely not approval for disgusting material.

To what extent does your belief that consumption of child porn should be decriminalized hinge on the assumption that decriminalizing consumption will not lead to an increase in production? Is there, to your mind, some level of increased production given which it would be OK to criminalize consumption, or do you maybe believe that no realistic amount of increase in production could justify imprisoning people only for looking at pictures? And can you give an estimate of the probability you assign to the proposition that production will increase if consumption is decriminalized?

Folks, this is what "things you can't say" looks like. This is what a real social taboo looks like.

Notice how different the community response is to this, versus to some of the things that are claimed by their proponents to be "things you can't say" but which are actually merely explicit statements of common beliefs in the cultural mainstream.

When someone triggers a social taboo, the response isn't so much "I will argue against this person!" — not even in the "someone is wrong on the Internet!" fashion. That's just disagreement (sometimes ideological or partisan disagreement), not taboo.

When someone triggers a social taboo, the response is more to try to stifle or exclude it quickly. This sometimes ends in trying to pretend that it never happened.

(I am not asserting that the taboo response is right or wrong on this subject. I am pointing out that it is different.)