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When someone removes a Chesterton fence without thinking about it much, what usually happens is that after a while people begin to see that there was a reason for the fence to be there. That doesn't necessarily mean that they have to put the fence back, but they do have to develop a new way to address the issues that were meant to be addressed by the fence. I expect this to happen over time with the fences that have been taken down in our current system (i.e. I think that those fences did have their reasons.)
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[Stub] The problem with Chesterton's Fence
Appealing to Chesterton's Fence is moving away from an object level argument. Thus, the general implication of the Chesterton's Fence argument is that there is not an efficient alternative solution to the problem.
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Voiceofra is banned
The user most likely to engage in retributive downvoting are those who engage in hostile debate and subsequently have low karma ratio's themselves (VoiceofRa has 68% favourability). Perhaps you could disable downvoting functionality for those with a karma ratio lower than 80%? Considering that poor quality of contributions is another big factor for low karma ratios this measure would have the added benefit that our most competent users have more power.
Unless your goal is exclude folks like me (which could be your goal - I could be considered a marginal user), 80% is too high.
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Is my theory on why censorship is wrong correct?
Is it that crazy to expect that a moderator remove posts like this? I don't mind that the quality is not very good, but the inclusion of racial slurs should make it over the line.
At this moment, the post is at -19. That is moderation removing it, round these parts.
Cancer and heart disease are diseases of longevity.
I don't have data at hand, but I think that's true only partially. Yes, the prevalence of cancer and CVD is a function of the age of the population, but as far as I remember, even after you control for age, they still show up as diseases of civilization with the "primitive" societies having considerably lesser age-adjusted rates.
At least one causal pathway for that is visible: diabetes and the metabolic syndrome in general are clearly diseases of civilization and they are strong risk factors for CVD (I don't know about cancer).
Interesting - I've modeled all cancer in my mind as vaguely similar to testicular cancer - one is likely to get it, but unlikely to die of it unless you survive many other potential causes of death.
In other words, I'm not sure if the data we care about is prevalence-of-cancer or prevalence-of-cancer-deaths.
On reflection, I think the assertion under question is essentially "Paleo diet creates more QUALYs." Which should be answered in part by how much prevalence of cancer effects quality of life even if the cancer was not a causal factor in death.
"Trying to communicate is worth the cost" is subjective, so I don't know if I could give an example that would satisfy you. But I would suggest imagining one of the situations where someone is asking it insincerely in order to make it harder for me to speak, then imagine that scenario slightly changed so that the person asking it is sincere.
Hypo:
Professor: Let's continue our discussion of sub-atomic particles. Top quarks have a number of interesting properties . . . .
Student: Excuse me professor, could you taboo "atomic?"
Professor: Get out.
In this situation, I think it is clear that the professor is right and the student is wrong. It doesn't matter if (a) the student is a quack who objects to atomic theory, or (b) is asking in good faith for more information on atomic theory. (a) is an example of bad faith. (b) is an example of sincere but not worth the effort - mostly because the topic of conversation is sub-atomic particles, not atomic theory.
I'm just having trouble understanding a situation where (1) question is on topic (ie worth answering) (2) asked sincerely, but (3) not worth tabooing a technical term.
In short, deciding the appropriate topic of conversation is difficult, but beyond the scope of the original article.
I can't back up any of this with solid citations but: If our ancestors have been eating a food for a very long time that's Bayesian evidence that the food is safe. We have been eating meat for so long that it seems likely parts of us are dependent on stuff we can get only from meat. Cancer, heart disease, and strokes seem to be mostly diseases of civilization that were relatively rare among hunter-gatherers who ate their traditional diets. Things go really badly for hunter-gatherers who switch from their traditional diets to modern diets. Wheat is cheap to grow so even if it is unhealthy it's understandable that it would be widely consumed. It's also understandable that sugar, being a superstimulus would be widely consumed even if it is unhealthy. Lots of people who try paleo succeed in loosing weight. The modern obesity epidemic shows something is very wrong with SAD (Standard American Diet) and paleo offers a tried and true safe harbor.
Cancer and heart disease are diseases of longevity. Why expect paleo to help with them when there's every reason to believe longevity wasn't a part of that environment?
Because there are downsides to it as well as upsides, and in a particular case the downsides might predominate. Just because someone is not acting in bad faith when they make the request doesn't mean that the request will do more good than harm.
Can you be specific? I'm having trouble thinking if situation where trying to communicate was worth the cost, but tabooing words if asked was not.
They can be dishonest, but they can also be well-meaning but mistaken.
If defining your terms makes your message incomprehensible, that's a problem with the medium you've chosen or the message itself.
Defining terms inline can make things hard to understand simply because human beings don't have a large stack size for the purpose of understanding sentences containing many inline clauses. I suppose that's a problem with the medium--if the medium is "speech by human beings".
The essay isn't about speech, it's about communication. Outside the scope of this essay, but sometime speech is the wrong medium.
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Not actively but maybe subconsciously.
As I already mentioned child directed speech is different.
And also yes: Most children probably can get by without that either.
And also: I'm sure gwern will chime in an cite that parents have no impact on language and concept acquisition at all.
There's overwhelming data that parenting can prevent language acquisition. But that requires extreme degenerate cases - essentially child abuse on the level of locking the child in the closet and not talking to them at all.
For typical parenting, I agree that it is unlikely that variance in parenting style has measurable effect on language acquisition.