The Allies won World War 2 largely by killing about 2 to 4 million civilians in Germany and Japan. Therefore, it isn't clear that the benefits of not killing civilians far outweigh the costs.

This will become more important as technology decreases the difficulty of building WMDs. Eventually, even a small nation like North Korea will be able to make nuclear missiles. By that time, the cost of allowing them to do as they please (and encouraging other nations to also do as they please) may be greater, in expected lives lost, than the cost of brutally killing a million North Korean civilians.

I would go on, but there's no point in going to the next shock level.

This is an interesting post, but...

Hating Hitler doesn't mean you're biased against Hitler. Likewise, having a belief about a particular ethnic group doesn't mean you're biased for or against them.

Then how do you know what score you should get on the IAT? I don't know what an unbiased score would be, but an equal-for-both-groups score is most likely biased.

In the Israel vs. Palestine case, your answer would depend more on some meta-level decisions than on ironing out another decimal point of bias. For instance: Should a settlement give equal benefits to both sides; should it compensate for historic injustices; should it maximize expected value for the participants; should it maximize expected value for the world?

If you want to maximize expected value for the world, you would end up calculating something like this:

• Israelis have given us a hugely disproportionate number of the world's famous scientists, musicians, artists, writers, producers, bankers, doctors, and lawyers.
• Palestinians have given us a hugely disproportionate number of the world's famous suicide bombers.

The answer you would then arrive at will be more different from the answer you would arrive at if "equitable outcome" is your goal, than the difference made by any bias. (Unless you really, really hate lawyers.)

So I don't think this approach gets at any of the hard problems.

I don't know how many people here would agree with the following, but my position on it is extreme relative to the mainstream, so I think it deserves a mention:

As a matter of individual rights as well as for a well working society, all information should be absolutely free; there should be no laws on the collection, distribution or use of information.

Copyright, Patent and Trademark law are forms of censorship and should be completely abolished. The same applies to laws on libel, slander and exchange of child pornography.

Information privacy is massively overrated; the right to remember, use and distribute valuable information available to a specific entity should always override the right of other entites not to be embarassed or disadvantaged by these acts.

People and companies exposing buggy software to untrusted parties deserve to have it exploited to their disadvantage. Maliciously attacking software systems by submitting data crafted to trigger security-critical bugs should not be illegal in any way.

Limits: The last paragraph assumes that there are no langford basilisks; if such things do in fact exist, preventing basilisk deaths may justify censorship - based on the purely practical observation that fixing the human mind would likely not be possible shortly after discovery.

All of the stated policy opinions apply to societies composed of roughly human-intelligent people only; they break down in the presence of sufficiently intelligent entities.

In addition, if it was possible to significantly ameliorate existential risks by censorsing certain information, that would justify doing so - but I can't come up with a likely case for that happening in practice.

In Virginia, if you're convicted of murdering someone and sentenced to life in prison, and that person shows up alive and healthy more than 21 days after your conviction, that is not grounds for an appeal of your sentence.

I don't believe you. Or rather, I believe that you have been confused by legal terminology. If a lower court reviews new evidence and decides to reverse a conviction, then that is not an appeal, because appeals can only be granted by a higher court, but it leads to the person being released anyways. You have confused a statement about legal procedure for a statement about outcomes, leading you to an obviously absurd conclusion about the value of innocent peoples' freedom.