META: Deletion policy

Suggestion: I recommend sending people their deleted posts.

I find it annoying to spend the effort to type a post, only to have it disappear into a bit bucket. If you want it gone, that's your prerogative, but I think it is a breach of etiquette for a forum to destroy information created by a forum user.

Now I assume you found the original post a breach of etiquette, so may feel that tit for tat is the right policy here. I'd consider an intentional breach of etiquette as an unnecessary escalation.

Concrete suggestions:

1. Bring the policy statements to the forefront; put the lengthy "background" discussion of "free speech" vs. "walled gardens" and the like in a brief FAQ or discussion section at the end. The first line of the policy statement should be the one beginning "Most of the burden of moderation ..."

Reason: Most readers want to know what the policy is — so that should come first. Most of the people who want to argue about the theory of the policy are looking to have an enjoyably clever argument, which the "background" provides — so that should be there, but not in front.

2. Use formatting to emphasize the document's structure. As it stands, there's not enough visual structure for the eye to pick out the little numbers that indicate new points. More notably, the paragraph that separates the "more controversial" items looks structurally like it should be the explanation of the spam item.

3. Readers have heard of the common cases. Spam, harassment, and posting of personal information are things that lots of forums ban; LW is not unusual in this regard. In gist, if it's against Reddit's policy, it doesn't need a lot of explanation.

4. Careful about spam and SEO. A major (possibly primary) to delete spam is that spam is clutter that gets in the way of people reading the forum. If someone posted a thousand posts that just contained "foo", that would be spam and would be deleted; even though it has nothing to do with SEO. Commercial spam is bad because allowing it creates a monetary incentive for endless clutter production.

5. Harassment section is too specific. There are a lot of forms of harassment that I suspect you'd want to get rid of that don't involve "following a particular user around and leaving insulting comments".

Also:

The violence section is much better explained than in the previous post discussing it. Specifically, the unwelcoming effect of "hypothetical" violence proposals is a really good point.

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.

The section on "information hazards" has an actual live link to TVTropes. Irony much?

I agree with this policy.

When a certain episode of Pokemon contained contained a pattern of red and blue flashes capable of inducing epilepsy, 685 children were taken to hospitals, most of whom had seen the pattern not on the original Pokemon episode but on news reports showing the episode which had induced epilepsy.

At the very least, this needs a citation or two, since the following sources cast doubt on the story as presented:

WebMD's account

CNN's account

Snopes' account

And CSI's account, which includes the following:

At about 6:51, the flashing lights filled the screens. By 7:30, according to the Fire-Defense agency, 618 children had been taken to hospitals complaining of various symptoms.

News of the attacks shot through Japan, and it was the subject of media reports later that evening. During the coverage, several stations replayed the flashing sequence, whereupon even more children fell ill and sought medical attention. The number affected by this “second wave” is unknown.

And then goes on to argue that the large number of cases was due to mass hysteria.

Please link to the wiki page somewhere so that it's not an orphan. Official policies need to be readily accessible. Also consider making it visible on the main site somewhere, if at all possible.

Is I read it, the policy does not address the basilisk and basilisk type issues, which, while I don't think should be moderated, are. "Information Hazards" specifically says "not mental health reasons."

I suspect a good deal of angst around the topic has been from people seeing the issues in online communities as symbolic of real-world issues - opposing policies not because they are bad for an online community, but because they would be bad if applied by a real-world government to a real-world nation; real-world governments come to mind because we have reasons to care more strongly about them, and we hear much more about them. But there are important differences! The biggest is that you can easily leave an online community any time you're not happy about it. I don't think an online community is more similar to a nation than it is to a bridge club, or a company, or a supermarket, or the people making an encyclopedia.

I don't think the concern about the symbolism of censorship is completely wrong; it's quite possible that China could argue that real-world censorship is important for the same reasons it is in online communities!

Somewhat off-topic, but this makes me think that maybe school should teach a bit about "online history" - the history of Usenet and Wikipedia for example.

This seems like a good deletion policy, but doesn't cover all the actual deletions that have been threatened. Edit: specifically, the policy of allowing certain parties to ban direct refutations of their arguments (edit2: from particular users).

At the end, the policy says that the policy does not force the mods to delete anything. Perhaps it should in the same breath also say that it does not prevent them from deleting anything. The judgement of the mods and admins is final and above the policy; the purpose of the policy is to inform them and the readership of the general principles that will be applied.

I was asked to post the following by an anonymous member.

There is a very big issue which this new policy fails to address:

Self defense is a widely advocated legal right in most jurisdictions. For instance, if someone is about to press a button that will activate a bomb which would kill you, and you have no other means of stopping them, in many jurisdictions you have a right to shoot them. Even when the offending party is not legally at fault (e.g. is insane).

This right puts extra burden of moral responsibility on the people that make certain claims. If someone made an unjustified claim that a button on your cellphone would trigger a bomb, and you get your face smashed against the ground by the concerned bystanders or the police - or get shot - the person that made that claim will take the fall for the incident even though formally it can be said that this person has never advocated any violence.

One can clearly see relevance of the above hypothetical to organizations and individuals which make broad and specific claims with regards to dangers and existential risks. Such as Singularity Institute, or a famous Friendly AI proponent Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, known for his somewhat dramatic statements with regards to dangers and risks posed by certain types of software and by completion of some specific projects.

Many replies in comments section on the censorship(sic) proposal on LessWrong do not seem to indicate that the authors accept this moral burden, instead seeing it as a fallacy. For instance, in http://lesswrong.com/lw/g24/new_censorship_against_hypothetical_violence/84qx , Eliezer S. Yudkowsky writes:

Point one: We never said X->Y. We said X, and a bunch of people too stupid to understand the fallacy of appeal to consequences said 'X->violence, look what those bad people advocate' as an attempted counterargument. Since no actual good can possibly come of discussing this on any set of assumptions, it would be nice to have the counter-counterargument, "Unlike this bad person here, we have a policy of deleting posts which claim Q->specific-violence even if the post claims not to believe in Q because the identifiable target would have a reasonable complaint of being threatened".

I agree with this policy.

Is the Pokemon story actually true? Casual googling suggests probably not, but I haven't investigated carefully enough to have a very strong opinion. Specifically, I didn't find corroboration of the claim that most of the children who went to hospital had seen news reports rather than the original programme.

That looks quite wall-of-text-y. It could be made more concise. Also, “We live in a society” -- “we” who? Not all LW users are from the US, or even from the Anglosphere, or even from the Western world. Whereas probably each LWer comes from some society with some stupid laws, that sentence still sounds kind of off, to me.

It's nice to have written ground rules, even if they are basically common sense.

I think this seems like a basically fine policy.

I will also say that my own experience being a moderator is firmly in agreement with http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/ , and thus in opposition to those who would rather see a totally hands-off approach to moderation.

Why would this post need to be deleted?

I agree with this policy. It sounds totally benign and ordinary.

I haven't been particularly encouraged to try responding to comments, either.

If you mean comment karma, consider that in the case where people appreciate your responses, but strongly disagree with their content, they will downvote you instinctively, as soon as they would furrow their brows: it's an immediately available, low effort way to scratch the itch of dissenting feelings. Since downvotes seem to give you cold-stabbies, but don't make you reevaluate your positions, instinct-downvoting is doubly ineffective, but still the default. We've now learned that saying "This isn't a poll. You have to correct me or I won't stop being wrong", isn't enough to break that habit.

I would repeat the thing about not binding at the top.

Well...

I'm upset by this.

Not sure why, exactly, but yeah, definitely upset by this. Just felt like sharing.

LessWrong is focused on rationality and will remain focused on rationality. There's a good deal of side conversation which goes on and this is usually harmless. Nonetheless, if we ask people to stop discussing some other topic instead of rationality, and they go on discussing it anyway, we may enforce this by deleting posts, comments, or comment trees.

This has always been the LW mission, and it's true that some threads are not at all on subject. And then it makes sense to delete them if their net value is even slightly negative, perhaps even if they are merely shown to take too much attention away from rationality topics. Although, I would appreciate it if the first tool used was a request or warning by a moderator to stop discussing something, rather than just deleting it.

People do want to discuss off-topic things, and I at least would like to do it with fellow LW users. (And I prefer forums or mailing lists to IRC.) Perhaps there is enough interest now to establish an offsite, unaffiliated, lightly moderated, Offtopic Discussion forum for LW users. Perhaps such a splitting off would also benefit LW by keeping it more focused on rationality. What do people think?

I see no definition for the word troll. It seems like a thing that should be obvious, but I've seen people using the word "troll" to describe people who are simply ignorant. I think I'm also picking up on a trend where, if a comment is downvoted, it is considered trolling regardless of the fact that it was simply an unpopular comment by an otherwise likable user. LessWrong seems to use a broader definition of the word "trolling" than I am used to. If you guys have your own twist on "trolling" it would be good to add LessWrong's definition to the wiki.

I'm really disappointed in EY -- the wiki page is incredibly careless of the safety of Brittany Fleegelburger, purple-eyed people, and congohelium producers. Large amounts of common sense indeed!

Consider adding something like "in return for donating $X to Y you will get a detailed reason for why your post was deleted."