New censorship: against hypothetical violence against identifiable people

I'm started to feel strongly uncomfortable about this, but I'm unsure if that's reasonable. Here's some arguments ITT that are concerning me:

Does advocating gun control, or increased taxes, count? They would count as violence is private actors did them, and talking about them makes them more likely (by states).

Violence is a very slippery concept. Perhaps it is not the best one to base mod rules on. (more at end)

We're losing Graham cred by being unwilling to discuss things that make us look bad.

This one is really disturbing to me. I don't like all the self-conscious talk about how we are percieved outside. Maybe we need to fork LW, to accomplish it, but I want to be able to discuss what's true and good without worrying about getting moderated. My post-rationality opinions have already diverged so far from the mainstream that I feel I can't talk about my interests in polite society. I don't want this here too.

If I see any mod action that could be destroyed by the truth, I will have to conclude that LW management is borked and needs to be forked. Until then I will put my trust in the authorities here.

Would my pro-piracy arguments be covered by this? What about my pro-coup d'etat ones?

Would it censor a discussion of, say, compelling an AI researcher by all means necessary to withhold their research from, say, the military?

The whole purpose of discussing such plans is to reduce uncertainty over their utility; you haven't proven that the utility gain of a plan turning out to be good must be less than the cost of discussing it in public.

Yeah seriously. What if violence is the right thing to do? (EDIT: Derp. Don't discuss it in public, (except for stuff like Konkvistador's piracy and reaction advocacy, which are supposed to be public))

My post was indeed inappropriate. I have used the "Delete" function on it.

This is important. If the poster in question agrees when it is pointed out that their post is stupid, go ahead and delete it. But if they disagree in some way that isn't simple defiance, please take a long look at why.

In general, two conclusions:

I support censorship, but only if it is based on the unaccountable personal opinion of a human. Anything else is too prone to lost purposes. If a serious rationalist (e.g. EY) seriously thinks about it and decides that some post has negative utility, I support its deletion. If some unintelligent rule like "no hypothetical violence" decides that a post is no good, why should I agree? Simple rules do not capture all the subtlety of our values; they cannot be treated as Friendly.

And, as usual, that which can be destroyed by the truth should be. If moderator actions start serving some force other than truth and good, LW, or at least the subset dedicated to truth and rationality, should be forked.

EY has publicly posted material that is intended to provoke thought on the possibility of legalizing rape (which is considered a form of violence). If he believed that there was positive utility in considering such questions before, then he must consider them to have some positive utility now, and determining whether the negative utility outweighs that is always a difficult question. This is why I will be opposed to any sort of zero tolerance policy in which the things to be censored is not well-defined a definite impediment to balanced and rationally-considered discussion. It's clear to me that speaking about violence against a particular person or persons is far more likely to have negative consequences on balance, but discussion of the commission of crimes in general seems like something that should be weighed on a case-by-case basis.

In general, I prefer my moderators to have a fuzzy set of broad guidelines about what should be censored in which not deleting is the default position, and they actually have to decide that it is definitely bad before they take the delete action. The guidelines can be used to raise posts to the level of this consideration and influence their judgment on this decision, but they should never be able to say "the rules say this type of thing should be deleted!"

Fun Exercise

Posts or comments advocating or 'asking about' violation of laws that are actually enforced against middle-class people (e.g., kidnapping, not anti-marijuana laws) may at the admins' option be censored on the grounds that it makes LW look bad and that anyone talking about a proposed crime on the Internet fails forever as a criminal

Consider what would have been covered by this 250, 100 and 50 years ago.

Bonus Consider what wouldn't have been covered by this 250, 100 and 50 years ago but would be today.

Would my pro-piracy arguments be covered by this? What about my pro-coup d'état ones?

I am asking in advance if anyone has non-obvious consequences they want to point out or policy considerations they would like to raise.

I'm not sure what's obvious for you. In an enviroment without censorship you don't endorse a post by not censoring the post. If you however start censoring you do endorse a post by letting it stand.

Your legal and PR obligations for those posts that LessWrong hosts get bigger if you make editorial censorship decisions.

My post was indeed inappropriate. I have used the "Delete" function on it.

I'm disappointed by EY's response so far in this thread, particularly here. The content of the post above in itself did not significantly dismay me, but upon reading what appeared to be a serious lack of any rigorous updating on the part of EY to--what I and many LWers seemed to have thought were--valid concerns, my motivation to donate to the SI has substantially decreased.

I had originally planned to donate around $100 (starving college student) to the SI by the start of the new year, but this is now in question. (This is not an attempt at some sort of blackmail, just a frank response by someone who reads LW precisely to sift through material largely unencumbered by mainstream non-epistemic factors.) This is not to say that I will not donate at all, just that the warm fuzzies I would have received on donating are now compromised, and that I will have to purchase warm fuzzies elsewhere--instead of utilons and fuzzies all at once through the SI.

Posts or comments advocating or 'asking about' violation of laws that are actually enforced against middle-class people (e.g., kidnapping, not anti-marijuana laws) may at the admins' option be censored on the grounds that it makes LW look bad

I'm dubious about this because laws can change. I'm also sure I don't have a solid grasp of which laws can be enforced against middle-class people, but I do know that they aren't all like laws against kidnapping. For example, doctors can get into trouble for prescribing "too much" pain medication.

Just because I think responses to this post might not have been representative:

I think this is a good policy.

On of the most challenging moderation decisions I had to do at another forum was whether someone who argues the position "Homosexuality is a crime. In my country it's punishable with death. I like the laws of my country" should have his right of free speech. I think the author of the post was living in Uganda.

The basic question is, should someone who's been raised in Uganda feel free to share his moral views? Even if those views are offensive to Western ears and people might die based on those views?

If you want to have a open discussion about morality I think it's very valuable to have people who aren't raised in Western society participating openly in the discussion. I don't think LessWrong is supposed to be a place where someone from Uganda should be prevented from arguing the moral views in which he believes.

When it comes to politics, communists argue frequently for the necessarity of a revolution. A revolution is an illegal act that includes violence against real people. Moldburg argues frequently for the necessity of a coup d'état.

This policy allows for censoring both the political philosophy of communism as well as the political philosophy of moldbuggianism.
Even when I disagree with both political philosophies I think they should stay within the realm of discourse on LessWrong.

A community which has the goal of finding the correct moral system shouldn't ban ideas because they conflict with the basic Western moral consensus.

TDT suggests that one should push the fat man. It's a thought exercise and it's easy to say "I would push the fat man". In a discussion about pushing fat man's on trolly I think it's valid to switch the discussion from trolly cars to real world examples.

Discussion of torture is similar. If you say "Policemen should torture kidnappers to get the location where the kidnapper hid the victim" you are advocating a crime against real people.

Corporal punishment is illegal violence.

Given the examples I listed in this posts, which are cases where you would choose to censor? Do you think that you could articulate a public criteria about which cases you censor and which you will allow?

I currently find myself tempted to write a new post for Discussion, on the general topic of "From a Bayesian/rationalist/winningest perspective, if there is a more-than-minuscule threat of political violence in your area, how should you go about figuring out the best course of action? What criteria should you apply? How do you figure out which group(s), if any, to try to support? How do you determine what the risk of political violence actually is? When the law says rebellion is illegal, that preparing to rebel is illegal, that discussing rebellion even in theory is illegal, when should you obey the law, and when shouldn't you? Which lessons from HPMoR might apply? What reference books on war, game-theory, and history are good to have read beforehand? In the extreme case... where do you draw the line between choosing to pull a trigger, or not?".

If it was simply a bad idea to have such a post, then I'd expect to take a karma hit from the downvotes, and take it as a lesson learned. However, I also find myself unsure whether or not such a post would pass the muster of the new deletionist criteria, and so I'm not sure whether or not I would be able to gather that idea - let alone whatever good ideas might result if such a thread was, in fact, something that interested other LessWrongers.

This whole thread-idea seems to fall squarely in the middle, between the approved 'hypothetical violence near trolleys' and 'discussion violence against real groups'. Would anyone be interested in helping me put together a version of such a post to generate the most possible constructive discourse? Or, perhaps, would somebody like to clarify that no version of such a post would pass muster under the new policy?

The "interesting" thing about violence is that it's one of the few ways that a relatively small group of (politically) powerless people with no significant support can cause a big change in the world. However, the change rarely turns out the way the small group would hope; most attempts at political violence by individuals or small groups fail miserably at achieving the group's aims.

Got it. Posts discussing our plans for crimes will herewith be kept to the secret boards only.

Deleting comments for being perceived as dangerous might get in the way of conversation. I think that if we're worried about how the site looks to outsiders then it's probably only necessary to worry about actual posts. Nobody expects comments to be appropriate on the internet, so it probably doesn't hurt us that much.

Yes, a post of this type was just recently made.

Well then.

I've heard that firemen respond to everything not because they actually have to, but because it keeps the drill sharp, so to speak. The same idea may apply to mod action... (in other words, MOAR "POINTLESS" CENSORSHIP)

More seriously, does this policy apply to things like gwern's hypothetical bombing of intel?

violence against real people.

Abortion, euthenasia and suicide fit that description, some say. For them and those who disagree with them this proposal may have unforeseen consequences. Edit: all three are illegal in parts of the world today.

I think this is an overreation to (deleted thing) happening, and the proposed policy goes too far. (Deleted thing) was neither a good idea or good to talk about in this public forum, but it was straight-out advocating violence in an obvious and direct way, against specific, real people that aren't in some hated group. That's not okay and it's not good for community for the reasons you (EY) said. But the proposed standard is too loose and it's going to have a chilling effect on some fringe discussion that's probably going to be useful in teasing out some of the consquences of ethics (which is where this stuff comes up). Having this be a guideline rather than a hard rule seems good, but it still seems like we're scarring on the first cut, as it were.

I think we run the risk of adopting a censorship policy that makes it difficult to talk about or change the censorship policy, which is also a really terrible idea.

I agree with the general idea of protecting LW's reputation to outsiders. After all, if we're raising the sanity waterline (rather than researching FAI), we want outsiders to become insiders, which they won't do if they think we're crazy.

"No advocating violence against real world people, or opening a discussion on whether to commit violence on real world people" seems safe enough as a policy to adopt, and specific enough to not have much of a chilling effect on discussion. We ought to restrict what we talk about as little as possible, in the absence of actual problems, given that any posts we don't want here can be erased by a few keystrokes from an admin.

Censorship is particularly harmful to the project of rationality, because it encourages hypocrisy and the thinking of thoughts for reasons other than that they are true. You must do what you feel is right, of course, and I don't know what the post you're referring to was about, but I don't trust you to be responding to some actual problematic post instead of self-righteously overreacting. Which is a problem in and of itself.

Do wars count? I find it strange, to say the least, that humans have strong feelings about singling out an individual for violence but give relatively little thought to dropping bombs on hundreds or thousands of nameless, faceless humans.

Context matters, and trying to describe an ethical situation in enough detail to arrive at a meaningful answer may indirectly identify the participants. Should there at least be an exception for notorious people or groups who happen to still be living instead of relegated to historical "bad guys" who are almost universally accepted to be worth killing? I can think of numerous examples, living and dead, who were or are the target of state-sponsored violence, some with fairly good reason.

Your generalization is averaging over clairvoyance. The whole purpose of discussing such plans is to reduce uncertainty over their utility; you haven't proven that the utility gain of a plan turning out to be good must be less than the cost of discussing it in public.

Does the policy apply to violence against oneself? (I'm guessing not, since it's not illegal.) Talking about it is usually believed to reduce risk.

There's a scarcity effect whereby people believe pro-violence arguments to be stronger, since if they weren't convincing they wouldn't be censored. Not sure how strong it is, likely depends on whether people drop the topic or say things like "I'm not allowed to give more detail, wink wink nudge nudge".

It's a common policy so there don't seem to be any slippery slope problems.

We're losing Graham cred by being unwilling to discuss things that make us look bad. Probably a good thing, we're getting more mainstream.

Would pro-suicide and general anti-natalist posts be covered by this?

I don't necessarily object to this policy but find it troubling that you can't give a better reason for not discussing violence being a good idea than PR.

Frankly, I find it even more troubling that your standard reasons for why violence is not in fact a good idea seem to be "it's bad PR" and "even if it is we shouldn't say so in public".

As I quote here:

if your main goal is to show that your heart is in the right place, then your heart is not in the right place.

Edit: added link to an example of SIAI people unable to give a better reason against doing violence than PR.

The freaky consequences are not of the policy, they're of the meta-policy. You know how communities die when they stop being fun? Occasional shitstorms are not fun, and fear of saying something that will cause a shitstorm is not fun. Benevolent dictators work well to keep communities fun; the justifications don't apply when the dictator is pursuing goals that aren't in the selfish interest of members and interested lurkers; making the institute the founder likes look bad only weakly impacts community fun.

Predictable consequences are bright iconoclasts leaving, and shitstorm frequency increasing. (That's kinda hard to settle: the former is imprecise and the latter can be rigged.)

Every time, people complain much less about the policy than about not being consulted. There are at least two metapolicies that avoid this:

• Avoid kicking up shitstorms. In this particular instance, you could have told CronoDAS his post was stupid and suggest he delete it, and then said "Hey, everyone, let's stop talking about violence against specific people, it's stupid and makes us look bad" without putting your moderator hat on.

• Produce a policy, possibly ridiculously stringent, that covers most things you don't like, which allows people to predict moderator behavior and doesn't change often. Ignore complaints when enforcing, and do what you wish with complaints on principle.

Taking this post in the way it was intended i.e. 'are there any reasons why such a policy would make people more likely to attribute violent intent to LW' I can think of one:

The fact that this policy is seen as necessary could imply that LW has a particular problem with members advocating violence. Basically, I could envision the one as saying: 'LW members advocate violence so often that they had to institute a specific policy just to avoid looking bad to the outside world'

And, of course, statements like 'if a proposed conspiratorial crime were in fact good you shouldn't talk about it on the internet' make for good out-of-context excerpts.

Posts or comments advocating or 'asking about' violation of laws that are actually enforced against middle-class people (e.g., kidnapping, not anti-marijuana laws) may at the admins' option be censored

The blasphemy laws of many countries fit this description - another possible unintended consequence.

I find that threatening hypothetical violence against my interlocutor can be a useful rhetorical device for getting them to think about ethical problems in near mode.

Maybe something like "Moderators, at their discretion, may remove comments that can be construed as advocating illegal activity" would work for a formal policy - it reads like relatively inoffensive boilerplate and would be something to point to if a post like mine needs to go, but is vague enough that it doesn't scream "CENSORSHIP!!!" to people who feel strongly about it. The "at their discretion" is key; it doesn't create a category of posts that moderators are required to delete, so it can't be used by non-moderators as a weapon to stifle otherwise productive discussion. (If you don't trust the discretion of the moderators, that's not a problem that can be easily solved with a few written policies.)

Yeesh. Step out for a couple days to work on your bodyhacking and there's a trench war going on when you get back...

In all seriousness, there seems to be a lot of shouting here. Intelligent shouting, mind you, but I am not sure how much of it is actually informative.

This looks like a pretty simple situation to run a cost/benefit on: will censoring of the sort proposed help, hurt, or have little appreciable effect on the community.

Benefits: May help public image. (Sub-benefits: Make LW more friendly to new persons, advance SIAI-related PR); May reduce brain-eating discussions (If I advocate violence against group X, even as a hypothetical, and you are a member of said group, then you have a vested political interest whether or not my initial idea was good which leads to worse discussion); May preserve what is essentially a community norm now (as many have noted) in the face of future change; Will remove one particularly noxious and bad-PR generating avenue for trolling. (Which won't remove trolling, of course. In fact, fighting trolls gives them attention, which they like: see Cons)

Costs: May increase bad PR for censoring (Rare in my experience, provided that the rules are sensibly enforced); May lead to people not posting important ideas for fear of violating rules (corollary: may help lead to environment where people post less); May create "silly" attempts to get around the rule by gray-areaing it (Where people say things like "I won't say which country, but it starts with United States and rhymes with Bymerica") which is a headache; May increase trolling (Trolls love it when there are rules to break, as these violations give them attention); May increase odds of LW community members acting in violence

Those are all the ones I could come up with in a few minutes after reading many posts. I am not sure what weights or probabilities to assign: probabilities could be determined by looking at other communities and incidents of media exposure, possibly comparing community size to exposure and total harm done and comparing that to a sample of similarly-sized communities. Maybe with a focus on communities about the size LW is now to cut down on the paperwork. Weights are trickier, but should probably be assigned in terms of expected harm to the community and its goals and the types of harm that could be done.

Aside from the fact that "it might make us look bad" is a horrible argument in general, have you not considered the consequence that censorship makes us look bad? And consider the following comment below:

Got it. Posts discussing our plans for crimes will herewith be kept to the secret boards only.

It was obviously intended as a joke, but is that clear to outsiders? Does forcing certain kinds of discussions into side-channels, which will inevitibly leak, make us look good?

Consideration of these kinds of meta-consequences is what separates naive decision theories from sophisticated decision theores. Have you considered that it might hurt your credibility as a decision theorist to demonstrate such a lack of application of sophisticated decision theory in setting policies on your own website?

And now, what I consider to be the single most damning argument against this policy: in the very incident that provoked this rule change, the author of the post in question, after discussion, voluntarily withdrew the post, without this policy being in effect! So self-policing has demonstrated itself, so far, to be 100% effective at dealing with this situation. So where exactly is the necessity for such a policy change?

(i.e., even if a proposed conspiratorial crime were in fact good, there would still be net negative expected utility from talking about it on the Internet; if it's a bad idea, promoting it conceptually by discussing it is also a bad idea; therefore and in full generality this is a low-value form of discussion).

This seems to be a fully general argument against Devil's Advocacy. Was it meant as such?

Would this censor posts about robbing banks and then donating the proceeds to charity?

I am asking in advance if anyone has non-obvious consequences they want to point out or policy considerations they would like to raise. In other words, the form of this discussion is not 'Do you like this?' - you probably have a different cost function from people who are held responsible for how LW looks as a whole - but rather, 'Are there any predictable consequences we didn't think of that you would like to point out

Eliezer, at this point I think it's fair to ask: has anything anyone has said so far caused you to update? If not, why not?

I realize some of my replies to you in this thread have been rather harsh, so perhaps I should take this opportunity to clarify: I consider myself a big fan of yours. I think you're a brilliant guy, and I agree with you on just about everything regarding FAI, x-risk, SIAI's mission.... I think you're probably mankind's best bet if we want to successfully navigate the singularity. But at the same time, I also think you can demonstrate some remarkably poor judgement from time to time... hey, we're all running on corrupted hardware after all. It's the combination of these two facts that really bothers me.

I don't know of any way to say this that isn't going to come off sounding horribly condescending, so I'm just going to say it, and hope you evaluate it in the context of the fact that I'm a big fan of your work, and in the grand scheme of things, we're on the same side.

I think what's going on here is that your feelings have gotten hurt by various people misattributing various positions to you that you don't actually hold. That's totally understandable. But I think you're confusing the extent to which your feelings have been hurt with the extent to which actual harm has been done to SIAI's mission, and are overreacting as a result. I'm not a psychologist - this is just armchair speculation.... I'm just telling you how it looks from the outside.

Again, we're all running on corrupted hardware, so it's entirely natural for even the best amongst us to make these kinds of mistakes... I don't expect you to be an emotionless Straw Vulcan (and indeed, I wouldn't trust you if you were)... but your apparent unwillingness to update in response to other's input when it comes to certain emotionally charged issues is very troubling to me.

So to answer your question "Are there any predictable consequences we didn't think of that you would like to point out"... well I've pointed out many already, but the most concise, and most important predictable consequence of this policy which I believe you're failing to take into account, is this: IT LOOKS HORRIBLE... like, really really bad. Way worse than the things it's intended to combat.

I don't know if we actually need a specific policy on this. We didn't in the case of my post...

Beware Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs.

I am for the policy, although heavy-heartedly. I feel that one of the pillars of Rationality is that there should be no Stop Signs and this policy might produce some. On the other hand, I think PR is important, and that we must be aware of evaporative cooling that might happen if it is not applied.

On a neutral note - We aren't enemies here. We all have very similar utility functions, with slightly different weights on certain terminal values (PR) - which is understandable as some of us have more or less to lose from LW's PR.

To convince Eliezer - you must show him a model of the world given the policy that causes ill effects he finds worse than the positive effects of enacting the policy. If you just tell him "Your policy is flawed due to ambiguitiy in description" or "You have, in the past, said things that are not consistent with this policy" - I place low probability on him significantly changing his mind. You should take this as a sign that you are Straw-manning Eliezer, when you should be Steel-manning him.

Also, how about some creative solutions? An special post tag that must be applied to posts that condone hypothetical violence which causes them to only be seen to registered users - and displays a disclaimer above the post warning against the nature of the post? That should mitigate 99% of the PR effect. Or, your better, more creative idea. Go.

Two thoughts:

One: When my partner worked as the system administrator of a small college, her boss (the head of IT, a fatherly older man) came to her with a bit of an ethical situation.

It seems that the Dean of Admissions had asked him about taking down a student's personal web page hosted on the college's web server. Why? The web page contained pictures of the student and her girlfriend engaged in public displays of affection, some not particularly clothed. The Dean of Admissions was concerned that this would give the college a bad reputation.

Naturally the head of IT completely rejected the request out of hand, but was interested in discussing the implications. One that came up was that taking down a student web page about a lesbian relationship would be worse reputation than hosting it could bring. Another was that the IT staff did not feel like being censors over student expression, and certainly did not feel like being so on behalf of the Admissions office.

It's not clear to me that this case is especially analogous. It may be rather irrelevant, all in all.

Two: There is the notion that politics is about violence, not about agreement. That is to say, it is not about what we do when everyone agrees and goes along; but rather what we do when someone refuses to go along; when there is contention over shared resources because not everyone agrees what to do with them; when someone is excluded; when someone gets to impose on someone else (or not); and so on. Violence is often at least somewhere in the background of such discussions, in judicial systems, diplomacy, and so on. As Chairman Mao put it (at least, as quoted by Bob Wilson), political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. And a party with no ability to disrupt the status quo is one that nobody has to listen to.

As such, a position of nonviolence goes along with a position of non-politics. Avoiding threatening people — taken seriously enough — may require disengaging from a lot of political and legal-system stuff. For instance, proposing to make certain research illegal or restricted by law entails proposing a threat of violence against people doing that research.

Would your post on eating babies count, or is it too nonspecific?

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ww/undiscriminating_skepticism/1scb?context=1

(I completely agree with the policy, I'm just curious)

So I finally downvoted Yudkowsky.

Eliezer, could you clarify whether this policy applies to discussions like "maybe action X, which some people think constitutes violence, isn't really violence"? And what about nuclear war strategies?

Censorship is generally not a wise response to a single instance of any problem. Every increment of censorship you impose will wipe out an unexpectedly broad swath of discussion, make it easier to add more censorship later, and make it harder to resist accusations that you implicitly support any post you don't censor.

If you feel you have to Do Something, a more narrowly-tailored rule that still gets the job done would be something like: "Posts that directly advocate violating the laws of in a manner likely to create criminal liability will be deleted."

Because, you know, it's just about impossible to talk about specific wars, terrorism, criminal law or even many forms of political activism without advocating real violence against identifiable groups of people.

What if some violence helps reduce further violence? For example corporal punishment could reduce crime (think of Singapore). Note that I am not saying that this is necessarily true, just that we should not a priori ban all discussion on topics like this.

Counter-proposal:

We don't contemplate proposals of violence against identifiable people because we're not assholes.

I mean, seriously, what the fuck, people?

I'll restate a third option here that I made in the censored thread (woohoo, I have read a thread Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn't want people to read, and that you, dear reader of this comment, probably can't!) Make an option while creating a post to have it be only viewable by people with certain karma or above, or so that after a week or so, it disappears from people without that karma. This is based on an idea 4chan uses, where it deletes all threads after they become inactive, to encourage people to discuss freely.

This would keep these threads from showing up when people Googled LessWrong. It could also let us discuss phyggishness without making LessWrong look bad on Google.

Posts advocating or "asking about" violence against identifiable real people or groups should be deleted at the admins' discretion:

[pollid:374]

Posts advocating or "asking about" violation of laws that are actually enforced against middle-class people, other than the above, should be deleted at the admins' discretion:

[pollid:375]

It seems like this represents, not simply a new rule, but a change in the FOCUS of the community. Specifically, it used to be entirely about generating good ideas, and you are now adding a NEW priority which is "generating acceptable PR".

Quite possibly there is an illusion of transparency here, because there hasn't really BEEN (to my knowledge) any discussion about this change in purpose and priorities. It seems reasonable to be worried that this new priority will get in the way of, or even supersede the old priority, especially given the phrasing of this.

At a minimum, it's a slippery slope - if we make one concession to PR, it's reasonable to assume others will be made as well. I don't know if that's the case - if I'm in error on that point, feel free to mention it.

If there's a general policy against discussing violence on LW, and I can point to statements from the same timeframe of mine condemning such violence, it may help. It may not. Reporters are stupid. Your argument does not actually say why the anti-violence-discussion policy is a bad idea, and seems to be ad hominem tu quoque.

Everyone even slightly famous gets arbitrary green ink. Choosing which green ink to 'complain' about on your blog, when it makes an idea look bad which you would find politically disadvantageous, is not a neutral act. I'm also frankly suspicious of what the green ink actually said, and whether it was, perhaps, another person who doesn't like the "UFAI is possible" thesis saying that "Surely it would imply..." without anyone ever actually advocating it. Why would somebody who actually advocated that, contact Ben Goertzel when he is known as a disbeliever in the thesis?

No, I don't particularly trust Ben Goertzel to play rationalist::nice with his politics. And describing him as a "former researcher at SIAI" is quite disingenuous of you, by the way; he never received any salary from us and is a long-time opponent of these ideas. At one point Tyler Emerson thought it would be a good idea to fund a project of his, but that's it.

Why the explicit class distinction?

It would be prohibited to discuss how to or speed and avoid being cited for it. (I thought that this was already policy, and I believe it to be a good policy.)

It would not be prohibited to discuss how to be a vagrant and avoid being cited for it. (Middle class people temporarily without residences typically aren't treated as poorly as the underclass.)

Should the proper distinction be 'serious' crimes, or perhaps 'crimes of infamy'?

I don't have any principled objection to this policy, other than that as rationalists, we want to have fun, and this policy makes LW less fun.

Does advocating gun control, or increased taxes, count? They would count as violence is private actors did them, and talking about them makes them more likely (by states). Is the public-private distinction the important thing - would advocating/talking about state-sanctioned genocide be ok?

Regardless of whether you think censoring is net good or bad (for the forums, for the world, for SIAI), you have to realize the risks are far more on Eliezer than they are on any poster. His low tolerance responses and angry swearing are exactly what you should expect of someone who feels the need to project an image of complete disassociation from any lines of speculation that could possibly get him in legal trouble. Eliezer's PR concerns are not just of the forums in general. If he's being consistent, they should be informing every one of his comments on this topic. There's little to nothing to be gained by trying to apply logic against this sort of totally justifiable (in my mind) conversational caution. Eliezer should probably also delete any comments about keeping criminal discussions off the public internet.

This is also why trying to point out his Okcupid profile as a PR snafu is a non sequitur. Nothing there can actually get him in trouble with the law.

If the point was to "make a good impression" by distorting the impression given by people on the list to potential donors, maybe a more effective strategy is to shut up and do it, instead of making an announcement about it and causing a ruckus. "Disappear" the problems quietly and discretely.

This reminds me of the phyg business. Prompting long discussion threads about how "We are not a phyg! We are not a phyg!" is not recommended behavior if you don't want people to think you're not a phyg.

Definition of green ink

If combined with a "Please write him and ask him to shut down!", sure. I think it's understood by default in most civilized cultures that violence is not being advocated by default when other courses of action are being presented. If the action to be taken is mysteriously left unspecified, it'd be a judgment call depending on other language used.

I wouldn't have posted the following except that I share Esar's concerns about representativeness:

I think this is a good idea. I think using the word "censorship" primes a large segment of the LW population in an unproductive direction. I think various people are interpreting "may be deleted" to mean "must be deleted." I think various people are blithely ignoring this part of the OP (emphasis added):

In other words, the form of this discussion is not 'Do you like this?' - you probably have a different cost function from people who are held responsible for how LW looks as a whole

In particular, I think people are underestimating how important it is for LW not to look too bad, and also underestimating how bad LW could be made to look by discussions of the type under consideration.

Finally, I strongly agree that

anyone talking about a proposed crime on the Internet fails forever as a criminal[.]

How about instead of outright censorship, such discussions be required to be encrypted, via double-rot13?

Yes, a post of this type was just recently made. I will not link to it, since this censorship policy implies that it will shortly be deleted, and reproducing the info necessary to say who was hypothetically targeted and why would be against the policy.

Someone please send me a link via PM? Or perhaps the author could PM me? Not because the censorship of that class bothers me but because talking to wedrifid is not posting things on the internet, I'm curious and there are negligible consequences for talking to me about interesting hypothetical questions.

(Disregard the above is the post or comment was boring.)

Would it censor a discussion of, say, compelling an AI researcher by all means necessary to withhold their research from, say, the military?

The overall emotional tone. The lack of calls to direct action. The encouragement to think about the effects of one's actions, with thinking including that you take an honest look at opposing points of view.

What would the response to this have been if instead of "censorship policy" the phrase would have been "community standard"?

laws that are actually enforced against middle-class people

Different countries can have very different laws. Are you going to enforce this policy with reference to U.S. laws only, as they exist in 2012? If not, what is your standard of reference?

As I commented elsewhere, if your goal is to prevent bad PR, it is not obvious to me that this policy is the right way to optimize for it. Perhaps you have thought this out and have good reasons for believing that this policy is best for this goal, but it is not clear to me, so please elaborate on this if you can.

So ... we can't discus assassination the president, that seems fine if unnecessary. But we can't debate kidnapping people and giving the ransom to charity without the "pro-" side being deleted? That seems like it will either destroy a lot of valuable conversations for minimal PR gain, or be enforced inconsistently, leading to accusations of bias. Probably both.

"anyone talking about a proposed crime on the Internet fails forever as a criminal"

I realize this isn't your TRUE objection, just a bit of a tangential "Public Service Announcement". The real concern is simply PR / our appearance to outsiders, right? But... I'm confused why you feel the need to include such a PSA.

Do we have a serious problem with people saying "Meet under the Lincoln Memorial at midnight, the pass-phrase is Sic semper tyrannis" or "I'm planning to kill my neighbor's dog, can you please debug my plot, I live in Brooklyn at 123 N Stupid Ave"?

You can use Private Messaging to send me actual examples, without causing a public reputation hit. I can't recall ever reading anything like that on this site.

LessWrong attracts all sorts of people including would-be unabombers of varying level of dedication.

Why do you think LW attracts would-be unabombers?

(I seriously should've posted this question back when the thread only had 3 comments.)

I have no qualms about the policy itself, it's only commonsensical to me; my question is only tangentially related:

Do you believe "censorship" to be a connotatively better term than "moderation"?

"Reason: Talking about such violence makes that violence more probable,"

Does it? In some cases yes, and some cases no. Wacky people advocating violence can be smacked down by the crowd. Wacky violent loners need perspective from other people.

Talking about socially approved violence probably makes it more likely. Talking about socially disapproved violence might make it less likely.

The problem with these conversations are the generalities involved. We don't have examples of the offending material, and worse, the whole point is to hide the examples of offending material.

SUGGESTION: Move disapproved posts to their own thread where replies aren't allowed. Wouldn't you get some brownie points from the people you're trying to impress by showing that you ban all this stuff you think they disapprove of?

My guess is that the policy will be applied reasonably, and were people allowed to see what was banned, they'd think so too.

I'd ask if there's any evidence of removal but... I can't imagine anything other than Eliezer saying "Yep, I deleted it" would do the trick.

Well, actually, does this software ALLOW deletions, or does deleted comment get replaced with a "Deleted Content" placeholder? Because if it's the latter, a link to that placeholder would be decent evidence :)

Do you have worked out numbers (in terms of community participation, support dollars, increased real-world violence, etc.) comparing the effect of having the censorship policy and the effect of allowing discussions that would be censored by the proposed policy? The request for "Consequences we haven't considered" is hard to meet until we know with sufficient detail what exactly you have considered.

My gut thinks it is unlikely that having a censorship policy has a smaller negative public relations effect than having occasional discussions that violate the proposed policy. I know that I am personally much less okay with the proposed censorship policy than with having occasional posts and comments on LW that would violate the proposed policy.

If virtualizing people is violence (since it does imply copying their brains and, uh, removing the physical original) you may want to censor Wei_Dai over here, as he seems to be advocating that the FAI could hypothetically (and euphemistically) kill the entire population of earth:

Wei Dai's Ironic Security Idea

may at the admins' option be censored on the grounds that ... anyone talking about a proposed crime on the Internet fails forever as a criminal

I like it.

For most people it doesn't really matter when they trade off better PR for not following higher values such as respecting free speech.

If you want to design a FAI that values human values, it matters. You should practice to follow human values yourself. You should take situation like this opportunities for deliberate practice in making the kind of moral decisions that an FAI has to make.

Power corrupts. It's easy to censor criticism of your own decisions. You should use those opportuniities to practice being friendly instead of being corrupted.

In the past there was a case of censorship that lead to bad press for LessWrong. Given that past performance, why should we believe that increasing censorship will be good for PR?

In other words, the form of this discussion is not 'Do you like this?' - you probably have a different cost function from people who are held responsible for how LW looks as a whole

The first instinct of an FAI shouldn't be: "Hey, the cost function of those humans is probably wrong, let's use a different cost function."

A few days ago someone wrote a post about how rationalists should make group decisions. I did argue that his proposal was unlikely to be effectively implementable.

A decision about how the perfect censorship policy for LessWrong could look like could be made via Delphi.

I am extremely in favor of this policy and would be in favor of extending it to posts or comments asking about the violation of any and all laws.

To all voters: please think about this for five minutes before upvoting or downvoting.

COME AT ME BRO!!!