Is my theory on why censorship is wrong correct?

1. Your post is hard to read. I recommend writing in shorter sentences and summarizing your main points at the end.

2. Furthermore, you should control the scope of your piece. You say at the beginning that you're going to make the case against censorship. Unfortunately only paragraphs 3 and 4 do that. Then you rant about tangential topics. You should also control the scope of your sentences and paragraphs. Your sentences jump all over the place. Try to make one sentence say one thing, and have one paragraph contain one small idea.

3. In paragraphs 3 and 4, you claim that we humans declared certain combinations of words to be inherently evil. Then you go on to argue that that's wrong because words don't inherently correspond to their meanings. This seems to be your argument against censorship. But you don't need to believe that certain combinations of words are inherently evil to be for censoring those words. You just need to believe that people hearing those words can result in things you don't want. You seem to anticipate this sort of response earlier on (it's hard to say, your writing isn't easy to comprehend), but dismiss the response because apparently it's irrational to feel emotions after seeing words. You think this because words don't inherently mean anything. Why you feel we should only feel emotions when seeing things that inherently mean something is never explained.

4. In the rest of the piece, you try to make the point that morality is a human construct. And you go off on tangential rants about some things you consider retarded. Profanity aside, most people here would agree that morality is to some extent arbitrary. What I don't see is why you believe that has anything to do with censorship.

5. Finally, I'm downvoting this mostly because it's very poorly written. It takes way too much effort to figure out what you probably meant and I would like to see less of this on this site. You say you haven't read a book since 8th grade. I'm sure you haven't.

Please tell me if I've misrepresented what you've written.

I wish I had seen this sooner. I wish I had had the chance to share some of my thoughts with Hoofwall before ze was banned. If you come back to reading this page, Hoofwall, I'd like you to know this: I've been where you are, and I'd like to show you a way out.

I know how the world of human interaction feels mysterious. It follows hundreds of unwritten rules that were invented before we were born, and we are expected to already know them, or to deduce them from just being around people. I know, it makes no sense.

We are confused; we are scared. We enter human society in a state of cluelessness as to what it is they want and how we can speak of what we want and how we will agree on anything and how we will help one another and how we will keep from hurting one another and it suddenly seems like it's forbidden to even speak of these fears out loud. We are supposed to have already figured it out.

So at first we approach cautiously, trying very hard to make as few mistakes as possible, and retreating in panic every time we step on the wrong place and activate the invisible laser alarm. Humans are so strange, and they don't want to make the effort to make themselves understood. They expect us to already know.

So after a while we start deducing our own rules, and making simplifications that work for us. At last there's some sense of structure, some explicit path for dealing with humans. And it feels like it works, but we can never be completely sure. Humans react in unpredictable ways, and we start fearing we missed some vital detail in the rules we invented to help ourselves navigate reality. Our rules conflict with the more ancient, more widespread, more complicated social rules which existed before us and envelop us. Some actions, gestures and words have a specific history; even if we were not taught them, we're still expected to already know. Yes, I know, humans make no sense.

And we are powerless against their rules. Humans seem to live happily with those rules; we need to adapt. Even if the rules we invented for ourselves seem to make more sense, it would be too much effort for all of humanity to unlearn and relearn. We need to adapt. We need to consider what already is. We need to deal with humans in their terms, because they're too lazy to accept any others. Even if those rules are also invented, even if no word has any "inherent" power in itself, the force of tradition is still strong, and it's easier for everyone to behave as if it were universal. I know, humans are stupid. But they don't take well to be told that. It has cost thousands of years to arrive at the rules humans have now, and when we try to show them why those rules make no sense, we're interpreted as if we were implying that all those thousands of years were a waste of effort. Humans look at us in disbelief, and ask, "How do you presume to know any better?" I know, humans are absurd.

But still, many of them seem happy. They seem to function perfectly fine with their complicated, invisible rules. Maybe it would be worth to know more about those rules, and why they exist in the form they have, and how humans benefit from them? It may be our best strategy; humans expect we address them in their language. Trying to use their language in our own private way will cause many misunderstandings. They don't know all the effort we have had to make to try to learn about their world; they will never know how much effort we make everyday to keep our sanity and still function; they don't see what we see in the words. Speaking to them in the same way we speak inside our minds will fail to show them what we see, because they don't live inside our heads. To make ourselves understood, we have to use words in a way humans are familiar with, and be mindful of the socially accepted ways of using words. Otherwise we'll all be speaking different languages. Even if we truly mean no offense, humans have already learned that some ways of speaking are used when offense is intended.

It's inevitable. Those rules existed before us. Humans are weird, and noisy, and erratic, and inconsistent. And more importantly, humans are in power. They get to decide how society works. Some of them have been trained to be sensitive to those of us with less than typical minds, and they try to do their best, but they don't live inside our heads and don't know what it's like to be always puzzled by everything. We need to adapt. We need to refrain from letting our anger take control. We need to be very patient with humans and remember that some of them may even be just as surprised as we are, and may get to see our point, if we really try to explain it.

You hate humans, did you say? You appear to be my enemy, why should I help you or engage with you?

I do, however, incorporate the words "retard", "nigger", and "faggot" into my vocabulary literally exclusively because it triggers humans and demonstrates the fact that the validity of one's argument and one's ability to defend themselves in argument does not matter to the human.

You demonstrate that humans can easily be driven insane. And then you are left with an insane human. In my experience, insane people aren't very helpful. I recommend trying to drive humans sane instead. It's vastly more difficult, but very productive if you can manage it.

Reputation has a lot to do with how people get treated. A bad reputation can mean anything from lost opportunities to being tortured to death.

One of the ways bad reputations are established and maintained is through insults, so it isn't irrational for people to react negatively to at least some insults.

You say you hate people, and you've given some evidence of that in your writing. Considering that we're people, is there any reason for us to want you on this blog?

You should do things that get good results. To a good approximation, that is what "rational" is used to mean around here.

Under this definition, if insulting people gets good results, it is rational to insult people. And if not insulting people gets good results, then it's rational to not insult people.

It's like playing League of Legends (or any other videogame that involves talking to teammates). Playing at the surface level, you just play the game by controlling your in-game pawn, and you talk to your teammates just based on what you want to say. But the things you say to your teammates are also directly impacting the game - the rational use of one's keyboard in this situation is to try to type things that increase your chances of victory, and not type things that decrease your chances.

Prophet hoofwall, you have witnessed for the truth at the reddit of the rationalists, and you see the results. The promised land for you is somewhere on Tumblr.

I suggest for all who have a pet crank theory to share, get to the point quickly if you want any engagement with your ideas.

The quality of argument in this post is awful, but the closest thing to a main point that I can extract from it is "there is no rational reason for human nudity taboos", which is amusing because it's probably true. Not important, but still true. Also, hoofwall, how did you even find this website? It's not the sort of website that people who haven't picked up a book since 8th grade usually find, let alone care to post on.

Mind you, I do not discriminate against literal retards, or blacks, or gays, or anything. I do, however, incorporate the words "retard", "nigger", and "faggot" into my vocabulary literally exclusively because it triggers humans and demonstrates the fact that the validity of one's argument and one's ability to defend themselves in argument does not matter to the human.

You have this almost exactly backwards. Discriminating against people, a.k.a., applying Baysian priors, is in fact rational, despite modern hangups against saying this publicly. In fact you probably do actually discriminate, i.e., use evidence about people in making decisions. For example, let's say you need someone to help you fix your computer, you probably want someone who's intelligent and knows about computers, thus you will not be happy if a literal retard shows up.

This is one of the only lesswrong posts I've ever read where I basically agree with nothing you wrote. You really should read the "rationality bible" though. Definitely before you keep posting here.

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.

You seem to be opposed to the nature of your species. This can't be very good for your self-esteem.

I upvoted this for a few reasons. One reason is because right now I'm winning the least Karma award. I have -200 karma! It seems that you have enough raw natural talent to easily steal this prestigious award from me. So that's one reason that I gave you an upvote. In fact, I'm going to go through and upvote all your posts.

Another reason that I gave you an upvote is that it's really rare to find someone who seems to have fired their "editor" or removed their facade.

And another reason is because I hate censorship too.