FWIW, I don’t consider this a nitpicky comment, and my model of Val would not have censored it (although the relevant question is whether Richard_Kennaway’s model of Val would have censored it). But a tradeoff is being made here, and I’m personally willing to trade off potentially not getting to see this kind of detailed criticism in comments in exchange for people like Eliezer and Conor writing more top-level posts.
Yeah. The chilling effect is almost entirely (I think) about people worrying they will be censored, rather than actual censorship. I have full ability on my blog to delete comments, have used it only for removing typo/duplicate comments, and felt vaguely bad about even doing that. Val censoring that comment would be a huge surprise and forced update for me, but Richard thinking he might censor it seems a reasonable thing to worry about.
Of course, if it was censored, there’s nothing to stop someone from then posting it elsewhere or as its own post, if they think it’s valuable, and presumably the system will save the comment so you can copy it. Given that, this circles back to the general case of The Fear people have around posting and commenting, as if negative feedback of any sort was just awful. If you get censored, it’s not that big a deal. Might even be good, now you know where the line is and not to do that again!
FWIW, I don’t consider this a nitpicky comment, and my model of Val would not have censored it (although the relevant question is whether Richard_Kennaway’s model of Val would have censored it). But a tradeoff is being made here, and I’m personally willing to trade off potentially not getting to see this kind of detailed criticism in comments in exchange for people like Eliezer and Conor writing more top-level posts.
+1
Yeah. The chilling effect is almost entirely (I think) about people worrying they will be censored, rather than actual censorship. I have full ability on my blog to delete comments, have used it only for removing typo/duplicate comments, and felt vaguely bad about even doing that. Val censoring that comment would be a huge surprise and forced update for me, but Richard thinking he might censor it seems a reasonable thing to worry about.
Of course, if it was censored, there’s nothing to stop someone from then posting it elsewhere or as its own post, if they think it’s valuable, and presumably the system will save the comment so you can copy it. Given that, this circles back to the general case of The Fear people have around posting and commenting, as if negative feedback of any sort was just awful. If you get censored, it’s not that big a deal. Might even be good, now you know where the line is and not to do that again!