The proposal is to ban such discussions not because violence is bad, but because discussing violence is bad PR. I am pretty sure advocacy of corporal punishment belongs to this category too.
Is it really bad PR, though? IMO one of the strengths of LW is that almost any weird topic can be discussed as long as the discussion is rational and civilized. If some interesting posts are banned by the moderators, then this diminishes the value of LW to me.
I don’t know whether it’s indeed bad PR. It probably depends on one’s expectations. I agree with you that banning weird discussions makes LW less attractive (to me, you, certain kind of people), but the site owners want to become more respected by the mainstream and in order to achieve that it is probably a good strategy to remove the weirdest discussions from sight.
But the point of LW is not merely having a forum that is valuable to you for discussing weird topics. If you want Reddit, you know where to find it. The point of LW is advancing human rationality, and being a place where people air proposals of violence may get in the way of that. How would we tell?
Eliezer and other big names here have been on the receiving end of scandal-sheet gossip-mongering before and may be particularly sensitive to some of these issues. One thing that worries me about this proposal is that Eliezer may be conflating “LW has a bad reputation” with “I have to answer snarky, demeaning questions about foolish things people posted on LW more often than I’m comfortable with” or “People publish articles making fun of my friends and I wish to heck they would stop doing that.” But I infer there is also evidence that Eliezer is withholding.
But it seems to me that the best way to have a good reputation is to actually be good. For instance, I would like it if people did not see LW as a place to air demeaning, privileged hypotheses (pun intended) about, say, race or gender — in part because many people’s evidence standards for these topics is appallingly low; in part because it drives away members of the less-privileged sets (I would rather cooperate with women and defect against PUAs than vice versa; for one thing, there are more women). I would accept the same restriction on discussions of political economy (viz. libertarianism and socialism); although I’ve talked politics here it’s not exactly an area where humans are renowned for being exemplary rationalists.
The proposal is to ban such discussions not because violence is bad, but because discussing violence is bad PR. I am pretty sure advocacy of corporal punishment belongs to this category too.
Is it really bad PR, though? IMO one of the strengths of LW is that almost any weird topic can be discussed as long as the discussion is rational and civilized. If some interesting posts are banned by the moderators, then this diminishes the value of LW to me.
I don’t know whether it’s indeed bad PR. It probably depends on one’s expectations. I agree with you that banning weird discussions makes LW less attractive (to me, you, certain kind of people), but the site owners want to become more respected by the mainstream and in order to achieve that it is probably a good strategy to remove the weirdest discussions from sight.
But the point of LW is not merely having a forum that is valuable to you for discussing weird topics. If you want Reddit, you know where to find it. The point of LW is advancing human rationality, and being a place where people air proposals of violence may get in the way of that. How would we tell?
Eliezer and other big names here have been on the receiving end of scandal-sheet gossip-mongering before and may be particularly sensitive to some of these issues. One thing that worries me about this proposal is that Eliezer may be conflating “LW has a bad reputation” with “I have to answer snarky, demeaning questions about foolish things people posted on LW more often than I’m comfortable with” or “People publish articles making fun of my friends and I wish to heck they would stop doing that.” But I infer there is also evidence that Eliezer is withholding.
But it seems to me that the best way to have a good reputation is to actually be good. For instance, I would like it if people did not see LW as a place to air demeaning, privileged hypotheses (pun intended) about, say, race or gender — in part because many people’s evidence standards for these topics is appallingly low; in part because it drives away members of the less-privileged sets (I would rather cooperate with women and defect against PUAs than vice versa; for one thing, there are more women). I would accept the same restriction on discussions of political economy (viz. libertarianism and socialism); although I’ve talked politics here it’s not exactly an area where humans are renowned for being exemplary rationalists.
“is valuable to you for discussing weird topics”
“reddit”
pick one.