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.
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.