In particular, if either Said makes a case that he can obey the spirit of “don’t imply people have an obligation to engage with his comments”; or, someone suggests a letter-of-the-law that actually accomplishes the thing I’m aiming at in a more clear-cut way, I’d feel fairly good about revoking the rate-limit.
The only thing that looks like a rule here is “don’t imply people have an obligation to engage with [your] comments”. Is that the rule you’ve been talking about? (I asked this of Raemon and his answer was basically “yes but not only”, or something like that.)
And the rest pretty clearly suggests that there isn’t a clearly defined rule here.
The mod note from 5 years ago seems to me to be very clearly not defining any rules.
Here’s a question: if you asked ten randomly selected Less Wrong members: “What are the rules of Less Wrong?”—how many of them would give the correct answer? Not as a link to this or that comment, but in their own words (or even just by quoting a list of rules, minus the commentary)?
(What is the correct answer?)
How many of their answers would even match one another?
As I said in a thread to Zack, case-law seems to me to be the only viable way of creating moderation guidelines and rules on a webforum like this, and this means that yes, a lot of the rules will be defined in reference to a specific litigated instance of something that seemed to us to have negative consequences. This approach also seems to work pretty well for lots of legal systems in the real world, though yeah, it does sure produce a body of law that in order to navigate it successfully you have to study the lines revealed through past litigation.
Yes, of course, but the way this works in real-world legal systems is that first there’s a law, and then there’s case law which establishes precedent for its application. (And, as you say, it hardly makes it easy to comply with the law. Perhaps I should retain an attorney to help me figure out what the rules of Less Wrong are? Do I need to have a compliance department…?) Real-world legal systems in well-functioning modern countries generally don’t take the approach of “we don’t have any written down laws; we’ll legislate by judgment calls in each case; even after doing that, we won’t encode those judgments into law; there will only be precedent and judicial opinion, and that will be the whole of the law”.[1]
… that comment is supposed to communicate rules?!
It says:
The only thing that looks like a rule here is “don’t imply people have an obligation to engage with [your] comments”. Is that the rule you’ve been talking about? (I asked this of Raemon and his answer was basically “yes but not only”, or something like that.)
And the rest pretty clearly suggests that there isn’t a clearly defined rule here.
The mod note from 5 years ago seems to me to be very clearly not defining any rules.
Here’s a question: if you asked ten randomly selected Less Wrong members: “What are the rules of Less Wrong?”—how many of them would give the correct answer? Not as a link to this or that comment, but in their own words (or even just by quoting a list of rules, minus the commentary)?
(What is the correct answer?)
How many of their answers would even match one another?
Yes, of course, but the way this works in real-world legal systems is that first there’s a law, and then there’s case law which establishes precedent for its application. (And, as you say, it hardly makes it easy to comply with the law. Perhaps I should retain an attorney to help me figure out what the rules of Less Wrong are? Do I need to have a compliance department…?) Real-world legal systems in well-functioning modern countries generally don’t take the approach of “we don’t have any written down laws; we’ll legislate by judgment calls in each case; even after doing that, we won’t encode those judgments into law; there will only be precedent and judicial opinion, and that will be the whole of the law”.[1]
Have there been societies in the past which have worked like this? I don’t know. Maybe we can ask David Friedman?