Laws are not comparable to blackmail because they have process behind them. If one loan individual told me that if I didn’t wear my seatbelt, he’d bust my kneecaps, then that would be blackmail. Might even qualify as terrorism, since he is trying to constrain my actions by threat of illegitimate force.
A lone individual making a threat against the main moderator of a site if he uses his discretion in a certain way is indeed blackmail/terrorism, particularly when the threat is over a thing substantially outside the purview of the site, and the act threatened is on its own clearly immoral (e.g. it’d be legitimate to threaten leaving the site, or reposting censored material on a separate site). As it stands, it’s an attempt to force another’s will without any semblance of legitimate authority, which seems to qualify as ” clearly wrong.”
If one loan individual told me that if I didn’t wear my seatbelt, he’d bust my kneecaps, then that would be blackmail.
I think this is closer to if one lone individual said that every time he saw you not wear a seatbelt (which for some reason a law couldn’t get passed for), he’d nudge gun control legislation closer to being enacted (assuming he knew you’d hate gun control legislation)
No, it’s not. You can’t just pretend that the threat is trivial when it’s not. “You’d hate gun control legislation” is not an appropriate comparison. The utility hit of nudging up the odds of something I’d hate happening is not directly comparable. Given the circumstances and EY’s obvious beliefs, the negative utility value of an FAI is vastly worse.
Comparable would be this: every time he sees me not wear a seatbelt, he rolls 8 dice. If they all come up sixes, he’d hunt down, torture, and murder everyone I know and love. The odds are actually slightly lower, and the negative payoff is vastly smaller in this example, so if anything it’s an understatement (though failing to wear a seatbelt is a much less bad thing to do than censoring someone, so perhaps it balances). I think this is pretty clearly improper.
Laws are not comparable to blackmail because they have process behind them. If one loan individual told me that if I didn’t wear my seatbelt, he’d bust my kneecaps, then that would be blackmail. Might even qualify as terrorism, since he is trying to constrain my actions by threat of illegitimate force.
A lone individual making a threat against the main moderator of a site if he uses his discretion in a certain way is indeed blackmail/terrorism, particularly when the threat is over a thing substantially outside the purview of the site, and the act threatened is on its own clearly immoral (e.g. it’d be legitimate to threaten leaving the site, or reposting censored material on a separate site). As it stands, it’s an attempt to force another’s will without any semblance of legitimate authority, which seems to qualify as ” clearly wrong.”
I think this is closer to if one lone individual said that every time he saw you not wear a seatbelt (which for some reason a law couldn’t get passed for), he’d nudge gun control legislation closer to being enacted (assuming he knew you’d hate gun control legislation)
No, it’s not. You can’t just pretend that the threat is trivial when it’s not. “You’d hate gun control legislation” is not an appropriate comparison. The utility hit of nudging up the odds of something I’d hate happening is not directly comparable. Given the circumstances and EY’s obvious beliefs, the negative utility value of an FAI is vastly worse.
Comparable would be this: every time he sees me not wear a seatbelt, he rolls 8 dice. If they all come up sixes, he’d hunt down, torture, and murder everyone I know and love. The odds are actually slightly lower, and the negative payoff is vastly smaller in this example, so if anything it’s an understatement (though failing to wear a seatbelt is a much less bad thing to do than censoring someone, so perhaps it balances). I think this is pretty clearly improper.