One could make the argument that anything that harms the mission of lesswrong’s sponsoring organizations is to the detriment of mankind. I’m not opposed to that argument, but googling censorship of lesswrong did not turn up anything I considered to be particularly dangerous. Maybe that just means that the censorship is more effective than I would have predicted, or is indicative or a lack of imagination on my part.
I’d say that “censorship” (things that could be classified or pattern-matched to this word) happens less than once in a year. That could actually contribute to why people speak so much about it; if it happened every day, it would be boring.
From my memory, this is “censored”:
inventing scenarios about Pascal’s mugging by AI
debating, even hypothetically, harm towards specific people or organization
replying to a downvoted post (automatically penalized by −5 karma)
And the options 2 and 3 are just common sense, and could happen on any website. Thus, most talk about “censorship” on LW focuses on the option 1.
(By the way, if you learned about the “basilisk” on RationalWiki, here is a little thing I just noticed today: The RW article has a screenshot of dozens of deleted comments, which you will obviously associate with the incident. Please note that the “basilisk” incident happened in 2010, and the screenshot is from 2012. So this is not the censorship of the original debate. It is probably a censorship of some “why did you remove this comment two years ago? let’s talk about it forever and ever” meta-threads that were quite frequent and IMHO quite annoying at some time.)
Also, when a comment or article is removed, at least the message about the removal stays there. There is no meta-censorship (trying to hide the fact that censorship happened). If you don’t see messages about removed comments at some place, it means no comments were removed there.
By meta-censorship I meant things like removing the content from the website without a trace, so unless you look at the google cache, you have no idea that anything happened, and unless someone quickly makes a backup, you have no proof that it happened.
Leaving the notices “this comment was removed” on the page is precisely what allowed RW to make a nice screenshot about LW censorship. LW itself provided evidence that some comments were deleted. Providing a hyperlink instead of screenshot would probably give the same information.
Also, I am mentioning basilisk now, and I have above 95% confidence that this comment will not be deleted. (One of the reasons is that it doesn’t get into details; it doesn’t try to restart the whole debate. Another reason is that don’t start a new thread.)
One could make the argument that anything that harms the mission of lesswrong’s sponsoring organizations is to the detriment of mankind. I’m not opposed to that argument, but googling censorship of lesswrong did not turn up anything I considered to be particularly dangerous. Maybe that just means that the censorship is more effective than I would have predicted, or is indicative or a lack of imagination on my part.
I’d say that “censorship” (things that could be classified or pattern-matched to this word) happens less than once in a year. That could actually contribute to why people speak so much about it; if it happened every day, it would be boring.
From my memory, this is “censored”:
inventing scenarios about Pascal’s mugging by AI
debating, even hypothetically, harm towards specific people or organization
replying to a downvoted post (automatically penalized by −5 karma)
And the options 2 and 3 are just common sense, and could happen on any website. Thus, most talk about “censorship” on LW focuses on the option 1.
(By the way, if you learned about the “basilisk” on RationalWiki, here is a little thing I just noticed today: The RW article has a screenshot of dozens of deleted comments, which you will obviously associate with the incident. Please note that the “basilisk” incident happened in 2010, and the screenshot is from 2012. So this is not the censorship of the original debate. It is probably a censorship of some “why did you remove this comment two years ago? let’s talk about it forever and ever” meta-threads that were quite frequent and IMHO quite annoying at some time.)
Also, when a comment or article is removed, at least the message about the removal stays there. There is no meta-censorship (trying to hide the fact that censorship happened). If you don’t see messages about removed comments at some place, it means no comments were removed there.
And yet earlier in your post you’re talking about some posts in 2012 about censorship in 2010 being deleted. Smells like meta-censorship to me.
By meta-censorship I meant things like removing the content from the website without a trace, so unless you look at the google cache, you have no idea that anything happened, and unless someone quickly makes a backup, you have no proof that it happened.
Leaving the notices “this comment was removed” on the page is precisely what allowed RW to make a nice screenshot about LW censorship. LW itself provided evidence that some comments were deleted. Providing a hyperlink instead of screenshot would probably give the same information.
Also, I am mentioning basilisk now, and I have above 95% confidence that this comment will not be deleted. (One of the reasons is that it doesn’t get into details; it doesn’t try to restart the whole debate. Another reason is that don’t start a new thread.)