Too much censorship is dangerous, but too little censorship is dangerous too. It’s true that Less Wrong would die if every dissenting opinion were to be culled. However, if Less Wrong were to be overrun by irrational jerks without moderators taking some sort of action, Less Wrong would die too. Would you really oppose banning literal Nazis from posting their views on this forum? Because if so, I find your lack of censorship disturbing.
Asking “should we ban people for their views or should we have freedom of speech?” is a false dilemma. The correct question is: “how much censorship should we have relative to freedom of speech, and which views should we ban if any?”
Jokes aside, I actually think it’s that kind of post that we should have a community norm against. Saying “Neo reactionaries are evil racists” or “Socialist regimes killed the most people!” is just as inflammatory as “black people are less intelligent than whites”. And what use does it serve?
A single comment is no cause for a ban of course, but if someone will look for any excuse to say that neoreactionaries are evil or blacks are inferior or socialists suck, and they post about it in every thread they can, then don’t you think they should be banned?
Let me explain my background. I grew up in a socialist country. Luckily, no one from my family or friends was a target of the regime, and it ended when I was 13. Only then I learned about what happened to other people. (You know, stuff like: secret police knocks on your door at midnight, they take your family member away, and you never seem them again. Later someone unofficially tells you they died during interrogation. They warn you that unless you shut up, you could be next. Also, you, your children, and your grandchildren will never be allowed to get to university or have a decent job, because you are relatives of a traitor, therefore politically unreliable. The regime hates you, but you are not allowed to leave the country, and will be killed if you try.) There was censorship to prevent me from learning sooner. I believed I was living in a happy paradise. Many people believe it today. (Many people also believe holocaust was a hoax, for similar psychological reasons.)
I remember a teacher at elementary school telling me: “Viliam, you think independently. You will have a lot of problems when you grow up.” I didn’t quite understand that, then. Now I do. So I guess I was lucky. Even my childhood experience with what you can and cannot say would be enough to predict that if someone in my country would write the Sequences, they would be inviting trouble. It’s difficult to explain why exactly; my neural network understands the rules, but they were never made explicit. It’s something like: merely saying “politics is the mind-killed” could be, under unlucky circumstances, be perceived as a criticism of the regime. You never say things that could be perceived as a criticism of the regime, because then you could have hard time explaining that you didn’t mean it that way.
The way I see it, the main difference between nazis and socialists is this: Nazis lost the war; their leaders were killed or put in prisons, their crimes publicly exposed and shamed. Socialists won the war, they were allowed to rule for decades, to eliminate free speech and spread their propaganda. After they killed and intimidated everyone who opposed them, and their rule was secured, they calmed down, and life under their rule became more peaceful during the following decades. Who knows; maybe in the parallel universe where nazis won the war, the nazis of 1980s were also less violent than the nazis of 1840s. (Maybe neoreactionaries are the moderate post-nazis from the parallel universe, where some later Führer hired Steve Jobs as the CEO.)
Anyway… the thing is, censorship “triggers” me. Censorship is the meta-evil that other evils can safely hide behind. Speaking about whether we need more or less censorship sounds like speaking about whether we need more or less secret police knocking on people’s doors at midnight. (Yeah, I can imagine a very exceptional situation, such as someone really constructing a nuclear bomb at their home… but that’s far from the typical scenario.) Censoring the bourgeois pseudoscience? Uhm, I’d rather have scientific questions answered by scientific means.
I generally try not to write off-topic comments. I consider exposing crimes of socialists highly relevant to the topic of censorship, because censorship was a critically important part of their regime; without censorship, it would fall apart. So the best way to keep me quiet about this topic is to stop proposing censorship on LW. Do we have a deal?
Thank you for taking the time to write all that, it helps me see where you are coming from. You clearly have a large framework which you are basing your views on, but the thing you have to keep in mind is that I do, too. I have several partially-written posts about this which I hope to post on Less Wrong one day, but I’m very worried they’ll be misconstrued because it’s such a difficult subject. The last thing I want to do is defend the practices of oppressive regimes, believe me. I’m worried that people just read my posts thinking “oh he is defending censorship, censorship is evil, downvote” without thinking about what I’m actually saying. “Censorship” is just a word. All of my arguments work just as well for “having a community norm against” something as opposed to “censoring” it.
The problem is a framing issue, I think. People keep seeing something like censorship as a bad thing period, because it is something that’s used by oppressive regimes. However, killing people is also used by oppressive regimes, and yet I still wouldn’t promote total pacifism. Your post reads to me like Ghandi saying that the Nazi’s should be opposed non-violently: I do believe that there is wisdom in what you say, but that’s going much too far. The thing you have to realize is that if all the nice and reasonable people in the world go around worrying that if they fight monsters they will themselves become monsters, the monsters always win because they’re the only ones willing to fight.
My view on killing is this: The crucial issue is who is being killed and why, and what principle you are using to determine who to kill. My view on censorship is this: The crucial issue is what view is being censored and why, and what principle you are using to determine what to censor. Censoring a view just because you disagree with it is just as wrong as killing someone just because they disagree with you. Getting everybody who disagrees with me to shut up wouldn’t actually make for the kind of world I want to live in. So what views do I think should be censored? Only those ones which seem to serve no purpose other than to destroy everything that’s good and right in this world.
Imagine you are the leader of Utopialand. Everything is going swimmingly: People are working hard, people are happy, and everyone is largely free to do and say as they please. Then one day, a foreign missionary enters your country in order to start spreading his religion among the naïve and carefree people of your land. His religion states things that not strictly illegal but which are incredibly harmful: You have to believe everything it says or you will be burned to death, you have to verbally abuse your children daily to raise them properly, you must reject anyone from society who holds ideas the religion disagree with, science and critical thinking are wicked, and so on and so forth. This religion goes against everything you value and what’s worse, it seems to be catching on. What is your reaction?
1) “Well if he wants to spread ideas that destroy everything I love and cherish that’s his right as a citizen. Who am I to tell him he can’t destroy the world? I mean it’s a free country. “ 2) “AAAAAAGHHH IT’S A VICTIM OF A MEMETIC PLAGUE! QUICK, ISOLATE HIM BEFORE HE INFECTS THE OTHERS.”
The way I see it, there is a war of ideas spanning across all of human history, with good and helpful ideas on the one side and horrible memetic plagues which destroy everything they touch on the other. The civilisations that have prospered so far are the ones which fought for the good ideas and won. I submit that if your reaction to the above is option 1) and not 2), you are essentially choosing to lose the war of ideas on purpose. There will be nothing left of your empire but fire and ash.
Your post reads to me like Ghandi saying that the Nazi’s should be opposed non-violently:
Uhm, no. I mean, this is exaggerating; we are not having any physical violence here. Worst case: poisoning of minds. (I believe Yvain handled the case of neo-reactionaries sufficiently, if that’s what we are talking about here.)
Then one day, a foreign missionary enters your country in order to start spreading his religion among the naïve and carefree people of your land. His religion states things that not strictly illegal but which are incredibly harmful:
What if there are two competing religions; each one of them evil in a different way. And one missionary approaches you with an offer that if you help him establish the holy inquisition, he will rid you of those evil heretics from the other side. Is it a good idea to give him the power?
Uhm, no. I mean, this is exaggerating; we are not having any physical violence here. Worst case: poisoning of minds.
Yes of course it’s an exaggeration, but it’s the same meta-type of error: Seeing X used for evil and therefore declaring that all X is evil and anyone who says X isn’t always evil is either evil or stupid themselves. It’s the same mistake as the one Neoreactionaries always complain about: “Perceived differences based on race or sex have been used to excuse evil, therefore anyone who says there are differences between races or sexes is evil!”
And poisoning of minds is very, very bad. People always seem to assume that physical violence is somehow worse than mental violence, but it’s just not true. Ideas can can be a lot more dangerous than guns.
(of course all of this is a bit moot since I’m not actually proposing banning democrats/republicans/race research/feminism or anything like that)
What if there are two competing religions; each one of them evil in a different way. And one missionary approaches you with an offer that if you help him establish the holy inquisition, he will rid you of those evil heretics from the other side. Is it a good idea to give him the power?
Of course not, why would I? Why are you asking this? Are you implying that in the real world, both sides to any conflict are always equally evil? Because that definitely isn’t the case in my experience.
Are you implying that in the real world, both sides to any conflict are always equally evil?
Didn’t say “equally”.
Seems to me that so far we had two significant attempts at suppressing opinions on LW.
1) Eugine’s one-person guerilla war of mass downvoting. Had some success for a few months, resulted in a ban.
2) Repeated suggestions that we should remove politically incorrect speech, because allegedly women don’t like it. Multiple proponents, no success yet.
I’m not sure which one of these is more dangerous; I could find arguments for either side. Eugine actually did censor the site for a while. However, he was finally banned, and if someone tries to do the same thing, they will probably get banned, too (hopefully much sooner). Also, his actions didn’t have popular support. On the other hand, censhorship of politically incorrect ideas is proposed repeatedly, by multiple people, openly in public. They demand that their norms become the official norms of the website, enforced by moderators.
Then I believe most people here want to have a debate without any political group dominating the website. About half of them don’t want to see here any politics at all, and I guess the other half would be okay with occassional, as rational as possible, polite debate about political topics.
Then one day, a foreign missionary enters your country in order to start spreading his religion among the naïve and carefree people of your land. His religion states things that not strictly illegal but which are incredibly harmful: You have to believe everything it says or you will be burned to death, you have to verbally abuse your children daily to raise them properly, you must reject anyone from society who holds ideas the religion disagree with, science and critical thinking are wicked, and so on and so forth. This religion goes against everything you value and what’s worse, it seems to be catching on.
If the religion is so obviously harmful why is it catching on? To paraphrase Kaj, why is it the place of individual people to decide that this religion needs censorship?
Saying “Neo reactionaries are evil racists” or “Socialist regimes killed the most people!” is just as inflammatory as “black people are less intelligent than whites”. And what use does it serve?
Well, two of those three statements are falsifiable statements that are useful for making predictions about the future.
Well. All three of them are falsifiable, barring quibbles over definition.
“Socialist regimes killed the most people!” may or may not be useful for making predictions—it’s not useful for making predictions about, say, the USSR—because it doesn’t exist now. But on the other hand, it created chains of cause and effect still in existence, and we would like to predict those.
“Neo reactionaries are evil racists” seems the most subjective, in that we are more confused about “evil” than “killing” or “intelligence”. But as long as we taboo “evil”, I don’t see how it could possibly be a useless-for-prediction, impossible-to-falsify statement.
“black people are less intelligent than whites” pretty clearly has the most confounders and controversy, but it’s certainly falsifiable in principle, and both sides would argue that it has already been tested, I think.
On the gripping hand, all three seem like prime candidates for political mind-killing.
“Neo reactionaries are evil racists” seems the most subjective, in that we are more confused about “evil” than “killing” or “intelligence”. But as long as we taboo “evil”, I don’t see how it could possibly be a useless-for-prediction, impossible-to-falsify statement.
You’d have to taboo “racists” too though.
(And tabooing “evil” is an almost FAI-complete problem, anyway.)
Fair enough—the value of free speech needs to be weighed against other values that might be promoted by censoring specific viewpoints. Still, I think there are good rule-utilitarian grounds for making free speech the default position and for requiring a high standard of proof for deviating from that default in a particular case. The considerations for censoring nazism probably meet that standard, whereas I don’t think that standard is met in the case of anti-feminism or biorealism. (The latter, in particular, seems to consist primarily in certain factual rather than normative claims, and there are particularly strong reasons against censoring views of that sort.)
Note, too, that the karma system might in most cases allow the community to discourage certain viewpoints from being expressed without the need to resort to censorship.
If I understand it correctly, the tradition of “not providing Nazis platforms for free speech” came from history when Nazis used violence against their opponents. I mean… it sounds crazy if you are polite and fair enough to invite them to a debate table, they use it to debate with you and express their beliefs… and on the way home from the debate they kill you.
So it’s something like: “Don’t try to cooperate with a known DefectBot”.
The question is, these days, which people use extra-debate tools to silence their opponents?
Yes, precisely! This is what I think should be the golden standard for censorship. Ask yourself if the other person would try to censor you if they thought they could get away with it even if you were nice to them, and if the answer is yes it is acceptable (but not necessarily desirable!) to censor them. So an honest and reasonable bio-realist should not be censored, but Eugine Nier should be. It’s simply a matter of memetic self-defence.
The same way you distinguish between someone who murders a person in order to steal their money and someone who kills a person in self defence: By evaluating on a case-by-case basis to the best of your ability. It’s not always easy, but it sure beats not bothering to make the distinction.
(In this case I think it’s quite obvious that Eugine Nier is the DefectBot and not Kaj_Sotala.)
Imagine the distance to the “cooperate” button is slightly higher than the “defect” button. Someone who can’t reach the cooperate button might not mean any harm. But from your point of view, they might as well be a defectbot.
Ask yourself if the other person would try to censor you if they thought they could get away with it even if you were nice to them, and if the answer is yes it is acceptable (but not necessarily desirable!) to censor them.
That isn’t what a DefectBot is. A DefectBot is an agent that would defect in every position, including this one.
For example, the Nazis might do everything in their power to hurt you now (such as attacking you on the way home), and when they are in power (such as, well, I think we all know the canonical example of that.)
On the other hand, they might act nice now but, you suspect, defect when they find themselves in power. Or they might attack as hard as they can now, but be generous in victory. Neither of those are DefectBot.
That’s funny because I view progressives as the exact group that would instantly throw me under the bus the moment I didn’t want to help them against someone else. Neoreactionaries at least propose to leave me alone.
I’m not excited about the NR plans for gay people if they ever come to power. Moldbug is charmingly neutral on the issue, but many of the others most certainly are not.
It is my impression that neoreactionaries want a non-democratic government. Surely this non-democratic government will make laws that you are required to obey, right?
Most neo reactionaries I read believe in something called Exit whereby if you want you can get the hell out. Contrast this to the ussr or how America will continue to tax you for something like 10 years if you want to emigrate.
Exiting isn’t cost-free, though. Most people won’t even exit by moving to a different state in the US, just because of all the direct and indirect costs of moving.
I think you’re confusing “responding to a point someone is trying to make” and “making fun of someone”.
Maybe the average progressive has neither the power or the inclination to put me in a gulag but the side of things that they historically have lent their power and rhetoric to sure does. I don’t feel it’s particularly likely to happen in the near future but I also recognize that no one seemed to have predicted the outcome ahead of time the last time.
Or to put it another way: Stalinists are on a continuum with progressives. They are not a different kind of thing.
I think you’re confusing “responding to a point someone is trying to make” and “making fun of someone”.
Fair point. My comment was unnecessarily snarky.
Maybe the average progressive has neither the power or the inclination to put me in a gulag but the side of things that they historically have lent their power and rhetoric to sure does.
There have been sections of the progressive left that lent their power and rhetoric to support Soviet communism. There have also been significant sections of the progressive left that lent their power and rhetoric to vociferously oppose Soviet communism. Andrei Sakharov, Vaclav Havel, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Camus and George Orwell—a few big names that come to mind immediately—all had political views that would probably classify them as “progressive” in today’s political climate. In addition, progressives have been at the forefront of most movements to expand civil liberties in the 20th century.
If you just focus on progressivism’s criticisms of capitalism and conservatism, then yeah, it doesn’t seem like a different kind of thing from Stalinism. But that ignores another prominent tendency in the history of the movement—a strong strain of civil libertarianism (the ACLU, for instance, is regarded by many as a progressive institution) -- which is qualitatively distinct from Stalinism.
Or to put it another way: Stalinists are on a continuum with progressives. They are not a different kind of thing.
I’m not sure what you mean by “progressives”, but it seems to me that “liberals” or “social-democrats” are actually closer to libertarians in terms of personal freedoms, while Soviet-style socialists are closer to fascists and theocrats on these issues.
The political spectrum has at least two dimensions: personal freedoms and economic freedoms.
I would probably put it as “The more power progressives get, the more they tend to evolve towards stalinists”. After all you’ve got to protect the people against the horrors of capitalism.
I was under the impression that “Exit” was the means by which they were going to establish their own utopia, that is, by exiting whichever one they were living in currently, rather than a fundamental right for us unlucky proles.
Ask yourself if the other person would try to censor you if they thought they could get away with it even if you were nice to them,
I think you are going to run into problems here. I suspect that most adherents of many ideologies would censor opposing views if they could get away with it.
Yes, that’s a very reasonable position to take, and I’m leaning the same way. I see the issue as being very similar to the question of whether or not a society should condone killing people: It makes perfect sense to have a general rule that says you can’t, but sometimes you have no choice. Pacifism is not the solution here.
The karma system does not solve this problem because a small number of people can have a disproportionate impact simply by voting more. And of course, extremists care more and so are more likely to vote. My post above is now at −3: Is this because the community disapproves? Or is it because 3 bio realists felt threatened by the notion that we should ban literal nazis because it might extend to them as well? I am not at all convinced it’s the former.
Too much censorship is dangerous, but too little censorship is dangerous too. It’s true that Less Wrong would die if every dissenting opinion were to be culled. However, if Less Wrong were to be overrun by irrational jerks without moderators taking some sort of action, Less Wrong would die too. Would you really oppose banning literal Nazis from posting their views on this forum? Because if so, I find your lack of censorship disturbing.
Asking “should we ban people for their views or should we have freedom of speech?” is a false dilemma. The correct question is: “how much censorship should we have relative to freedom of speech, and which views should we ban if any?”
I nominate socialists. Socialist regimes killed more people than nazi regimes.
(Just joking. I mean, the numbers are correct, but I actually don’t support censorship.)
Per unit time per capita or totally?
Also, the ones the Nazis killed were better ;-)
I think that the Khmer Rouge hold the per capita record, and the Soviets (*) the total one. Dunno about per unit time.
( * I’m not counting the Great Chinese Famine, since it was apparently caused by incompetence rather than deliberate malice.)
Jokes aside, I actually think it’s that kind of post that we should have a community norm against. Saying “Neo reactionaries are evil racists” or “Socialist regimes killed the most people!” is just as inflammatory as “black people are less intelligent than whites”. And what use does it serve?
A single comment is no cause for a ban of course, but if someone will look for any excuse to say that neoreactionaries are evil or blacks are inferior or socialists suck, and they post about it in every thread they can, then don’t you think they should be banned?
Let me explain my background. I grew up in a socialist country. Luckily, no one from my family or friends was a target of the regime, and it ended when I was 13. Only then I learned about what happened to other people. (You know, stuff like: secret police knocks on your door at midnight, they take your family member away, and you never seem them again. Later someone unofficially tells you they died during interrogation. They warn you that unless you shut up, you could be next. Also, you, your children, and your grandchildren will never be allowed to get to university or have a decent job, because you are relatives of a traitor, therefore politically unreliable. The regime hates you, but you are not allowed to leave the country, and will be killed if you try.) There was censorship to prevent me from learning sooner. I believed I was living in a happy paradise. Many people believe it today. (Many people also believe holocaust was a hoax, for similar psychological reasons.)
I remember a teacher at elementary school telling me: “Viliam, you think independently. You will have a lot of problems when you grow up.” I didn’t quite understand that, then. Now I do. So I guess I was lucky. Even my childhood experience with what you can and cannot say would be enough to predict that if someone in my country would write the Sequences, they would be inviting trouble. It’s difficult to explain why exactly; my neural network understands the rules, but they were never made explicit. It’s something like: merely saying “politics is the mind-killed” could be, under unlucky circumstances, be perceived as a criticism of the regime. You never say things that could be perceived as a criticism of the regime, because then you could have hard time explaining that you didn’t mean it that way.
The way I see it, the main difference between nazis and socialists is this: Nazis lost the war; their leaders were killed or put in prisons, their crimes publicly exposed and shamed. Socialists won the war, they were allowed to rule for decades, to eliminate free speech and spread their propaganda. After they killed and intimidated everyone who opposed them, and their rule was secured, they calmed down, and life under their rule became more peaceful during the following decades. Who knows; maybe in the parallel universe where nazis won the war, the nazis of 1980s were also less violent than the nazis of 1840s. (Maybe neoreactionaries are the moderate post-nazis from the parallel universe, where some later Führer hired Steve Jobs as the CEO.)
Anyway… the thing is, censorship “triggers” me. Censorship is the meta-evil that other evils can safely hide behind. Speaking about whether we need more or less censorship sounds like speaking about whether we need more or less secret police knocking on people’s doors at midnight. (Yeah, I can imagine a very exceptional situation, such as someone really constructing a nuclear bomb at their home… but that’s far from the typical scenario.) Censoring the bourgeois pseudoscience? Uhm, I’d rather have scientific questions answered by scientific means.
I generally try not to write off-topic comments. I consider exposing crimes of socialists highly relevant to the topic of censorship, because censorship was a critically important part of their regime; without censorship, it would fall apart. So the best way to keep me quiet about this topic is to stop proposing censorship on LW. Do we have a deal?
Thank you for taking the time to write all that, it helps me see where you are coming from. You clearly have a large framework which you are basing your views on, but the thing you have to keep in mind is that I do, too. I have several partially-written posts about this which I hope to post on Less Wrong one day, but I’m very worried they’ll be misconstrued because it’s such a difficult subject. The last thing I want to do is defend the practices of oppressive regimes, believe me. I’m worried that people just read my posts thinking “oh he is defending censorship, censorship is evil, downvote” without thinking about what I’m actually saying. “Censorship” is just a word. All of my arguments work just as well for “having a community norm against” something as opposed to “censoring” it.
The problem is a framing issue, I think. People keep seeing something like censorship as a bad thing period, because it is something that’s used by oppressive regimes. However, killing people is also used by oppressive regimes, and yet I still wouldn’t promote total pacifism. Your post reads to me like Ghandi saying that the Nazi’s should be opposed non-violently: I do believe that there is wisdom in what you say, but that’s going much too far. The thing you have to realize is that if all the nice and reasonable people in the world go around worrying that if they fight monsters they will themselves become monsters, the monsters always win because they’re the only ones willing to fight.
My view on killing is this: The crucial issue is who is being killed and why, and what principle you are using to determine who to kill. My view on censorship is this: The crucial issue is what view is being censored and why, and what principle you are using to determine what to censor. Censoring a view just because you disagree with it is just as wrong as killing someone just because they disagree with you. Getting everybody who disagrees with me to shut up wouldn’t actually make for the kind of world I want to live in. So what views do I think should be censored? Only those ones which seem to serve no purpose other than to destroy everything that’s good and right in this world.
Imagine you are the leader of Utopialand. Everything is going swimmingly: People are working hard, people are happy, and everyone is largely free to do and say as they please. Then one day, a foreign missionary enters your country in order to start spreading his religion among the naïve and carefree people of your land. His religion states things that not strictly illegal but which are incredibly harmful: You have to believe everything it says or you will be burned to death, you have to verbally abuse your children daily to raise them properly, you must reject anyone from society who holds ideas the religion disagree with, science and critical thinking are wicked, and so on and so forth. This religion goes against everything you value and what’s worse, it seems to be catching on. What is your reaction?
1) “Well if he wants to spread ideas that destroy everything I love and cherish that’s his right as a citizen. Who am I to tell him he can’t destroy the world? I mean it’s a free country. “
2) “AAAAAAGHHH IT’S A VICTIM OF A MEMETIC PLAGUE! QUICK, ISOLATE HIM BEFORE HE INFECTS THE OTHERS.”
The way I see it, there is a war of ideas spanning across all of human history, with good and helpful ideas on the one side and horrible memetic plagues which destroy everything they touch on the other. The civilisations that have prospered so far are the ones which fought for the good ideas and won. I submit that if your reaction to the above is option 1) and not 2), you are essentially choosing to lose the war of ideas on purpose. There will be nothing left of your empire but fire and ash.
Uhm, no. I mean, this is exaggerating; we are not having any physical violence here. Worst case: poisoning of minds. (I believe Yvain handled the case of neo-reactionaries sufficiently, if that’s what we are talking about here.)
What if there are two competing religions; each one of them evil in a different way. And one missionary approaches you with an offer that if you help him establish the holy inquisition, he will rid you of those evil heretics from the other side. Is it a good idea to give him the power?
Yes of course it’s an exaggeration, but it’s the same meta-type of error: Seeing X used for evil and therefore declaring that all X is evil and anyone who says X isn’t always evil is either evil or stupid themselves. It’s the same mistake as the one Neoreactionaries always complain about: “Perceived differences based on race or sex have been used to excuse evil, therefore anyone who says there are differences between races or sexes is evil!”
And poisoning of minds is very, very bad. People always seem to assume that physical violence is somehow worse than mental violence, but it’s just not true. Ideas can can be a lot more dangerous than guns.
(of course all of this is a bit moot since I’m not actually proposing banning democrats/republicans/race research/feminism or anything like that)
Of course not, why would I? Why are you asking this? Are you implying that in the real world, both sides to any conflict are always equally evil? Because that definitely isn’t the case in my experience.
Didn’t say “equally”.
Seems to me that so far we had two significant attempts at suppressing opinions on LW.
1) Eugine’s one-person guerilla war of mass downvoting. Had some success for a few months, resulted in a ban.
2) Repeated suggestions that we should remove politically incorrect speech, because allegedly women don’t like it. Multiple proponents, no success yet.
I’m not sure which one of these is more dangerous; I could find arguments for either side. Eugine actually did censor the site for a while. However, he was finally banned, and if someone tries to do the same thing, they will probably get banned, too (hopefully much sooner). Also, his actions didn’t have popular support. On the other hand, censhorship of politically incorrect ideas is proposed repeatedly, by multiple people, openly in public. They demand that their norms become the official norms of the website, enforced by moderators.
Then I believe most people here want to have a debate without any political group dominating the website. About half of them don’t want to see here any politics at all, and I guess the other half would be okay with occassional, as rational as possible, polite debate about political topics.
If the religion is so obviously harmful why is it catching on? To paraphrase Kaj, why is it the place of individual people to decide that this religion needs censorship?
Farmville must be an excellent game because so many people play it.
Well, two of those three statements are falsifiable statements that are useful for making predictions about the future.
Well. All three of them are falsifiable, barring quibbles over definition.
“Socialist regimes killed the most people!” may or may not be useful for making predictions—it’s not useful for making predictions about, say, the USSR—because it doesn’t exist now. But on the other hand, it created chains of cause and effect still in existence, and we would like to predict those.
“Neo reactionaries are evil racists” seems the most subjective, in that we are more confused about “evil” than “killing” or “intelligence”. But as long as we taboo “evil”, I don’t see how it could possibly be a useless-for-prediction, impossible-to-falsify statement.
“black people are less intelligent than whites” pretty clearly has the most confounders and controversy, but it’s certainly falsifiable in principle, and both sides would argue that it has already been tested, I think.
On the gripping hand, all three seem like prime candidates for political mind-killing.
You’d have to taboo “racists” too though.
(And tabooing “evil” is an almost FAI-complete problem, anyway.)
Fair enough—the value of free speech needs to be weighed against other values that might be promoted by censoring specific viewpoints. Still, I think there are good rule-utilitarian grounds for making free speech the default position and for requiring a high standard of proof for deviating from that default in a particular case. The considerations for censoring nazism probably meet that standard, whereas I don’t think that standard is met in the case of anti-feminism or biorealism. (The latter, in particular, seems to consist primarily in certain factual rather than normative claims, and there are particularly strong reasons against censoring views of that sort.)
Note, too, that the karma system might in most cases allow the community to discourage certain viewpoints from being expressed without the need to resort to censorship.
If I understand it correctly, the tradition of “not providing Nazis platforms for free speech” came from history when Nazis used violence against their opponents. I mean… it sounds crazy if you are polite and fair enough to invite them to a debate table, they use it to debate with you and express their beliefs… and on the way home from the debate they kill you.
So it’s something like: “Don’t try to cooperate with a known DefectBot”.
The question is, these days, which people use extra-debate tools to silence their opponents?
Yes, precisely! This is what I think should be the golden standard for censorship. Ask yourself if the other person would try to censor you if they thought they could get away with it even if you were nice to them, and if the answer is yes it is acceptable (but not necessarily desirable!) to censor them. So an honest and reasonable bio-realist should not be censored, but Eugine Nier should be. It’s simply a matter of memetic self-defence.
The problem is how does one distinguish someone defecting because he’s dealing with a DefectBot with someone defecting because he is a DefectBot.
The same way you distinguish between someone who murders a person in order to steal their money and someone who kills a person in self defence: By evaluating on a case-by-case basis to the best of your ability. It’s not always easy, but it sure beats not bothering to make the distinction.
(In this case I think it’s quite obvious that Eugine Nier is the DefectBot and not Kaj_Sotala.)
And it wasn’t the people Eugine Nier was downvoting?
No, it wasn’t. Do you have any reason to think it was?
Well Eugine seemed to think so.
He seemed to think they were not rational enough to participate on this site. That’s not the same as being a DefectBot.
Imagine the distance to the “cooperate” button is slightly higher than the “defect” button. Someone who can’t reach the cooperate button might not mean any harm. But from your point of view, they might as well be a defectbot.
That isn’t what a DefectBot is. A DefectBot is an agent that would defect in every position, including this one.
For example, the Nazis might do everything in their power to hurt you now (such as attacking you on the way home), and when they are in power (such as, well, I think we all know the canonical example of that.)
On the other hand, they might act nice now but, you suspect, defect when they find themselves in power. Or they might attack as hard as they can now, but be generous in victory. Neither of those are DefectBot.
That’s funny because I view progressives as the exact group that would instantly throw me under the bus the moment I didn’t want to help them against someone else. Neoreactionaries at least propose to leave me alone.
I’m not excited about the NR plans for gay people if they ever come to power. Moldbug is charmingly neutral on the issue, but many of the others most certainly are not.
It is my impression that neoreactionaries want a non-democratic government. Surely this non-democratic government will make laws that you are required to obey, right?
Most neo reactionaries I read believe in something called Exit whereby if you want you can get the hell out. Contrast this to the ussr or how America will continue to tax you for something like 10 years if you want to emigrate.
Exiting isn’t cost-free, though. Most people won’t even exit by moving to a different state in the US, just because of all the direct and indirect costs of moving.
this is true, and one reason why I’m not a neoreactionary. But I’d still rather be deported than gulagged.
I think you’re confusing progressives with Stalinists.
I think you’re confusing “responding to a point someone is trying to make” and “making fun of someone”.
Maybe the average progressive has neither the power or the inclination to put me in a gulag but the side of things that they historically have lent their power and rhetoric to sure does. I don’t feel it’s particularly likely to happen in the near future but I also recognize that no one seemed to have predicted the outcome ahead of time the last time.
Or to put it another way: Stalinists are on a continuum with progressives. They are not a different kind of thing.
Fair point. My comment was unnecessarily snarky.
There have been sections of the progressive left that lent their power and rhetoric to support Soviet communism. There have also been significant sections of the progressive left that lent their power and rhetoric to vociferously oppose Soviet communism. Andrei Sakharov, Vaclav Havel, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Camus and George Orwell—a few big names that come to mind immediately—all had political views that would probably classify them as “progressive” in today’s political climate. In addition, progressives have been at the forefront of most movements to expand civil liberties in the 20th century.
If you just focus on progressivism’s criticisms of capitalism and conservatism, then yeah, it doesn’t seem like a different kind of thing from Stalinism. But that ignores another prominent tendency in the history of the movement—a strong strain of civil libertarianism (the ACLU, for instance, is regarded by many as a progressive institution) -- which is qualitatively distinct from Stalinism.
I’m not sure what you mean by “progressives”, but it seems to me that “liberals” or “social-democrats” are actually closer to libertarians in terms of personal freedoms, while Soviet-style socialists are closer to fascists and theocrats on these issues.
The political spectrum has at least two dimensions: personal freedoms and economic freedoms.
I would probably put it as “The more power progressives get, the more they tend to evolve towards stalinists”. After all you’ve got to protect the people against the horrors of capitalism.
I was under the impression that “Exit” was the means by which they were going to establish their own utopia, that is, by exiting whichever one they were living in currently, rather than a fundamental right for us unlucky proles.
I think you are going to run into problems here. I suspect that most adherents of many ideologies would censor opposing views if they could get away with it.
Yes, that’s a very reasonable position to take, and I’m leaning the same way. I see the issue as being very similar to the question of whether or not a society should condone killing people: It makes perfect sense to have a general rule that says you can’t, but sometimes you have no choice. Pacifism is not the solution here.
The karma system does not solve this problem because a small number of people can have a disproportionate impact simply by voting more. And of course, extremists care more and so are more likely to vote. My post above is now at −3: Is this because the community disapproves? Or is it because 3 bio realists felt threatened by the notion that we should ban literal nazis because it might extend to them as well? I am not at all convinced it’s the former.