Lumifer didn’t say anything about enforceability. E.g. the boy scouts have the right (as a private group, if you accept that a group with the U.S. president as their figurehead is in fact private) to disallow membership based on gender, sexual orientation, or religion. That doesn’t mean it is right for them to do so. One should expect that in a civilized society groups like the boy scouts shouldn’t discriminate based on things like sexual orientation. But that doesn’t necessarily imply that there should be regulatory action to enforce that.
Likewise, Facebook should be a public commons where freedom of speech is respected. But that doesn’t mean I’d call for regulatory enforcement of that.
One should expect that in a civilized society groups like the boy scouts shouldn’t discriminate based on things like sexual orientation.
Agreed in principle, but there are certain situations where the boundaries are much less clear. Should I in a gentleman’s club allow women? Obviously not, and it’s not even discrimination.
Should I in Lesswrong allow the discussion of theology? Obviously not, and someone shouldn’t, in the normative sense, invoke freedom of speech to allow trolling.
At the same time, I can create a social network which is devoted to the dissemination of only carefully verified news, and no one should be able to invoke freedom of speech to hijack this mission.
Should I in Lesswrong allow the discussion of theology? Obviously not
LW discusses theology all the time, it just uses weird terminology and likes to reinvent the wheel a lot.
The whole FAI problem is better phrased as “We will create God, how do we make sure He likes us?”. The Simulation Hypothesis is straight-up creationism: we were created by some, presumably higher, beings for their purposes. Etc.
I see no meaningful difference between a god and a fully-realized (in the EY sense) AI. And the Simulation Hypothesis is literally creationism. Not necessarily Christian creationism (or any particular historic one), but creationism nonetheless.
Should I in Lesswrong allow the discussion of theology? Obviously not, and someone shouldn’t, in the normative sense, invoke freedom of speech to allow trolling.
I don’t think we have any ban on discussion on theology or that it was mentioned in any discussion we had about what might be valid reasons to ban a post.
Theology was just an example, but a relevant one: in a forum devoted to the improvement of rationality, discussing about some flavor of thoughts that have by long being proved irrational should amount to trolling. I’m not talking trying to justify rationally theism, that had and might still have a place here, but discussing theology as if theism was true shouldn’t be allowed. On the other hand, you cannot explicitly ban everything that is off-topic, so that isn’t written anywhere shouldn’t be a proof against.
On the other hand, you cannot explicitly ban everything that is off-topic, so that isn’t written anywhere shouldn’t be a proof against.
LW never used to have an explicit or implicit ban against being off-topic. Off-topic posts used to get downvoted and not banned.
We delete spam, we delete advocacy of illegal violence and the Basilisk got deleted under the idea that it’s a harmful idea.
An off-topic post about theism would be noise and not harmful, so it’s not worth banning under our philosophy for banning posts.
In addition, I don’t think that it’s even true that a post about theology has to be off-topic. It’s quite common on LW that people use replacement Gods like Omega for exploring thought experiments. Those discussions do pretend that “Omega existence is true” and that doesn’t make them problematic in any way.
Taking a more traditional God instead of Omega wouldn’t be a problem.
It’s also even clear that theism has been proved irrational. In the census a significant portion allocates more than 0 percent to it being true.
I think at the first Double Crux we did at LW Berlin someone updated in the direction of theism. A CFAR person did move to theism after an elaborate experiment of the Reverse Turing test.
LW likely wouldn’t have existed if it wouldn’t be for the philanthropic efforts of a certain Evangelical Christian.
David Chapman made in his posts about post-rationality the point that his investigation of religious ideas like Tantra allowed him to make advances in AI while at MIT that he likely otherwise wouldn’t have made.
That’s a weird position to have: basically you’re saying that there’s no moral way to limit the topic of or the accessibility to a closed group. Am I representing you correctly? If not, where would you put the boundaries?
Gentlemen clubs are actually concentrations of power where informal deals happen. Admitting women to these institutions is vital to having gender equality at the highest echelons of civic power.
And theology is discussed all the time on LW, even if it is often the subject of criticism.
I was just saying that those particular examples were poorly chosen. But since you have me engaged here, the problem with taking an absolutive view is when a private communication medium, e.g. Facebook, becomes a medium of debate over civic issues. Somewhere along the way it becomes a public commons vital to democracy where matters of free speech must be protected. In some countries (not the USA) this is arguably already the case with Facebook.
I don’t think that freedom of speech is enforceable inside a private-owned network.
We’re talking about “should”, the normative approach. A private entity can do a lot of things—it doesn’t mean that it should do these things.
Freedom of speech is not just a legal term, it’s also a very important component of a civil society.
Still: should Lesswrong allow the discussion of any off-topic subject just because “free speech”?
...did anyone claim anything like that?
You did, implicitly.
I did not. You read me wrong.
Lumifer didn’t say anything about enforceability. E.g. the boy scouts have the right (as a private group, if you accept that a group with the U.S. president as their figurehead is in fact private) to disallow membership based on gender, sexual orientation, or religion. That doesn’t mean it is right for them to do so. One should expect that in a civilized society groups like the boy scouts shouldn’t discriminate based on things like sexual orientation. But that doesn’t necessarily imply that there should be regulatory action to enforce that.
Likewise, Facebook should be a public commons where freedom of speech is respected. But that doesn’t mean I’d call for regulatory enforcement of that.
Agreed in principle, but there are certain situations where the boundaries are much less clear. Should I in a gentleman’s club allow women? Obviously not, and it’s not even discrimination.
Should I in Lesswrong allow the discussion of theology? Obviously not, and someone shouldn’t, in the normative sense, invoke freedom of speech to allow trolling.
At the same time, I can create a social network which is devoted to the dissemination of only carefully verified news, and no one should be able to invoke freedom of speech to hijack this mission.
LW discusses theology all the time, it just uses weird terminology and likes to reinvent the wheel a lot.
The whole FAI problem is better phrased as “We will create God, how do we make sure He likes us?”. The Simulation Hypothesis is straight-up creationism: we were created by some, presumably higher, beings for their purposes. Etc.
You are strawmanning both positions a lot...
No, I’m being quite literal here.
I see no meaningful difference between a god and a fully-realized (in the EY sense) AI. And the Simulation Hypothesis is literally creationism. Not necessarily Christian creationism (or any particular historic one), but creationism nonetheless.
Hell yeah, bro. Sufficiently advanced Superintelligence is indistinguishable from God.
I don’t think we have any ban on discussion on theology or that it was mentioned in any discussion we had about what might be valid reasons to ban a post.
Theology was just an example, but a relevant one: in a forum devoted to the improvement of rationality, discussing about some flavor of thoughts that have by long being proved irrational should amount to trolling. I’m not talking trying to justify rationally theism, that had and might still have a place here, but discussing theology as if theism was true shouldn’t be allowed.
On the other hand, you cannot explicitly ban everything that is off-topic, so that isn’t written anywhere shouldn’t be a proof against.
LW never used to have an explicit or implicit ban against being off-topic. Off-topic posts used to get downvoted and not banned.
We delete spam, we delete advocacy of illegal violence and the Basilisk got deleted under the idea that it’s a harmful idea.
An off-topic post about theism would be noise and not harmful, so it’s not worth banning under our philosophy for banning posts.
In addition, I don’t think that it’s even true that a post about theology has to be off-topic. It’s quite common on LW that people use replacement Gods like Omega for exploring thought experiments. Those discussions do pretend that “Omega existence is true” and that doesn’t make them problematic in any way. Taking a more traditional God instead of Omega wouldn’t be a problem.
It’s also even clear that theism has been proved irrational. In the census a significant portion allocates more than 0 percent to it being true. I think at the first Double Crux we did at LW Berlin someone updated in the direction of theism. A CFAR person did move to theism after an elaborate experiment of the Reverse Turing test. LW likely wouldn’t have existed if it wouldn’t be for the philanthropic efforts of a certain Evangelical Christian.
David Chapman made in his posts about post-rationality the point that his investigation of religious ideas like Tantra allowed him to make advances in AI while at MIT that he likely otherwise wouldn’t have made.
Actually neither of those are obvious to me.
That’s a weird position to have: basically you’re saying that there’s no moral way to limit the topic of or the accessibility to a closed group.
Am I representing you correctly? If not, where would you put the boundaries?
Those specific examples are bad examples.
Gentlemen clubs are actually concentrations of power where informal deals happen. Admitting women to these institutions is vital to having gender equality at the highest echelons of civic power.
And theology is discussed all the time on LW, even if it is often the subject of criticism.
I was just saying that those particular examples were poorly chosen. But since you have me engaged here, the problem with taking an absolutive view is when a private communication medium, e.g. Facebook, becomes a medium of debate over civic issues. Somewhere along the way it becomes a public commons vital to democracy where matters of free speech must be protected. In some countries (not the USA) this is arguably already the case with Facebook.