Generally speaking, if someone commits heinous and unambiguous crimes in service of an objective like “getting people to read X”, and it doesn’t look like they’re doing a tricky reverse-psychology thing or anything like that, then we should not cooperate with that objective. If Kaczynski had posted his manifesto on LessWrong, I would feel comfortable deleting it and any links to it, and I would encourage the moderator of any other forum to do the same under those circumstances.
But this is a specific and unusual circumstance. When people try to cancel each other, usually there’s no connection or a very tenuous connection between their writing and what they’re accused of. (Also the crime is usually less severe and less well proven.) In that case, the argument is different; either the people doing the cancelling think that the crime wasn’t adequately punished, and are trying to create justice via a distributed minor punishment. If people are right about whether the thing is bad, then the main issues are about standards of evidence (biased readings and out-of-context quotes go a long way), proportionality (it’s not worth blowing up peoples’ lives over having said something dumb on the internet), and relation to nonpunishers (problems happen when things escalate from telling people why someone is bad, to punishing people for not believing or not caring).
Generally speaking, if someone commits heinous and unambiguous crimes in service of an objective like “getting people to read X”, and it doesn’t look like they’re doing a tricky reverse-psychology thing or anything like that, then we should not cooperate with that objective. If Kaczynski had posted his manifesto on LessWrong, I would feel comfortable deleting it and any links to it, and I would encourage the moderator of any other forum to do the same under those circumstances.
But this is a specific and unusual circumstance. When people try to cancel each other, usually there’s no connection or a very tenuous connection between their writing and what they’re accused of. (Also the crime is usually less severe and less well proven.) In that case, the argument is different; either the people doing the cancelling think that the crime wasn’t adequately punished, and are trying to create justice via a distributed minor punishment. If people are right about whether the thing is bad, then the main issues are about standards of evidence (biased readings and out-of-context quotes go a long way), proportionality (it’s not worth blowing up peoples’ lives over having said something dumb on the internet), and relation to nonpunishers (problems happen when things escalate from telling people why someone is bad, to punishing people for not believing or not caring).