[Thought experiment meant to illustrate potential dangers of discourse policing]
Imagine 2 online forums devoted to discussing creationism.
Forum #1 is about 95% creationists, 5% evolutionists. It has a lengthy document, “Basics of Scientific Discourse”, which runs to about 30 printed pages. The guidelines in the document are fairly reasonable. People who post to Forum #1 are expected to have read and internalized this document. It’s common for users to receive warnings or bans for violating guidelines in the “Basics of Scientific Discourse” document. These warnings and bans fall disproportionately on evolutionists, for a couple reasons: (a) evolutionist users are less likely to read and internalize the guidelines (evolutionist accounts tend to be newly registered, and not very invested in forum discussion norms) and (b) forum moderators are all creationists, and they’re far more motivated to find guideline violations in the posts of evolutionist users than creationist users (with ~30 pages of guidelines, there’s often something to be found). The mods are usually not very interested in discussing a warning or a ban.
Forum #2 is about 80% creationists, 20% evolutionists. The mods at Forum #2 are more freewheeling and fun. Rather than moderating harshly, the mods at Forum #2 focus on setting a positive example of friendly, productive discourse. The ideological split among the mods at Forum #2 is the same as that of the forum of the whole: 80% creationists, 20% evolutionists. It’s common for creationist mods to check with evolutionist mods before modding an evolutionist post, and vice versa. When a user at Forum #2 is misbehaving, the mods at Forum #2 favor a Hacker News-like approach of sending the misbehaving user a private message and having a discussion about their posts.
Which forum do you think would be quicker to reach a 50% creationists / 50% evolutionists split?
I think this thought experiment isn’t relevant, because I think there are sufficient strong disanalogies between [your imagined document] and [this actual document], and [the imagined forum trying to gain members] and [the existing LessWrong].
i.e. I think the conclusion of the thought experiment is indeed as you are implying, and also that this fact doesn’t mean much here.
I thought about this a bit more, and I think that given the choice between explicit discourse rules and implicit ones, explicit is better. So insofar as your post is making existing discourse rules more explicit, that seems good.
[Thought experiment meant to illustrate potential dangers of discourse policing]
Imagine 2 online forums devoted to discussing creationism.
Forum #1 is about 95% creationists, 5% evolutionists. It has a lengthy document, “Basics of Scientific Discourse”, which runs to about 30 printed pages. The guidelines in the document are fairly reasonable. People who post to Forum #1 are expected to have read and internalized this document. It’s common for users to receive warnings or bans for violating guidelines in the “Basics of Scientific Discourse” document. These warnings and bans fall disproportionately on evolutionists, for a couple reasons: (a) evolutionist users are less likely to read and internalize the guidelines (evolutionist accounts tend to be newly registered, and not very invested in forum discussion norms) and (b) forum moderators are all creationists, and they’re far more motivated to find guideline violations in the posts of evolutionist users than creationist users (with ~30 pages of guidelines, there’s often something to be found). The mods are usually not very interested in discussing a warning or a ban.
Forum #2 is about 80% creationists, 20% evolutionists. The mods at Forum #2 are more freewheeling and fun. Rather than moderating harshly, the mods at Forum #2 focus on setting a positive example of friendly, productive discourse. The ideological split among the mods at Forum #2 is the same as that of the forum of the whole: 80% creationists, 20% evolutionists. It’s common for creationist mods to check with evolutionist mods before modding an evolutionist post, and vice versa. When a user at Forum #2 is misbehaving, the mods at Forum #2 favor a Hacker News-like approach of sending the misbehaving user a private message and having a discussion about their posts.
Which forum do you think would be quicker to reach a 50% creationists / 50% evolutionists split?
I think this thought experiment isn’t relevant, because I think there are sufficient strong disanalogies between [your imagined document] and [this actual document], and [the imagined forum trying to gain members] and [the existing LessWrong].
i.e. I think the conclusion of the thought experiment is indeed as you are implying, and also that this fact doesn’t mean much here.
Well, the story from my comment basically explains why I gave up on LW in the past. So I thought it was worth putting the possibility on your radar.
I thought about this a bit more, and I think that given the choice between explicit discourse rules and implicit ones, explicit is better. So insofar as your post is making existing discourse rules more explicit, that seems good.