When you have power, you generally don’t have the option to not be seen as having power.
If you have the power to stop X, and you do nothing, then you are observed to tolerate X. That is what “tolerating” is — “I could do something about X, but I don’t” — whether X is “proposals of violence on my web forum” or “squirrels raiding the bird feeder in my back yard”.
If you delegate capability Y to Alice, and Alice does action A with that capability, and you do nothing about it, then you are observed to accept A being done. This includes where “A” is “post threatening things on the web” and Y is “the ability to submit posts to your web forum”.
You cannot beg off responsibility for power that you actually do possess. “Alice put a post on your web forum saying that all green-eyed, black-haired people are dirty wiggins and maybe we should bisect them all! Are you really OK with that!?” While you are running the forum, you do not have the option of credibly saying, “That’s nothing to do with me.” You either tolerate the proposal to bisect wiggins, or you do not tolerate it — in which case you delete the post, ban Alice, or something of the like.
As far as I can tell, you would do well to realize that there is a whole Web out there that is not Less Wrong, and you can post your ideas on quite a lot of it. What you are doing here is what the Wikipedia folks call disrupting the project to make a point, and indicates that you value your freedom to post violent speculations on other people’s web forums much more highly than their freedom to have a web forum that does not endorse or promulgate your violent speculations.
Your argument would seem to recommend a hands-off policy to moderation—in fact this is very the basis on which websites with full-time legal staff recommend such policies.
If you censor (i.e. “exercise editorial control over”) posts which you disapprove of, the inescapable implication is that you DO approve of all OTHER posts. Whereas if you instead institute a policy of not exercising editorial control of your comments (except as mandated by law), then you escape that implication, by saying “we don’t exercise editorial control over our comments, therefore lack of censorship cannot logically be read to imply endorsement”.
You cannot beg off responsibility for power that you actually do possess. “Alice put a post on your web forum saying that all green-eyed, black-haired people are dirty wiggins and maybe we should bisect them all! Are you really OK with that!?”
Youtube and Reddit all have a mostly hands-off approach towards moderation. When people use poor grammar and poor spelling on those sites, the administrators don’t come down and say that those comments are not allowed. When near-illiterate people make garbage comments on those websites, people don’t assume that the creators and administrators are also nearly illiterate.
Sure, it states that the creators and administrators are willing to tolerate low-quality comments. What does that say about them? Nothing, actually, except that they espouse freedom of expression.
I believe that the same principle is at play here, on this website. Although Eliezer Yudkowsky isn’t willing to tolerate idiocy on this website, he is willing to tolerate intelligent dissent. I recall a discussion a while back about how a physicist felt that Eliezer’s presentation of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, and how it must be “obviously correct”, is wrong. The mods could have deleted that thread immediately; however the mods were shown to tolerate that.
Likewise, I think that we have the option of tolerating intelligent discussions concerning what type of torture is acceptable vs what type of torture is unacceptable, or whether certain forms of violence qualify as disproportionate force or not. Tolerating an open discussion is never a liability.
As I said in my comment below, I think that if there is a justification for this decision, it would be to prevent intelligent discussions from being derailed by emotional responses.
When you have power, you generally don’t have the option to not be seen as having power.
If you have the power to stop X, and you do nothing, then you are observed to tolerate X. That is what “tolerating” is — “I could do something about X, but I don’t” — whether X is “proposals of violence on my web forum” or “squirrels raiding the bird feeder in my back yard”.
If you delegate capability Y to Alice, and Alice does action A with that capability, and you do nothing about it, then you are observed to accept A being done. This includes where “A” is “post threatening things on the web” and Y is “the ability to submit posts to your web forum”.
You cannot beg off responsibility for power that you actually do possess. “Alice put a post on your web forum saying that all green-eyed, black-haired people are dirty wiggins and maybe we should bisect them all! Are you really OK with that!?” While you are running the forum, you do not have the option of credibly saying, “That’s nothing to do with me.” You either tolerate the proposal to bisect wiggins, or you do not tolerate it — in which case you delete the post, ban Alice, or something of the like.
As far as I can tell, you would do well to realize that there is a whole Web out there that is not Less Wrong, and you can post your ideas on quite a lot of it. What you are doing here is what the Wikipedia folks call disrupting the project to make a point, and indicates that you value your freedom to post violent speculations on other people’s web forums much more highly than their freedom to have a web forum that does not endorse or promulgate your violent speculations.
Your argument would seem to recommend a hands-off policy to moderation—in fact this is very the basis on which websites with full-time legal staff recommend such policies.
If you censor (i.e. “exercise editorial control over”) posts which you disapprove of, the inescapable implication is that you DO approve of all OTHER posts. Whereas if you instead institute a policy of not exercising editorial control of your comments (except as mandated by law), then you escape that implication, by saying “we don’t exercise editorial control over our comments, therefore lack of censorship cannot logically be read to imply endorsement”.
I have some trouble with your logic.
Youtube and Reddit all have a mostly hands-off approach towards moderation. When people use poor grammar and poor spelling on those sites, the administrators don’t come down and say that those comments are not allowed. When near-illiterate people make garbage comments on those websites, people don’t assume that the creators and administrators are also nearly illiterate.
Sure, it states that the creators and administrators are willing to tolerate low-quality comments. What does that say about them? Nothing, actually, except that they espouse freedom of expression.
I believe that the same principle is at play here, on this website. Although Eliezer Yudkowsky isn’t willing to tolerate idiocy on this website, he is willing to tolerate intelligent dissent. I recall a discussion a while back about how a physicist felt that Eliezer’s presentation of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, and how it must be “obviously correct”, is wrong. The mods could have deleted that thread immediately; however the mods were shown to tolerate that.
Likewise, I think that we have the option of tolerating intelligent discussions concerning what type of torture is acceptable vs what type of torture is unacceptable, or whether certain forms of violence qualify as disproportionate force or not. Tolerating an open discussion is never a liability.
As I said in my comment below, I think that if there is a justification for this decision, it would be to prevent intelligent discussions from being derailed by emotional responses.