Sure, it’s possible to encourage niceness without deleting anything that wouldn’t be deleted in a less nice regime, but I don’t think censorship was my true objection—or at least my only serious objection—in either of the cases I mentioned.
Thing is, nice is costly. “Don’t be a jerk” is a fairly low bar to clear, but if you have expectations beyond that—if you’re actually treating apparent agreeableness as a terminal value w.r.t. post quality, to put it in LW-speak -- then that implies putting effort into optimizing for it. Which then implies less effort going into optimizing for insight or clarity, since most of us don’t have an unlimited amount of effort budgeted for composing LW posts. To make matters worse, niceness in Anglophone culture generally implies indirection: avoiding direct reference to potentially sensitive points, and working around that with a variety of more or less standardized circumlocutions. Which of course directly reduces clarity. It might be another story if English had a richer formal register, but it doesn’t.
I recognize that others might have more unpleasant emotional responses to direct language than I, and I further recognize that that links into a variety of heuristics which affect exactly the same clarity considerations I’ve been talking about. But, and speaking only for myself here, I’d rather run the risk of occasionally being chafed if it means I have a better chance of integrating what’s being said.
Sure, it’s possible to encourage niceness without deleting anything that wouldn’t be deleted in a less nice regime, but I don’t think censorship was my true objection—or at least my only serious objection—in either of the cases I mentioned.
Thing is, nice is costly. “Don’t be a jerk” is a fairly low bar to clear, but if you have expectations beyond that—if you’re actually treating apparent agreeableness as a terminal value w.r.t. post quality, to put it in LW-speak -- then that implies putting effort into optimizing for it. Which then implies less effort going into optimizing for insight or clarity, since most of us don’t have an unlimited amount of effort budgeted for composing LW posts. To make matters worse, niceness in Anglophone culture generally implies indirection: avoiding direct reference to potentially sensitive points, and working around that with a variety of more or less standardized circumlocutions. Which of course directly reduces clarity. It might be another story if English had a richer formal register, but it doesn’t.
I recognize that others might have more unpleasant emotional responses to direct language than I, and I further recognize that that links into a variety of heuristics which affect exactly the same clarity considerations I’ve been talking about. But, and speaking only for myself here, I’d rather run the risk of occasionally being chafed if it means I have a better chance of integrating what’s being said.