A big problem I see is that if the panel explains their reasoning, it exposes them to a libel lawsuit, but if the panel does not expose their reasoning, it allows the bad actor to publish their own bullshit version unopposed.
(Specifically, I have seen “they simply don’t like me because I am politically incorrect” written by people who were actually banned for doing specific bad things to other people in the rationalist community; things that were completely unrelated to politics or anything in that style.)
Bingo, the root problem is pretending to have any quasi-judicial structure/authority at all.
People of roughly equal status issuing ‘judgements’ or ‘decisions’ on each other really doesn’t make sense for that reason, at best you can do so within a private club and its property lines.
A federation of private clubs may decide to do so, very rarely, only for the most serious cases, because as mentioned in the OP there’s always the risk of some clubs siding with the accused and then deciding to leave, splitting the federation.
I guess plausibility is in the eye of the beholder.
To me it seems very unlikely, because I have said a ton of politically incorrect things on LW and I do not remember any negative consequence. Quite the opposite, for me LW and ACX are the places where I can speak most freely. (I have been banned on Reddit, for saying things that seemed very mild to me.)
I do not even remember anyone being banned from LW for expressing an opinion. I admit I am no longer paying attention to bans, but when I did, the typical reason was “an obvious spam account”, and occasionally “creates dozens of sockpuppet accounts and uses them for vote manipulation”. Other things (such as crackpottery or religious zealotry) are solved by the community downvoting the offender. Which is exactly how the karma system is supposed to work.
Now consider how little effort it takes to ban someone from a website (just clicking a button), compared to banning someone from the community (choosing a panel, collecting evidence, dozen people spending 100 hours debating the issue, writing a public announcement). The idea that someone does all this effort for something they wouldn’t care to push a button for is… just absurd.
The number of people banned in real life is very small (I do not know the exact number), and if you ask in private, the typical reason is something like “raped someone” or “stole money from someone”. But you don’t put that in writing, unless you also want a lawsuit on top of those 100s of hours spent on the issue.
But ultimately this is a matter of trust. Like, maybe I am lying to you right now...
Another piece of evidence is that the debate on LW is mostly uncensored. Even if your opinion gets downvoted, it still stays there for everyone to read. So if things like “someone gets banned from rationalist meetups merely for saying [insert heresy]” actually happened, someone would complain about that on LW. If that comment got downvoted, other people would ask why it got downvoted and whether it is true; etc. If the entire comment section got nuked, people would debate that on ACX or Facebook, etc. The rationalist community is connected by various tools (LW, ACX, Reddit, Discord, Facebook, meetups); censorship in one part would be a hot topic in the other parts.
So the fact that you have never seen such controversy debated on LW is also evidence that such things simply do not happen.
For a community that makes a big deal about “Bayesian reasoning,” it’s amusing and utterly unsurprising that so many here fail utterly to recognize applications of it in practice.
A big problem I see is that if the panel explains their reasoning, it exposes them to a libel lawsuit, but if the panel does not expose their reasoning, it allows the bad actor to publish their own bullshit version unopposed.
(Specifically, I have seen “they simply don’t like me because I am politically incorrect” written by people who were actually banned for doing specific bad things to other people in the rationalist community; things that were completely unrelated to politics or anything in that style.)
Bingo, the root problem is pretending to have any quasi-judicial structure/authority at all.
People of roughly equal status issuing ‘judgements’ or ‘decisions’ on each other really doesn’t make sense for that reason, at best you can do so within a private club and its property lines.
A federation of private clubs may decide to do so, very rarely, only for the most serious cases, because as mentioned in the OP there’s always the risk of some clubs siding with the accused and then deciding to leave, splitting the federation.
If that’s plausible, I think them lying about it being the case in their specific instances is the lesser problem.
I guess plausibility is in the eye of the beholder.
To me it seems very unlikely, because I have said a ton of politically incorrect things on LW and I do not remember any negative consequence. Quite the opposite, for me LW and ACX are the places where I can speak most freely. (I have been banned on Reddit, for saying things that seemed very mild to me.)
I do not even remember anyone being banned from LW for expressing an opinion. I admit I am no longer paying attention to bans, but when I did, the typical reason was “an obvious spam account”, and occasionally “creates dozens of sockpuppet accounts and uses them for vote manipulation”. Other things (such as crackpottery or religious zealotry) are solved by the community downvoting the offender. Which is exactly how the karma system is supposed to work.
Now consider how little effort it takes to ban someone from a website (just clicking a button), compared to banning someone from the community (choosing a panel, collecting evidence, dozen people spending 100 hours debating the issue, writing a public announcement). The idea that someone does all this effort for something they wouldn’t care to push a button for is… just absurd.
The number of people banned in real life is very small (I do not know the exact number), and if you ask in private, the typical reason is something like “raped someone” or “stole money from someone”. But you don’t put that in writing, unless you also want a lawsuit on top of those 100s of hours spent on the issue.
But ultimately this is a matter of trust. Like, maybe I am lying to you right now...
Another piece of evidence is that the debate on LW is mostly uncensored. Even if your opinion gets downvoted, it still stays there for everyone to read. So if things like “someone gets banned from rationalist meetups merely for saying [insert heresy]” actually happened, someone would complain about that on LW. If that comment got downvoted, other people would ask why it got downvoted and whether it is true; etc. If the entire comment section got nuked, people would debate that on ACX or Facebook, etc. The rationalist community is connected by various tools (LW, ACX, Reddit, Discord, Facebook, meetups); censorship in one part would be a hot topic in the other parts.
So the fact that you have never seen such controversy debated on LW is also evidence that such things simply do not happen.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah
For a community that makes a big deal about “Bayesian reasoning,” it’s amusing and utterly unsurprising that so many here fail utterly to recognize applications of it in practice.