Any post or comment which advocates or ‘asks about’ violence against sufficiently identifiable real people (as opposed to aliens or people on trolley tracks) may be censored.
Reason: Talking about violence makes it more probable, makes LW look bad, and numerous message boards across the Earth censor discussion of various subtypes of proposed criminal activity without anything bad happening to them.
More generally: Posts or comments advocating or ‘asking about’ violation of laws that are actually enforced against middle-class people (e.g., not drug laws) may be censored on the grounds that it makes LW look bad and that anyone talking about a proposed crime on the Internet fails forever as a master criminal (i.e., even if a proposed conspiratorial crime were hypothetically good, there would still be net negative expected utility from talking about it on the Internet, therefore and in full generality this is a low-value form of discussion).
This is not a poll, but I am asking in advance if anyone has non-obvious consequences they want to point out. In other words, the form of this discussion is not ‘Do you like this?’ - you have a different utility function from people who are responsible for how LW looks as a whole—but rather, ‘Are there any predictable consequences we didn’t think of that you would like to point out, and possibly bet on with us if there’s a good way to settle the bet?’
I think he chose “starting a campaign of assassination against executives of tobacco companies” as a deliberately extreme example so that it would be obvious he isn’t serious. (EDIT: Though of course he failed Poe’s Law.)
New proposed censorship policy:
Any post or comment which advocates or ‘asks about’ violence against sufficiently identifiable real people (as opposed to aliens or people on trolley tracks) may be censored.
Reason: Talking about violence makes it more probable, makes LW look bad, and numerous message boards across the Earth censor discussion of various subtypes of proposed criminal activity without anything bad happening to them.
More generally: Posts or comments advocating or ‘asking about’ violation of laws that are actually enforced against middle-class people (e.g., not drug laws) may be censored on the grounds that it makes LW look bad and that anyone talking about a proposed crime on the Internet fails forever as a master criminal (i.e., even if a proposed conspiratorial crime were hypothetically good, there would still be net negative expected utility from talking about it on the Internet, therefore and in full generality this is a low-value form of discussion).
This is not a poll, but I am asking in advance if anyone has non-obvious consequences they want to point out. In other words, the form of this discussion is not ‘Do you like this?’ - you have a different utility function from people who are responsible for how LW looks as a whole—but rather, ‘Are there any predictable consequences we didn’t think of that you would like to point out, and possibly bet on with us if there’s a good way to settle the bet?’
I think he chose “starting a campaign of assassination against executives of tobacco companies” as a deliberately extreme example so that it would be obvious he isn’t serious. (EDIT: Though of course he failed Poe’s Law.)
Is the account of the user who posted this also deleted?