OK but what’s actually being done is a one-off ban of someone with multiple credible public rape allegations against them.
Also, what’s actually being done is a one-off ban of a user whose name starts with ‘i.’ That is, yes, I agree with the facts you present, and contest the claim of relevance / the act of presenting an interpretation as if it were a brute fact.
There is a symmetry to the situation, of course, where I am reporting what I believe my intentions are / the interpretation I was operating under while I made the decision, but no introspective access is perfect, and perhaps there are counterfactuals where our models predict different things and it would have gone the way you predict instead of the way I predict. Even so, I think it would be a mistake to not have the stated motivation as a hypothesis in your model to update towards or against as time goes on.
The specific policy goal of developing better immune responses to epistemic corruption is just not relevant to that
According to me, the relevance is that this action was taken to further that policy goal; I agree it is only weak evidence that we will succeed at that goal or even successfully implement policies that work towards that goal. I view this as a declaration of intent, not success, and specifically the intent that “next time, we will act against people who are highly manipulative and deceitful before they have clear victims” instead of the more achievable but less useful “once there’s consensus you committed crimes, not posting on LW is part of your punishment”.
Also, what’s actually being done is a one-off ban of a user whose name starts with ‘i.’ That is, yes, I agree with the facts you present, and contest the claim of relevance / the act of presenting an interpretation as if it were a brute fact.
There is a symmetry to the situation, of course, where I am reporting what I believe my intentions are / the interpretation I was operating under while I made the decision, but no introspective access is perfect, and perhaps there are counterfactuals where our models predict different things and it would have gone the way you predict instead of the way I predict. Even so, I think it would be a mistake to not have the stated motivation as a hypothesis in your model to update towards or against as time goes on.
According to me, the relevance is that this action was taken to further that policy goal; I agree it is only weak evidence that we will succeed at that goal or even successfully implement policies that work towards that goal. I view this as a declaration of intent, not success, and specifically the intent that “next time, we will act against people who are highly manipulative and deceitful before they have clear victims” instead of the more achievable but less useful “once there’s consensus you committed crimes, not posting on LW is part of your punishment”.