If that’s what Zack means, then it seems odd that the OP puts so much emphasis on how rules can be an effective way to keep people safer from literal death, brain damage, and the like.
Oh, I didn’t mean that the LW mods are the only examples of this sort of thing. But you did mention that you’d never encountered such people, and my response was to say that yes, you have indeed.
As for Zack’s examples, I think that they illustrate fairly well the general principle that he’s describing. I’ll leave it to him (or others) to answer the criticism beyond that.
Noted. For what it’s worth, I haven’t as yet seen much reason to believe that the LW moderators think they are empowered “to make judgement calls controlling the minute details of everyone’s behaviour”.
If you delete the word “the”, or better yet make things more explicit along the lines of “to make judgement calls about small details of what behaviour is acceptable when posting/commenting on Less Wrong”, then I dare say the moderators consider themselves empowered to do that. But that’s very much not the sort of thing that I understand when I read “make judgement calls controlling the minute details of everyone’s behaviour”, especially not at the end of an article full of examples about regulation of neurotoxic chemicals and road safety.
So perhaps this is yet another case where Zack says something that can with substantial stretching be interpreted as something true, but that (at least as it seems to me; others’ intuitions may differ) is an extremely unnatural way to say what he claims was all he was saying, and that strongly suggests something much worse but that is not actually true. I am beginning to find it rather tiring.
Oh, I didn’t mean that the LW mods are the only examples of this sort of thing. But you did mention that you’d never encountered such people, and my response was to say that yes, you have indeed.
As for Zack’s examples, I think that they illustrate fairly well the general principle that he’s describing. I’ll leave it to him (or others) to answer the criticism beyond that.
Noted. For what it’s worth, I haven’t as yet seen much reason to believe that the LW moderators think they are empowered “to make judgement calls controlling the minute details of everyone’s behaviour”.
If you delete the word “the”, or better yet make things more explicit along the lines of “to make judgement calls about small details of what behaviour is acceptable when posting/commenting on Less Wrong”, then I dare say the moderators consider themselves empowered to do that. But that’s very much not the sort of thing that I understand when I read “make judgement calls controlling the minute details of everyone’s behaviour”, especially not at the end of an article full of examples about regulation of neurotoxic chemicals and road safety.
So perhaps this is yet another case where Zack says something that can with substantial stretching be interpreted as something true, but that (at least as it seems to me; others’ intuitions may differ) is an extremely unnatural way to say what he claims was all he was saying, and that strongly suggests something much worse but that is not actually true. I am beginning to find it rather tiring.