I agree that your points about ambiguity have some merit, but I don’t think there’s much of a risk of free speech being chilled more than was intended, because there will be people who test these limits. Some of their posts will be deleted, some of them will not. And then people can see directly roughly where the intended line goes. The chilling effect of censorship would be a more worrying factor if the punishment for transgressing was harsher: but so far Eliezer has only indicated that at worst, he will have the offending post deleted. That’s mild enough that plenty of people will have the courage to test the limits, as they tested the limits in the basilisk case.
As for self-policing, well, it worked once. But we’ve already had trolls in the past, and the userbase of this site is notoriously contrarian, so you can’t expect it to always work—if we could just rely on self-policing, we wouldn’t need moderators in the first place.
I agree that your points about ambiguity have some merit, but I don’t think there’s much of a risk of free speech being chilled more than was intended, because there will be people who test these limits. Some of their posts will be deleted, some of them will not. And then people can see directly roughly where the intended line goes. The chilling effect of censorship would be a more worrying factor if the punishment for transgressing was harsher: but so far Eliezer has only indicated that at worst, he will have the offending post deleted. That’s mild enough that plenty of people will have the courage to test the limits, as they tested the limits in the basilisk case.
As for self-policing, well, it worked once. But we’ve already had trolls in the past, and the userbase of this site is notoriously contrarian, so you can’t expect it to always work—if we could just rely on self-policing, we wouldn’t need moderators in the first place.