Please link to the relevant comment, and please don’t post screenshots of extremely highly downvoted comments without showing their karma.
LessWrong’s tentative official policy is that we allow discussion of violence on the site, because I think it is better to create common knowledge that people think violence is a bad idea than to delete any discussion of it. The latter leaves people thinking about it no choice but to make guesses at what other people think about it. You can’t actually have a fully generic “no violence is ever OK” policy, reality is not that convenient, there are clearly some circumstances in which violence is permitted, and people will know that, but rationalize that their situation is one of those circumstances, and not be able to get any clarity on that because all discussion of it is banned.
If someone is thinking about doing something crazy, they should post on LessWrong and hear people’s counter-arguments and disagree-votes.
I did link to it in the original version of my comment and did not have a screenshot attached at all. (Feel free to look up the full edit history of the comment).
I later replaced the comment with an approximate copy of tweet (mostly for consistency and seeing that many of lw users liked it).
Why I did not include an uncropped screenshot in the tweet:
The name of the person would’ve been visible and it would be much harder to not make it dog-whistly and to not make people who want violence easily able to contact the person, and also it had irrelevant parts at the beginning, and I didn’t want to redact it because I was lazy (it’s tricky on iPhone) and didn’t want it to look like I’m protecting the identity of the person. So I simply cropped to the relevant part and said that it’s “heavily downvoted”. Idk what −68 karma on the screenshot would’ve communicated that “heavily downvoted” didn’t.
I did explicitly want to include “heavily downvoted” to reduce the chance of anyone possibly thinking that the LessWrong community agrees with what the comment suggests (since the crop made the karma invisible), and I spent a lot of time replying to people on Twitter who tried to say that the call for violence is downstream of anything LW is. I also pointed out to many people that the text of the comment is not visible by default due to it being heavily downvoted. (Maybe wrote a couple dozen comments in total defending LW?)
I was not aware that this is a policy that you already have and discussed with others; I would not have taken it to Twitter, in this specific form, with the goal that I had.
Idk what −68 karma on the screenshot would’ve communicated that “heavily downvoted” didn’t.
Imagine the opposite: downvoted but agreed would mean “technically true, but do not post such things on LW”, so kinda disagreeing with style but not with the substance, or something like that.
Thus, downvoted and disagreed means “do not post such things on LW and we think it is a bad idea”, i.e. not just that it is e.g. strategically inappropriate to post publicly but we secretly think the same, but we emphasize that we do not think the same.
By the way, notice that heavily downloaded comments are hidden by default, so you have just increased the visibility of the kind of content you believe should not be on LW.
I think most of the issue was with it being posted on Twitter (later removed). The audience outside LW has no clue what the second karma-looking-number is.
I have not linked to the comment, and I think most of the issue was with it was easy to contact the author of the comment until they deactivated their account, not as much with the actual call (as it was for people to organize to do crime, not to do specific actions right now and alone).
Why is LessWrong allowing calls for assassinations?
They’re heavily downvoted, but not removed and the people expressing them are not banned.
Please link to the relevant comment, and please don’t post screenshots of extremely highly downvoted comments without showing their karma.
LessWrong’s tentative official policy is that we allow discussion of violence on the site, because I think it is better to create common knowledge that people think violence is a bad idea than to delete any discussion of it. The latter leaves people thinking about it no choice but to make guesses at what other people think about it. You can’t actually have a fully generic “no violence is ever OK” policy, reality is not that convenient, there are clearly some circumstances in which violence is permitted, and people will know that, but rationalize that their situation is one of those circumstances, and not be able to get any clarity on that because all discussion of it is banned.
If someone is thinking about doing something crazy, they should post on LessWrong and hear people’s counter-arguments and disagree-votes.
I did link to it in the original version of my comment and did not have a screenshot attached at all. (Feel free to look up the full edit history of the comment).
I later replaced the comment with an approximate copy of tweet (mostly for consistency and seeing that many of lw users liked it).
Why I did not include an uncropped screenshot in the tweet:
The name of the person would’ve been visible and it would be much harder to not make it dog-whistly and to not make people who want violence easily able to contact the person, and also it had irrelevant parts at the beginning, and I didn’t want to redact it because I was lazy (it’s tricky on iPhone) and didn’t want it to look like I’m protecting the identity of the person. So I simply cropped to the relevant part and said that it’s “heavily downvoted”. Idk what −68 karma on the screenshot would’ve communicated that “heavily downvoted” didn’t.
I did explicitly want to include “heavily downvoted” to reduce the chance of anyone possibly thinking that the LessWrong community agrees with what the comment suggests (since the crop made the karma invisible), and I spent a lot of time replying to people on Twitter who tried to say that the call for violence is downstream of anything LW is. I also pointed out to many people that the text of the comment is not visible by default due to it being heavily downvoted. (Maybe wrote a couple dozen comments in total defending LW?)
I was not aware that this is a policy that you already have and discussed with others; I would not have taken it to Twitter, in this specific form, with the goal that I had.
Imagine the opposite: downvoted but agreed would mean “technically true, but do not post such things on LW”, so kinda disagreeing with style but not with the substance, or something like that.
Thus, downvoted and disagreed means “do not post such things on LW and we think it is a bad idea”, i.e. not just that it is e.g. strategically inappropriate to post publicly but we secretly think the same, but we emphasize that we do not think the same.
By the way, notice that heavily downloaded comments are hidden by default, so you have just increased the visibility of the kind of content you believe should not be on LW.
I think most of the issue was with it being posted on Twitter (later removed). The audience outside LW has no clue what the second karma-looking-number is.
I have not linked to the comment, and I think most of the issue was with it was easy to contact the author of the comment until they deactivated their account, not as much with the actual call (as it was for people to organize to do crime, not to do specific actions right now and alone).