What I find hard to understand is why the mod team seems to think it’s good for them to try to shape culture by means other than clear and explicit rules that could be neutrally enforced.
No judicial system in the world has ever arrived at the ability to have “neutrally enforced rules”, at least the way I interpret you to mean this. Case law is the standard in almost every legal tradition, and the US legal system relies heavily on things like “jury of your peers” type stuff to make judgements.
Intent frequently matters in legal decision. Cognitive state of mind matters for legal decisions. Judges go through years of training and are part of a long lineage of people who have built up various heuristics and principles about how to judge cases. Individual courts have their own culture and track record.
And that is for the US legal system, which is absolutely not capable of operating remotely to the kind of standard that allows people to curate social spaces or deal with tricky kinds of social rulings. No company could make cultural or hiring or business decisions based on the standard of the US legal system. Neither could any internet forum.
There is absolutely no chance we will ever be able to encodify LessWrong rules of conduct into a set of specific rules that can be neutrally judged by a third party. Zero chance. Give up. If that is something you need here, leave now. Feel free to try to build it for yourself.
No judicial system in the world has ever arrived at the ability to have “neutrally enforced rules”, at least the way I interpret you to mean this. Case law is the standard in almost every legal tradition, and the US legal system relies heavily on things like “jury of your peers” type stuff to make judgements.
Intent frequently matters in legal decision. Cognitive state of mind matters for legal decisions. Judges go through years of training and are part of a long lineage of people who have built up various heuristics and principles about how to judge cases. Individual courts have their own culture and track record.
And that is for the US legal system, which is absolutely not capable of operating remotely to the kind of standard that allows people to curate social spaces or deal with tricky kinds of social rulings. No company could make cultural or hiring or business decisions based on the standard of the US legal system. Neither could any internet forum.
There is absolutely no chance we will ever be able to encodify LessWrong rules of conduct into a set of specific rules that can be neutrally judged by a third party. Zero chance. Give up. If that is something you need here, leave now. Feel free to try to build it for yourself.