I confess I don’t know what you’re trying to say here. I have a few vague hypotheses, but none that stand out as particularly likely based on either the quoted text or the context. (E.g. one of them is “remember that something that looks/is called evil, may not be”; but only a small part of the text deals with that, and even if you’d said it explicitly I wouldn’t know why you’d said it. The rest are all on about that level.)
Vaniver mentioned that Michael Vassar was one of the partial inspirations for a supervillain in one of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s works of fiction. I’m saying that, firstly, I don’t think that’s germane in a discussion of moderation policies that aspires to impartiality, even as a playful “Appropriately enough [...]” parenthetical. But secondly, if such things are somehow considered to be relevant, then I want to note that Michael was also the explicit namesake of a morally-good fictional character (“Vhazhar”) in another one of Yudkowsky’s stories.
The fact that the latter story is also about the importance of judging things on their true merits rather than being misled by shallow pattern-matching (e.g., figuing that a “Lord of Dark” must be evil, or using someone’s association with a fictional character to support the idea that they might be worth banning) made it seem worth quoting at length.
I confess I don’t know what you’re trying to say here. I have a few vague hypotheses, but none that stand out as particularly likely based on either the quoted text or the context. (E.g. one of them is “remember that something that looks/is called evil, may not be”; but only a small part of the text deals with that, and even if you’d said it explicitly I wouldn’t know why you’d said it. The rest are all on about that level.)
Vaniver mentioned that Michael Vassar was one of the partial inspirations for a supervillain in one of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s works of fiction. I’m saying that, firstly, I don’t think that’s germane in a discussion of moderation policies that aspires to impartiality, even as a playful “Appropriately enough [...]” parenthetical. But secondly, if such things are somehow considered to be relevant, then I want to note that Michael was also the explicit namesake of a morally-good fictional character (“Vhazhar”) in another one of Yudkowsky’s stories.
The fact that the latter story is also about the importance of judging things on their true merits rather than being misled by shallow pattern-matching (e.g., figuing that a “Lord of Dark” must be evil, or using someone’s association with a fictional character to support the idea that they might be worth banning) made it seem worth quoting at length.