Our model of rationalists does have to account for them being normal-ish humans who speak the language in common use around them. “Kill” is in common usage for disabling something, temporarily or permanently, without specifying mechanism; e.g. one can kill the lights or the music or wasteful spending or careless use of lanuguage on internet forums. Granted, it’d be quite prudent to avoid such use in Biology contexts. Given this is a rationality forum, what do you think is reasonable likelyhood for misunderstanding caused by sloppy use of language vs major oversights in subject matter research like you’re suggesting above? I’d be very surprised if it was less than 10:1. How much does that differ from your estimate elsewhere?
[Genuinely interested in peoples’ thought process during an exchange like above from a “how do we manage to talk past eachother even in a good faith rational discourse?” angle]
[Not the origional poster, but I’ll give it a shot]
This argument seems to hinge mostly on if the majority of those expected to read this content end up being Less Wrong regulars or not—with the understanding that going viral e.g. reddit hug of death would drastically shift that distribution.
Even accepting everything in the post as true on it’s face it’s unlikely such info would take the CDC out of the top 5 sources of info on this for the average American, but it’s understandable people would come away with a different conclusion if lead here by some sensationalist clickbait headline and primed to do so. That entire line of argument is increadably speculative, but nessisarily so if viral inbound links up your readership two orders of magnitude. Harm and total readership would be very sensitive to the framing and virality of the referer. It’s maybe relevant to ask if content on this forum has gone viral previously and if so, to what degree it was helpful/harmful.
I’m not really decided one way or the other, but that private/member only post option sounds like a really good idea. It sounds like there’s some substance to this disagreement, but it also has a pascal’s mugging character to it that makes me very reluctant to endorse the “info hazard” claim. Harm reductions seems like a reasonable middle ground.