Comments
More from the author
Curated and popular this week
Disclaimer: This blog post focuses on a new piece of research from Rethink Priorities. I was not involved with the funding or execution of this research, and therefore write this piece merely as a consumer. However, I am the Executive Director of Giving Green and a board member of Rethink Priorities, and acknowledge that these affiliations may bias my...
90
Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'.
As examples, he gives:
* Hammurabi's creation of a code of laws (in 1754 BCE) and his justification of his rule not in terms of divine or hereditary right, but by the delivery of justice to his citizens.
* St Gregory of Nyssa's...
Recent opportunities to take action
We've banned the user denyeverywhere for a month for promoting violence on the forum.
As a reminder, bans affect the user, not the account(s).
If anyone has questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out, and if you think we made a mistake here, you can appeal the decision
I don't have any strong views on whether this user should have been given a temporary ban vs a warning, but (unless the ban was for a comment which is now deleted or a private message, which are each possible, and feel free to correct me if so), from reading their public comments, I think it's inaccurate (or at least misleading) to describing them as "promoting violence". Specifically, they do not seem to have been advocating that anyone actually use violence, which is what I think the most natural interpretation of "promoting violence" would be. Instead, they appear to have been expressing that they'd emotionally desire that people who hypothetically would do the thing in question would face violence, that (in the hypothetical example) they'd feel the urge to use violence, and so on.
I'm not defending their behavior, but it does feel importantly less bad than what I initially assumed from the moderator comment, and I think it's important to use precise language when making these sorts of public accusations.