This moderation policy seems absurd. The post in question was clearly asking purely hypothetical questions, and wasn’t even advocating for any particular answer to the question. May as well ban users for asking whether it’s moral to push a man off a bridge to stop a trolley, or ban Peter Singer for his thought experiments about infanticide.
Perhaps dstudiocode has misbehaved in other ways, but this announcement focuses on something that should be clearly within the bounds of acceptable discourse. (In particular, the standard of “content that could be interpreted as X” is a very censorious one, since you now need to cater to a wide range of possible interpretations.)
Ah, thanks, that’s important context—I semi-retract my strongly worded comment above, depending on exactly how bad the removed post was, but can imagine posts in this genre that I think are genuinely bad
I don’t like my mod message, and I apologize for it. I was rushed and used some templated language that I knew damn well at the time that I wasn’t excited about putting my name behind. I nevertheless did and bear the responsibility.
That’s all from me for now. The mods who weren’t involved in the original decision will come in and reconsider the ban, pursuant to the appeal.
In the post that prompted the ban, they asked whether murdering meat-eaters could be considered ethical. I don’t want to comment on whether this would be an appropriate topic for a late night philosophy club conversation, it is not an appropriate topic for the EA Forum.
I think speculating about what exactly constitutes the most good is perfectly on-topic. While ‘murdering meat-eaters’ is perhaps an overly direct phrasing (and of course under most ethical frameworks murder raises additional issues as compared to mere inaction or deprioritization), the question of whether the negative utility produced by one marginal person’s worth of factory farming outweighs the positive utility that person experiences—colloquially referred to as the meat-eater problem—is one that hasbeendiscussedherea numberoftimes, and that I feel is quite relevant to the question of which interventions should be prioritized.
This moderation policy seems absurd. The post in question was clearly asking purely hypothetical questions, and wasn’t even advocating for any particular answer to the question. May as well ban users for asking whether it’s moral to push a man off a bridge to stop a trolley, or ban Peter Singer for his thought experiments about infanticide.
Perhaps dstudiocode has misbehaved in other ways, but this announcement focuses on something that should be clearly within the bounds of acceptable discourse. (In particular, the standard of “content that could be interpreted as X” is a very censorious one, since you now need to cater to a wide range of possible interpretations.)
That is not the post in question. We removed the post that prompted the ban.
Ah, thanks, that’s important context—I semi-retract my strongly worded comment above, depending on exactly how bad the removed post was, but can imagine posts in this genre that I think are genuinely bad
Another comment from me:
I don’t like my mod message, and I apologize for it. I was rushed and used some templated language that I knew damn well at the time that I wasn’t excited about putting my name behind. I nevertheless did and bear the responsibility.
That’s all from me for now. The mods who weren’t involved in the original decision will come in and reconsider the ban, pursuant to the appeal.
In the post that prompted the ban, they asked whether murdering meat-eaters could be considered ethical. I don’t want to comment on whether this would be an appropriate topic for a late night philosophy club conversation, it is not an appropriate topic for the EA Forum.
I think speculating about what exactly constitutes the most good is perfectly on-topic. While ‘murdering meat-eaters’ is perhaps an overly direct phrasing (and of course under most ethical frameworks murder raises additional issues as compared to mere inaction or deprioritization), the question of whether the negative utility produced by one marginal person’s worth of factory farming outweighs the positive utility that person experiences—colloquially referred to as the meat-eater problem—is one that has been discussed here a number of times, and that I feel is quite relevant to the question of which interventions should be prioritized.