General discussion thread

Do you want to bring up something to me or to the kinds of people who are likely to read this post? Or do you want to just say hi? This is the post to do it.

Why am I doing this?

Well, the EA Forum was my preferred forum for discussion for a long time. But in recent times it has become more censorious. Specifically, it has a moderation policy that I don’t like: moderators have banned people I like, like sapphire or Sabs, who sometimes say interesting things. Recently, they banned someone for making a post they found distasteful during April Fools in the EA forum—whereas I would have made the call that poking fun at sacred cows during April Fools is fair game.

So overall it feels like the EA Forum has become bigger and like it cares less about my values. Specifically, moderators are much more willing than I am to trade off the pursuit of truth in exchange for having fewer rough edges. Shame, though perhaps neccessary to turtle down against actors seeking to harm one.

On the other end of the spectrum, The Motte is more spiky (waaay more spiky, warning if you click that link: irreverence towards any and all sacred cows), but it is also more unfocused and less forecasting-adjacent, and I don’t know the community there.

So I thought I would try hosting a discussion here. Note that registration isn’t needed to post a comment.

What I expect will happen

I don’t really know, that’s why I’m trying this!

One salient possibility is that I will go down the same censorship slope as everyone else, where I start out being very in favour of uncensored speech and then decide that that is not optimal, after all. But I’ll do my best to not censor stuff in this first thread.