This post does not represent the best arguments that different sides might produce, and I don't claim to pass anyone's ITT here; I write this to start a discussion I think is important for LW to have.
America’s First Amendment protections often give people in the US a right to call for violence, except specific calls likely to produce imminent action. Social media platforms converged on banning specific calls for violence. The community around LessWrong values honesty and open conversation; it also represents a community of people focused on AI existential threat, and what’s going on here reflects on the perception of the broader AI x-risk community and on the Overton window of actions available to the sympathizers.
At the moment, LessWrong’s policy is to allow calls for violence, including specific[1].
The head of LessWrong moderation Oliver Habryka says that allowing discussion of violence leads to better common knowledge that people think violence is a bad idea, than instead deleting any discussion of it. (Disclosure on potential conflict of interests: Oliver and I had conflicts, including my Twitter post about the topic of this post resulting in Oliver banning me from everything he can, except LW.)He also said there are clearly some circumstances in which violence is permitted, and people will know that, and if discussion of violence isn’t permitted, people will rationalize that their situation is one of those circumstances.
I think it's a false dichotomy to either allow all discussion of violence, including specific calls for killing specific people in a coordinated manner, or to not ever permit any discussion even of the kinds of situations where violence can be justified, at any degree of specificity.
These two extremes are not the only options. Many platforms strike some balance and have some rules. Discussion of whether you’re allowed to hit someone who is attacking you with a gun is usually allowed. Conspiracy to assassinate the president is usually not permitted. For some corner cases, moderators use their judgment.
LessWrong is more libertarian than many platforms; however, even X, Telegram, and Substack, all with quite libertarian free speech absolutist branding, don’t permit calls for violence. I expect LessWrong to want to have rules that permit policy discussions of when it’s okay for people to resort to violence that Substack and X allow (e.g., a post about when people must violently revolt to sustain democratic institutions); but I expect that on reflection, LessWrong would not want to permit specific calls for violence, or discussion of whether violence is okay when a reader can find a way to contact a participant of the discussion and collaborate with them on committing violence. The cost of some guy regularly talking about violence on LW, and then going out and doing something, is pretty bad.
The following are the arguments I thought of and potential remedies for the downside risks. (They might not represent anyone's opinion.)
Potential reasons and ways of allowing more discussion of violence on LW
Here's why LW might allow more than zero discussion of violence, how it might do it to avoid some of the downside, and why I think some of those don't work or can be improved:
Dissuading people
Some of the people who think violence can be helpful could be persuaded otherwise.
If you can post that you think it’s a good idea to kill someone because that can prevent the doom, then someone can reply that it won’t prevent doom for specific reasons, that normally when we think violating deontology is good for some well thought through reasons, our brains are lying to us, etc.
I can see how talking about specifics can allow others to come up with very specific negative consequences of violence that might be more persuasive for many people than general or higher-level arguments. But I don’t think allowing specific calls for violence is really necessary for that; plausibly, it’s sufficient to let people have discussions of specific hypotheticals (“why would it be bad if someone…”) without permitting calls like “let’s kill that and that person”, or perhaps even let people only have policy-level/high-level discussions.
I don't think it's easy to convince the guy who made this comment to halt; he is psychopathic, self-describes as "have always been violent", and found a justification for attempting violence in AI x-risk. But perhaps some people can be marginally convinced not to go through with violent and ill-advised plans.
Common knowledge about strong unacceptability of violence
If everyone knows that one side of a discussion is banned, it might be unclear to people if there’s a real consensus that violence is bad, or only apparent consensus because one of the sides cannot say anything.
I think there’s some merit to this: it’s good to be able to transparently show that the community actually thinks that violence is bad, and isn’t just saying it because of constraints placed by the community organizers and their beliefs (or potentially the beliefs they pretend to have).
However, the absence of pro-violence content isn't strong evidence of community consensus, because the legal and reputational costs of supporting violence in public would produce that absence regardless of underlying views. People might not quite be able to publicly support violence due to it being illegal, or upvote calls for violence out of fear that the upvotes would be reported, or want to post in supprot of violence because someone might support violence while not wanting the community to be known for supporting violence for PR reasons, and so, even on a supposedly unregulated and uncensored platform, one would expect to see all of the senior community members not expressing support for violence, regardless of whether the community and its senior members universally oppose violence or not.
There's also the automod mechanism: depending on your karma and the karma of your recent contributions to the website, you might be rate-limited and unable to write more posts or comments than some number per hour/day/week. That and the common knowledge of the unpopularity of violence on LessWrong mean a reader can't distinguish a world where almost no one supports violence from a world where a non-trivial minority does, but is silent, rate-limited, and outvoted.
So it would not be quite fully believable, to someone considering committing violence, that the community strongly opposes violence, even if LW is supposed to not censor support for violence; self-censorship would still happen and prevent common knowledge of the strong unacceptability of violence.
(Tangentially, it might be good to think of mechanisms to show that the community in fact strongly opposes violence despite these issues. E.g., strongly anonymous surveys for users above some karma threshold? Displaying the number of or karma from upvotes or downvotes on hover instead of just the absolute number of votes?)
Using LW as a honeypot and reporting people who want to commit violence to the FBI
If a part of why calls for violence are allowed on LW is that they will be reported to the law enforcement, hopefully preventing successful realization of the violence in question, Habryka’s comment that contains “If someone is thinking about doing something crazy, they should post on LessWrong and hear people’s counter-arguments and disagree-votes” doesn’t quite pass the onion test.
I would, however, agree with the policy: it is good to report people who might conspire to kill others to police. (A friend reported the guy who wrote the comment above to the FBI.) I don’t even find it to be bad to mislead such people (as long as you’re meta-honest about it); if someone wants to commit a violent crime, it’s better to stop them if such possibility arises (e.g., if they're not staying anonymous), even when this means reporting their public comments on your own website that you previously welcomed them to. When dealing with such people, it’s fine to wear a hat of a website moderator, and then separately a hat of someone who looks at the website, sees a call for violence, and reports it.
This could, in principle, make it harder for the stupidest of criminals to succeed at their misguided objectives; e.g., the guy reported to the FBI posted under (what appears to be) his real name.
Still, many people would be able to share their contacts while staying anonymous. This would mean that we’re getting all of the downsides of people being able to get in touch with each other and coordinate and present various threats without the upside of being able to report and stop them via being the platform where this happens.
So for most relevant potential criminals, honeypotting would not work.
Also, not being able to honestly tell people they won’t be proactively reported means that people will be careful in what they’re saying, somewhat defeating the purpose of allowing discussions of specifics to allow others to convince the person otherwise, except in not-so-smart people who are less likely to succeed.
Perhaps, a much better effort is to spin up a bunch of honeypots unrelated to LW, ideally in coordination with law enforcement, so that people looking for committing violence due to AI would be able to find a community and be arrested before they actually commit a crime.
(The potential of using AI for honeypotting criminals is quite large. Would be cool if anyone who wants to buy an illegal firearm finds a legit-looking but an AI-run honeypot and cannot actually obtain the means for committing crimes. Someone could run a network of darknet websites reviewing each other etc. with none of the services sold by any of them being real, and with everything being reported.)
Claude comments: “If LW says publicly “we report violence posts to law enforcement,” the honeypot is broken (no one posts). If LW says publicly “we don’t,” it has explicitly accepted a coordination venue. Habryka’s “post here and hear counter-arguments” framing implicitly commits to the latter. Either he should commit to the former (and then drop the “deradicalization through discussion” framing, since people won’t post), or accept that the policy actively facilitates coordination.”
Additionally, if people still post on LW calls for violence and then violence is committed downstream of that, "we've been honeypotting people and reporting them" would be a pretty weak defence (and validly so).
Allowing discussion of planned crimes, while being transparent that it might be sent to law enforcement agencies
It might make sense to be a platform transparent that it'll inform law enforcement agencies of plans of this type, because some people will still want to loudly telegraph their intent to commit stupid violent crimes, and even people aren't dissuaded by other commenters, law enforcement might prevent some of those crimes because of the discussion.
Requiring anonymity; disallowing contact information for posts about violence
An opposite approach is to require that if you want to post about violence, you need to sign up for a special kind of account, and have your posts and comments and edits to them pre-moderated, making sure that you do not leave contact information anywhere.
In case LW wants to have additional rules (e.g., only policy discussions are allowed: is it okay to do such and such thing in such and such situation, to allow others to change your mind; no specific plans or specific calls for violence are allowed), those can also be enforced.
This reduces the problem of the website facilitating coordination between potential criminals.
If not allowed on LW, criminals go dark
If LW bans discussion of violence, people might find other platforms to talk, where they might reinforce each other’s radicalization, not experience the pushback from the majority of the community, and be less visible to law enforcement.
(It's not clear how many such people there are and how easy it would be for them to find each other in the absence of LW.)
Some reasons against allowing various kinds of discussion of violence
I once read that I should not write an argument that the reader can straightforwardly generate, so I'm not expanding on some of the following. If anything here is unclear, let me know, and I’ll expand.
Dissuading people might work less because of LessWrong's AutoMod
Even if you grant the rest of LW policies' premises, persuasion normally requires sustained back-and-forth and doesn’t just work via replies to the first post that doesn’t go into the details of the reasons for beliefs and crises that can be argued with. But due to LessWrong’s automod, people who try to argue for unpopular opinions are not able to post more details of their arguments. This means that while people would be able to post in support of violence once, they won’t be able to go into a detailed/prolonged discussion. This somewhat defeats the justification.
(I think disabling automod for average discussions of violence is ill-advised. I can imagine a solution of separate threads that are not shown to anyone by default/are almost shadowbanned except it’s an explicit mechanism, where automod is off to allow people to continuously have downvoted discussions with anyone who wants to participate.)
Reference classes
I gave Claude a draft of this post and asked it to research reference classes. I think its analysis is fairly sycophantic and/or trying to write for the bottom line of woke values me and Claude share, so perhaps ask your Grok instead. Claude says that “the direction of the evidence is one-sided against the LW policy on specific calls for violence, but not against the broader category of philosophical discussion of when violence might be justified.”
Some points it mentioned:
Counter-narrative systematic reviews show effects on attitudes, not on violence — and sometimes backfire on the highest-risk subset
Where attacks are prevented, prevention is achieved by law-enforcement action triggered by leakage, not by community counter-argument changing the attacker’s mind. The documented deradicalization successes (Life After Hate, EXIT-Germany, ISD’s “Counter Conversations”) are uniformly private, peer-mentored, long-term interventions by trained formers — not public forum debate.
(It talked about the forum-to-attack pipeline, but that’s ridiculously irrelevant, given that all of the examples it gave are forums where a majority would I think be pretty much in support of violence.)
A simple test could be “Could a sympathetic reader use this post as a starting point for action?”.
I think discussions of when it is okay to commit violence are fine (e.g.,a discussion of “if someone is breaking into your house, is it okay to stop them with force” will not cause a reader to find someone and kill them).
I think most of why allowing discussions of violence could be good still works even if discussions that don’t pass this test are not allowed.
Would be good to avoid causing actual violence.
Garden
(Some of the core LW users might dislike the website a bit more due to the presence of calls for violence, and lead to the well-kept gardens die by pacifism dynamic.)
Overton window
(Shifts to the Overton window of permissible actions due to the discussions being allowed and taken seriously, even if most people disagree with one of the sides.)
Facilitating coordination
Some of the potential targets of threat actors have reasonably good security, and it might be hard for lone actors to cause harm. LessWrong is a Schelling point for AI x-risk discussions. It’s plausible that LessWrong allowing such discussions would marginally cause more threat actors to find each other and coordinate, with all of the potential terrible consequences.
Strong norms of non-violence without exceptions
Movements with strong norms of non-violence are more successful, including because people are a lot more sympathetic towards these kinds of movements.
PR against well-resourced opponents who want to see violence that can be attributed to/as originating from our community
The marginal cost of allowing discussions of violence is some chance of one successful attack that (a) kills someone and (b) tags the entire AI x-risk community as the source of stochastic terrorism in many future articles about AI policy. The coverage of the guy who threw Molotov at an Altman's house already mentions PauseAI; AI x-risk is mentioned in basically every story. If someone regularly talks about violence on LW and then goes out and does something, this would be terrible PR-wise in a way that’s hard to overstate.
Research shows that if moderate organizations don’t distance themselves from radical flanks, they bear reputational cost; radical-flank existence correlates with decreased mobilization and higher state repression, especially when it involves violence. (Chamberlain 2025, Ellefsen 2018, ask your LLM for animal-rights and other cases.)
Influencing the norms of nearby communities
It is vital for movements to be strictly non-violent. It might be harder for PauseAI and others to have members adhere to that if there’s a non-marginalized platform open to them for discussions of violence, including specifics and not just intellectual inquiry.
Laws, European anti-terrorism laws
According to Claude, the UK Online Safety Act makes “inciting violence” a “priority illegal content” category that in-scope platforms must proactively identify, remove, and design against; “Senior executives can face criminal liability if they are found responsible for breaches of the regulation”. The EU Digital Services Act has parallel provisions.
These are not, in my opinion, unjust laws. As a civilization, we would prefer a world in which no community considers committing violence that’s broadly conceived of as illegal. If a community thinks of it as an exception, it is normally wrong; and we would prefer to live in a world with a strong coordinated-on norm of not facilitating coordination of those who might commit violence, even when they think it’s a good idea to.
Conclusion
My — not necessarily unbiased[2] — opinion is that the reasonable default should be to not allow specific calls for violent actions.
I sketched some ideas for potential marginal improvements (mostly in parentheses): allowing policy discussion but not specific calls, requiring anonymity to make it harder for people to get in contact with each other, pre-moderating comments marked as calls for violence to exclude ones with contact information, creating separate threads for dissuading people where you don't run into automod even with negative karma, possibly displaying the numbers of or karma from upvotes and downvotes, or running anonymous surveys.
Ideally, LW's policies do not facilitate violence while preventing criminals from going dark and losing visibility to law enforcement.
There's going to be an increasing number of misguided people willing to do crime, and LessWrong is a place they will easily find. It might be good for the community and the team running the website to think through what the good policies here would be.
Depending on your karma and the karma of your recent contributions to the website, you might be rate-limited and unable to write more posts/comments than some small number per hour/day/week.
I think this particular policy's first order impact rounds down to zero but I support libertarian moderation because I would prefer the site be less not more influenced by European speech laws and people who consider them just.
This post does not represent the best arguments that different sides might produce, and I don't claim to pass anyone's ITT here; I write this to start a discussion I think is important for LW to have.
America’s First Amendment protections often give people in the US a right to call for violence, except specific calls likely to produce imminent action. Social media platforms converged on banning specific calls for violence. The community around LessWrong values honesty and open conversation; it also represents a community of people focused on AI existential threat, and what’s going on here reflects on the perception of the broader AI x-risk community and on the Overton window of actions available to the sympathizers.
At the moment, LessWrong’s policy is to allow calls for violence, including specific[1].
The head of LessWrong moderation Oliver Habryka says that allowing discussion of violence leads to better common knowledge that people think violence is a bad idea, than instead deleting any discussion of it. (Disclosure on potential conflict of interests: Oliver and I had conflicts, including my Twitter post about the topic of this post resulting in Oliver banning me from everything he can, except LW.) He also said there are clearly some circumstances in which violence is permitted, and people will know that, and if discussion of violence isn’t permitted, people will rationalize that their situation is one of those circumstances.
I think it's a false dichotomy to either allow all discussion of violence, including specific calls for killing specific people in a coordinated manner, or to not ever permit any discussion even of the kinds of situations where violence can be justified, at any degree of specificity.
These two extremes are not the only options. Many platforms strike some balance and have some rules. Discussion of whether you’re allowed to hit someone who is attacking you with a gun is usually allowed. Conspiracy to assassinate the president is usually not permitted. For some corner cases, moderators use their judgment.
LessWrong is more libertarian than many platforms; however, even X, Telegram, and Substack, all with quite libertarian free speech absolutist branding, don’t permit calls for violence. I expect LessWrong to want to have rules that permit policy discussions of when it’s okay for people to resort to violence that Substack and X allow (e.g., a post about when people must violently revolt to sustain democratic institutions); but I expect that on reflection, LessWrong would not want to permit specific calls for violence, or discussion of whether violence is okay when a reader can find a way to contact a participant of the discussion and collaborate with them on committing violence. The cost of some guy regularly talking about violence on LW, and then going out and doing something, is pretty bad.
The following are the arguments I thought of and potential remedies for the downside risks. (They might not represent anyone's opinion.)
Potential reasons and ways of allowing more discussion of violence on LW
Here's why LW might allow more than zero discussion of violence, how it might do it to avoid some of the downside, and why I think some of those don't work or can be improved:
Dissuading people
Some of the people who think violence can be helpful could be persuaded otherwise.
If you can post that you think it’s a good idea to kill someone because that can prevent the doom, then someone can reply that it won’t prevent doom for specific reasons, that normally when we think violating deontology is good for some well thought through reasons, our brains are lying to us, etc.
I can see how talking about specifics can allow others to come up with very specific negative consequences of violence that might be more persuasive for many people than general or higher-level arguments. But I don’t think allowing specific calls for violence is really necessary for that; plausibly, it’s sufficient to let people have discussions of specific hypotheticals (“why would it be bad if someone…”) without permitting calls like “let’s kill that and that person”, or perhaps even let people only have policy-level/high-level discussions.
I don't think it's easy to convince the guy who made this comment to halt; he is psychopathic, self-describes as "have always been violent", and found a justification for attempting violence in AI x-risk. But perhaps some people can be marginally convinced not to go through with violent and ill-advised plans.
Common knowledge about strong unacceptability of violence
If everyone knows that one side of a discussion is banned, it might be unclear to people if there’s a real consensus that violence is bad, or only apparent consensus because one of the sides cannot say anything.
I think there’s some merit to this: it’s good to be able to transparently show that the community actually thinks that violence is bad, and isn’t just saying it because of constraints placed by the community organizers and their beliefs (or potentially the beliefs they pretend to have).
However, the absence of pro-violence content isn't strong evidence of community consensus, because the legal and reputational costs of supporting violence in public would produce that absence regardless of underlying views. People might not quite be able to publicly support violence due to it being illegal, or upvote calls for violence out of fear that the upvotes would be reported, or want to post in supprot of violence because someone might support violence while not wanting the community to be known for supporting violence for PR reasons, and so, even on a supposedly unregulated and uncensored platform, one would expect to see all of the senior community members not expressing support for violence, regardless of whether the community and its senior members universally oppose violence or not.
There's also the automod mechanism: depending on your karma and the karma of your recent contributions to the website, you might be rate-limited and unable to write more posts or comments than some number per hour/day/week. That and the common knowledge of the unpopularity of violence on LessWrong mean a reader can't distinguish a world where almost no one supports violence from a world where a non-trivial minority does, but is silent, rate-limited, and outvoted.
So it would not be quite fully believable, to someone considering committing violence, that the community strongly opposes violence, even if LW is supposed to not censor support for violence; self-censorship would still happen and prevent common knowledge of the strong unacceptability of violence.
(Tangentially, it might be good to think of mechanisms to show that the community in fact strongly opposes violence despite these issues. E.g., strongly anonymous surveys for users above some karma threshold? Displaying the number of or karma from upvotes or downvotes on hover instead of just the absolute number of votes?)
Using LW as a honeypot and reporting people who want to commit violence to the FBI
If a part of why calls for violence are allowed on LW is that they will be reported to the law enforcement, hopefully preventing successful realization of the violence in question, Habryka’s comment that contains “If someone is thinking about doing something crazy, they should post on LessWrong and hear people’s counter-arguments and disagree-votes” doesn’t quite pass the onion test.
I would, however, agree with the policy: it is good to report people who might conspire to kill others to police. (A friend reported the guy who wrote the comment above to the FBI.) I don’t even find it to be bad to mislead such people (as long as you’re meta-honest about it); if someone wants to commit a violent crime, it’s better to stop them if such possibility arises (e.g., if they're not staying anonymous), even when this means reporting their public comments on your own website that you previously welcomed them to. When dealing with such people, it’s fine to wear a hat of a website moderator, and then separately a hat of someone who looks at the website, sees a call for violence, and reports it.
This could, in principle, make it harder for the stupidest of criminals to succeed at their misguided objectives; e.g., the guy reported to the FBI posted under (what appears to be) his real name.
Still, many people would be able to share their contacts while staying anonymous. This would mean that we’re getting all of the downsides of people being able to get in touch with each other and coordinate and present various threats without the upside of being able to report and stop them via being the platform where this happens.
So for most relevant potential criminals, honeypotting would not work.
Also, not being able to honestly tell people they won’t be proactively reported means that people will be careful in what they’re saying, somewhat defeating the purpose of allowing discussions of specifics to allow others to convince the person otherwise, except in not-so-smart people who are less likely to succeed.
Perhaps, a much better effort is to spin up a bunch of honeypots unrelated to LW, ideally in coordination with law enforcement, so that people looking for committing violence due to AI would be able to find a community and be arrested before they actually commit a crime.
(The potential of using AI for honeypotting criminals is quite large. Would be cool if anyone who wants to buy an illegal firearm finds a legit-looking but an AI-run honeypot and cannot actually obtain the means for committing crimes. Someone could run a network of darknet websites reviewing each other etc. with none of the services sold by any of them being real, and with everything being reported.)
Claude comments: “If LW says publicly “we report violence posts to law enforcement,” the honeypot is broken (no one posts). If LW says publicly “we don’t,” it has explicitly accepted a coordination venue. Habryka’s “post here and hear counter-arguments” framing implicitly commits to the latter. Either he should commit to the former (and then drop the “deradicalization through discussion” framing, since people won’t post), or accept that the policy actively facilitates coordination.”
Additionally, if people still post on LW calls for violence and then violence is committed downstream of that, "we've been honeypotting people and reporting them" would be a pretty weak defence (and validly so).
Allowing discussion of planned crimes, while being transparent that it might be sent to law enforcement agencies
It might make sense to be a platform transparent that it'll inform law enforcement agencies of plans of this type, because some people will still want to loudly telegraph their intent to commit stupid violent crimes, and even people aren't dissuaded by other commenters, law enforcement might prevent some of those crimes because of the discussion.
Requiring anonymity; disallowing contact information for posts about violence
An opposite approach is to require that if you want to post about violence, you need to sign up for a special kind of account, and have your posts and comments and edits to them pre-moderated, making sure that you do not leave contact information anywhere.
In case LW wants to have additional rules (e.g., only policy discussions are allowed: is it okay to do such and such thing in such and such situation, to allow others to change your mind; no specific plans or specific calls for violence are allowed), those can also be enforced.
This reduces the problem of the website facilitating coordination between potential criminals.
If not allowed on LW, criminals go dark
If LW bans discussion of violence, people might find other platforms to talk, where they might reinforce each other’s radicalization, not experience the pushback from the majority of the community, and be less visible to law enforcement.
(It's not clear how many such people there are and how easy it would be for them to find each other in the absence of LW.)
Some reasons against allowing various kinds of discussion of violence
I once read that I should not write an argument that the reader can straightforwardly generate, so I'm not expanding on some of the following. If anything here is unclear, let me know, and I’ll expand.
Dissuading people might work less because of LessWrong's AutoMod
Even if you grant the rest of LW policies' premises, persuasion normally requires sustained back-and-forth and doesn’t just work via replies to the first post that doesn’t go into the details of the reasons for beliefs and crises that can be argued with. But due to LessWrong’s automod, people who try to argue for unpopular opinions are not able to post more details of their arguments. This means that while people would be able to post in support of violence once, they won’t be able to go into a detailed/prolonged discussion. This somewhat defeats the justification.
(I think disabling automod for average discussions of violence is ill-advised. I can imagine a solution of separate threads that are not shown to anyone by default/are almost shadowbanned except it’s an explicit mechanism, where automod is off to allow people to continuously have downvoted discussions with anyone who wants to participate.)
Reference classes
I gave Claude a draft of this post and asked it to research reference classes. I think its analysis is fairly sycophantic and/or trying to write for the bottom line of woke values me and Claude share, so perhaps ask your Grok instead. Claude says that “the direction of the evidence is one-sided against the LW policy on specific calls for violence, but not against the broader category of philosophical discussion of when violence might be justified.”
Some points it mentioned:
See all of it: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/4684e5c5-a3db-4523-8e63-e178cafc06ae.
Post with calls that might cause actual violence
A simple test could be “Could a sympathetic reader use this post as a starting point for action?”.
I think discussions of when it is okay to commit violence are fine (e.g.,a discussion of “if someone is breaking into your house, is it okay to stop them with force” will not cause a reader to find someone and kill them).
I think most of why allowing discussions of violence could be good still works even if discussions that don’t pass this test are not allowed.
Would be good to avoid causing actual violence.
Garden
(Some of the core LW users might dislike the website a bit more due to the presence of calls for violence, and lead to the well-kept gardens die by pacifism dynamic.)
Overton window
(Shifts to the Overton window of permissible actions due to the discussions being allowed and taken seriously, even if most people disagree with one of the sides.)
Facilitating coordination
Some of the potential targets of threat actors have reasonably good security, and it might be hard for lone actors to cause harm. LessWrong is a Schelling point for AI x-risk discussions. It’s plausible that LessWrong allowing such discussions would marginally cause more threat actors to find each other and coordinate, with all of the potential terrible consequences.
Strong norms of non-violence without exceptions
Movements with strong norms of non-violence are more successful, including because people are a lot more sympathetic towards these kinds of movements.
PR against well-resourced opponents who want to see violence that can be attributed to/as originating from our community
The marginal cost of allowing discussions of violence is some chance of one successful attack that (a) kills someone and (b) tags the entire AI x-risk community as the source of stochastic terrorism in many future articles about AI policy. The coverage of the guy who threw Molotov at an Altman's house already mentions PauseAI; AI x-risk is mentioned in basically every story. If someone regularly talks about violence on LW and then goes out and does something, this would be terrible PR-wise in a way that’s hard to overstate.
Research shows that if moderate organizations don’t distance themselves from radical flanks, they bear reputational cost; radical-flank existence correlates with decreased mobilization and higher state repression, especially when it involves violence. (Chamberlain 2025, Ellefsen 2018, ask your LLM for animal-rights and other cases.)
Influencing the norms of nearby communities
It is vital for movements to be strictly non-violent. It might be harder for PauseAI and others to have members adhere to that if there’s a non-marginalized platform open to them for discussions of violence, including specifics and not just intellectual inquiry.
Laws, European anti-terrorism laws
According to Claude, the UK Online Safety Act makes “inciting violence” a “priority illegal content” category that in-scope platforms must proactively identify, remove, and design against; “Senior executives can face criminal liability if they are found responsible for breaches of the regulation”. The EU Digital Services Act has parallel provisions.
These are not, in my opinion, unjust laws. As a civilization, we would prefer a world in which no community considers committing violence that’s broadly conceived of as illegal. If a community thinks of it as an exception, it is normally wrong; and we would prefer to live in a world with a strong coordinated-on norm of not facilitating coordination of those who might commit violence, even when they think it’s a good idea to.
Conclusion
My — not necessarily unbiased[2] — opinion is that the reasonable default should be to not allow specific calls for violent actions.
I sketched some ideas for potential marginal improvements (mostly in parentheses): allowing policy discussion but not specific calls, requiring anonymity to make it harder for people to get in contact with each other, pre-moderating comments marked as calls for violence to exclude ones with contact information, creating separate threads for dissuading people where you don't run into automod even with negative karma, possibly displaying the numbers of or karma from upvotes and downvotes, or running anonymous surveys.
Ideally, LW's policies do not facilitate violence while preventing criminals from going dark and losing visibility to law enforcement.
There's going to be an increasing number of misguided people willing to do crime, and LessWrong is a place they will easily find. It might be good for the community and the team running the website to think through what the good policies here would be.
(I agree with @jimrandomh here.)
Growing up, I was pretty convinced by Gene Sharp's ideas in a context that doesn't necessarily apply here.
Depending on your karma and the karma of your recent contributions to the website, you might be rate-limited and unable to write more posts/comments than some small number per hour/day/week.