However, even if the poster had used only information from LinkedIn profiles and not their own knowledge, this would still constitute a reveal of private information because “private information” is context-dependent.
If you list your organizational affiliation on LinkedIn (and if you are indeed correct that Paradigm Academy was not trying to be a cover for Leverage Research that shielded it from public scrutiny), then I don’t think you get to complain when someone quickly googles you and finds your LinkedIn profile.
Like, if Scott Alexander had listed his real name on his about page, or on LinkedIn, connected to his pseudonym, then yeah, I would have also had very little sympathy for the objections to the New York Times. There clearly are degrees of what kind of connections you can make here, and searching an organization on LinkedIn really does not cross any obvious line here.
Maybe you are objecting to drawing a connection between Leverage Research and Paradigm Academy, but you are also saying that nobody was saying that Paradigm Academy was intentionally trying to not appear to be part of what was broadly known as “Leverage”, so I don’t understand how you can make both of these arguments at the same time.
If you list your organizational affiliation on LinkedIn (and if you are indeed correct that Paradigm Academy was not trying to be a cover for Leverage Research that shielded it from public scrutiny), then I don’t think you get to complain when someone quickly googles you and finds your LinkedIn profile.
First, as I noted in my response to Ben, some of the information included in the doxing was from the poster’s personal knowledge and not from the people’s LinkedIn profiles. Thus, you can’t defend the doxing by saying that the information was publicly available. It simply wasn’t.
Second, I am not complaining about someone quickly googling anyone and finding their LinkedIn profile. I am complaining about making it easier to harass people by posting a central repository of information about those people on a forum frequented by people with a history of harassing them.
It is certainly the case that former Leveragers took the release of their names on the EA forum as an attempt to invite harassment by members of the EA community. We were contacted by former Leveragers to see if there was anything we could do to get the names removed for this very reason.
I suspect the actual crux of the discussion here is that most EAs are unaware of the history of poor and bizarre behavior towards Leverage/Paradigm by members of the EA community. To help with the knowledge gap, I’m considering writing a Twitter thread that will share some of the most egregious examples.
If you list your organizational affiliation on LinkedIn (and if you are indeed correct that Paradigm Academy was not trying to be a cover for Leverage Research that shielded it from public scrutiny), then I don’t think you get to complain when someone quickly googles you and finds your LinkedIn profile.
Like, if Scott Alexander had listed his real name on his about page, or on LinkedIn, connected to his pseudonym, then yeah, I would have also had very little sympathy for the objections to the New York Times. There clearly are degrees of what kind of connections you can make here, and searching an organization on LinkedIn really does not cross any obvious line here.
Maybe you are objecting to drawing a connection between Leverage Research and Paradigm Academy, but you are also saying that nobody was saying that Paradigm Academy was intentionally trying to not appear to be part of what was broadly known as “Leverage”, so I don’t understand how you can make both of these arguments at the same time.
First, as I noted in my response to Ben, some of the information included in the doxing was from the poster’s personal knowledge and not from the people’s LinkedIn profiles. Thus, you can’t defend the doxing by saying that the information was publicly available. It simply wasn’t.
Second, I am not complaining about someone quickly googling anyone and finding their LinkedIn profile. I am complaining about making it easier to harass people by posting a central repository of information about those people on a forum frequented by people with a history of harassing them.
It is certainly the case that former Leveragers took the release of their names on the EA forum as an attempt to invite harassment by members of the EA community. We were contacted by former Leveragers to see if there was anything we could do to get the names removed for this very reason.
I suspect the actual crux of the discussion here is that most EAs are unaware of the history of poor and bizarre behavior towards Leverage/Paradigm by members of the EA community. To help with the knowledge gap, I’m considering writing a Twitter thread that will share some of the most egregious examples.