Without having thought at all about the potential downsides, those all seem like plausibly useful features. Having said that, you’re allowed to create an anonymous or pseudonymous account, people frequently do, and creating a new email address isn’t hard.
Is there a reason I’m missing that means that these features would give people a substantial advantage over just creating an account with a non-identifiable name?
Some people might make an account on the EA Forum, post some comments online about a variety of topics, but then later find themselves running for public office or otherwise suddenly exposed to greater public scrutiny. In that situation, many people would want to go back and delete or hide previous comments they’d made even on relatively innocuous (by EA standards) topics. For example, in 80,000 Hours’ guide for a career path as a congressional staffer, they advise “Keep a low profile: Don’t publish controversial opinions on social media or do anything else that could make you look bad. Congressional staffers are in the public eye, so doing so could prevent you from getting a job.”
One recent example of something like this happening in real life was when Andrew Sabinsky was hired by Dominic Cummings in the UK to promote Phil-Tetlock-style “superforecasting” and prediction-market initiatives within the UK government, but was soon forced to resign in disgrace when past comments on rationalist blogs—about embryo selection, IQ, nootropics, and other controversial Slate-Star-Codex-y topics—were exposed by the media and used to paint a picture of Sabinsky as a misogynist and eugenicist. Most EA Forum commenters have a much less aggro writing style than Sabinsky and don’t have as many hot-button controversial opinions as he did. But even my own writing on the EA Forum would probably look pretty bad if I suddenly found myself running for congress. After all, I’ve:
Fortunately, I’m an aerospace engineer with good personal financial security, and I have no twitter account and no plans to run for office, so I can say all this stuff without fear! But plans change. I could imagine plenty of unlikely-but-possible scenarios where I’d enjoy the ability to delete my account, or change my username from “Jackson Wagner” to something more discreet like “LongtermistResearcher”, or lower my posts’ prominence in search engine results.
Without having thought at all about the potential downsides, those all seem like plausibly useful features. Having said that, you’re allowed to create an anonymous or pseudonymous account, people frequently do, and creating a new email address isn’t hard.
Is there a reason I’m missing that means that these features would give people a substantial advantage over just creating an account with a non-identifiable name?
Some people might make an account on the EA Forum, post some comments online about a variety of topics, but then later find themselves running for public office or otherwise suddenly exposed to greater public scrutiny. In that situation, many people would want to go back and delete or hide previous comments they’d made even on relatively innocuous (by EA standards) topics. For example, in 80,000 Hours’ guide for a career path as a congressional staffer, they advise “Keep a low profile: Don’t publish controversial opinions on social media or do anything else that could make you look bad. Congressional staffers are in the public eye, so doing so could prevent you from getting a job.”
One recent example of something like this happening in real life was when Andrew Sabinsky was hired by Dominic Cummings in the UK to promote Phil-Tetlock-style “superforecasting” and prediction-market initiatives within the UK government, but was soon forced to resign in disgrace when past comments on rationalist blogs—about embryo selection, IQ, nootropics, and other controversial Slate-Star-Codex-y topics—were exposed by the media and used to paint a picture of Sabinsky as a misogynist and eugenicist. Most EA Forum commenters have a much less aggro writing style than Sabinsky and don’t have as many hot-button controversial opinions as he did. But even my own writing on the EA Forum would probably look pretty bad if I suddenly found myself running for congress. After all, I’ve:
praised an essay written by Peter Thiel (increasingly a right-wing figure demonized by NYT)
talked about what Nick Bostrom’s “Vulnerable World Hypothesis” might have looked like in an alternate history where nuclear weapons had been easier to build (which could easily be smeared into something crazy like claiming I support a police/surveillance state in the real world)
pooh-poohed the idea of Israel/Palestine activism from an importance-tractability-neglectedness perspective (for which I won a Forum Prize for promoting friendly, polite discourse norms! But that might not carry much cred with the median America voter or progressive activist...)
I’m pretty sure that expressing literally any opinion whatsoever on philosophical population ethics questions like the Repugnant Conclusion is politically toxic and would be described by sufficiently cynical journalists as “eugenics”, no matter if you accept the Repugnant Conclusion or reject it or anything in between.
Fortunately, I’m an aerospace engineer with good personal financial security, and I have no twitter account and no plans to run for office, so I can say all this stuff without fear! But plans change. I could imagine plenty of unlikely-but-possible scenarios where I’d enjoy the ability to delete my account, or change my username from “Jackson Wagner” to something more discreet like “LongtermistResearcher”, or lower my posts’ prominence in search engine results.