While I do think I maybe disagree with Buck on the actual costs to people speaking openly, I also think there are pretty big gains in terms of trust and reputation to be had by speaking out openly. In my experience it’s a kind of increase-in-variance of how people relate to you, with an overall positive mean, with there definitely being some chance of someone disliking you being open, but there also being a high chance of someone being very interested in supporting you and caring a lot about you not being unfairly punished for speaking true things, and rewarding you for sharing important information. There are a lot of very high-integrity people around who will be willing to die on the hill of you speaking openly about what you think is important.
My guess is this variance causes some people to genuinely be silenced, since some people really hate the idea of anyone taking adversarial action against them. I feel genuinely stuck on what to do about that. I often try my best to reward and incentivize people who speak out openly in epistemically sane ways, but I don’t have a good solution for how to make it so that nobody will take any adversarial action against that. The community is big, and I can’t uniformly enforce norms everywhere, and even trying would probably have a pretty bad false-positive rate.
While I do think I maybe disagree with Buck on the actual costs to people speaking openly, I also think there are pretty big gains in terms of trust and reputation to be had by speaking out openly. In my experience it’s a kind of increase-in-variance of how people relate to you, with an overall positive mean, with there definitely being some chance of someone disliking you being open, but there also being a high chance of someone being very interested in supporting you and caring a lot about you not being unfairly punished for speaking true things, and rewarding you for sharing important information. There are a lot of very high-integrity people around who will be willing to die on the hill of you speaking openly about what you think is important.
My guess is this variance causes some people to genuinely be silenced, since some people really hate the idea of anyone taking adversarial action against them. I feel genuinely stuck on what to do about that. I often try my best to reward and incentivize people who speak out openly in epistemically sane ways, but I don’t have a good solution for how to make it so that nobody will take any adversarial action against that. The community is big, and I can’t uniformly enforce norms everywhere, and even trying would probably have a pretty bad false-positive rate.