Note that “lots of people believe that they need to hire their identities” isn’t itself very strong evidence for “people need to hide their identities”. I agree it’s a shame that people don’t have more faith in the discourse process.
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.
I agree, but many people—some of whom seem to be highly engaged in the community—clearly believe that they do need to do so. Even if the truth is that they don’t, the fact that this belief is widespread is a significant issue for our community. We need to have open mechanisms for feedback on actions and ideas, so that we do end up doing the most good.
Tl,dr: You are correct, these are logically separate points. But people not having faith in the process is the important issue imo.
Note that “lots of people believe that they need to hire their identities” isn’t itself very strong evidence for “people need to hide their identities”. I agree it’s a shame that people don’t have more faith in the discourse process.
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.
I agree, but many people—some of whom seem to be highly engaged in the community—clearly believe that they do need to do so. Even if the truth is that they don’t, the fact that this belief is widespread is a significant issue for our community. We need to have open mechanisms for feedback on actions and ideas, so that we do end up doing the most good.
Tl,dr: You are correct, these are logically separate points. But people not having faith in the process is the important issue imo.