Thatâs my prior assumption too, I just find it very upsetting how many recent posts are prefaced by a disclaimer that the author doesnât want to reveal themselves for this reason :(
Edit: Disagree voters, what about this comment do you disagree with? I was just reporting my reaction, but maybe I was making a too broad claim about how many posts are pseudonymous for these reasons?
Note that âlots of people believe that they need to hire their identitiesâ isnât itself very strong evidence for âpeople need to hide their identitiesâ. I agree itâs a shame that people donât 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 itâs 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 donât 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 canât uniformly enforce norms everywhere, and even trying would probably have a pretty bad false-positive rate.
I agree, but many peopleâsome of whom seem to be highly engaged in the communityâclearly believe that they do need to do so. Even if the truth is that they donât, 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.
Thatâs my prior assumption too, I just find it very upsetting how many recent posts are prefaced by a disclaimer that the author doesnât want to reveal themselves for this reason :(
Edit: Disagree voters, what about this comment do you disagree with? I was just reporting my reaction, but maybe I was making a too broad claim about how many posts are pseudonymous for these reasons?
Note that âlots of people believe that they need to hire their identitiesâ isnât itself very strong evidence for âpeople need to hide their identitiesâ. I agree itâs a shame that people donât 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 itâs 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 donât 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 canât uniformly enforce norms everywhere, and even trying would probably have a pretty bad false-positive rate.
I agree, but many peopleâsome of whom seem to be highly engaged in the communityâclearly believe that they do need to do so. Even if the truth is that they donât, 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.