I’m not going to deal with the topic of the post, but there’s another reason to not post under a burner account if it can be avoided that I haven’t seen mentioned, which this post indirectly highlights.
When people post under burner accounts, it makes it harder to be confident in the information that the posts contain, because there is ambiguity and it could be the same person repeatedly posting. To give one example (not the only one), if you see X number of burner accounts posting “I observe Y”, then that could mean anywhere from 1 to X observations of Y, and it’s hard to get a sense of the true frequency. This means it undermines the message of those posting, to post under burners, because some of their information will be discounted.
In this post, the poster writes “Therefore, I feel comfortable questioning these grants using burner accounts,” which suggests in fact that they do have multiple burner accounts. I recognize that using the same burner account would, over time, aggregate information that would lead to slightly less anonymity, but again, the tradeoff is that it significantly undermines the signal. I suspect it could lead to a vicious cycle for those posting, if they repeatedly feel like their posts aren’t being taken seriously.
Here’s an example of a past case where a troll (who also trolled other online communities) made up multiple sock-puppet accounts, and assorted lies about sources for various arguments trashing AI safety, e.g. claiming to have been at events they were not and heard bad things, inventing nonexistent experts who supposedly rejected various claims, creating fake testimonials of badness, smearing people who discovered the deception, etc.
One thing I’d like to quickly flag on the topic of this comment: using multiple accounts to express the same opinion (e.g. to create the illusion of multiple independent accounts on this topic) is a (pretty serious) norm violation. You can find the full official norms for using multiple accounts here.
This doesn’t mean that e.g. if you posted something critical of current work on forecasting at some point in your life, you can’t now use an anonymous account to write a detailed criticism of a forecasting-focused organization. But e.g. commenting on the same post/thread with two different accounts is probably quite bad.
I agree with the second paragraph of this comment.
Regarding the third paragraph,
In this post, the poster writes “Therefore, I feel comfortable questioning these grants using burner accounts,” which suggests in fact that they do have multiple burner accounts.
In my specific case,
I acknowledged in the post that I previously used a burner two years ago for whose password I did not save (due it being a burner) and therefore found myself logged out of. I would have used the same burner otherwise.
I could flip this around and say that I don’t have other active burners because fact that my next bullet-point in the post was “I’ll do some of that now” with me proceeding to comment on recent grants in the same post under the same burner instead of making a different post with a different burner.
The use of the plural term “burner accounts” is me talking about burner accounts in the abstract rather than me saying I have multiple burner accounts.
My thinking has evolved over the past two years since making the post, and I think it adds little value to this post to establish the link.
I would think differently had I carried on using that burner account, and people could read many posts showing how my thinking has evolved (which would instead turn it into a pseudonym instead of a burner), but a two-year gap doesn’t show any evolution in thought.
Edit: I’m aware this discredits my previous statement of, “I would have used the same burner otherwise”, but that statement was made before I read that previous post.
I’m not going to deal with the topic of the post, but there’s another reason to not post under a burner account if it can be avoided that I haven’t seen mentioned, which this post indirectly highlights.
When people post under burner accounts, it makes it harder to be confident in the information that the posts contain, because there is ambiguity and it could be the same person repeatedly posting. To give one example (not the only one), if you see X number of burner accounts posting “I observe Y”, then that could mean anywhere from 1 to X observations of Y, and it’s hard to get a sense of the true frequency. This means it undermines the message of those posting, to post under burners, because some of their information will be discounted.
In this post, the poster writes “Therefore, I feel comfortable questioning these grants using burner accounts,” which suggests in fact that they do have multiple burner accounts. I recognize that using the same burner account would, over time, aggregate information that would lead to slightly less anonymity, but again, the tradeoff is that it significantly undermines the signal. I suspect it could lead to a vicious cycle for those posting, if they repeatedly feel like their posts aren’t being taken seriously.
Here’s an example of a past case where a troll (who also trolled other online communities) made up multiple sock-puppet accounts, and assorted lies about sources for various arguments trashing AI safety, e.g. claiming to have been at events they were not and heard bad things, inventing nonexistent experts who supposedly rejected various claims, creating fake testimonials of badness, smearing people who discovered the deception, etc.
One thing I’d like to quickly flag on the topic of this comment: using multiple accounts to express the same opinion (e.g. to create the illusion of multiple independent accounts on this topic) is a (pretty serious) norm violation. You can find the full official norms for using multiple accounts here.
This doesn’t mean that e.g. if you posted something critical of current work on forecasting at some point in your life, you can’t now use an anonymous account to write a detailed criticism of a forecasting-focused organization. But e.g. commenting on the same post/thread with two different accounts is probably quite bad.
I agree with the second paragraph of this comment.
Regarding the third paragraph,
In my specific case,
I acknowledged in the post that I previously used a burner two years ago for whose password I did not save (due it being a burner) and therefore found myself logged out of. I would have used the same burner otherwise.
I could flip this around and say that I don’t have other active burners because fact that my next bullet-point in the post was “I’ll do some of that now” with me proceeding to comment on recent grants in the same post under the same burner instead of making a different post with a different burner.
The use of the plural term “burner accounts” is me talking about burner accounts in the abstract rather than me saying I have multiple burner accounts.
Can you name the prior burner to establish a link?
I just looked up the post I made back then.
My thinking has evolved over the past two years since making the post, and I think it adds little value to this post to establish the link.
I would think differently had I carried on using that burner account, and people could read many posts showing how my thinking has evolved (which would instead turn it into a pseudonym instead of a burner), but a two-year gap doesn’t show any evolution in thought.
Edit: I’m aware this discredits my previous statement of, “I would have used the same burner otherwise”, but that statement was made before I read that previous post.
Understandable, but you should edit your prior comment and put that assertion in strikeout text.