A few relevant thoughts from a Facebook thread of mine yesterday:
Man, I feel *super* creeped out by how many posts and comments I’m seeing on the EA forum from anonymous this, burneraccount that, groupofnamelessconcernedcitizens, etc.
Seems like a sign of *something* real bad, even though I haven’t quite put my finger on what, and doesn’t seem to me like “the light as people come out of the tunnel” in the sense that it doesn’t feel to me like a precursor to something good, or people finally overcoming coordination challenges in a bad environment, or whatever.
I wonder if there’s a Bizarro Duncan out there who’s, like, super stoked to see so many people choosing to anonymously share their heretical thoughts or whatever.
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I think, trying to introspect on the creepies, that a big part of the problem is something like:
“Here I am, in substantial disagreement/criticism of a subculture, but I don’t want my large and fairly crucial disagreement attached to my name because if people understood my *true* beliefs they might not want to hire me at their org.”
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To be clear, I think [things like] Chatham room [are] amazing; I think that it’s quite good/important to have *clearly defined contexts* in which people can be anonymous.
I would not at all mind a single, promoted, pinned/stickied top-level post that was, like, this is the thread for anonymous posting of things you think are true; mods will moderate for discourse norms and like Actual Dangerous Or Crazy Stuff but otherwise let’s make room for people to Say Stuff.
But like. It seems that the tide is turning toward “oh, flooding the EA forum with anonymous sniping from the sidelines is the Cool And Correct Thing To Do Now” and that seems like two or three distinct kinds of bad.
There’s always a tension between assimilating into a preexisting culture, and attempting to change that culture, and I just generally think that the incentives are better *overall* when people have common-knowledge skin in the game; it’s just *so easy* for bad stuff to proliferate when it becomes open-season on anonymous chime-ins, and the EA forum over the past week has felt like it was moving in that direction.
Anonymous accounts created within the very recent past I found just from skimming the posts and comments from the past few days for, like, five minutes:
If you have time to have a look at my post and recent comments, would you say that this account creeps you out, or only the more EA-critical ones?
The alternative is not really to post these things under my real name, but not to post at all (for various reasons: don’t want the pro-EA posts to be seen as virtue signaling, don’t want to be canceled in 26 years for whatever will be cancelable then, don’t want my friends to get secondhand reputation damage)
Pro-EA posts made anonymously creep me out 98% as much; I personally would rather (most) anonymous posts not happen at all than happen anonymously. See above for my caveat to that general position.
I have a job outside EA where reputation is a concern, so as is normal for people in such industries I post mostly anonymously online, and start new accounts periodically to prevent potential information leakage. If the only way to engage with EA discussion online was under my real name I wouldn’t do so.
That’s probably on the extreme end, but I think lots of people exist somewhere on this spectrum and it would probably be bad for the movement if discussions were limited to only people willing to post under their real names, or persistent identities, as that would exacerbate problems of insularity and group think.
Another example: here’s a comment created with a new anonymous account, I think so they could use the “username” field as a subject line for their comment?
I think, trying to introspect on the creepies, that a big part of the problem is something like:
“Here I am, in substantial disagreement/criticism of a subculture, but I don’t want my large and fairly crucial disagreement attached to my name because if people understood my *true* beliefs they might not want to hire me at their org.”
Hm, I hadn’t thought about it in those terms, but I guess that is a little weird.
I tend to like people being able to weigh in on stuff anonymously, as long as it doesn’t dominate the discussion. (If there are tons of anons in a discussion, I start to worry more about sockpuppetry.)
And, e.g., if you’re writing a sweeping critique of medical culture while trying to start a career in medicine, it makes sense that you might want to post pseudonymously because of the potential career repercussions.
But I guess it’s a little odd to write a sweeping critique of EA culture, and hide your identity in the hope of working at an EA org? Getting an EA job is an altruistic goal, where the quality of the mission and strategy presumably matters a great deal for where you want to work.
If EA is unresponsive to your awesome critique, then if the critique is important enough, I’d think that’s a reason to not want to end up working within EA (or within that part of EA). Doubly so if EA is the sort of place that would use your true view as a reason to reject you.
And if other EAs do agree with you, knowing who you are is a great way for you to serve as a sort of beacon within EA and gather more and more people who share the same perspective.
Or, really, whether this beacon happens within “EA” or outside of “EA” is beside the point. If you have cool stuff you want to do to improve the world, and lots of people disagree with you, then I suspect it’s often a good idea to attach a stable name to your arguments (at the very least a pseudonym) so you can team up with like-minded people. (And specifically avoid ending up on teams with people who are mistaken and not interested in working with people they disagree with on this dimension.)
I don’t think people are thinking of it as “muhaha, now I can infiltrate EA orgs who don’t know my real views on anything”, I’m guessing it’s more that some people (a) haven’t thought through the upside of loudly signaling their views (to spark useful debates, and find like-minded EAs to team up with), or (b) haven’t thought through the downside of working at an EA org where you have to keep your real views about lots of important EA things a secret.
Thinking about it more, I could imagine a thing here like ‘EAs wanting to put their best foot forward’. Maybe you endorse a post you wrote, but you don’t think it reflects your very best work, so you’re wary of it being the first thing people see from you. Whereas once you’ve already proven yourself to someone, you might feel more comfortable sharing your full thinking with them; there’s plenty of middle ground between “wanting critique X to be the first thing everyone hears about you” and “wanting to hide critique X from your co-workers”.
Or they might indeed think that their critique isn’t that important, such that it’s not the specific hill they want to die on; if their post doesn’t get a really positive reception on their first attempt, it may be something they’d rather drop than keep fighting for, while also being too minor for them to want to use it as a filter for which projects they’d like to work at.
A few relevant thoughts from a Facebook thread of mine yesterday:
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Anonymous accounts created within the very recent past I found just from skimming the posts and comments from the past few days for, like, five minutes:
BurnerAcct
OutsideView
whistleblower9
anonymousEA20
Sick_of_this
AnonymousAccount
temp_
Burner1989
AnonymousQualy
ConcernedEAs
If you have time to have a look at my post and recent comments, would you say that this account creeps you out, or only the more EA-critical ones?
The alternative is not really to post these things under my real name, but not to post at all (for various reasons: don’t want the pro-EA posts to be seen as virtue signaling, don’t want to be canceled in 26 years for whatever will be cancelable then, don’t want my friends to get secondhand reputation damage)
Pro-EA posts made anonymously creep me out 98% as much; I personally would rather (most) anonymous posts not happen at all than happen anonymously. See above for my caveat to that general position.
I have a job outside EA where reputation is a concern, so as is normal for people in such industries I post mostly anonymously online, and start new accounts periodically to prevent potential information leakage. If the only way to engage with EA discussion online was under my real name I wouldn’t do so.
That’s probably on the extreme end, but I think lots of people exist somewhere on this spectrum and it would probably be bad for the movement if discussions were limited to only people willing to post under their real names, or persistent identities, as that would exacerbate problems of insularity and group think.
Another example: here’s a comment created with a new anonymous account, I think so they could use the “username” field as a subject line for their comment?
Wow that’s really hard-defecting on forum norms
Hm, I hadn’t thought about it in those terms, but I guess that is a little weird.
I tend to like people being able to weigh in on stuff anonymously, as long as it doesn’t dominate the discussion. (If there are tons of anons in a discussion, I start to worry more about sockpuppetry.)
And, e.g., if you’re writing a sweeping critique of medical culture while trying to start a career in medicine, it makes sense that you might want to post pseudonymously because of the potential career repercussions.
But I guess it’s a little odd to write a sweeping critique of EA culture, and hide your identity in the hope of working at an EA org? Getting an EA job is an altruistic goal, where the quality of the mission and strategy presumably matters a great deal for where you want to work.
If EA is unresponsive to your awesome critique, then if the critique is important enough, I’d think that’s a reason to not want to end up working within EA (or within that part of EA). Doubly so if EA is the sort of place that would use your true view as a reason to reject you.
And if other EAs do agree with you, knowing who you are is a great way for you to serve as a sort of beacon within EA and gather more and more people who share the same perspective.
Or, really, whether this beacon happens within “EA” or outside of “EA” is beside the point. If you have cool stuff you want to do to improve the world, and lots of people disagree with you, then I suspect it’s often a good idea to attach a stable name to your arguments (at the very least a pseudonym) so you can team up with like-minded people. (And specifically avoid ending up on teams with people who are mistaken and not interested in working with people they disagree with on this dimension.)
I don’t think people are thinking of it as “muhaha, now I can infiltrate EA orgs who don’t know my real views on anything”, I’m guessing it’s more that some people (a) haven’t thought through the upside of loudly signaling their views (to spark useful debates, and find like-minded EAs to team up with), or (b) haven’t thought through the downside of working at an EA org where you have to keep your real views about lots of important EA things a secret.
Thinking about it more, I could imagine a thing here like ‘EAs wanting to put their best foot forward’. Maybe you endorse a post you wrote, but you don’t think it reflects your very best work, so you’re wary of it being the first thing people see from you. Whereas once you’ve already proven yourself to someone, you might feel more comfortable sharing your full thinking with them; there’s plenty of middle ground between “wanting critique X to be the first thing everyone hears about you” and “wanting to hide critique X from your co-workers”.
Or they might indeed think that their critique isn’t that important, such that it’s not the specific hill they want to die on; if their post doesn’t get a really positive reception on their first attempt, it may be something they’d rather drop than keep fighting for, while also being too minor for them to want to use it as a filter for which projects they’d like to work at.