I have had an influential senior EA explicitly deny support for my project because they didn’t like my opinions and decided on my behalf that I wasn’t going to suitably change them (obviously I can’t be very specific, not least because they didn’t tell me which opinions were unacceptable, so I can’t say much to show whether this might have been justified in my case. But for the record, I’m not into justifying oppression, harassing people, defrauding people, or any of the classic reasons to kick someone out of an EA party)
I would be a lot more comfortable putting my name and more details to this anecdote if the general attitude of senior EA staff was more ‘shit, all these anecdotes should strongly update us towards the belief that this happens. We should actively try to find out about such cases and do something about them’ rather than ‘we polled each other and everyone said they hadn’t done this, so I guess it doesn’t happen’.
Maybe there’s nothing more they could actually do; but until they figure something out I will feel compelled to use a burner account for certain criticisms.
On the one hand, Duncan is thoroughly dead right in this subthread. There’s a bizarre conspiracism and entitlement around experiencing disagreement that I think is poisonous.
On the other hand, formal and informal power itself poisons proper disagreement. We kinda should expect discourse to be like this.
One time I misled a company about how cool I thought their projects were because I was poor and they had money. In my life, a breach of personal integrity like this is well quarantined from EA, I’d rather eat chicken 4x a week for a year and kick a puppy for good measure than manipulate EAs, and I don’t think formal or informal power asymmetries mean that manipulation would be “justified defense” or “punching up”. But when I try to reverse engineer this mindset I’m detecting from the “it was wrong of the employer not to hire someone they in fact disagree with about the fundamentals” crowd, I find myself wondering: are people poor? Is that why it gets adversarial? It’s ok if that’s what’s going on with some of them, I don’t think it justifies manipulative mindset or strategy against EAs and I think they should go manipulate and be strategic in a low stakes setting until their brain repairs itself from the damages of poverty, but it’s something I could understand.
There’s a related topic of making EA orgs robust to password guessing, but I’m not running an org so that’s none of my business. But if I have colleagues who are in the password guessing mindset, I absolutely want to know about it, and I want them to bust out of that mindset.
“I’d rather extract money/support from people who wouldn’t willingly give it to me, if I were being candid.”
:/ :/ :/ :/
Like, I’m not saying I don’t get it, but the “it” that I’m getting seems super duper sad. People’s money/support/endorsement should be theirs to give, and tricking people into giving it to you when they wouldn’t if they knew your true positions seems … not great.
How is anonymous posting any different in this regard than self-censoring by not posting at all? People don’t owe anyone their thoughts on the Forum, and deciding to be silent (or post anonymously) isn’t “tricking people”.
It greatly increases the odds of the forum being flooded with unaccountable bs; it removes/breaks the feedback loop of reputation.
Deciding to be silent isn’t tricking people. Posting anonymously because you don’t want to be associated with your own views (but you want to inject those views without paying the reputational cost of having them) is.
It greatly increases the odds of the forum being flooded with unaccountable bs
There are low-bs forums such as Hacker News and slatestarcodex where most people don’t use their real names. I’m skeptical that real name use is a good predictor of bs density.
Posting anonymously because you don’t want to be associated with your own views (but you want to inject those views without paying the reputational cost of having them) is.
There are 2 possibilities: either the view is correct, or the view is incorrect.
If the view is correct, the reputational cost is bad, and the person did a service by posting it anonymously.
If the view is incorrect, “injecting” it by posting it anonymously seems not that bad, because others can reply and explain why it’s incorrect.
Insofar as we respect the ability of forum readers to evaluate the correctness of what they read, we shouldn’t be too worried about people posting incorrect views. It’s through discussion itself that we can better determine which views are correct vs incorrect.
Posting anonymously does not instill a false belief in another person, so I don’t see the trickery.
I found your comment concerning. Important-to-enforce punitive measures for wrongthink could be justified in certain limited situations (maybe stuff like “justifying oppression, harassing people, defrauding people”), but let’s just say that if we’re running into those situations on a regular basis, the EA movement is doing something very wrong.
There are low-bs forums such as Hacker News and slatestarcodex where most people don’t use their real names.
In those forums, reputation accrues to username; little (or at least less) attention is paid to brand-new accounts.
Here, a lot of accounts are trying to recruit/use the “I’m a for real serious longtime member of this community” reputational/seriousness boost, while being who the heck knows who.
Then one solution would be to have a trusted third party vet the burner’s identity under an NDA that allows them to verify agreed-upon non-identifying information, such as EAG attendance history, employment history, etc.
In those forums, reputation accrues to username; little (or at least less) attention is paid to brand-new accounts.
I’ve spent a lot of time on both HN and slatestarcodex (subreddit/blog comments), and this isn’t really the case. Most usernames I see are ones that I have no particular recollection of. I basically never look at the username to decide whether to read a comment.
HN will display your username in green for the first two weeks after you register, and you get the ability to downvote after accumulating 500 karma, but for the most part people ignore usernames. (Example: I once got a reply from a user who said “I keep seeing people make this argument.” It took me a little while to realize that was because the two of us had a related discussion a few weeks ago, where I’d made this argument to them. It was only after I looked through my comment history for the older discussion that I realized what was going on.)
An exception here is that in both communities there are a few celebrity users that get upvotes more easily, but they’re a small minority.
If you want you could create a post in one of those communities asking people how much they pay attention to usernames and see what responses you get.
Here, a lot of accounts are trying to recruit/use the “I’m a for real serious longtime member of this community” reputational/seriousness boost, while being who the heck knows who.
Maybe a trusted neutral party could vouch for these claims?
We have a system for deciding if a post is “bs”—the upvote/downvote system. The community is quite capable of dealing with actual “bs” by downvoting it into oblivion. The evidence is that the community does not find the bulk of burner-poster posts to be “bs”.
It is also very easy for users who do not want to engage with burner posts to skip on past them. The engagement that happens is with users who have chosen to engage with that content.
The community is quite capable of dealing with actual “bs” by downvoting it into oblivion.
I disagree that the community is doing anything remotely close to a good job of distinguishing bs from non-bs via downvotes. [The evidence is that the community does not find the bulk of burner-poster posts to be “bs”] is a true statement, and is revealing the problem.
It is also very easy for users who do not want to engage with burner posts to skip on past them.
This is straight false; they’re showing up on all sorts of posts WAY more than they used to.
“I’d rather extract money/support from people who wouldn’t willingly give it to me, if I were being candid.”
I wasn’t hiding anything at the time—my views were evidently public when I spoke to this person.
Maybe I didn’t make this clear enough in the first post: by clear inference and implication, I was turned down because of critical views on senior EAs/orgs—because I don’t have any other views that anyone ever suggested would be problematic in this context.
I’m hiding now because of that same experience. As Jason says, I didn’t need to post, and it’s quite unpleasant to do so. I posted to contradict the narrative promoted by senior EAs that criticising EA leadership has no reputational risk—which seems highly relevant to a thread telling people they shouldn’t use burner account to criticise EA leadership.
I have had an influential senior EA explicitly deny support for my project because they didn’t like my opinions and decided on my behalf that I wasn’t going to suitably change them (obviously I can’t be very specific, not least because they didn’t tell me which opinions were unacceptable, so I can’t say much to show whether this might have been justified in my case. But for the record, I’m not into justifying oppression, harassing people, defrauding people, or any of the classic reasons to kick someone out of an EA party)
I would be a lot more comfortable putting my name and more details to this anecdote if the general attitude of senior EA staff was more ‘shit, all these anecdotes should strongly update us towards the belief that this happens. We should actively try to find out about such cases and do something about them’ rather than ‘we polled each other and everyone said they hadn’t done this, so I guess it doesn’t happen’.
Maybe there’s nothing more they could actually do; but until they figure something out I will feel compelled to use a burner account for certain criticisms.
It’s hard.
On the one hand, Duncan is thoroughly dead right in this subthread. There’s a bizarre conspiracism and entitlement around experiencing disagreement that I think is poisonous.
On the other hand, formal and informal power itself poisons proper disagreement. We kinda should expect discourse to be like this.
One time I misled a company about how cool I thought their projects were because I was poor and they had money. In my life, a breach of personal integrity like this is well quarantined from EA, I’d rather eat chicken 4x a week for a year and kick a puppy for good measure than manipulate EAs, and I don’t think formal or informal power asymmetries mean that manipulation would be “justified defense” or “punching up”. But when I try to reverse engineer this mindset I’m detecting from the “it was wrong of the employer not to hire someone they in fact disagree with about the fundamentals” crowd, I find myself wondering: are people poor? Is that why it gets adversarial? It’s ok if that’s what’s going on with some of them, I don’t think it justifies manipulative mindset or strategy against EAs and I think they should go manipulate and be strategic in a low stakes setting until their brain repairs itself from the damages of poverty, but it’s something I could understand.
There’s a related topic of making EA orgs robust to password guessing, but I’m not running an org so that’s none of my business. But if I have colleagues who are in the password guessing mindset, I absolutely want to know about it, and I want them to bust out of that mindset.
In other words:
“I’d rather extract money/support from people who wouldn’t willingly give it to me, if I were being candid.”
:/ :/ :/ :/
Like, I’m not saying I don’t get it, but the “it” that I’m getting seems super duper sad. People’s money/support/endorsement should be theirs to give, and tricking people into giving it to you when they wouldn’t if they knew your true positions seems … not great.
How is anonymous posting any different in this regard than self-censoring by not posting at all? People don’t owe anyone their thoughts on the Forum, and deciding to be silent (or post anonymously) isn’t “tricking people”.
It greatly increases the odds of the forum being flooded with unaccountable bs; it removes/breaks the feedback loop of reputation.
Deciding to be silent isn’t tricking people. Posting anonymously because you don’t want to be associated with your own views (but you want to inject those views without paying the reputational cost of having them) is.
There are low-bs forums such as Hacker News and slatestarcodex where most people don’t use their real names. I’m skeptical that real name use is a good predictor of bs density.
There are 2 possibilities: either the view is correct, or the view is incorrect.
If the view is correct, the reputational cost is bad, and the person did a service by posting it anonymously.
If the view is incorrect, “injecting” it by posting it anonymously seems not that bad, because others can reply and explain why it’s incorrect.
Insofar as we respect the ability of forum readers to evaluate the correctness of what they read, we shouldn’t be too worried about people posting incorrect views. It’s through discussion itself that we can better determine which views are correct vs incorrect.
Posting anonymously does not instill a false belief in another person, so I don’t see the trickery.
I found your comment concerning. Important-to-enforce punitive measures for wrongthink could be justified in certain limited situations (maybe stuff like “justifying oppression, harassing people, defrauding people”), but let’s just say that if we’re running into those situations on a regular basis, the EA movement is doing something very wrong.
In those forums, reputation accrues to username; little (or at least less) attention is paid to brand-new accounts.
Here, a lot of accounts are trying to recruit/use the “I’m a for real serious longtime member of this community” reputational/seriousness boost, while being who the heck knows who.
Then one solution would be to have a trusted third party vet the burner’s identity under an NDA that allows them to verify agreed-upon non-identifying information, such as EAG attendance history, employment history, etc.
If anyone wants me to validate their otherwise anonymous account I’d be happy to do that.
I would support that.
I’ve spent a lot of time on both HN and slatestarcodex (subreddit/blog comments), and this isn’t really the case. Most usernames I see are ones that I have no particular recollection of. I basically never look at the username to decide whether to read a comment.
HN will display your username in green for the first two weeks after you register, and you get the ability to downvote after accumulating 500 karma, but for the most part people ignore usernames. (Example: I once got a reply from a user who said “I keep seeing people make this argument.” It took me a little while to realize that was because the two of us had a related discussion a few weeks ago, where I’d made this argument to them. It was only after I looked through my comment history for the older discussion that I realized what was going on.)
An exception here is that in both communities there are a few celebrity users that get upvotes more easily, but they’re a small minority.
If you want you could create a post in one of those communities asking people how much they pay attention to usernames and see what responses you get.
Maybe a trusted neutral party could vouch for these claims?
We have a system for deciding if a post is “bs”—the upvote/downvote system. The community is quite capable of dealing with actual “bs” by downvoting it into oblivion. The evidence is that the community does not find the bulk of burner-poster posts to be “bs”.
It is also very easy for users who do not want to engage with burner posts to skip on past them. The engagement that happens is with users who have chosen to engage with that content.
I disagree that the community is doing anything remotely close to a good job of distinguishing bs from non-bs via downvotes. [The evidence is that the community does not find the bulk of burner-poster posts to be “bs”] is a true statement, and is revealing the problem.
This is straight false; they’re showing up on all sorts of posts WAY more than they used to.
I wasn’t hiding anything at the time—my views were evidently public when I spoke to this person.
Maybe I didn’t make this clear enough in the first post: by clear inference and implication, I was turned down because of critical views on senior EAs/orgs—because I don’t have any other views that anyone ever suggested would be problematic in this context.
I’m hiding now because of that same experience. As Jason says, I didn’t need to post, and it’s quite unpleasant to do so. I posted to contradict the narrative promoted by senior EAs that criticising EA leadership has no reputational risk—which seems highly relevant to a thread telling people they shouldn’t use burner account to criticise EA leadership.
Then … please stop.