Some musicians have multiple alter-egos that they use to communicate information from different perspectives. MF Doom released albums under several alter-egos; he even used these aliases to criticize his previous aliases.
Some musicians, like Madonna, just continued to “re-invent” themselves every few years.
Youtube personalities often feature themselves dressed as different personalities to represent different viewpoints.
It’s really difficult to keep a single understood identity, while also conveying different kinds of information.
Narrow identities are important for a lot of reasons. I think the main one is predictability, similar to a company brand. If your identity seems to dramatically change hour to hour, people wouldn’t be able to predict your behavior, so fewer could interact or engage with you in ways they’d feel comfortable with.
However, narrow identities can also be suffocating. They restrict what you can say and how people will interpret that. You can simply say more things in more ways if you can change identities. So having multiple identities can be a really useful tool.
Sadly, most academics and intellectuals can only really have one public identity.
---
EA researchers currently act this way.
In EA, it’s generally really important to be seen as calibrated and reasonable, so people correspondingly prioritize that in their public (and then private) identities. I’ve done this. But it comes with a cost.
One obvious (though unorthodox) way around this is to allow researchers to post content either under aliases. It could be fine if the identity of the author is known, as long as readers can keep these aliases distinct.
I’ve been considering how to best do this myself. My regular EA Forum name is just “Ozzie Gooen”. Possible aliases would likely be adjustments to this name.
- “Angry Ozzie Gooen” (or “Disagreeable Ozzie Gooen”)
- “Tech Bro Ozzie Gooen”
- “Utility-bot 352d3”
These would be used to communicate in very different styles, with me attempting what I’d expect readers to expect of those styles.
(Normally this is done to represent viewpoints other than what they have, but sometimes it’s to represent viewpoints they have, but wouldn’t normally share)
Facebook Discussion
When discussing forecasting systems, sometimes I get asked,
The obvious answer is,
Or,
For example,
We make a list of 10,000 potential government forecasting projects.
For each, we will have a later evaluation for “how valuable/successful was this project?”.
We then open forecasting questions for each potential project. Like, “If we were to run forecasting project #8374, how successful would it be?”
We take the top results and enact them.
Stated differently,
Forecasting is part of general-purpose collective reasoning.
Prioritization of forecasting requires collective reasoning.
So, forecasting can be used to prioritize forecasting.
I think a lot of people find this meta and counterintuitive at first, but it seems pretty obvious to me.
All that said, I can’t be sure things will play out like this. In practice, the “best thing to use forecasting on” might be obvious enough such that we don’t need to do costly prioritization work first. For example, the community isn’t currently doing much of this meta stuff around Metaculus. I think this is a bit mistaken, but not incredibly so.
Facebook Thread