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
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.
.
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.”
.
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.
For anybody who wants more on this precise subject, check out Cat Couplings Revisited.
(Full disclosure: am polyamorous rationalist ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
Will probably add this in as another example when I publish an update/expanded appendix to Setting the Zero Point.
Yep, basically endorsed; this is like the next layer of nuance and consideration to be laid down; I suspect I was subconsciously thinking that one couldn’t easily get the-audience-I-was-speaking-to across both inferential leaps at once?
There’s also something about the difference between triaged and limited systems (which we are, in fact, in) and ultimate utopian ideals. I think that in the ultimate utopian ideal we do not give people less moral weight based on their capacity, but I agree that in the meantime scarce resources do indeed sometimes need dividing.
What follows is a tangent, but it feels like a relevant tangent. Like, I do not claim this is quite the same conversation as the above, it’s slightly in a different direction, but it’s not fully a non-sequitur.
Forgive the slightly-not-normal-for-this-venue language; this was originally a personal Facebook comment.
Here is a point that I don’t think gets made often enough:
It doesn’t matter whether other people are inferior, when it comes to talking about their fundamental dignity and the rights that a civilized society should grant them.
Like, often nazis or misogynists or whatever will try to start demonstrating that [some group] is objectively inferior on [some axis], and often the opposition will come right back with NUH-UH, [group] IS EVERY BIT AS CAPABLE—
I think there’s a mistake, there, and I think that mistake is *acting like that would matter,* even if true. Playing into the frame of the bigot, letting them set the terms of the debate, implicitly conceding that the question of two different group’s equality or inequality is the *crux* of the issue.
It isn’t.
I happen to think that it’s *false* that [race] or [gender] or whatever is inferior; my sense is that even if the bell curves for different groups peak in slightly different places and have their tails in slightly different places, they basically cover the same ground and overwhelmingly overlap anyway, so whatever.
But even if it were *demonstrably true* that [group] were inferior, that wouldn’t change my sense of moral obligation toward its members, and it wouldn’t change my beliefs about what kinds of treatment are fair or unfair.
I know for a fact that I have more raw intelligence than most humans! Even in nerd circles, I’m more-than-half-the-time in the upper quartile of whatever room I’m in, and guess what! Doesn’t matter! Practically every human outstrips me in some domain or other anyway! I can’t step to someone’s unique expertise, nor can I compete with them along domains orthogonal to intelligence (e.g. physical prowess), and even if I were superior to someone along 10 out of 10 of the *most* important axes …
… EVEN THEN, I do not think that gives me the right to dictate the terms of their existence, cut them off from opportunity, or take a larger share of the social pie.
The whole *point* of civilization is moving away from a state of base natural anarchy, where your value is tied to your capability. The whole point of building a safe, stable, cooperative society is making it so that you *don’t* have to pull your whole weight every second of every day or else be abandoned to the wolves or enslaved by strongmen.
The thing we’re trying to build here is a world where the absolutely inferior—
(To the extent that’s even a category that exists; a lot depends on your point of view and what axes you consider relevant)
The thing we’re trying to build here is a world where *even the absolutely inferior* get to have the maximum achievable amount of sovereignty, and agency, and happiness, and health, and get to participate in society to the greatest possible degree permitted by their personal limitations and the technology we have available (both literal technology and social/metaphorical tech).
IDGAF if you can “prove” some group’s inferiority. It means nothing to me. It changes nothing. It was never the key hinge of the conversation for me. Superiority is not the foundation of my sense of my fellow humans’ dignity.
(And that’s setting *aside* the fact that even if you’ve proven a difference between groups at the statistical level, you’ve done very little to demonstrate the relevance of that statistical difference on individual members; bell curves are not their averages.)
I think it’s good to push back on bigots when they are spreading straightforward falsehoods. I’m not saying “don’t fire back with facts” in these conversations.
But the *fire* with which people fire back seems to me to be counterproductive and wrong, and it worries me. Acting outraged at the mere possibility that some group might be inferior to another, as if that would be morally relevant in any way whatsoever—
I kind of fear that those people are closer to the bigots than I might wish. That they’re responding with such fervor because they *do* believe, on some gut level, that if the groups are different, then the moral standards must necessarily also be different. They don’t want to conclude that the moral standards should be different, and so they object with *desperation* to any evidence that threatens to show actual differences between groups.
Potential competence differences between groups don’t matter on a moral level. Or at least, let me-and-my-philosophy be an existence proof to you: they don’t HAVE to matter.
You can build a society that doesn’t give a fuck if people are fundamentally inferior, and that does its best to be fair and moral toward them anyway.
That’s the society you *should* be trying to build. If for no other reason than the fact that that’s going to be you one day, when you break a leg or have a stroke or just succumb to the vicissitudes of time. If for no other reason than the fact that that could be your kid, or the kid of someone you care about.
(There are other reasons, too, but that’s the one that’s hopefully at least a little bit persuasive even to selfish egotists.)
Competence is not the measure of worth. Fundamental equality is *not* the justification for fair and moral treatment.
Build your ethics on firmer ground, please.
Just noting that my shoulder Nate is fairly calibrated/detailed thanks to over a decade of interaction with Nate, and is incapable of endorsing the sentence “if there are going to be sociopaths in power, they might as well be EA sociopaths.”
My shoulder Nate insists quite adamantly that this is Not A Good Thing To Boil Down To A Binary Yes-No, but that if someone’s forcing him to say yes or no, then he will say no. And before someone argues that picking no sounds dumb, [insert coherent explanation of why the frame is badwrong].