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Some people might make an account on the EA Forum, post some comments online about a variety of topics, but then later find themselves running for public office or otherwise suddenly exposed to greater public scrutiny. In that situation, many people would want to go back and delete or hide previous comments they'd made even on relatively innocuous (by EA standards) topics. For example, in 80,000 Hours' guide for a career path as a congressional staffer, they advise "Keep a low profile: Don’t publish controversial opinions on social media or do anything else that could make you look bad. Congressional staffers are in the public eye, so doing so could prevent you from getting a job."

One recent example of something like this happening in real life was when Andrew Sabinsky was hired by Dominic Cummings in the UK to promote Phil-Tetlock-style "superforecasting" and prediction-market initiatives within the UK government, but was soon forced to resign in disgrace when past comments on rationalist blogs -- about embryo selection, IQ, nootropics, and other controversial Slate-Star-Codex-y topics -- were exposed by the media and used to paint a picture of Sabinsky as a misogynist and eugenicist. Most EA Forum commenters have a much less aggro writing style than Sabinsky and don't have as many hot-button controversial opinions as he did. But even my own writing on the EA Forum would probably look pretty bad if I suddenly found myself running for congress. After all, I've:

praised an essay written by Peter Thiel (increasingly a right-wing figure demonized by NYT)
talked about what Nick Bostrom's "Vulnerable World Hypothesis" might have looked like in an alternate history where nuclear weapons had been easier to build (which could easily be smeared into something crazy like claiming I support a police/surveillance state in the real world)
pooh-poohed the idea of Israel/Palestine activism from an importance-tractability-neglectedness perspective (for which I won a Forum Prize for promoting friendly, polite discourse norms! But that might not carry much cred with the median America voter or progressive activist...)
I'm pretty sure that expressing literally any opinion whatsoever on philosophical population ethics questions like the Repugnant Conclusion is politically toxic and would be described by sufficiently cynical journalists as "eugenics", no matter if you accept the Repugnant Conclusion or reject it or anything in between.

Fortunately, I'm an aerospace engineer with good personal financial security, and I have no twitter account and no plans to run for office, so I can say all this stuff without fear! But plans change. I could imagine plenty of unlikely-but-possible scenarios where I'd enjoy the ability to delete my account, or change my username from "Jackson Wagner" to something more discreet like "LongtermistResearcher", or lower my posts' prominence in search engine results.

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EA Forum Feature request: More privacy features

by niloyew917@

Feb 15 20221 min read 6

22

Building effective altruismEffective Altruism Forum

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EA Forum Feature request: More privacy features

Why?

Feature requested

6 comments

tl;dr, request for more features that allow people to interact with the forum privately

Why?

This forum's current culture of complete epistemic humility, honesty and openness runs counter to a lot of professional cultures.

A person in a professional culture may want to not disclose some sensitive opinions of theirs. This could be a political leaning towards left or right. It could be revealling motivations or vulnerabilities - for instance if someone dicloses they're actually more interested in things other than what they claimed in their career. It could even be something extreme like discussion over AI alignment or infohazards, which a person cannot speak publicly about because they're in a position of authority on those issues.

There may also occassionally be reasons for someone to be deceptive for good reason in their professional life. And project more confidence than is epistemically honest.

All of this matters more to people who have more influence and authority, which is exactly who the EA forum may benefit from more interaction with. They currently would choose to limit their interaction with such forums to be on the safe side. Privacy features could change this.

Feature requested

- ability to delete account and all posts/comments

- ability to delete account but leave posts/comments up

- ability to change username

- ability to disable profile from search indexing (and ensure the subdomain or link alloted reflects changed username)

- ability to disable posts from search indexing

- ability to download user data

- ability to create account without linking an email

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Sarah ChengFeb 15 202225

Thanks for providing feedback on the Forum! I just wanted to clarify some of the specific features you requested.

ability to delete account and all posts/comments
- We can do this for you if you contact us.
ability to delete account but leave posts/comments up
- We can do this for you if you contact us.
ability to change username
- You can now do this from your account settings page! Though you only get one change, after that you'll have to contact us to change it again.
ensure the subdomain or link alloted reflects changed username
- We can do this for you if you contact us.
ability to disable profile from search indexing
- We can do this for you if you contact us.
ability to disable posts from search indexing
- We can do this for you if you contact us.

We really appreciate hearing from folks. We keep an eye on the Forum feature suggestion thread, so please feel free to post suggestions there.

Charles HeFeb 15 202212

Aiight.

To onlookers reading this, to the degree that these are designed to erase forum content to prevent public discoverability, you should know that these are effectively impossible in some sense:

- ability to delete account and all posts/comments
- ability to delete account but leave posts/comments up
- ability to change username
- ability to disable profile from search indexing (and ensure the subdomain or link alloted reflects changed username)
- ability to disable posts from search indexing

For example, this project itself makes this impossible.

In fact, much simpler actions, such as running a Python snippet I could provide, could download much of this information in <5 minutes on an office computer.

I write this for "personal deontological reasons" basically, however the availability and permanence of this information is not due to me. For example, consider the situation if one had information about other, non-EA entities collecting this information (which might suggest one reason to collect this, of many).

Note that this situation cannot be prevented by shutting down the API (e.g. array of scraping residential proxies).

Separately and additionally, much more information is available than might be obvious, again using just the publicly available information on the forum.

In addition to "deontological" reasons, one reason I comment is that I want to discourage adding duties or tasks to the EA forum development team, since this might often not actually do the thing you want.

alex lawsenFeb 15 20226

Without having thought at all about the potential downsides, those all seem like plausibly useful features. Having said that, you're allowed to create an anonymous or pseudonymous account, people frequently do, and creating a new email address isn't hard.

Is there a reason I'm missing that means that these features would give people a substantial advantage over just creating an account with a non-identifiable name?

Jackson WagnerFeb 15 202218

praised an essay written by Peter Thiel (increasingly a right-wing figure demonized by NYT)
talked about what Nick Bostrom's "Vulnerable World Hypothesis" might have looked like in an alternate history where nuclear weapons had been easier to build (which could easily be smeared into something crazy like claiming I support a police/surveillance state in the real world)
pooh-poohed the idea of Israel/Palestine activism from an importance-tractability-neglectedness perspective (for which I won a Forum Prize for promoting friendly, polite discourse norms! But that might not carry much cred with the median America voter or progressive activist...)
I'm pretty sure that expressing literally any opinion whatsoever on philosophical population ethics questions like the Repugnant Conclusion is politically toxic and would be described by sufficiently cynical journalists as "eugenics", no matter if you accept the Repugnant Conclusion or reject it or anything in between.

micFeb 15 20222

Based on my very limited understanding of the GDPR, it's possible that some of these features (like the ability to delete one's account and all posts) are legally required, given that a) some users are EU citizens and b) many users have their name (which is personally identifying information) in their username. Well, I guess to be GDPR-compliant, you don't need these to be automated features; it should be okay if EA Forum administrators are able to manually, e.g., delete all posts by an EU user, within one month after they request it.

Charles HeFeb 15 20220

A person in a professional culture may want to not disclose some sensitive opinions of theirs. This could be a political leaning towards left or right. It could be revealling motivations or vulnerabilities - for instance if someone dicloses they're actually more interested in things other than what they claimed in their career. It could even be something extreme like discussion over AI alignment or infohazards, which a person cannot speak publicly about because they're in a position of authority on those issues.
There may also occassionally be reasons for someone to be deceptive for good reason in their professional life. And project more confidence than is epistemically honest.
All of this matters more to people who have more influence and authority, which is exactly who the EA forum may benefit from more interaction with. They currently would choose to limit their interaction with such forums to be on the safe side. Privacy features could change this.

Yeah, this isn't really true.

The most relevant situation might be for a small group of people who join and briefly make "magisterial" comments with great depth and perspective. This is some of the most valuable and unique engagement the forum gets.

These people giving magisterial perspective are usually senior and are basically trained to communicate and present themselves. In some sense, it is their duty and wish to use their persona in this way.

So things are kind of exactly the opposite of the perspective in this post.

For established EAs in a position of authority who want to say something about "AI alignment or infohazards", there are several channels that they can act or dissent, and I don't think the EA forum is a large part of that. It's also trivial to create a new forum account, and a much more difficult task to really try to conceal their identity.