I'd like to take a moment to mourn what the discourse doesn't have.
It's unfortunate that we don't trust eachother.
There will be no enumeration by me right now (you're encouraged to try in the comments) of the vastly different types of anonymous forum participation. The variance in reasons people have for not committing posts and comments is broad, and I would miss at least one.
Separately, I'd like to take a moment to mourn the fact that this short note about movement drama can be expected to generate more comments than my effortposts about my actual work can hope to get.
But I think it's important to point out, for anyone who hasn't noticed yet, that the presence of burner accounts is a signal we're failing at something.
Think of how much more this excellent comment of Linch's would have meant if the OP was out and proud.
I would like to say that I feel like a coward when I hold my tongue for reputational considerations, without anyone who's utilized a burner account hearing me and responding with "so you're saying I'm a coward". There are too many reasons out there for people to partake in burner accounts for me to say that.
I'm normally deeply sympathetic to romantic discussions of the ancient internet values, in which anonymity was a weapon against the biases of status and demographic. I usually lament the identityfication of the internet that comes up around the time of facebook. But there is a grave race to the bottom of integrity standards when we tolerate infringements on anyone's ability - or indeed their inclination - to tell the truth as they see it and own the consequences of standing up and saying it.
I'm much more saying "if burner account users are correctly or rationally responding to the environment (with respect to whatever risk tolerance they have), then that's a signal to fix the environment" than I am saying "burner account users are not correct or rational". But I think at the margin, some of the burnerified comments I've seen have crossed the line into, I say as I resist a perceptible urge to say behind a burner account, actual cowardice.
I'm concerned that there's an information cascade going on. That is, some claims were made about people being negatively affected by having posted public criticism; as a result some people made critical posts anonymously; that reinforces the perception that the original claim is true; more people post anonymously; the cycle continues.
But I just roll to disbelieve that people facing bad consequences for posting criticism is a serious problem. I can totally believe that it has happened at some point, but I'd be very surprised if it's widespread. Especially given how mild some of the stuff that's getting anonymously posted is!
So I think there's a risk that we meme ourselves into thinking there's an object level problem when there actually isn't. I would love to know what if any actual examples we have of this happening.
This is true. Another reason I think public fears of professional retaliation are overstated is that "I'm afraid of professional retaliation" is generally taken as a legitimate reason to hide, whereas lots of other fears are not, and so many other fears get justified in terms that will be well-received. Like, if saying "I'm posting anonymously because I'm afraid of being looked at funny" is seen as cowardly but saying "I'm posting anonymously because I'm afraid of professional retaliation" is seen as sympathetic, then I expect both types of people will claim to fear professional retaliation.
(I do think EA institutions have a totally-normal-for-white-collar-professional degree of retaliation for not toeing the line. I just think the discourse here overweights how much of it comes from, like, posts on this forum, whereas all the cases I know about were because of more substantive causes like materially supporting a disfavored institution, or normal bureaucratic power struggles, or something.)
I find some of the comments here a bit implausible and unrealistic.
What people write online will often affect their reputation, positively or negatively. It may not necessarily mean they, e.g. have no chance of getting an EA job, but there are many other reputational consequences.
I also don't think that updating one's views of someone based on what they write on the EA Forum is necessarily always wrong (even though there are no doubt many updates that are unfair or unwarranted).
Here's my take for why this might not be a serious issue:
It's very common in other forums I'm a part of for literally everyone except me to be various levels of pseudonymous and I find it pretty rare that people use their real name, especially for giving spicy takes that people disagree with. I'm actually pretty pleasantly surprised by the number of people in EA who give spicy takes with their real name attached.
Likewise, I think it's pretty natural to want to be able to speak unfiltered without having to worry about how what you say will affect your reputation, either rightly or wrongly. Especially given how bad tail risks to your reputation can be, I understand the fear to use a real name to challenge the status quo and I'm super glad people still have an outlet to give critical spicy feedback. Jeff Kaufman writes about Responsible Transparency Consumption - plus what Holden said - and this is a norm I very much value and I think is higher in EA than elsewhere, but still not a guarantee.
That being said, I am definitely super duper concerned by the number of people who say something literally like "posting anonymously because I don't want to lose out on jobs or tank my ca... (read more)
In my personal experience most EA orgs have been extremely tolerant of even harsh criticism. I would guess that criticising CEA, MIRI, CSER, GWWC, LTFF, EVF, CE, OP, GCRI, APPGFG, GAP (and probably others I have forgotten) has been overall positive for me. I don't know of any other movement where leaders are as willing to roll with the punches as they are here and I think they deserve a lot of credit for that.
On the other hand, ACE did attempt to cancel and defund Anima because of some hot takes on facebook, so maybe things are worse in the animal welfare side of things that I am less familiar with.
I agree with your first paragraph. I disagree about your read of the ACE <> Anima situation, but there's no need to re-litigate that here. Regardless of your feelings about the Anima situation, I do think ACE has been criticized so many times in so many different ways by so many different people and they have been good about it.
This seems incredibly surprising to me. Someone writes the best post in existence on whether mealworms suffer, you are considering hiring them to research invertebrate sentience, and you're like "don't care – your research was posted on the forum so I'm not going to look at it?"
Do you look at anything people have done before working at RP?
Disclaimer: Work at RP, but am not speaking on behalf of RP here or those involved in hiring processes.
I think this is basically accurate for the standard hiring round, depending on what you consider "when hiring". For example, my understanding is that knowledge of an author who has written a post you described would likely contribute to whether RP reaches out to people inviting them to apply for a role (though this bar is much, much lower than whether someone has authored such a post), but these invitation confers no advantage during the hiring process itself, which leans rather heavily on the test task / skills assessment portions of the hiring process (one example here).
RP also aims to not select for knowledge and experience in EA beyond the extent that it is relevant for the specific role they are applying for (and keeping in mind that much of EA knowledge, like other knowledge, can be learned). My personal impression is that having a process of checking EA forum history, even if this was somehow blinded, would risk biasing this in favour of active EAF users in a way that was not reliably predictive for selecting the best candidate.
I have less insight into the processes t... (read more)
Not really. We mainly have people do test tasks. Usually people who have written really good things on the EA Forum also do really well on test tasks anyways.
In the past we have had people submit writing samples and we've graded those. That writing sample could be an EA Forum post. So in that case, a great EA Forum post could directly affect whether you get hired.
Definitely open to this being a bad approach.
The main thing I was trying to get at though is that having downvoted EA Forum comments or participating in some spicy takes doesn't affect RP employment.
I think there might be an important difference between pseudonymous and burner accounts here. I basically have no problem with consistent pseudonymous identities, whereas I share the feeling that having a bunch of throwaway accounts posting anonymous complaints is kind of bad.
Theres at least some evidence to suggest these fears are justified. Take the thankfully scrapped "PELTIV " proposal for tracking conference attendees:
I don't think it's unreasonable to be worried that if people are being tracked for their opinions at conferences, their forum presence might also be. I'll repeat that this proposal was scrapped, but I get why people would be paranoid.
Theres also the allegation in the "doing ea better" post that:
If this is true, then criticising EA orthodoxy might make you less "value aligned" in the eyes of EA decision makers, and cost you real money.
Maybe people have started to use "value-aligned" to mean "agrees with everything we say", but the way I understand it it means "_cares_ about the same things as us". Being value-aligned does not mean agreeing with you about your strategy, or anything else much. In fact, someone posting a critical screed about your organization on the EA forum is probably some decent evidence that they are value-aligned: they cared enough to turn up in their spare time and talk about how you could do things better (implicit: to achieve the goal you both share).
There are definitely some criticisms that suggest that you might not be value-aligned, but for most of the ones I can think of it seems kind of legitimate to take them into account. e.g. "Given that you wrote the post 'Why animal suffering is totally irrelevant', why did you apply to work at ACE?"
So, many things that could be said about PELTIV, but I'm not convinced that filtering for value-alignment filters negatively for criticality, if anything I think it's the opposite.
Yeah in contrast I would generally expect a post called "Statistical errors and a lack of biological expertise mean ACE have massively over-estimated chicken suffering relative to fish" to be a positive signal, even though it is clearly very critical.
I agree with you that filtering for alignment is important. The mainstream non-profit space speaks a lot about filtering for "mission fit" and I think that's a similar concept. Obviously it would be hard to run an animal advocacy org with someone chowing down on chicken sandwiches every day for lunch in the organization cafeteria.
But my hot take for the main place I see this go wrong in EA: Some EAs I have talked to, including some quite senior ones, overuse "this person may be longtermist-adjacent and seem to be well-meaning but they just don't give me enough vibes that they're x-risk motivated and no I did not actually ask them about it or press them about this" -> "this is not a person I will work with" as a chain of reasoning, to the point of excluding people with nuanced views on longtermism (or just confused views who could learn and improve) and this makes the longtermist community more insular and worse. I think PELTIV and such give a similar take of making snap judgements from afar without actually checking them against reality (though there are other clear problems also).
My other take about where this goes wrong is less hot and basically amounts to "EA still ignores outside expertise too much because the experts don't give off enough EA vibes". If I recall correctly, nearly all opinions on wild animal welfare in EA had to be thrown out after discussion with relevant experts.
A few months ago I would have easily agreed with "the view that EA employers are so fragile as to deny job opportunities based on EA Forum hot takes is hopefully greatly exaggerated and very disturbing if not."
However, then I read about the hiring practices at FTX, and significantly updated on this. It's now hard for me to believe that at least some EA employers would not deny job opportunities based on EA forum hot takes!
Where is there info on hiring practices at FTX? I don't remember seeing this and would be interested.
More generally, I would be really interested in hearing about particular examples of people being denied job opportunities in EA roles because of opinions they share on the EA Forum (this would worry me a lot).
The only rumor I've heard is that someone was once denied an opportunity because they were deemed not a longtermist and the only way the org could've known the person was not a longtermist was from their public writing, and I personally wasn't sold that strongly holding longtermist values was a key requirement for the position. That being said, I've only heard it from the person who didn't get hired and possible that I may be substantially misunderstanding the situation.
I definitely would like to hear other people's views on this, from burner accounts if need be.
FTX seems to have been a trash fire in many different respects at once, but the above sentence seems super hyperbolic (you hope zero practices at FTX are common at EA orgs??), and I don't know what the non-hyperbolic version of it in your mind is.
I'm somewhat wary of revisionist history to make it sound like FTX was more wildly disjoint from EA culture or social networks than it in fact was, at least in the absence of concrete details about what it was actually like to work there.
The base rate I have in mind is that FTX had access to a gusher of easy money, run by young energetic people with minimal oversight and a limited usage of formalized hiring systems. That produced a situation where top management's opinion was the critical factor in who got promoted or hired into influential positions. The more that other EA organizations resemble FTX, the stronger I would think this.
I have been using a burner account recently as opposed to my account with my real name following the Bostrom controversy. That decision is not motivated by any fear of reprisal within EA communities; at my local EA group, I am perfectly happy to espouse the beliefs that I'd want anonymity for on here.
The reasons for doing so are as follows:
Potential Costs: EA seems to be under a microscope in the current landscape (See Bostrom, FTX, recent Time article on SA). This forum is not viewed only by people with beliefs in charitable understanding and respect for evidence-driven conclusions. If I say something "controversial" to an EA and provide sufficient evidence, I have much more confidence that, even if they disagree, they will be understanding of my thought process. I have no fear of social costs among EAs; not so with journalists trawling for someone to quote as a "eugenicist" or other pejorative. This and showing up as a Google result could have severe costs to my reputation and life outcomes.
Lack of Potential Benefits: Because of EAs high decoupling norms, I don't think that attaching my real name to posts provides much marginal value. In my experience and viewing others', people ... (read more)
Holden Karnofsky on evaluating people based on public discourse:
... (read more)Buck seems to be consistently missing the point.
Although leaders may say "I won't judge or punish you if you disagree with me", listeners are probably correct to interpret that as cheap talk. We have abundant evidence from society and history that those in positions of power can and do act against them. A few remarks to the contrary should not convince people they are not at risk.
Someone who genuinely wanted to be open to criticism would recognise and address the fears people have about speaking up. Buck's comment of "the fact that people want to hide their identities is not strong evidence they need to" struck me as highly dismissive. If people do fear something, saying"well, you shouldn't be scared" doesn't generally make them less scared, but it does convey that you don't care about them - you won't expend effort to address their fears.
GiveWell liked your criticism so much they literally started a contest to get more like it and gave you tens of thousands of dollars.
I'm trying to read your comment charitably but come on. Saying this quote is "cheap talk" when you've personally profited from it not being cheap talk is unfair to the point of being actively deceptive.
But Buck wasn't saying you shouldn't be scared? He was just saying that high burner count isn't much evidence for this.
Precisely, I think he was claiming that p(lots of burners | hiding identity is important) and p(lots of burners | hiding identity isn't important) are pretty close.
I interpreted this as a pretty decoupled claim. (I do think a disclaimer might have been good.)
Now, this second comment (which is the root comment here) does try to argue you shouldn't be worried, at least from Holden and somewhat from buck.
Hello Ivy! I think you've missed at least one scenario, which is where you use your real name, your criticism is not well received, you have identified yourself as a troublemaker, and those in positions of power torpedo you. Surely this is a possibility? Unless people think it's a serious possibility, it's hard to make sense of why people write things anonymously, or just stay silent.
I think there's two separate dynamics at play here:
I think we could do more to avoid punishing opinions perceived wrong. An example of punishing behavior at play is my own comment two days ago. I made it while being too upset for my own good and lashed out at someone for making a completely reasonable point.
I don't blame the user I replied to for wanting an anonymous account when that is the response they can expect.
Secondly, I suspect that people are vastly overrating just how much anybody cares about who says what on the forum.
While I understand why someone making a direct attack on some organization or person might want to stay anonymous, most things I see posted from anonymous accounts seem to just be regular opinions that are phrased with more hostility than the mean.
It's a bit weird to me why somebody would think that a few comments on the EA forum would do all that much to ones reputation. At ea globals, at most, I've had a few people say "oh you are the one who wrote that snakebite post? Cool!" and that's about it.
It all feels very paranoid to me. I'm way too busy worrying about whether I look fat in this t-shirt to notice or care that somebody wrote a com... (read more)
I don't know. Reading the post from the burner account that wants to get rid of weird people, and who thinks my wife is a poisonous creep because she views inviting coworkers to BDSM parties is a completely reasonable thing to do made me actually understand for the first time the emotions that underly parts of cancel culture.
This both makes me think that my instinct that he shouldn't be hired for anything should be taken less seriously, and makes me think that I took cancel culture style concerns about simply not wanting to work near a person who has certain attitudes about the sort of person that you are actually should be taken at least somewhat seriously.
It probably was wise for him to go anonymous before saying that weird people like me are generally bad actors who do not deserve an assumption that we are speaking in good faith (I know that is not what he actually said. That is what it feels like he said, and I suspect if I ever was in a position where I knew who he was, and was deciding whether he should get it, I would not be able to ignore my sense that he is attacking me personally and my right to exist, and assess him in the way that I would look at other candidates -- and this is despite knowing that my reading of what he said is uncharitable).
Could you explain why you and your wife think inviting coworkers to a BDSM party is not a problem? I am genuinely curious for your perspective.
I think people might be imagining some pretty different situations? Compare:
Employee A approaches new hire B at lunch and says "I'm putting together a BDSM party this weekend, let me know if that's the sort of thing you might be into."
Employees A and B have become close over a long time working together. They talk about a lot of things, and have gradually become more comfortable sharing details about their personal lives. At this point they both know that the other is into BDSM, and A invites B to a BDSM party they're organizing.
[EDIT: in both cases imagine the employees are at the same level, and not in each other's management chains]
There's a continuum from 1 to 2, and while I do expect some of the disagreement here is about whether to treat BDSM parties as different from other social activities (if #1 was about a board game party then it would probably be widely viewed as welcoming) my guess is most of it is how much information people are imagining A has about whether B would like to receive an invitation?
BDSM is not primarily about sex, and sex mostly does not happen at BDSM parties, at least not the ones that I've been at. A sex party is a different thing. The impression I get from your comment is that you are not very familiar with the BDSM scene -- though I might be wrong. There isn't any tell in it that shows that you definitely are ignorant about a basic fact, it is just a vibe I'm feeling.
In either case, as far as I know, neither of us work at an EA org, and from your comment it seems like you imagine that what happens at these parties is very different from what I imagine happens at them (which is not to say I'm correct, they probably occur in the Bay Area or London, where the scene is very different, and vastly bigger than where I live).
Also, I think we have a different set of priors here about sex, relationships and careers.
And again, I am self employed, and have been for the entire time I've earned meaningful money, and I'm male, so my intuitive pov is likely missing important things. And also, my resistance to changing norms in EA around sex is not about thinking that there shouldn't be a norm where managers don't sleep with subordinates in EA orgs -- there p... (read more)
On the other hand we're talking about situations where someone is inviting their coworkers to BDSM parties. While (as I said above) I think this can be ok if the asker already knows the askee is into this kind of thing, consider the more dubious cases where the asker doesn't:
A: I'm putting together a BDSM party this weekend, let me know if that's the sort of thing you might be into.
B: Um, no thanks.
How B feels here depends mostly on their likely-uninformed understanding of what happens at these parties.
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.
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".
If anyone wants me to validate their otherwise anonymous account I'd be happy to do that.
I think as this place becomes a place that gets quoted in external publications more it will be harder to speak freely as a named account without a lot of practice, a very thick skin. I don't really know what to do here.
I have spent so long on twitter that I red team almost everything I say for "being able to be taken out of context" even while trying to be very honest and straightforward. If one hasn't done this work, then it seems easy to avoid the anxiety of being quoted as "a forum commenter, Adam Parsons thought" by saying things anonymously.
I mean, perhaps easier said than done, but some of my main advice would be: grow a thicker skin, and spend less time anxiously refreshing social media or focusing your attention on low-quality hit pieces.
EA is prominent enough now that we will in fact get a lot less good done in the world if we devote a day or two to reading and debating every news article that mentions us. (Bad-but-illustrative example: Imagine trying to solve a physics problem while also feeling a panicky impulse to read every news article in the world that mentions physicists.)
Writing under stable pseudonyms also seems like it captures a lot of the value of writing stably under your real name.
That... sounds incredibly unhealthy to me, and makes me think we need better alternatives to Twitter -- some platform where it's easier to just ignore haters and talk to people who are there to do collaborative truth-seeking and good-faith meeting of minds.
If EAs feel pressure to do that level of red-teaming whenever they post on Twitter, I'd suggest they strongly consider not using Twitter.
Something to note is that by posting my opinions I do in fact reveal how dumb I am. I mean, in terms of size to wrongness ratio, I've got to be doing pretty well :P. I think commenting under your real name does have real costs, people message me and go "no that was dumb" about twice a week across various media.
Probably if I wanted better job prospects I would hide this better. I have literally been rejected from jobs before for saying "I'm concerned that I might do a bad job here" and them being like "we didn't feel like you wanted it". But I guess I take honesty (I was genuinely uncertain) over "get the best jobs you can". You're welcome.
For most people, the benefit that accrues to you from signing your real name to a controversial post seems pretty minimal. Using one's name creates some increase in author credibility, and thus effectiveness -- although less so on certain types of posts, and where the author doesn't have much of a reputation either way. Otherwise, there seems to be little incentive to do it if you think your post may be unfavorably received by a significant number of people. So even if you assign only a small probability to "postings of the sort I am making will have adverse career effects for me," the decision of whether to sign your post is likely to be EV-negative to you.
(There's also the Google effect, although that can be solved with the use of a consistent psuedonym that is not publicly linked to one's name.)
I disagree, I think that making controversial posts under your real name can improve your reputation in the EA community in ways that help your ability to do good. For example, I think I've personally benefited a lot from saying things that were controversial under my real name over the years (including before I worked at EA orgs).
I think posting under pseudonyms makes sense for EAs who are young[1], who are unsure what they want to do with their lives, and/or people who have a decent chance of wanting jobs that require discretion in the future, e.g. jobs in politics or government.
I know at least some governance people who likely regret being openly tied with Future Fund and adjacent entities after the recent debacle.
Also in general I'm confused about how the tides of what's "permissible internet dirt to dig up on people" will change in the future. Things might get either better or much worse, and in the worse worlds there's some option value left in making sure our movement doesn't unintentionally taint the futures of some extremely smart, well-meaning, and agentic young people.
That said, I personally prefer pseudonymous account names with a continued history like Larks or AppliedDivinityStudies[2], rather than anonymous accounts that draw attention to their anonymity, like whistleblower1984.
- ^
... (read more)<22? Maybe <25, I'm not sure. One important factor to keep track of is how likely you are to dramatically change your mind in politically relevant ways, e.g. I think if you're currently a
I'm not particularly young anymore, and work in a non-EA field where reputation is a concern, which is a large part of why I post pseudonymously. I think it would be bad if it became the norm that people could only be taken seriously if they posted under their real names, and discussion was reserved for "professional EAs".
Quinn -- I agree that over-use of anonymous & burner accounts is becoming a significant problem in EA Forum (and in social media generally).
To put this in the broader context of cancel culture: there seems to be a common Gen Z/Millennial narrative that says: 'Older established professionals actively seek any possible reason to penalize, ostracize, and harm any younger people who speak up, complain, or criticize any aspect of current practices, systems, and ideas; these older professionals are ruthless, biased, unforgiving, and eager to harm our reputations and careers; they pay enormous attention to everything we say, and they never forget or forgive any criticism; therefore, the only possible response is for us to make our complaints and criticisms from behind the veil of anonymous burner accounts'.
I think that's usually a false, harmful, and self-defeating narrative, and it seems especially inaccurate applied to EA culture. But it's a very useful narrative, because it empowers people to engage in cancel culture, anonymously and self-righteously, hiding behind the moral armor of 'I'm so brave to speak up at all, and look, it's so dangerous to do so that I had to use an a... (read more)
A few relevant thoughts from a Facebook thread of mine yesterday:
... (read more)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.
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,... (read more)
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.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qbcuk8WwFnTZcXTd6/thomas-kwa-s-miri-research-experience?commentId=6eveBXGHb5KbyHoDE
Kurt's comment is shifting my thinking a lot.
Speaking only for ConcernedEAs, we are likely to continue remaining anonymous until costly signals are sent that making deep critiques in public will not damage one's career/funding/social prospects within EA.
We go into more detail in Doing EA Better, most notably here:
... (read more)If ConcernedEAs posted with their real names, would you be less likely to hire them for an EA role? Even if not, would you agree that ConcernedEAs might reasonably draw that conclusion from your comment suggesting they might not belong here?
Obviously, when someone keeps making dummy accounts over and over again to circumvent forum moderation, they should be disabled immediately. (Also, you should stop doing that.)
I've been trying it out for a while now before the posts on why there are burner accounts on the forum during the last few days, though I've been trying out this thing where I've posted lots of stuff most effective altruists may not be willing to post. I cover some of the how and why that is here.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KfwFDkfQFQ4kAurwH/evan_gaensbauer-s-shortform?commentId=EjhBquXGiFEppdecY
I've been meaning to ask if there is anything anyone else thinks I should do with that, so I'm open to suggestions.