We (the LW moderation team) have given Roko a one-week site ban and an indefinite post/topic ban for attempted doxing. We have deleted all comments that revealed real names, and ask that everyone respect the privacy of the people involved.
Naive question: why are the disgruntled ex-employees who seem to have made many serious false allegations the only ones whose ‘privacy’ is being protected here?
The people who were accused at Nonlinear aren’t able to keep their privacy.
The guy (Ben Pace) who published the allegations isn’t keeping his privacy.
But the people who are at the heart of the whole controversy, whose allegations are the whole thing we’ve been discussing at length, are protected by the forum moderators? Why?
This is a genuine question. I don’t understand the ethical or rational principles that you’re applying here.
We can talk about under what conditions revealing the identities of people who’ve made false accusations is appropriate, and about whether that accurately describes anything Alice and/or Chloe have done. But jumping straight to deanonymizing is seriously premature.
Did not Ben instantly deanonymize Spartz and Woods without discussion? I’m not getting banned for saying their names and I’d bet dollars to donuts they would prefer if they were never mentioned by name.
There’s a big difference between arguing that someone shouldn’t be able to stay anonymous, and unilaterally posting names. Arguing against allowing anonymity (without posting names) would not have been against the rules. But, we’re definitely not going to re-derive the philosophy of when anonymity should and shouldn’t be allowed, after names are already posted. The time to argue for an exception was beforehand, not after the fact.
Just to pull on some loose strings here, why was it okay for Ben Pace to unilaterally reveal the names of Kat Woods and Emerson Spartz, but not for Roko to unilaterally reveal the names of Alice and Chloe? Theoretically Ben could have titled his post, “Sharing Information About [Pseudonymous EA Organization]”, and requested the mods enforce anonymity of both parties, right? Is it because Ben’s post was first so we adopt his naming conventions as the default? Is it because Kat and Emerson are “public figures” in some sense? Is it because Alice and Chloe agreed to share information in exchange for anonymity? That was an agreement with Ben. Why do we assume that the agreement between Ben Pace and Alice/Chloe is binding upon LessWrong commenters in general? I agree that it feels wrong to reveal the identities of Alice and/or Chloe without concrete evidence of major wrongdoing, but I don’t think we have a good theoretical framework for why that is.
I agree with asking this question. There’s a worthy journalistic norm against naming victims of sexual assault, and a norm in the other direction in favor of naming individuals charged with a crime. You could justify this by arguing that a criminal ‘forfeits’ the right to remain anonymous, that society has a transparency interest to know who has committed misdeeds. Whereas a victim has not done anything to diminish their default right to privacy.
How you apply these principles to NL depends entirely on who you view as the malefactor (or none/both), and there is demonstrable disagreement from the LW community on this question. So how do you adjudicate which names are ok to post?
I agree that it feels wrong to reveal the identities of Alice and/or Chloe without concrete evidence of major wrongdoing, but I don’t think we have a good theoretical framework for why that is.
Ethically (and pragmatically), you want whistleblowers to have the right to anonymity, or else you’ll learn of much less wrongdoing that you would otherwise, and because whistleblowers are (usually) in a position of lower social power, so anonymity is meant to compensate for that, I suppose.
How do you determine who counts as a whistleblower? The generic definition refers to anyone who discloses insider information with the intent to warn others about potentially illegal or unethical misconduct. By this definition, Kat is a whistleblower because she revealed information about Alice’s history of dishonesty (assuming of course this accusation is correct).
They’re accused, not whistleblowers. They can’t retroactively gain the right to anonymity, since their identities have already been revealed.
They could argue that they became whistleblowers as well, and so they should be retroactively anonymized, but that would interfere with the first whistleblowing accusation (there is no point in whistleblowing against anonymous people), and also they’re (I assume) in a position of comparative power here.
There could be a second whistleblowing accusation made by them (but this time anonymously) against the (this time) deanonymized accuser, but given their (I assume) higher social power, that doesn’t seem appropriate.
Is it because Kat and Emerson are “public figures” in some sense?
Well, yeah. The whole point of Ben’s post was presumably to protect the health of the alignment ecosystem. The integrity/ethical conduct/{other positive adjectives} of AI safety orgs is a public good, and arguably a super important one that justifies hurting individual people. I’ve always viewed the situation as, having to hurt Kat and Emerson is a tragedy, but it is (or at least can be; obviously it’s not if the charges have no merit) justified because of what’s at stake. If they weren’t working in this space, I don’t think Ben’s post would be okay.
Kat and Emerson were well-known in the community and they were accused of something that would cause future harm to EA community members as well. By contrast, Chloe isn’t particularly likely to make future false allegations even based on Nonlinear’s portrayal (I would say). It’s different for Alice, since Nonlinear claim she has a pattern. (But with Alice, we’d at least want someone to talk to Nonlinear in private and verify how reliable they seem about negative info they have about Alice, before simply taking their word for it based on an ominous list of redacted names and redacted specifics of accusations.)
Theoretically Ben could have titled his post, “Sharing Information About [Pseudonymous EA Organization]”, and requested the mods enforce anonymity of both parties, right?
That would miss the point, rendering the post almost useless. The whole point is to prevent future harm.
but not for Roko to unilaterally reveal the names of Alice and Chloe?
Alice and Chloe had Ben, who is a trusted community member, look into their claims. I’d say Ben is at least somewhat “on the hook” for the reliability of the anonymous claims.
By contrast, Roko posted a 100 word summary of the Nonlinear incident that got some large number of net downvotes, so he seems to be particularly poorly informed about what even happened.
By contrast, Roko posted a 100 word summary of the Nonlinear incident that got some large number of net downvotes, so he seems to be particularly poorly informed about what even happened.
Roko posted a request for a summary—he offered his own current and admittedly poorly-informed understanding of the situation, by way of asking for a better version of same. (And he was right about the post he was commenting on being very long.) This is virtuous behavior, and the downvotes were entirely unwarranted.
My point is that I have no evidence that he ended up reading most of the relevant posts in their entirety. I don’t think people who read all the posts in their entirety should just go ahead and unilaterally dox discussion participants, but I feel like people who have only read parts of it (or only secondhand sources) should do it even less.
Also, at the time, I interpreted Roko’s “request for a summary” more as a way for him to sneer at people. His “summary” had a lot of loaded terms and subjective judgments in it. Maybe this is a style thing, but I find that people should only (at most) write summaries like that if they’re already well-informed. (E.g., Zvi’s writing style can be like that, and I find it fine because he’s usually really well-informed. But if I see him make a half-assed take on something he doesn’t seem to be well-informed on, I’d downvote.)
My point is that I have no evidence that he ended up reading most of the relevant posts in their entirety.
Indeed, because they were very long. That was Roko’s complaint!
I don’t think people who read all the posts in their entirety should just go ahead and unilaterally dox discussion participants, but I feel like people who have only read parts of it (or only secondhand sources) should do it even less.
I don’t think “how much of a post has someone read” has any bearing whatever on whether it’s proper to dox anyone.
Also, at the time, I interpreted Roko’s “request for a summary” more as a way for him to sneer at people. His “summary” had a lot of loaded terms and subjective judgments in it.
Neither sneers nor loaded terms (a) make the summary untrue, or (b) bear on whether it’s fine to dox someone.
Now, if the summary was untrue, that’s another matter. But the proper response to that is to reply with a correction—which is exactly what Roko asked for! It would have been easy for someone (including the mods, if they wished) to post a reply saying “nah actually that’s wrong, the situation in fact is [some comparably short but more accurate description]”.
Sneers and loaded terms are, IMO, evidence that the summary is unlikely to be true. It’s not impossible to sneer while having an accurate understanding of the situation, but typically sneering goes along with a lack of interest in the details of whatever one sneers at and a lack of concern for the accuracy of one’s characterization; mechanically, a sneer is a status attack on something the sneerer feels contempt for. It can also be a sign of dishonesty: sneering feels good, so people are generally inclined to lower their epistemic standards when presented with a description of something that makes it sound sneerworthy, and this is a convenient impulse for bad actors to exploit.
Due to these same features, I think they are also evidence that the speaker is, if they dox the target of the sneering, likely to be doing so out of a desire to hurt the target and without careful consideration for whether the ostensible justification for the doxxing is true.
Posting a request would have been fine, and nothing about that request requires or really benefits from including a summary. I don’t see how it’s virtuous to include one, especially one so inaccurate that it adds a lot of heat and noise to the discussion?
Elsewhere in discussions on LW, I have been told, repeatedly, that it’s proper to say what you think your interlocutor meant, if you have any kind of idea or guess, but are not sure or are confused. I don’t see why that principle should suddenly go out the window now, when it’s inconvenient.
I’m not sure if I agree with that principle in general, especially if you have as little context as Roko seemed to, but it also seems pretty different if you’re going back and forth with someone as opposed to making a request for someone to summarize the discourse so far? Like, who is the “interlocutor” you’re referring to in this case?
And then another reason I’m negative on the comment is that I don’t actually think Roko was trying to summarize the discussion as best as he understood it, but was in part trying to mock some of the participants.
Though also note that it’s mostly just heavily disagree voted and not downvoted.
Like, who is the “interlocutor” you’re referring to in this case?
In the phrase “what you think your interlocutor meant”, the interlocutor is the OP, naturally.
The request was directed to the commentariat generally.
And then another reason I’m negative on the comment is that I don’t actually think Roko was trying to summarize the discussion as best as he understood it, but was in part trying to mock some of the participants.
Here’s my attempt at an answer. Note that nothing in this answer is meant to make any claims about the credibility of Ben’s or Nonlinear’s accounts.
Ben Pace wrote a post saying “Hey, you know Kat Woods and Emerson Spartz? The people who run Nonlinear? The people listed on Nonlinear’s website as running it? Well here’s some info about them qua their role as running Nonlinear”. It’s an instance of taking a professional identity and relaying claims about their behaviour under that known identity.
In his post, people using the identities of “Alice” and “Chloe” take the role of Nonlinear employees/contractors/whatever, and talk about stuff they experienced in terms of those roles.
In Nonlinear’s post, they make claims about things related to the identities of “Alice” and “Chloe” behaved in their roles as Nonlinear employees/contractors/whatever.
In all of these instances, you’re taking an identity/reputation someone has established in a domain, and making claims about behaviour associated with that identity in that domain, so that you can keep the reputation of that identity accurate. So you’re not e.g. saying “Hey you know Joe Bloggs, the person who is publicly identified as CEO of NonCone? He actually secretly has Y weird habit in his personal life”—that would be an instance of cross-domain identification.
So: the way revealing Alice and Chloe’s names is different than what Ben did is that it takes an identity established in a domain, and links it to cross-domain information. This is bad because it makes it harder to set up identities in domains the way you want, which is valuable. But it seems like it could be justified if it turned out that Alice was (e.g.) a famous journalist, and that Alice’s claims in Ben’s post are totally false—then, knowing that the journalist did sketchy journalist stuff under the name of Alice would be very relevant to judging their reputation as a journalist.
I don’t think that works. Imagine Pat and Sam had a series of really bad interactions and each thinks the other has done something seriously wrong to the point that other people should avoid interacting with them under some contexts. Sam (though it could have just as easily been Pat) posts publicly first, posting under a pseudonym, naming Pat, and detailing the interactions.
Does this mean that Pat is now permanently unable to use this “post your concerns publicly” community process to warn people about Sam, since if they ever do this, it will clearly link Sam to Sam’s pseudonym?
We (the LW moderation team) have given Roko a one-week site ban and an indefinite post/topic ban for attempted doxing. We have deleted all comments that revealed real names, and ask that everyone respect the privacy of the people involved.
Naive question: why are the disgruntled ex-employees who seem to have made many serious false allegations the only ones whose ‘privacy’ is being protected here?
The people who were accused at Nonlinear aren’t able to keep their privacy.
The guy (Ben Pace) who published the allegations isn’t keeping his privacy.
But the people who are at the heart of the whole controversy, whose allegations are the whole thing we’ve been discussing at length, are protected by the forum moderators? Why?
This is a genuine question. I don’t understand the ethical or rational principles that you’re applying here.
We can talk about under what conditions revealing the identities of people who’ve made false accusations is appropriate, and about whether that accurately describes anything Alice and/or Chloe have done. But jumping straight to deanonymizing is seriously premature.
Did not Ben instantly deanonymize Spartz and Woods without discussion? I’m not getting banned for saying their names and I’d bet dollars to donuts they would prefer if they were never mentioned by name.
There’s a big difference between arguing that someone shouldn’t be able to stay anonymous, and unilaterally posting names. Arguing against allowing anonymity (without posting names) would not have been against the rules. But, we’re definitely not going to re-derive the philosophy of when anonymity should and shouldn’t be allowed, after names are already posted. The time to argue for an exception was beforehand, not after the fact.
Just to pull on some loose strings here, why was it okay for Ben Pace to unilaterally reveal the names of Kat Woods and Emerson Spartz, but not for Roko to unilaterally reveal the names of Alice and Chloe? Theoretically Ben could have titled his post, “Sharing Information About [Pseudonymous EA Organization]”, and requested the mods enforce anonymity of both parties, right? Is it because Ben’s post was first so we adopt his naming conventions as the default? Is it because Kat and Emerson are “public figures” in some sense? Is it because Alice and Chloe agreed to share information in exchange for anonymity? That was an agreement with Ben. Why do we assume that the agreement between Ben Pace and Alice/Chloe is binding upon LessWrong commenters in general? I agree that it feels wrong to reveal the identities of Alice and/or Chloe without concrete evidence of major wrongdoing, but I don’t think we have a good theoretical framework for why that is.
I agree with asking this question. There’s a worthy journalistic norm against naming victims of sexual assault, and a norm in the other direction in favor of naming individuals charged with a crime. You could justify this by arguing that a criminal ‘forfeits’ the right to remain anonymous, that society has a transparency interest to know who has committed misdeeds. Whereas a victim has not done anything to diminish their default right to privacy.
How you apply these principles to NL depends entirely on who you view as the malefactor (or none/both), and there is demonstrable disagreement from the LW community on this question. So how do you adjudicate which names are ok to post?
Ethically (and pragmatically), you want whistleblowers to have the right to anonymity, or else you’ll learn of much less wrongdoing that you would otherwise, and because whistleblowers are (usually) in a position of lower social power, so anonymity is meant to compensate for that, I suppose.
How do you determine who counts as a whistleblower? The generic definition refers to anyone who discloses insider information with the intent to warn others about potentially illegal or unethical misconduct. By this definition, Kat is a whistleblower because she revealed information about Alice’s history of dishonesty (assuming of course this accusation is correct).
They’re accused, not whistleblowers. They can’t retroactively gain the right to anonymity, since their identities have already been revealed.
They could argue that they became whistleblowers as well, and so they should be retroactively anonymized, but that would interfere with the first whistleblowing accusation (there is no point in whistleblowing against anonymous people), and also they’re (I assume) in a position of comparative power here.
There could be a second whistleblowing accusation made by them (but this time anonymously) against the (this time) deanonymized accuser, but given their (I assume) higher social power, that doesn’t seem appropriate.
L’Ésswrong, c’est moi.
Well, yeah. The whole point of Ben’s post was presumably to protect the health of the alignment ecosystem. The integrity/ethical conduct/{other positive adjectives} of AI safety orgs is a public good, and arguably a super important one that justifies hurting individual people. I’ve always viewed the situation as, having to hurt Kat and Emerson is a tragedy, but it is (or at least can be; obviously it’s not if the charges have no merit) justified because of what’s at stake. If they weren’t working in this space, I don’t think Ben’s post would be okay.
Why not protect the EAs from a bpd liar who accuses everybody she comes into contact with of mistreatment and abuse?
See my comment here.
Kat and Emerson were well-known in the community and they were accused of something that would cause future harm to EA community members as well. By contrast, Chloe isn’t particularly likely to make future false allegations even based on Nonlinear’s portrayal (I would say). It’s different for Alice, since Nonlinear claim she has a pattern. (But with Alice, we’d at least want someone to talk to Nonlinear in private and verify how reliable they seem about negative info they have about Alice, before simply taking their word for it based on an ominous list of redacted names and redacted specifics of accusations.)
That would miss the point, rendering the post almost useless. The whole point is to prevent future harm.
Alice and Chloe had Ben, who is a trusted community member, look into their claims. I’d say Ben is at least somewhat “on the hook” for the reliability of the anonymous claims.
By contrast, Roko posted a 100 word summary of the Nonlinear incident that got some large number of net downvotes, so he seems to be particularly poorly informed about what even happened.
Roko posted a request for a summary—he offered his own current and admittedly poorly-informed understanding of the situation, by way of asking for a better version of same. (And he was right about the post he was commenting on being very long.) This is virtuous behavior, and the downvotes were entirely unwarranted.
My point is that I have no evidence that he ended up reading most of the relevant posts in their entirety. I don’t think people who read all the posts in their entirety should just go ahead and unilaterally dox discussion participants, but I feel like people who have only read parts of it (or only secondhand sources) should do it even less.
Also, at the time, I interpreted Roko’s “request for a summary” more as a way for him to sneer at people. His “summary” had a lot of loaded terms and subjective judgments in it. Maybe this is a style thing, but I find that people should only (at most) write summaries like that if they’re already well-informed. (E.g., Zvi’s writing style can be like that, and I find it fine because he’s usually really well-informed. But if I see him make a half-assed take on something he doesn’t seem to be well-informed on, I’d downvote.)
Indeed, because they were very long. That was Roko’s complaint!
I don’t think “how much of a post has someone read” has any bearing whatever on whether it’s proper to dox anyone.
Neither sneers nor loaded terms (a) make the summary untrue, or (b) bear on whether it’s fine to dox someone.
Now, if the summary was untrue, that’s another matter. But the proper response to that is to reply with a correction—which is exactly what Roko asked for! It would have been easy for someone (including the mods, if they wished) to post a reply saying “nah actually that’s wrong, the situation in fact is [some comparably short but more accurate description]”.
Sneers and loaded terms are, IMO, evidence that the summary is unlikely to be true. It’s not impossible to sneer while having an accurate understanding of the situation, but typically sneering goes along with a lack of interest in the details of whatever one sneers at and a lack of concern for the accuracy of one’s characterization; mechanically, a sneer is a status attack on something the sneerer feels contempt for. It can also be a sign of dishonesty: sneering feels good, so people are generally inclined to lower their epistemic standards when presented with a description of something that makes it sound sneerworthy, and this is a convenient impulse for bad actors to exploit.
Due to these same features, I think they are also evidence that the speaker is, if they dox the target of the sneering, likely to be doing so out of a desire to hurt the target and without careful consideration for whether the ostensible justification for the doxxing is true.
Posting a request would have been fine, and nothing about that request requires or really benefits from including a summary. I don’t see how it’s virtuous to include one, especially one so inaccurate that it adds a lot of heat and noise to the discussion?
Elsewhere in discussions on LW, I have been told, repeatedly, that it’s proper to say what you think your interlocutor meant, if you have any kind of idea or guess, but are not sure or are confused. I don’t see why that principle should suddenly go out the window now, when it’s inconvenient.
I’m not sure if I agree with that principle in general, especially if you have as little context as Roko seemed to, but it also seems pretty different if you’re going back and forth with someone as opposed to making a request for someone to summarize the discourse so far? Like, who is the “interlocutor” you’re referring to in this case?
And then another reason I’m negative on the comment is that I don’t actually think Roko was trying to summarize the discussion as best as he understood it, but was in part trying to mock some of the participants.
Though also note that it’s mostly just heavily disagree voted and not downvoted.
In the phrase “what you think your interlocutor meant”, the interlocutor is the OP, naturally.
The request was directed to the commentariat generally.
The two are not incompatible!
Here’s my attempt at an answer. Note that nothing in this answer is meant to make any claims about the credibility of Ben’s or Nonlinear’s accounts.
Ben Pace wrote a post saying “Hey, you know Kat Woods and Emerson Spartz? The people who run Nonlinear? The people listed on Nonlinear’s website as running it? Well here’s some info about them qua their role as running Nonlinear”. It’s an instance of taking a professional identity and relaying claims about their behaviour under that known identity.
In his post, people using the identities of “Alice” and “Chloe” take the role of Nonlinear employees/contractors/whatever, and talk about stuff they experienced in terms of those roles.
In Nonlinear’s post, they make claims about things related to the identities of “Alice” and “Chloe” behaved in their roles as Nonlinear employees/contractors/whatever.
In all of these instances, you’re taking an identity/reputation someone has established in a domain, and making claims about behaviour associated with that identity in that domain, so that you can keep the reputation of that identity accurate. So you’re not e.g. saying “Hey you know Joe Bloggs, the person who is publicly identified as CEO of NonCone? He actually secretly has Y weird habit in his personal life”—that would be an instance of cross-domain identification.
So: the way revealing Alice and Chloe’s names is different than what Ben did is that it takes an identity established in a domain, and links it to cross-domain information. This is bad because it makes it harder to set up identities in domains the way you want, which is valuable. But it seems like it could be justified if it turned out that Alice was (e.g.) a famous journalist, and that Alice’s claims in Ben’s post are totally false—then, knowing that the journalist did sketchy journalist stuff under the name of Alice would be very relevant to judging their reputation as a journalist.
I don’t think that works. Imagine Pat and Sam had a series of really bad interactions and each thinks the other has done something seriously wrong to the point that other people should avoid interacting with them under some contexts. Sam (though it could have just as easily been Pat) posts publicly first, posting under a pseudonym, naming Pat, and detailing the interactions.
Does this mean that Pat is now permanently unable to use this “post your concerns publicly” community process to warn people about Sam, since if they ever do this, it will clearly link Sam to Sam’s pseudonym?