I mostly agree with your analysis; especially the point about 1 (that the more likely I think my thoughts are to be wrong, the lower cost it is to share them).
I understand that there are good reasons for discussions to be private, but can you elaborate on why we’d want discussions about privacy to be private?
Most examples here have the difficulty that I can’t share them without paying the costs, but here’s one that seems pretty normal:
Suppose someone is a student and wants to be hired later as a policy analyst for governments, and believes that governments care strongly about past affiliations and beliefs. Then it might make sense for them to censor themselves in public under their real name because of potential negative consequences of things they said when young. However, any statement of the form “I specifically want to hide my views on X” made under their real name has similar possible negative consequences, because it’s an explicit admission that the person has something to hide.
Currently, people hiding their unpopular opinions to not face career consequences is fairly standard, and so it’s not that damning to say “I think this norm is sensible” or maybe even “I follow this norm,” but it seems like it would have been particularly awkward to be first person to explicitly argue for that norm.
I mostly agree with your analysis; especially the point about 1 (that the more likely I think my thoughts are to be wrong, the lower cost it is to share them).
Most examples here have the difficulty that I can’t share them without paying the costs, but here’s one that seems pretty normal:
Suppose someone is a student and wants to be hired later as a policy analyst for governments, and believes that governments care strongly about past affiliations and beliefs. Then it might make sense for them to censor themselves in public under their real name because of potential negative consequences of things they said when young. However, any statement of the form “I specifically want to hide my views on X” made under their real name has similar possible negative consequences, because it’s an explicit admission that the person has something to hide.
Currently, people hiding their unpopular opinions to not face career consequences is fairly standard, and so it’s not that damning to say “I think this norm is sensible” or maybe even “I follow this norm,” but it seems like it would have been particularly awkward to be first person to explicitly argue for that norm.