This is a tangent, but I made this anon account because I’m about to voice an unpopular opinion, but the people who dug up su3su2u1′s identity also verified his credentials. If you look at the shlevy post that questioned his credentials, there is an ETA at the bottom that says “I have personally verified that he does in fact have a physics phd and does currently work in data science, consistent with his claims on tumblr.” His pseudo-anonymous expertise was more vetted than most.
His sins were sockpuppeting on other rationalists blogs not lying about credentials. Although, full disclosure I only read the HPMOR review and the physics posts. We shouldn’t get too wrapped up in these ideas of persecution.
su3su2u1 told the truth about some credentials that he had, and lied by claiming that he had other credentials and relevant experiences which he did not actually have. For example:
he used a sock puppet claiming to have a Math PhD in to criticize MIRI’s math papers, and to talk about how they sound to someone in the field. He is not, in fact, in the field.
and:
when he argued that allowing MIRI in AI risk spheres would turn people away from EA, a lot of people pointed out that he wasn’t interested in effective altruism anyway and should butt out of other people’s problems. Then one of his sock puppets said that he was an EA who attended EA conferences but was so disgusted by the focus on MIRI that he would never attend another conference again. This gave false credibility to his narrative of MIRI driving away real EAs.
This is a tangent, but I made this anon account because I’m about to voice an unpopular opinion, but the people who dug up su3su2u1′s identity also verified his credentials. If you look at the shlevy post that questioned his credentials, there is an ETA at the bottom that says “I have personally verified that he does in fact have a physics phd and does currently work in data science, consistent with his claims on tumblr.” His pseudo-anonymous expertise was more vetted than most.
His sins were sockpuppeting on other rationalists blogs not lying about credentials. Although, full disclosure I only read the HPMOR review and the physics posts. We shouldn’t get too wrapped up in these ideas of persecution.
su3su2u1 told the truth about some credentials that he had, and lied by claiming that he had other credentials and relevant experiences which he did not actually have. For example:
and: