It confuses me that I seem to be the first person to talk much about this on either LW or EA Forum, given that there must be people who have been exposed to the current political environment earlier or to a greater extent than me. On the other hand, all my posts/comments on the subject have generally been upvoted on both forums, and nobody has specifically said that I’m being too alarmist. One possible explanation for nobody else raising an alarm about this is that they’re afraid of the current political climate and they’re not as “cancel-proof” as I am, or don’t feel that they have as much leeway to talk about politics-adjacent issues here as I do.
I think Scott put it best when he said:
No, you don’t understand. It’s not just the predictable and natural reputational consequences of having some embarrassing material in a branded space. It’s enemy action.
Every Twitter influencer who wants to profit off of outrage culture is going to be posting 24-7 about how the New York Times endorses pedophilia. Breitbart or some other group that doesn’t like the Times for some reason will publish article after article on New York Times‘ secret pro-pedophile agenda. Allowing any aspect of your brand to come anywhere near something unpopular and taboo is like a giant Christmas present for people who hate you, people who hate everybody and will take whatever targets of opportunity present themselves, and a thousand self-appointed moral crusaders and protectors of the public virtue. It doesn’t matter if taboo material makes up 1% of your comment section; it will inevitably make up 100% of what people hear about your comment section and then of what people think is in your comment section. Finally, it will make up 100% of what people associate with you and your brand. The Chinese Robber Fallacy is a harsh master; all you need is a tiny number of cringeworthy comments, and your political enemies, power-hungry opportunists, and 4channers just in it for the lulz can convince everyone that your entire brand is about being pro-pedophile, catering to the pedophilia demographic, and providing a platform for pedophile supporters. And if you ban the pedophiles, they’ll do the same thing for the next-most-offensive opinion in your comments, and then the next-most-offensive, until you’ve censored everything except “Our benevolent leadership really is doing a great job today, aren’t they?” and the comment section becomes a mockery of its original goal.
So let me tell you about my experience hosting the Culture War thread.
(“hosting” isn’t entirely accurate. The Culture War thread was hosted on the r/slatestarcodex subreddit, which I did not create and do not own. I am an honorary moderator of that subreddit, but aside from the very occasional quick action against spam nobody else caught, I do not actively play a part in its moderation. Still, people correctly determined that I was probably the weakest link, and chose me as the target.)
People settled on a narrative. The Culture War thread was made up entirely of homophobic transphobic alt-right neo-Nazis. I freely admit there were people who were against homosexuality in the thread (according to my survey, 13%), people who opposed using trans people’s preferred pronouns (according to my survey, 9%), people who identified as alt-right (7%), and a single person who identified as a neo-Nazi (who as far as I know never posted about it). Less outrageous ideas were proportionally more popular: people who were mostly feminists but thought there were differences between male and female brains, people who supported the fight against racial discrimination but thought could be genetic differences between races. All these people definitely existed, some of them in droves. All of them had the right to speak; sometimes I sympathized with some of their points. If this had been the complaint, I would have admitted to it right away. If the New York Times can’t avoid attracting these people to its comment section, no way r/ssc is going to manage it.
But instead it was always that the the thread was “dominated by” or “only had” or “was an echo chamber for” homophobic transphobic alt-right neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that the subreddit was dominated by homophobic etc neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that the SSC community was dominated by homophobic etc neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that I personally was a homophobic etc neo-Nazi of them all. I am a pro-gay Jew who has dated trans people and votes pretty much straight Democrat. I lost distant family in the Holocaust. You can imagine how much fun this was for me.
People would message me on Twitter to shame me for my Nazism. People who linked my blog on social media would get replies from people “educating” them that they were supporting Nazism, or asking them to justify why they thought it was appropriate to share Nazi sites. I wrote a silly blog post about mathematics and corn-eating. It reached the front page of a math subreddit and got a lot of upvotes. Somebody found it, asked if people knew that the blog post about corn was from a pro-alt-right neo-Nazi site that tolerated racists and sexists. There was a big argument in the comments about whether it should ever be acceptable to link to or read my website. Any further conversation about math and corn was abandoned. This kept happening, to the point where I wouldn’t even read Reddit discussions of my work anymore. The New York Times already has a reputation, but for some people this was all they’d heard about me.
Some people started an article about me on a left-wing wiki that listed the most offensive things I have ever said, and the most offensive things that have ever been said by anyone on the SSC subreddit and CW thread over its three years of activity, all presented in the most damning context possible; it started steadily rising in the Google search results for my name. A subreddit devoted to insulting and mocking me personally and Culture War thread participants in general got started; it now has over 2,000 readers. People started threatening to use my bad reputation to discredit the communities I was in and the causes I cared about most.
Some people found my real name and started posting it on Twitter. Some people made entire accounts devoted to doxxing me in Twitter discussions whenever an opportunity came up. A few people just messaged me letting me know they knew my real name and reminding me that they could do this if they wanted to.
Some people started messaging my real-life friends, telling them to stop being friends with me because I supported racists and sexists and Nazis. Somebody posted a monetary reward for information that could be used to discredit me.
One person called the clinic where I worked, pretended to be a patient, and tried to get me fired.
Many of the users on LW have their real names and reputations attached to this website. If LW were to come under this kind of loosely coordinated memetic attack, many people would find themselves harassed and their reputations and careers could easily be put in danger. I don’t want to sound overly dramatic, but the entire truth seeking and AI safety project could be hampered by association.
That’s why even though I remain anonymous, I think it’s best if I refrain from discussing these topics at anything except the meta level on LW. Even having this discussion strikes me as risky. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t discuss these topics at all. But it needs to be on a place like r/TheMotte where there is no attack vector. This includes using different usernames so we can’t be traced back here. Even then, the reddit AEO and the admins are technically weak points.
I don’t want to sound overly dramatic, but the entire truth seeking and AI safety project could be hampered by association.
I think I addressed your points already in an earlier comment and would be interested if you could read that and give any further thoughts. But to elaborate on this point, I’m quite worried about this risk as well, but decided that it’s worth having this discussion here anyway due to countervailing risk of not discussing it here (as described in above linked comment). I did bring up the topic in various comments first to give people a chance to push back if they thought we should avoid talking about it altogether, and nobody did or even expressed disapproval via downvotes as far as I can tell. The mods here also seem to think that limiting political talk to “personal blogposts” is sufficient safeguard (but I actually think that’s probably not enough for discussing object-level political topics so I’m trying to avoid that as much as possible).
This includes using different usernames so we can’t be traced back here.
I just wanted to note here: Wei_Dai, in the past, you’ve noted that having to keep track of usernames vs real names is fairly cognitively intensive. But I do think having separate and deliberately obfuscated usernames is one of the important things for maintaining more independent thinking here. (I suspect someone brought that up last time, but you might have a different vantage point on the subject now)
I did say “unless they’re deliberately trying to keep their physical identities secret”, which covers this? Or are you suggesting that having something in between just using real names and maintaining full separation between online and physical identities is useful?
“In that post, it seemed like you were thinking of ‘keep identities secret’ as a rare thing some people might want to do’, and I think the framing of this post suggests something more like ’keeping identities secret is in fact a sensible default, and whether our culture nudges you towards or away from it is a pretty high level decision, and if you’re worried about LW as a whole being safe from political machines, it probably makes sense to default harder to anonymity.”
I think Scott put it best when he said:
Many of the users on LW have their real names and reputations attached to this website. If LW were to come under this kind of loosely coordinated memetic attack, many people would find themselves harassed and their reputations and careers could easily be put in danger. I don’t want to sound overly dramatic, but the entire truth seeking and AI safety project could be hampered by association.
That’s why even though I remain anonymous, I think it’s best if I refrain from discussing these topics at anything except the meta level on LW. Even having this discussion strikes me as risky. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t discuss these topics at all. But it needs to be on a place like r/TheMotte where there is no attack vector. This includes using different usernames so we can’t be traced back here. Even then, the reddit AEO and the admins are technically weak points.
I think I addressed your points already in an earlier comment and would be interested if you could read that and give any further thoughts. But to elaborate on this point, I’m quite worried about this risk as well, but decided that it’s worth having this discussion here anyway due to countervailing risk of not discussing it here (as described in above linked comment). I did bring up the topic in various comments first to give people a chance to push back if they thought we should avoid talking about it altogether, and nobody did or even expressed disapproval via downvotes as far as I can tell. The mods here also seem to think that limiting political talk to “personal blogposts” is sufficient safeguard (but I actually think that’s probably not enough for discussing object-level political topics so I’m trying to avoid that as much as possible).
I just wanted to note here: Wei_Dai, in the past, you’ve noted that having to keep track of usernames vs real names is fairly cognitively intensive. But I do think having separate and deliberately obfuscated usernames is one of the important things for maintaining more independent thinking here. (I suspect someone brought that up last time, but you might have a different vantage point on the subject now)
A bit off topic, but does LW have username pinging?
Not right now, although we may add it after switching to a new editor.
I did say “unless they’re deliberately trying to keep their physical identities secret”, which covers this? Or are you suggesting that having something in between just using real names and maintaining full separation between online and physical identities is useful?
The update I was suggesting was something like:
“In that post, it seemed like you were thinking of ‘keep identities secret’ as a rare thing some people might want to do’, and I think the framing of this post suggests something more like ’keeping identities secret is in fact a sensible default, and whether our culture nudges you towards or away from it is a pretty high level decision, and if you’re worried about LW as a whole being safe from political machines, it probably makes sense to default harder to anonymity.”