If anyone’s interested (ha!), then sure, go ahead, ask me anything. (Of course I reserve the right not to answer if I think it would compromise my real-world identity, etc.)
N.B. I predict at ~75% that this thread will take off (i.e. get more than about 20 comments) iff Eliezer or another public figure decides to participate.
N.B. I predict at ~75% that this thread will take off (i.e. get more than about 20 comments) iff Eliezer or another public figure decides to participate.
For what it’s worth I posted this with my main account and not with a sockpuppet precisely to ensure the exclusion of Eliezer.
Why are you hiding your real identity? Don’t you fear that in a few years programs, available to the general public, will be able to match writing patterns and identify you?
I see it more as introducing a trivial inconvenience which keeps people I know in real life generally away from my (often frank) online postings. In some sense it’s just psychological, since by nature I am a very reticent person and it makes me feel like I can jot out opinions and get feedback without having to agonize over it. (That’s also why I’m not necessarily comfortable directly listing out personal details which could probably be inferred/collected from what I write.)
FWIW, this is the same as my rationale. It is theoretically possible to trace Alsadius back to me-the-human, since I’m sure I’ve given enough identifying details to narrow down the pool of candidates to one given perfect information, but it is sufficiently difficult that I doubt anyone will actually bother.
As someone who feels the same way, forestalling that possibility/making it take effort to identify me is somewhat worth it. And there’s a substantial possibility that it won’t take that long from development of programs-which-can-recognize to development of programs-that-can-hide.
If anyone’s interested (ha!), then sure, go ahead, ask me anything. (Of course I reserve the right not to answer if I think it would compromise my real-world identity, etc.)
N.B. I predict at ~75% that this thread will take off (i.e. get more than about 20 comments) iff Eliezer or another public figure decides to participate.
For what it’s worth I posted this with my main account and not with a sockpuppet precisely to ensure the exclusion of Eliezer.
Why are you hiding your real identity? Don’t you fear that in a few years programs, available to the general public, will be able to match writing patterns and identify you?
I see it more as introducing a trivial inconvenience which keeps people I know in real life generally away from my (often frank) online postings. In some sense it’s just psychological, since by nature I am a very reticent person and it makes me feel like I can jot out opinions and get feedback without having to agonize over it. (That’s also why I’m not necessarily comfortable directly listing out personal details which could probably be inferred/collected from what I write.)
FWIW, this is the same as my rationale. It is theoretically possible to trace Alsadius back to me-the-human, since I’m sure I’ve given enough identifying details to narrow down the pool of candidates to one given perfect information, but it is sufficiently difficult that I doubt anyone will actually bother.
As someone who feels the same way, forestalling that possibility/making it take effort to identify me is somewhat worth it. And there’s a substantial possibility that it won’t take that long from development of programs-which-can-recognize to development of programs-that-can-hide.