Compare: if you were in a theater troupe, and someone preferred to play malicious characters, would you make the same judgment?
So, it’s not a question of “playful” versus “serious” attitudes, but of “bounded by fiction” versus “executed in reality”.
It’s not anything like a 1:1 relationship, but I do indeed infer some information of that sort. I think people on-average play roles in acting that are “a part of them”. It’s easy to play a character when you can empathize with them.
There are people I know who like to wear black and play evil/trollish roles in video games. When I talk to them about their actual plans in life regarding work and friendship, they come up with similarly trollish and (playfully) evil strategies. It’s another extension of themselves. In contrast I think sometimes people let their shadows play the roles that are the opposite of who they play in life, and that’s also information about who they are, but it is inverted.
Again, this isn’t a rule and there’s massive swathes of exceptions, but I wouldn’t say “I don’t get much information about a person’s social and ethical qualities from what roles they like to play in contexts that are bounded-by-fiction”.
However, if the host suddenly announced that the tokens in the game would be cashed out in currency and that stealing them would be considered equivalent to stealing money from their purse, while the game were ongoing, I would expect some people to get up and leave, even if they weren’t intending to cheat, because the tradeoff parameters around other “noise” risks have suddenly been pulled out from underneath them.
Right. Good analogy.
I definitely updated a bunch due to TLW explaining that this noise is sufficiently serious for them to not want to be on the site. It seems like they’ve been treating their site participation more seriously than I think the median regular site-user does. When I thought about this game setup during its creation I thought a lot more about “most” users rather than the users on the tails.
Like, I didn’t think “some users will find this noisy relationship to things-related-to-deanonymization to be very threatening and consider leaving the site but I’ll do it anyway”, I thought “most users will think it’s fun or they’ll think it’s silly/irritating but just for a week, and be done with it afterward”. Which was an inaccurate prediction! TLW giving feedback rather than staying silent is personally appreciated.
It’s plausible to me that users like TLW would find it valuable to know more about how much I value anonymity and pseudonymity online.
For example about around two years ago I dropped everything for a couple days to make DontDoxScottAlexander.com with Jacob Lagerros, to help coordinate a coalition of people to pressure the NYT to have better policies against doxing (in that case and generally).
When a LW user asked if I would vouch for their good standing when they wanted to write a post about a local organization where they were concerned about inappropriate retaliation, I immediately said yes (before knowing the topic of the post or why they were asking) and I did so, even while I later received a lot of pressure to not do this, and ended up myself with a bunch of criticisms of the post.
And just last week I used my role as an admin to quickly undo the doxing of a LW user who I (correctly) suspected did not wish to be deanonymized. (I did that 5 mins after the comment was originally posted.)
After doing the last one I texted my friend saying it’s kind of stressful to make those mod calls within a couple minutes close to midnight, and that there’s lots of reasons why people might think it mod overreach (e.g. I edited someone else’s comment which feels kind of dirty to me), but I think it’s kind of crucial to protect pseudonymous identities on the internet.
(Obvious sentences that I’m saying to add redundancy: this doesn’t mean I didn’t make a mistake in this instance, and it doesn’t mean that your and TLW critiques aren’t true.)
It’s not anything like a 1:1 relationship, but I do indeed infer some information of that sort. I think people on-average play roles in acting that are “a part of them”. It’s easy to play a character when you can empathize with them.
There are people I know who like to wear black and play evil/trollish roles in video games. When I talk to them about their actual plans in life regarding work and friendship, they come up with similarly trollish and (playfully) evil strategies. It’s another extension of themselves. In contrast I think sometimes people let their shadows play the roles that are the opposite of who they play in life, and that’s also information about who they are, but it is inverted.
Again, this isn’t a rule and there’s massive swathes of exceptions, but I wouldn’t say “I don’t get much information about a person’s social and ethical qualities from what roles they like to play in contexts that are bounded-by-fiction”.
Right. Good analogy.
I definitely updated a bunch due to TLW explaining that this noise is sufficiently serious for them to not want to be on the site. It seems like they’ve been treating their site participation more seriously than I think the median regular site-user does. When I thought about this game setup during its creation I thought a lot more about “most” users rather than the users on the tails.
Like, I didn’t think “some users will find this noisy relationship to things-related-to-deanonymization to be very threatening and consider leaving the site but I’ll do it anyway”, I thought “most users will think it’s fun or they’ll think it’s silly/irritating but just for a week, and be done with it afterward”. Which was an inaccurate prediction! TLW giving feedback rather than staying silent is personally appreciated.
It’s plausible to me that users like TLW would find it valuable to know more about how much I value anonymity and pseudonymity online.
For example about around two years ago I dropped everything for a couple days to make DontDoxScottAlexander.com with Jacob Lagerros, to help coordinate a coalition of people to pressure the NYT to have better policies against doxing (in that case and generally).
When a LW user asked if I would vouch for their good standing when they wanted to write a post about a local organization where they were concerned about inappropriate retaliation, I immediately said yes (before knowing the topic of the post or why they were asking) and I did so, even while I later received a lot of pressure to not do this, and ended up myself with a bunch of criticisms of the post.
And just last week I used my role as an admin to quickly undo the doxing of a LW user who I (correctly) suspected did not wish to be deanonymized. (I did that 5 mins after the comment was originally posted.)
After doing the last one I texted my friend saying it’s kind of stressful to make those mod calls within a couple minutes close to midnight, and that there’s lots of reasons why people might think it mod overreach (e.g. I edited someone else’s comment which feels kind of dirty to me), but I think it’s kind of crucial to protect pseudonymous identities on the internet.
(Obvious sentences that I’m saying to add redundancy: this doesn’t mean I didn’t make a mistake in this instance, and it doesn’t mean that your and TLW critiques aren’t true.)