I feel kind of lost. Your examples imply a narrowly focused malign attention (in which case I would add “potential backstabbing” to the list :), Viliam seems to be talking about working with groups of people who are more or less neutral to the actual cause, and Sarah seems to be talking about working with people who have at least ostensibly agreed to move in a common direction. Won’t there be different threats in all these cases?
OTOH, how about “I will get you fired” promises? Less spooky than death threats, but much more manageable.
Yeah, I think what happened is that Sarah talked about people pushing towards secrecy for vague reasons, Villiam tried giving a more specific reason (people disagreeing with you), and I was like “wait wtf how are any of these responding to serious threats, here’s my best attempt at thinking about what could actually go wrong, is this what you’re worried about?”
I think there is a lot of irrational paranoia going on with pushes towards secrecy, perhaps a rationalization of a desire to create/maintain an inner ring. Very likely, if the people Sarah was talking to were more transparent, none of the things I listed would happen; some much-less-serious negative consequences might happen, and they would be relatively easy to deal with.
(note: Sarah did mention a concern about the general public stopping you if you were transparent, which implies neutral/negative attention)
I think there is a lot of irrational paranoia going on with pushes towards secrecy
I think the paranoia is basically entirely rational. Several people have listed a variety of threats ranging from (at one extreme) death threats, and much more commonly, mild social disapproval that just makes it harder to accomplish things.
This doesn’t mean there aren’t benefits to transparency. But I think the threats are generally well understood, and if you want (yourself, or others) to get the benefits of transparency you to need to actually do a lot of social infrastructure work to alleviate those costs.
This is an important and worthwhile project, but even within the rationality community, “mild social disapproval that is demoralizing and makes it harder to accomplish things” is still a problem that needs to be actively addressed in order for transparency benefits to scale.
I feel kind of lost. Your examples imply a narrowly focused malign attention (in which case I would add “potential backstabbing” to the list :), Viliam seems to be talking about working with groups of people who are more or less neutral to the actual cause, and Sarah seems to be talking about working with people who have at least ostensibly agreed to move in a common direction. Won’t there be different threats in all these cases?
OTOH, how about “I will get you fired” promises? Less spooky than death threats, but much more manageable.
Yeah, I think what happened is that Sarah talked about people pushing towards secrecy for vague reasons, Villiam tried giving a more specific reason (people disagreeing with you), and I was like “wait wtf how are any of these responding to serious threats, here’s my best attempt at thinking about what could actually go wrong, is this what you’re worried about?”
I think there is a lot of irrational paranoia going on with pushes towards secrecy, perhaps a rationalization of a desire to create/maintain an inner ring. Very likely, if the people Sarah was talking to were more transparent, none of the things I listed would happen; some much-less-serious negative consequences might happen, and they would be relatively easy to deal with.
(note: Sarah did mention a concern about the general public stopping you if you were transparent, which implies neutral/negative attention)
I think the paranoia is basically entirely rational. Several people have listed a variety of threats ranging from (at one extreme) death threats, and much more commonly, mild social disapproval that just makes it harder to accomplish things.
This doesn’t mean there aren’t benefits to transparency. But I think the threats are generally well understood, and if you want (yourself, or others) to get the benefits of transparency you to need to actually do a lot of social infrastructure work to alleviate those costs.
This is an important and worthwhile project, but even within the rationality community, “mild social disapproval that is demoralizing and makes it harder to accomplish things” is still a problem that needs to be actively addressed in order for transparency benefits to scale.