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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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Roko was banned for revealing Alice and Chloe's real names. It's not hard to figure out their names, but I'll refrain from revealing them, to prevent the search engines from linking them to this.

I want to highlight this comment, contrasting the nonlinear environment with normal professional employment. Erica had the insight that Alice and Chloe might be "exploited immigrants," and indeed they are from Germany and Denmark.

Chloe is still active in EA, with a similar job title, but hopefully her current job is lower stress and more aligned with her interests. Her boyfriend from Puerto Rico has also continued in the EA space and has several posts on EA forums.

Alice has been deleting some of her online activity, and possibly changing her name. She frequents vegan restaurants and continues to be poly (amazingly, with prediction markets).

When the real names are that easy to find, the ethics of enforcing a prohibition on 'doxxing' get a bit weird. What, exactly, are you protecting?

Probably, most people are just lazy and won't look anyway, so it still has a significant effect on the number of peripheral people who know. But I think people feel like they're really protecting alice/chloe's names more than they are.

It's also somehow funny that he only got a 1 week ban from the forum. It feels very short.

(note: I only quickly crosschecked with your descriptions, not with the nonlinear post content)

When Scott wrote that the NYT article would make his job more difficult, I was sympathetic but curious. It's easy to find his previous handle yvain and his old blog and then his personal site where he has his name. Despite his poor op-sec of not making a hard break between identities, patients couldn't easily google his name to find his somewhat controversial postings. All was well until adding Scott's full name to Metz's article did more harm than good.

The current case isn't quite so clear. Starting with Alice and Chloe's real names, you quickly (without archive.org) find references to Nonlinear. But you have to put a few things together to connect with the current controversy.

Even without doxxing, it may be awkward when Alice/Chloe apply for their next job in the EA sphere. Upon seeing their résumés, the interviewer might ask, "was your experience at infamous Nonlinear as bad as Alice's?"

Of course, the reputations of Ben / Kat / Emerson are much more directly impacted. I think the common theme is that they didn't know (or care) about the normal standards for investigative journalism / employment. Not that I would've done much better, but spirited rejection of Chesterton's fences to escape local optima probably makes things worse.

What, exactly, are you protecting?

Norms, generally. Deanonomizing people is something I'd rather not become allowable, and the incompetence of others shouldn't affect me.