Pseudonyms to protect authors of controversial articles
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
We are in a sad state where we can't even discuss ideas.
Anonymity has a place, but people need to become more comfortable with attaching their identities to their ideas. (and we need more protections or enforcement for the consequesnces so people can actually feel safer)
For uncontroversial stuff, I use my real name. That way I can get credit for useful technical ideas while avoiding having my career ruined. If you don't believe that can happen, I don't know what to tell you. There are plenty of low profile cases that don't make the news, but I'm sure everyone's heard of James Damore.
1. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Edit: I'd also like to pat myself on the back for recognizing this trend toward intolerance back in 2010 (when this account was created). Finally, my cynicism and pessimism pay off! And if you're wondering why my comments aren't always controversial, it's because I also use this account when I'm drunk and/or high.
I've gone into work some days and there's been lines of cocaine railed up ready to go. (I haven't taken any drugs in over a month, for perspective). I sometimes hate my job, but I'm terrified of moving company to a culture I can't stand.
I made a throwaway account, for the future.
Yeah, well, you're not fooling anyone around these parts, Brian.
Seen talented hardworking people fired because of tweets and our government contracts.
I'd argue this even extends to mundane topics like city planning, you never know who you can piss off. There's always someone to offend.
"there are more male geniuses in society than women because men are subject to more variability in terms of IQ. In other words, while men had more people at the tail ends of the IQ bell curve, women were more likely to have average IQ scores."
What will happen to my career ?
Larry Summers did that. Within 13 months, he was forced to resign from his job....
"there are more male dunces in society . . . in other words, women were less likely to be dunces."
my guess is that it wouldn't be very destructive to your career at all -- but maybe i'm wrong on that point. of course, if i'm right, this effect would be entirely a result of incomplete or incorrect interpretation of the principles by the readers.
Regardless of what you think of Summers, read the exact transcript of what he actually said at that conference. The fact that he was fired for what he said should be incredibly shameful for Harvard.
You give no reason why that should be the case. Holding a controversial opinion and not being on your toes how you phrase things can easily provoke bans/deplatforming in many environments. It's a lot easier to just let another account bite the dust than tiptoe around things all the time just to maintain a persistent identity.
People change and grow up, the new generation(s) aren't given an opportunity to fuck up or express shitty opinions and learn from them because the internet never forgets.
Some stupid social media post or whatever can forever be attributed to them and be dug up later in life.
I'm just glad I'm in my 30's and don't have to go through puberty in a world with social media.
I rarely have a need to be anonymous online, and when I do, I do create a throwaway alias. i.e. i'm active on Twitter, but not as me. That place is WAY too toxic to openly tweet under your real name.
because experimentation often fails. and public failures lead to getting discredited and kicked out of the discourse. people who experiment while using their real identities probably can't get back in.
see the appeal of pseudoanonymity?
Times have changed a lot in the last 10 years. 10 years ago, I would have agreed with you.
2. Even if one gets a tenure, your students' won't get any jobs if you don't toe the line of the dominant themes in social sciences--identity politics, political correctness, knowledge/power, etc.
3. Intellectual honesty and integrity, core virtues of being an intellectual, is missing in the picture.
As a tenured professor, one wants more than a stable job and being invited to cool parties. One wants to attract student researchers, get grants, even find them post doctoral fellowships in other research groups, and in other countries, finally get them jobs. Otherwise, there is no intellectual legacy for one's research program, which is different from the dominant themes in social sciences. That's one way of destroying intellectual competitors in the academic arena.
1. There are lots of other cases where we would agree there’s some form of silencing going on, even as a group has many supporters and rich, famous spokespeople
2. In fact, taboo opinions seem to promote a culture of celebrity
3. Fame lets people avoid social repercussions, but that doesn’t mean those repercussions don’t exist for ordinary people
4. If you spend decades inventing a powerful decentralized network to allow unpopular voices to be heard, sometimes you end up with unpopular voices being heard
5. When the IDW claims they are threatened, harassed, and blacklisted, people should at least consider that they are referring to the actual well-known incidents of threats, harassment, and blacklisting against them rather than imagining this is code for “they demand to be universally liked”
6. The IDW probably still censor themselves
7. Nobody in this discussion seems to really understand how silencing works.
The man has one of the most popular podcasts in the world, but still can get the times to write an article about how he's some underground thinker.
If you dig deeper into these kinds of complaints from these kinds of people, it usually turns into "The people _I_ want to like me do not". They expect universal admiration, and when they don't they yell about some sort of conspiracy.
The fact that everyone even knows about the popular people making these complaints disproves the thesis that they can't get out there and make their arguments.
It just turns out that none of these alternative thinkers can handle any sort of criticism against their ideas, and think there's a mass conspiracy. Ocamm's razor suggests otherwise
The problem is not that they can't accept criticism, the problem is other people disenfranchising them for their opinions.
He's a fairly blatant racist - I think that's a bit more than "unpopular" when it comes to views.
> livelihoods destroyed and lives ruined > Curtis Yarvin was disinvited from Strange Loop
In what way did "not being invited to speak at a conference" destroy his livelihood or ruin his life?
When I met Curtis Yarvin, he told me about some efforts he’d been taking to reduce the risk of violence to him and his family. I disagree with him on pretty much everything, but it saddened me that he had to worry about that.
I mean, sure, that's inconvenient but it's really nothing in the grand scheme of things.
> some efforts he’d been taking to reduce the risk of violence to him and his family
If people have threatened him or his family, that definitely sucks and I cannot condone or support those people.
If you spout bad opinions people like you less. If you show bad judgement people won’t want to hire you.
If you preach an ideology that implicitly concludes that a certain set of people are biologically inferior, it’s not a surprise that people who disagree will fight you about it. What else do you expect? What other outcome? “Oh cool yeah you think I’m subhuman. awesome. Let’s get to work.” In what universe does _that_ align with free association?
These sorts of conversations contrast mainstream media (TV and headline news) because the participants are free to speak for hours, not minutes, and are not put on their heels the entire time.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/sep/25/bath-spa-u...
Also, Bath Spa University is a relatively small, relatively new university with a less established research tradition than most of the UK's universities. It wouldn't surprise me if its ethics committees were less confident too.
None of which is to say that the student isn't right, just that we currently only have his word for it and the university is quite correctly saying nothing. But I'm pretty sceptical.
I don't really care whether celebrities feel persecuted or not. (I believe there's too much cult of celebrity already, so I do not feel any more sympathy for them than I do for everyone else.) I'm not really sure why a few different people thought my comment was relevant specifically to that NY Times IDW article.
The danger I was referring to is the danger to _anyone_ and the reason behind an academic journal being created to allow regular academics to publish under pseudonyms. This is a far more serious issue than celebrities feeling unloved and blaming a conspiracy.
For instance I've personally seen multiple people ostracized from their predominantly-left-leaning friend groups for saying something mildly positive about something Trump has done in office, or for arguing that not everyone who voted for Trump is a racist. I'm not sure how rational political discussion can be held when saying such innocuous things as I've mentioned can result in instant ostracization. Fortunately I noticed this happening before I too said something that would end the same way for me. (I already learned not to discuss politics with my very right-leaning dad, so adding "most of my friends" to the do-not-discuss-politics-with-them list was fairly easy.) Although I'm in a very liberal area so I see this primarily happening in fervently left-leaning circles, I understand that similar happens in fervently right-leaning circles as well. I can only imagine how much one has to censor themselves when publishing something that shouldn't be controversial at all in an academic journal! This is seriously not good.
* You can't put it in your resume. And that is importante because many academics need a minimal amount of publication each year. Perhaps someone with a tenure can have the luxury of a hidden article, but most of them have some graduate student or postdoc that is a coauthor and wants to increase the total count of papers by any mean.
* If the article is controversial enough, the authors will be identified using a text analysis. Most papers reuse a lot of parts of the previous papers of the authors, so it is not so difficult.
* Each controversial article will get the offended side (right/left/whatever) asking for an exemption of the anonymity and/xor deplataforming the journal.
I agree that untenured academics need to publish papers they can put on their resume, but it's not a fatal flaw if most of the early articles are penned by tenured professors.
I'm not an expert in text analysis, but I think that if someone is trying to obfuscate their authorship they could probably do so.
The reason I don't think your second and third point are too big a deal is because they seem to be predicated on the assumption that the articles published in this journal will be wildly controversial. I don't think that's necessarily true. Presumably, the people running the journal will still decide what they want to publish and they won't be giving a free pass to every single submission. If someone decides to submit a study that is an unrigorous veiled attempt at justifying racism, I expect those reviewing the submissions will reject it. There are all kinds of things academics are likely afraid to publish with their names on it in the current sociopolitical climate out of fear of _potential_ blowback, without even getting into the things they won't publish due to _certain_ blowback.
So in summation, I think it could potentially succeed if A) there are enough submissions even though people can't put it on their resumes, and B) the journal publishes enough not-so-controversial studies.
The worst case is that the Org just cuts out the middle-man and writes the paper themselves and publishes the BS study in this journal too.
Assuming any of this is happening in the US, it's an indictment of the whole system. This is what tenure is for.
EDIT: Oops, avani beat me to it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18437414
We've seen in journals on social sciences, for example, that peer reviewers can be fooled relatively easily. By setting up the incentives like this, won't this just become a bastion of crackpots and frauds?
Not really, he's widely regarded as a fine professor of psychology. But does that really wave a magic wand over his head and grant him immunity from being judged for the self-help books he publishes? I don't think anyone reasonable person would agree with that. Also, what protection does pseudonymous authorship afford him? He's literally making a career out of touring different countries giving speeches about the moral decay of western culture.
Here's my question: Does this problem actually exist? Or is this misplaced fear about a different issue that actually does exist.
> I have heard too many stories from my China-based colleagues about rights infringements to list. Common problems include: universities and publishers demanding that research questions and conclusions are in line with the current political orthodoxy, restrictions on traveling abroad for professional conferences, and incessant invitations to “have tea” with security agents.
> Political repression is shutting down many more areas of academic inquiry than just labor scholarship. As the Chinese state cracks down on an increasing array of social actors, including rights lawyers, feminists, ethnic minorities, and religious minorities—both Muslim and Christian—the related topics become off-limits to academic researchers.
It sounds exactly like the sort of thing the journal in this article is for:
> An international group of university researchers is planning a new journal which will allow articles on sensitive debates to be written under pseudonyms. They feel free intellectual discussion on tough issues is being hampered by a culture of fear and self-censorship.
If you want to ensure that academics don't self-censor out of fear of reprasials, you could prove to potential authors that their fears are baseless, or you could provide mitigations for their fears. Or, you could do both.