EA - The Ethics of Posting: Real Names, Pseudonyms, and Burner Accounts by Sarah Levin

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Ethics of Posting: Real Names, Pseudonyms, and Burner Accounts, published by Sarah Levin on March 9, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Recently there’s been debate about the ethics of using burner accounts to make attacks and accusations on this forum. See The number of burner accounts is too damn high and Why People Use Burner Accounts especially. This post is a more systematic discussion of poster identity, reputation, and accountability.Types of AccountsWe can roughly break accounts down into four categories:Real name accounts are accounts under a name that is easily linkable to the poster’s offline identity, such as their legal name. A real name account builds a reputation over time based on its posts. In addition, a real name account’s reputation draws on their offline reputation, and affects their offline reputation in turn.Pseudonymous accounts are accounts which are not easily linkable to the poster’s offline identity, and which the poster maintains over time. A pseudonym builds a reputation over time based on its posts. This reputation is separate from the poster’s offline reputation.Burner accounts are accounts which are intended to be used for a single, transient purpose and then abandoned. They accrue little or no reputation.Anonymous posts are not traceable to a specific identity at all. This forum mostly doesn’t have anonymous posts and so I will not discuss them here.All of these accounts have some legitimate uses. Because of the differences in how these types of accounts operate, readers should evaluate their claims differently, especially when it comes to evaluating claims about the community. Posters should use accounts appropriate for the points they are making, or restrict their claims to those which their account can support.Arguments, Evidence, and AccountabilityWhen it comes to abstract arguments, the content can be evaluated separately from the speaker, so all this stuff can be disregarded. If someone on this forum wants to post a critique of the statistics used in vitamin A supplementation trials, or an argument about moral status of chickens, or something like that, then the poster’s reputation shouldn’t matter much, and so it’s legitimate to post under any type of account. When 4chan solved an open combinatorics problem while discussing a shitpost about anime, mathematicians accepted the proof and published it with credit to "Anonymous 4chan poster". When it comes to abstract arguments, anything goes, except for blatant fuckery like impersonation or sockpuppet voting.If someone wants to claim expertise as part of an argument, then it helps to demonstrate that expertise somehow. If someone says “I’m a professional statistician and your statistical analysis here is nonsense”, then that rightly carries a lot more weight if it’s the real-name account of a professional statistician, or a pseudonymous account with a demonstrable track record on the subject. Burner accounts lack reputation, track records, and credentials, so they can’t legitimately make this move unless they first demonstrate expertise, which is often impractical.Things get trickier when it comes to reporting facts about the social landscape. The poster’s social position is a legitimate input into evaluating such claims. If I start telling everyone about what’s really happening in Oxford board rooms or Berkeley group houses, then it matters a great deal who I am. Am I a veteran who’s been deep inside for years? A visitor who attended a few events last summer? Am I just repeating what I saw in a tweet this morning?Advantages of Real Name AccountsReal name accounts can report on social situations with authority that other types of account can’t legitimately claim, for two reasons. First, their claims are checkable. If I used this pseudonymous account to make a f...