I was able to figure out what university the course is from information in the comments with high probability and an trivial amount of googling but I’m not sure if it would be socially appropriate to share the results.
What bothers me more at this point is the apparent expectation on the part of at least three people (the anonymous professor, lukeprog, and gwern) that we wouldn’t be curious.
For fun though: Can you introspect what considerations you applied to come to that limit? Why exactly was the limit drawn at the method rather than the results?
My guess would be that that is a convenient Schelling point. (Edit: And not exactly a Schelling point but there seems to be some history on the internet of it being more acceptable to post methods than results that lead to privacy issues.) It makes it so that there’s still a barrier to get the information but limits that so that someone still needs to do the work. Moreover, it only goes in one direction. That is, it allows someone here to get the prof’s name but it doesn’t make it easier for someone else who already knows the prof’s name to find the blog.
I did that before I made the first post and came up with a pretty satifactory conclusion. I almost included it in my first post , but I decided not to include it due to length and other considerations.
I was able to figure out what university the course is from information in the comments with high probability and an trivial amount of googling but I’m not sure if it would be socially appropriate to share the results.
What bothers me more at this point is the apparent expectation on the part of at least three people (the anonymous professor, lukeprog, and gwern) that we wouldn’t be curious.
But it was socially appropriate to share the method for coming to those results?
Not sure that it was, but there is a limit to how much I’m willing to limit myself to avoid violating social norms that may not even exist.
For fun though: Can you introspect what considerations you applied to come to that limit? Why exactly was the limit drawn at the method rather than the results?
My guess would be that that is a convenient Schelling point. (Edit: And not exactly a Schelling point but there seems to be some history on the internet of it being more acceptable to post methods than results that lead to privacy issues.) It makes it so that there’s still a barrier to get the information but limits that so that someone still needs to do the work. Moreover, it only goes in one direction. That is, it allows someone here to get the prof’s name but it doesn’t make it easier for someone else who already knows the prof’s name to find the blog.
I did that before I made the first post and came up with a pretty satifactory conclusion. I almost included it in my first post , but I decided not to include it due to length and other considerations.
I see. Upvoted.