Hmm, maybe. Presumably the scenario you have here is applying for a job; I don’t think anyone’s going to get fired for being associated with Less Wrong unless things get much worse than they are now, one way or another. Even then, this seems to me some way from being a real danger at present.
[EDITED to add:] I do completely agree, though, with your point that seeing that someone uses Less Wrong is much easier than seeing that someone is a rationalist when all you’re doing is a cursory web search or whatever.
I don’t think anyone’s going to get fired for being associated with Less Wrong unless things get much worse than they are now
Yep, neither do I. It’s just this feeling that things today are worse than I would have imagined 10 years ago, so maybe it is prudent to assume that they get even worse 10 years later, and start mitigating the risks now while it is relatively easier.
Specifically, I believe that the privacy-invasion technologies will only get better. I could imagine that in 10 years there will be some machine-learning software that will (1) connect your pseudonymous writings across the internet, based on various “fingerprints” such as rare words you use, the typos you make, frequency of using capital letters and diacritics, etc; and maybe also (2) automatically select the potentially most controversial content. I can also imagine that once this technology becomes generally known, it will quickly become used everywhere, simply because not using it would be considered negligence on the side of the HR person.
Also, god knows what could be considered controversial 10 years in the future; the politics can change in any direction. Perhaps writing on an atheist website will already be quite damning, but that can of course be made much worse by algorithmically cherry-picked quotes. Maybe the future will be more woke, maybe it will be a backlash against wokeness, maybe the definition of what is considered woke will change unpredictably. (That is, even people who feel safe today have a good reason to fear the future.) Maybe in the future it will be acceptable to get fired not only for what you wrote, but also for what your parents wrote, in which case my actions today are mostly hurting my kids. Maybe.
I wish we could have a norm that what happens outside of workplace stays outside of workplace, especially when we are talking about fucking opinions.
Luckily, now we have a scientific paper that smugly insists that all my worries are silly.
(And by the way, my actual object-level opinion on race vs intelligence is “I don’t know”. Which is already quite damning, because all good and decent people already know the right answer, so pretending to not fully understand the actual mechanism of intelligence is surely just an excuse for something evil. I know people in real life who were called out as racist—luckily, outside their jobs—for saying there was a genetic component of intelligence.)
Hmm, maybe. Presumably the scenario you have here is applying for a job; I don’t think anyone’s going to get fired for being associated with Less Wrong unless things get much worse than they are now, one way or another. Even then, this seems to me some way from being a real danger at present.
[EDITED to add:] I do completely agree, though, with your point that seeing that someone uses Less Wrong is much easier than seeing that someone is a rationalist when all you’re doing is a cursory web search or whatever.
Yep, neither do I. It’s just this feeling that things today are worse than I would have imagined 10 years ago, so maybe it is prudent to assume that they get even worse 10 years later, and start mitigating the risks now while it is relatively easier.
Specifically, I believe that the privacy-invasion technologies will only get better. I could imagine that in 10 years there will be some machine-learning software that will (1) connect your pseudonymous writings across the internet, based on various “fingerprints” such as rare words you use, the typos you make, frequency of using capital letters and diacritics, etc; and maybe also (2) automatically select the potentially most controversial content. I can also imagine that once this technology becomes generally known, it will quickly become used everywhere, simply because not using it would be considered negligence on the side of the HR person.
Also, god knows what could be considered controversial 10 years in the future; the politics can change in any direction. Perhaps writing on an atheist website will already be quite damning, but that can of course be made much worse by algorithmically cherry-picked quotes. Maybe the future will be more woke, maybe it will be a backlash against wokeness, maybe the definition of what is considered woke will change unpredictably. (That is, even people who feel safe today have a good reason to fear the future.) Maybe in the future it will be acceptable to get fired not only for what you wrote, but also for what your parents wrote, in which case my actions today are mostly hurting my kids. Maybe.
I wish we could have a norm that what happens outside of workplace stays outside of workplace, especially when we are talking about fucking opinions.
Luckily, now we have a scientific paper that smugly insists that all my worries are silly.
(And by the way, my actual object-level opinion on race vs intelligence is “I don’t know”. Which is already quite damning, because all good and decent people already know the right answer, so pretending to not fully understand the actual mechanism of intelligence is surely just an excuse for something evil. I know people in real life who were called out as racist—luckily, outside their jobs—for saying there was a genetic component of intelligence.)