But can think of some people here who might have created this explicitly as a test of rationality, who are sort of annoyed that the politics involved here get less scrutiny and want to demonstrate that.
Which people? Stylometry might us allow to work out whether someone’s writting style matches this post. Anonymity is hard.
Yes, we could probably de-anonymize OP; I have some passing familiarity with stylometrics, so I considered trying that myself. I decided not to because so far no one has produced any smoking guns that this is false (school districts vary massively in quality across the USA & I have already mentioned an existing and far more shocking instance of school failure/corruption), if it is true then I approve of whistleblowing and have no interest in attacking the OP*, de-anonymizing probably would not set a good precedent, and if it were false—well, I do not disapprove of red team tests of LW (and would be hypocritical to disapprove) and so far this seems to be limited to LW.
* Similarly, it’s been suggested to me by a few people that it would be an interesting project to try to de-anonymize Satoshi Nakamoto or La Griffe du Lion. I am not sure I could, and even if I could, I would choose not to since I either approve of their work or find their material interesting.
If this post ever looked like it was both false and not a limited-scale test, like it was something else (an entrapment of an off-site person? an attempt to discredit LW entirely with a Sokal-style attack?), then I might change my mind. But so far, that does not seem to be the case since I see nothing indicating this post has been picked up by the Drudge Report, Hacker News, Fox News, Breitbart, etc.
Which people? Stylometry might us allow to work out whether someone’s writting style matches this post. Anonymity is hard.
Yes, we could probably de-anonymize OP; I have some passing familiarity with stylometrics, so I considered trying that myself. I decided not to because so far no one has produced any smoking guns that this is false (school districts vary massively in quality across the USA & I have already mentioned an existing and far more shocking instance of school failure/corruption), if it is true then I approve of whistleblowing and have no interest in attacking the OP*, de-anonymizing probably would not set a good precedent, and if it were false—well, I do not disapprove of red team tests of LW (and would be hypocritical to disapprove) and so far this seems to be limited to LW.
* Similarly, it’s been suggested to me by a few people that it would be an interesting project to try to de-anonymize Satoshi Nakamoto or La Griffe du Lion. I am not sure I could, and even if I could, I would choose not to since I either approve of their work or find their material interesting.
If this post ever looked like it was both false and not a limited-scale test, like it was something else (an entrapment of an off-site person? an attempt to discredit LW entirely with a Sokal-style attack?), then I might change my mind. But so far, that does not seem to be the case since I see nothing indicating this post has been picked up by the Drudge Report, Hacker News, Fox News, Breitbart, etc.