Come now LWers don’t make more of this proposal than there is.
I didn’t perceive a secret society vibe at all in what amounts to a bunch of people having a topic restricted private correspondence.
Everyone has some email correspondences he wouldn’t be comfortable posting in public. Private correspondences as well as physical meetings restricted to friends or colleagues have been a staple of intellectual life for centuries and are nothing to be a priori discouraged. In effect nearly every LW meet up is a private affair, since people don’t seem to be recording them. Privacy matters in order to preserve the signal to noise ration (technical mailing lists) and so that people feel more comfortable saying things that can be taken out of context as well as be somewhat protected from ideological or religious persecution.
Also quite frankly lots of the people in such a mailing list have probably written on such ideas in some digital format or another before, either corresponding with friends, commenting in a shady on-line community or just writing out some notes for their own use.
Everyone has some email correspondences he wouldn’t be comfortable posting in public.
Yes, but having semi-public statements on the record is a very different situation, where the set of people who may get to see them is open-ended.
This thread certainly hasn’t made me more optimistic. Observe that even though I have made the utmost effort to avoid making any concrete controversial statements, there is already a poster—and a decently upvoted LW poster, not some random individual—who has confabulated that I have made such statements about an extremely charged topic (“openly,” at that), and is presently conducting a subthread under this premise. Makes you think twice on what may happen if you are actually on the record for having made such statements.
Come now LWers don’t make more of this proposal than there is.
I didn’t perceive a secret society vibe at all in what amounts to a bunch of people having a topic restricted private correspondence.
Everyone has some email correspondences he wouldn’t be comfortable posting in public. Private correspondences as well as physical meetings restricted to friends or colleagues have been a staple of intellectual life for centuries and are nothing to be a priori discouraged. In effect nearly every LW meet up is a private affair, since people don’t seem to be recording them. Privacy matters in order to preserve the signal to noise ration (technical mailing lists) and so that people feel more comfortable saying things that can be taken out of context as well as be somewhat protected from ideological or religious persecution.
Also quite frankly lots of the people in such a mailing list have probably written on such ideas in some digital format or another before, either corresponding with friends, commenting in a shady on-line community or just writing out some notes for their own use.
Yes, but having semi-public statements on the record is a very different situation, where the set of people who may get to see them is open-ended.
This thread certainly hasn’t made me more optimistic. Observe that even though I have made the utmost effort to avoid making any concrete controversial statements, there is already a poster—and a decently upvoted LW poster, not some random individual—who has confabulated that I have made such statements about an extremely charged topic (“openly,” at that), and is presently conducting a subthread under this premise. Makes you think twice on what may happen if you are actually on the record for having made such statements.