Comment on 2012 Less Wrong Census Survey: Call For Critiques/Questions

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 22:33:12 GMT

I'm just a bit touchy about privacy-related procedures.)

If you're touchy about privacy issues, the way to express that is NOT to out someone's anonymous survey answers. That is anti-social behavior, and implies that you are only interested in your OWN privacy while not at all valuing the privacy of others.

If you wanted to show how easy it was to find out someone's identity from the survey answers, the better course of action would have been to put in a comment something like "in fact, from last year's survey I was able to figure out the identity of at least one person using karma score as the main indicator", and then to PM Yvain personally with the information, since he could tighten security unilaterally. It is NOT acceptable to post publicly the identity of the person whose identity you discovered.

I suggest you retract your comment, and ask a mod to delete it-- especially if you are as touchy about privacy procedures as you claim to be.

Discuss