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komponisto comments on A philosophy professor elicits college students' reactions to Less Wrong - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (77)
But the OP doesn't contain any information either.
Is there a reason the rest of us can't know who and where this is?
The professor did link his name/email to the post by mailing us; and he specifically said "Please do not leave a comment on the class blog."
I am guessing he wants students to feel free to write what they think without worrying about being criticized or corrected on every point by aggrieved LWers.
But did he say "please don't tell anybody who I am or where I teach?" This is completely orthogonal to the question of preventing comments from LWers, aggrieved or otherwise.
I wasn't interested in writing a comment on the blog (except possibly to ask where the course was -- and I might very well have done so, since Luke's post does not contain any instruction to the contrary! So if info was somehow being hidden with the goal of preventing comments, it would have directly backfired.).
No, but it is a closed list and the public materials are, as you noted, apparently sanitized. What is the reasonable inference?
Indeed; Luke is perhaps lacking in discretion, or someone passed the URL on to him without also passing on the request.
I have no idea. It just looks like bizarre crypticness to me; like there's some inside joke that I'm not in on.
If it is a closed list, then why is it being posted to LW? And especially, why is it being posted without acknowledgment of the fact that the source was a closed list?
Conspicuous secrecy is rude.
The fact that the list itself is closed is not a good argument by itself not to post the link given that the link is to a public and easily accessible website. However, it probably would have made sense of it had included the request not to the post to the blog.
The post should have included an explanation of the lack of information (e.g. "the instructor posted this to a private mailing list that I subscribe to, and does not wish himself or his institution to be identified" -- if this is in fact the case; otherwise, the information should have been included).
He really should edit the OP to contain the "please don't comment on the class blog" instructions.
I'm already imagining a foaming at the mouth angry LWer vivisecting with sadistic glee a post of a poor freshman yelling at him "how dare you say you like us for the wrong reasons!". And once LWers see one such comment, the scent of blood will drive them into a commenting frenzy.
My model of typical LWers disagrees. I don't think the student comments there look like tempting targets even to those among us who like to correct people.
The typical LWer wouldn't do this agreed, but there are plenty of LWers.
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.