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gwern comments on Problems in Education - Less Wrong Discussion

65 Post author: ThinkOfTheChildren 08 April 2013 09:29PM

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Comment author: gwern 11 April 2013 11:08:09PM *  4 points [-]

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.