I agree. I feel violated, offended and frankly sorry for Gleb. Illya I honestly never would have expected this and from you of all people.

I think its important to evaluate the impact of your suspicion being wrong. Calling Gleb Clarity is practically slander. And as I've said before my name is mentioned several times in my post history: Carlos.

More ethically questionable is that I started a discussion on the ethics of voluntary identification any my anxiety around the level of association and attention I bring to stress my anxiety here and was 'outed' albeit frivolously in this way

I think that even making guesses about someone's identity on an anonymous account is in very poor taste and actively discourages participation by people who are attempting to use anonymity as a tool to, "share [their] mind authentically". I consider that sort of thing d̶o̶x̶i̶n̶g̶ similar to doxing because it takes actions on identity outside of the anonymous person's terms. These days I'm generally against anything that has the potential to decrease activity on LW. (And even if Clarity is a generally ridiculous poster, he does foster discussions on the site at the very least.)

I think it's far from ideal, but that d̶o̶x̶i̶n̶g̶ things similar to doxing are at least 100x worse as a community norm.

For both if true and if not true: do you think posting this publicly is productive or a good idea when Clarity just said he didn't want to cross pollinate?

I don't believe I'm mischaracterizing statistics. My original point was an observation that, in my experience, good mathematicians and good statisticians are different. Their brains work differently. To use an imperfect analogy, good C programmers and good Lisp programmers are also quite different. You just need to think in a very different manner in Lisp compared to C (and vice versa). That, of course, doesn't mean that a C programmer can't be passably good in Lisp.

I understand that in the academia statistics departments usually focus on theoretical statistics. That's fine -- I don't in particular care about "official" discipline boundaries. For my purposes I would like to draw a divide between theoretical statistics and, let's call it practical statistics. I find it useful to classify theoretical statistics as applied math, and practical statistics as something different from that.

Data science is somewhat different from traditional statistics, but I'm not sure its distinction lies on the theoretical-practical divide. As a crude approximation, I'd say that traditional statistics is mostly concerned with extracting precise and "provable" information out of small data sets, and data science tends to drown in data and so loves non-parametric models and ML in particular.

Keeping secrets is a burden, or so the traditional wisdom goes. I googled: ''keeping secrets cognitive load''. The first result that referenced a sufficiently trustworthy source was a PDF hosted by Harvard uni. It was too fundamental research - experimental based on neuropsychological tests. I vaguely remember a key reason I abdicated from an intelligence analyst interview was reading about the negative consequences of secrecy. Based on the difficulty of finding clarity on this issue, I'll go with my subjective experience which is that keeping a secret is a mental burden (utility: -2, confidence: 60%)

Now, my name can be found somewhere in my post history. But, in practice my real life social circle is oblivious to my LW identity, including those in my social circles who are in the LW community. I would consider my identity a secret.

On LW, I am a schizotypal, perverted, oft depressed character who shares all. But, I share my mind authentically. In real life, I am well mannered early-career academic (util +7, 20%) with a foot in party politics (selfish util -4, 90%, EA util +12, 25%. Now, academic careers are often apolitical, so I should be fine there, and I've recently mentally figured that my involvement in party politics (on the recommendation of 80,000 hours) is sufficiently stressful that dropping that I don't care for it anymore. However, I am concerned by the possibility of stigmatisation for the self that I have revealed here, by the cohort of people in my social circle.

Doing a quick run through of the utils and likelihoods, it looks to me that I should open up my identities. On the other hand, I feel I no longer am the identity I have evolved from as I have been posting: I have gotten a lot more rational. In spite of this, I have no plans to cross pollinate identities yet.

I post because I am very interested to hear stories from anyone who has cross pollinated, so to speak. Will you share for a moment?

Why are you talking about this?

Because I'm interested in the subject. Do you have objections?

I seem to be the lone dissenter here, but I am unhappy about the ban. Not that it is unjustified, it definitely is. However, it does not address the main issue (until jackk fiddles with karma): preventing Eugine from mass downvoting. So this is mainly retribution, rather than remediation, which seems anti-rational to me, if emotionally satisfying, as one of the victims.

Imagine for a moment that Eugine did not engage in mass downvoting. He would be a valuable regular on this site. I recall dozens of insightful comments he made (and dozens of poor ones, of course, but who am I to point fingers), and I only stopped engaging him in the comments after his mass-downvoting habits were brought to light for the first time. So, I would rather see him exposed and dekarmified, but allowed to participate.

TL;DR: banning is a wrong decision, should have been exposed and stripped of the ability of downvote instead. Optionally, all his votes ever could have been reversed, unless it's hard.

EDIT: apparently not the lone dissenter, just the first to speak up.

Less Wrong doesn't seem "overgrown" to me. It actually seems dried out and dying because the culture is so negative people don't want to post here. I believe Eliezer has talked about how whenever he posted something on LW, the comments would be full of people trying to find anything wrong with it.

Here's an example of what I think makes LessWrong unappealing. User Clarity wrote an interesting discussion level post about his mistakes as an investor/gambler and it was downvoted to oblivion. Shouldn't people be encouraged to discuss their failures as they relate to rationality? Do we really want to discourage this? No one even bothered to explain why they downvoted.

All discussion in Less Wrong 2.0 is seen explicitly as an attempt to exchange information for the purpose of reaching Aumann agreement. In order to facilitate this goal, communication must be precise. Therefore, all users agree to abide by Crocker's Rules for all communication that takes place on the website.

I think trying to impose strict new censorship rules and social control over communication is more likely to deal the death blow to this website than to help it. LessWrong really needs an injection of positive energy and purpose. In the absence of this, I expect LW to continue to decline.