Eh, I don't mind someone using a different account, as long as they don't repeat the behavior that got them banned originally.
Well, I'm not advocating for the new account to get banned either; it's just that as far as I'm aware most places have rules against evading bans, and LW doesn't seem to have a clear-cut policy on such situations. I just thought the community should be aware, and then it's up to mods to discuss the matter and take action if they so choose.
You are the fourth or fifth person who has reached the same suspicion, as far I as know, independently. Which of course is moderate additional Bayesian evidence for its truth (at the very least, it means you are seeing a objective pattern even if it turns out to be coincidental, instead of being paranoid or deluded)
I propose a new version of the Turing test: An AI is as smart as a human when it can figure out which new poster on a message board is actually the same person as an old poster who got banned. :)
This is an old problem, see e.g.:
https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~russell/papers/ifsa01-identity.pdf
for special cases. Both google and facebook are very interested in versions of this problem.
I don't think this is actually a difficult problem. Some simple machine learning on word frequencies, bigram frequencies, etc. will be probably enough to solve it.
Friend of mine did it via computational complexity: using gzip (as an approximation for KC) for attributing classical latin literature to their respective authors by checking which strings add the least additional complexity (due to shared writing styles, word choice, etc.) when compressed together and then clustering. Worked like a charm.
ETA: These were large bodies of text, however. Probably not gonna work for a bundle of comments, except for me, due to my overuse of "obviously", obviously.
I thought this was pretty impressive:
We study techniques for identifying an anonymous author via linguistic stylometry, i.e., comparing the writing style against a corpus of texts of known authorship. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques with as many as 100,000 candidate authors.
[...]
...In experiments where we match a sample of just 3 blog posts against the rest of the posts from that blog (mixed in with 100,000 other blogs), the nearest-neighbor/RLSC combination is able to identify the correct blog in about 20% of cases; in about 35% of cases, the correct blog is one of the top 20 guesses. Via confidence estimation, we can increase precision from 20% to over 80% with a recall of 50%, which means that we identify 50% of the blogs overall compared to what we would have if we always made a guess.
The efficacy of the attack varies based on the number of labeled and anonymous posts available. Even with just a single post in the anonymous sample, we can identify the correct author about 7.5% of the time (without any confidence estimation). When the number of available posts in the sample increases to 10, we are able to achieve a 25% accuracy. Authors with
I downvoted this post not because I hate you, or because I love Eugine_Nier (o), but because I'd like to see fewer post like this one in the future. And I think that expressing my sentiment is what the "Downvote" button is for.
More specifically, I don't think that public shaming and witch hunts belong on Less Wrong, even when the person being hunted is actually a witch (oo). I think that the toxic culture such tactics create is likely to be more harmful than individual unruly posters, in the long term.
(o) I don't even remember who he is, though the name does sound familiar.
(oo) Metaphorically speaking.
I am fairly sure that Azathoth123 downvotes comments that he disagrees with just because he disagrees with them, even when he is responding, which seems a bit rude if you are going to engage someone.
I also think it was wrong / overly risky to write this up publicly, unless you've contacted moderators personally first and found them unresponsive.
Alright, but
1) Overly risky for whom? I personally don't feel I have exposed myself to any risk other than vindictive downvoting, and if that happens (it hasn't yet) I trust that the resulting karma issues won't affect my participation much.
2) As far as I know LW doesn't have a well set-up report & moderation system. I even searched for the official rules of conduct and only found a page on what people should not talk about (not on how they should behave generally, or the policy for bans and banned members). I don't remember seeing a list of all the mods on LW or which of them is currently online. Even Viliam Bur said here that it might take even mods a long time to get to the bottom of such an issue.
3) Some people who have an interest in knowing this (e.g. people who have been the targets of mass downvoting) might have been duped otherwise, and I view this as an intrinsically bad thing.
I would retract and contact the moderator regarding your suspicion. See http://lesswrong.com/lw/kza/meta_new_lw_moderator_viliam_bur/
One of the problems with moderation is that cooperation with LW admins is very slow. As in: extremely slow. Which means: even more slow than you imagine after reading this. Certainly much slower than I imagined when volunteering for this role.
Using my own moderator powers, all I have is a "Ban user" button which can ban a user. (And a corresponding "Unban user" button.) That is the whole moderator user interface as far as I know. If I am wrong, please educate me.
So, my options as this moment are: (a) ban Azathoth123 because I feel sufficiently convinced that he is a reincarnation of Eugine Nier, or (b) send an e-mail asking for more evidence, and wait literally forever, or (c) ignore the whole thing. From the outside, options "b" and "c" seem indistinguishable, and... well, how much happy would you be if I started using the option "a" as a general strategy?
What would really help me at this moment:
Someone with knowledge of Python and SQL, willing to cooperate with me for a few weeks (an hour or two every week). The task would be: reading and analyzing a few already written scripts to understand how exactly the data are stored in data...
Found the correct control. For mods, the link is:
And Azathoth123 is out. It's not very good, but it's the best I can do - I encourage everyone to help Viliam make the software support better.
I should have asked for help sooner. I should have updated sooner that the help will be necessary.
At this moment, I already have a few volunteers, and... uhm, I guess I will publicly ask for help again if the situation is not solved until 1.1.2015.
I know this reeks of witch-hunting, but... I have a hunch that u/Eugine_Nier is back under the guise of u/Azathoth123. Reasons:
I don't have an axe to grind against the guy, I've only spoken to him a couple of times and didn't notice any particularly large karma hits afterwards, I just really dislike it when someone skirts the rules like that. Disruptive users evading permanent bans never helped any community ever.
Obviously I'm posting this here because I think a moderator should look into the matter. Usually I would be posting a disclaimer of some sort, apologizing in advance to Azathoth123 for attacking his standing with slanderous accusations if this turned out not to be the case. Well, I won't. The more I look into the matter, the more confident I get that they're the same person. Azathoth, if you're reading this and you're not Eugine_Nier, then I strongly advise you go search for your twin brother, I think you'll get along very well. Seriously, I'm saying this in good faith. You have a suspiciously great deal of things in common.
If retributive downvoting is (still) a concern (if not, then disregard this paragraph): I'd like to request, if such a thing is possible, that a mod karma-blocks me until the issue is over, so as to not incur undeserved downvotes (it would also mean I'd get no upvotes). In turn, I promise not to abuse the system by spamming the boards with garbage without consequences, but then again given my history so far on LW I don't think that such an abuse should be expected from me. For the record, I could have made a throwaway account just to say this, and not risk being karmassassinated, but 1) a zero karma account has no credibility and 2) for signalling reasons I prefer to put my money where my mouth is.
P.S. I only made this announcement its own post because the latest open thread was about to "expire".