I knew the On Privacy post by Holly Elmore, in fact, I had copied this paragraph to my Anki deck:
I now think privacy is important for maximizing self-awareness and self-transparency. The primary function of privacy is not to hide things society finds unacceptable, but to create an environment in which your own mind feels safe to tell you things. If you’re not allowing these unshareworthy thoughts and feelings a space to come out, they still affect your feelings and behavior– you just don’t know how or why. And all the while your conscious self-image is growing more alienated from the processes that actually drive you. Privacy creates the necessary conditions for self-honesty, which is a necessary prerequisite to honesty with anyone else. When you only know a cleaned-up version of yourself, you’ll only be giving others a version of your truth.
Another entry in my Anki deck is about arguments against “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”:
Epistemic status: N=1
I've always written several thousand words a day in a private Google doc about anything that came to mind. Only recently have I started publishing to LessWrong. It's a long and arduous process for me, too slow to be worth the effort usually. [1] Still, publishing on LW is probably a net good overall.
It also leads to interesting new failure modes. Here are a few.
Emotional security
Orwell’s 1984:
Ingsoc has managed to be so invasive and precise in their button-pushing that citizens must monitor their own thoughts. They're making them systematically suppress their own subagents. The state's definition of "public" has gained so much ground over "private" that there's barely anything left. Orwell is describing the ideal of totalitarianism.
Holly Elmore writes about privacy[2] (emphasis mine):
This is a more voluntary kind of subagent-suppression than what’s going on in 1984, and is motivated by signaling rather than survival. That doesn’t make it much less disastrous, as far as quality of thinking is concerned. In both cases, you are forcing filters closer and closer to the source of thoughts and suffering for it.
Intellectual output is heavily mediated by your sense of emotional security, and these demonstrate failure-modes from having a poor sense of emotional security.
Intellectual security
Elizabeth writes:
I’m writing this on a personal Google Doc (instead of, say, the LW editor), which helps me feel free to go on tangents. But despite this, I know I’m going to end up publishing this, and can’t help but writing like it's the final draft. LessWrong is probably the most cutting-edge butterfly-crushing capabilities lab in the world. It's scary.
I’m applying LW-grade intellectual rigor to an exploratory draft. This restricts creativity, makes work less fun overall, and isn’t even fair. Were the best works written without intellectual security? No. They all used to be a loose collection of butterfly ideas, just like this one. It's only after benefiting from a load of intellectual slack (eg writing in private) that they get to their present ironclad status.
Freedom of goal
Tvsi writes:
I’m writing this in expectation that it’ll be useful to someone on LessWrong. That's important to me for the express purpose of contributing to x-risk mitigation, even if it's in a small and indirect way. This means I’m restricting my thoughtspace to “things that seem useful”, which blocks me from accessing that vast space called “things that don’t seem useful, but are in fact useful”. (See Paul Graham noticing his confusion at this.)
When writing on LW, I don’t feel like I have freedom of goal. This is my fault, not the platform’s; I know all sorts of posts Tsvi would call “fun” are appreciated here. Nonetheless, I only feel comfortable exploring nothing in particular, for no other reason than curiosity, when I’m in private. If I did it on LW, I'd feel like I was squishing flowers and making the website overall worse.[3]
Practical takeaways
Anytime I formulate a sentence or footnote I like but that isn't on topic, I copy and paste it and put it in another doc which serves as my negentropy reservoir for unfinished tangents. This allows me to not kill my darlings (squishing butterflies) while getting the post out the door within a short timeframe.
When I want to publish an idea, I explicitly label it in my doc as “to publish”. Doing this, I trade freedom of movement for focus.[4] And when I don't want to publish, I sometimes try being deliberately messy in my private docs by eg skipping inferential steps or writing run-on sentences and asymmetric footnotes. I think “deliberately messy” is key here, because if I start controlling for quality while I'm writing, I end up slippery-sloping into stressing over the placement of every comma. Personal docs are meant to be chaotic; you'd be stifling that garden by tending to it like you'd tend to LessWrong. You should let weeds grow everywhere.
Before publishing, I tend to get my ideas vetted by a group of friends through email. This reaps many of the benefits that come with public writing (like slamming my map against the territory) while dodging many of the emotional and intellectual security concerns LW represents for me. Plus, it’s more fun because I can afford to be more casual. Don't get the weed-whacker just yet.
As per James Somers’ seminal post, I’ve dispensed effort in speeding up writing for the express purpose of reducing the average effort/time cost per post published.
Thanks to Kaj Sotala’s comment for inspiring this post.
I'm grateful for how well the karma system works. When I write bad posts, they quietly go away and never get read again, and I don't have to feel guilty for wasting people's time. So the karma system makes me more likely to publish.
Would you believe me if I said I’d never realized that phrase was redundant until now?