[META] Building a rationalist communication system to avoid censorship

A quiz and a day's wait before adding a new user is another option. Make it something that a regular lurker who read the rules would be able to pass easily, but a rando couldn't. SCP wiki did something like this, it seemed to help with quality control.

Rotate through 3 different quizes, or scramble the quiz order sometimes, if you want to make automated sign-ups annoying for mobs and spammers. Have the web people track the number of sign-up-quiz fails (it's a nice metric for "is there a mob at the doorstep").

(Edit: Ah, someone already proposed a more-elaborate variant using GPT-X. Simple quizes with a few mild gotcha-questions should be enough of a screen for most cases, though.)

A proposal I think I haven't seen posed is giving new members a "trial period." If an average (or randomly-selected) post doesn't have a karma score of at least X by the end of the period (or if it dips below Y at any point), they're out and their stuff is deleted. Ban them from handing out karma until after the trial, or this quickly breaks. This probably still has weird incentive consequences that I'm not seeing, though...

...it does mean having a bit of an evaporative-filter for quality-ratings, and it means links to crappy posts turn into deadlinks in just a matter of time.

If log-in is required to read posts, I am afraid there would be no new users. How would anyone find out that the interesting debate exists in the first place? But if you have no users, there is no one to talk to.

Users on this "network" are capable of being pseudonymous. Anonymity is probably also possible, tho (much?) harder. We don't seem to have attracted too many people "spewing nonsense", or that many at all.

Requiring a personal connection to existing users will shut out a lot of potential users. And it's probably better for plausible deniability that we continue to allow anyone to signup.

I – and I'd guess most other users – are not doing enough to reliably avoid de-anonymization. It requires very strict opsec in general.

And I don't know how you could possibly calculate the probability of being de-anonymized, even with perfect information about everything you've leaked. Relying on your feelings is probably the only practical option, besides not sharing any info.

This might become difficult with values of $X\ge 4$, though…

I have seen some captchas like "What's the capital of [Some Country]" in some forums. We can add some basic captchas that need some level of highschool math and basic familiarity with the sequences for verifying new user registrations, and then wall-off certain posts from unverified users.

I'm not sure this will be that  effective though. All it takes to defeat it is some screenshots.

But as the OP notes, we need only defend against mobs and hard evidence. If, e.g., Scott writes pieces with throwaway accounts that are obviously in his style, he can always claim that's an imitator. The mob lives for easy outrage, so as long as we decrease that factor we have a partial solution.

There's no purely technological solution to censorship, especially indirect forms like what's arguably happening to Scott.

Bruce Schneier, a famous cryptography expert and advocate, eventually realized that cryptography, while good, was often besides the point – it almost always made sense to attack the other parts of systems instead of try to break encryption algorithms. Here's a good essay by him about this and a matching XKCD:

• Essays: Security Pitfalls in Cryptography - Schneier on Security
• xkcd: Security

To the degree that we want to avoid censorship, we need to either adopt sufficient opsec – much better than Scott and even better than Gwern, who wrote to someone blackmailing them (by threatening to dox them):

It would be annoying to have my name splashed all over, but I resigned myself to that back in ~2010 when I decided to set up my website; I see Gwern as a pen name now, and not a real pseudonym. I’m glad it managed to last to 2015.

– or we need to prevent censorship IRL. Obviously, we can (and should) do both to some extent.

But really, to avoid the kind of censorship that inspired this, one would need to remain strictly anonymous/pseudonymous, which is hard (and lonely – IRL meetups are a threat vector!).

Is a commitment to entertain controversial or unpopular or odious ideas (or to advocate for them) separate from or integral to rationalism?

Integral – for epistemological rationality anyways, and arguably too for instrumental rationality as well.

Is a mental health professional's preference to maintain enough anonymity so that their blog does not interfere with their practice or their safety separate from or integral to rationality?

I don't think it's "separate from" as much as 'mostly orthogonal'. Scott is largely to blame for his relative lack of pseudonymity – he's published, publicly, a lot of evidence of his identity. What's he trying to avoid is losing enough of what remains so that his (full) legal name is directly linked to Scott Alexander – in the top results of, e.g. a Google search result for his legal name.

When it comes to the general idea that anonymity is needed to discuss certain or any topics, I'm more skeptical.

You're right, it's not needed to discuss anything – at least not once. The entire issue is whether one can do so indefinitely. And, in that case, it sure seems like anonymity/pseudonymity is needed, in general.

I don't think there's a lot of anonymity here on LessWrong but it's certainly possible to be pseudonymous. I don't think most people bother to really try to maintain it particularly strictly. But I find the comments here to be much better than in anonymous/pseudonymous comments in other places, or even – as you seem to agree – on or via FaceBook or Twitter (or whatever). This place is special. And I think this place really is vulnerable to censorship, i.e. pressure NOT to discuss what's discussed here now. The people here – some of them anyways – really would refrain from discussing some things were they to suffer for it like they fear.

The problem with that is that people who don't use throwaway accounts might be tarred by association, e.g. "I googled their name and it looks like they are a LWer; haven't you heard LW is a haven for white supremacists now? Here's a screenshot of a post on LW that got upvoted instead of removed..."