I want the forum to remain a place where there is open discussion and one where upvotes and attention are tied to argument quality and usefulness. I suspect that seeing people's names doesn't help foster open discussion and agnostic use of attention, though I have no concrete evidence or analysis to provide.
There are also different options for how to anonymize. It could be an optional add on, It could be hidden text that unhides when you click, it could only anonymize posts that are presenting arguments, etc. We could also just run a week of anonymization and see how it goes.
One last point is that if it is an issue of getting credit for your work, we could still all have accounts with our names that include all of our comments, but you would have to click directly on profiles to see what comments/posts they have made.
Interested to hear if people feel similarly or a steel-man for why names are important/why anonymization would be harmful.
I find names helpful to decide what to read and to associate ideas with people. If you want to hide names on your end, you can view the forum through https://ea.greaterwrong.com and click the anti-kibitzer button on the right side of the page.
Oh awesome thanks for the link, did not know that.
I find names helpful for similar reasons. I'm curious how much more productive you feel it makes you (vs a counterfactual where you can click on the accounts that made posts to see true identity), though it might be hard to give a concrete answer.
It's sort of interesting that the thing you like about names is also the thing I think could cause problems.
Using names to sort content could improve epistemics if you sorted people well. But it also could reduce if you sort badly. Per... (read more)