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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2697 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 14, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I don't understand why the motte can't either. No one would even have to reveal their tags, everyone would just know that you're from the motte. Some people here are scared of being doxxed past the point of any rationality. Their reasoning usually has no statistical or information theory backing, it's all just woo god AI with 0 false positive rate nonsense.

A little story of my life no one would believe if I tell them. My employer is a SSC reader. I met him at a SSC meetup while I was in university and I asked him for work 2 years later when I was having a hard time finding work. Going to that 1 meetup changed my life.

It's a shame we can't meet the people we spent so many cumulative hours having good discussions with.

I don't really give a damn about doxing, but I don't live in America, and I'm not enough of conversationalist or social networkers to make a good host for a German Mottizens meeting, so by force of geography I don't see it happen for me either way.

Are you sure about the "no statistical or information theory backing" part? Even if they don't provide a good explanation, their worries are valid as deanonymization is rather easy. Sufficiently advanced information theory mathematics may as well be magic, by the way

I hate to be the "source" guy, but source? Give me a few good papers to read and I will potentially change my mind. I have yet to receive any. It doesn't have to be a paper, just anything at all.

Key search terms "stylometry" and "social media":

Using publicly available data, our best model, a combined temporal-linguistic one, was able to correctly match the accounts of 31% of 5,612 distinct users across Twitter and Facebook.

Does sub 50% accuracy impress (scare) you?

Yes, because the baseline for "randomly guessing" is 1/5612 ("twitter user @fluffyporcupine matches this specific one of the 5612 facebook users"), not 1/2 ("twitter user @fluffyporcupine is/is not the same user as facebook user Nancy Prickles").

Doesn't scare me for personal reasons -- I'm trivially identifiable, you don't need to resort to fancy ML techniques. But if you're actually trying to remain anonymous, and post under both your real name and a pseudonym, then perhaps it's worth paying attention to (e.g. spinning up separate throwaway accounts for anything you want to say that is likely to actually lead to significant damage to your real-world identity and doing the "translate to and from a foreign language to get changed phrasing without changed meaning" thing).

https://gwern.net/death-note-anonymity#de-anonymization

These 18 references (under that large paragraph) scare me a little, what about you? I have personal experience as well, but not at some impressive level that I can write about. It's just a general savviness which has taught me that most people are safe because bad actors lack interest or competence, and not because finding them is impossible

I think I would stand out like a sore thumb in a group of motteizeans enough to be doxxable even if we don’t share our usernames.

I register I have no fucking idea who you are.

You could approach things from the opposite direction and just go by your username. It’s long, but at least it’s pronounceable.

Huh, I'm not sure how. (No need to reveal.)

Here I was, thinking the same.

Has the idea previously been raised and rejected, or is it something that’s just never been considered here? And if it was raised previously, did that occur when The Motte was still on Reddit? If so, some people’s opinions might have changed now that we’re on our own site.

You know, it really wouldn’t take too many people to make some kind of meetup feasible. I think DSL’s usually only have around a dozen people. It would just take a small nucleus of attendees and careful initial planning.

(To be clear, I’ve never been to an SSC or DSL meetup before, despite considering it, and I’m guessing I probably wouldn’t end up going to one associated with The Motte either unless it were National Park-based, and even then, it’s doubtful. Adjust your view of what I’m saying accordingly.)

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