Slartibartfastibast

February 26, 2016

nostalgebraist:
shlevy:
I’m the reason su3su2u1 just made this post:
and I wanted to make two points relating to it:
First, and most important: Do not harass or doxx su3su2u1. Whatever you think of his actions, they do not warrant that and it would be worse than anything he has done. If you don’t buy that argument, consider this: This information was known in conclusive form for months and was held back out of fear that the evidence would enable someone to more easily doxx him. If you choose to do so, you directly contribute to people having to choose between putting someone’s personal life at risk and allowing bad behavior to go unchecked. Please don’t prove the more cautious members of this community right. If you want to comment on this, do so in your own space, and don’t tag him unless you’re interacting with him in good faith.
Second: I confronted su3su2u1 about this issue today and gave him the opportunity to say something himself, specifically to avoid my having to put forward evidence that could enable worse behavior from others. Had he not written this, I would have compiled up the information myself. As it stands, I want to comment on why I think this is important: su3su2u1 has a positive reputation in this community on the basis of his qualifications and work experience. No one questions, and up until now no one should have questioned, basic statements of fact he has made about his areas of expertise or his personal experiences. That’s a fundamental component of online psuedo-anonymous interaction with expertise/experience asymmetry. su3su2u1 has now shown willingness to lie about these kinds of facts, and to double down when confronted (he has been asked about being frink in the past, for example), and while his honesty now is hopeful (though mitigated by the fact that it was under pressure) I think it behooves all of us to be very careful about what we take at face value from him going forward, especially so when it comes to MIRI and Eliezer Yudkowsky. If you choose to continue to engage with him, please double check factual claims he makes, and please don’t share them without verifying yourself or at least noting to people who may not be aware that there may be reason to doubt. If he has convinced you of something in the past, please review the basis of that convincing. Hopefully nothing of substance to his arguments has been lied about, but in my opinion this kind of trust, once lost, should be very hard to gain back.
ETA: better screenshot
ETA x2: I have personally verified that he does in fact have a physics phd and does currently work in data science, consistent with his claims on tumblr.
A few comments – I haven’t mentioned this before out of politeness (etc.), but I have often been wary of the way su3su2u1 brings in third parties when making arguments. He regularly mentions checking things with “friends” who have convenient types of expertise, often a very short amount of time (e.g. minutes) after an issue has been brought up. An occasional claim of this sort might be believable, but he makes them so often that I started discounting them long ago.
Part of the reason I never mentioned it is that I figure (perhaps wrongly) that if I notice something like this, most other people are too. Another part is that I’m not actually sure how important this kind of thing is. After all, when talking about things that are verifiable and don’t require extending trust, I have generally found su3su2u1‘s posts to be very accurate and insightful.
In particular, whenever su3su2u1 talks about subjects that I already know a lot about, he has always seemed perceptive and knowledgable about them. Either he agrees with me, or he disagrees for a good reason which would be seen as sensible within the community of people who know a lot about the subject. This is largely how I evaluate people who claim expertise on the internet, and su3su2u1 has done extremely well here.
So to me, this is kind of like finding out that a book I really liked contained a few trivial plagiarized paragraphs: important insofar as “plagiarism” is considered a serious offense, and I would wonder why such a good author would do it knowing the risk, but not something that really changes my opinion of the book.
(Also, I’m not sure I understand the clause “especially so when it comes to MIRI and Eliezer Yudkowsky” in the OP – why these areas?)
I am one of the people who has known this for a while and avoided talking about it so as not to make doxxing su3 too easy for anybody malicious. But since now it’s out and people are starting to attack Shea and call him petty for even worrying about it, fine, let me explain why I’m upset.
1. Often su’s lies and sock puppets have the effect of making him seem more credible, or making him seem like somebody it’s important to take seriously. For example, when he argued that allowing MIRI in AI risk spheres would turn people away from EA, a lot of people pointed out that he wasn’t interested in effective altruism anyway and should butt out of other people’s problems. Then one of his sock puppets said that he was an EA who attended EA conferences but was so disgusted by the focus on MIRI that he would never attend another conference again. This gave false credibility to his narrative of MIRI driving away real EAs.
2. Likewise, a sock puppet described how he attended MIRI’s talks and thought that they sounded money-grubbing. He talked about how at the EA conference, he couldn’t get anyone to talk about pandemics or global warming because they were all obsessed with AI risk. None of these stories were true. These sorts of things aren’t just using a pseudonym for self-protection, they’re making up evidence to support a position.
3. Similarly, the times nostalgebraist mentions where su3 comes up with suspiciously many expert friends who agree with him in a suspiciously short time are used to create the illusion of a consensus for su3’s position. For example, one time he said that one of MIRI’s research papers was unimportant, and he knew this because he ran it by a bunch of math PhD and computer science PhD friends and they all agreed it was unimportant. If these friends are in fact made up, that’s an important thing to know.
4. Similarly, he used a sock puppet claiming to have a Math PhD in to criticize MIRI’s math papers, and to talk about how they sound “to someone in the field”. He is not, in fact, in the field.
5. Su3su2u1 hasn’t just made a couple of pseudonyms here and there. He has a pattern of really weird, consistent pathological lying. For example, on another site not related to the rationalistsphere, he’s said that “I was a liberal arts prof. for five years at a small school before I was denied tenure (the primary mark against me was a blog).” None of this is true. At other times he’s said he “worked in tech during the 90s”, which based on things he’s said elsewhere is impossible - unless those other things are themselves false.
6. Related: I asked for help with a legal issue in Michigan, and one of his sock puppets gave me advice based on a story of the time he had to hire an attorney in Michigan. The real su3su2u1 doesn’t live anywhere near Michigan and although it’s possible he did in the past, that’s not listed on the social media sites of his I’ve found, and based on everything else it seems more likely this story is made up. This pisses me off because it’s basically giving me fake legal advice that could really hurt me. It also supports the whole pathological lying thing - if you want to use pseudonyms to hide your identity, fine, but don’t tell me you know things about Michigan law when you don’t!
7. When confronted about all these things, he made up even more lies to deny all of them, including in ways that hurt other people’s reputation. For example, Alyssa called him out on her own blog about one of his alternate accounts, su3 denied it, various su3 sock puppets piled on Alyssa, and eventually everyone agreed Alyssa was just paranoid and trying to character assassinate a MIRI opponent. Note that even after this, Alyssa didn’t reveal any of this evidence or confront su3, proving her to be a much better person than I am.
8. Likewise, before admitting to being Frink, he made an unconvincing denial, saying that Frink was some friends from work using his computer. Or something. I can’t tell for sure because he’s since deleted that Tumblr post. I checked the timestamps for Frink’s posting on SSC any many of them were after midnight, ie not working hours.
As far as I can tell, this is not just using a pseudonym to prevent doxxing, it’s a consistent pattern of making anecdotes as evidence for his position, claiming expertise in various fields which he doesn’t have when it’s convenient to his arguments, and lying about weird things that don’t even matter a bunch of times just for the heck of it.
Since su3’s argument style relies a lot on personal anecdote, I think it’s important to let people know that they can’t trust his personal anecdotes or those of his sock puppets.
I’m avoiding providing links here, once again to make su3su2u1 harder to doxx, but if someone challenges me I can give links privately or something, and if su himself challenges me and gives permission I can give them publicly.