I went looking for the relevant rule. I wanted to read the text of the rule (and while I’m at it the other rules). I thought it might help me consider:
- If there were other ways I might be at risk of unintentionally violating rules.
- If there was an answer about a logical problem I’ll describe below.
I failed to find the rule, but I remember reading it in the past. I specifically remember something about not outing anons, so that was what I was looking for.
Perhaps the rule was in the rules of one of the predecessor forums and didn’t get carried over to this one. Or perhaps I missed it on this forum despite what seemed to me to be a fairly diligent search.
Here is where/how I looked:
FAQ: FAQ - Critical Falliblism
TOS: Terms of Service - Critical Falliblism
Privacy: Privacy - Critical Falliblism
Rules Updates: Rules Updates
I initially did in-page search of each of these docs for “anon”. When I didn’t find the rule that way I went ahead and read through the pages, looking for something that didn’t specifically say “anon” but was about not outing them. I didn’t find anything.
I also noticed that in message threads (like Rules Updates) at least in Firefox it appears that find in page does not search the whole thread, even if the thread appears to be on one page. There were multiple mentions of “anon” in the Rules Updates thread (though none with the rule I was looking for) but find in page only found the ones in the post that was currently on screen.
I also did a general search of the forum, with:
https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/search?q=anon
It was dominated by results that were hits simply because the poster was an anon. However, I scrolled through the entire list of results and didn’t see anything that looked promising.
To be clear: I don’t want to out anons, and didn’t have that goal when I was writing the post that caused this problem. Speculating about an anon’s identity contributes to outing them. Even if it wasn’t in the rules I’d agree that speculating on an anon’s identity was bad. I want to avoid doing it again.
The reason I think the speculation about an anon got into my message at all was I was trying to make my post logically consistent. I’ll use a generic description here to avoid any repeating of speculation about an anon:
Suppose I think I notice a problem, P, with post X which was posted by anon A. However, I also think P would not be a problem if A was a particular person, or a member of a particular group of persons.
It seems my options without speculating on the identity of A are:
(1) Not post about P at all (always an option, but seems to defeat the purpose of the forum).
(2) Post P without any mention of thinking that P wouldn’t be a problem if X was posted by certain A.
I think there are two serious problems with option (2): First, it fails to fully convey my understanding of P; it leaves out important information. Second, it baits someone else to post that P wouldn’t be a problem for certain A - also a speculation about an anon. I don’t want to encourage that even if I’m not the one doing it.
Does anyone know a better answer to this situation I’m not thinking of?