> So, his experience is probably well outside the norm.
Absolutely not. I've been a minor OSS celebrity for a while and even on that scale, it attracted a good number online stalkers and harassers.
Basically, if you're ever "newspaper famous", there will be completely unhinged people convinced that you're the one talking to them through their microwave, as well as rational people who make it their life mission to follow your around and "expose" you / put you down, simply because they think they deserved the limelight more than you.
I was once in a high up position for a somewhat popular project. I can confirm that it attracts obsessive people with anger issues.
It scales with popularity and changes with demographic. I’ve known non-famous CEOs who needed security details when visiting any conference or public event because they had stalkers who would reliably appear and try to get close to them.
Even on HN I had a stalker. With a previous handle I wrote a long comment about a subject that someone found insightful. They scanned my whole comment history until they found a comment where I mentioned a company I had worked for, then did a process of elimination to figure out who I was, then started contacting me through email and other channels demanding more conversation and writing on the topic to answer their questions. It was very unsettling. I’m now more careful to leave out any identifying facts on HN.
Wow, this makes me glad to not really be involved with anything publicly, not interact with the media, and not run popular web site or manage social media. The only thing I participate with under my real name is HN. In probably over a decade here, I got a grand total of one unhinged, threatening E-mail over something I posted, and no IRL stalkers. Looks like I've been lucky so far.
This would be a much better comment on the top of the thread, rather than the current ad hominem.
This is why you throw in false details every once in a while online, to throw people off.
> Basically, if you're ever "newspaper famous", there will be completely unhinged people convinced that you're the one talking to them through their microwave
I was interviewed by a semi-famous YouTuber in Taiwan (~100k subs) and reaped a ton of benefits. Had one bad encounter though: one of the viewers came into my restaurant and had a super bizarre interaction with me about it, standing next to me and talking well after close while I washed dishes, repeating talking points from the video and not getting increasingly strong hints to leave. Had to straight up throw him out in the end.
Never really felt unsafe, but it was bizarre to have such an uncomfortable interaction with someone fawning over me like that, all because they saw me in a video with only 150k videos!
> minor OSS celebrity
Look into any kind of OSS drama and you'll realize the OSS community may have a higher proportion of crazies.
nit: "rational people who make it their life mission to follow your around and "expose" you"
^ those are not rational people.
I find it fascinating that people can be convinced that they are very very rational, but they can also be convinced about crazy things, things like that the Earth is a flat disc, or that Bill Gates and the rest of the secret cabal of elites are going to put 5G receivers through a mandated vaccination, or that races other than their own need to be eradicated...
It makes me worry that what if my belief that I'm rational is also skewed...
In my opinion the explanation is easy: it comes all down to conditional probability and Bayes' theorem:
Conditional probability and Bayes' theorem tell you that how given some "ground belief" and new facts, the ground belief should be adjusted to incorporate the new evidence. Making this part of your daily life and belief system is what rationalism is about.
But what happens if your ground truth is "fucked up" (in the sense of how an average person would see it)? Then it can easily happen that new evidence can perfectly explained by your ground truth/belief system and thus (in a very rational sense) actually strengthen it.
Also keep in mind that a lot of things in the world are "messy", so it's not so hard to come up with a belief system that gives an "encompassing" framework that actually "explains" more things. If this system than becomes "strengthened" by incorporating lots of additional seen evidence (again using conditional probability and Bayes' theorem), this leads to a similar situation.