Agreed - and makes me wonder if confirming your own view of your virtues/flaws with a few people you trust to be honest with you might be more helpful than, along with perhaps asking them for advice on how to improve your flaws, might be more helpful than have an anonymous feedback form
I see anonymous feedback as a way of taking the temperature of a community's perception of me. I'd prefer it if people gave me non-anonymous feedback, for all the reasons you've specified. But it's a lot better to get anonymous feedback than no feedback at all, which is what's going to happen if people don't trust me to react graciously to their feedback. If there are people who feel uncomfortable giving me feedback directly, that is itself a very useful fact for me to know, and an anonymous feedback form allows me to get that information.
For example, I know someone who seems like they want to be a decent person. However, they've told me that some other people have attempted to give them (likely accurate) critical feedback, and this person's response was to cut them out of their lives entirely and ignore their feedback. I would like to politely suggest that this person may have a poor emotional response to feedback, and they're going to end up being someone that everyone else is scared of interacting with if they don't change their behavior. But I don't feel safe telling this to them directly, since they may do the same to me. If they had an anonymous feedback form, I could provide this feedback there; in the world where they're able to act on this feedback they can now do so, and in the world where they can't, I don't get hurt by the attempt. But they don't have such a form, and I'm not willing to jeopardize my relationship with them over a small chance of helping them get out of their negative spiral.
In general, I think that as a culture's attitude towards feedback goes from good to bad, it'll pass through four stages:
* Allowing anonymous feedback, which few people feel the need to use.
* Allowing anonymous feedback, which many people feel the need to use.
* Allowing anonymous feedback, which is mostly personal attacks rather than useful feedback.
* Banning anonymous feedback altogether.
Seeing which stage you're in lets you know how the community is doing.
This is all true, but I still find Admonymous extremely valuable as a way to share specific information of the type “you have a booger hanging out of your nose” that anyone would really want to know and could easily fix but has a bunch of extra social implications when shared any other way. I often possess this info about others but it would be too embarrassing or shaming to them to make it common knowledge, so it’s not worth it to tell them and they don’t get to fix it.
My only use of Admonymous has been to compliment acquaintances' stylistic choices (e.g. haircut, glasses). This was less awkward for me to do over Admonymous because there was no chance of them wondering if I had a crush on them when I didn't.
How much answers these forms get? My guess is that very little - maybe aside from people living in places like Berkeley where your IRL friends are largely from EA community.
Agreed - and makes me wonder if confirming your own view of your virtues/flaws with a few people you trust to be honest with you might be more helpful than, along with perhaps asking them for advice on how to improve your flaws, might be more helpful than have an anonymous feedback form
I see anonymous feedback as a way of taking the temperature of a community's perception of me. I'd prefer it if people gave me non-anonymous feedback, for all the reasons you've specified. But it's a lot better to get anonymous feedback than no feedback at all, which is what's going to happen if people don't trust me to react graciously to their feedback. If there are people who feel uncomfortable giving me feedback directly, that is itself a very useful fact for me to know, and an anonymous feedback form allows me to get that information.
For example, I know someone who seems like they want to be a decent person. However, they've told me that some other people have attempted to give them (likely accurate) critical feedback, and this person's response was to cut them out of their lives entirely and ignore their feedback. I would like to politely suggest that this person may have a poor emotional response to feedback, and they're going to end up being someone that everyone else is scared of interacting with if they don't change their behavior. But I don't feel safe telling this to them directly, since they may do the same to me. If they had an anonymous feedback form, I could provide this feedback there; in the world where they're able to act on this feedback they can now do so, and in the world where they can't, I don't get hurt by the attempt. But they don't have such a form, and I'm not willing to jeopardize my relationship with them over a small chance of helping them get out of their negative spiral.
In general, I think that as a culture's attitude towards feedback goes from good to bad, it'll pass through four stages:
* Allowing anonymous feedback, which few people feel the need to use.
* Allowing anonymous feedback, which many people feel the need to use.
* Allowing anonymous feedback, which is mostly personal attacks rather than useful feedback.
* Banning anonymous feedback altogether.
Seeing which stage you're in lets you know how the community is doing.
This is all true, but I still find Admonymous extremely valuable as a way to share specific information of the type “you have a booger hanging out of your nose” that anyone would really want to know and could easily fix but has a bunch of extra social implications when shared any other way. I often possess this info about others but it would be too embarrassing or shaming to them to make it common knowledge, so it’s not worth it to tell them and they don’t get to fix it.
My only use of Admonymous has been to compliment acquaintances' stylistic choices (e.g. haircut, glasses). This was less awkward for me to do over Admonymous because there was no chance of them wondering if I had a crush on them when I didn't.
How much answers these forms get? My guess is that very little - maybe aside from people living in places like Berkeley where your IRL friends are largely from EA community.