> What's the benefit in the operator revealing themself?

    - Owning the mistake they did.
    - Being a credible human being for others.
    - Having the courage to face with themselves on a (literal and proverbial) mirror and use this opportunity to grow immensely.
    - Being able make peace with what they did and not having to carry that burden on their soul.
    - Being a decent human being.
    - Being honest to themselves and others looking at them right now.

the list goes on and on and on...

The downside is he will likely receive a lot of death threats. Probably in his literal, physical mailbox.

Having seen what a self righteous online mob can do in the name of justice over literally nothing, I fully defend his decision to stay anonymous. As much as I find his action idiotic and negligent.

Does your defense extend to others? Do you believe that anyone should be able to avoid consequences if they’re clever enough to stay anonymous?

Avoiding consequences for unethical actions is, itself, unethical. If you don’t want the time, don’t do the crime.

Fair. If before an impartial judge and/or a jury of your peers. Not so much in the case of an internet mob.

Same answer, though — if you don’t want to get hung by an Internet mob, don’t poke one with a short stick.

I believe the rules are simple.

    1. Don't do anything you don't want to experience yourself.
    2. If you don't want to find out, do not fool around.

As an arguable middle ground, they can plead to Scott non-anonymously while addressing the public anonymously. That'd work to a point, but it's not ideal.

Also, their tone is coming through very cocky. Defining their agent as a "God!", then giving it a cocky and "you're always right, don't stand down" initialization prompt doesn't help.

I mean, prompting a box of weights without any kind of reasoning or judgement capability with "Don't be an asshole. Don't leak private shit. Everything else is fair game." is both brave and rich. No wonder things went sideways. Very sideways. If everything else is fair game, everything done to the bot and its "operator" in turn is a "fair game". They should get on with it, and not hide behind the word "anonymous". They don't deserve it.

All in all, they doesn't give impression of being a naive person who did a mistake unintentionally, but on the contrary.

If it was malicious then a call for deanonymization is meaningless. Similar in spirit (though not intent) to how Anna's Archive, etc just ignore court orders and continue doing their thing.

If bad actions do not have consequences they tend to be repeated

> What's the benefit in the operator revealing themself?

That's a frighteningly illiterate take on this.

I don't think that constructively answers the questions

It's an excellent comment on the attitude behind the question and this is, after all, a comment section not an "answers" section.

"No it's not"

See how that works? Flippant dismissal contributes little if anything to discussion and is a conversational dead-end

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What makes it "frighteningly illiterate" to ask "what difference does it make if they put a name to the post?"

Does it change the outcome? Does it change the ideas? Does it change the unsettling implications about alignment?

The internet is a frothing mob, look at the impact on Scott himself. Other than allow the internet to hunt them down and do it's thing or dig up ad-hominem attacks, what would change if the person put a name to it? Look at what this guy got from the "internet sleuths" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46991190)

Other sibling comments made an attempt to answer those questions

We don't need to know the specific person. But, yeesh, it'd be a waste of a lot of people's good faith if they ended up contributing under another anonymous identity, that could just vanish again if they put their foot in it.

Scott could receive an apology from a real person, for one.

They are a coward.

..and a glass cannon; they can dish it out -- through intentional negligence -- but can't take it.