Comment on Welcome to Less Wrong!

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:02:29 GMT

At the very least, they could dictate an arbitrary passage (or an MD5 hash) to this person who claims to be AK, and ask them to post this passage as a comment on this thread, coming from AK's account. This would not definitively prove that the person is AK, but it might serve as a strong piece of supporting evidence.

In addition, once the "AK" persona and the "WillNewsome" persona each post a sufficiently large corpus of text, we could run some textual analysis algorithms on it to determine if their writing styles are similar; Markov Chains are surprisingly good at this (considering how simple they are to implement).

The problem of determining a person's identity on the Internet, and doing so in a reasonably safe way, is an interesting challenge. But in practice, I don't really think it matters that much, in this case. I care about what the "AK" persona writes, not about who they are pretending not to be.

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