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Lumifer comments on Stupid Questions Thread - January 2014 - Less Wrong
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What threat do you want to protect against? If you fear the NSA, they have probably have no trouble linking your real name to your alias.
They know where the person with your real name lives and they know what web addresses get browsed from that location.
I could not do that. I study in university under my real name and my identity as a university student is linked to my public identity. The link is strong enough that a journalist who didn't contact me via a social network called my university to get in touch with me.
On LessWrong I write under my firstname plus the first two letters of my lastname. That means that anyone who recognises my identity from somewhere else can recognize me but if someone Google's for me he can't find me easily.
I have no trouble having to stand up for write I write on Lesswrong to people I meet in real life but having a discussion with one of my aunts about it wouldn't be fun, so I don't make it too easy. I also wouldn't want the writing to be quoted out of context in other places. I would survive it but given the low level of filtering on what I write on LW it would be annoying.
As far as self censoring goes I feel safe to say one of my aunts given that I have multiple of them. Anybody reading couldn't reduce who I mean. Whenever else I write something about someone I know I think twice whether someone could identify the person and if so I wouldn't write it publicly under this identity. Asking about relationship advice and flashing out specific a problem would be a no-go for me because it might make details public that the other person didn't want to have public. Everything I say in that regard is supposed to be general enough that no harm will come from it to other people I know personally.
How about a publicly accessible collection of everything you did or said online that is unerasable and lasts forever?
"I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record"
You don't name a threat.
If you think that the work you produce online is crap and people you care about will dislike you for it, than having a permanent record of it is bad. If you think that the work that you produce online is good than having a permanent record of it is good.
You might say that some people might not hire me when they read that I expressed some controversial view years ago in an online forum. I would say that I don't want to increase the power of those organisations by working for them anyway.
I rather want to get hired by someone who likes me and values my public record.
There a bit of stoicism involved but I don't think that it's useful to live while hiding yourself. I rather fear having a lived a life where I leave no meaningful record than living a life that leaves a record.
How far from the normal are you? You may quickly find your feelings change drastically as your positions become more opposed. I don't want to work for organizations that would not hire me due to controversial views, but depending on the view and on my employment prospects, my choices may be heavily constrained. I'd rather know which organizations I can choose to avoid, rather than be forced out of organizations. ((There are also time-costs involved with doing it this way: it a company says it hates X in the news, and I like X, I can not send them a resume. But I send them a resume and then discover than they don't want to hire me due to my positions on X during an interview, it's a lot of lost energy.))
Conversely, writing under my own name would incentive avoiding topics that are or are likely to become controversial enough.
No, I name a capability to misrepresent and hurt you.
If I do most of my public activity under identity Bob but the government knows me as Dave, someone can still misrepresent me as I'm acting as Bob by misquoting things written under the Bob identity in the past.
If I want to prevent permanent records I would have to switch identities every so often which is hard to do without losing something if you have anything attached to those identities that you don't want to lose.