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Coscott comments on Beware Trivial Fears - Less Wrong Discussion
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I am a PhD math student, and will later want tenure. Should I be afraid of posting LW related content, that might make me appear sexist/racist with my real name?
"I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record"
I recommend a nym.
Is this recommendation based on anything? I agree, but it feels like a trivial fear, and I don't have any (even anecdotal) evidence that this is necessary.
I do not think it is hard to figure out my identity, but I am trying to avoid a google search of my name bringing up anything from LW.
(e.g. I do not put my name on my blog, or talk about it on facebook.)
An empirical observation that people like to Google-stalk everyone they come into contact with, to start with.
Evidence of what, precisely? You don't think that people google up, say, job applicants and then reject them on the basis of what they found?
Shit. I thought that I was the only one.
People do that?
People have too much time on their hands. Geez.
As much as possible, you want to optimize what a trivial investigation of you brings up - like, for instance, an internet search with your name as the query. Putting anything anywhere under your real name cedes a lot of that control.
If you're worried about nontrivial investigations, whether or not you choose a pseudonym makes very little difference.
Actually it's the other way around. If there nothing that you put up under your own name that's well ranked it's easy for someone else to put something up. Not putting up anything means having no control.
Perhaps I should have been more specific - every time you use your real name outside of a public-image building context, it becomes harder to build a public image associated with your name. I wasn't trying to say that you should put nothing up - more that it should be something like what you'd expect a medical doctor's official web page to look like. Not a stream of possibly controversial or misinterpreted posts on a web forum.
I think you're not really looking. Richwine comes to mind as a recent example.
Sorry. I have not looked and did not mean to imply that I have.
At the moment part of MIRI's problem is that they lack people who translate some of Eliezers insights into publishable papers.
If I would be a math student myself, translating insights that someone else already has seems to be a straightforward way to build a record of papers under which to seek tenure.
If you go down that road, your LW identity might get linked to your real life identity whether or not you are using your real name for it.
Trying to keep identities apart might block you from pursuing high payoff activities that combine your professional math identity with your LW identity. You might have fear that holds you back from sharing a paper that you wrote in the open thread that could be interesting to other LW'lers. You might avoid asking for help via the help desk when another LW'ler would happily help you.
You seem to have started a blog that's linked to your LW identity. Do you expect to publish something that might look favorable to a tenure committee on your blog or do you expect to only publish low impact work on your blog?
Of course if writing something on your blog that might get noticed by someone who runs a tenure committee is something that you fear, you will likely get akrasia when it comes to creating high impact work on that blog.
The straightfoward solution is to choose a real name and either accept the risk of being judged as sexist or to completely avoid saying sexist/racist stuff.
Yes.