It makes it much easier for people to dox you. There are some very bad ways that this can manifest.
I agree with this, so my original advice was aimed at people who already made the decision to make their pseudonym easily linkable to their real name (e.g., their real name is easily Googleable from their pseudonym). I’m lucky in that there are lots of ethnic Chinese people with my name so it’s hard to dox me even knowing my real name, but my name isn’t so common that there’s more than one person with the same full name in the rationalist/EA space. (Even then I do use alt accounts when saying especially risky things.)
On the topic of doxing, I was wondering if there’s a service that would “pen-test” how doxable you are, to give a better sense of how much risk one can take when saying things online. Have you heard of anything like that?
I agree with this, so my original advice was aimed at people who already made the decision to make their pseudonym easily linkable to their real name (e.g., their real name is easily Googleable from their pseudonym). I’m lucky in that there are lots of ethnic Chinese people with my name so it’s hard to dox me even knowing my real name, but my name isn’t so common that there’s more than one person with the same full name in the rationalist/EA space. (Even then I do use alt accounts when saying especially risky things.)
On the topic of doxing, I was wondering if there’s a service that would “pen-test” how doxable you are, to give a better sense of how much risk one can take when saying things online. Have you heard of anything like that?