I don’t use a pseudonym, here or anywhere [1], but even though you’re not asking I’ll answer anyway to give some of the ideas that point in the other direction.
Overall, I feel like there are a lot more advantages to a unified identity than disadvantages, and using a single identity has gone pretty well for me.
I’m in multiple communities that are mostly separate but still have a lot of overlap. And people in that overlap are often the people I most want to talk to about intersections (ex: automating a piece of being a contra dance musician) If I used different identities for LW, EA, contra dance, tech, etc then I would miss out on these connections.
Actually successfully keeping your identity private is hard. It’s especially hard because technological advance makes things retroactively and unpredictably no longer private. So I generally act as if I don’t have privacy, and get the advantages of making things public.
I’m not very worried about this making things hard for me in employment, but I’m also pretty established in my career as an engineer at this point. I put all my side-project code on github, even things that I would absolutely not write in a work context. Though if I wanted to move into something EA-ish as my primary career, I think these years of public writing would really be very helpful.
In general I am really pro-transparency, to the point that things like “never associate anything with your real name unless it makes you look good and you can take it down later when the cultural tides change and that stops being true” are not at all a way I would like to live. If I do good things I want people to know that about me, but if I do bad things I want people to hold that against me. That keeps me honest. And history is really important: I have old blog posts that I definitely wouldn’t write now, but the strongest I’ll do is add a note at the top retracting them—I would not try to hide something I’d written just because it turned out to reflect poorly on me.
[1] I’m cbr on reddit because this predates deciding to use my name or a simple variant of it everywhere. But I also don’t use reddit much anymore.
I don’t use a pseudonym, here or anywhere [1], but even though you’re not asking I’ll answer anyway to give some of the ideas that point in the other direction.
Overall, I feel like there are a lot more advantages to a unified identity than disadvantages, and using a single identity has gone pretty well for me.
I’m in multiple communities that are mostly separate but still have a lot of overlap. And people in that overlap are often the people I most want to talk to about intersections (ex: automating a piece of being a contra dance musician) If I used different identities for LW, EA, contra dance, tech, etc then I would miss out on these connections.
Actually successfully keeping your identity private is hard. It’s especially hard because technological advance makes things retroactively and unpredictably no longer private. So I generally act as if I don’t have privacy, and get the advantages of making things public.
I’m not very worried about this making things hard for me in employment, but I’m also pretty established in my career as an engineer at this point. I put all my side-project code on github, even things that I would absolutely not write in a work context. Though if I wanted to move into something EA-ish as my primary career, I think these years of public writing would really be very helpful.
In general I am really pro-transparency, to the point that things like “never associate anything with your real name unless it makes you look good and you can take it down later when the cultural tides change and that stops being true” are not at all a way I would like to live. If I do good things I want people to know that about me, but if I do bad things I want people to hold that against me. That keeps me honest. And history is really important: I have old blog posts that I definitely wouldn’t write now, but the strongest I’ll do is add a note at the top retracting them—I would not try to hide something I’d written just because it turned out to reflect poorly on me.
[1] I’m
cbron reddit because this predates deciding to use my name or a simple variant of it everywhere. But I also don’t use reddit much anymore.