Any advice for people who kind of want to write more but get stuck on questions surrounding pseudonymity, audience, public reputation?
The “anxious” end is problems around doxxing and the like. Which are real concerns but I would bet people like me, on balance, are risk averse less out of good risk modeling and more out of “unknown unknown.”
At the less anxious end of problems: writing for an indeterminate audience is hard. It leads to defending oneself from hypothetical attacks from all sides. Sometimes this is desired, for instance you want to find holes in your math proofs. But some of your “takes” really do need to just sit out there and have insufficient backstory to full “prove” them. I think. (Lol.)
Contrary goals: general networking/community building, versus just wanting to do takes, versus wanting a little bit of a professional portfolio going on. The last case, of course, would put pressure toward political neutrality, less take-ish-ly.
Nonetheless clearly I am not terrible at this. I just survived 3 bullet points, under a pseudonym, while knowing my audience.
For short timelines I’m volunteering at a cat shelter and focusing on chess more, and probably pseudonymity is better since I’m already doing it and no point in adapting to something else.
LessWrong is half maybe? NY Times writers I’m not aspiring to be like. That lives some very reputed people on Substack who I’m not sure I should be emulating because they have institutional backing, loyal readerships and just better since with what takes go to press.
Which of those contrary goals is most important to you? Do you believe writing is the optimal method to reach that goal? If you wrote in a way that better served that goal—what differences would you expect to see?
Nonetheless clearly I am not terrible at this. I just survived 3 bullet points, under a pseudonym, while knowing my audience.
I think any time a person posts something on a particular forum, whether that be here, the comments in a Tik Tok video, Metafilter, Disqus comments on a particular blog, there carries with it a certain amount of assumptions and therefore a profile about the audience. Even if you just picked that forum out of convenience rather than believing that the message to audience match is optimal.
I probably get >50% of the value being need-to-know pseudon. For example, you can start pseudon, interact, and de-anon if you connect more (what I do here).
I have a mental model for LessWrong readers’ politics that helps me a lot. Like, left-nonpartisan, somewhat opposed to politics epistemics, you can bring up most major issues (e.g. abortion) without derailing. Just those things make it way easier to write than on my Substack.
I think of it as the “barstool take” problem. Some of your takes probably just need to happen at a bar and not wind up on social media, definitely not de-anon, and that’s fine. I may overestimate this—a spicy stance on abortion is probably bad for Substack, but acknowledging that people talk about the issue is normal.
Sometimes I think I could build myself professionally better with a more central writing portfolio. This to me has the resume problem where it has to be “everything and nothing” to everyone. Maybe I concede to you that pseudon gets me most of the value. I still have the question—okay, so I really think I’m missing part of the value of non-anon writing (also include “unknown unknowns”, or identity shifts), and I’m probably still complicating it, forex, overestimating how much stuff I might want to say that would be unprofessional.
If your primary goal is to write for professional advancement, then pseudonymous writing would be pointless. I would also assume you want to write for a very targeted audience using very targeted themes: you’ll want to write primarily about your current or prospective industry, in a way which displays competence and authority. It basically has to be optimized for the decision makes who have the power to hire or commission you for work.
At that point it’s a classic marketing problem: What is the ‘pain point’ or the ‘job to be done’ that those decision makers are experiencing? Each thing you write addresses those. But really they are covert ads for them to hire you, like all “content marketing” which is what most professional blogs are.
I realize I’m writing very abstractly because I don’t know what your profession is, what expertise you’d be brining, or how you expect a writing portfolio to help you. What I will assume is this means no barstool takes, if you’re looking for work as a Project Manager in Residential Developments, you’re not really displaying competency by telling people what you think about Abortion, or Prince Harry, or why Paul Simon’s Graceland is actually really an overrated album. Instead you’d be writing about stuff like—the closest thing would be “unpopular opinions” that are actually widely held like “everyone in this industry is always doing X which is wrong and stupid, they should be doing it Y, which is efficient and cost-effective.”
Any advice for people who kind of want to write more but get stuck on questions surrounding pseudonymity, audience, public reputation?
The “anxious” end is problems around doxxing and the like. Which are real concerns but I would bet people like me, on balance, are risk averse less out of good risk modeling and more out of “unknown unknown.”
At the less anxious end of problems: writing for an indeterminate audience is hard. It leads to defending oneself from hypothetical attacks from all sides. Sometimes this is desired, for instance you want to find holes in your math proofs. But some of your “takes” really do need to just sit out there and have insufficient backstory to full “prove” them. I think. (Lol.)
Contrary goals: general networking/community building, versus just wanting to do takes, versus wanting a little bit of a professional portfolio going on. The last case, of course, would put pressure toward political neutrality, less take-ish-ly.
Nonetheless clearly I am not terrible at this. I just survived 3 bullet points, under a pseudonym, while knowing my audience.
If timelines are short, does maintaining pseuonymity matter? And, how many of the people you read regularly are pseudonymous?
For short timelines I’m volunteering at a cat shelter and focusing on chess more, and probably pseudonymity is better since I’m already doing it and no point in adapting to something else.
LessWrong is half maybe? NY Times writers I’m not aspiring to be like. That lives some very reputed people on Substack who I’m not sure I should be emulating because they have institutional backing, loyal readerships and just better since with what takes go to press.
Which of those contrary goals is most important to you? Do you believe writing is the optimal method to reach that goal? If you wrote in a way that better served that goal—what differences would you expect to see?
I think any time a person posts something on a particular forum, whether that be here, the comments in a Tik Tok video, Metafilter, Disqus comments on a particular blog, there carries with it a certain amount of assumptions and therefore a profile about the audience. Even if you just picked that forum out of convenience rather than believing that the message to audience match is optimal.
I probably get >50% of the value being need-to-know pseudon. For example, you can start pseudon, interact, and de-anon if you connect more (what I do here).
I have a mental model for LessWrong readers’ politics that helps me a lot. Like, left-nonpartisan, somewhat opposed to politics epistemics, you can bring up most major issues (e.g. abortion) without derailing. Just those things make it way easier to write than on my Substack.
I think of it as the “barstool take” problem. Some of your takes probably just need to happen at a bar and not wind up on social media, definitely not de-anon, and that’s fine. I may overestimate this—a spicy stance on abortion is probably bad for Substack, but acknowledging that people talk about the issue is normal.
Sometimes I think I could build myself professionally better with a more central writing portfolio. This to me has the resume problem where it has to be “everything and nothing” to everyone. Maybe I concede to you that pseudon gets me most of the value. I still have the question—okay, so I really think I’m missing part of the value of non-anon writing (also include “unknown unknowns”, or identity shifts), and I’m probably still complicating it, forex, overestimating how much stuff I might want to say that would be unprofessional.
If your primary goal is to write for professional advancement, then pseudonymous writing would be pointless. I would also assume you want to write for a very targeted audience using very targeted themes: you’ll want to write primarily about your current or prospective industry, in a way which displays competence and authority. It basically has to be optimized for the decision makes who have the power to hire or commission you for work.
At that point it’s a classic marketing problem: What is the ‘pain point’ or the ‘job to be done’ that those decision makers are experiencing? Each thing you write addresses those. But really they are covert ads for them to hire you, like all “content marketing” which is what most professional blogs are.
I realize I’m writing very abstractly because I don’t know what your profession is, what expertise you’d be brining, or how you expect a writing portfolio to help you. What I will assume is this means no barstool takes, if you’re looking for work as a Project Manager in Residential Developments, you’re not really displaying competency by telling people what you think about Abortion, or Prince Harry, or why Paul Simon’s Graceland is actually really an overrated album. Instead you’d be writing about stuff like—the closest thing would be “unpopular opinions” that are actually widely held like “everyone in this industry is always doing X which is wrong and stupid, they should be doing it Y, which is efficient and cost-effective.”