I thought that JenniferRM did demon research and used to work at MIRI, but I had I mixed her up with Jessicata.
And, worst of all, I mixed up Thane Ruthenis with Thoth Hermes, causing me to think that Thane Ruthenis wrote Thoth’s downvoted post The truth about false.
Has this happened to other people? The main thing is that I just didn’t notice the mixup at all until ~a week after we first exchanged messages. It was just a funny manifestation of me not really paying much attention to some new names, and it’s an easy fix on my end, but the consequences are pretty serious if this happens in general.
This is also mitigated by automatic images like gravatar or the ssh key visualization. I wonder if they can be made small enough to just add to usernames everywhere while maintaining enough distinguishable representations.
I often accidentally mix you up with the Trevor from Open Phil! More differentiation would be great, especially in the case where people share the same first name.
I have been around a long while, so the names are mostly familiar to me. I did make a minor embarrassing mistake a few months ago, thinking that Max H (on the East Coast) was the account of my friend Max H (on the west coast). East Coast Max H added a note to his profile to disambiguate. Do you read people’s profiles before first messaging them?
Confession: I’ve sometimes been getting Lesswrong users mixed up, in a very status-damaging way for them.
Before messaging with lc, I mixed his writings and accomplishments with lsusr (e.g. I thought the same person wrote Luna Lovegood and the Chamber of Secrets and What an actually pessimistic containment strategy looks like).
I thought that JenniferRM did demon research and used to work at MIRI, but I had I mixed her up with Jessicata.
And, worst of all, I mixed up Thane Ruthenis with Thoth Hermes, causing me to think that Thane Ruthenis wrote Thoth’s downvoted post The truth about false.
Has this happened to other people? The main thing is that I just didn’t notice the mixup at all until ~a week after we first exchanged messages. It was just a funny manifestation of me not really paying much attention to some new names, and it’s an easy fix on my end, but the consequences are pretty serious if this happens in general.
That’s funny. When I read lc’s username I think “that username looks similar to ‘lsusr’” too.
Yep, happened to me too. I like LW aesthetic so I wouldn’t want profile pics, but I think personal notes on users (like discord has) would be great.
Someone told me that they like my story The Redaction Machine.
The secret is out. Ben’s secret identity is Ben Pace.
Well, that’s cause I’m his alt
There are at least two Steves, and also at least two Evans. But I don’t know if anything embarassing happened, I just mixed some people up.
This happens to me too. IMO one of the best arguments for something like profile pictures or something. Not enough entropy in name space.
This is also mitigated by automatic images like gravatar or the ssh key visualization. I wonder if they can be made small enough to just add to usernames everywhere while maintaining enough distinguishable representations.
I often accidentally mix you up with the Trevor from Open Phil! More differentiation would be great, especially in the case where people share the same first name.
I have been around a long while, so the names are mostly familiar to me. I did make a minor embarrassing mistake a few months ago, thinking that Max H (on the East Coast) was the account of my friend Max H (on the west coast). East Coast Max H added a note to his profile to disambiguate. Do you read people’s profiles before first messaging them?
Yes, it happened before for me as well. I think it would be good to have profile pictures to make it easier to recognize users.
Maybe to make it uniform and non-distracting it could just be small grayscale pattern icons next to names based on a hash of the name.