I prefer to keep my work, family, gaming, and online-discussion identities rather distinct. I don’t knowingly post things that would reflect badly on me (I do sometimes take contrarian-advocacy positions, but I do so at work too), and I tend not to play games with strangers who’d be tempted to retaliate outside the game, but it still adds a bit of comfort to not mix them up.
Whether you want to do the same is entirely up to you. Less Wrong, in fact, could have positive reputation effects on other aspects of your life. More likely completely neutral, but unlike some other sites, it’s less likely to be pure negative.
It depends entirely on what you intend to post. If you think people will be googling your name and then will call you a bad person due to lesswrong comments, and that this will impact you emotionally or make you harder to hire, you should probably go make a different account.
Imagine that two years in the future someone decides to manufacture a controversy in media, where the LW website and/or the rationalist community will be accused of horrible things. When the fake news get out, other media start copying it blindly, and after too many people jumped on the bandwagon, no one will want to admit they actually made a mistake.
The whole Twitter will shake with rage, users demanding the worst punishments for anyone associated with LW.
Imagine yourself on that day, thinking about today—will you wish you would have done something differently?
The whole Twitter will shake with rage, users demanding the worst punishments for anyone associated with LW.
Currently that’s not happening even for websites who do have a lot of controversy. Randomly targeting every user of a website doesn’t fit into the pattern.
Just as counterpoint: Now imagine that two years in the future some people from the LW community have impressed others enough to gain a lot of status and power, and (perhaps because they credit LW for some of their success) LW becomes a place you would be positively proud to be associated with. Now what will you wish you had done differently?
(I think the downsides are bigger than the upsides overall, though neither is big enough for me to have taken any trouble to hide my real identity here.)
It depends whether you think you will post things that will produce problems if someone who googles your name find the posts.
On the other hand a person who finds what you post might also want to talk to you about it when they meet you in meatspace. It’s more likely that you get offered a job because a person thinks you have demonstrated the required experience by reading your posts when you use your real name.
Meta-question: I’m a longtime lurker who just made an account under his real name.
How badly am I fucking up by doing so? Should I nuke it from orbit and start over with a pseudonym?
I prefer to keep my work, family, gaming, and online-discussion identities rather distinct. I don’t knowingly post things that would reflect badly on me (I do sometimes take contrarian-advocacy positions, but I do so at work too), and I tend not to play games with strangers who’d be tempted to retaliate outside the game, but it still adds a bit of comfort to not mix them up.
Whether you want to do the same is entirely up to you. Less Wrong, in fact, could have positive reputation effects on other aspects of your life. More likely completely neutral, but unlike some other sites, it’s less likely to be pure negative.
It depends entirely on what you intend to post. If you think people will be googling your name and then will call you a bad person due to lesswrong comments, and that this will impact you emotionally or make you harder to hire, you should probably go make a different account.
Imagine that two years in the future someone decides to manufacture a controversy in media, where the LW website and/or the rationalist community will be accused of horrible things. When the fake news get out, other media start copying it blindly, and after too many people jumped on the bandwagon, no one will want to admit they actually made a mistake.
The whole Twitter will shake with rage, users demanding the worst punishments for anyone associated with LW.
Imagine yourself on that day, thinking about today—will you wish you would have done something differently?
Currently that’s not happening even for websites who do have a lot of controversy. Randomly targeting every user of a website doesn’t fit into the pattern.
Just as counterpoint: Now imagine that two years in the future some people from the LW community have impressed others enough to gain a lot of status and power, and (perhaps because they credit LW for some of their success) LW becomes a place you would be positively proud to be associated with. Now what will you wish you had done differently?
(I think the downsides are bigger than the upsides overall, though neither is big enough for me to have taken any trouble to hide my real identity here.)
It depends whether you think you will post things that will produce problems if someone who googles your name find the posts.
On the other hand a person who finds what you post might also want to talk to you about it when they meet you in meatspace. It’s more likely that you get offered a job because a person thinks you have demonstrated the required experience by reading your posts when you use your real name.