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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3465 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 11, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How much should I care about being-opaque-to-casual-inspection level "opsec", given that I don't really care about actually being unidentifiable?

So I have this username on TheMotte. I have another that I use elsewhere. The other one is extremely easy to connect to my real life identity, to the point that I treat it like posting under my real name. I don't have the sort of spicy opinions that would make me a serious target for cancellation, but there's some stuff I've posted here that would probably have some social repercussions if people IRL knew that I'd written it. This is largely why I picked a fresh username here in the first place.

I'm under no illusions that it's impossible to get [dovetailing] -> [real identity] with some sleuthing. (I'm curious how hard it is, but there's no way it's even close to impossible.) What I'm a bit more concerned about is getting from a casual search of [real identity] to [dovetailing]. This has led me to divide up my posts across various places, and not cross-post links here to things I've written elsewhere, or share the same writing in multiple places. However, it strikes me that this may be an incorrect amount of paranoia -- not nearly enough to hinder the [dovetailing] -> [real identity] pathway for a serious inquirer, but more than makes sense if all I care about is someone I know personally, or a (potential) employer, casually searching my real name or my other username and getting my posts here.

So... what do you all think?

A related topic that I often think about:

By a quirk of fate, I share the name, both first and last, of a famous professional athlete. I wonder how much opsec that gives me, if any. Imagine someone called "Thomas Brady" - I'm sure there are hundreds of them. But if you Googled "Thomas Brady, Atlanta, Georgia," would you just get all the times Tom Brady did something in Atlanta?

So I've benefited from this. I have a relatively common name, and also a significant amount of discoverability on search engines using the correct search terms, but the ways most people search they instead catch one of the several people with wikipedia entries who have the same name.

I've had dates report this to me (women doing the usual stalking to figure out if someone is a creep), so I suspect you may be protected in the same way.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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