John Hawks just got tenure (congrats, John!) and is now writing a series of posts on blogging for academics. The first installment has pushed me further along in considering something that
colinmarshall got me started on about a month ago -- pseudonymity.
I don't attach my legal name to this journal, but the reason is perhaps not the usual one: I'm not particularly afraid that the views I express here are likely to get me into some kind of trouble. The embarrassing truth of it is that I'm just shy: it messes with my ability to think out loud when I know that people are scrutinizing me, and I don't like the idea of a permanent public record of any gaffes I might make while doing it. Yet I still like to get feedback, so imposing a psychological buffer zone between myself and whoever might read this journal provides a workable solution. (Once I've gotten acquainted with someone who's proven themselves to be a constructive interlocutor, I'm pretty open with them about my personal details.)
But this still comes at a cost: in general anonymity tends to encourage excessive spouting off, and while I like to think I mostly rise above this tendency it still shows itself now and then. There's a superior solution to the problem of gaffes: don't make them. I know for a fact that it's not as hard as it sounds: just
check every non-trivial assertion and take into account
how much error it comes with. Even when you're just speculating, acknowledging that you're going out on a limb takes the sting out of being wrong because you haven't set up a commitment to being right. All this is just good scientific practice anyhow. Attaching my legal name to everything I write would encourage me to be more scrupulous in this regard -- ironically removing the main concern motivating the pseudonymity, and improving the signal-to-noise ratio in my writing to boot.
I'm at least a decade away from having to worry about tenure, but the best time to start building a good reputation is always now. With that in mind, I'm making two minor changes here. The first is simply putting my full birth name in my profile; it's a detail, but
some details matter. The other is that any posts I might make here on contemporary events will be no longer than 200 words, unless I use them as a springboard for making some non-obvious general point.
That latter is simply to preserve my attention for what matters.
This post is a good example of the kind of disposable junk I spit out when I decide to comment on the news just for the sake of it. At the end of it I'm sure nobody reading it walked away any wiser in any way that mattered; I certainly didn't after writing it. This demon seems to come out of me when my attention is drawn to an example of sheer batshit fucking insanity, but there's enough of that in the world that responding to it all would require an entire industry, nevermind being a full-time job. I have more respectable things to do, surely, and I can only apologize for trying to drag other people into my madness, like a junkie who doesn't need to admit he has a problem as long as he's got company.
I think I'm also going to give this URL to a former prof of mine. Knowing you're being read by people you respect raises the bar in a way that I think I can handle now.