Anonymity and Pseudonymity

Looking at this from the security side, pseudonyms are just an alias, and unlikely to remain secret for long. If one needs true secrecy, one has to remain anonymous.

You can't fool me. With a name like "Chad Orzel", you must have come out of the witness protection program.

;-)

This isn't a defense of Ed Wheelan's decision to out Publius, so please don't take it as such. After reading the exchanges between the two, it looks like the decision was the result of an ill-considered fit of bad temper over being called names by another blogger. Neither really covered themselves with glory, though I think Wheelan came off looking worse. Anyway though, I want to take issue with your distinction between pseudonyms and anonymity. I think it is partially correct, but with some problems.

The problem with the example of a pseudonym like Mark Twain's is that MT was, in a sense, a real person. Whether you knew his actual name was Samuel Clemens or not, he was a public figure you could recognize on the street, meet in person, etc. That isn't really comparable to modern internet identities because Clemens essentially "became" Mark Twain. He could no more shed the persona than you could shed the name Chad.

As for modern bloggers who write under a pseudonym, there are still certain freedoms that it allows that a regular person loses. Whatever value or negativity you build up for your false self, it can still be shed without a second thought. Simply close up shop, stop paying your ISP, etc. The positive aspect to this is that it allows freedom to build a reputation without fear of reprisal if you have reason (as Publius seems to) to keep your public and private personas distinct. However, it also allows a certain level of disregard to the consequences that would naturally reign in the less pleasant aspects of human nature.

You are right that pseudonymous writing has a long and celebrated history (Tom Paine and the writers of the Federalist immediately spring to mind), but that is in part because we only remember those figures who had great impacts on history. If you go back and look at the vast majority of pamphleteering that was done contemporaneously with those great American polemics, most of it was poorly-sourced rumor-mongering rubbish. The value of a pseudonym hinges entirely on whether the writer behind it cares about his false name being dragged through the mud.

I guess what I'm saying is that if we want to defend a person's ability to publish in this manner, we must understand that we are giving license to irresponsible behavior as well as thoughtful freedom of expression. On the balance, it is probably a good tradeoff, but it must be understood as a tradeoff.

It takes about 32 bits of information to uniquely identify most people.
A lot of incidental information provides more than one bit of information. eg. "I am a physical scientist" provides maybe about 8 bits of information.
It is impossible to put out publicly any significant amount of consistent information without uniquely identifying the source.

Consistently inconsistent information is worthless.
Inconsistently inconsistent information is futile.

Pseudonymity is mostly preserved because people who can do so, can't be bothered to put the information together, and quite righly so.

Excellent post, Chad.

... some jerk from the National Review ...

That, Prof. Orzel, is a first-degree redundancy.

Come along quietly, now!

As I skimmed the opening lines of this I thought "Doesn't everyone know that Publius was Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay?"

I highly doubt that I'd have spent so much of my first term of college reading "The Federal Papers" if we thought they were written by some random guy and not people who actually shaped and ran the government. If provides insights into why they made some of the choices they did. Who they are makes what they wrote matter.

On the other hand, I suspect that people would still be reading Tom Sawyer no matter what Samuel Clemens called himself or not. The identity of the author is interesting and useful, but it is not crucial for the text or story to have relevance.

So while I respect the right to write under a pseudonym, I think that anything that is based on claims of expertise is vulnerable to people digging around to see if the person really has the credentials he or she is claiming. If the person using the pseudonym is likely to be any one of a decent sized group and talks credibly about issues that are interesting, but not life or death most people are willing to accept it, especially in places where they value the ability to use a pseudonym.

I agree ... true anonymity really rubs me the wrong way ... but pseudonymous writers, as you say, are connected to what they write, their comments, their history of content on the internet.

Josh -

I don't really see your point. I mean yes, people can use pseudonymity to be complete and utter gits - but they can also use it to provide them with the opportunity to talk about things that they couldn't otherwise, for whatever reason - usually professional or a combination of that and to keep their personal life separate from their writing.

And it is precisely because of the latter, that I think it is unreasonable to out the former. Because ultimately who is a git, versus who isn't, is very subjective.

At one point I attempted to start an pseudonymous blog, because I wanted to discuss something that I really can't talk about publicly. It wasn't about anything nefarious, nor was it something that I really want to keep quiet about - it is just something I have to keep quiet about for the time being. A blogger who's demesne I frequented a lot discovered that blog and really liked it and decided to link it - not good for my pseudonym. In spite of trying to alter my "voice," it was apparently still very much me - something that became obvious when I got a couple emails from people there, asking if that was me...Then someone who doesn't like me outed me.

Not because I was being nasty to anyone, hiding behind my pseudonym - I am inclined to only get mean using my actual name. Not because I was talking about something they thought was bad or negative in the least on that blog. They outed me, because we had some rather heated exchanges wherein I was using my real name - ironically, that jerk doesn't use his - and he figured that outing me as that blogger would be a good way to get "even" with me.

In all honesty, I really don't care, excepting that I did feel compelled to stop blogging over there. It isn't very easy to connect me to that blog through any but the most exhaustive searches, though I chose not to delete it altogether. And I really don't have the time for it anyways. But it was done out of spite and with the intent of silencing me to some degree or another.

And the same is true of this outing of Publius. I have never read his blog and probably never will. I am given to understand that it is far from pointless rumor-mongering drivel, but that is besides the point. Outing him was spiteful and I would imagine that it was also an attempt to silence him on some level or another. It wouldn't be any different if the pseudonymous blogger in question was a Rush Limbaugh clone - stupid and completely odious has the same right to speak it's mind, as Orac and Abel Pharmboy do.

My favorite example is William Gosset, the statistician behind the t test (among other work), who published under the name of Student as his company, Guinness, wasn't happy with him publishing under his own name.