“The Ones Who Build Will Have Names”

Why Posting Under Your Real Name Benefits You

“The Ones Who Build Will Have Names”

~Samo Burja on the From the New World podcast

Recently Matthew Peterson had a discussion with Auron MacIntyre about building new business alternatives. Around 29:00, they discuss anonymity and power. I think Matthew has an accurate picture of the negative incentives, but both him and Auron miss the greatest upside of being public with your name. It’s generally seen as a negative to lose friends or job opportunities due to political disagreements. 

To me, this is thinking from a long past era where offline, nepotistic networking was stronger than online, transparent networking. In those situations, what opportunities people could offer was far less correlated to ideology. A benefit of polarization is that this is no longer the case. If you are talented, disagreeable, and conscientious, by far the best opportunities come from being values-aligned. Moreover, collecting all possible opportunities and manually determining which is best is no longer an easy task. There are simply too many opportunities on the internet to scroll through all of them. You need to narrow down the field. You can add some filters, such as salary, career area, or location, but there are still nonetheless too many filters to go through manually. The best solution is to have someone else do the filtering for you.

In this sense, political discrimination is unequivocally good. Why should a dissident software engineer work for a loyalist company or vice-versa. It would not be a fun experience. In the internet era, being disagreeable is a constant benefit. Breaking weak relationships to give more time to strong ones is a benefit. Being honest with your intentions and your beliefs is not only the path of least resistance, but a path of greater benefit. But finding out who is aligned with you and who isn’t is a difficult task.

Countersignalling, or proactively acting in ways which distance yourself from groups of people, is an excellent way to make others do the work for you. In my experience, after even a small amount of micro-fame in politics and tech circles, around two hundred newsletter subscribers, the people who sought me out far outweighed the people who might have cut ties with me after reading. Moreover, being out early allows you to be in a position where your career is not at risk in the future. The internet fundamentally changes the cost-benefit due to scale. The number of potential connections is far greater. Consequently, the reward of possible new friendships is much greater while the cost of lost friendships (which, let’s be honest, probably weren’t the strongest) is much lower. The same is true for careers and entrepreneurship.

For sure, there are some gatekept professions and academic fields where a pseudo-monopoly makes this impossible. I’m uncertain if this advice would work for a psychiatrist, teacher, or social worker. There is a role for anons in those and similar cases. However, for business, tech, journalism, politics, and even genuine scientific pursuits, I would strongly recommend being public with your name.