Open thread, Dec. 26, 2016 - Jan. 1, 2017

Based on what I know of habit formation and the principles of deliberate practice, this should work.

A friend also commented that it worked for her when she wanted to start exercising more regularly.

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?

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.

It would be awesome for link posts to require a description or reason it's posted here. Even if these were just a mandatory (or trivially-easy nudge) comment by the poster.

Just to be clear, you probably want a change to the output of the rss feed, not the website, although changing the website is a kludgey way of doing so.

The dynamic I match it to is "being mean for its own sake, to a specific individual, over an extended period of time, in an environment where they can't get away from their tormentor(s)." The social equivalent of a cat playing with a mouse it's caught.

N=1 for this interpretation, and it may not be quite necessary or sufficient even by my own lights.

Edit: A more succinct definition might be: "Bullying: persistent, targeted cruelty."

As with "violence" itself, it seems like some uses of "bullying" strike me as being somewhat metaphorical rather than literal; but the folks using it those ways may not agree.

That said, my experience in school was that physical violence and "word stuff" could be combined arms in an effort to create misery or to drive someone away: perpetrators could use physical harm when they expected to get away with it; aggressive posturing (e.g. miming a punch) to remind the victim of the possibility of physical harm; and verbal attacks when they expected to get away with those.