Eugene Leitl wrote:
>
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky writes:
>
> > really don't expect it to be all *that* long before somebody can run
> > automated searches like "Has my inner geek ever done anything illegal?"
>
> The message has not been signed with a certified digital signature (in
> case legislation already covers this, which I doubt), so it could have
> been anybody, posing as my inner geek. Legally, this doesn't hold
> water.
It wasn't somebody dragging him to court that I was worried about.
> Of course there are several people who now wish (in vain) they hadn't
> posted as much foolishness as they did,
I've considered changing my name to outrun some posts I made when I was twelve or thereabouts, but I've got a different email address now and thus "plausible deniability". Probably I should create an "alternate Eliezer" to claim that past self, just in case.
Nothing incriminating, just stuff that's not up to my current standards of post quality.
Probably in the future, people will change their name on their 18th birthday, then again on their 35th birthday, to outrun their life as recorded on the 'Net. That poor girl with a birth condition that necessitated the replacement of all her skin, with, as it so happens, skin grown from a circumcized foreskin. Her idiot parents let the idiot researchers use her real name in the idiot press release on Eurekalert, so almost any 'Net search is going to turn it up. Can you imagine the amount of ribbing that poor girl is going to go through, probably starting in kindergarten? Anyway, I was envisioning things more along the lines of prospective employers, security-clearance checkers, and so on, not prosecutors.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way