this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
43 points (95.7% liked)
Privacy
31939 readers
705 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Part of being an academic is being available to discuss your publications. Your full name will not only be flying around the internet but recorded permanently in libraries and journals.
Science is about collaboration, and standing behind the work you do, publicly. You will find it extremely difficult or impossible to get your PhD without being known to the academic community.
I think you won't find many anonymous scientific papers held in high regard.
Another commenter mentioned going by a pseudonym, which is pretty much what I had in mind - I've always been grown up on the idea of not disclosing your full name nor your physical location, but many universities' websites not only shows the full names of their profs, but also their coordinates and their office hours.
There's a publicly available record of where and when someone is readily present, for better and, especially when it comes to preserving one's safety, for worse.
Let me make this point clearer: would you publicly disclose where you live or where you spend most of your time? I hope you see some of my concerns now.
I trust this is the right place to find like minded people and maybe find a solution, not to argue about what an academic should or should not be.
A huge part (maybe the most important one) of academic work, is to argue why your ideas are worth listening to and discuss and present them. This is not the same as writing fiction where you can just use a pseudonym, people will be looking you up to see what kind of educational background you have, which university you got the PhD from etc. No place worth having a PhD from is going to let you use a pseudonym, let alone hire you under a different name than your legal name.
I'm sorry, but if using your real name is a deal breaker for you, even with an employer (I.e. the professor example you're giving), you're very unlikely to succeed with this.