I was positively surprised to find out that I was able to edit my username in the forum to be my full name. As I was previously under the impression that this was impossible, I wanted to share this and encourage users to consider switching to their full names.
The suggestion in the how-to-guide is:
In general, we think that real names are good for community bonding, and we encourage you to use yours. But it's not required.
I think this is a good policy. I can imagine cases where using a pseudonym might make it easier to communicate openly without people outside the community being able to connect the post to the author. For most posters, especially the frequent posters, it seems relatively easy to find out who the author is. After meeting several users at EAGs I'm building up a mental database where I keep track of real names (used on Swapcard and emails), forum user names, and sometimes nicknames and Twitter handles. This seems unnecessary.
Connecting names you saw in comments and posts to name tags at conferences makes it easier for people new to the community to start conversations based on what you read. It's also easier when you hear others refer to people by their real name.
In a growing community that aspires to be welcoming, I think it's a good norm to make it easy for people to learn about the engaged participants. In addition to using the real name, I would also like to encourage adding a description to the profile. This can include the current organisation, group, university, cause area or GWWC membership. Similar to Swapcard at the EAG conferences, it helps to understand better where someone is coming from or is currently active.
A counter-argument might be that readers might defer too much to people with impressive affiliations instead of focussing on the content. I would agree with that. However, currently, many pseudonyms seem to be known to engaged members, which leads to different levels of knowledge.
Looking at the posts with the highest karma it's nice to see many using real names already and I hope to see more in future.
My policy on this, to the extent I have one, is a sort of soft lockdown: I don't mind sharing enough personal info on here that an EA who knows me in real life could figure out my identity, but I need to always have at least plausible deniability in the face of any malicious actor.
As far as the risks in policy careers, I think the risk is very high for appointed jobs and real but lower for elected ones. Politicians are more risk averse than voters, and when they can pick from a pool of 100, they'll look for any reason to turn you down. When the voters have to pick one of two or a small handful of candidates, they gotta make a decision, by election day, and maybe they don't care so much about a few mildly controversial statements.
If EA-aligned employers are using ppl saying smart stuff on here as a basis for hiring, but only if they have a real name account, I suggest they simply stop arbitrarily eliminating a major portion of their potential talent pool. Pretty easy to reach out to someone and ask for their identity if u are interested in hiring them.