“Pseudpocalypse” by dynomight

Here's a conjecture: If you put any significant amount of text on the internet under different names, those identities can be linked using only the text itself. This is possible (I conject) because of the statistical "fingerprint" you leave in everything you write.

Imagine a website where you can paste in some brand-new text someone just wrote. In return, the website provides links to all the text that writer has ever published under any name. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. As far as I know, no such website exists—at least not on the public internet. But I suspect it's possible and will soon become easy. This will pose some difficulty for pseudonymous blogging.

Note: I wrote most of this essay in mid-2025, after which I idiotically sat on it for a year tinkering with theorem statements that none of you will read.[1]In the meantime, LLMs have gotten much better at guessing authors from text. (Given the first 1000 words of a draft of this post, Claude 4.8 knows it's me.) Still, I think we're just getting started. I expect to see increasingly obscure writers identified from increasingly small bits of text. I expect that this work even [...]

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Outline:

(02:32) Starting bits

(08:53) Feature space

(19:47) Demographic bits

(25:18) Personality bits

(26:16) Style bits

(27:23) Guessing bits

(31:25) Seriously?

(32:29) How would this work?

(35:21) Countermeasures

(40:15) Generalized pseudpocalypse

(44:00) Appendix: Section for skeptical information theory enthusiasts

The original text contained 18 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
July 23rd, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eaxoBCmQd4vew9ZXX/pseudpocalypse

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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