This is dangerous advice that assists abusers and others from being called out regarding their behavior, because those who witness / are victimized / etc feel that they should “keep a low profile” and avoid getting involved. I know, because I used to believe this sort of thing and didn’t act when watching abusers operate in a variety of scenes, including Silicon Valley. Luckily, large groups of angry women have vocalized the before-hidden consequences of this sort of thing, so I’ve gotten wiser.

Hollywood producers and shadowy finance guys used to “keep their identity small.” We have learned quite a bit about them in recent years (and there’s obviously so much more we don’t know). As we live in a time when there is a crisis of trust across institutions — politics, religion, corporate, whatever — you’re much better off being transparent.

The thing that’s missing, of course, is that people aren’t “iterating on their beliefs” and people aren’t also accepting of the fact that people who had beliefs that were wrong or problematic in the past are able to iterate and change. This is a future area of improvement for human social development.

All of this “every human in the world is connected” stuff is very new. There aren’t really any absolute truths or rules yet. It’s going to take a lot longer than 30 years to sort out.

Edit: I would also say that there are binary opinions (ex: people shouldn’t harm kids) and what I call “spectrum” opinions (ex: the existence of America is a net positive to the world). We have to get better about engaging people on spectrum opinions and allowing differences to exist, without going to war as we would with a binary opinion that probably has only one right answer for any decent human. Again, things to be done in the future.