It was pretty obvious what was happening; naming your fictional debate partner after the most famous pseudonym of all time is as transparent as you can get. There's a long history of people doing exactly this in a variety of fields; it's not deception.
The name was "Nickieben Bourbaki", a reference to the collective pseudonym "Nicholas Borbaki" of the French mathematician collective. RPG had the idea that other people at Lucid would be interested in participating under this collective name, but that didn't happen.
>I don't think so, we now call that kind of behaviour a sock puppet account. Why the deception?
When did "looking at both sides of an argument" fall out of favor? It's a practice advised by science, philosophy, politics, all the way back to Plato's dialogues and earlier (which also used different names to present the views) all the way to "Godel, Escher, Bach".
>a sock puppet account
Sock puppet accounts are fake accounts made to seem as many people are in favor of a specific point X. They're meant to amplify X's perceived adoption.
It's not about a single person debating both sides of an argument (X and -X).
In fact, debating also for the opposite of your point, would be close to an opposite of a sock puppet account.
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/cs181/projec...
Summarized as:
"When tradeoffs are required in a software system, priority should go to implementation simplicity at the expense of completeness or correctness."
See also the wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
An interesting aspect of all this is that Gabriel argues with himself in a series of papers under a false name:
https://dreamsongs.com/Files/worse-is-worse.pdf
A great example of someone looking at both sides of an argument.