I see no public interest value in denying his request to remain pseudonymous.

To publish his name and associate it with his pseudonym - especially in what would obviously become the top Google result - is egregious when he had pleaded for it not to happen.

I'm glad they appear to have backed down but I'm still furious they ever intended to do it, and held the sword of Damocles over his head for so many weeks.

> I'm still furious they ever intended to do it, and held the sword of Damocles over his head for so many weeks.

I think the actual “Sword of Damocles” story does not illustrate what you wish it to. From Wikipedia:

“ According to the story, Damocles was pandering to his king, Dionysius, exclaiming that Dionysius was truly fortunate as a great man of power and authority, surrounded by magnificence. In response, Dionysius offered to switch places with Damocles for one day so that Damocles could taste that very fortune firsthand. Damocles quickly and eagerly accepted the king's proposal. Damocles sat on the king's throne, surrounded by every luxury, but Dionysius, who had made many enemies during his reign, arranged that a sword should hang above the throne, held at the pommel only by a single hair of a horse's tail to evoke the sense of what it is like to be king: Though having much fortune, always having to watch in fear and anxiety against dangers that might try to overtake him.”

The NY Times is equivalent to the King?

Thinking too hard about it.

The point was the dangling sword over his head, being the imminent publishing of the article.

They told him they wouldn't hide his name, but they didn't tell him they wouldn't publish the article.

My point was the irony. Damocles wanted to sit in the hot seat, until he found out just how hot it was.

Scott Alexander has been a semi-public figure (popular blog, shares pieces of personal information and parts of his name, his location, online) for a while.

Now Scott Alexander is in the hot seat (getting an NY Times article written about you).

So he hung his own sword of Damocles over his head. Certainly, as a psychiatrist, if anonymity is so important then I do wonder, unless he didn't understand the importance of it years ago, why he wasn't fully anonymous then?

IMHO there's a difference between Scott Alexander-level anonymity and Satoshi Nakamoto level anonymity.

Which raises a good question - is it in the public interest enough to, say, know the name of who created bitcoin, that, if the NY Times found out, it'd be appropriate for them to publish it?

I still can't figure out any legitimate reason why the Times thought it was a good idea to try and use his real name in an article about the site.

I mean, if someone goes by a certain identity online when running a blog or working on something, what's wrong with just using that name in an article or video about them? Whenever I interview a game developer that uses a pseudonym, or a YouTuber/Twitch streamer/blogger in the same situation, that's the name I use in the article. I might ask them for a bit of background info at one point sure, but I won't push for it, nor will I go around trying to dox them to get said information.

Is there any real reason that 'Scott Alexander [last name]' would be used rather than just 'Scott Alexander'?

Still, it's nice to see the blog's back up, and I hope people learn from this debacle in some way or another.

This is pure speculation on my part, but it may just be due to organizational inflexibility and poor communication. I remember reading somewhere that internally The Times said it was having a credibility problem when it came to "unnamed sources" and there was an effort to confront this.

So, the author of the article, knowing Scott's real and full name, would be obliged to use it in the article. I can imagine Scott's request to protect his identity going back and forth between layers of management. And each of those managers realized they had nothing to gain by granting Scott's request.

There's a huge difference between pure "unnamed sources" that are highly partisan and publishing the pseudonym someone publishes under rather than their actual name.

Also, most of the credibility loss has been because a lot of those anonymous sources flat-out lied to them, but that's another story and I have yet to see them write about it.

scott wasn’t an unnamed source; from the sound of it this was in large part an article about him, eg the journo was going around and asking questions about him specifically. i guess we’ll see if those sources are named.

There are different types of reporting, specifically there's a difference between reporting a story and running a profile.

If your piece is about morale within the state department, an unnamed source who works there could be acceptable. If your piece is "here is this interesting person who runs this community" then identifying who the person actually is seems defensible.

http://egmncorp.com/student-journalist-toolbox/how-to-write-...

After this whole NYT showdown, I'll definitely appreciate SSC more. I always liked it, but it was just one blog among many. The realization that it could disappear at any time somehow makes it seem more precious.

I'll appreciate it quite a bit less, as this tantrum suggests that he fears being liable for just how much of is patients' experience he shared. The fear-of-doxxing charade never held water, borne out by how comfortable he felt siccing his community on the NYT reporter.

Tucker Carlson recently perfomed the same kind of cynical rhetorical judo. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/21/tucker-carl...)

Influential platforms do, once in a while, see a drop of accountability. The reaction to it is telling

AFAIK sharing anonymized patient stories is pretty standard.

It may be the case that he did not do his due diligence to sufficiently anonymize them. This is from the APA:

4.07 Use of Confidential Information for Didactic or Other Purposes

Psychologists do not disclose in their writings, lectures, or other public media, confidential, personally identifiable information concerning their clients/patients, students, research participants, organizational clients, or other recipients of their services that they obtained during the course of their work, unless (1) they take reasonable steps to disguise the person or organization, (2) the person or organization has consented in writing, or (3) there is legal authorization for doing so.

https://www.apa.org/ethics/code

Well, if he did disclose PII, then surely there's enough to identify one of them, right?

Reading the comments here, I’m surprised to realize that his name is already this well known.

In that case, I’m a bit confused - if someone did an article on SSC, without reaching out to the chap - what would have happened then? Articles using publicly available information are beyond routine So his name would be exposed.

I’m not sure what his options would be or what the consensus opinion is for that scenario. Would that have been an issue, but not as much since it would be a fait accompli? How would anyone be able to reverse such an article after it was published ?

Ironically, Scott himself has an old (2013) post on "the virtue of silence" that talks specifically about the NYT: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/14/the-virtue-of-silence/

Scott's argument is basically, he is a psychiatrist and his patients will put his real name into google to find out info about him, check he's correctly licenced etc. But this shouldn't lead to them finding out too much as him as a person as that would get in the way of the therapeutic relationship. One thing he does to help with this is not run his public online identity under his full name.

The problem is not people searching for "scott alexander real name", even if they find it. The problem is reverse searches for "scott $surname" by his patients, leading to an article on the politics of his online community, his views on polyamory and transhumanism and gender etc.

If some random blogger made a post using his real name, and it didn't end up ranking highly in the google results for his real name, it probably wouldn't hurt too much - especially as most people don't look at more than the top 5 search results or so. The information being out there by itself is not the big problem.

But if a NYT article gets enough of an impact that it's the number 1 search result for his real name, then we have a problem. And the NYT has a pretty big platform, as Scott pointed out in the linked article, so it's a real hazard.

Further, this behavior is quite common. Pretty much every mental health professional I know who engages in social media does so under a (light) pseudonym. Its their solution for maintaining a professional relationship with people who may not understand or respect that boundary. A great many teachers do too, for basically the same reason.

How is this different than a security through obscurity argument which is so roundly discounted by virtually everyone who reads HN?

Doesn’t he admit as much in the article?

He doesn’t claim the NYT is the first to discover his identity, only that that are big enough to for that revelation to be pernicious.

Obscurity as a primary security method is criticized when it exist as an alternative to being, you know, actually secure.

Like, I could have RCE's in my software and hide the source to hopefully slow you from finding them. ... or I could fix the bugs!

But for many things, being "actually secure" isn't cheap or even possible at all... and perhaps obscurity and other less strong tools are the best anyone can do.

Security by obscurity is roundly discounted when there's an obvious way to do it right. For example, you store your passwords BASE64 encoded in the database, when you could be using scrypt.

When there's not an obvious way to do it, you have to fall back on the chouices that you have. The choices for a psychiatrist seem to be not have a blog or online profile at all, or run one under a pseudonym.

Security by obscurity is a problem because a site can get destroyed if one person discovers the flaw. He cares mainly if a not insignificant number of his patient discover him.

Thanks, that blog post was quite the intellectual indulgence to read and enjoy.

Thank you for engaging.

So if someone just .... wrote an article after doing a few google searches, what would the consensus be in that scenario?

I can see a few options, two of which require having made steps to avoid this outcome intentionally -

1) always separate your personal from digital profiles and

2) have ways to modify your search rankings ?

(He could reach out to The news paper and sue them After the fact I suppose, But Im not sure it would stand up in court if it’s public info)

————-

Side note : I’m assuming people agree, that the creation of large platforms is a natural outcome of the way the world is set up.

(Limited brain storage/attention, competition in media, network effects of leaks, Etc.- these conspire to give a few channels greater reach than others)

——-

It is possible to disagree politically with your psychiatrist and still think he is good at his job. My head shrinker is a hippy kooky leftist and I am a govt-paranoid cabin-in-woods type right-libertarian. I still pay him $200 an hour because he does good work. Politics is only one part of a person. It is a part that is highly visible on the internet and mostly hidden in real life.

> But this shouldn't lead to them finding out too much as him as a person

Well he may want to look again, because his real name is pretty strongly tied to SSC now, via a tweet and some other articles that pop up. Google even autocompletes it.

Google autocompletes a lot of names, and Scott's isn't exactly unique. Checking just now, SSC is not on the front page of a Google search in a private window for his professional name.

Note that if you're already using the blog name as part of your search, then you're not in the protected audience Scott wants to avoid spoiling.

"But this shouldn't lead to them finding out too much as him as a person as that would get in the way of the therapeutic relationship."

Forgive me because I posted something very similar a month ago when Alexander deleted SSC, but I'm a mental health professional in full-time research and clinical practice and this bears repeating: the "damage to the therapeutic relationship with patients" argument for Alexander's anonymity is weak at best, since

(a) psychiatrists in particular have little to no "therapeutic alliance" with their patients as traditionally understood, and (b) professional mores in mental health more generally (including clinical psychology, social work, counseling, and psychiatric nursing) have changed in favor of a great deal more "self-disclosure" being permitted in the therapeutic relationship (or "alliance") than 75 years ago.

In my view, it would damage Mr. Alexander's relationship with his patients very little to know that he has a popular blog about rationalism etc. As another commenter points out above, most adults (and most users of psychiatric / mental health services, believe it or not) are perfectly capable of separating whatever they know about their clinicians' personal lives from their ability to do their jobs.

I'll quote myself from the earlier thread:

"I'd expect a more robust defense of personal privacy from a "rationalist", because this reason is bunk, and everyone in modern mental health knows it. I've worked as a clinician in the types of settings Mr. Alexander works in (locked inpatient psychiatric units), and others in mental health as well, and while there's certainly a longstanding debate within psychotherapy (talk therapy) about so-called "self-disclosure", the days when clinicians were expected to be "impenetrable to the patient" and "reflect nothing but what is shown to him" are long over.

Researchers and practitioners from nearly every therapeutic modality that rose up to challenge (and in many cases mostly displace) these leftovers from Freud have challenged the notion of "psychiatrist-as-cipher" from within their own perspectives. And there's even a very good case to be made that hiding oneself as aggressively as Freud wanted clinicians to do (and as aggressively as S. Alexander seems to want to maintain) only augments an already severely lopsided "power dynamic" in the therapeutic relationship. In plain English: it's attitudes like these that allow "the therapeutic class" of which I am a part to lord it over the populations we are ostensibly treating, people who in many cases aren't treated as people and who have valuable expertise and experience in matters relevant to them but who we, historically, have been eager to ignore.

But it's funny because these debates have occurred within the universe of "talk therapy", a universe that psychiatry as such abandoned about fifty years ago. Dr. Alexander is a psychiatrist in 2020 - not a psychologist, not a social worker, not even a nurse. His profession left all pretense of actually talking to patients behind when they fully embraced medications as the first-line treatments for nearly all mental disorders; psychiatrists today do "medication management".

None of this is to slander the guy, by the way; he's really good at what he does (the blogging, I mean), and I've enjoyed a lot of his output over the years. But this specific reason for remaining anonymous got under my skin a bit, because it's wobbly for the reasons I listed. It's _also_ wobbly, I'll add, because the rest of us in mental health could have no such luxury of privacy these days even if we wanted it - and 99.9999% of us do not maintain ultra-popular and highly public-facing blogs. I value my privacy greatly, perhaps more than Alexander, but citing ancient and highly contested professional mores to maintain it is pulling a fast one on the public he very much needs right now."

I don't speak for all mental health professionals or researchers, of course, but I feel I owe it to HN (where most are not in the field, I'm guessing) to offer another point of view on this, especially in light of SSC's popularity with the HN crowd.

Your comment does not make too much sense to me as a layperson. As far as I know, therapy by talking is still being done and research is still being done that investigates how it works. Scott and others have implied psychiatrists (individuals not the field as a whole) still try to avoid self-disclosing.

To me his choice to remain under pseudonym is communicated as his choice, not policy. If therapy by talking is still considered useful and he thinks self-disclosure has an impact on that, it is sufficient for his choice to be sane.

I appreciate that you highlight self-disclosing is contested, but calling this "pulling a fast one" seems excessive to me given your reasons

Your point of view is much appreciated, especially as you say because you are a professional in the field yourself.

Did the Times ever publish the story? Has it been officially scrapped? Do we even know?

The story has not been published yet, though a review of the whole situation was published in the New Yorker [1] that has been met with mixed reviews, but largely positive from what I have seen (mostly from followers of the blog, strangely).

You can check the subreddit for more info on how things have been going down, I peeked in a few days ago and got caught up on all this.

[1] : https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/slate-st...

I think that their recent experience with Tucker Carlson has gotten the NYT staff to reconsider the relative merits of doxxing the subjects of their articles. It's a most double-edged sword, and they will cut themselves if they keep swinging it around.

Was there ever actually any evidence that the NYT was about to reveal Carlson's address? The paper has denied any intention to do so, and Carlson's wording was ambiguous.

I don't know of any direct evidence, but my understanding is that Tucker met reporters reporting on him at his new residence.

For context, they moved a while back because they had a crowd of protesters beating on his door and terrifying his wife & kids, who hid in a closet and called 911.

There's absolutely no evidence that the NYT intended to publish Carlson's home address. You only need to think for a moment to realise it's completely not what it does - what do you think the reporters are, walking around wearing Vendetta masks and shouting "EXPECT US"? You should also be able to consider the logical possibility that Carlson was talking bollocks. And then weigh the two possibilities against each other: NYT doing something that it never does (please cite last time you saw it give someone's full home address, rather than "tidy suburb in Pensacola") v Carlson spouting bollocks.

Dismaying that there are people who would lack so little logical capability to be found on what I thought was a site for coders.

Could you clarify the situation with Tucker Carlson? My understanding was that, although he has claimed they intended to publish his home address, they have not thus far done so.

As far as I know that's accurate. Additionally the NYT is denying they were ever planning to do so.

My personal interpretation is that Tucker's statement is more or less true and his reading off the names of everyone allegedly involved at the NYT and implicitly threatening to doxx them on the most watched cable news program in the country was an effective deterrent that caused the Tucker address story to get killed. I also believe that the NYT statement lacks candor and that their denying there ever was such a story is a face saving measure.

I freely admit there are other interpretations that fit the publicly available facts and that others may believe otherwise while being intellectually honest.

I actually find observing my own cognitive biases at work more interesting than the underlying story. I know for a fact that my interpretation is driven to some greater or lesser extent by my own confirmation bias. Sadly, being aware of one's own cognitive biases doesn't generally counter the effect. The best I can do is to try to keep an eye on the facts and at least limit myself to beliefs that don't contradict them. For example, why do I believe that the NYT statement is dishonest but the Tucker statement is honest? Firstly of course my cognitive bias runs that way. However I do believe the circumstantial evidence really does support my belief. Tucker was able to name the specific people involved in the alleged cancelled story which implies that either there was a cancelled story or he just made up some names.

Edit: Added some elaboration.

He claimed that they would "show where he lived," not necessarily publish his address. I don't believe the Times would publish his address, but I do believe they might put enough information in the article to make it easy to figure out.

That's my interpretation as well. They might have been planning to publish what neighborhood he lives in, for example.

I have to imagine the NYT staff, as biased and (IMO) as poor as they are at news-writing, must take no pleasure in being asked to doxx subjects of their stories on the arbitrary and capricious whims of management. Most journalists I know are good people, even when they perpetuate a bad system. They tend to be quite left and sometimes (many times) blindly biased, yet pursuit of the truth is the main goal for the bulk of journalists. Most editors, by contrast, seem genuinely terrible. They thwart honest journalists at every opportunity to sell something fake but salacious. (Something similar can be observed about academia and the faculty vis-a-vis the deans and university administration.)

I imagine many in the NYT are looking at Carlson or Scott Alexander and are saying, "hmm, would I want my own personal details published?"

I was told by the author of the New Yorker piece that the article is still on track. I don't think they paused it because of the controversy, these things just take longer than people think.

For those who like me didn't know about the blog until today, and why it's a big deal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex#New_York_Time...

I canceled my digital subscription to the times over this. I'm not a huge fan of cancel culture, but aside from writing a letter, what else can I do? (serious question)

I think canceling your digital subscription makes sense and doesn't really feel like cancel culture to me.

I'm not a fan of cancel culture, but I am a fan of canceling. I've got similar feelings about boycotts.

If you want to tell someone about how a company is bad, then do that. If you don't want to give money to someone who does things you disagree with, then don't give them money. There are a lot of other options for your time and money.

Where I think it gets a little ridiculous is when you (uh, not you, but like the general person) tell other people that you canceled something because it's bad. You're trying to make yourself look like the good guy/hero when all you did was decide to spend your time and money elsewhere.

And it gets really ridiculous when you go right back to what was canceled when they provide some other thing that you like OR when it turns out nobody else cares about your virtuous canceling and you want to fit back in with the group.

"Hey, we're all going to go see Avengers 10! It will be a huge party and it's going to be great. Oh, hey Josh, I forgot that you swore a blood oath to never see another movie owned by Disney after Walt Disney's zombie ate your dog."

"Uh, I guess it's okay. It was kind of a silly blood oath anyway. And fluffy had a good life I guess. I suppose I can come."

Of course you might also write a letter explaining why you canceled your subscription and say that you'll come back on the condition that they don't continue to pull shenanigans like this and that they take responsibility and apologize. Who knows it might actually change their policy if they see enough of this sort of thing.

Boycotting a company that did something awful (or threatened to do something awful) to an individual is the opposite of cancel culture. Boycotts are a well-established and effective method for individuals to take action against corporations. It's not as if dropping your Times subscription is somehow going to silence an individual

This is not cancel culture. It is at most a boycott. Cancel culture is when the boycotting is transitive that is you decide to boycott also the times' sponsor that refuse to join in the boycott.

this is how you increase readership exponentially

For the quality of blogging, psychiatry, and writing, I am willing to forgive his sysadmin capabilities... my inbox might not be so forgiving though.

Journalists typically ask two questions here: 'does this person wish to be named?' and 'is it in the public interest to ignore this request?'. It is highly dubious that there is any public interest in revealing Scott's name, hence the outrage.

Second, depending on the story and person, revealing a name can very easily lead to revealing phone numbers and addresses. So this isn't just 'a name'.

Finally, Scott very clearly does not want to be a public figure.

>Finally, Scott very clearly does not want to be a public figure.

If you're writing a blog under a consistent identity pretty much by definition you are a public figure because you're creating public discourse and attaching your name/pseudonym to it.

You can't really have it both ways. If you want to speak publicly but truly don't want to be identified you can do that by just posting anonymously, or you can just not engage in public discourse.

But if you do write even with some invented persona clearly you want others to recognise that.

Keeping a persona wholly separate from your identity is fine, and that's clearly and explicitly his goal.

Having a persona doesn't mean you "want attention" and thus it's somehow then fine to link your persona to your private life.

His persona is his first and middle name, and he's posted his profession, place of residence on the blog and attented public events, even posted pictures of himself and organised real world SSC meetups. So you'll have to explain to me how his goal was to separate those identities.

Hell he is explicitly blogging as a psychiatrist, which is his actual identity.

If he wanted to keep them separate it would have been trivial to keep them separate. He never chose to do that. He even blogged about his patients.

Not sure why we have to? In the article on his blog, in the New Yorker piece, and in the reddit threads, Scott articulates his goal and his rationale.

Because what he articulates is contradicted by his behaviour on a regular basis. Scott is an intelligent guy, if he wanted to stay anonymous he could. He clearly doesn't, so he is at the very least insincere.

There's an increasing culture on the internet of wanting to be able to speak to large audiences without being personally held accountable for what is being said, treating pseudonomity or anonmity as a right rather than as a personal practise.

This was already explained so many times at Hacker News, at least three times by myself. Here is another attempt:

If you are a reader of Slate Star Codex, and you google for e.g. "Scott Alexander, psychiatrist", you can find that his real identity is Alex Salamander. Scott was always okay with this, because he trusts his readers. (Yeah, maybe he regrets it now.)

But if you are a patient looking for a psychiatrist, and you google for "Dr. Alex Salamander", Scott doesn't want you to find Slate Star Codex. Because... that's obviously not a good thing to read for people who are depressed, or paranoid, or whatever.

NYT publishing an article containing "Alex Salamander" and "Slate Star Codex" together, would obviously put SSC into top google results for "Alex Salamander". Which is what Scott is trying to prevent. Does it make more sense now?

tl;dr: google for Scott Alexander, find Alex Salamander = okay; google for Alex Salamander, find Scott Alexander = not okay

(By the way, his real name is not Alex Salamander, I just made it up now to make the example easier to read.)

>NYT publishing an article containing "Alex Salamander" and "Slate Star Codex" together, would obviously put SSC into top google results for "Alex Salamander". Which is what Scott is trying to prevent. Does it make more sense now?

Yeah that makes total sense, I understand why he doesn't want that. But this doesn't really mean a journalist shouldn't divulge it if the journalist thinks using his name is in the public interest. (which in itself is a case-by-case judgement of course, but using people's real names who engage in public discourse is quite common).

That was my earlier point, if both your real name and your pseudonym are out there and connected, you don't really have a right or even a really reasonable expectation to not turn up in a Google search result.

That said I have a different suspicion. He may be simply afraid that his patients feel betrayed when they find out he's been blogging about them in the past, and they might be uncomfortable with the content they find on the site, even if in anonymized form.

Barrin92 has been posting publicly since 2016 and has amassed a considerable amount (10k+) since then. Clearly, you're a public figure since you're creating public discourse and attaching your name/pseudonym to it.

Presumably you should be okay publishing your personal/legal name, and easy-to-google employment information. I'll wait.

> It's almost as if people desire the ability to be a public figure without any of the downsides.

This is a dangerous trend in thinking I'm seeing more and more.

Run a blog when you're not at your day job and answer questions for an interview? Congrats, you're a "public figure!" Say hello to Kanye for me.

Sharing a dumb article with friends on Facebook? Nope. You're actually "publishing content on a global news platform."

etc etc

If you are running a blog presented to the public for public access, what do you expect? Yes, you are indeed trying to become a public figure. You are interacting with the public on public terms. Otherwise you would restrict the blog to a more private venue such as yourself (a journal) or some small community (friends, family, etc).

Sharing content is a different matter because you didn't originate the content and you didn't set the public policy on it.

If I talk to my friends in a pub, I don't expect my boss to get a full report on my speech the next day. I also don't expect that report to appear at my next job interview.

Unfortunately, internet blurs the boundaries between the work and non-work life. We need to find out new ways how to navigate this. It seemed like using a pseudonym would be a solution (because you can hardly hide your real name from your boss). Unfortunately, seems like unless you use paranoid precautions, people will take pleasure at connecting your private life to your job.

I think you're creating a binary where one doesn't exist. People communicate ideas for a variety of reasons only one of which is to gain public notoriety. If someone wishes to publish their writing pseudonymously then they should be free to do so with the expectation that any reasonable person will respect their right to privacy. The idea that people should just keep to themselves or their in-group to avoid public persecution is directly contrary to the idea of a free and open society and has been repeatedly demonstrated to be a symptom of authoritarian regimes or movements.

Sounds like a recipe for a chilling effect to me. Why risk being denounced? Just shut up and never interact with anyone in any way that others could use against you. As a society we need to enforce norms that protect everyone's ability to operate in good faith. If a person or an organization doxxes someone or publishes information against their expressed wishes without a clear moral obligation to do so then they should be held accountable. I'm hoping that this case has garnered enough attention that the pressure is being felt by the NYT and others.

What value does adding the real name of the person to the article bring to you, the reader? Would you interpret it any differently if the name was different?

Seems like a pretty clear cut case for not mentioning the name.

> What value does adding the real name of the person to the article bring to you, the reader?

Honestly, it's hard to tell without the article being published and seeing what comes of it?

It's not like particularly rare for an article to be published where the journalist includes the name and two or three aliases of the subject of the article, and suddenly a lot of people realize that the person they thought they were dealing with in an isolated way is actually engaged in a much larger pattern of behavior -- the person who skipped out on a couple of grand in rent with a sob story under one name did the same thing ten more times under three different names, the guy with a family in one state has a couple more in two different states that didn't know about each other, the "reference" that spoke so well about a former employee is actually said employee, etc etc etc.

Well, I don't know much about this person or the article that was coming up, hence making a general point. [0]

But generally when writing a piece on anybody it's normal to gather all kinds of details about one's life. Profession/job, educational history, some basic family background and name is usually one of them too.

Now again if the journalist has a good relationship with the person and they say they really want to go by XYZ instead of their full name, this is a perfectly valid request to me. But the notion that one is committing a grave crime if they don't comply (or ask) is another story.

Say back in the day I wrote a little piece on something that had absolutely nothing to do with me. Some journalist got interested in it and called me to discuss it. Spent most of the time discussing my own background. Hardly talked about my story at all. Wasn't enthused about this but I understand that's something people generally want to know.

[0] I mean correct me if I'm wrong but this person publishe[s/ed] under their regular first and second name. Mentions his actual life and experiences in his publicly available writings. Is generally easy to track down. Has a big cult following. But wants their last name redacted. Again, not saying that the journalist shouldn't honor the request. But nonetheless the whole situation is a bit bizarre. And sooner or later his full name will be out there (probably already is). So he's essentially asking for his full name not to rank too well in search results?

Pseudonymous publishing has a long and respected history.

Criticising the wrong people, or arguing with the beliefs of a mob, can be physically dangerous.

Anonymity gives writers of all kinds a platform to express an opinion without fear of violent reprisals from those who disagree.

Journalists also need to protect useful sources - hence the cliche "...according to people familiar with the matter."

As long as writers don't abuse this by promoting personal attacks on others, I'm completely fine with this.

> Pseudonymous publishing has a long and respected history.

Well there's definitely a history of authors publishing pseudonymously. I don't know of a tradition of keeping the identities secret even after they've been revealed. Unless legally mandated as it is in come countries[0].

I mean someone afraid of getting killed for their writings would certainly not make it obvious who they are and then rely on others not mentioning it. There's certainly no tradition of that.

The whole phenomenon of "doxxing" as I understand it is something new. In the most radical form the ask seems to be that you should outright not mention any information about a person unless it has been explicitly volunteered to you for publishing.

I guess the problem here is many people publish publicly on the Internet not expecting much of anything. And then after they become notorious they may regret giving up their privacy. So there's a new push to create a stronger norm of what's considered private and who's considered a public figure.

[0] say some places will mandate redacting last names of people charged with crimes

> I guess the problem here is many people publish publicly on the Internet not expecting much of anything. And then after they become notorious they may regret giving up their privacy.

I will definitely tell my kids to never use their real names online. Maybe let them brainstorm an alias they will use consistently, so that their friends will know. Just in case they would want one day to have a fresh start, get rid of whatever haters and stalkers they happened to collect in the past, etc.

Unfortunately, in the Age of Online Advertising, many websites have using the real name as a condition in their terms of service. They will not verify the name when you create the account, but they might do it later if someone reports you. Should I teach them to lie? Should I teach them to use a fake photo? Sooner or later someone will upload a photo with them, and tag them, anyway.

Also, if you use a pseudonym, you better make a habit of changing it regularly, because at some moment someone will dox you.

...and that's with the technology we have today. Maybe in the near future an artificial intelligence will connect everything you ever wrote online, regardless of the pseudonyms or whatever, based on the statistical analysis of your writing, or something like that.

Journalists and writers in general aim to make a story appealing to their readers. One way they do this is bring to life their subjects, and some ways they can do that is to name the subject, tell readers what neighborhood the subject lives in, age, what kind of life they lead etc. People are interested in other people.

It has value but it's a mechanism that isn't necessarily needed in all cases.

One could do a thought experiment imagining a group of newspaper readers evaluating an edition where names of subjects were not given and one where they were. Which edition would be more interesting?

> some ways they can do that is to name the subject

That is "to give the subject a name", not "to reveal the name of the subject". It's usually "Maria [name changed] is the youngest of three daughters, her parents ...". That gives the subject a name, but there's no need for it to be the full name, or even the actual first name, because the story tend to be about the circumstances or what happened to the subject, not their name.

Scott Alexander is a public figure. He himself shares his first name, middle name, profession, and city.

Is that true of “Maria” in your example?

"Public figure" doesn't really go well with "wants to remain pseudonymous". He writes a blog as a personal hobby, he's not a celebrity or politician.

And yes, that's pretty often true about subjects of articles that do not get doxxed, because "Maria, NYC, Nurse" is enough to give you an idea about the person but far away from being enough for individual identification. And, of course, it doesn't matter for the story, just as the name doesn't matter for any profile about SSC.

He is arguably a minor celebrity because of the number of followers he has and level of influence.

Come on - if the New York Times is writing about your blog then you're obviously, anonymous or not, a "public figure", though perhaps a minor one.

Also until we know what the article is - it's actual contents - how can we know if the name is relevant or not?

Doxxing is a classical example of the ad hominem logical fallacy. Criticise the argument, not the person making it.

This idea is of course completely lost on the post-modern cancel culture.

The amount is Sophistry in modern times is stunning. Appeal to authority, appeal to the crowd, anecdotal evidence, straw men, etc

The quality of thought seems to be incredibly low.

Critical thinking is not taught properly in western schools.

Are there any current schools where it’s taught properly?

Can it even be taught?

I think anyone can learn...but the discovery of truth can be extremely scary and painful...and I don't think most people want to face REAL reality even if its more truthful and data based.

An easy narrative is much happier and easier to digest do people will choose that over truth.

I think religius narratives came about specifically to deal with the reality of pain, the unknown, and death.

Up to a degree, definitely. It seems thought that for certain people it somehow comes naturally. (But perhaps it was taught to them unbeknownst to themselves)

People can at least be told about the concept. Mentioning the socratic method yields nothing but blank stares to high schoolers.

I was going to comment nearly this exact thing. SSC guy has worked slavishly for years to grow a fan base which has had knock-on effects as the community he’s carefully curated intersects with some that have done incredible harm on twitter and reddit. This just reads like not wanting to have to take real responsibility for what has come of his speech.

> a fan base which has had knock-on effects as the community he’s carefully curated intersects with some that have done incredible harm on twitter and reddit

You can say this about pretty much any group of people.

Everyone is now partly responsible for what the other adults they associate with do when they're not around?

This is not the world you want to live in even if you think you want it.

Why is it relevant that this can be true about any group? You’re projecting. My comment was about the fact that the OTHER group will seek reprisal and it’s at very least rather immature to stamp your feet about this after the fact. Dude isn’t a kid. He makes a gigantic show of his intellect and turns around and acts shocked when he reaps the product of celebrity.

Also to answer your other question yes, we’re all responsible for what others do because no action exists in a vacuum. Like it or not that’s the world we live in. It’s always been this way.

Are we talking about his supposed desire for celebrity or the claim that he's responsible for the actions of others? Those seem orthogonal.

The guy has so much contempt for his patients, disclosing his name is a public service.

It doesn't sound like you've actually read the blog. It isn't about his patients, and it's pretty much never written in a contemptuous tone.

I am not sure what the fuss is about. The NYT hasn't actually published anything yet, Alexander self-cancelled himself in a fit of _something_ and managed to drum up quite a bit of publicity for himself and his blog in the process. Clever.

I must admit I am somewhat on the side of the NYT being able to use his real name. Alexander's blog is related to his work, by staying anonymous (but not really) he is trying to have it both ways: "Hear my words, for I am an experienced psychiatrist with insights and stuff. I'm just not going to tell you which one. I will bask in the glow of accolades but am anonymous to critical articles."

I think it is in the public interest for the NYT to state that Alexander is who he says he is, especially since some of his comments have attracted controversy.

It would be different if this was some underground blog about model trains or something, but Alexander is a licensed professional. He likes that his words carry weight based on that or else he would go by AnonMemberOfThePublic375.

> "Hear my words, for I am an experienced psychiatrist with insights and stuff. I'm just not going to tell you which one. I will bask in the glow of accolades but am anonymous to critical articles."

Huh? I don’t think he has ever used his status as a psychiatrist to claim credibility, nor do I think his readers care about that beyond the occasional anecdote. People (including me) were drawn to his writings long before they were aware of that aspect about him. When he moved to SSC c. 2013 he even made a post about just staring his residency, which isn’t “experienced”.

I can see why Alexander might desire anonymity but even his list of reasons why he is deleting his blog post contains several pieces of potentially identifying information - far more than the hypothetical NYTs article would have contained, including details of his housing situation.

I find his response confusing. Full marks on managing to get of lot of publicity off the back of the NYT not writing are article though. He is really getting is very-slightly-obfuscated name out there.

Did you mean to respond to someone else? My comment was about your point on whether his writing unfairly benefits from his author’s claim to be a psychiatrist, and now you’re talking about something else and repeating some general claims. Are you not defending the above point anymore?

I am just going by my experiences but Alexander being a psychiatrist is literally the only thing I know about him from the last time I heard mention of him.

He mentions his job several times in his "goodbye" article. It is a big part of his online persona that he has deliberately put out there for his own reasons.

I disagree on your latter points. Of he had known he might become (semi) famous he might have kept his me properly anonymous or down to initials. Didn’t we lose The Last Psychiatrist to de-anonymizing? And he was definitely anonymous. His coverage for being a psychiatrist was that he wrote in a way a psychiatrist would.

I've noticed this mentioned somewhere else, but I'm not aware of "The last psychiatrist".

I tried googling around and I don't see much information on what happened. Why was he deanonymised?

Could you give me a quick rundown of the situation?

Seems to still be down for me.

Scroll down, the old content is visible again.

It is definitely in patients’ and Scott’s interest to maintain anonymity.

There is a tradition in therapy going back to Freud that the therapist should be a blank slate to the patient(there’s a technical term for this which I can’t recall..)

In a Lacanian sense, the role of the analyst is to be filled up with the images and ideas of the patient. https://nosubject.com/Discourse_of_the_analyst

Some may find the Greek term "kenosis" interesting, meaning "emptying". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenosis

I agree that SSC being separate from his psychiatry is pretty important. I like SSC, and at the same time I would find it difficult to go to therapy knowing Scott is behind SSC. It would cause me to fixate on obsessional traits in myself, knowing that he is predisposed to the same thing.

> going back to Freud

That's not a very solid foundation. Pretty much everything from Freud has since been reconsidered.

My experience with therapists is that I want a certain connection, and I've been rather unsatisfied with most I've seen (though my sample size is only 4). It's not optimal to have to keep rolling the dice to try and find someone I'm comfortable opening up to, and of course both the situation where I'd need to find a new therapist and the US healthcare system (& attitude to mental health) do not make it any easier.

Personally, I like to know professionals' opinions on the major debates of their profession. e.g., for mental health professionals: What is their opinion on the debates around the validity and usefulness of the DSM? Do they think overdiagnosis and/or underdiagnosis are problems? (It is possible to believe both are a problem simultaneously – I have heard some professionals express the opinion that ASD is overdiagnosed in males yet simultaneously underdiagnosed in females.) Are antidepressants overprescribed? Do antipsychotics cause brain atrophy?

For most professionals, however, it is quite hard to work this out, at least without asking them in person. (For a minority, who are involved in research/etc, one can look at their publications.)

So I'd actually encourage more mental health professionals to blog (or otherwise engage with the public) with their opinions on their field of professional expertise.

(SSC mostly isn't doing that, since Scott mostly comments on general topics, and only posts something on his profession every now and again. I often find what Scott has to say on general topics interesting, but I doubt I'd find what J. Random Psychiatrist or J. Random Psychologist has to say on general topics anywhere near as interesting.)

> Personally, I like to know professionals' opinions on the major debates of their profession. e.g., for mental health professionals: What is their opinion on the debates around the validity and usefulness of the DSM?

That's... risky. There are accreditation boards and professional orgs for a reason, and if they're pushing questionable science or standards they still control what the requirements are.

Debating it behind closed doors with your peers is one thing, but it's another to air dirty laundry to the public. A professional puts out their doubts about [X] to the general public and then it gets picked up by cranks, "official doctor says [X] is bullshit, and that alternative [Y] might hold promise." And then people start buying healing crystals or Jordan Peterson or something.

Has that actually happened to anyone? I can think of a number of psychiatrists and psychologists who have made contributions to the public debates relevant to their profession, and I've never heard of anyone being formally disciplined for expressing doubt about the science behind the DSM-5, or expressing concern about underdiagnosis/overdiagnosis, underprescribing/overprescribing, etc. (See for example CEP-UK [1] and the Critical Psychiatry Network [2] – many of the opinions of their members are rather unpopular with their peers, yet their members are still allowed to practice.)

If some crank misuses a professional's comments to justify their crank views, that's not the professional's fault, and I've never heard of a professional being disciplined for that.

[1] http://cepuk.org

[2] https://www.criticalpsychiatry.co.uk

I am 100% for respecting Scott's wish for anonymity and in general there seems to be a strong norm of not giving to much personal information to patients in the psychiatrist and therapist communities.

But Scott doesn't exactly try to be a blank slate to patients, given that he mentions details like his time in Japan and his "struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder" in his public profile as a psychiatrist, which seems to be aimed at patients (there's a big button for booking an appointment).

Of course, there is a difference between making a few superficial details like this available to your patients or millions of words of your essays.

On the other hand, perhaps his patients should be aware about the fact that their psychiatrist is divulging what they probably thought of as their private information to the entire internet.

No he’s not. He takes extra care to anonymize the patient descriptions.

I disagree. I feel like that's up for the patient to decide. If I am going to tell my deepest secrets to someone I'd rather there not even be the faintest idea that details would be written about, even in very general ways.

It's standard practice in psychiatry to publish anonymized patient stories. Your issue is with the entire field, then.

I specifically had to sign a consent form before starting therapy, with exactly how my data would be handled and what could or could not be done with it. I think that is SOP in the field.

edit: This is in the EU

In the US, afaik, there is no such requirement, and publishing anonymized stories in pyschiatric journals is common practice, without any sort of consent.

Surely there is a difference between a professional journal with standards and peer review, and a public blog with a comments section that frequently features Steven Pinker and discussions about racial effects on IQ.

There are differences, obviously. Which ones do you think are relevant here?

Sorry, I got my online Steves confused and meant Steve Sailer, not Pinker. For one, there aren't any professional journals for which Steve Sailer's ideas about race, IQ or the Holocaust would meet their standards. Second, doctors often get consent for case studies on their patients, and only give pertinent details like sex, age, or complicating medical conditions if absolutely necessary. Case studies are meant for professionals to peruse in an effort to better advance the field they practice in.

A personal blog where a psychiatrist divulges his patients' sexualities and relationship issues to pontificate about polyamorism with his laymen blog readers, including Steve Sailer, is not the same thing as a case study in a professional journal.

I agree that they are not the same. But I don't really understand why it is different in a way that changes its moral character. Steve Sailer can read psychiatry journals if he wants to. As long as the stories are well anonymized, I don't really see much difference.

Not on a random blog.

It costs the NYC nothing to respect his efforts at pseudo-anonymity, as halfhearted as they were. The cause of journalism is not advanced in the slightest by publishing the real name.

The problem with "unnamed sources" is there's no fixed point to compare against -- the unnamed source loses nothing by lying or making things up. Scott has a huge amount of reputation to lose if he lies, even if it doesn't directly tie back to his real-life persona. It would be a REALLY long con to blog for a decade to build a reputation, just to be a disreputable unnamed source in an article.

Google results are very different for different people. SSC is not returned at all when I search for his real name; a result many others have reported in the ongoing discussion about SSC on Hacker News.

I'm not sure what that means for your conclusion, but I think you may be overestimating how closely connected SSC and his real name are on average.

Do you already know his real name in order to search it on Google?

If you search for "Scott Alexander" then, yes, Slate Star Codex comes up. But that's not the dots he's trying to avoid being connected. He doesn't share his last name on SSC, and his patients probably don't know his middle name.

Depending on your search engine of choice, given just his first and last name, you will discover either his middle name or his blog on the first or second page of results. If a patient wanted to look him up online, it wouldn't take much, and if a person familiar with his blog wanted to find his real name, it also wouldn't take much. I did it just now in a few minutes of Googling.

Now, regardless of all that, it still seems like it would be a nice thing to do for news media to respect his wishes. But it also seems like a bit much to say that publishing his name would be all that significant of a change to his level of anonymity.

It's still a difference though if a patient searching for his real name to check if he's properly licenced etc. gets SSC as their first search result or not.

Anyone selling stuff online knows that if it takes "a few minutes of googling" to find you, you might as well not exist; whether you're #1 or #2 on the search results can already have a huge impact on your bottom line and the how many people even advance to the second page of results?

> I did it just now in a few minutes of Googling.

A few minutes? Google literally suggests it as an autocomplete for me.

Google also has "related searches" at the bottom of the results page. It works both ways. Searching First Middle, the related searches return First Middle Last. Searching First Last still for the most part accomplishes what he wants, not bringing up a lot about his online life, however the related searches hint at it, by showing First Last Middle, and First Last 'Blog'.

That's what I get for using the address bar rather than the actual website!

I have no particular interest in SSC or this controversy around it, so I have no search history around him. I just tried this and the search suggestion drop-down totally had his full name listed. That sucks.

This was previously not the case. Cat is out of the bag though.

The cats been out of the bag for a long, long time.

I mean, look, if he had already had anonymity, I would absolutely be considerably more understanding of the outrage behind this, but let’s be honest, his name has been connected to ssc (simple google search levels of easy) for a long time.

That fact has really made me question the motives behind why he chose this particular hill to die on.

The issue was debated to death when the initial story flared up, but the strongest counter-point I saw was this:

Publication of his name in a NYT feature would have made a huge difference to the awareness level of his identity, vs just being able to be sniffed out by determined online sleuths, and would have dramatically altered his identifiability with respect to his clients.

I can see it both ways and don't care to argue the topic any further, but this position deserves to be put.

I think it’s a bit dishonest for us to imply it would have taken a determined online sleuth — unless we now consider anyone who would have simply googled a name to be a determined sleuth.

I agree though, it’s kind of a silly thing to put much concern into. I’m done worrying about it as well lol.

In the original discussions, people were reporting different degrees of ease of finding his name via Google. Some said it came up in autocomplete on Google when you started typing his name, whereas others didn't get this, including myself. Perhaps it was influenced by region, as I'm outside the U.S.

Of course it became a whole lot easier to identify him soon after he took down his blog, as it suddenly became a much bigger discussion topic online.

But being written about in the NYT still takes it to a whole new level. Without that, it's just something that nerds like us talk about on obscure discussion forums like this. When it's in a feature article in the NYT, it becomes something ordinary people talk about at dinners and cocktail parties.

I think these things have become truer since the NYT debacle, due to people spamming his real name in lots of public places. Among many other examples, somebody set up a linkedin profile under his real name, listing his occupation as "author of slatestarcodex blog".

There was a campaign on Twitter recently, people encouraging each other to post Scott Alexander's full name, because "if all the hundreds of people who know his real last name just started saying it we could put an end to this ridiculous farce".

Translation: if enough people join this doxing campaign, it will be difficul to report our accounts for violating Twitter terms of service.

The usual suspects have joined, including David Gerard from RationalWiki. (Not linking the tweet here, because it contains the dox.)

For those that don’t know, when the posts were republished hundreds of email notifications went out. One for each post.

Quite the splash for coming back online.

Reminds me of when Libgdx migrated their issues to Github[0], and all watchers got an email. So 300k emails or so were sent. It would have been a couple of millions if he didn't catch it happening.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6387140

Delightfully, My RSS feed has no such problem.

383 emails, it seems. I am glad when I search my inbox some of those posts will surface.

Is there any evidence to suggest that this is true? The new york times denies it, and it doesn't really pass the smell test.

If someone can provide a reason for why they might want to do this I might consider it, but I can't think of one that would remotely make sense? It would provoke outrage and reflect badly on the paper, and the address would need to be important to the story. It's not similar to the slate star case, since publishing someones address is not a normal journalistic practice.

Now I know of no reasons that the NYT would publish his address, and there are reasons why Tucker Carlsen might want to accuse them of publishing his address, such as him trying to deflect from the current accusations of sexual harassment.

Does anyone believe the NYT at this point?

Yes. They're a big organization with a lot of internal controls and transparency and a long history of owning up to mistakes. The idea that they would do something underhanded and manage to keep it secret is an extraordinary claim and requires real evidence, not "it sounds like the kind of thing those jerks would do" from someone who disagrees with their political bent.

A priori, if you expect me to make a factual determination based on what the NYT says, and what Tucker Carlson says, I'm gonna pick NYT unless I see some other evidence.

Yes. The inversion of this makes no sense. I am supposed to believe Tucker Carlson instead?

Are you sure? It's no secret that "Scott Alexander" are the first and middle name. The author wants to keep his last name secret.