9 ms·

It is literally the second hit on an incognito google search for his full name. The address of his business is up on hit one. Please show me the veil.

nkurz 6y ago
> Please show me the veil. In mundo's terminology, it's not he veil that's important, but the direction that one is looking through it. Scott's stated desire is that a search for "Scott [RealLastName] psychiatrist" doesn't turn up his personal blog posts at the top of the results. This is the search that a current or potential client is likely to do, and he would like the results of this search to be professionally oriented. So far as I know (I haven't tried the searches) most casual searches of such terms don't lead to directly to the blog. He is less concerned with whether a search for "Scott Alexander Slate Star Codex real name" comes up with his real last name, since as you point out this information is already available online and won't be changed by a NYT article. His reasoning (I think correct) is that if a high profile article comes out that uses his full name and his profession, casual psychiatry related searches will highlight his blog rather than his professional career. Whether or not Scott has a right to this level of privacy is a separate matter, but does this distinction make sense?
- tptacek 6y ago
  No. The distinction seems fanciful, because it's not how information works. It isn't even how information worked before the Internet. It's a "the floor is lava" grade of anonymity, based on offering people permission to connect 2 publicly available dots. It's also moot, since, again, one of his best-known pieces was released under his real name. Many of us have had the experience of being unhappy with what Google chooses to surface for our names. I never thought to declare "Anonymity!", Michael Scott style, to resolve that problem for myself.
  - anatoly 6y ago
    As a psychiatrist, Scott Alexander meets new patients or potential patients who haven't heard his real name before all the time, probably almost every day. It's been his experience until now, despite his blog being rather popular in certain circles and occasionally linked in national op-eds and such, that his patients, despite the inevitable cursory Googling that everyone does nowadays, are not aware of his blog and controversies that surround it (such as, e.g., numerous culture warriors on both sides loathing it). He greatly prefers it stay this way, for several very good reasons he wrote about better than I could, and suspects - I think correctly - that in the case of a NYT profile that outs his real name it will not. I don't know why you keep repeating that him deleting his blog ensures the lack of anonymity (in this sense) where there'll be a NYT article or not. I suspect he'd disagree, and I think that if this story ends with no NYT article that outs his name, all the discussions and media articles about this story that happened so far won't change the desirable status quo re: his patients not connecting his name to Online Controversies through cursory Googling.
- KirinDave 6y ago
  You've constructed a search query that returns at least 2 conspicuous links about his reactionary blog in the first page, and depending on your search history may or may not reveal the SSC reddit. This is ridiculous. You're now litigating if things are "private" if they're below a 1080p page fold in Google.
  - nkurz 6y ago
    I wonder if Google might be returning different results for "private" results based on some other factor, like geographic IP or browser? Searching now for "Scott [RealLastName] psychiatrist" in an anonymous Safari window from Vermont, I get 9 professional results and a link to an Overcoming Bias post by Robin Hanson. The OB link has redacted Scott's last name, doesn't contain anything immediately alarming, has a dead link to a nonexistent previous blog, and importantly doesn't link to SSC. A search from my regular account returns 100 results (as it should) and starts with the same first 10. The following 90 are mostly professional or for unrelated people. One midway down is a link to Reddit where the excerpt mentions SSC. Another at the bottom is a denunciation of him as a "low iq autist" "Jewish, clinically insane blogger", which I suppose might give a client pause. I'm also not trying to "litigate" anything. I was just trying to be sure you understood the point that 'undo' was trying to make. You are welcome (and in fact encouraged) to disagree with it as long as you explain your reasoning. ps. Separately, "reactionary blog" sounds like an odd description. Oddly, "neoreactionary" and "Moldbug" were among the banned terms on the site. Do you mean it in some other sense?
    - tptacek 6y ago
      What alarming stuff would you be concerned about a search exposing?
      - nkurz 6y ago
        Is this like the joke about the condemned engineer who knows how to fix the faulty guillotine? I think Scott is correctly concerned that a Twitter mob might try to get him fired as a result of his blog. I don't really understand his reasoning for taking it down now, but I presume "real name in a national publication" was a pre-arranged line-in-the-sand for him. I think his actual opinions are secondary; the real problem is that he's clearly not fully supportive of team SJW. I suspect the main problem wouldn't be his own opinions, but that he allows others to discuss "unacceptable" topics on his site. His window for acceptable doesn't include everything (white nationalism was out) but is much wider than most. That said, I found SSC to be the best place on the internet for hearing people calmly explain views I disagree with --- and I disagree with almost everyone! There aren't a lot of places where atheists and Catholics would productively discuss why they felt the way they do about abortion, where former Mennonites could explain how community health care works without insurance, where Marxists could try to explain to gun nuts what they have in common, or where a self-proclaimed a Social Justice Warrior can field questions from an anarcho-capitalist economic professors about redistribution. I probably spent about an hour a day reading comments there, and felt that it was time fairly well spent. Although I'm mostly a reader rather than poster, for a few years now it's been my primary contact with the outside world. I'll miss it, and don't know if there will be anywhere that can replace it.

nkurz 6y ago

> Please show me the veil. In mundo's terminology, it's not he veil that's important, but the direction that one is looking through it. Scott's stated desire is that a search for "Scott [RealLastName] psychiatrist" doesn't turn up his personal blog posts at the top of the results. This is the search that a current or potential client is likely to do, and he would like the results of this search to be professionally oriented. So far as I know (I haven't tried the searches) most casual searches of such terms don't lead to directly to the blog. He is less concerned with whether a search for "Scott Alexander Slate Star Codex real name" comes up with his real last name, since as you point out this information is already available online and won't be changed by a NYT article. His reasoning (I think correct) is that if a high profile article comes out that uses his full name and his profession, casual psychiatry related searches will highlight his blog rather than his professional career. Whether or not Scott has a right to this level of privacy is a separate matter, but does this distinction make sense?

tptacek 6y ago
No. The distinction seems fanciful, because it's not how information works. It isn't even how information worked before the Internet. It's a "the floor is lava" grade of anonymity, based on offering people permission to connect 2 publicly available dots. It's also moot, since, again, one of his best-known pieces was released under his real name. Many of us have had the experience of being unhappy with what Google chooses to surface for our names. I never thought to declare "Anonymity!", Michael Scott style, to resolve that problem for myself.
- anatoly 6y ago
  As a psychiatrist, Scott Alexander meets new patients or potential patients who haven't heard his real name before all the time, probably almost every day. It's been his experience until now, despite his blog being rather popular in certain circles and occasionally linked in national op-eds and such, that his patients, despite the inevitable cursory Googling that everyone does nowadays, are not aware of his blog and controversies that surround it (such as, e.g., numerous culture warriors on both sides loathing it). He greatly prefers it stay this way, for several very good reasons he wrote about better than I could, and suspects - I think correctly - that in the case of a NYT profile that outs his real name it will not. I don't know why you keep repeating that him deleting his blog ensures the lack of anonymity (in this sense) where there'll be a NYT article or not. I suspect he'd disagree, and I think that if this story ends with no NYT article that outs his name, all the discussions and media articles about this story that happened so far won't change the desirable status quo re: his patients not connecting his name to Online Controversies through cursory Googling.
KirinDave 6y ago
You've constructed a search query that returns at least 2 conspicuous links about his reactionary blog in the first page, and depending on your search history may or may not reveal the SSC reddit. This is ridiculous. You're now litigating if things are "private" if they're below a 1080p page fold in Google.
- nkurz 6y ago
  I wonder if Google might be returning different results for "private" results based on some other factor, like geographic IP or browser? Searching now for "Scott [RealLastName] psychiatrist" in an anonymous Safari window from Vermont, I get 9 professional results and a link to an Overcoming Bias post by Robin Hanson. The OB link has redacted Scott's last name, doesn't contain anything immediately alarming, has a dead link to a nonexistent previous blog, and importantly doesn't link to SSC. A search from my regular account returns 100 results (as it should) and starts with the same first 10. The following 90 are mostly professional or for unrelated people. One midway down is a link to Reddit where the excerpt mentions SSC. Another at the bottom is a denunciation of him as a "low iq autist" "Jewish, clinically insane blogger", which I suppose might give a client pause. I'm also not trying to "litigate" anything. I was just trying to be sure you understood the point that 'undo' was trying to make. You are welcome (and in fact encouraged) to disagree with it as long as you explain your reasoning. ps. Separately, "reactionary blog" sounds like an odd description. Oddly, "neoreactionary" and "Moldbug" were among the banned terms on the site. Do you mean it in some other sense?
  - tptacek 6y ago
    What alarming stuff would you be concerned about a search exposing?
    - nkurz 6y ago
      Is this like the joke about the condemned engineer who knows how to fix the faulty guillotine? I think Scott is correctly concerned that a Twitter mob might try to get him fired as a result of his blog. I don't really understand his reasoning for taking it down now, but I presume "real name in a national publication" was a pre-arranged line-in-the-sand for him. I think his actual opinions are secondary; the real problem is that he's clearly not fully supportive of team SJW. I suspect the main problem wouldn't be his own opinions, but that he allows others to discuss "unacceptable" topics on his site. His window for acceptable doesn't include everything (white nationalism was out) but is much wider than most. That said, I found SSC to be the best place on the internet for hearing people calmly explain views I disagree with --- and I disagree with almost everyone! There aren't a lot of places where atheists and Catholics would productively discuss why they felt the way they do about abortion, where former Mennonites could explain how community health care works without insurance, where Marxists could try to explain to gun nuts what they have in common, or where a self-proclaimed a Social Justice Warrior can field questions from an anarcho-capitalist economic professors about redistribution. I probably spent about an hour a day reading comments there, and felt that it was time fairly well spent. Although I'm mostly a reader rather than poster, for a few years now it's been my primary contact with the outside world. I'll miss it, and don't know if there will be anywhere that can replace it.