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

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.