3 ms·
> It's hard to take that objection seriously, though. His pen name and his real name are already strongly linked in search engine space. The only thing that wil
by scarmig 6y ago
> It's hard to take that objection seriously, though. His pen name and his real name are already strongly linked in search engine space. The only thing that will change as a result of the NYT article is that there will be additional scrutiny of his ideas.
"strongly linked" is doing a lot of work. They're linked in that if you're a tech professional, you can figure out his last name with five minutes of dedicated digging. A casual searcher would not make the connection without knowing it beforehand.
> I also agree that protecting his patients and his business is something he should have seen to, but it is a problem he should have addressed six years ago, not after building a minor media ecosystem around himself, including books, published articles, and con appearances.
Kind of victim-blaming, but yeah, he should have used better opsec six years ago. That boat has sailed. But what's the public benefit of the NYT outing his real name? The public costs are clear: primarily hurting a provider of healthcare services and secondarily making it more dangerous to entertain even slightly heterodox ideas in public.
- throwaw4y-plate 6y agoIt's wider fame that threatens Scott's current life track. This is true for all people whether that fame is positive or negative, whether the person in question is Scott Alexander, Rebecca Black, or Monica Lewinsky. By those lights, the only thing he's a victim of is his own success. I suspect we'd be getting the same reaction from SA regardless of any so-called "doxing," the trail of breadcrumbs leafing back to his identity would still have been present. And at least the article was planned to be positive As far a the goofle-fu needed to find that specific information, well, I think you're overestimating the difficulty of that particular feat.
- scarmig 6y agoOne thing that I'd be curious to test: if Scott were given a choice between a very critical article that maintained his weak pseudonymity and a very positive one that didn't, which would he go for? My expectation is that he'd go for the former, and I'd be disappointed if he went for the latter.
- throwaw4y-plate 6y agoI think that's fair.
- boring_twenties 6y agoAs Scott himself has explained, the bigger deal isn't whether or not it's easy to find out his last name if you know the blog. It is finding the blog from his last name. In other words, if his patients, who don't know the blog exists, find it simply by googling the name of their doctor.
- unknownkadath 6y agoSeems like that would happen eventually whether or not NYT did anything, if SSC got famous enough. Though, I wouldn't dare to tell him how important the timeline of that is. It is his life, after all.