I agree that deleting the blog makes it less likely that NYT readers would investigate and find something objectionable, both because the blog becomes less acce

I agree that deleting the blog makes it less likely that NYT readers would investigate and find something objectionable, both because the blog becomes less accessible (but not inaccessible) and because if the story doesn't run (as it seems not to have) then there's no readers in the first place. The New Yorker claim was about the NYT reporter, though, not the readers. If I had an embarrassing secret out in public and a reporter was sniffing around, then conspicuously deleting some but not all copies of it seems like the stupidest possible thing I could do, just encouraging them to dig further for it. That's the reason I doubt that could be Alexander's motivation in deleting the blog. As to the Streisand effect, we're talking about this now at least, and you're aware that he "likes" eugenics[1]--indeed, if anyone's still reading this thread then perhaps they learned that Alexander likes eugenics specifically because of this article, which appeared specifically because he deleted the blog. I can't imagine the NYT reporter doesn't know too. So as a tactic to conceal his writing, I think deleting the blog has empirically failed. Though I agree that he probably did fear that an NYT story that said "[Scott Alexander's full name] likes eugenics" would harm his ability to practice as a psychiatrist, and reasonably so. Eugenics obviously has an abhorrent history in its purported application, and he treats the subject casually enough to creep me out too. I didn't read his blog extensively, but the creepier stuff always felt to me more like autistic-style disregard for social context than a desire to revive those horrors. I think the remedy to that should be for someone to point that out to him (as they have, of course), rather than for a journalist to quote his worst phrasing out of context and thus end his career. 1. Literally with the word "like", too, https://web.archive.org/web/20200109033206/http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/08/a-something-sort-of-like-left-libertarianism-ist-manifesto/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200109033206/http://slatestarc...