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

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?