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He was not blogging under his real name. Scott Alexander is not his real name.
by throwawayk7h 6mo ago
He was not blogging under his real name. Scott Alexander is not his real name.
- fsh 6mo agoIt is his real name, and he also used his real surname in early blog posts.
- johnfn 6mo agoIt is not his real name. Once he upended his life, he revealed his real name here[1]. It is not Scott Alexander. [1]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/still-alive https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/still-alive
- Xenoamorphous 6mo agoScott Alexander are his first and middle names, and Siskind his last name, or that's what I've understood.
- vanviegen 6mo agoIt's his first and middle name. At least that's what he said in the post about shutting down the blog.
- rafram 6mo agoIt's most of his name. Long before his full name became common knowledge, you could already Google "Scott Alexander psychiatrist" and find him almost instantly.
- SatvikBeri 6mo agoYes, but a patient who googled his real name would not find his blog. That was the point.
- SkyPuncher 6mo agoThat part of things is what really made this entire argument all apart of me. There are ~50k psychiatrists in the US. Roughly, 1 in 10k people in the US is named Scott. Mathematically, that means knowing "Scott is a psychiatrist" brings you down to ~5 people. Even if we assume there's some outlier clustering of people named Scott who are psychiatrists, we're still talking about some small number. Surely adding in the middle name essentially makes him uniquely identifiable without an other corroborating information.
- rafram 6mo ago> Roughly, 1 in 10k people in the US is named Scott. Seems to be more like one in 425 per SSA.
- kbelder 6mo agoTake a moment and apply some common sense to your math. Do you really think there are 5 psychiatrists in the country named Scott? That's off by multiple orders of magnitude.
- SkyPuncher 6mo agoNo, but I doubt there are more than 100. The magnitude is so small that anonymity is essential broken.
- lux-lux-lux 6mo agoHis pre-SSC blogging was, and he’d link those posts directly from time to time.