3 ms·
It'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.
by rafram 6mo ago
It'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.