Scott and the community were fine with an article, even a critical one. What's being objected to is the NYT outing Scott's name in a way that makes it easy for patients to see his online presence, which would more or less make him unemployable.

But can you explain the rationale for removing the blog though? I don't see his actions to be well thought-out here, unless it was a publicity stunt to infuriate his followers with NYT.

It doesn't have a particularly obscure rationale: it's a game of chicken with the NYT to pressure them not to publish his real name. He's decreased the benefit to them by making the article an irrelevancy if they do publish it, and made it costly as an action by making lots of people upset at the NYT if they do publish it.

I think, if anything, deleting the blog only raised the stakes. It definitely increased the publicity of the blog and the interest of the general audience to read his writing, which is still readily available through Internet Archive, and NYT can link it in their article. Far from becoming an irrelevancy. Also the more drama, the more interest NYT will have to publish a piece on it. So, his explanation that no blog = no story does not convince me. This is why I think that his action had a different goal, if he was rational in it. (Well, I think, his real goal was to make it maximally public, and make his followers and bystanders to go mobbing against NYT, or something like that.)

It's unclear to me what the best course of action for him actually was, given the Streisand effect. I tend toward thinking that taking down the blog was an emotional outburst at the NYT not respecting his request, and that he could have probably gotten a good outcome, both for his community and real career, if he accepted the press and maybe tried to negotiate the use of his real name down to a single instance, e.g. Scott Alexander, born Scott Alexander Scott. But I see it more as a fit of pique than anything else, not an intentioned effort to cause an internet freakout.

Yeah, I agree with you, I think.

I was originally quite supportive of the choice made but it really has a smell after some reflection. He seems quite open on twitter in front of 50k followers about his real name.

His twitter bio:

Scott Alexander

@slatestarcodex

54.5K Followers

I have a place where I say complicated things about philosophy and science. That place is my blog. This is where I make terrible puns.

https://twitter.com/slatestarcodex

You clearly didn't (and probably should) read his post explaining why he took the blog down. It literally says right there, that Scott Alexander is part of his name, but that the NYT would expose his _full name_ instead.

Even if he did broadcast his full name regularly on @slatestarcodex (which he doesn't), the main problem is in the other direction, as he and others have repeatedly noted. The worry is that people (i.e. patients) can go from Scott LastName to SlateStarCodex, not the other way round.

That's not his full name. IIRC Scott Alexander is just his first and middle name or something, and the journalist was going to lay out his full name for everyone to know.

By deleting the blog, SA created a scenario in which if the NYT run their story about a significant blog, they're also left with how to address the readers' curiosity as the why the blog no longer exists.

The Times could address this directly, or not. In either case, the Times's outing of SA is made a major focus of the story. And to that degree, SA's action strikes me as exceptionally well considered, as it turns the Times's own strength and public status and reputation against itself. Far more so than any possible argument or appeal might.

And in terms of strategy and tactics, I have to admire the move regardless of the merits or insensitivity of the Times or its identification policy.

I think the questions surrounding identity really need deeper exploration, and that there isn't a simple pat answer.

There are cases where pseudonymity or anonymity is valid and justified, cases in which they are not. Cases in which at least some self-labelling is reasonable, others in which it's clearly not. Names and labels are powerful tools. As with all tools, it's how they're used and to what ends which ultimately determines morality.

He wrote a very thoughtful explanation of it on his website.

Did it convince you? It certainly did not convince me.

It convinced me that he had a rational reason for his decision, and that the Times should not be pushing to dox him. That doesn’t mean that I would have taken the same decisions, but I respect his reasoning and his reasons. And he had an excellent website, so I hope he prevails.

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.

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.

> 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.

It'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.

As 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.

Seems 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.

One 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.

I think that's fair.

You're thinking with the wrong threat model. The concern is not about people who really want to know what his real name is, it's people putting his real name into Google and getting references to Slatestarcodex on the first page of the results.

>His pen name and his real name are already strongly linked in search engine space.

It's not.

I've been following the development of the drama for a while. And even though I know a thing or two about OSINT, I still don't know Scott Alexander's real full name.

It was autocompleting in a major search engine at least as recently as several days ago.

Having his real name linked to the gathering place and intellectual support he provided for eugenicists is beneficial to his patients, since it lets them see just who it is they’re really going to for treatment.

I'm aware it's fashionable among certain parts of the left to refer to any discussion at all of population genetics as "supporting eugenicists" but it's honestly not an effective way to make any sort of point.

How's that even remotely relevant? Your doctor is not your wife and treatment does not involve enthusiastic agreement on every controversial topic of the day.

I don't care about my doctor's opinions as long as they behave professionally and do their job well.

If this is a reference to discussions around IQ, I'd suggest that equating "person X scores lower on IQ tests than person Y" and "person X is subhuman compared to person Y" is a frankly horrifying position and if that isn't the equivalence you're trying to draw then you might do better being less combative and more descriptive around your actual objections.

>what was likely to be an enthusiastic article has been absolutely pathological

The NY Times was willing to use pseudonyms for the subjects of articles in the past. I didn't see Banksy exposed for instance.

So if the article was in fact sympathetic why use the real name, when it has no relevancy to the subject?

Unless, the article was actually not sympathetic, but meant as a zesty piece to "expose" Scott Alexander as a reactionary/eugenist/sexist in the current hot climate of "cancel-culture".

Which surely would generate lots of clicks for the NY Times, but would also destroy the subject of their story at the hands of SJW/twitter mob, then allowing for more stories about the drama and generate more clicks.

Exposing SA's real name is a win only for the NY Times.